Symbolist Space and Habitat

Abstract

This research aims to analyze the structure of space and habitat as it appears in the perceptions of 19th-century French artists and poets, using the tools of structural anthropology, inspired by Claude Lévi-Strauss, and of semiotics. For this purpose, we followed a scheme in concentric circles including: room→ house → windows → garden → city. To better understand this structure, we have analyzed each element separately. We saw that the further we advance on the scale of degrees of space’s openness, the more concrete reality is denied to us. This reality is replaced by a mental decor and various moods. For the symbolists, the tendency to harmonize in an agreeable manner with nature is almost non-existent. The perception of gardens is
embedded in the sphere of the dysphoric because it is associated with the isotopy of the twilight (which contains: evening, night, rain, autumn, winter and especially death). Moreover, the time which corresponds to the symbolist space is the twilight time which marks, fixes and above all provokes the march towards alienation. Therefore we can affirm, without fear of being wrong, that the perception of space in
Symbolism, completely removing the romantic nature, is nothing more than a state of mind, a mental reality, which will become neurotic in the symbolists, in general, melancholic in Verlaine and delirious in Rimbaud’s art.