The Voyage and the Woman as Symbol in Baudelaire

Abstract

Throughout the 19th century, travel began to modernize and become more frequent thanks to industrialization and technological advances such as the steam engine, which facilitated travel and contact with distant countries, peoples and cultures other than European ones. From these movements, human beings decided to begin documenting them, in order to leave a record of their travels. These records would not only be limited to cold and neutral travel chronicles, but there would also be an increasingly present interest in showing the impressions, emotions and thoughts of the travellers in each of these writings. From these manuscripts, literary creations will later be born in the form of poetry and narrative that will develop all these existing themes in the chronicles such as, just to mention a few, the encounter with the other, estrangement and fascination. These same themes will be present in Charles Baudelaire's poems Les fleurs du mal (1857) where through 126 poems, the Parisian poet will transport the reader to distant and unknown lands, while he allows himself to be soaked in all the sensations that the poet describes him. This journey will not only be physical, but the mystical element will also be present, which will manifest itself in the figure of the woman, constantly represented in Baudelaire's work and which functions as a symbol of the poet's search for the aesthetic ideal.