Miller Frank, The Mechanical Song

[Dave Monroe]

... from Felicia Miller Frank, The Mechanical Song: Women, Voice, and
the Artificial in Nineteenth-Century French Narrative (Stanford, CA:
Stanford UP, 1995), Chapter 5, "Baudelaire and the Painted Woman," pp.
118-42):

This taste [in Italian opera for the "unearthly" voices of the castrati]
for the artificial appaers to run counter to the mainstream of romantic
valuation of nature and, where it bears on the representation of women,
the deeply inscribed cultural assimilation of woman to nature.  At the
same time, however, both the artificial woman and teh woman as nature
are equally reified, or, in Heideggerian terms, seen as physis, as
opposed to techne.  We have seen how [Jean-Joesph] Goux [in Symbolic
Economies: After Marx and Freud] has suggested that Western metaphysics
distributes gender throughout these categories, linking the feminine
with the former as matter, the macsuline with the latter as spirit.
Within the context of romanticism, a definite shift nevertheless takes
place.... (118)

I suggest that this apparent contradiction in fact articulates the shift
to modernity and modernism.  The new phantasmal projection of woman as
artifice, as simulacrum, appears in french letters through the writing
of Baudelaire ... (119)

The preferred rendition of the woman as statue, of artifice as the
desirable woman's most important fashion accessory, is adumbrated
already in Baudelaire's praise of makeup in Le Peintre de la vie
moderne.  In these essays, he intervenes in the tradition dating to
antiquity that censures women's use of "paint," affirming instead the
value of artificiality and linking it specifically with ideas of
modernity.  While the painted woman has long been a metaphor for teh
seductions of representation, I will argue that the artificial woman
enacts a etafiguration of the technologies of the mechanical
reproduction (to borrow Benjamin's phrase) of human presence that
transformed the culture of the late nineteenth century: the brilliance
of electricity, the instantaneity of telegraphy, the capture of the
warmth of the human voice in the phonograph, the advent of cinema.
(119)

My argument is parallel in this regard, once again, with certain points
of [Friedrich] Kittler's discussion of teh transition from romanticism,
his shift from the "discourse network" 1800 to that of 1900.  Kittler
argues that in 1800, the woman was idnetified with nature, in 1900, no
longer: "If the phantasm of woman arose in teh distribution of form and
matter, spirit and nature, writing and reading, production and
consumption, to the two sexes, a new discourse network canceled the
polarity." [Kittler, Discouse Networks 1800/1900, p. 348] (119)

The inhuman woman carries forward the ancient topos of teh automaton so
prevalent in German literature of teh period at the same time she
expresses one aspect of the dominant image of the fatal woman as [Mario]
Praz has described it [in his The Romantic Agony], and the icy,
expressionless symbolist woman [Frank] Kermode isolates in his
discussion of the dance figure in romantic imagery [in his Romantic
Image].  (120)

... the kind of nineteenth-century fantasy of the femme fatale that Praz
shows to be pervasive in romantic writing and that Bram Dijkstra [in his
Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle
Culture] finds typical in the visual representations of women in the
late nineteenth century: a vision of the woman as seductive, perverse,
and infinitely dangerous. (121)

Baudeliare begins the first of these pieces, "la Femme," with what
resembles an invocation of the woman as muse ....  "as terrible and
incommunicable as the Deity." ... Baudelaire rather perversely misquotes
Joseph de Maistre, attributing to him the statement taht the woman is a
"garceful animal whose beauty enlivened and made easier the serious game
of politics; for whom, and through whom, fortunes were made and unamde,
for whom, but above all, through whom poets and artists create their
most exquisite jewels" ([Baudeliare,] Painter, 30).  (121)

... she is a kind of idol, stupid perhaps, but dazzling and bewitching,
who holds wills and destinies suspended on her glance. ([Baudelaire,]
Painter, 30).  (122)

Baudelaire finally discloses to his reader the source of the woman's
charm: its secret lies in the magical luxury of her adornments.  All the
touches that enhance and ornament her beauty are part of her, and one
must make no effort to think of her as separate from them ... (122)

Everything that adorns woman, everything that serves to show off her
beauty, is part of herself.... No doubt Woman is sometimes a light, a
glance, an invitation to happiness, sometimes just a word ... in the
metal and the mineral which twist and turn around her arms and neck,
adding to the fire of her glance ... ([Baudelaire,] Painter, 30) (122,
though I edited a much longer quote here)

Despite teh charming style of this passage, there is no doubt of the
misogyny of the underlying message: where women are concerned, it is
better not to look too closely. (123)

Baudelaire's sense that the woman lacks "something essential" is not
surprising, given the weight of themetaphysical tradition dating back to
Plato that identifies the woman as lacking, in fact, an essence. (124)

In this piece, Baudelaire attacks the association of beauty and virtue
with nature in order to relocate them in the realm of art and artifice.
(127)

Rather, Baudelaire excoriates nature as the source of crude constraint
and evil (he himself preferred evil in a more refined form).  (127)

Baudelaire thus places virtue and good on the side not simply of
religion and philosophy but of what is specifically artificial.  (127)

This paradoxical logic allows Baudelaire to strike one of teh essential
themes of Le Peintre de la vie moderne: the revelation of teh
transcnedent in the transitory. (127-8)

Speaking of fashion leads Baudelaire metonymically to the subject of
women and makeup, the heart of "Eloge du maquillage."  If virtue is
"surnaturel," then it becomes the woman's duty to make herself up, not
to imitate natural beauty or to "heigheten" her good features, but to
make them appear as artificial as possible.... For Baudelaire, tehn, the
woman is at her best by making herself appear "supernatural" ... (128)