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.
Themes
The Reification and Problematization of Gender Norms
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses graphic sexual content, including depictions of bondage and sadomasochism and nonconsensual sexual encounters. The guide also refers to suicidal ideation.
After her first night in her room at Roissy, chained up, O remarks on how “no woman there possessed keys either to the doors or to the chains, but each man carried a bunch of skeleton keys” (41), allowing them to open all doors, collars, and bracelets. Thus, in this way, the keys encapsulate gender relations in the sadomasochistic milieu in which O and other characters inhabit. For in that world, men—even valets—hold all the power, and women are reduced to passive aesthetic objects for their pleasure. Men are literally and metaphorically masters over the women, able to lock them away like toys. In contrast, the women require a man’s grace and “key” just to get out of bed or to leave their rooms. This point is again stressed at the novel’s end. There an O reduced to absolute passivity, and with her labia pierced, is examined by a young man whose girlfriend “obeyed in silence” (262) while he explains that “he would have the same thing done to her” (261).
Yet if Story of O in one sense affirms and reifies traditional gender norms, in other ways it problematizes them. This can be seen, first, in connection with O’s backstory. Although mentioned only briefly, O describes how before meeting René she had “amused herself tempting the boys who were wild about her” (126). In fact, she had pushed one man to attempt suicide by refusing him after inciting his love, then, when he was out of hospital, stripped in front of him while “forbidding him from laying a finger on her” (126). This story shows how the female gender role is not necessarily submissive. Instead, just as the male gender role can be one of masochism or weakness, the female one can be sadistic and powerful.
The story also highlights a more complex point about the interrelation of sadism and masochism. Namely, it shows that the positions of dominant and submissive do not exist as clearly distinct or static poles. Rather, the positions, along with male and female gender roles, exist as constantly interpenetrating and evolving processes, dependent on adopting the viewpoint of the other who is submitting or dominating. This can be seen in the way that O continually imagines herself in the role of the sadist in connection with Jacqueline. O not only constantly pictures Jacqueline at Roissy but, when in bed with her, imagines herself—through Jacqueline—in the position of one of the men using O. As she says, her “pleasure in grasping a […] wet and burning Jacqueline was a constant reminder of the pleasure Sir Stephen took in doing the same thing to her” (219). Further, this projection onto, and confusion of, other gender identities is not restricted to female characters. When watching O and Sir Stephen having sex, René “more closely watched Sir Stephen’s face than hers” (141). René’s admiration and love for Sir Stephen seems to be rooted in and consummated through the imaginative projection of himself into O’s place with Sir Stephen. This explains not only his constant absence when O and Sir Stephen are together, but also why he grants Sir Stephen exclusive “rights” to anal sex with her, the act most resembling sex between men. Thus, the Story of O posits that masochistic joy comes from awareness of sadistic joy and vice versa. Likewise, awareness of active and passive positions is premised on the imaginative projection into their opposite. In this sense, the novel problematizes straightforward binaries of male and female, and submission and dominance, at the same time as it reiterates them.
The Role of Clothing in Creating and Erasing Identity
At the novel’s start, O describes how she is “wearing what she always wears: high heels, a suit with a pleated skirt, a silk blouse, no hat” (9). She is also wearing the leather handbag containing her “papers.” Thus clothing, for O, constitutes her identity in a dual sense. On the one hand, her choice of clothes, like her identifying documents, distinguishes her from others. At the same time, her consistent style of clothing marks the persistence of this identity over time, something remaining constant as “her” despite the flow of events. This link between clothing and identity is seen throughout the novel in other ways. A hint of what distinguishes O’s relation to René, beyond the generic one of “master” and “slave,” is given by an observation O’s makes about René’s clothing. As she says, in a rare moment of normality at Roissy, he was “dressed the way he was when he got up from bed […] in striped pyjamas and a blue wool bathrobe […] the one […] they’d chosen together the year before” (42-43). Likewise, the author distinguishes Jacqueline by her sense of style. Right to the novel’s end, her black sweaters and couture ski-suits mark her as an individual with her own ideas and agenda.
