The Flowers of Eve : How Baudelaire found his way into feminist science fiction

This paper considers the use of literary intertexuality and its feminist implications through a case study of a specific intertexual reference found in Angela Carter’s 1977 novel The Passion of New Eve : that of the canonical work of Charles Baudelaire. In true feminist form, Carter deflates the nineteenth-century poet – who has risen to the status of myth in Western culture – by re-contextualizing the various elements of the Baudelairean aesthetic. After defining theories of intertextuality and the notion of bricolage as they pertain to Carter’s work, this paper goes on to examine how Carter reworks to various degrees the key notions that define Baudelaire as a canonical author : from revisitation, as found in the portrayal of the urban landscape, to modification, through the image of the flâneur, to full-blown perversion – the exaggeration of the beloved dandy. Carter’s practice is not a complete rejection of the canon. Rather, what this paper reveals is the ambivalent relationship of the feminist author to her male, modernist predecessors.