Generic baggage: encountering other people in ‘À une passante’ and ‘Les Veuves’

Baudelaire's exploitation and challenging of generic conventions have implications for readers' impressions of a text, including their perceptions of the other people with whom the speaker comes into contact. This article explores these issues in relation to two short texts: "À une passante" (a sonnet evoking one of the most celebrated Baudelairean encounters) and "Les veuves" (a poème en prose in which an apparently similar subject is treated very differently). I conclude that generic baggage can be as problematic as the heuristic assumptions we bring to our everyday dealings with other people.