# Dracula and the Fear of Degeneration

Speaker: Ken Gemes
Course: The Biology of Evil
Watch: https://ergo.org/videos/ken-gemes-dracula-and-the-fear-of-degeneration
Transcript: https://ergo.org/videos/ken-gemes-dracula-and-the-fear-of-degeneration/transcript/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK_1ah9zmd4

When quoting, name the speaker and link to the watch URL.

In this lecture, Ken Gemes examines how nineteenth-century degeneration theory moved beyond science and medicine into popular literature, focusing on two major case studies: Bram Stoker's Dracula and the poetry of Charles Baudelaire. Gemes reveals how Dracula draws on degenerationist rhetoric, casting its villain as an exotic, atavistic Eastern figure coded with antisemitic tropes, from foul smells to references to 'old Jerusalem.' He also explores the novel's anxieties about the New Woman, gender mixing, and homoerotic desire, showing how domesticity serves as the story's resolution against perceived threats. The lecture then pivots to Baudelaire, presenting him as a heroic figure who refused to separate good from evil. Rather than treating corruption as something escapable or confined to degenerate outsiders, Baudelaire insisted that infection and evil are universal, implicating every reader. For Gemes, this makes Baudelaire a vital counter to the scapegoating logic of degeneration theory.

## Degeneration Theory Enters the Novel

We've already seen how degenerationist notions are reflected in scientific literature, particularly in Darwin we saw, we also saw it invoked in medical literature that was people like Morel and also people like Nordau. I want to have a little look now how it reflected in actual literatures and novels. And it's funny because some of these novels we might deal with are very, very famous, but people today have no conception, sorry I'm losing my voice a bit, no conception that they were extremely influenced by degenerationist literature, and often were an attempt to make degenerationist literature available to the public.

Of course, that's not going to be done through scientific discourse, but what better discourse to do it than the novel? And someone who I unfortunately don't have time to talk about today is the very famous French 19th century writer Emile Zola who wrote a really, a 20-volume series of books which was really trying to introduce degeneration theory to the public. But I'll deal with it in an English setting, and the book that I want to deal with is something I think known

## Dracula as Degenerationist Literature

To all of you, which was *Dracula*. Now *Dracula* was originally published in 1897 and it was originally meant to be, Bram Stoker, the author of *Dracula*, he actually just wanted to make money, and he saw that there was this book by a French writer called Sheridan Le Fanu who wrote this vampire story called *Carmilla*. He says, "This looks like a moneymaker. I'm going to do the same thing." But at the same time, he started reading the people we've talked about. He started reading Lombroso and Nordau. He also may have been more influenced not directly by Nordau, but by reading Havelock Ellis' *The Criminal*. But *The Criminal*, of course, Havelock Ellis' *The Criminal* was based on his own reading of Nordau.

There are also many other novels that dealt with degeneration. Some of the ones you'll, I think, as soon as I say the name it will be obvious to you. *Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde*. That is really just a story of a good middle class doctor who has this element of degeneration within him. There's also a novel very well-known in the early 20th century, and I think there have been movies made of it, Rider Haggard's *She*, there were a whole series of novels, *The Island of Dr. Moreau*, they're all influenced by degeneration theory.

And I think some of these were actually very much influenced not so much by their reading of, say, Nordau, but the reading of Lankester's very influential book *Degeneration* which I think I mentioned earlier. That was from 1880. There was also Henry Drummond's very popular *Natural Law in the Spiritual World*. But what I want to do, I want to quote before I get on to

## Extermination Rhetoric and the Degenerate

Dracula, to go back to Nordau, because basically this idea of Nordau is absolutely central to what Bram Stoker is warning us about Dracula, the figure of the Count Dracula. This is from Nordau, not from Dracula. "Whoever believes with me that society is the natural organic form of humanity in which it alone can exist, prosper and continue to develop itself to higher destinies, whoever looks upon civilization as a good thing, having value and deserving to be defended, must mercilessly crush under his thumb the anti-social vermin. To him," who with nature, remember nature is seen as a degenerate by Nordau, "is enthusiastic over the free-loving, lusting beast of prey, we cry, get you gone from civilization. Rove far from us. Be a lusting beast of prey in the desert. Satisfy yourself. There is no place among us for the lusting beast of prey, and if you dare to return to us, we will pitilessly beat you to death with clubs."

