“Don’t loiter, girl! Do you think I shall lose appetite for the meal if you are so long about serving it? No; I shall grow hungrier, more ravenous with each moment, more cruel... Run to me, run! I have a place prepared for your exquisite corpse in my display of flesh!”
-Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber-
If Simone de Beauvoir’s ultimate assessment of the Marquis de Sade was to assign a broadly positive, proto-psychoanalytical value to his work, Andrea Dworkin—characteristically, of course—takes quite the opposite approach in her 1981 book, Pornography: Men Possessing Women. Here, she devotes an entire chapter to Sade’s cultural toxicity and its pervasive effect on the sexual politics of our times, going so far as to position him as “the world’s foremost pornographer.” As she writes:
“In him, one finds rapist and writer twisted into one scurvy knot. His life and writing were of a piece, a whole cloth soaked in the blood of women imagined and real. In his life he tortured and raped women. He was batterer, rapist, kidnapper, and child abuser. In his work he relentlessly celebrated brutality as the essence of eroticism; fucking, torture, and killing were fused; violence and sex, synonymous. His work and legend have survived nearly two centuries because literary, artistic, and intellectual men adore him and political thinkers... claim him as an avatar of freedom.”
Her unflinching appraisal of what Sade both embodies and symbolises in attaining respected status within the rigid spectrum of contemporary Western canonical traditions, leads her to assert—in direct rebuttal of Beauvoir’s earlier point—that Sade’s “...ethic—the absolute right of men to rape and brutalise any “object of desire” at will—resonates in every sphere.”
In literary terms, she highlights the myriad ways in which women’s roles, bodies, voices have been routinely diminished; female experience relegated to mere utility; objectification the norm:
“What happens to men is portrayed as authentic, significant, and what happens to women is left out or shown not to matter. Women are portrayed as the shadows that tamely follow or maliciously haunt men, never as the significant beings who matter.”
Marginalised in this manner, women become types—and in Sade’s “fiction”—wholly dehumanised in service of masculine insatiability. By contrast, Sade has been lionised by large swathes of the academic establishment and is seen almost exclusively in terms of anti-despotic and emancipatory triumphs:
“Throughout the literature on him, with some small qualifying asides, Sade is viewed as one whose voracious appetite was for freedom; this appetite was cruelly punished by an unjust and repressive society. The notion is that Sade, called by Apollinaire “that freest of spirits to have lived so far,” was a monster as the word used to be defined: something unnaturally marvellous. Sade’s violation of sexual and social boundaries, in his writings and in his life, is seen as inherently revolutionary. The antisocial character of his sexuality is seen as a radical challenge to a society deadly in its repressive sexual conventions. Sade is seen as an outlaw in the mythic sense, a grand figure of rebellion in action and in literature whose sexual hunger, like a terrorist’s bomb, threatened to blow apart the established order.”
These “Sadeian sycophants” have, therefore, portrayed him as “victimised, unjustly imprisoned, persecuted, for daring to express radical sexual values in his life.” No harm, no foul, springs to mind—straight from the rape apologist’s playbook. As for Sade himself, Dworkin interprets his letters as containing rhetoric indicative of a man who is “militant, with the pride of one martyred in righteousness,” and who accepts no personal responsibility whatsoever for the degradations, asphyxiations, immolations and exsanguinations he both rendered incarnate—and inspired.
Overall, Dworkin is succinct in her measure of Sade’s nature:
“Sade was a sexual predator and... the pornography he created was part of that predation.”
So, in light of this, how might Sade be reconciled with a more empowered feminist reading? If, as Dworkin claims, Sade endures as a proverbial “Everyman” in a misogynistic nightmare women find only too “true,” is it possible—even by the smallest degree—to find in him the empathetic kinship that defines a work as human?
Enter Angela Carter—Dworkin’s “pseudo-feminist” other—and her controversial 1979 treatise on Sade, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History. Now I feel I should preface this by saying that the last time I read the text in its entirety was when I was twenty, a few months out from finishing my degree and blissfully ensconced in love with a man attuned to reciprocity. Nothing about my life then—or now, to be quite honest—should make Sade in the slightest bit deserving of my consideration. But this book and its bold assertions concerning Sade’s Justine/Juliette dialectic spoke to me. So let’s call this, and my preliminary musings, an attempt to work out why.
“Pornographers are the enemies of women only because our contemporary ideology of pornography does not encompass change,” Carter writes. Whilst acknowledging that myths and abstractions are inseparable from cultural and religious notions of female sexuality—which are, by their very nature, a conscious method of reducing sex to the penetrative act alone and thereby consigning women to the role of passive vessels subject exclusively to phallocentric dominance and its procreative imperative—she also posits that pornographic literature has “several functions.” However, by extension, this means that pornographic content largely “reinforces the false universals of sexual archetypes” and ignores “social context.” Thus, she wonders at the possibility of “the moral pornographer” whom she defines as:
“...an artist who uses pornographic material as part of the acceptance of the logic of a world of absolute sexual licence for all genders... His business would be the total demystification of the flesh and the subsequent revelation, through the infinite modulations of the sexual act, of the real relations of man and his kind. Such a pornographer would not be the enemy of women, perhaps because he might begin to penetrate the heart of the contempt for women that distorts our culture even as he entered the realms of true obscenity as he describes it.”
