| dc.description.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. | en_US |
