VV(18): Doll-like

[Dave Monroe]

"'What are you like unclothed?  A chaos of flesh.  But as Su Feng, lit by 
hydrogen, oxygen, a cylinder of lime moving doll-like in the confines of 
your costume ... You will drive Paris mad.  Women and men alike.'" (V., Ch. 
14, Sec. ii, p. 404)

"Her eyes were dead, her nose French: the strength there and about the chin 
and lips made her resemble the classical rendering of Liberty.  In all, the 
face was quite beautiful except for the eyes, which were the color of 
freezing rain." (V., Ch, 14, sec i., p. 394)


>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 ...

"If these women are cast as feral, demonic, or vampiristic, demanding the 
submission of hapless young lovers to their insatiable and bloody passions, 
they are also called cold, statuelike in their pallor and cruel indifference 
in a way that recalls Helen, the jeweled agalma, or
the female automaton ... [Theophile Gautier's] Nyssia ... "the fingers of a 
bronze statue animated by some marvel" ... Prosper Merimee's Venus d'Ille 
... "her arms of bronze" ... Swinburne's Faustine, who, like his ghostly 
Venus (Laus Veneris), is eternal, a frightening 'love-machine with clockwork 
joints of supple gold' made for the destruction of her lovers (Praz, 240).  
Other characterizations of the fatal woman portray her as frighteningly 
pallid, like a statue (like Balzac's Jane la Pale), or beautiful and dead 
(like Very, seven years dead, in Heinrich Heine's 'Florentine Night' (Salon, 
iii).  The attraction of necrophilic amours closes the circle back to 
Baudelaire.  (p. 139)

[see here, of course, Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony (2nd ed.  Trans. Angus 
Davidson.  New York: Oxford UP, 1951 [1933].  Cleveland: Meridian, 1956]

"[Frank] Kermode treats some related material in Romantic Image where he 
discusses the motif of the masklike dead face of the dancer." (p. 139)

"... he calls the concept of the dead face and the dancer the central
icon of Yeats and of the whole romantic tradition ..." (p. 141)

[Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (London: RKP, 1957), see Ch. 4, "The Dancer"]

"It may be useful to remember that dance during the nineteenth century
had developed into a highly artificial, stylized form ....  The topos of the 
fatal woman, icy, cruel, and statuelike .... and of the remote
dancer ... are both affiliated with the new valuation of artificiality as a 
defining term of modernity first given form by Baudelaire ..." (p. 141)

"The inhuman woman of the romantics is thus a hypostasis of self-reflective 
images of masochistic romantic sexual pathology, of its aesthetic theory 
with its newly valued art for art's sake, and finally, of the ancient 
dream--or nightmare--of an uncanny artificial being: Helen as jeweled 
statue."  (p. 142)


And note that "chaos of flesh" ...

_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com