Baudelaire's 'Black Venus': Identity, alterity, and the modern muse

In this thesis, I examine the relationship between the major French poet, Charles Baudelaire, and his obscure mulatto mistress, Jeanne Duval, in relation to his personal and public writing and within the broader historical context of nineteenth-century France. Analyzing Baudelaire's letters about Duval, his poetry connected with her, his novella La Fanfarlo, his writing on dandyism as well as accounts of the couple made by their contemporaries, I consider questions not only to do with race, gender and exoticism, but also the nineteenth-century family and the particular world-view generated by Romanticism. Since there is so little evidence concerning Duval's personal identity, I do not attempt to create a definitive, biographical portrait of Duval herself. Rather, in trying to understand Baudelaire's relationship with his mistress in terms of the culture and society of his day, my aim is to offer a comprehensive picture of Duval's role in Baudelaire's life, both as a companion and a muse. I argue that Baudelaire's relationship with Duval not only helped him define himself as an iconoclast poet against his conservative family and bourgeois society in general, but that she provided Baudelaire with a model of beauty which was fundamental to his modernist aesthetic, and that their relationship was integral to the highly refined aesthetics of the self through which Baudelaire articulated his concerns about identity and artistic creativity and struggled to externalize his own unique sense of self. Moreover, I argue that Baudelaire's relationship with Duval enabled him to create a poetic representation of the exotic other that is a much more challenging and complex than similar representations made by his contemporaries.