The shift in emphasis here has been most generously described as an embrace of lateral thinking although, in the main, modern critics have roundly repudiated this “polemical preface” used to build a moral case for Sade. Yes, we may falsely believe that “we fuck stripped of social artifice” and continue to struggle with regards to eliminating harmful stereotypes of “female acquiescence,” but to sanctify Sade and normalise him as feminist saviour runs a gamut of pitfalls that, frankly, suggests democratisation in one form—that which has gone disturbingly awry.
Sade may be the revolutionary republic celebrated by Apollinaire and the like. But of his ardent devotees, how many of them appreciate the reality of having a vagina or the way that it impacts upon one’s life?
By Carter’s own admission, Sade is a “connoisseur of these [vaginal] mutilations.” But she sweeps aside any robust probe of the oft-invoked defence—that of him ushering forth egalitarianism in the bedroom as in the political sphere—with the fanciful conviction that “I would like to think that he put pornography in the service of women,” when there is, in fact, a paucity of evidence to support it.
However, to give Sade—and Carter—their due, Justine and Juliette are, at least allegorically, portrayed with a view to highlighting the corrupt practices of oppression rife in society in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Justine, “martyrised” in consequence of her virtue; and Juliette, transformed into the libertine “monster” herself, are the dichotomous virgin/whore of Original Sin brought to its rawest conclusion. Under Sade’s direction, no offence is left untouched—the lines between pleasure and pain, consent and refusal not blurred but eradicated in pursuit of the ultimate trespass. As Carter goes on to write in her short story, The Bloody Chamber:
“In the course of that one-sided struggle, I had seen his deathly composure shatter like a porcelain vase flung against a wall; I had heard him shriek and blaspheme at the orgasm; I had bled. And perhaps I had seen his face without its mask; and perhaps I had not. Yet I had been infinitely dishevelled by the loss of my virginity.”
Purchased with “a handful of coloured stones and the pelts of dead beasts,” the narrator is imprisoned here, in the skin of her sexual inertia and fated for slaughter in the elaborate manner of her husband’s—coincidentally, another Marquis’—choosing. Although Carter subverts, arguably reinvents, the Bluebeard tale and thwarts her protagonist’s brutal decapitation via the “eagle-featured, indomitable” mother who saves her, she seems only too at ease to overlook the fiendish machinations Sade inflicts on—or through—his own heroines. The intertextual echo of Hamlet’s lament that death is “the undiscovered country from whose bourne/ No traveller returns,” sits askance of mere foreboding and, in this way, we are left to wonder if Carter would deign to rescue Justine from her abuses with quite the same Amazonian zeal.
Yet, like Simone de Beauvoir before her, Carter finds that there is, indeed, a point at which she must diverge from apologia of Sade. In the final chapter, she writes:
“Sexuality, stripped of the idea of free exchange, is not in any way humane; it is nothing but our cruelty. Carnal knowledge is the infernal knowledge of flesh as meat. The fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is cooked up and served for breakfast... So flesh becomes meat by magical transition about which there is nothing natural... In Sade, Nature is a version of the Cruel God of the Old Testament.”
Finally, she is repulsed. This is where “transgression becomes regression” and, by unleashing Freud’s unbridled id, Sade’s libertine flounders into madness, the solipsistic world of his creation as unfathomable to him as the rest.
It is, then, with relief that I approach Carter’s conclusion:
“The annihilation of the self and the resurrection of the body, to die in pain and to painfully return from death, is the sacred drama of the Sadeian orgasm. In this drama, flesh is used instrumentally, to provoke these spasmodic visitations or dreadful pleasure. In this flesh, nothing human remains; it aspires to the condition of the sacramental meal. It is never the instrument of love.”
What spoke to me, therefore, isn’t the latitude Carter offers Sade in her opening, but this statement that places him firmly as “the source of all opposition to the emancipation of women.” And it is the fundamental lack, the dearth of human connection, that carries us past estrangement to the essential truth Emma Goldman writes in The Tragedy of Women’s Emancipation:
“The demand for equal rights in every vocation of life is just and fair; but, after all, the most vital right is the right to love and be loved. Indeed, if partial emancipation is to become a complete and true emancipation of woman, it will have to do away with the ridiculous notion that to be loved, to be sweetheart and mother, is synonymous with being slave or subordinate. It will have to do away with the absurd notion of the dualism of the sexes, or that man and woman represent two antagonistic worlds.”
It will have to dispense with Sade as illumination; challenge the critical lens that grants his iniquity a moral equivalence—and simultaneously, allow his implications to breathe, as if to proffer caution.
As for me? Here I see my brighter things and what Goldman notes to close:
“Pettiness separates; breadth unites. Let us be broad and big. Let us not overlook vital things because of the bulk of trifles confronting us. A true conception of the relation of the sexes will not admit of conqueror and conquered; it knows of but one great thing: to give of one’s self boundlessly, in order to find one’s self richer, deeper, better. That alone can fill the emptiness, and transform the tragedy of woman’s emancipation into joy, limitless joy.”
At its core—and, indeed, in its surface horrors—this is what Sade’s work cannot be. Joy speaks to triumph, transcendence, and to allow the women he rails against to experience anything of the sort would be to render himself obsolete. In Sade’s world, freedom may only be conceived of “as existing in opposition” and “defined by tyranny.” Female liberation—often signified by climactic ecstasy and the implied irrelevance of biological function or limitation—is thus denied before it can be realised, the text stripped to the blank but crude slate of a “masturbatory device,” and Sade categorically cast as the coward “still in complicity with the authority he hates.”
So it is I am able to light my philosophical torch and orient myself away from here. So it is I find distinct, my answer.
