Charles Baudelaire generally portrays women negatively in his poetry. They are described as ambiguous and extremely difficult to understand. His fascination with making everything that is seen as beautiful into something ugly manifests itself in his writing. Baudelaire's aim is to transfer that which is thought of as revolting into beauty, and that which is seen as beautiful into something horrid.
             I will start by giving examples of certain poems in which this is true, and later I will examine the reasons for this passiveness and hatred towards women.
             The poem "a celle qui est trop gaie", starts off very gently, using stereotypical
             imagery of women, e.g. flowers, beautiful landscapes, the sky etc. By verse five, the tone changes dramatically and Budelaire becomes sarcastic, dark thoughts prevail. Now he hates flowers, and he destroys them. He wants to keep the woman in his room and make a hole inside her, where he can inject his venom, thereby killing her (" a travers ces levres nouvelles, plus eclatantes et plus belles, t'infuser mon venin, ma soeur!"). Baudelaire's aim is to shock the reader; he combines the romantic (from the 19th century romanticism movement), with the gothic.
             In the poem "le serpent qui danse", Baudelaire describes a woman as having a head of a child, which is carried by an elephant; this suggests heaviness and ugliness ("ta tete d'enfant sa balance avec la mollesse d'un jeune elephant.). He later changes this unattractive description into something positive, "why shouldn't an elephant be beautiful?" Baudelaire toys with this idea of aesthetic beauty; his aim is to be unconventional. He believes that there is more to beauty than meets the eye. As mentioned previously he wants to turn everything that is previously thought of as unattractive, into something beautiful. This poem is a perfect demonstration of his desire to achieve thi
             ...