DEATH AND EROTISM IN THE SHORT STORY “THE CRIMSON CURTAIN” BY D'AUREVILLY

Abstract

The current paper aims to make an analysis of the death-erotism line in the short story “The Crimson Curtain” by Barbey d'Aurevilly, which is situated in two perspectives. Firstly, in the figure of the main character, Miss Albertine, passing successively from an intense state of “la petite mort” (or “little death”) to the fatal freezing of actual death. From that moment on, the Vicomte de Brassard is the perpetrator, not of an act of love, but of excess. The second aspect is marked with the sign of necrophilia. The “demonic tendency” (about which Baudelaire speaks) in the art of the 19th century is kept: the leitmotif of the diabolical, however, is manifested in a markedly ambiguous way – the text remains silent too much, and what it does say is filtered through the aesthetics of dandyism.