As such, it is logical that clothing should also play such a prominent role in the control of identity. As evident through the clothes the women wear at Roissy— long flowing skirts, restrictive “whalebone bodices,” and collars and bracelets—the purpose of such attire is both to restrict a sense of individuality and enforce uniformity. This is not just achieved by having the women all dress identically. Rather, as shown by the resemblance of the costumes to those of “eighteenth-century chambermaids” (13), they stifle individuality by confusing any distinct sense of time or place. Denaturing clothes from their historical moment, they erode the individual’s sense of who they are by dislocating them from who or where they were. This means of control is not limited to how the women dress. At Roissy the “flowing robes” with ease of opening at the front, worn by all the masters, are designed to anonymize interactions with the men as well. As O remarks about René when the men have sex with her for the first time, “she had not been able to distinguish him from amongst the rest” (19). Any sense of individuality coming from her specific relation to René is stifled by the uniform that turns all the men, for her, into anonymous avatars of power and domination.
The use of clothing to erase identity also works on a deeper level still. The clothes at Roissy, O says, “looked on the girl clad in it, not so much like an article of clothing, a protective device, but like a provocative one, a mechanism for display” (50). As such, the aim of the outfits at Roissy is not just to encourage disorientation and conformity, but to subvert the very purpose of clothing itself. This is achieved by changing that purpose from protecting and concealing the body to exposing and instrumentalizing it. Clothing becomes a means of alienating the women from their own bodies and making them see themselves into terms of what men desire of them. As the novel progresses, though, clothing becomes a way as well of changing the body to better accommodate that desire. The corset O is made to wear by Anne-Marie is intentionally designed to transfigure her body, narrowing her waist and making her “more lovely” for Sir Stephen. Likewise, this is the case with the disks O wears attached to metal rings in her labia: This adornment both changes O’s body and dissolves her identity into that of the man whose name is inscribed upon her.
Humiliation as a Means for the Destruction of the Social Self
Nine days into her stay at Roissy, O describes how Pierre the valet, after taking her into the bathroom, “bade her ready herself, nodding to the Turkish toilet in the corner where indeed he did make her squat” (67). O then is made to urinate in front of him. The humiliation of this act does not consist merely in her being forced to perform such a private function while being watched, nor does it stem from the fact that the observer is a man. Rather, the deeper reason why the act is so humiliating is that the man who orders her to do it is, as she says, “a kind of peasant” (32), someone who—by looks and position—is well below her in her perception of ordinary social hierarchy. This pattern of humiliation being linked to and heightened by the involvement of perceived social inferiors recurs throughout the novel. For example, it is evident in the case of a gardener “pushing a wheelbarrow” (40) at Roissy. O’s sense of degradation after being whipped and chained for the first time is intensified by the sense that “had he come nearer to rake up the leaves fallen by the asters […] he’d have seen O, enchained and naked, and the arks the crop left on her thighs” (40). Sir Stephen’s servant, Norah, provokes a similar response from O: “[T]aking her clothes off before this patient old woman […] was as much of an ordeal for her as being naked before the eyes of the Roissy valets” (182). And one of the most humiliating events of the novel for O is when Norah walks in on her, on her hands and knees, about to be penetrated by Sir Stephen. However, this association of class and humiliation raises the question about why this link is so important for Réage. Relatedly, it raises the question as to why O seems to derive satisfaction from such degradation. Part of the answer can be found through observing a related trope of O’s humiliation, public exposure.
It is not enough that O is humiliated through exposure before servants and workers. Rather, O’s social humiliation, and resulting deeper fall in social standing, must also itself be exposed in the world beyond Roissy and Sir Stephen. This is accomplished specifically only after O has had Sir Stephen’s marks affixed to her. First, Jacqueline walks in on O in the bath and sees these. Viewing what she sees with a “scornful manner,” Jacqueline’s revulsion and contempt represent the reaction of O’s peers and the world of work to her state. Second, the reaction of Sir Stephen’s friend, Eric, who “turned white […] and vanished” (226) after seeing O “spread grotesquely open” (225) represents the reaction of potential “respectable” marriage partners to O’s state.
In both cases, what occurs is the logical endpoint of humiliation: social ruin. When combined with her initial fall brought about by humiliation before her inferiors, what O experiences is the irrevocable destruction of her name, her social death. Further, this is pleasurable for the same reason that loss of self-awareness during orgasm is pleasurable. Namely, just as loss of self during climax is blissful due to the feeling of liberation from the bonds of thought, so too is the death of the social-self pleasurable, because it involves a freeing from the tension of social bonds. In this sense, O’s humiliation encapsulates yet another of masochism’s paradoxes: The logic and rationale of humiliation for O encapsulates the sense that true freedom is only ultimately possible through bondage.
