I don't know if I should be so quick to admit this, but The Story of O is one of my comfort reads.
I started thinking about this today after reading this post that Peter Tupper wrote about here.
I have no clear idea why I keep returning to this little book. I'm far too self-absorbed to be into the loss of self, and I don't fancy humiliation. I think it might have a lot to do with O as Hercules: she's the hero that must perform difficult tasks to become who she's meant to be. Except O is obliterated in the process, and I'm not really into that, and we're back at the beginning again.
Let's start there. When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a nun. I wanted to be part of a collective, to be seamlessly integrated into something larger than myself. I wanted to dedicate myself to serve a god I was sure wanted my service. I became obsessed with this thought, and if the church had been a more hospitable place... Well, who knows. Now that I am fairly godless, the echoes of that craving still exist, but don't have any real outlet.
It's interesting that O's author was also an atheist who had once thought about becoming a nun. I think I might be on to something with this connection. Everyone has a shadow side, and who they are might have nothing to do with where their mind likes to go when it's idling. I often dream about how I would cope with a loss of freedom, because that scares me, and this book might be one way that I deal with that.
This is turning out to be less coherent than I though it would be. I do find the introduction by Paulhan to be deeply disturbing, and I will never agree that women, or any other group, are made to be dominated. Maybe Paulhan missed the point. Maybe I did. I prefer to view O's journey as one that could have been taken by anyone brave enough, anyone who wanted it badly enough. It's not Woman's Journey: it is, as I said before, a hero's journey. Maybe only a sex-nerd-atheist-with-nun-related-daydreams can see it as such, though. :-)
Thanks for the link.
ReplyDeleteI see "O", not as a Campbell-style circular journey, but as a descent into hell that has no escape. O isn't Hercules or Inanna or Jesus; she's Sisyphus, except she rolls her stone downhill all the way. There's no higher purpose to what she does.
You're onto something interesting when you talk about O as a kind of perverse nun. There's a long tradition of anti-Catholic propaganda that attributes perverse sexuality to convent and monastic life. "The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk" was published in the 1830s and tells the allegedly true story of Maria being forced into Montreal convent to serve the sexual desires of monks, who enter the convent via a secret tunnel. Works like this and Diderot's "The Nun" easily inspired pornographic works and fantasies. Oscar Wilde has Dorian Gray purchase and fetishize a nun's habit, and there's a whole genre of nun-sploitation film.
"O" is basically an initiation narrative, and for a long time women had only two initiations open to them: marriage and renunciation. So, it isn't surprising that Reage/Aury/Desclos would distill these ideas into erotica, as would another good Catholic girl gone bad, Anne Rice.
See, this is why you're the literary historian, and I'm the mildly perverse fan girl. :-)
ReplyDeleteI don't know if I agree about your Sisyphus assessment. Of course there's no higher purpose in anything O does: that's not really the point. It is entirely possible to have an intense personal journey that has no higher purpose without invalidating the experience.
I know about all those anti-nun propaganda pieces, but I always found them rather comical. I think, to really get inside the O/nun comparison, you need to read the work of medieval nuns, like Julian of Norwich or even Teresa of Avila. These women describe their long, lonely quests as self-effacing, drenched in suffering, and utterly ecstatic. If you allow yourself to be swept along by their passion, the effect is intoxicating.