43 pages • 1 hour read
Pauline RéageStory of O
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1954A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Sir Stephen”
Part 2, Pages 74-123 Summary
O returns to the fashionable Ile Saint-Louis apartment in Paris where she is staying with René. René tells O that she “mustn’t think of herself as free” (76), except to leave him absolutely and immediately. Otherwise, he says, if she loves him, she must accept that she is totally unfree and must prove that love. Part of that “proof” consists in O being totally sexually open to him and others who know about the chateau. As such, and to this end, René demands that O hand over to him all the clothes that do not make her accessible to men, and to go and get a new set of clothes that do.
O works in the fashion branch of a photographic agency. Her coworkers notice how she has changed during her two-week absence at Roissy, specifically in her style of dress and her “faultless immobility when she was still” (84). In fact, one of the models O is photographing, Jacqueline, accidentally notices O’s ring from Roissy and that she is not wearing a garter belt. When O is taking photographs of Jacqueline, O finds that Jacqueline resembles one of the other women at Roissy and that her choker and bracelet resembles the collar and bracelets of Roissy. This leads O, for the first time with one of her models, to follow Jacqueline to her dressing room and watch her undress.
Two weeks later, as O is preoccupied with work, she finds a note from René telling her that they will be going out for a meal with another man and to wear the perfume and makeup as if she had been at Roissy. O meets René in an Italian restaurant with an Englishman called Sir Stephen, and afterward, they go back to his house. Sir Stephen explains to O that he is the son of René’s mother’s first husband, so that while not related by blood to René, as he says, “we are brothers, after a fashion” (97). Sir Stephen then states that he and René have always shared everything and asks if O will consent to their “common ownership” (98) of her. After a moment’s hesitation, O repeats after René the phrases expressing her consent to becoming “a slave” (101) to the men. René then holds O in place while Sir Stephen touches and anally penetrates her. After this, René declares to O, “I leave you to Sir Stephen” (108), and goes. O recalls how René had offered to give Sir Stephen exclusive use of O’s anus and senses that René cares more about him than about her.
After René leaves, Sir Stephen makes O give him fellatio, with him using her mouth and throat aggressively. He then tells O that she is “wanton” (117). Sir Stephen observes that while O loves René, she nonetheless yearns for all the men she is with, and that by sending her to Roissy, René is inadvertently legitimizing her desire for multiple partners. Sir Stephen then tells O to masturbate in front of him. However, she cannot, reflecting that she can only ever do this alone, and never orgasms. The reason for her reticence is a story a friend had once told O about being caught masturbating in her office by her boss. When O refuses his request, Sir Stephen slaps O. He then tells her that she needs to learn submission without love before anally penetrating her again. O reflects on how she intends to make Sir Stephen love her. She senses that René’s attitude will mirror Sir Stephen’s, so if Sir Stephen starts to hold her in contempt, so will René. O is then taken to a room in Sir Stephen’s house where she falls asleep.
Part 2, Pages 124-167 Summary
Sir Stephen’s chauffeur drives O home the next day. While working on a photoshoot, O recollects, earlier in her life, cruelly teasing and denying the men “who were wild about her” (126). Indeed, she had pushed one man to attempt suicide and then, afterward, stripped in front of him while forbidding him to touch her. Further, O recounts how before meeting René she had never truly given herself to anyone and had only pursued women. However, René’s desire for and possession of her had given her a new form of happiness. The only problem is that O’s happiness is fragile since it is premised on René continuing to love her, something which cannot be guaranteed. O notices in the months after meeting Sir Stephen that René only has sex with her on the nights after O has seen Sir Stephen and that René always defers to him when it comes to plans or to sex. This development comes to a head one evening when O asks to spend the night with René rather than Sir Stephen, even though the latter had asked for her. René not only refuses O’s request but betrays her to Sir Stephen and recommends to him that she be “severely punished” before leaving her in Sir Stephen’s hands. That evening, for the first time, O then truly gives herself to Sir Stephen and is whipped in a way that she recognizes René never could.
The following day, Sir Stephen drops O off at her apartment. This incident leads René, who has a key to O’s apartment, to realize that Sir Stephen should likewise have one, and he has a key made and delivered to him. One morning, Sir Stephen then arrives at O’s apartment when she had been expecting René. Sir Stephen makes O lie naked in an exposed position and asks O a series of questions, including whether she has any female friends that she desires. O responds by telling him about Jacqueline and showing him photographs of her. Sir Stephen and O then get lunch at a café on the bank of the Seine. There he gives O a new set of instructions to obey. First, she must consent to touch herself whenever asked. She must also have sex with other men who do not love her “before someone who loved her” (163), which could mean either René or Sir Stephen. Sir Stephen also explains that she belongs primarily to him and not René, and that before returning to Roissy, she would be given a mark to designate her permanently and unmistakably as his “slave.” Finally, Sir Stephen asks O to seduce Jacqueline so that she, too, can be lured to Roissy.
