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.
Symbols & Motifs
Mirrors and Self-Objectification
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses graphic sexual content, including depictions of bondage and sadomasochism and nonconsensual sexual encounters.
One of the first things O sees at Roissy while being prepared for the men by the other women is a “a mirror running from floor to ceiling and straight ahead of her, in plain view” (14). O notices mirrors everywhere she goes in the novel. The bathroom at Roissy has “mirrors entirely covering every wall” (33), Sir Stephen’s house is full of them, and so is the fashion agency where she works and the house where she goes to get Sir Stephen’s marks attached. In this way, mirrors are not arbitrary pieces of furniture but play an important role in O’s development and training. Mirrors exist as a way of forcing O to take a third-person perspective on her body and to participate in her own objectification. This is evident when Anne-Marie makes O look at herself in the mirror, after fitting the irons to her labia. As she says, “Sir Stephen or anyone else, you too before the mirror, whoever lifts up your skirt will immediately see the rings on your belly” (207).
As such, O is encouraged to see herself as a sexual and submissive object, controlled and circumscribed by others’, specifically dominants’, perceptions of her. Similarly, this effort to subject O to an external viewpoint on herself via mirrors serves to destabilize her ordinary sense of self, evident when Anne-Marie making O stand in front of a mirror before attaching the permanent rings and branding her. As she says, “this is the last time you’ll see yourself intact […] I’ll bring you back again to look at the mirror on the eve of your departure. You’ll not recognize yourself” (213-14). Thus, mirrors not only serve to dislocate O from an independent or earlier sense of self, but also to confuse any stable sense of self whatsoever, something that makes O even more malleable to the wishes of others.
Keys, Locks, and Doors
Describing the collar and bracelets she is made to wear at Roissy, O says that they are “fitted with a catch that worked automatically, like a padlock, and which needed a key to be opened” (15). In one sense, then, as found throughout the novel, keys and locks serve an obvious practical and political function. If, like at Roissy, or Sir Stephen’s or Anne-Marie’s, submissives need to be restrained overnight or for the purposes of whipping, then there must be a means of controlling when and by whom they can be locked up and released. Control of keys thus also denotes who has power. This is indicated at Roissy by the fact that “no woman there possessed keys either to the doors or to the chains” (41), while all the men had skeleton keys opening all the locks. Likewise, René giving Sir Stephen a key to O’s apartment indicates René’s power, as well as Sir Stephen’s growing power over O and O’s life.
However, keys and locks also serve a fetishistic and symbolic function in the novel. The idea of the locked door—many of the doors at Roissy are—represents the thrill of the forbidden and the unknown. Locked doors represent illicit or repressed fantasies and desires, and it is only the masters possessing the “keys” who can unlock them. They do this, symbolically, by training and remolding the submissives to become aware of and open to such desires. Conversely, being locked or chained up symbolizes and satisfies another kind of fantasy. This is seen with O after Sir Stephen has received the keys to her apartment: “[S]he waited a good while, wondering whether he would surprise her in the middle of the night […] whether indeed he would come at all” (148). In this the case, the thrill is in ceding power over one’s body to someone, and the excitement of not knowing how or when they will use it. With both cases, the thrill lies in the unknown. Only in the latter case, though, do locks also allow for the problematic fantasy of being subjected to acts against one’s will.
Masks, Hoods, and Concealment
While at Cannes, O describes how her and Jacqueline’s room would be separated from Sir Stephen’s by a “partition which looked blind but which, behind false latticework […] was transparent” (231). This would mean, as O stresses, that by raising a shade on his side he “would be able to see and overhear everything that went on in the room” (231). This dynamic of voyeurism and exhibitionism is repeated at numerous points in the novel. It is also typically facilitated by some kind of mask, literal or symbolic. For instance, the first man O sees at Roissy is “masked in a black hood completed by a section of gauze hiding his eyes” (15). Likewise, when O first does a photoshoot for Jacqueline, she is wearing a “veil, which was like a suggestion of a mask” (86).
What all these instances share, like the partition in Sir Stephen’s room, is a desire to see without being seen. As with the order at Roissy that O should never look the masters in the face, the mask wearer, like the voyeur, wishes to become a purely objectifying look. This dynamic would be compromised if the object of the look was able to objectify the looker in turn. It is also why the masters insist on blindfolding O when using her in Roissy’s dungeon. The pure object of use should, by this logic, always be denied the chance of looking at—or using—the other herself. However, if masks conceal for the sake of sadism and voyeurism, they also conceal in another way. As O says, when reflecting on Roissy, there the “prison scenery, party costumes, people in masks, all this had denied reality, transported her out of the realm of her everyday life” (102). Masks as part of a broader context serve to conceal a world and milieu behind the atmosphere of fantasy. It is in this sense that one can understand the owl mask that O wears at the novel’s end. The mask in this instance does not necessarily make O a voyeur, nor is it intended to conceal O’s identity in any straightforward way. Rather, the mask, like the moonlight and dancers, or Roissy’s “party costumes,” is part of a dream-like context designed to confuse, and hence conceal, one’s sense of what is real and what is not.
