Baudelaire's `Black Venus' Poems

Poems 22 to 39 are all about Jeanne Duval. The woman in the poems is dark-skinned and dark-haired and the images used to describe her are full of an exotic tropicality. The poems are marked by their sensuality and their stress on the physical aspects of love and of sexual intimacy. The Jeanne Duval or black Venus poems are linked formally through certain recurrent images pertaining to heat, scent and physical abundance. The poem `Parfum exotique' is a key text here with the physicality of woman, to be more explicit, the scent of her sultry breast (`l'odeur de ton sein chaleureux') provoking in the poet an imaginative reverie of exploration and escape.

In `La Chevelure', it is the scent of her hair that inspires another fantasy of escape to a tropical idyll. The common link between these two poems is of woman as muse inspiring the poet, provoking exotic and erotic daydreaming. Woman's physicality allows the poet escape through imagination and memory. The magical powers of the imagination which had hitherto laid dormant are reawakened through women's physicality.

On a more critical level, what we can see Baudelaire doing is to repeat and reinforce stereotypes about non-western women as sexually voracious and animal-like. Indeed, when Jeanne is described in the sonnets it is generally in terms of an animal, often a cat. In `La Chevelure', the vocabulary used has strong animal connotations: `toison' (fleece), `moutonner' (to billow) and `encolure' (neck-line). Baudelaire in these poems, reveals himself to be very much a man of his time, reworking colonial stereotypes of the non-western woman. It is interesting to compare Baudelaire's representations of Jeanne Duval with French painting of the nineteenth century which also made use of western stereotypes about the colonial Other. You may like to consider the relevance of the argument made by Griselda Pollock in her book on the painter Paul Gauguin to Baudelaire's poems to his `Vénus noire':

The culturally feminized and racially othered body also carries the projected burden of cultural lack - the ennui - experienced by some of the Western bourgeoisie in the face of capitalism's modernity. Gauguin talks so often of escaping the urban industrial West for renewal in the Tropics. (Pollock: 1992 p.47)

Further Reading
• E.J. Ahearn, `Black Venus, White Poet: Exile and Exploitation in Baudelaire's Jeanne Duval Poems' in The French Review, 51 (1977) 212-220

• A. Carter, `Black Venus' in Black Venus (London: Picador, 1986) 9-24
• G. Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits 1888-1893: Gender and the Colour of Art History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992)

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Concept: Charlie Mansfield, Text: Tony McNeill, Artwork: Carole Baker
The University of Sunderland, GB, Last Update 24-Mar-96