The Seductive Vampire: Metamorphosis of a Vampire

An Analysis of the Vampire Poem: The Seductive Female Vampires

The “Metamorphosis of a Vampire” by Charles Baudelaire (1857) is, at first reading, a just plain strange poem. At first sight it shows a very Victorian take on women, and their powers of temptation and sin. You will note that it is only the women who are blamed, and the man, who freely goes to bed with a woman he isn’t married to and obviously barely knows, carries no blame. But at second glance the reader sees the myriad ways the theological beliefs of the time come into play in the poem.

Remember that the good woman of this period was told that when her husband required the sexual act, as a good woman she should “close her eyes and think about queen and country” while he had his way with her. Thus she was not to enjoy the sexual acts. She is only participating in order to create children who will carry forth the spread of the empire. In a very mixed message, the man wasn’t told anything about his role in the bed.

Thus the “vampire” in this poem with its detailed physical description of her here represents the temptation towards sin, from her “red mouth” “husky tones,” “serpent-like tones,” “white breasts falling from imprisonment,” she plays the typical demonic and anti-Christian role, showing the woman in her age-old role of temptress, and demonstrating her coaxing the non-sinner towards sin by calling the rules against the desired sin an “antique demon.” It is, after all, human nature to want to be with it, and not “outdated.” She is free, easy, and quite desirable in a very human way.

But her desirability factor reaches far beyond that of any human female; it reaches into the heavens itself, where “impotent angels would be damned for [her].” Remember that angels are thought to be sexless, neither male nor female; thus she must be beyond the bliss of orgasm if a non-sexual angel would leave heaven in order to fornicate with her.

Then, as with all temptations (especially chocolate cake), after he indulges, allows her to “drain” the very “marrow” and leave him replete and “cold,” there is the inevitable piper to pay. She is the opposite of the desirable sexual partner that he took to bed. She is now a “putrescent thing, all faceless and exuding pus.” In a word, yuck! Sin, or the true appearance, the “metamorphosis” of the vampire is demonstrated as quite ugly. The true post-coitus, post-blood ingestion face of the vampire is now shown. In spite of the thing having recently “replenished her arteries from his own,” she is just a skeleton. Temptation and the desirability of sinfulness, is just plain hideous.

Again, this is just one reading of this extremely odd and theologically loaded poem.