Rhyme Like a Man: Poetry, Masculinity, and the Body in C19th France Seminar

In this paper I look at how male poets in C19th France used poetic texts to articulate profound anxieties around masculinity following the 1789 Revolution. I read a wide variety of poetic texts as sites of precarious self-construction for individuals threatened by social, economic and cultural forms of emasculation. We will look at how poets such as Victor Hugo, Paul Verlaine and Jules Laforgue employed a gendered language of the body in order to articulate aesthetic questions, with certain forms representing a hyper-virile ideal, and other – non-normative – forms identified as effeminate. Yet close readings of the poems suggest that their textual performances of gender are more complex, fluid and unstable than the rigid binary framework structuring C19th discourses on gender could express.