So this is the extreme exterminist version of degeneration theory. Nordau is saying, "We need to either isolate them and they can be off in the desert, or we beat them to death." Well, Dracula is a figure of the degenerate and Bram Stoker is saying, "We need to beat him to death before he takes us over." So again, the two possibilities seen by Nordau for degenerates, isolation, grow far from us in the desert away from civilization, or extermination, we will beat you to death. Bram Stoker in *Dracula* is going for option B, the beating to death.

## Dracula as Exotic Eastern Atavistic Figure

At the very beginning, Dracula is seen as something exotic. Remember, he's a mysterious figure from the east, and I'll come back to the importance of the east later, but basically the east is configured in a lot of literature. As Edward Said said in his book on Orientalism, "The east is a site of the exotic, of the foreign." And how does Dracula put it? He says, "Others of his race, in a later age, again and again brought his forces over the great river into Turkey Land." So he's coming from the Far East, he's this exotic figure.

But also it's important for Stoker that he's come somewhat like an animal. He's got a feline quality, but he's possessed of great strength and agility. Remember, these are features that Lombroso attaches to the atavistic born criminal. I'll just do a little quotation from the book *Dracula*. "But my very feelings changed to revulsion and terror when I saw the whole man slowly emerge from the window and begin to crawl down the castle wall," like an animal. "I saw fingers and toes grasp the corner of the stones." He's like this primitive animal as he scales down the castle wall, and Stoker refers to him that he moves like a lizard upon the wall.

And he says, "What manner of man is this? Or what manner of creature is it in the semblance of a man?" So Dracula, again, he's someone who assumes human form, but is he really human? Two of the questions we've seen about, women and Jews, and that's gonna be one of the punchlines of this that

## The Feminized Criminal With a Child's Brain

Dracula is a feminized Jewish figure for Stoker, as we'll come to see. So we see more of these tropes of Lombroso, notions of atavism, reference to the vampire as being a born criminal with a child's brain, with a pronounced lack of the faculty of reason. Reason is associated in this Kantian manner with the white male as a paradigm.

So this is what he says, and you can see the echoing of Lombroso's male offender and female offender. "Empirical science reveals he is a born criminal, with a child's brain, working more like an animal than being endowed with a full faculty of reason." Again, the Kantian overhang of this reference to the faculty of reason.

And there's a passage which people actually don't know, well, they wouldn't know this because they're not familiar with the literature, in *Dracula* where he directly references Lombroso and Nordau. I'll just read you a bit from it. "This criminal has not the full man brain. He is clever and cunning and resourceful, but he be not of stature as to brain. He be of child brain in much. Now this criminal of ours is predestined to crime also." Straight Lombroso. "And it is of the child to what he, we have done." Meaning he's comparing him to childhood.

Then he says, "To count as a criminal and of a criminal type, Nordau and Lombroso would so classify, and qua criminal, he is of imperfectly formed mind. Thus, in a difficulty, he has to seek resource in habit." And then, again, he refers to him, he's fled back from Danube, from Turkey land.

## Antisemitic Coding in Dracula

In the 19th century and early 20th century imagination, the East is seen as a sign of the exotic, but it's also seen as a sign of the Semitic. Jews came from the East. And there were these famous pogroms, starting in Russia, starting in the 1890s with the assassination of the Czar, first of Czar Alexander, where there were pogroms, and then Jews fled from the East to the West. So in configuring of Dracula as coming from the East, that's already a clue that he's a Semitic Jewish origin, or he stands for the Semitic Jewish.

But to his audience of the time, we today just read it as a vampire story, but to his audience of the day, it was bloody clear. First of all, he abhors the cross. Think about Christian antisemitism, they abhor Jesus, they abhor the cross. Secondly, he needs blood. Remember the old Christian libel that Jews need the blood of Christian children for their Passover services and to make matzo, et cetera? It's called the famous blood libel.

