SOURCE: "Baudelaire and the Vicissitudes of Venus: Ethical Irony in Fleurs du Mal," in The Shaping of Text: Style, Imagery, and Structure in French Literature, edited by Emanuel J. Mickel, Jr., Bucknell University Press, 1993, pp. 113-30.

In the following essay, Kaplan explores the relationship between ethics and sexuality in Les Fleurs du Mal.

Respectful attention to literary context often helps resolve thorny theoretical issues. The "architecture" (or overall thematic structure) of Les Fleurs du Mal can be delineated, with some certainty, through analysis of certain sequences (or cycles), and Baudelaire's deliberate revisions of the first (1857) edition provide empirical confirmation. Here, quite briefly, are the changes. The second (1861) edition, which remained definitive, marks a radical shift from a poetics of transcendent Beauty to a poetics of compassion for imperfect, and afflicted, people. Most of the thirty-two added poems embrace the world as it exists.

Baudelaire altered the first and...