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UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Rethinking Queer Poetry: Queerness in the French Lyric Tradition from 1819 to 1918 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/68s5453d Author Brown, Louise Alison Publication Date 2020 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Rethinking Queer Poetry: Queerness in the French Lyric Tradition from 1819 to 1918 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in French and Francophone Studies by Louise Alison Brown 2020 © Copyright by Louise Alison Brown 2020 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Rethinking Queer Poetry: Queerness in the French Lyric Tradition from 1819 to 1918 by Louise Alison Brown Doctor of Philosophy in French and Francophone Studies University of California, Los Angeles, 2020 Professor Laure Murat, Chair Current conceptions of queer poetry focus solely on poetry written by a queer poet or poetry written about a queer subject-matter. Consequently, they rely on primarily biographical and thematic readings of poetic texts. In this dissertation, I argue that a poem’s queerness does not derive solely from the queer identity of its author or the queer nature of its thematic content, and I call for a critical approach to queer poetry that supplements its conventionally biographical and thematic readings with more literary and theoretical readings. In order to rethink current conceptions of queer poetry, I examine the nature of both queerness and poetry, and I explore the ways in which the two intersect. I situate this exploration in the French literary tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a context marked by three cultural phenomena of particular interest – a revitalization of the lyric tradition, a burgeoning interest in non-normative sexual and gender identities, and the emergence of modernité in the artistic domain. An ii examination of these intersecting phenomena provides a framework for exploring the intricate relation between poetry and queerness. On a discursive level, I demonstrate that the French lyric tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is shaped by, and shapes in return, expressions and conceptions of queerness. And on a more theoretical level, I develop the notion of “literary queering” to demonstrate how a poem’s queerness can also result from its subversion or transgression of literary conventions such as the structure of the love lyric paradigm, the nature of versification, and the relation between text and page. As a result, I show that the literary field of queer poetry is in fact much larger and more diverse than we currently assume, and that a more comprehensive critical approach to queer poetry involves novel applications for both poetic theory and queer theory. iii The dissertation of Louise Alison Brown is approved. Joseph E. Bristow Françoise Lionnet Zrinka Stahuljak Laure Murat, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2020 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1: THE POET TYPE 20 SECTION 1: THE POÈTE MAUDIT (ACCURSED POET) 20 SECTION 2: THE POÈTE VOYOU (DELINQUENT POET) 26 SECTION 3: THE POÈTE VOYANT (ENLIGHTENED POET) 33 SECTION 4: THE FEMME POETE (POET WOMAN) 41 CHAPTER 2: THE LYRIC “I” 62 SECTION 1: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL LYRIC “I” 63 Marcel Proust’s Referential Ambiguity 66 SECTION 2: THE TRANSLATED LYRIC “I” 85 Renée Vivien and Transcreation 86 Pierre Louÿs and Pseudo-translation 103 Marceline Desbordes-Valmore and Auto-translation 111 SECTION 3: THE LOVE LYRIC “I” 122 Arthur Rimbaud’s “I” as Another 122 Paul Verlaine’s Feminine “I” 131 Renée Vivien’s Androgynous “I” 142 v CHAPTER 3: THE POETIC LINE 153 SECTION 1: SIGNIFYING THE POETIC LINE 153 Queer Connotations in Marcel Proust 154 Queer Impressions in Renée Vivien and Paul Verlaine 158 Queer Negations in Stéphane Mallarmé 172 SECTION 2: VERSIFYING THE POETIC LINE 181 Victor Hugo and the Dislocated Alexandrine 182 Marie Krysinska and Free Verse 187 Charles Baudelaire and the Prose Poem 198 SECTION 3: VISUALIZING THE POETIC LINE 213 Black on White: “La cravate et la montre” 216 White on Black: “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard” 227 CONCLUSION 248 BIBLIOGRAPHY 254 vi VITA Before attending the University of California, Los Angeles, Louise Alison Brown earned a Master of Arts with Honors in French Literature in 2011 and a Bachelor of Arts with Highest Distinction in French in 2007. She completed both degrees at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. Louise taught English culture and language at the Université de Franche-Comté in Besançon, France from 2008 to 2009 and worked as an administrator at the École Supérieure de Commerce in Clermont-Ferrand, France from 2010 