Marie Krysinska's Poetics of Parody: Figures of the Woman Artist

Marie Krysinska's "Symphonie des Parfums" reveals that she was aware of her role as the only woman artist at the Chat Noir cabaret. She employed her free verse techniques in conjunction with the parodic mode of self-expression popularized at the cabaret to reject the feminine ideal and legitimate her status as an original poet. Krysinska parodies descriptions of imaginary women associated with flowers in conventional poetry by revising synaesthesic analogies and tropes of women's adornments that Baudelaire designated as symbols of alluring signifying power to represent a multiform "feminine" subjectivity in figures of women performing various, interrelated genres of art. (TLP)