The South Central Modern Language Association

"Tout dire"?: Sade and the Female Body Author(s): John Phillips Source: South Central Review, Vol. 19/20, Vol. 19, no. 4 - Vol. 20, no. 1, Murdering Marianne?: Violence, Gender and Representation in French Literature and Film (Winter, 2002 - Spring, 2003), pp. 29-43 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of The South Central Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3190134 Accessed: 31/03/2010 22:59
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The Johns Hopkins University Press and The South Central Modern Language Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to South Central Review.

http://www.jstor.org

"Tout dire"?: Sade and the Female Body

John Phillips University of North London

In the introduction to Les 120journees de Sodome, (The 120 Days of Sodom), the Marquis de Sade assures his reader that the book will fulfil the encyclopedic mission to leave nothing unsaid in the area of sexual depravity: "if we hadn't said everything, analysed everything, how could we have guessed what was right for you?"' Despite this claim to treat the sexual with encyclopedic thoroughness, however, I have argued elsewhere that Sade draws our attention to the existence of secret spaces throughout his fiction, in which the activities of the libertines are effectively censored. I have suggested that, on both metaphorical and referential levels, these secret spaces may offer some insight into the Sade phenomenon generally.2 In all of Sade's fictions, there are rooms and antechambers, to which we do not have access, spaces in which sometimes boys, but mainly women are enjoyed and destroyed. For Sigmund Freud, rooms are themselves feminine spaces. Freud noted that the polite German expression, Frauenzimmer, used to denote woman, or rather, lady, literally translates as woman's room." So in a Freudian perspective, one might say that the spatial and the feminine in Sade are already conceptually and geographically linked. The female body is imprisoned within secret spaces, located in the depths of remote castles and monasteries, but this body is also itself the locus of secret and, especially, forbidden territory. The woman's genitals are both obviously spatial, and a "place" which, until very recently, it was forbidden to enter outside marriage, a "no-man's land," whose very

? South Central Review 19.4-20.1 (Winter2002-Spring 2003): 29-43.

30

Review SouthCentral

in the Freudian I shouldlike to character, view, is absence.3

focus here on this most taboo of all Sadian spaces, in the wider context of Sade's representation of the female body as a whole. In particular, I shall ask why the female sex organs are in Sade a privileged object of hatred, exploring the possible sources of this gendered violence in his writing. The answers to this question might help us to a better understanding of why, in some forms of contemporary pornography, the female body is attacked as much as it is desired.4 There has in the past been a tendency, interestingly enough on the part of some of the more prominent female critics of Sade, to view the Sadian woman as a positive, even heroic figure. In the Virgin/Vamp dichotomy, represented by Justine and Juliette, which Angela Carter sees as informing Hollywood's portrayal of the feminine, she draws satisfaction from the triumph of Juliette, of an active female role model who, as Carter puts it, "fucks" at least as much as she "is fucked."5 Sade, Carter claims, is "obviously not for women or against women," he is "unencumbered by prejudice against women."6 However, while the minority of Sade's women that are libertines are accepted by their male counterparts as equal subjects, the overwhelming majority are consistently represented as objects: objects of desire, and yet, of simultaneous contempt ("I get pleasure from women, but I despise them; more than that, I detest them as soon as my passion is sated" says J6rome in Justine7); objects of exchange (they marry each other's daughters, or, like J6rome and his cousin, give each other their sisters8), and especially, objects of violence and even consumption. The breasts and the vagina of their female victims are repeatedly bitten, pricked, whipped and stabbed. Sade's libertines frequently declare their aversion for the female genitals, which they insist be kept hidden from view. This is the case, for example, of Dubourg and J6rome in La nouvelle Justine9 (The New Justine), of both le president Curval and the rich old notary of Duclos's story in Les 120 journees de Sodome (JS, 260-01), of Noirceuil in Histoire de Juliette (The Story of Juliette).o1 At the very least, like Dolmanc6 in La

philosophie dans le boudoir (Philosophy in the Boudoir), they

find the transsexual posterior infinitely preferable to the uniquely feminine vagina.11 As he sodomizes a female victim, Noirceuil actually thinks of turning fantasy into reality by