Also, he's a parasite. Also, it's emphasized very much that he's a wanderer. He has no fixed home or abode. Well, that's what Christians said about the Jews, that the Jews under the curse of God for not accepting Jesus are forced to be wanderers forever. And the Jews were seen at this stage, remember, this is before the formation of Israel, as not having any fixed country.

He's also feminine and perverted. Again, this is a strange trope for us, but to the readers of the day, Jews were configured, as we've seen with Weininger, as basically feminine and basically as perverted, as having kind of, I can only say indirect sexual desires. Maybe I'll come to explain that later when we do Freud.

In fact, in a very famous scene in *Dracula*, there's a moment when he's cornered by his adversaries, Jonathan Harker, that American guy, Van Helsing and others, and his life is threatened. And someone goes at him with a dagger and slits his pocket, and what happens is all this gold falls out. Now you think what he should be doing is running and his life is at, but no, he goes and he grabs and he tries to get all the gold back into his midst. It's a trope, to his readers of the day it's bloody obvious, he's Jewish. He's obsessed with money.

Recall what I call the economy of liquids. Liquids have no determinant shape. Well, Dracula, and this was often said of Jews, that they're, we saw that with Weininger, they're adaptable. They become like the host nation they're with. That's how they try to blend in and disguise themselves, what I call the economy of liquids. Well, famously, Dracula is a shapeshifter.

Also, there is an association of Dracula with the East End of London. One of his initial lairs is in Chicksand Street in Whitechapel. I've actually visited this place.

## Whitechapel, Jack the Ripper, and Jewish Caricature

Now, again, English readers might know this, but Whitechapel was the place in the east of London where, after these massive pogroms in Russia, tons of Jews fled to. The Jews who came to London actually tended to settle around Whitechapel. I might also happen to say, Whitechapel is the place of the Jack the Ripper murders, and so I think Stoker wanted to remind his readers of the Jack the Ripper murders.

Dracula is often described as an animal. Mina, one of the main female characteristics, who's infected by Dracula in the end, refers to him as "a tall thin animal with a beaky nose and a black mustache." Again, the beaky nose should remind his readers of caricatures of Jews. "And pointed beard." Jews known for their big black beards, the religious ones. "Who had also been observing a pretty girl. He was looking at her so hard that he did not see either of us, and so I had a good view of him. His face was not a good face. It was hard and cruel and sensual."

So Dracula is configured as kind of sensual, feminist. There's stuff about his big lips, and this was very true of the caricature of Jews in the days. His big white teeth that look all the whiter because his lips were so red were pointed like animals. So Dracula is configured as an animal, again, because he's read Lombroso, as an atavism.

And Jonathan's diary makes clear that Dracula's basically a hellish beast. I'll quote from the diary. "The count turned his face, and the hellish look that I had heard described seemed to leap into it. His eyes flamed red with devilish passion. The great nostrils of his wide aquiline nose opened wide and quivered at the edge, and the sharp white teeth behind the full lips of blood dripping mouth clamped together like those of a wild beast." So Dracula's configured as a beast, hence as an atavism. And there's a lot of themes of unpleasant smells associated with Dracula. Yeah.

## The Smell of the Devil and Old Jerusalem

And of course, this was also one of the tropes of anti-Semitism. Remember very early on I said that Christian anti-Semites said the Jews had this foetus Judaicus. They smelled of sulfur. They smelled of the devil. Well, the same thing is often said of Dracula. Wherever he was, there was this weird smell.

For instance, describing his house, Jonathan Harker says, "But as to the odor itself, how should I describe it? It was not alone that it was composed of all the ills of mortality and with the pungent acrid smell of blood, but it seemed as though corruption itself had itself become corrupt. Ugh. It sickens me to think of it. Every breath exhaled by that monster seemed to have clung to the place and intensified its loathsomeness." So Dracula's identified with bad smells and this was a famous trope of anti-Semitism, of Christian anti-Semitism.

