The eccentric theater of alterity: the decadent femininity in Alexandru Macedonski’s poetry

Abstract

The eccentric theater of alterity: the decadent femininity in Alexandru Macedonski's poetry): More than a hundred years after his death, Macedonski's multiform and eclectic literary career is still waiting to be rediscovered and objectively evaluated in a transnational perspective, necessary today, given that we are in the presence of a bilingual author whose work in French has the same value as that in Romanian. Macedonski's poetics, constantly open to innovation, through fruitful grafts and hybridizations with the literary and artistic currents that dominated and shaped the Western European culture, carries within itself all the devastating contradictions and paradoxical excesses of a transitional, deeply precarious and unstable age. If we consider the time frame of Macedonski's work , we will notice that, in his eccentricity always exhibited in a narcissist way, his work overlaps, in part, with an "extended" and "amplified" fin de siècle, a troubled historical and cultural period, but at the same time dynamic in the highest degree, which can no longer be circumscribed only to the last years of the 19th century. Beyond these chronological coincidences, the very coordinates of the Macedonski's work require us to frame it in a specific cultural atmosphere, imbued not only with aestheticism and esotericism, but also with experimentalism. If we look at it through this prism, the literary and existential trajectory of Macedonski is configured as one of the most emblematic moments of European Decadentism, an era traversed by the anxieties of a fractured complexity. The Macedonskian identity, as it is constructed especially at the level of eroticism (focused on an ambiguous interrelationship between male and female polarities, with their specific representations in the poetic imaginary) is certainly the thematic area in which, more than any other, a fin de siècle spirituality is mirrored, marked by abysmal stratifications and mythical sedimentations. I propose to outline, this time focusing only on some poetic texts in Romanian and in French, the construction of Macedonskian femininity as a reflex of the decadent theatricalization of alterity, and the interaction between femininity and masculinity which, as I will demonstrate, is materialized through magnetism, both psychic and erotic.