Baudelaire’s Celestial Vision of Jeanne Duval

Abstract

My first experience of Charles Baudelaire’s work resulted from reading Angela Carter’s short story, ‘Black Venus’ (1985), which is interspersed with allusions to his poetry, including an excerpt from ‘Sed non satiata’.[i] The title refers to the so-called ‘Black Venus’ cycle of poems inspired by Jeanne Duval, Baudelaire’s Haitian partner. In ‘Black Venus’, Carter reconfigures Duval and Baudelaire’s relationship from Duval’s perspective, and presents us with a woman who is in turn vivacious, jaded, provocative, shrewd, and who lights cigarettes with Baudelaire’s discarded sonnets. Carter’s daring depiction inspired me to seek out the source-material – Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (1857), translated by James McGowan for Oxford University Press (1998). On reading ‘Exotic Perfume’, ‘A Phantom’, and ‘The Cat’, I became fascinated by Baudelaire’s extraordinary linguistic dexterity, and how tantalizing glimpses of Duval were scattered like jewels throughout each poem. Even two hundred years after Baudelaire’s birth, his desire for Duval lingers on to trouble and entice the reader. As the title ‘Sed non satiata’ suggests, satisfaction remains ever-thwarted, engulfing the subject of the poet’s desire and the poetic self: ‘Like a cook with ghoulish appetite |I boil and devour my own heart’, the speaker mourns in ‘A Phantom’, while his incorporeal lover glows with incandescence, a ‘splendid ghost’.[ii]

[i] Angela Carter, ‘Black Venus’, in Burning your Boats: Collected Short Stories (London: Vintage, 1996), pp. 231-44.

[ii] Charles Baudelaire, ‘A Phantom’, in The Flowers of Evil, trans. by James McGowan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 76-81 (p. 77).