John Phillips

31

cutting away the flesh that separates the vagina from the anal canal and so literally abolishing the former while leaving the latter intact.12 Many of the libertines also express a violent abhorrence for pregnancy. In Les 120 journdes de Sodome, for instance, le president Curval readily admits his disgust for the condition: "There's no doubt at all, said the President, that I don't like progeny, and that when the beast is full, she fills me with utter disgust" (JS, 181). Unsurprisingly, therefore, among all Sadean victims, pregnant women are subjected to the worst treatment imaginable, leading to miscarriage and the death of both mother and child. In La nouvelle Justine, for instance, two heavily pregnant women are tied back to back and made to stand on one foot on a ten-foot high pedestal, around which the ground is strewn with large brambles and thorns. It is not long before both fall onto the spiky bed below, causing their own deaths and those of their unborn babes.13 Broadly speaking, then, nonreproductive sex is privileged in Sade, while reproductive sex is abhorred, which is why the vagina is only tolerated when it is tight for pleasure, not elastic for child-birth. If some women, like Juliette, are positive female role models within Sade's terms, it is because they strongly resemble the men that befriend them. Juliette herself is essentially a projection of her creator's male psyche.14 Anatomically female, Juliette nevertheless masculinizes herself both physically and mentally. Though physically possessing all the usual Sadean attributes of feminine beauty, her reproductive potential is underplayed. There is a single reference, for example, to her menstrual periods, and although she does give birth to a daughter, we are given no details whatever of this event. Moreover, she is completely bereft of any maternal instincts, easily consenting to the horrific murder of her daughter Marianne by Noirceuil, which she herself aids and abets. In the many sexual orgies in which she participates, she never fails to don artificial phalluses in the form of dildos which she actively employs to penetrate both men and other women, although, being the phallic woman she is, she naturally prefers female victims: "I only like doing to my own sex what this whore wants to do to men" (HJ, 8:560) she declares, distinguishing the female targets of her sexual aggression from the male targets of

32

South Central Review

Clairwil's. In fact, Juliette shares all the behavioral traits and sexual preferences of her male sodomist associates, to the extent that only the lack of the appropriate anatomical equipment she prevents her from conforming exactly to that model-as herself confesses at the sight of an exceptionally beautiful female posterior: I could not resist the sight of that divine posterior. Manlike in my tastes as in my thinking, how bitterly I regretted that I was unable to burn some more real incense before my idol. I kissed it, opened it and gazed ecstatically therein, my tongue sounded it and while it thrilled in that celestial hole I refrigged lovely Honorine's clitoris: thus did I wheedle a fresh discharge from her. But the more I aroused her, the greater was my distress at being powerless to arouse her farther still. "Oh,my dearest one," said I, my heart heavy because of this regret, "be sure that when next we come together I shall have by me some instrument capable of dealing more telling blows than may a tongue: I would be your lover, your husband, I have told you so: I wish to have you as might a man."'5 If her active sexual performances are intrinsically masculine, so too is her status as passive sexual object. Again, sodomy is the order of the day: "They devour me, but in the Italian style: my ass becomes the unique object of their caresses . . . they . . . behave for all the world as if they are unaware I am a woman" (Juliette, 738). In a more general sense, Juliette displays attitudes and characteristics more recognizably male than female: she is and prioritizes reason over goal-orientated, promiscuous, emotion. For Marcel Henaff, Juliette is "the impossible Monsieur Juliette," a woman defined in terms of male fantasies and objectives.16 Her first crime, a street robbery, is committed wearing men's clothes. This is a symbolic and defining moment in Juliette's progress in libertine crime. After that, she is quickly assimilated into the male libertine world, not as the stereotypical female victim-Noirceuil excepts her from that category because of her male spirit and character7"-but as a sort of honorary male. She is accepted without difficulty into the male libertine

