On the frustration of my bittersweet smiles
‘It is only people who possess firmness who can possess true gentleness. In those who appear gentle it is generally only weakness, which is readily converted into harshness.’ De La Rochefoucauld, Moral maxims (479).
I was never firm. I’ve always looked for compromises in a gentle way, surely out of fear of conflict. But I never thought of my gentleness as a weakness. I believed it made me stronger. Yet, over time, and now that I read his lines, harshness arises in the form of resentments and frustrations hiding behind my bittersweet smiles...
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Rimbaud, narcissism and emotional dependency in an infernal delirium
In a ‘Delirium’ (A Season in Hell), Rimbaud describes, in the form of a brutally authentic confession, the torture of a ‘foolish Virgin’ emotionally dependent on her narcissistic and ‘infernal Bridegroom’. Most of the analyses conducted demonstrate the autobiographical nature of the poem. In terms of French analysis, Suzanne Bernard, for example, questions whether the ‘infernal Bridegroom’ is a portrayal of the accursed poet, Rimbaud, while the ‘foolish Virgin’ depicts Rimbaud’s sweet beloved, Verlaine. Or, as Marcel A. Ruff phrases it, she is the hallucinating soul of Rimbaud’s earlier self, consumed by a later, freed, Rimbaud. Pierre Brunel eventually concluded it was a ‘text with numerous meanings’, which is a common approach to Rimbaud’s writings...
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Feminist analysis — Pénélope Delaur
Women on the streets
Women on the streets analyses the streets and squares named after women in Valencia, Spain, from a statistical, urbanistic, historical and feminist perspective. By studying the limited number of signs named after women in Spain...
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