And this is the quotation I wanted to come to. It's interesting when Dracula is shipped to England in daylight, on a boat, in a coffin with earth from his native country, and the people who have to carry the coffin say, and this is a real giveaway, but most readers will bypass them. The people carrying the coffin complain and say, "Yeah, it might have smelled of old Jerusalem in it." So it's clearly a weighted reference to Dracula as some kind of Jewish entity, especially the stuff about unpleasant smell.

In *Dracula*, there's not just encoded the fear of the East, of the Semitic, of the foreign, but also a fear of the new women. There's a contrast in the book between two women. There's Mina, who's much more sexually adventurous, and she actually gets infected by Dracula and becomes a vampire. And then there's, oh my God, Jonathan Harker's wife. Lucy. And Lucy's the one who survives the attack of Dracula because she represents an old-fashioned notion of woman. At the end, she marries and she has children, et cetera.

## Fear of the New Woman in Dracula

One thing I need to let you know of is that at the same time as this degeneration of literature, there's a literature concerning the new woman. A lot of this was promulgated as a reaction to the suffragette movement, especially in England, that was campaigning for women's rights. For instance, in 1872, there was a formation of the National Society for Women's Suffrage. What Stoker does in *Dracula* is he's actually making a commentary on this notion of the new woman, the woman who is assertive and who's more sexually active. And that's in Mina, the one who gets infected by Dracula and becomes a vampire, and Lucy is meant to be the rejection of that.

It's interesting to note that in *Dracula*, women are configured as a site of infection. And this is what Dracula himself says. He's talking about his revenge, revenge against the white male presumably. "My revenge has just begun. I spread it over centuries and time is on my side. Your girls that you love are mine already and through them, you and others shall be mine, my creatures to do my bidding and to be my jackals when I want to feed."

Remember, there's this very early scene where Jonathan Harker goes to Transylvania and there are these three vampiresses and they're trying to seduce him. They really want to turn him into a vampire. The woman is configured in *Dracula*, even though Dracula himself is male, you've got to remember, he's configured as somewhat Jewish and somewhat female. But females in themselves are seen by Dracula as his means of infecting our society. So you see, it really reflects the fear of the new woman and the fear of our societies becoming feminized.

## Gender Mixing and Domesticity as Resolution

Funnily enough, Mina is also described as having certain male qualities. But that goes back to Lombroso, where he said certain females have male qualities, and also Weininger, and that gives them the power to be criminals. So Van Helsing says to Jonathan, "That wonderful Madam Mina, she has a man's brain, a brain that a man should have were he much gifted and a woman's heart." So this idea, and she also got in Weininger. This is not to say that *Dracula* was influenced by Weininger, the book was written before Weininger was available in English, of the idea of a possible mixture of female and male.

So the implication is that because Mina can't think and be rational, she cannot be wholly feminine but must have some part man. Nevertheless, she's reclaimed as a woman proper since she has a woman's heart. And here we have this implicit gendering of the, this idea that reason is a male notion and passions belong to the female. She has a man's brain but a female's heart.

The novel ends on a note of domesticity where Lucy has been fully reclaimed as a normal woman, now with a young child, and Van Helsing, the vampire hunter, says, "The boy will someday know what a brave and gallant woman his mother is. Already, he knows her sweetness and loving care. Later on, he will understand how some men have so loved her that they did dare much for her sake." So she is a good woman, the old-fashioned woman, the retrograde woman, as opposed to the new woman.

So in a way, *Dracula* represents a milder version of the anxieties exhibited in Weininger's *Sex and Character* because women can be reclaimed, according to Stoker. So *Dracula* sees the atavistic, exotic, Eastern Semitic invading empire, and that's aligned with the new assertive, sexually liberated woman. And they're kind of configured as an existential threat to civilization. So the novel is really reflecting certain anxieties of the days, and the call to eliminate the alleged vampires within our society, when amplified by massive social unrest caused by wars and economic collapse, that can have really murderous consequences.

