SAINTS AND STRANGERS
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SAINTS AND STRANGERS
Little is known of Jeanne Duval, the mixed-race woman from Haiti who served as Charles Baudelaire’s iconic muse for Les Fleurs du Mal, the heady collection of love poems that landed its author in court for obscenity. An actress who funded her career by dancing at the cabaret, Jeanne eventually became Baudelaire’s ‘kept woman’, relying on the dandyish poet to house her, feed her and financially support her. A relationship that swung from high to low, good to bad, the toxic, hedonistic affair lasted two decades. Other than his mother, Jeanne Duval was probably the most important woman in Charles Baudelaire’s life.
For the white, male poet, Jeanne was a shimmering mirage, the direct inspiration for “Le serpent qui danse” (“The serpent that dances”), in which Baudelaire likens his lover to the sinuous movements of a snake—lethal and enthralling all at once. In “Parfum exotique” (“Exotic perfume”), Baudelaire wrote, “I inhale the fragrance of your warm breast/I see happy shores spread out before me. . . and women in whose eyes shine a startling candor.” The waves of the sea, blue skies and paradise emerge in Baudelaire’s poems when he is with Jeanne, who is an object, a fetish, a gateway to another world, where the respectability of bourgeois society dissolves, and the natives exist for the pleasure of the poet.
While mythologized in Baudelaire’s poems, feminist attempts to glimpse Jeanne from her vantage point as a Black woman, dancer and migrant persist, significantly in Angela Carter’s 1985 short story, “Black Venus”, later printed in the short fiction collection, Saints and Strangers. Narrated from Jeanne’s eyes, the prose sings with a resigned, detached cynicism, of a woman who has accepted her lot in life, well-versed in elevating the art of melancholy with bitter wit and restrained anger. Even with her lover near, she is truly alone, her only companion a cat. Her sole means of protest is her lethargy, which still gives Baudelaire ample time to write about her. She reflects on her grandmother describing the Middle Passage to her, and the irony that the man she viewed as her savior has infected her with syphilis, a nightmarish disease that disfigured the faces of its victims before the invention of penicillin.
The contrast of highly aestheticized love and desire with the physical horror of disease and death reveals Carter—the queen of gothic horror—in top form. It’s also realistic: Baudelaire did indeed die of syphilis, and while it’s unclear when Jeanne followed him to the grave, she suffered from the disease and is thought to have passed away in her 40s.
Perhaps this, too, is what it means to be a woman: our mortality always lurks beneath our desirability, the tricky gamble between love and death, and the artist’s muse, the symbol spurring his art, is always ultimately cannibalized in his fantasies, her voice echoing somewhere in the ether, silent but not forgotten.
Written by Iman Sultan
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