SOURCE: "Fragmentation and Irony in Les Fleurs du Mal," in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1, Fall-Winter, 1991-92, pp. 177-86.

In this essay, Harrington examines the complex sense of self that Baudelaire reveals in Les Fleurs du Mal.

Fragmentation commands special significance in Les Fleurs du Mal and stresses an often contradictory split occurring at many levels such as the structural opposition between spleen and ideal. Thematic polarities of love and hate, time and space, good and evil, God and Satan abound in Baudelaire's work. Of greater importance, perhaps, is the position of the fragmented self that shapes the core or nucleus upon which other forms of fragmentation acquire meaning. It finds expression in various ways: the self identifies with others, thereby engaging in an interplay of its own absence and presence. The divided self also calls attention to the distancing of the poetic voice from the poem's movement...