John Phillips

33

club, La socidte des amis du crime (The Society of the Friends of

Crime),s8 and commits as many lust-murders as any of the men around her.19 In every significant aspect of her behavior, then, Juliette becomes a kind of "supermale" libertine. Anatomically, however, she remains female. This is not the case with other female libertines encountered by her. The beautiful nun, Volmar, has a mini phallus of a clitoris three inches long, while Durand's vagina is "obstructed," her clitoris is "as long as a finger," and she discharges "like a man." Both seem able to sodomize women with their clitoris alone: "I was buggered as solidly as if I had been dealing with a man, and from it experienced the same pleasure," declares Juliette ecstatically, as she relates her first sexual experiences with Durand (Juliette, 1033). Defying nature and reality in every way, Sade's female sex-criminals are quite simply the product of male fantasy. This fantasy is on one level a self-protection against castration anxiety-as what Freud calls the "woman's real small penis," the enormous clitoris of these femmes fatales, reassuringly restores the lost phallus to the female body.20 Like Juliette, then, all Sade's "strong women" are or become essentially phallic. What is described is the male body in the female-the In La phallic clitoris and the bisexual anus. nouvelle Justine, Dorothee, for instance, is thought beautiful by Verneuil because she has the body of a handsome man (NJ, 2:182). As he undresses her, he is delighted to discover that she is "much more like a man than a woman" (NJ, 2:184), having a clitoris the size of a penis. All such women ejaculate like men. Together with the privileging of the anus, in women as in men, the reluctance to describe breasts or express any liking for them21 and hatred of the reproductive aspects of woman's of the female body seems anatomy, this masculinization indicative of a desire to deny sexual difference, in other words, to confirm the power and sovereignty of the phallus. I shall return presently to the question of phallic power. On another, more erotic level, Volmar and Durand represent the impossible but ideal fusion of the masculine and the feminine that Sade unconsciously craves, creatures of the phallic-anal eroticism that defines his sexual universe. Even at the level of narrative structure, the feminine gives way to the masculine in

34

South CentralReview

Juliette, as the ostensible authority of Juliette as narrator is seriously undermined by a complexity of form that privileges numerous male voices. In a variety of ways, the third-person authorial narrative, which is of course male in perspective, frames and controls Juliette's own: we remember that outside of Juliette's narration of her story to Justine, the marquis and the chevalier, is the author-narrator, who from time to time interrupts Juliette and finally reasserts himself in the novel's closing pages to describe to the reader directly the eventual fate death in the thunderstorm, the of his protagonists-Justine's elevation of Noirceuil, the survival of Durand, and the to draw the morals of his continuing prosperity of Juliette-and male authorial But the presence also makes itself felt in story. other, more subtle ways. Numerous intertextual allusions remind the reader of Sade's erudition and help to drive home his is also the effect of the underlying philosophical message-this delivered dissertations extended by his libertines (the many is over for of defence murder, thirty pages long), example, Pope's and of the travelogue-style passages describing the parts of Italy visited by his heroine (Sade had famously spent many months touring Italy with his young sister-in-law in 1772). At the same time, the preponderant metanarrativity of the text constantly refers the reader back to the writing and reading process. And of course, the implied male reader's sexual interests are efficiently represented in the text by the marquis and the chevalier, who listen with prurient eagerness to Juliette. Less subtly, perhaps, the author's male point of view surfaces repeatedly in the many footnotes that punctuate the novel: there are 129 of these notes, or roughly one per every eight pages of text. Lucienne FrappierMazur sees the notes as instances of male narration within Juliette's female narrative, reminding the reader of the narrative situation.23 According to Frappier-Mazur, with a single exception in La nouvelle Justine, "Implicitly all the notes in Sade's oeuvre The notes come under the are the work of the author. ... category of an 'assumption of authorship' in that they refer to a (fictive) reality and take on the authority of a male judgement standing outside the fiction."24 Sade literally underwrites the spoken dissertations of his characters, which has the double effect of completing the point or argument and drawing attention

John Phillips

35

to the illusion, whereby an essentially written use of language is passed off in the main text as speech.25 In addition to the male voice of the author himself, there are also a couple of lengthy male micro-narratives embedded within Juliette's story: Saint-Fond's tale and, especially, the hundred page long story of Brisa Testa, otherwise known as Borchamps. This narrative embedding sometimes extends to a second level as, for example, with Princess Sophie's story, told by the Princess within Borchamps' own. The effect for the reader is rather like opening Russian dolls to find smaller versions inside, as narratives are found within narratives within narratives within We note, however, that it is the male recit of narratives. that frames and so structures that of Sophie, in a Borchamps control of symmetric mirroring of the author-narrator's Juliette's. Nowhere else in world literature, then, is the female voice so systematically shaped and controlled by male narrative authority, and nowhere else is the female body so consistently abhorred, degraded and effectively redesigned on the analphallic model. On the other hand, no other text returns again and again to physical manifestations of femininity with such obsessive fascination. In spite of their aversion for the female body, Sade's libertines are repeatedly drawn to peer at it and dissect it, to torture, tear, eat and defecate upon it, to turn it inside out, so that they can know exactly what it is, the everpresent breast that they control, that can be milked or bled, pricked or ingested. Despite their constantly declared preference for the bisexual posterior, their favored victim and therefore abiding preoccupation is almost always female. Why does the Sadian text consistently take the feminine as its principal focus, to the extent that, as the titles of his two main works and many of his lesser known novels and stories suggest, Sade's writing is "about the feminine"? For Jane Gallop, this ambivalence towards the feminine in Sade has its origins in Freud's notion of ambivalence toward the mother, "made up of a universal primary attachment to the mother as nurturer and universal disappointment in the mother."26 Gallop argues, however, that in the case of Sade, the oedipal myth is less appropriate a model than the Neronic myth, so that instead of the ambivalence being divided into a positive

