Story of O

As O is driven to Roissy, she is described as sitting “motionless and so silent, so denuded […] in a black car going she hasn’t the least idea where” (11). In this way, O’s journey to the mansion is a metaphor for the paradoxical nature of her narrative. On one hand, O is the novel’s protagonist, around whom events revolve. Via a third-person narrator, the story focuses on O’s perspective, and it is her thoughts and feelings to which readers are given access. At the same, as a character and a viewpoint, she is a void. She is “silent,” surrounded by darkened glass, and passive. Especially at the novel’s start, there is little indication as to who O is or what she wants. The narrator makes no mention of a job, family, or friends or of any contextualizing backstory. The novel does not indicate the decade in which she is living. Her only distinguishing feature—her clothes, “what she always wears” (9)—are quickly taken from her, and her dress is then decided by others. Likewise, she hands over the bag with her papers in it. She is thus symbolically and literally “denuded,” stripped of identity and hence, agency. All that remains is her “lover,” René. As he is “so quiet, so still” (10) in the car, so opaque himself, he offers little in the way of illuminating O’s character either.

These elements raise the question of why Réage portrays O in this fashion, so devoid of the hallmarks of a protagonist and of the means for agency. While the novel being erotica, and hence focused on sex, is part of the explanation, a deeper reason becomes clearer once O enters the mansion. This is evident when O is given new clothes and made to wear a skirt that “could be held at any desired height, thus, which meant that all of what was exposed was very ready to hand” (24). O’s transformation via her dress highlights The Role of Clothing in Creating and Erasing Identity. This dress intentionally turns O into an object that is accessible and pliable to the desires of others. Her own specific desires or interests, and her own character, are irrelevant. On the contrary, any past character or life outside of Roissy becomes, like her “normal” clothes and her underwear, mere impediments to her new and real function. Namely, they are obstacles to her being a fitting and empty vessel for what is desired by the mansion’s men.

In this way, the Story of O is precisely that: It is the story not of a whole woman before “O,” with a distinct life and name, but of O, someone defined solely by her masochistic goal of being nothing but what others make of her. This is not easily achieved. Although the loss of O’s previous clothes and identity is necessary, and symbolically important, the real work of her transition and denudement begins in the mansion. New clothes play a part, as do the chains that acclimatize her to the idea that “her own body itself was inaccessible to her” (36). This teaches her that her body is there for others’ pleasure, not hers. Likewise, the phallic objects inserted into O’s anus are designed both to physically alter O and to make her more open to the sexual desires of her “masters.” Thus O is sculpted into a more ideal sex object and prepared for further physical change via the ease with which men are now able to have anal sex with her. In this way, the novel establishes its Reification and Problematization of Gender Norms. The mansion at Roissy is a highly gendered environment in which women are objectified. While the narrative exposes O’s consent in submitting sexually, submission inherently requires a loss of agency and power, thus reinforcing gender roles in which women are subservient to men. However, later parts of the novel problematize these norms—as well as binaries of submission and dominance.   

The real changes made to O are not physical or external but psychological, introducing the theme of Humiliation as a Means for the Destruction of the Social Self. The men achieve this by making O submit to rules that forbid her from talking or from looking the “masters” in the eye. They force her to internalize and re-affirm the absence of any independent will or voice she might have possessed. More importantly, she is whipped. As one of the men explains to her, the main purpose of these regular floggings is neither the men’s pleasure, nor to leave signs of their dominance, via marks and welts, on her body. Rather, as O is told, it is “to teach you that you utterly belong to something which is apart from and outside yourself” (27). By means of pain, whipping is intended to make O realize that her fate—her continued suffering, or its cessation—is entirely in the hands of another. Her cries and tears, as the men stress, are to count for nothing. Instead, the duration and extent of her pain, and her life itself, is determined by the caprice of her “masters” and whether they feel she has been sufficiently schooled. In this sense, the goal is to make O stand in relation to the men as one might stand before a god. Concomitantly, for O to acknowledge them as gods is to accept her total reduction to nothing in their eyes and to accept the absolute denudement of her being.