Entre le Parnasse et le modernisme: L'affirmation feministe de Maria Krysinska dans les Rythmes Pittoresques (1890)

Abstract

A brilliant pianist, singer, and poet at age sixteen, Maria Krysinska went to Paris to study music at the Paris Conservatory. She soon left it to join the hippie Hydropathes (mad dogs) to sing and play at Le Chat Noir café, as the only female member. Her role in reviving Free Verse (already used by La Fontaine) has been much discussed, but the structure and meaning of her best collection of verse,Rythmes Pittoresques, still needs attention. Its five sections suggest a five-act play. The poems in MIRAGES depict the awakening of consciousness. SYMBOLES dramatizes an ontological degradation, where plants and animals—and finally, a sentient stone cross—lament. FEMMES corrects misogynist mythology by depicting women in charge, and with positive roles. CONTES, at the climax, expresses disillusionment as the female dancers from various countries are dominated and abused by men, but their proprioception endows them with kinetic potential for exercising force and movement, and the selfhood of the implied author expresses itself through the especially free and dynamic irregular versification, and through the worldwide roaming of her settings. RÉSURRECTIONS suggests the poet's passing doubts concerning her self-exile, as she briefly turns toward orthodox Catholicism, but the Rythmes Pittoresques' pervasive synesthesia; the addition of a sixth sense, proprioception; the premodernist emphasis on the Classical Four Elements of Creation (earth, air, fire, and water), and the versatile poet's depiction of her implied roles as painter, actress, dancer, musician, and dramaturge create a miniature Gesamtkunstwerk worthy of Wagner.