Flowers Of Evil Bauudelaire

This poetical study will define the theme of social deviancy, taboo sexuality, and the quest for beauty through the dualistic meaning of “spleen and ideal” in The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire. In these poems, Baudelaire is attempting to find beauty in the most malignant and ugly aspects of life. The first section of the book entitled “Spleen and Ideal” defines the ugliness of death, disease, and other malignant aspects of life in the “spleen”, and the way that the “ideal” attempts to extract beauty from life through eroticism, drinking, and drug usage. These deviant ways of viewing life in France created a social outcry against Baudelaire, which exposed the ugliest and deviant aspects of French life to the reading public. The governmental
Historically, Baudelaire rejected the idea of Rousseau’s ideology of the inherent natural goodness of human beings, which he countermands by celebrating Original Sin through a Satanic perspective. Baudelaire was a devote Catholic that believed in the Fall of Adam and Eve, which sets a quasi-historical way to refute Rousseau’s dominant view of humanity as being inherently good. In the poem “Destruction”, Baudelaire defines the premise of Original Sin as a provocative and enthralling part of self-depravation and immorality when succumbing to
In this manner, Baudelaire believed that humanity was flawed and corrupted, which was based on the inherent selfishness and cruelty of human behavior. For instance, in the poem “To a Red-Haired Beggar Girl”, Baudelaire defines the celebrating of poverty as a form of “beauty” in a corrupt class-based system that breeds poverty and inequality in French society: “Pale girl with the auburn hair,/Whose dress through its tears and holes/Reveals your poverty,/And your beauty” (Baudelaire 169). In this political view, Baudelaire is summarizing his love for the poor, which defines the beauty of the most wretched people living in a society that is based inequality and class status. In this manner, Baudelaire does not believe in democracy or collective forms of governing, since he summarizes the inherently selfish and evil behavior of humankind that makes this type of political view impossible in the context of Original