Gender Trouble (and Cognitive Science) in Baudelaire

Nature is a temple. Death is a captain. Hair is an ocean. Woods are like cathedrals. Beauty bestrides her throne like a sphinx. An indigent muse sings like a cynical choirboy. It’s a wellknown fact that Baudelaire’s poetry is full of metaphor, simile, and analogy; what’s less obvious is the fact that many of these comparisons cross grammatical gender, bringing together la nature and un temple, un amour and la matière, la Beauté and un sphinx, le ciel and une grande alcôve, la muse and un enfant de chœur, un plaisir and une vieille orange. Are such choices a matter of irrelevant happenstance, or could they have significant (if subliminal) effects? What we find, when we look at the corpus, is that the mixed-gender metaphors are surprisingly common. They crop up when easy alternatives are on hand; when we’d be very likely to visualize an allegorical figure, complete with its traditionally gendered attributes; and when the subject of comparison is the masculine-gendered speaker himself, or a feminine-gendered addressee. They form, at times, patterns of alternation that seem hard to attribute to chance. Could such moves, operating beneath the threshold of conscious awareness, generate a series of cognitive jolts, placing the reader’s attention on alert? Could they end up jarring the mind out of its gendered ruts of thought? Might they even chip away at a pernicious ideological system, one so deeply entrenched its victims are barely aware of it?