36

South Central Review

feeling fixed onto the mother and a negative feeling directed toward the father, as in the oedipal scenario described by Freud, it is focused entirely on the mother. Gallop sees this ambivalence towards the maternal as having two main consequences. Firstly, the maternal aspects of the feminine (breasts, menstruation, and the vagina) are underrepresented in the fiction. Secondly, the libertine's attitudes to the mother are reflected in his attitudes to mother nature, which, for Gallop, has two identities in Sade's text: nature vanquished (normal sexuality and procreation) and nature triumphant (anything that actually occurs in nature, including all sorts of monstrosities). Gallop characterizes these two natures respectively as "castrated nature" and the "preoedipal, phallic mother."27 Now, there is no doubt that nature and the mother are closely linked in the Sadean imaginary. Nature is always "she" In his "Idees sur le or "mother" in Sade's writing. for on roman" ("Notes the Novel"), example, Sade offers the following advice to aspiring novelists: O you who would follow this thorny career! never forget that the novelist is nature's man, created by her to be her painter; if he does not become his mother's lover at the moment of birth, let him never write, for no one will ever read him; but if he experiences that burning thirst to paint everything, if, quiveringly, he opens nature's womb in order to seek his art and find his models there, if he has the fever of talent and the enthusiasm of genius, let him follow the hand that leads him.28 The writer is seen here as an infant Oedipus, returning into mother nature's womb just as he leaves it at the moment of birth. These confusing metaphors depict him as incestuously penetrating and at the same time, ripping open the mother in order to become a writer. Both nature and the mother are therefore simultaneously objects of desire and of violence. This ambivalence towards nature and the maternal is repeatedly rehearsed in Sade's own novels, where mother nature is Phallic-woman, and attitudes towards Her are as complex as to women themselves: an awesome force to be worshipped, and yet, at the same time, the image of maternal indifference to be vilified and annihilated.

John Phillips

37

Gallop's analysis is, then, in many respects, extremely persuasive. However, I want to challenge her central thesis that the ambivalent attitude of the libertines to nature is a metaphorical extension of their ambivalence to the femininematernal, that, in other words, Sadean attitudes to nature are, above all, the expression of a problematic relationship with the mother. Let us return to the power issue in the context of which, following Sade himself, I have framed my own enquiry: "Tout

Dire?"
In an earlier study, an intertextual analysis, based on readings of Sade by Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Pierre Klossowski,29 Gallop attempts to display a critical mastery of her subject matter by "deconstructing" (her own word) the readings of other critics. In a sense, then, like Sade, she aims to For instance, she "say all," to provide the definitive view. demolishes Bataille's claim that there is no solidarity among Sade's libertines, by demonstrating the importance of a sense of community in Silling, Sainte-Marie-des-Bois and other libertine societies.30 Everyone, it seems, author and critics alike (and of course, I include myself here) wants to control the text, and this desire for mastery can lead to a forcing of the argument, to a process of polarization or oversimplification, as in Angela Carter's binary approach to the Sadean woman.31 These issues of mastery and control, which inform critical commentary on Sade, also inform the writing itself, underlying, in particular, the text's obsessive focus on the female body. I should like to suggest, however, that this manifest desire to control the physical aspects of femininity is but a symptom of a far greater, indeed a universal will to power, residing in the Sadean imaginary. Generally speaking, the secret and the hidden are valorized in Sade. The author-narrator of La nouvelle Justine, for example, insists in a footnote that the ellipses and omissions of his narrative are necessary, if there is to be room for the workings of the reader's imagination: "Things are better expressed by being suppressed," La Mettrie writes somewhere, "desire is stimulated, by arousing curiosity about a partly hidden object, which cannot yet be perceived, but which one wants to be able to perceive."

