The Bad Beginning

The Bad Beginning’s chapters are filled with references to the artistic movement known as Symbolism. This style, centered in France during the mid-to-late 1800s, used words or painted images as symbols that represented the corruption and decadence of life and the dreamed-of ideals of something better in the afterlife. (Symbolists often are confused with the related Decadent movement, which focused on morbidity for its own sake.)

One of the founders of Symbolism was Charles Baudelaire, whose 1857 book of poems, Les Fleurs du Mal (in English, The Flowers of Evil), influenced generations of writers, artists, and composers who followed, including such greats as Oscar Wilde and the playwrights Maurice Maeterlinck and Anton Chekhov. Baudelaire’s life was beset by health and financial problems; his poetic verses dream of a more ideal world while bemoaning the debasement that life imposes on creative humans. In his poem “The Albatross” (1859), he writes:

The poet is a kinsman in the clouds

Who scoffs at archers, loves a stormy day;

But on the ground, among the hooting crowds,

He cannot walk, his wings are in the way (Baudelaire, Charles. The Flowers of Evil, translated by James McGowan. Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 17).

Snicket pays homage to Baudelaire’s fallen idealism by naming the protagonists of A Series of Unfortunate Events after him. The Baudelaire children, whose parents’ wealth sheltered them from life’s sorrows, suddenly are cast adrift amid the corruption and greed of a big city like the poet pulled down from the clouds in “The Albatross.” Despite the degradation they suffer, they maintain their ideals and do their best, but their hope of finding a kindly foster parent is snatched away at the last moment—they, too, “cannot walk” among the “hooting crowds.”

Other Symbolist allusions abound. Mr. Poe, the banker who runs the children’s estate, has a pessimistic attitude, coughs constantly as if suffering from tuberculosis, and sticks to the letter of the law instead of showing compassion. His name is a nod to one of Baudelaire’s favorite authors, Edgar Allan Poe, the tubercular American writer who inspired many Symbolists with his morbid tales of doubt and terror.

The children live in a “dirty and busy city” (2), where statues of dollar signs suggest that the culture is based on greed. Their appointed guardian, Count Olaf, dresses in shabby, soiled clothes and lives in a run-down, gothic house grimy with filth and littered with dirty dishes and empty wine bottles. His obsession with eyes—they appear everywhere on the walls of his house, and he has an eyeball tattoo on his ankle—bespeaks an intrusive paranoia. All these attributes symbolize the decadent deterioration of the criminal mind.

Count Olaf’s persona and surroundings contrast with the beautifully maintained home next door, owned by Justice Strauss. Her title is the opposite of crime; her home’s large library and lovely garden inspire the children, who yearn for her to adopt them. Good and evil houses thus stand side by side on the streets of the metropolis.

Disease ran rampant in European cities during the 1800s. Some of these ailments were transmitted sexually, and the Symbolists saw a connection between intimate relationships and death. In The Bad Beginning, Count Olaf, though officially Violet’s guardian, schemes to arrange an incestuous marriage with her, obtain control of the Baudelaire wealth, and then murder her. His plan to corrupt matrimony epitomizes what Symbolists opposed.

The Count’s plot is echoed slyly by the names of Klaus and Sunny: Socialite Klaus von Bülow in the 1980s was famously accused in court of trying to murder his wife, Sunny. Another recurring character, Beatrice—who’s mentioned only twice in The Bad Beginning but recurs as a character in the book’s many sequels—has a name associated with similarly named women in history who met tragic ends (Kramer, Melody Joy. “A Series of Unfortunate Literary Allusions.” NPR, 12 Oct. 2006).

The Bad Beginning thus is not merely an eerie entertainment for children but, as a descendant of Symbolist literature, is a sardonic social commentary on the corruption of big cities, the greed that drives people to murder, and adults who fail in their duties to children.

(Study guides for Baudelaire’s “The Albatross” and for many of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories are available at SuperSummary.com.)