Sixty Years On: The (Transatlantic) Scandal of “Submissive Agency” and the Afterlife of O

ABSTRACT

When Histoire d'O was published pseudonymously in 1954, shortly after Beauvoir's defense of Sade, its status as a female-authored sadomasochistic text created something of a stir. Reactions to the American translation (1966) were even stronger and focused more on the perceived anti-woman bias of the novel. While Sontag defended it on the basis of its literary quality, anti-porn theorists and campaigners such as Dworkin and Millett objected strongly to its representation of a passive woman subjected to multiple instances of physical and mental abuse.

This study looks at environmental factors that arguably determined responses to the book in France and in the United States, such as cultural attitudes to pornography and resistance to the wave of “porno chic” of the 1970s and 1980s. How is the notion of self-mortification as a form of agency perceived in two very different cultures?

KEYWORDS:

• Histoire d'O
• porno chic
• feminism
• sadomasochism
• submissive agency

Notes

1. James, E.L. Fifty Shades of Grey. London: Arrow, 2011.

2. Space does not allow for a discussion of these classifications. I will use these terms as they have been used by the source authors.

3. For a full discussion of the publication and reception of Story of O, see Amy Wyngaard. “The End of Pornography: The Story of The Story of O.” Modern Language Notes 130.4 (2015): 980–997. Accessed 10 January 2017.

4. See the autobiographical revelations of coercion from both actresses, Linda Boreman (Deep Throat) and Maria Schneider (Last Tango in Paris).

5. Later filmed by American “adult” director Radley Metzger.

6. Beckman, Frida. “Tensions in Deleuzian Desire: Critical and Clinical Reflections on Female Masochism.” Angelaki. Journal of Theoretical Humanities 15:1 (2010): 93–108. Ward, Michell. “Empowerment in Chains: Exploring the Liberatory Potential of Masochism.” eSharp 6:1 (2005): 1–14. http://www.gla.ac.uk/media/media_41189_en.pdf. Accessed 12 Mar 2017. Benjamin, Jessica. “The Bonds of Love: Rational Violence and Erotic Domination.” Feminist Studies 6:1 (Spring 1980): 144–174.

7. Included in the collection of essays under the same title, dealing with conservatism and privilege.

8. This point of view is underlined by Ruwen Ogier, Penser la pornographie (2015).

9. Unlike Catherine Robbe-Grillet (Jean / Jeanne de Berg), whose practice as a former submissive become dominatrix is well known (see Bentley, Toni. “The Thin End of the Whip: Inside the Life of France's Most Famous Dominatrix.” Vanity Fair (22 January 2014). Accessed 10 February 2017).

10. Brooke Magnanti (2013) remarks in her revisiting of Nancy Friday's seminal study My Secret Garden (1973), that until the 1970s there was little recognition, in America particularly, of the fact that women might actually have sexual fantasies. (See “Top Five Women's Sexual Fantasies in 2013.” The Telegraph, 27 August 2013. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/sex/10268770/Top-5-womens-sexual-fantasies-in-2013.html. Accessed 30 March 2017.)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jean Anderson

Jean Anderson is Reader in French at Victoria University of Wellington, where she founded the New Zealand Centre for Literary Translation in 2007. A practicing translator of indigenous Pacific writing, she has also published numerous articles on contemporary and nineteenth-century women's writing in French and international crime fiction. She recently co-edited Serial Crime Fiction: Dying for More.