38

South Central Review

This is why we throw a veil over scenes the content of which we do no more than suggest. (NJ, 2:251, note 6)

Like Verneuil, we do not witness the murder of his wife by d'Esterval, because, as Verneuil says, "By leaving it all to my imagination, it was much more strongly aroused..." (NJ, 2:250). Like the murder of Mme Verneuil, the female anatomy inhabits an absent space, a space that the imagination can nevertheless make present. Whether of libertine or of reader, the imagination has The imagination is indispensable to the ultimate control. libertines, not just because it excites their passions, letting them play a "Fort! Da!' game with the female victim, but because it enables them to exceed the bounds of nature. "The imagination," says Annie Le Brun, "is what enables Man to best nature."32 I want to argue that mastery of the feminine-maternal in Sade is rooted, less in the mother-son dyad, as Gallop proposes, than in a much more general megalomania, which manifests itself, above all, in the confrontation with nature itself. Nature is perceived by the libertines both as ally and as opponent. It is, firstly, an ally, because it justifies all libertine crimes, for, as the source of everything, including evil, it is nature that makes human beings criminal. We are what nature makes us, as Mme d'Esterval explains to the unfortunate Justine: "one never strays from nature's path when one follows one's inclinations, and I tell you that it is from nature alone that my husband and I have received all those we indulge in" (NJ, 2:99). In contrast to the ephemeral relativity of social mores and the chimeras of religion, nature is the only enduring reality, the only absolute: "Nature supplies us with everything we need to be as happy as our existence allows," she continues: It is in nature that we find the means to satisfy our physical needs; it is in nature alone that are to be found all the laws governing our happiness and our survival: anything outside nature is pure illusion, that we should curse and hate our whole lives long. (NJ, 2:113) Nature, then, must bear ultimate responsibility for all crimes, nature alone is to blame. Indeed, the victims, the great majority of whom, of course, are female, frequently meet their deaths at

John Phillips

39

the hands of nature, so to speak: Juliette and Clairwil throw their friend, Olympe, into Vesuvius; Eug6nie's mother in La philosophie dans le boudoir will be infected by venereal disease; and most memorably, the Sadian victim par excellence, Justine herself is killed during a storm by a thunderbolt that splits her in two. In the final version of this scene, the thunderbolt enters her body through her mouth and exits through her vagina, destroying the maternal organs,33 but leaving the privileged anus intact. Nature is, at the same time, a hated enemy that the libertines vainly seek to challenge and destroy. The very elision of sexual difference, implicit in the construction and destruction of the feminine in Sade, can be seen as expressing a desire to destroy nature itself and replace it with an exclusively phallic universe. The maternal is hated, then, less for its own sake, as Gallop and other feminist readers of Sade have proposed, but because it is a manifestation of nature's sovereignty. It is not that nature is hated because she is a mother, rather, mothers are hated because they remind the libertines of nature's power. So does the ability of women to make men come. In La nouvelle Justine, Roger revealingly declares: "Is there anything in the world more vile than the presence of a woman who has made us come!" (NJ, 2:290). Like virtually all of Sade's male libertines, Roger fears loss of control above all else. Nature leads women to conceive and give birth, but it also gives them sexual power over men. Unlike the reassuringly phallic sameness of the sodomizing/sodomized male that does not reproduce, womannature is the frightening other that, in reality, always wins. Both woman as mother and woman as object of desire, therefore, are reminders of man's dependency on nature, manifestations of man's inferiority in the face of natural laws. For Annie Le Brun, Eugenie sews up her mother's vagina in La philosophie dans le boudoir, "As if we can only begin to experience pleasure by ending our dependence on nature."34 Like Roger, any male libertine who has lost his sperm to woman must therefore reassert his authority over her body by from her-blood taking something (Gernande), beauty, virginity,35 faeces, and of course, life itself. In this perspective, to eat the female body, which the libertines do with pathological regularity, is not merely to rob the female of life, but in the most

