Melancholy and Baudelaire

Part II focuses on melancholy (Chapters 4 and 5) and begins a commentary on Les Fleurs du Mal (Chapters 6–10), which will be completed in Part IV (Chapters 15–19). This chapter focuses on melancholy itself, the condition and its history. It proposes that for Baudelaire melancholy is neither a form of pathological mental disorder nor a mere mood but the irremediable default experience of all humanity—what he terms ‘le Mal’. There follows a brief exploration of the possible biographical basis for Baudelaire’s focus on melancholy and then discussion of its depiction in the prose narrative La Fanfarlo (1847) and in two poems, ‘Le Gouffre’ and ‘Sur Le Tasse en prison d’Eugène Delacroix’. The final section examines how Jean Starobinski has analysed Baudelaire’s poetic treatment of melancholy in relation to traditional iconography, especially the mirror, and as an intuitive anticipation of more recent psychiatric and psychoanalytic approaches to the condition.