Now, the fear of vampires was one thing that is exemplified in Stoker's *Dracula*, but when this fear of our feminization, of our Jewification becomes exaggerated and extreme, it can lead to not just the killing of vampires, but many much bigger consequences.

I want to have a little note before finishing this part on *Dracula* on the homoerotic aspects of *Dracula*. There are certain interpretations that look at Stoker's personal life, including his ambivalent relation to Oscar Wilde, and his seeming infatuation with the actor Henry Irving, and of Dracula's relationship with Jonathan Harker. Because Dracula is fixated on Jonathan Harker in a certain sense, and to a certain extent, it's reciprocated. So some people have interpreted *Dracula* as also showing certain anxieties about homoeroticism. There's a very well-known article by Talia Schaffer called "A Wilde Desire Took Me: The Homoerotic History of *Dracula*," but this is a theme I don't want to enlarge upon here.

## Homoerotic Dimensions of the Vampire

## Decadence versus Degeneration

But there is one little thing I do want to enlarge upon, because I'm not doing a lecture on Zola, and that is, there is a distinction we need to observe for this course between the difference between decadence and degeneration. Degeneration was, as I say, except for some Lombroso with his account of genius, and later we'll see with Nietzsche, degeneration was always seen as a negative thing. But at the same time there was a rhetoric of degeneration, there was a rhetoric of decadence. This was more in France, the French word, décadence.

Now most of the people involved in the rhetoric of decadence saw decadence as something totally negative. Degeneration was seen to be physiological, as in the blood or in your phrenology and the shape of your skull, the stuff that Lombroso and others did. Decadence was seen as more spiritual. But decadence was nevertheless seen as a bad thing, but there were a group of people who took up decadence and actually said decadence is actually a key to a different kind of creativity.

Oscar Wilde is seen as a decadent, but he celebrated his decadence. Now, a lot of people referred to him as a degenerate and as a decadent, and they meant it in a wholly negative way. Remember, because he was a notorious homosexual. But the decadents themselves, some of them configured decadence as a positive quality. And that's important for the figure we're about to come next to, Baudelaire.

I'm now going to talk about Baudelaire. This is always a difficult part for me because I often feel poetry is above my pay grade. I've read a lot of books on Baudelaire and I've immersed myself in Baudelaire, but still, it's difficult. And the thing is, for me, Baudelaire is one of the heroes of this course.

## Introducing Baudelaire as a Hero

If you like, there are three heroes to this course, really, though the third one is complicated. The first is Baudelaire, the second is Nietzsche, and the third is Freud. Why? All of these are involved in the degeneration literature. And Baudelaire is the most difficult case because he's not a theoretician, he's not a philosopher like Nietzsche or a psychologist like Freud. He's a poet. And he's not going to be so explicit in the themes.

But why are these three the heroes? Because ultimately, while they use these tropes, like they configure male as reason, female as the passions, et cetera, in the end, they reject

## Rejecting the Separation of Good and Evil

What is essential to degeneration thinking, what I called earlier Manichaeism. Remember, what the Manichaeist picture is, is there's good over here and there's evil over here, and they are isolatable elements. And it is the job of good to eliminate evil. That's when it becomes pathological, when you nominate certain people as evil and think, "The only way we can achieve goodness is their elimination." That is the extreme case.

Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and Freud have these elements of degeneration, but ultimately, they are not manichaeistic. Rather, they say evil comes from a misalignment between certain elements. So they don't encompass this fantasy, "Oh, we could eliminate it. There's the bad. We can isolate it over there and we can eliminate it." No. They say evil really becomes a misalignment between, let's say for Freud, maybe the ego and the id. Well, it could be a misalignment between the male and the female. And we need a better alignment if we are to eliminate evil.

Now one thing I've got to be careful. In early renditions of the class, some people who read Baudelaire said, "You're trying to disguise the fact that he's really extremely misogynistic." No, I'm not gonna deny that, though I think it's pretty facile to just write off a genius like Baudelaire as a misogynist. But yeah, nevertheless, there are extremely misogynistic elements and the vampire, for instance, is always configured as a female.