40

South Central Review

literal of ways, to reimburse themselves for their physical loss, and perhaps also, to become nature by ingesting its chief human literal introjection. representative-a The best way, however, to be rid of this dependency on nature is to do away with nature itself-the Sadean "final solution." Consequently, we frequently encounter in Sade an unusual ambition: Clairwil in Juliette, J6r6me, Verneuil, Dorothee in Justine, for instance, express an impossible desire to destroy the entire universe. In all cases, the real target is seen to be nature: "Oh! if I could set the universe on fire," declares Clairwil, "I would still curse nature for only offering a world to my ardent desires!" (Juliette, 9:356), whilst J6r6me is exasperated at not being able to "outrage nature": "the impossibility of outraging nature is, in my view, Man's greatest torment" (NJ, 1:297); Dorothee, too, would like to "outrage nature" (NJ, 2:243), and Verneuil would like to destroy the entire planet (NJ, 2:207). While standing on Mount Etna during his stay in Sicily, Jer6me repeats this ambition of total destruction, and is overheard by a similarly minded chemist, named Almani, who launches into an anti-Rousseau tirade against nature.36 Like so many of Sade's other libertines, Almani castigates nature as wholly malevolent, and yet, he copies her, using her own weapons against her. For instance, he contrives to cause earthquakes on Sicily, killing twenty-five thousand people. However, what Almani really wants to kill, it seems, is not people, but nature itself, in all its relentless and maddening inscrutability. It is, for Almani, as for so many other libertines, the absence of nature's motivation, of her "causes," that he finds most intolerable: While offering me only her effects, she kept all her causes hidden from me. I therefore restricted myself to imitating the effects; not being able to guess the motive for placing the dagger in my hands, I have managed to steal the weapon from her, and have used it just like her. (NJ, 2:45) Nature is hateful for him, not because she does evil, for he takes great pleasure in doing this himself, but because she is motiveless and arbitrary. What is hated here, in other words, is a kind of absence, an absence of logic, beyond the control of phallic man. The female body's hidden spaces are the obscenity

John Phillips

41

of Sade's text-"the horror of that which cannot be seen in in Luce unlike the woman" Irigaray's expression-because, and controlled of the Sadean planned ellipses diegesis, they figure an absence impossible to master, an absence for which nature, and not the castrating father, is to blame: "So that is what a woman is" cries the young Jer6me in La nouvelle Justine, at the first sight of his naked sister: oh! what's beautiful about that! . . . what extraordinary contrariness has led nature not to enrich with all its graces that part of the woman's body that makes her different from us? For there's no doubt that that's what men seek out; and what's desirable about a place where there is nothing? (NJ, 1:391) Nature, then, is responsible for female absence, which itself inescapably becomes a metonym for nature's absent causes. Sade cannot "say everything" about the female body, partly because, like the young Jerome, he finds nothing to say. And yet, this "nothing" is what men desire, what holds them in its thrall. By casting this absence into the imagination's secret space, his text symbolically removes the threat to phallic sovereignty, posed less by woman than by nature itself. The absent spaces and spatial absences of the woman's body are the unbearable sign of an empty universe, of a lack that not even the omnipotent phallus can fill.

NOTES 1. Les 120 journees de Sodome (Paris: P.O.L., 1992), 76. This and all subsequent translations from Sade's works are my own, unless otherwise indicated. References to this edition will henceforth be indicated in the text by JS and the appropriatepage number in parentheses after the quotation. 2. See John Phillips, "Sadeand Self-censorship,"in "Sadeand his Legacy," special issue of Paragraph, 23.1 (March2000): 107-18. 3. Quite apart from the absence of the phallus, it seems that, in certain circumstances, females can live and die without knowing that the clitoris, or even the vagina, exist. 4. For a detailed discussion of this and other aspects of modern and contemporary pornographic writing in French, see John Phillips, Forbidden Fictions: Pornography and Censorship in Twentieth-CenturyFrench Literature (London:Pluto Press, 1999).