Part 2 Analysis
In one sense, O’s story could have ended with her time at Roissy. Thoroughly used and whipped, locked up, and reduced to an object, O could have returned to her normal life believing that she had pushed her masochistic fantasy to the limit. Yet, in a deeper sense, this would have left her story unfinished. As both O and René realize, without further action, Roissy remains only a fantasy which has “no reality save in a closed circle” (103). Precisely because it is so different from ordinary life, the changes made to the person there—the purpose of masochism—can disappear once one reencounters normal reality and wakes from the fantasy. For instance, a person talks to others again as equals and sets boundaries regarding how others treat them. As such, O and René strive to make what happened in Roissy come to affect a change in life outside of Roissy. They strive, that is, to make the masochistic fantasy for O in some way real.
At first these efforts are subtle and symbolic. O wears “the iron ring with the triple golden spiral” (92), which she received at Roissy, to her job in a fashion agency. In this way, she can be identified and, in theory, used by any man who understands the ring’s meaning. Likewise, on her return, René insists that O wears a new, revealing wardrobe, which would “signify her accessibility to those who knew what these signs implied” (77). In addition, she should make “a continual effort” (77) to keep her legs uncrossed. This should serve the function of continually reminding O even “in the midst of the most everyday occupations and while amongst those who did not share the secret” of her state of servitude (78). Still, these actions are too tentative with regard to her pursuit of Humiliation as a Means for the Destruction of the Social Self. O imagines the potential embarrassment involved in getting a new corset made while not wearing a bra. A model she is working with, Jacqueline, does notice O’s ring and that she is not wearing a garter belt. Overall, though, like the ring—“the symbol declaring that she belonged to whomsoever knew its secret” (100)—these efforts, as O says, “had simply not happened to produce any consequences” (100).
Consequently, two weeks later, René introduces his stepbrother Sir Stephen into his relationship with O. Shortly after, René asks O if she will consent to their common ownership of her and their “right to dispose of her body as they saw fit” (102). As O notes, what they ask of her is “almost identical” (102) to what was asked regarding the other men at Roissy. However, there are key differences with Sir Stephen’s “ownership,” which effects real world consequences and does not simply make it a repeat of Roissy. For as he says to O, “I’ll constantly be there” (99). Sir Stephen seeks, and gets, the right to use O and to demand her company at all hours of the day, regardless of what she is doing. This reaches its apotheosis when he is given keys to O’s apartment, denying O “any space all to herself in a place where she had been wont to retreat” (150). It is not only, then, that Sir Stephen extends the boundaries of when and where she can be used relative to her time at Roissy, but also that in being thus available to and always anticipating Sir Stephen, he colors all aspects of her life and psychology and all “normal” existence outside of Roissy. He does this in a way that her merely wearing a ring or different clothes cannot.
At the same time, Sir Stephen allows Roissy to affect O’s normal life insofar as he is a real, identifiable, individual. At the mansion, O was used by multiple men besides René, but they were all anonymous and indistinguishable. As such, it was easy for O to forget them once her stay was over and to neatly delineate relations with them from her ordinary life. In contrast, Sir Stephen, and his link to Roissy, cannot be forgotten or compartmentalized. He is not only part of the normal world but is rooted in it and bound to their world by emotional and family ties. As O observes, about René and Sir Stephen, “when they were younger, they had shared a journey together, or a boat, or a horse” (112).
Further, it is because of this link, and his rootedness in their reality, that O’s submission to Sir Stephen brings about real changes in O’s world. While O could maintain at Roissy that it was her love for René that led her to submit to other men, and hence that her love remained unchanged afterward, this is not possible with Sir Stephen. Sir Stephen’s identifiable use of O in a more dominant way than René, and René’s deferral to him, leads O to question her love. She wonders whether René is, or can ever be, the ideal master she seeks. In this way, alongside the demands he makes of O regarding Jacqueline, the arrival of Sir Stephen truly infects O’s normality with Roissy fantasy. It also subverts the foundations of the very love that had allegedly brought O to Roissy in the first place.