## Flowers of Evil and the Hypocrite Reader

Evil is basically configured as feminine, but ultimately, there's a point where he says it's really a question of the logic of opposites. For instance, and I'll quote from an essay of his called *My Heart Laid Bare*. "There are in man, in every man always, two simultaneous postulations. One to God, the other to Satan." Also from his selected writings, "Every well-ordered brain has within it two infinities, heaven and hell. And any image of one of these, it suddenly recognizes the other half." So what he wants to emphasize is we're always a composite of these elements and they're always living within each other. He doesn't have the dream of the isolation and elimination.

Yes, he configures, he genders them. Basically, evil is basically gendered as feminine. But what he asserts is you cannot have this fantasy of the elimination of the feminine, of the elimination of evil. And in fact, I'll jump to it here. I'll probably come back to it in my notes.

In the beginning, he has, to the reader, and he talks about all these ugly things. It's this very famous book. I should tell you. The most famous book of his is this wonderful book of poetry called *Les Fleurs, Les Fleurs du Mal*, *Flowers of Evil*. Remember, we have this trope that evil belongs to the animal world, to the world of fauna and flora. And he calls it *Flowers of Evil*. But you can see in some way, he exposes evil, but like a decadent, he admires evil. He sees a source of creativity in it.

And so in the introduction where he says to the reader, he addresses the reader and he says, "Why am I talking about all this weird stuff, this foreign stuff, this horrible stuff, this putrid stuff?" And he ends, "I speak of boredom," because he thinks worse than evil is boredom. This is something he borrowed from Schopenhauer, which, "with ready tears, dreams of hangings as if it puffs in a pipe. Reader, you know this squeamish monster well. Hypocrite reader, alias, my alias, my twin."

So what he's trying to tell his audience is that, "You might think I'm talking about something foreign, this notion of evil. You need to recognize yourself. You yourself, like me, are made up of these different elements." So that is why yes, he's a misogynist, and he's an anti-Semite too, I might add. He configures the Jew negatively, we'll come to see that, and he configures the woman negatively. But he doesn't dream this dream of isolating, of being able to eliminate it. He said, "Learn to see it as an intrinsic part of yourself." Now interestingly, and I mentioned this before, Nordau classed Baudelaire as a paradigm degenerate.

## Baudelaire Classified as a Paradigm Degenerate

I'll read to you what Nordau said about Baudelaire. "He was at once a mystic and an erotomaniac." So nearly always a degenerate is seen as somehow hyper-sexualized. "He was an eater of hashish and opium." That actually is true. "He felt himself attracted in the fashion by other degenerate minds." So Nordau is striking this theme that degenerates attract each other and develop, help develop each other.

He published, I'll skip a fair bit here. Well actually, I'll quote Nietzsche on him, because Nietzsche says, and Nietzsche was kind of appreciative of Baudelaire. He said, "Charles Baudelaire, that typical decadent, in whom a whole tribe of artists recognize themselves." So Nietzsche configures Baudelaire as a decadent too. But Nietzsche is one of those ones, like Baudelaire, who thinks decadence can be the road to higher creativity.

One thing I should add is, in the 19th century, there was a lot of awareness of the rise and falls of civilizations.

## France's Decline and the Rise of Decadence

And this was especially important in France, because France had gone through the Napoleonic period and France had seen itself as a leader. But bit by bit in the 19th century, France was being eclipsed, and by the mid-19th century, France was a much weaker power, and then of course it got overridden by Germany in 1872 with the Franco-Prussian War. And the Germans became the engine of Europe, began becoming seen as the engine of modern Europe. And France was seen as a decadent, old country.

And a lot of people who were interested in notions of decadence and degeneration, they referred a lot to a very famous book by the Englishman, Edward Gibbon, called *The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire*. And basically, the story of *The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire*, it's 12 volumes, it's really huge, but the punchline. And he does use the word degeneration a few times. But he more uses the word decadence. The punchline for Gibbon is that the Roman Empire fell because at first, the Romans were warriors, they had martial skills, they were a militaristic thing. Then they became rich and luxurious, they became feminized, they became decadent, he occasionally uses the word degenerate, and that's why they fell.