42

South Central Review

5. Angela Carter, The Sadean Woman:An Exercise in Cultural History (London:Virago Press, 1979), 27. 6. Angela Carter, speaking on The Late Show, BBC2, 1990. La nouvelle Justine ou Les malheurs de la vertu, 2 vols. (Paris: 7. Editions 10/18, Union Gendrale d'Editions), 1:422. All quotations from this edition will be indicated NJ followedby the page reference. 8. NJ, 1:397. 9. NJ, 1:62. 10. Histoire de Juliette, ou Les prospirites du vice, vols 8 & 9 of (Euvres Completes, Le Brun & Pauvert, eds., (Paris: SocietA Nouvelle des Editions Pauvert, 1987). All references to the original French version will be to this edition, and quotations from it will be indicated HJ followed by the page reference. 11. See La philosophie dans le boudoir (Paris: Union Gendrale d'Editions, 10/18, 1972), 183-84: Dolmanc6:"Comeon, come on, push it in deeper, honest Augustin; and when you have a little more experience, you'll agree with me that arses are better than cunts.". 12. See JS, 280. 13. See NJ, 1:301-02. 14. Pierre Klossowski sees Juliette as androgynous:see his "Sade, or the philosopher-villain," in Sade and the Narrative of Transgression, David B. Allison, Mark S. Roberts & Allen S. Weiss, eds., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 33-61 (56 et seq). 15. Juliette, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (London:Arrow Books Ltd, 1991; translation, 1968), 699-700. In the case of all subsequent English translations from Juliette, a page reference following Juliette refers to this edition. All other translations from Juliette are my own. 16. See Marcel Henaff, L'invention du corps libertin (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1978), 310; see also, on this point, Luce Irigaray, ne faites plus un effort," in Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un (Paris: '"FranCaises' Minuit, 1977). 17. See HJ, 8:239. 18. The Society of the Friends of Crime is in one sense a parody of the numerous secret societies that flourished in France during the revolutionary years. 19. Sex crimes are committed almost exclusively by men. Even those few women, like Myra Hindley or Rosemary West, who have been found guilty of them in recent times, have invariably been under the influence of a Svengalilike male. As Freud observes, women show little need to degrade the sexual object. 20. Sigmund Freud, "Fetishism,"in Three Essays on Sexuality (London: Pelican Books, 1984), 351-57 (357). 21. See, for instance, JS, 280. 22. See HJ, 9:556. 23. Lucienne Frappier-Mazur, Writing the Orgy: Power and Parody in Sade (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 147 (first de l'orgie [Paris:Nathan, 1991]). published in French as Sade et l'dcriture

John Phillips

43

24. Frappier-Mazur,149. 25. Since footnotes are a typographical convention and, as such, a quintessentially written and indeed printed use of language, Frappier-Mazuris therefore able to link speaking with the feminine and writing with the masculine (Writing the Orgy, 151), the implication being that the female story teller is seen to need the male author's written seal of approval. One might object, however, that this feminist reading polarizes the masculine and the feminine too simplistically, ignoring the many notes that lend support to the views of male libertines, whose narratives/dissertations are embedded within Juliette's own (for example, in Juliette, Brisa Testa's [Borchamps'] lengthy autobiographical tale). Moreover, in Juliette, Sade appears on occasions to forget that his heroine is speaking, rather than writing, for instance, "fromhere on I shall describe it in the cynically frank style which will always be the hallmark of my writing"(Juliette, 682; adapted;my emphasis). 26. Jane Gallop, "Sade, Mothers And Other Women,"in Sade and the Narrative of Transgression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 122-41 (128). 27. Gallop, 129. 28. D.A.F. Sade, "'Noteson the Novel' in 'Sade',"YaleFrench Studies, 35 (1965): 16. 29. Jane Gallop, Intersections:A Reading of Sade with Bataille, Blanchot, and Klossowski (Lincoln:University of Nebraska Press, 1981). 30. See Gallop, 11-33. 31. Shoshana Felman throws light on the processes at work in such games of critical one-upmanship in her psychoanalytically informed study of Henry James's novel, The Turn of the Screw and commentary upon it: "Turning the Screw of Interpretation,"in Literatureand Psychoanalysis: The Questionof Reading Otherwise(Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 94-207. 32. Annie Le Brun, Soudain, un bloc d'abinte, Sade (Paris: Gallimard Folio, 1993), 285. 33. For Angela Carter, this is a parody of the act of birth: see The Sadean Woman,100. 34. Le Brun, op. cit., 262. 35. Saint-Florent, for instance, in La nouvelle Justine: "there is no sensual delight in the world that arouses me as much as the rape of a young female virgin"(NJ, 2:260). 36. NJ, 2:43-45.