On The Story of O

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. :-)

Living by Love... Stories

This lovely lady is Aphra Behn. If her name sounds familiar, but you're not sure why, you may have seen it here:

All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds. It is she--shady and amorous as she was--who makes it not quite fantastic for me to say to you tonight: Earn five hundred a year by your wits.-- Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

That's a truly moving epitaph, and for women who write for a living, it should be inspiring. Mistress Behn is especially important for those of us that work in the romance and erotica markets, and I'm going to take a moment to tell you why.

Aphra Behn was one of the Fair Triumvirate, a trio of ladies who wrote a class of novels called amatory fiction. That link will give you all the details, but basically amatory fiction was about women writing love stories for women. Sound familiar? Because of the time, these stories were almost always tragic, and shamelessly melodramatic, but that does not mean that they deserve to be as overlooked as they have been. I'm currently reading through Behn's works (you can grab them for free here), and they are so much fun.

And going back to Woolf's point, it's especially important to note that Behn literally lived by her pen. She was not a kept woman, or an heiress. She wrote because she could, and she wrote to make money. The publishing market is scary enough now for aspiring writers, but imagine what it would have been like then, and tip your hat to this woman. Without Behn, and women like her, I would not be where I am today, and neither would thousands of other women.

Now, seriously, download those books onto your favourite ereader, pull up a glass of wine, and prepare to laugh your fool head off. :-)