And this analysis was applied a lot by the French to themselves. And so for a lot of French people, Baudelaire became a symbol of the French decadence of his time. Baudelaire actually rejected the notion of progress. He was very suspicious that civilization has a linear progression towards the better. In other words, he rejected enlightenment ideals.

He also was very, very suspicious of the masses. And you'll see this in Nietzsche, and he very much favored the man of genius. But the man of genius, for him, tended to be configured as a decadent. Remember, we already saw an element of this in Lombroso. Lombroso generally was against degeneration and was against decadence, but he didn't have this idea that maybe the genius is a form of the degenerate.

Well, Baudelaire is the inverse of this. He doesn't care about the ordinary man, just like Nietzsche. He cares about the genius. And if the genius be decadent or degenerate, so much the better for degeneration and decadence.

I'm now going to look at his poetry. I wanted to show some of these images he used to convey the notions of decadence, images of corruption, images of complacency, images of possession, really. In the passage that I ended up quoting, "Hypocrite reader, learn to recognize yourself!" he says, "The devil's hand directs our every move; The things we loathe become the things we love." Analyze a bit, look at some of his poetry.

## Poetry of Corruption, Beauty, and Gender

I'll look at a poem and I'll try not to quote too much from his poetry. "I Prized a Memory," and he says, "In our corruption, we possess Beauties unrivaled, unrevealed to ancient times." So what I want you to clock is this theme that corruption is normally seen by people who write on degeneration or decadence as something wholly negative. But he says it also unveils beauties, beauties that he sees as unrivaled from ancient times. "But subtle though they are, such artifacts of belated muse will never keep our sickly race from offering her youth its truest homage."

There, he has a metaphor of sickness, that we are essentially sick. And there are often, with him, images of males, associated with contemplation, and females who are eroticized, who are trying to take us away from this world of complication. So he says, in which poem? In a very famous poem called Jewels, and he refers to the female, "My darling was naked, a Moorish slave..." Exoticism in the East, "... a half-tamed tiger..." The woman as animal, "... flesh and blood..." Woman of the body. And then he contrasts this, "To undermine what peace I had achieved, dislodged my soul from its rock-crystal throne of contemplation once so aloof, so serene."

And normally when I'm teaching this course, I love to show these paintings of men looking up, contemplating the heavens, and these women prowling in the grass like lions or lionesses, ready to pounce. And often, these women are full of flowers and they're like things of nature. There's a whole series of 19th century painting, where reproduced that trope. There's a very famous one, actually it's in Budapest, by Maximilian Lenz, the artist, not a very good artist, called *The Philosopher*. And it shows this man in a coat and a hat with his hands like this, looking towards the heaven. He's obviously contemplating philosophical ideas.

And all around him are all these women dancing in a sexual frenzy, and there're flowers growing out of their hair. So this is this trope that men seek to attain to spirituality and Kantian contemplation of the rational, and women are the animals that bring us down, back to earth, to the sexual. So Baudelaire refers to his spiritual contemplation of the rock crystalline throne, and these women who are like a half-tamed tiger who draw him back. And it's like *The Godfather*, "Just when I thought I escaped, they drew me back in." He also wrote about vampires. And he often configured the female as a vampire.

## The Vampire at My Own Veins

There's a famous poem, "You'd Sleep With Anyone," and he refers to, "Your teeth, incisive for this singular sport. You claim a daily ration of fresh hearts." And he configures a vampire again, as an animal. I'll turn now to a poem called "The Vampire." And what's really important here is, he shows a certain element of complicity and corruption. That is, in a sense, the perpetrator, the vampire, and the victim merge in a certain way.

He says, and I'll just read a fair bit of this poem: "Sudden as a knife you thrust into my sorry heart, and strong as a host of demons came, gaudy and liberate, to take in my corrupted mind, your bed and bedlam there, beast, who bind me close to you, as convict who is chained, as gambler to his winning streak, as drunkard to his wine." I'll skip a bit. "You are not worthy to be free of your enslavement, fool." He's talking to himself. "Suppose we saved you even now for her supremacy, your kisses would resuscitate your vampire's waiting corpse." So he's talking about the victim of the vampire, but he's also talking about the victim of the vampire wanting the vampire.

