Charles Baudelaire

The nineteenth century was famous for breaking with tradition and for the setting of trends. Land mark innovations occurred in industry, politics and society. The literary giants of the day waxed poetic and prosaic as they charged the populace with a fevered call to return to the values of the past and the pastoral. Poets and novelists cried out to their audiences to return to nature and to once again revel in the sublime.

Conversely, Charles Baudelaire pioneered a new form of poetic expression with anti-romantic sentiments and dark views on sex and death. This darkness is echoed in his drug laden and pathetic personal life. This paper will discuss Baudelaire's themes of depression, sexual deviance, and drug use and delineate some of the parallels within the writer's life and lifestyle.

Depression

Charles Baudelaire was born to an elderly former priest turned civil servant, Francois Baudelaire and his much younger wife Caroline. Francois died when Charles was only six and Caroline remarried swiftly the following year. Charles' new step-father was a career military man who sought to provide a proper education for his new son at a respectable boarding school. Loneliness and isolation suffered during his educational exile are reflected in the adolescent Baudelaire's correspondence with his parents.

This early sense of isolation is echoed in a latter letter to his mother in the spring of 1861. In a biography entitled Baudelaire the Damned by F. W. J. Hemmings, there is a particularly telling phrase which in very few words, volumes of profound emptiness are recorded. "I am alone, with no friends, no mistress, without even a dog or cat to complain to."

Similar feelings of emotional seclusion led to the dark and icy imagery in Baudelaire's poetry. In Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris, Petits Poemes En Prose, He tells a tale of an old woman who tries to play with a baby in the same fashion as everyone else who was surrounding the child (The Old Woman's Despair). Sadly, the old woman horrified the baby and it cried out with fear and loathing. Just as the virginal cannot accurately describe the act of love, the rejection felt by the old woman in Baudelaire's poem could not have been so clearly described if it had not been experienced first hand by the man who recorded her pain.

In 1857 Baudelaire published his Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil). He was brought to trial for thirteen of the poems in the collection of which six were ultimately found to be obscene. Of the poems that were to remain in the book, the imagery is far less than cheerful. An example is the following excerpt of "Spleen, quand le ciel bas lourdÐ'..." (When the sky low and heavyÐ'...):

Ð'...long hearses

Pass by slowly in my soul; Hope, vanquished,

Weeps and atrocious, despotic Anguish

On my bowed skull plants her black flagÐ'...

Black sentiments and hollow emotions leap from the page in a manner that leaves little doubt as to the mental state of the author. To draw further comparison between the poems and the poet, Baudelaire also referred to his black moods and deep depressions as "spleen" in his letters to his mother.

Sexual misconduct

Baudelaire's black moods may have stemmed in part from his sometimes putrid and sometimes pathetic relationships with women. This can be seen in his attitude about his mother and their relationship in a telling quote used by Hemmings in Baudelaire the Damned, "when a woman has a son like me, she doesn't remarry again." In Baudelaire's Ennobling Revulsion, a review written about Baudelaire's letters, Kenneth Rexroth supports the theory of unhealthy affection between mother and son.

My God! What a wretched fellow he was...It was unlucky

for Baudelaire that his mother saved all of his letters to herÐ'...

They are all dishonestÐ'...He lies about his business affairs.

He lies about his love affairs. Always he picks at the scabs

of his ulcerating Oedipus complex. It is all very disgusting.

The relationship a man has with his mother sets the tone for every significant relationship that man has with every other woman in his life. Baudelaire's over-attachment to his mother almost guaranteed a life of unhealthy liaisons.

As a young man Baudelaire sought pleasure in the arms of prostitutes only to receive a scorching case of venereal disease in return for his coins. Soon after his discharge ceased he encountered a young woman of questionable attributes known affectionately as Sarah-la-Louchette or Squint-Eyed Sarah. This love affair left the young Lothario with syphilis before his twentieth birthday.

The Fleur du Mal poem with the bold title "Une nuit que j'etais pres d'une affreuse Juive" (one night when I lay with a frightful Jewess) was undoubtedly about his sad love affair with Sarah. He compares their supine forms with two corpses which is most likely a reference to the death sentence he was given by his very literally unhealthy love for her.

One of Baudelaire's banned works, "Le Lethe", spells out clearly the pain suffered by a man who has lost his love and who longs "to inhale, as from a withered flower, the moldy sweetness of my defunct love." His repeated failure to find love and true companionship outside of the shallowest sexual release