Women in literature are subjects to intense and divine glorification, as well as extreme and bitter disapproval. The 19^th century works of literature “The Death of Ivan Ilyitch” by Leo Tolstoy, and “A Carcass” by Charles Baudelaire, introduce us to these contrasting views of women, and more specifically, how they are understood through death. The false hope of Praskovya Fedorovna, and the disgustingly poetic reality of the carcass, respectively reprimand the shallow and fickle clean surface of women, as well as celebrate their base and dirty side.

Through the actual death of Ivan Ilyitch, as his health crumbles day after day, his wife Praskovya Fedorovna becomes an unmovable rock. Unfortunately, instead of being a rock of genuine support, she becomes a rock of stolid comfort, if any comfort at all, unwilling to see the ugly side that is mortalities eventual end. Rather than being an eternal optimist, Praskovya merely chooses a path of ignorance and lying, of which Tolstoy despises through Ivans thoughts on page 1448 “What tormented Ivan Ilyitch the most was the deception, the lie, which for some reason they all accepted, that he was not dying but was simply ill, and that he only need keep quiet and undergo a treatment and then something very good would result.” While this is a more blanket statement of the whole cast of liars in Ivans life, Praskovya is certainly a central part of it, and more specific examples can be seen on pages 1441 and 1442. On 1441, Tolstoy writes, “ Praskovya Fedorovna’s attitude to Ivan Ilyitch’s illness, as she expressed it both to others and to him, was that it was his own fault and was another of the annoyances he caused her. Ivan Ilyitch felt that this opinion escaped her involuntarily – but that did not make it easier for him.” She is seen as a disguiser of emotions, although Ivan can see through it. The mask she wears is one of feigned support, where she is not just simply trying to convince Ivan or others around him that his illness isn’t dire, but trying to convince herself for the sake of a proper and pleasant life, not love. She desires a normal, pleasant life without death and it’s disturbances, and so she doesn’t face the reality of Ivan’s situation. She presents a world that is clean, sterile, and healthy, “Jean, my dear, do this for me. It can’t do any harm and often helps. Healthy people often do it.” when all her dying husband wants is for comfort and warmth that accepts death as normal and not something beyond the realm of what is proper, but rather among it.

The carcass that the couple in Baudelaire’s grim poem discovers that morning in June, depicts a women quite opposite that of Praskovya Fedorovna. Rather than assaulting the forced cleanliness of a woman’s pleasant life, Baudelaire celebrates and glorifies not beauty, as is most proper, but the dead, rotting and ugly carcass of a woman. He does so by first combining a meter oft used in poems of love, with idealized, romantic, and repulsive words, to describe the dead girl. The fourth stanza applies all his methods, describing the carcass as “marvelous meat” and comparing the way the sun fell on the body as “over the flowers in bloom” bringing beauty to her death. Yet he still brings us back to reality with “The stench was so wretched that there on the grass, You nearly collapsed in a swoon” both evincing some terrible dirty smell capable of making a person faint, yet still utilizing the word “swoon” which calls to mind a person swooning for another in love. His effective ability to combine life and death into one gag inducing picturesque moment of reality allows us to understand his messages of adoration on facing the often thought disturbing images of death and decay. But it’s not just the adoration of the dead, but on a disgusting decaying woman. As this is a love poem, although not “normal”, the focus is on a love. The carcass woman is the ugliness, and reality that lies behind every beautiful woman. The tenth stanza writes, “- And you, in your turn, will be rotten as this: Horrible, filthy undone, Oh sun of my nature and star of my eyes, My passion, my angel in one!” describing the inevitability of life as is effective on all mortals, as well as the lovers continued devotion to his woman. Even understanding that she will be an awful corpse with an “army of maggots” and “stinking and festering womb” he continues to see her as a “regent of grace”, exclaiming “oh my beauty” after discussing her future state in the ground. Baudelaire believes something more than the shallow worlds of superficial looks, and this “essence divine” is how he views women. Beyond the proper laws of what is beauty and what is horrible, but merely what is reality.

Disgusted by shallow cleanliness, and in awe of real dirtiness, are the outlooks of these writers. Though they present opposing views of women, they seem to both desire the same one. Where Praskovya could not stand to look at her carcass of a husband, hiding all the ugliness that surrounded her, Baudelaire’s carcass hid nothing. The rotting corpse of the women was what it was and rightfully should be. In the matter of what is proper and pleasant, the lesson learned might be that what is proper is not always pleasant. And where a woman who chooses to keep away the dirtiness of life’s inevitabilities does nothing to hinder them, and the one who claims to be only what she truly is in the end, is one worth glorifying.