What Does Baudelaire Denounce The Ideal Beauty?

Baudelaire denounces the ideal beauty, as he injects elements of modernity -multiple perspectives, subjectivity, and emotions into his poems. He introduces multiple perspectives into the poems, as he contests the notion that beauty can only be perceived from the objective point of view. He switches between the uses of pronouns, from first person plural imperative, “contemplons” to 2nd person singular imperative, “vois” (Stamelman 256, trans. Wan). He also shifts between objectivity and subjectivity: he first distances himself from the statue and describes its physicality, but he soon adds his subjective interpretation in parenthesis and transforms the objective, aesthetic appreciation into his personal commentary (Bassim 170, trans. Wan). In fact, it is only through subjectivity that Baudelaire is able to

A woman with “Florentine beauty” is made to be enthroned on “sumptuous beds” as “entertainment for a pope or prince.” She is a creature, destined for the service of man. Also, Baudelaire treats woman’s body as an object, a “work, not of nature, but of artistic perfection” (Baudelaire, qtd. in Groom 57). During the époque, women are “obliged to adorn herself in order to be adored,” and are expected to put on cosmetics in order to appear “magical and supernatural…to astonish and charm [men]” (Baudelaire 33). Beneath these “impositions” also hide the masculine desire to control women. It is a society that “silences” woman to be a mute sculpture, and forces the masks upon bourgeoisie women. The mask “[limits] bourgeoisie women’s engagement with aspects of urban life and culture” (Souza 49). As Anthea Callen mentions, “looking was… an activity to be discouraged in woman – whose submission to an assertive male gaze or sexuality was its guarantee of meaning, and thus power” (Callen, qtd. in Souza