A confession of hopes, dreams, failures, and sins, The Flowers of Evil
attempts to extract beauty from the malignant. Unlike traditional poetry that
relied on the serene beauty of the natural world to convey emotions, Baudelaire
felt that modern poetry must evoke the artificial and paradoxical aspects of
life. He thought that beauty could evolve on its own, irrespective of nature and
even fueled by sin. The result is a clear opposition between two worlds,
"spleen" and the "ideal." Spleen signifies everything that is wrong with the
world: death, despair, solitude, murder, and disease. (The spleen, an organ that
removes disease-causing agents from the bloodstream, was traditionally
associated with malaise; "spleen" is a synonym for "ill-temper.") In contrast,
the ideal represents a transcendence over the harsh reality of spleen, where
love is possible and the senses are united in ecstasy.
The ideal is primarily an escape of reality through wine, opium, travel, and
passion. Dulling the harsh impact of one's failure and regrets, the ideal is an
imagined state of happiness, ecstasy, and voluptuousness where time and death
have no place. Baudelaire often uses erotic imagery to convey the impassioned
feeling of the ideal. However, the speaker is consistently disappointed as
spleen again takes up its reign. He is endlessly confronted with the fear of
death, the failure of his will, and the suffocation of his spirit. Yet even as
the poem's speaker is thwarted by spleen, Baudelaire himself never desists in
his attempt to make the bizarre beautiful, an attempt perfectly expressed by the
juxtaposition of his two worlds. As in the poem "Carrion," the decomposing
flesh has not only artistic value but inspires the poet to render it
beautifully.
Women are Baudelaire's main source of symbolism, often serving as an
intermediary between the ideal and spleen. Thus, while the speaker must run his
hands through a woman's hair in order to conjure up his ideal world, he later
compares his lover to a decomposing animal, reminding her that one day she will
be kissing worms instead of him. His lover is both his muse, providing
ephemeral perfection, and a curse, condemning him to unrequited love and an
early death. Women, thus, embody both what Baudelaire called the elevation
toward God and what he referred to as the gradual descent toward Satan: They are
luminous guides of his imagination but also monstrous vampires that intensify
his sense of spleen, or ill temper. The result is a moderate misogyny:
Baudelaire associates women with nature; thus, his attempt to capture the poetry
of the artificial necessarily denied women a positive role in his artistic
vision.
Baudelaire's poetry also obsessively evokes the presence of death. In "To a
Passerby," a possible love interest turns out to be a menacing death. Female
demons, vampires, and monsters also consistently remind the speaker of his
mortality. However, the passing of time, especially in the form of a newly
remodeled Paris, isolates the speaker and makes him feel alienated from society.
This theme of alienation leaves the speaker alone to the horrific contemplation
of himself and the hopes of a consoling death. Baudelaire further emphasizes
the proximity of death through his reliance on religious imagery and fantasy.
He earnestly believes that Satan controls his everyday actions, making sin a
depressing reminder of his lack of free will and eventual death.
Finally, elements of fantastical horror--from ghosts to bats to black cats--
amplify the destructive force of the spleen on the mind. Baudelaire was
inspired by Edgar Allen Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination, and he saw
Poe's use of fantasy as a way of emphasizing the mystery and tragedy of human
existence. For example, Baudelaire's three different poems about black cats
express what he saw as the taunting ambiguity of women. Moreover, the presence
of tortured demons and phantoms make the possibility of death more immediate to
the speaker, prefiguring the fear and isolation death will bring.