So again, it's a refusal of the Manicheanism. The victim is already implicated in the corruption. He's refusing this Manichaean movement of saying, "Here's the good, the pure person, the Christian, whatever, and here's the bad, the vampire." He says, "The corpse mutilated by the vampire actually desired the vampire."

Again, you see this in a very famous poem of his called "I Spent the Night." I'll begin that. "I spent the night with a gruesome Jewish whore, and lying there, a corpse beside a corpse." So yes, the Jew is configured in this awful way, this whore, gruesome, but he sees himself as a corpse also, a corpse beside a corpse. And there's an element of identification, and an element of willful identification that one loves. One loves the knife that one wounds oneself.

And that we get in a very famous poem of his, meaning self-tormentor. And I'll just read the end of the poem. "I am the knife and the wounded heals. I am the slap and the cheek. I am the wheel and the broken limbs. Hangman and victim both. I am the vampire at my own veins." It's a wonderful line, and it gets to the idea that we are the disease from which we suffer. It is not the disease over there. It is the disease within us. He also says we have a love of this infection, and this infection gives us a certain kind of decadence which is a core to our creativity.

And I'll quote to you lastly, from which poem? Eros on the Skull. In this poem, he takes, and he'd read Schopenhauer. He takes a Schopenhauerian line about how Eros can rule over us in a certain sense. It's very central to Schopenhauer. That Schopenhauer as opposed, Kant thinks we are ultimately engines of reason, where Schopenhauer says, "No, we're ultimately engines of," the thing he calls the will, but one form of the will is eroticism, the Eros.

## Eros Rules Over Reason

This was very much taken over by Freud. And in fact, where Kant says, "Ideally we can be pure reason," Schopenhauer says, "No, reason is a minor thing. It's actually an instrument of your will." For instance, it's an instrument of your erotic nature. This obviously became really important to Nietzsche and really important to Freud.

Well, Baudelaire got that notion exactly from Schopenhauer. He says, "Insolent Eros, seated on the skull of humanity as if on a throne." In other words, like Schopenhauer, he says he rejects the Kantian position that we are ruled by reason, but we are ruled by Eros. And Eros is configured to him in some sense as the feminine.

And the last lines of that very poem say, "Monster assassin, my brain, my blood, my flesh." So he's saying he is his own assassin. And his own character is fundamentally characterized by Eros, which in this literature is configured as feminine. So there is no hope in him of, there's not the fantasy of overcoming the body, of overcoming the eros, of being a monster of pure reason. Not that Kant would call it a monster. That was his ideal.

## Universal Infection and Inescapable Evil

Baudelaire is very complicatedly involved, and yes, he configures the Jew negatively. There are dribs and drabs of antisemitism throughout Baudelaire's work. It's not something at the forefront of his work. You might say it's not thematized. The misogyny is pretty thematized. He had a Catholic upbringing, and there was probably some conventional Christian, anti-Semitic tropes that were figuring in his life.

Later on in life, he had a lot of financial difficulties. And in a typical manner that we'll come to talk about later, he associated Jews with money and he saw them as maybe part of his financial difficulties, his trouble getting published, et cetera. It's a complicated issue, but the main reason I talk about this is, in one of his notebook jottings, there's a cryptic couple of lines. "A beautiful conspiracy to be organized for the extermination of the Jewish race. The Jews, librarians are witnesses of redemption." This is in a little essay, *My Heart Laid Bare*.

But it's interesting that he has this moment of extremism when he talks about the possibility of a conspiracy of elimination of the Jewish race. We shouldn't make too much of this in light of the 20th century events. It's easy to back read. But the essential element for our purposes of this course is, he is not one who says, "This is escapable." He says, "This is who all of us are. We are all infected with this, and we need to recognize that." And that is why he's one of the heroes of this cause.