to 2011. At UCLA, she has taught a wide variety of courses covering French culture, language, and literature, as well as a selection of courses in the LGBTQ Studies Program. Her forthcoming publication, “Like Constellations, Shimmer: A Translation of ‘Je contemple souvent le ciel de ma mémoire’ by Marcel Proust,” will appear in Volume 9, Issue 1 of Francosphères. vii INTRODUCTION What is queer poetry? Is it poetry written by a queer poet such as Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, or Renée Vivien? Is it poetry written about a queer subject-matter, like Charles Baudelaire’s “Lesbos” (“Lesbos”) or “Femmes damnées” (“Damned Women”), which describe scenes of Sapphic eroticism? Or is it poetry that challenges normative knowledges about the nature and functioning of the poetic genre, such as Marie Krysinska’s free-verse poems, Guillaume Apollinaire’s calligrams, or Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard” (“A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance”)? Our conception of queer poetry depends in large part on our understanding of queerness, and it determines, to a large extent, our critical approach to poetic texts. Current conceptions of queer poetry focus solely on poetry written by a queer poet or poetry written about a queer subject-matter. Consequently, they rely on primarily biographical and thematic readings of poetic texts. In this dissertation, I argue that a poem’s queerness does not derive solely from the queer identity of its author or the queer nature of its thematic content, and I call for a critical approach to queer poetry that supplements its conventionally biographical and thematic readings with literary and theoretical readings of poetic texts. In order to interrogate the concept of queer poetry, I consider the nature of both queerness and poetry, and I examine the ways in which the two can intersect. I situate this examination in the French literary tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a result of three concurrent cultural phenomena, this context fosters a particularly intricate relation between the poetic and the queer: Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, French society became increasingly fascinated with questions of “sexual perversion” and “gender subversion,” and this burgeoning cultural interest led to a proliferation of discourses on the 1 matter. This discursive phenomenon was paralleled by a sudden revitalization and rapid evolution of the French lyric tradition. After the relatively scarce poetic production of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the turn of the nineteenth century witnessed a proliferation of poetic works and a dynamic succession of large-scale poetic movements. And in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the notion of modernité, which began to take hold in the artistic domain, encouraged poets to experiment with formal and stylistic innovations that undermined prosodic conventions and destabilized conceptions of the poetic genre. I ask how these concurrent cultural phenomena intersected and influenced one another. In what way did the revitalized lyric tradition shape the discursive production of queerness in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France? And in what way was it shaped by it in return? How might the formal and stylistic poetic innovations characteristic of modernité constitute forms of “literary queering”? Under what circumstances can formal poetic features like versification be considered queer? And what insights can be gained from conceptualizing queerness in poetic terms? Such questions reveal important intersections between literary studies and LGBTQ studies, and they concern the critical potential of both poetic theory and queer theory. State of the Field Despite the rapidly growing field of LGBTQ+ studies and its frequent intersection with literary studies, the questions raised above remain largely, if not entirely, unanswered. The most in-depth study concerning the role of French literature in the discursive production of queerness is Michael Lucey’s Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide, and Proust (2006). Lucey closely examines the social and historical contexts influencing twentieth century literary articulations of queer sexualities, and he focuses his analysis on the literary technique of 2 first-person narration. By drawing from the field of linguistics, Lucey thoroughly explores the pragmatic and metapragmatic issues at stake in the writing and reception of literary works by Marcel Proust, André Gide, and Colette, who all narrated stories of same-sex desire in the first person. But the scope of Lucey’s study does not consider first-person expressions of same-sex desire in the context of poetry. As a literary form that