Pauline Reage and Guido Crepax - Story of O: Part II Return to the Chateau

Sitting in my first day of a new graduate school workshop, the class wondered amazingly off-topic and began discussing Fifty Shades of Grey and how they felt that it had failed to shock or draw in the reader despite the explicit subject matter and concentration on sexual deviance. During that discussion, someone mentioned that The Story of O had more adeptly handled the subject, introducing a French woman who, seeking adventure, gets more than she bargained for, ultimately leading to a self-immolation of sorts. Curious, and having a long metro ride home, I downloaded The Story of O. I fail to understand the draw of BDSM, but most novels focusing on a sexual problem tend to be interesting and, if the characters are effective, tend to present a unique sort of emotional turmoil. I expected that The Story of O would compel me as Fifty Shades of Grey had by introducing a reluctant character immersed in a terrible world which she cannot escape. Beyond that, I was in the mood for a controversial read and curious to see what my classmates were lauding as literary erotica.

The story focuses on O, an unnamed French woman. We meet O in medias reis as she is transported to a strange chateau where she is initiated into sexual slavery and bondage at the whim of her lover, Rene, who hands her over to the rough guidance of his masked group of friends, the first infidelity of the relationship. O gives us very little and despite the abruptness of her situation, the sudden polyamorous tint of her obsessive love, the chains and brutal whippings, O remains detached, an observer watching the degradation of her own body.

A plethora of bizarre essays precedes the actual novel, where men proclaim an admiration for the unknown female author of this piece, claiming that there is a deep dignity to her relinquishment and love of punishment. The essays alone were enough to make me want to turn back, the implicit Freudian psychosexual feeling letting me know early that I had hold of a narrative more bizarre and off-putting than I desired. This was going to be beyond mere prurient entertainment. The result, oddly, was less showy than the essays which preceded it, and the detachment of O pulls readers away from the horrors to a jaded, bored status as we watch floggings, helpless women chained to beds and beaten by strange men, ownership carved into the body with burning coals, and a neediness that leads to a willful and ultimately unrewarded debauchery. We can stand it because O just doesn’t feel real. We don’t care about her and the small amount of characterization attributed later in the story makes us not like her. Sometimes, there is a perverse feeling that needy things desire to implode. O’s final desecration, then, leaves us completely removed and unmovable.

The entire focus of S&M, according to this book anyway, is the desire to be owned. The masters are as gods and they enjoy the tears of their subjects. This, apparently, is what O needs to feel fulfilled and despite all the explanations peppered throughout the book, a plea for us to understand the aberrations of O’s final desire to be killed rather than be left masterless,  most readers are not going to understand such a relinquishment. We find out early that O, before her fascination with slavery, was the predator once causing a man to attempt suicide and then coming the night after, lying naked beside him but denying him touch, just to feel her own power. It’s hard to like a character who consistently admits to such things and, so, when O descends even further, fearing now that she is owned, a sense of revenge is ever present. O’s desire to be loved by Rene poisons her and, after having lived so cruelly, we hardly care if Rene casts her aside.

The shocking nature attributed to this novel seems tame by today’s standards as far as details are concerned. Frankly, however, considering how awful the things are that are done to O, this is a good thing. I hardly need details of someone burning their initials into another human who is, sadly, become so needy of affection that she allows the disfigurement. In moments such as these, readers are glad that O’s detached retelling of her story is so far removed from the mental predicament of the moment.
Rene and Sir Stephen, the two masters who own O, are even less well drawn although no less alien than O. They are the “gods” that shift the scenes of this moribund world and we watch as they initiate a pantomime of ownership cloaked by a false affection that seems adopted only so the subject will commit to the punishment and not rebel. If these are gods, they are evil gods and we, as the reader, have no interest in them not even to the stage that we ponder why they act as they do. Ultimately, they seem even less real than O.

Jacqueline, the “other woman” of the tale functions as a villainous portrayal of a woman more in control of her fate and, hence, dangerous to O. The story diverges quite a great deal of Jacqueline as O seduces her, adding another lair onto the tale as O fights between fascination and fear of this woman who, although O’s lover, threatens to take Rene’s love ultimately. As I said, needy things beg to be destroyed and, in this tale, there is no sympathy for the weak despite what the author is supposedly espousing.

The language of the piece is a little more elegant than modern novels, Fifty Shades of Grey, being my only comparison for this genre. That being said, the language is rarely descriptive and a feeling of fear is poorly concealed, fear of revealing too much of this world since the reader might judge and run in horror. And so, a blasé type of boredom, a retelling that shows no emotion, cloaks the full horror of what is really being described and what is happening. The end chapter epitomizes this as we learn, in a few sentences, of O’s downfall, something that is related with the interest you would evince when you talk of killing a fly. The Story of O is a failed endeavor on so many levels: the shocking nature of the content is veiled so well behind a wall of apathetic rendering that readers fail to be titillated by the forbidden, although the disturbing nature of the topic is alive enough to cause readers discomfort and a great degree of abhorrence. Not recommended.



Countess_Eva

Recommend this product? No