3 Objectification, Complicity, and Coldness: the Story of O's

3 Objectification, Complicity, and Coldness: The Story of O’s Narratives of Femininity and Precarity FOR A BOOK that has engendered so much commentary, The Story of O begins unassumingly, with a walk in the park: “Her lover one day takes O for a walk in a section of the city where they never go—the Montsouris Park.”1 From there the narrative progresses rapidly. René, her lover, deposits O at Roissy, a castle, where she is stripped, penetrated orally, anally, and vaginally and taught how to submit. After her initia- tion, the narrative ricochets between S&M tableaux and descriptions of O at work. O is given to another lover, goes away for further training, and is pierced and branded as a sign of her bondage to Sir Stephen. In one of two endings offered, O has become a living statue in an owl cos- tume; in another, she asks to die because her lover has lost interest in her. The novel caused an immediate stir when it was published in France in 1954.2 Written by Pauline Réage (later unmasked as Dominique Aury), The Story of O won the Prix de Deux Magots for emerging voices in literature but was also subject to censorship from the French government. One of the main axes of contention was the identity of the author. Pauline Réage was previously unknown: Was she really a woman? Could women write such erotica? In his introduction to the text, the publisher Jean Paulhan pleads ignorance but argues that the text suggests that the author, whoever Réage might actually be, is really a woman.3 As evidence, he points to her attention to detail—“the green satin dresses, wasp-waist corsets, and skirts rolled up a number of turns (like hair rolled up in a curler)”—and to the narrator’s persistent selflessness: “When René abandons O to still further torments, she still man- ages to have enough presence of mind to notice that her lover’s slippers are frayed, and notes that she will have to buy him another pair. It is something a man would have never thought of, or at least would never Copyright @ 2014. NYU Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 58 EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 2/18/2018 11:53 AM via THE NEW SCHOOL AN: 836539 ; Musser, Amber Jamilla.; Sensational Flesh : Race, Power, and Masochism Account: s8891047.main.ehost Objectification, Complicity, and Coldness 59 have dared express.”4 The connection that Paulhan draws between aesthetics, selflessness, and femininity forms the core of this chapter. The question of Réage’s gender matters because it speaks to larger issues of agency and submission. Most immediately, this gender confu- sion is a continuation of assumptions that masochism carries a masculine valence and represents patriarchal power structures. Indeed, there is much in The Story of O to support that reading. Some of Paulhan’s statements on the matter, for example, further this association between masochism and masculinity. Even as he expresses certainty about Réage’s femininity, he writes that the central character, O, “expresses a virile ideal. Virile or at least masculine.”5 By this Paulhan implies that O functions as a sort of masculine wish fulfillment: “Rare is the man who has not dreamed of possessing Justine.”6 Though pleased with the text, he cannot quite comprehend its narrative of submission as a feminine desire: “So far as I know, no woman has ever dreamed of being Justine.”7 In order to reconcile both the desire for submission and the courage that he imagines it would take to write about that desire with femininity, Paulhan resorts to placing Réage in a masculine genealogy: “Woman you may be, but descended from a knight or crusader.”8 Paul- han’s statement resonates with the radical feminist claim that sado- masochistic practices are the result of an internalization of patriarchal notions of masculine domination and female submission. Paulhan claims O as male fantasy, and, indeed, when Aury revealed herself to be Réage, she said that she wrote The Story of O as a love letter to Paul- han in order to impress and titillate him with her ability to emulate the Marquis de Sade. In this vein, one could also argue that O’s submission is emblematic of Michel Foucault’s description of the subject’s relation to power. Foucault’s conception of power as diffuse and perva- sive, his theoretical emphasis on the impossibility of resistance outside of power, and the productive power of repression can easily be mapped onto O’s submission.9 Indeed, as readers, we see O as a subject formed through these matrices. What could be read as an abstraction is made concrete through the physical changes O undergoes at the direction of René and Sir Stephen. As men (with power) who look, they produce this new version of O.10 I suggest, however, that we read The Story of O otherwise. Even as it illuminates the constraints of life for women within patriarchy, it also reveals spaces of agency. O is desirous of Copyright @ 2014. NYU Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. and complicit in her own objectification. Rather than diagnose this as a mode of false consciousness, this chapter provides a sustained EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 2/18/2018 11:53 AM via THE NEW SCHOOL AN: 836539 ; Musser, Amber Jamilla.; Sensational Flesh : Race, Power, and Masochism Account: s8891047.main.ehost 60 Objectification, Complicity, and Coldness examination of the production of self as it is manifest in an attention to aesthetics and an affective coldness. The Story of O offers a window into this discussion because O’s submission is presented not as something innate or inevitable but rather as something that she chooses. Within the world of the book, her masochism is symptomatic of her fraught relationship to power. When O is framed as complicit in her own objectification, complicity emerges as a mode of self-fashioning in which agency and aesthetics collide. In order to make this argument, this chapter presents several different readings of The Story of O. First, I turn to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex to parse out the gendered implications of theorizing complicity as a form of agency. Next, I position The Story of O against Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Venus in Furs. If O represents not just a mode of submission but a mode of femininity, the feminine domination in Venus in Furs presents its own process of objectification. Finally, I turn toward Jessica Benja- min’s argument that The Story of O is a narrative about recognition and love in order to argue, through a reading of Jean Paul Sartre, that they form the other side of objectification and coldness. In this chapter, coldness, objectification, recognition, and aesthetics emerge as crucial com- ponents to understanding complicity as a modern response to power. Muddling the Story of O(bjectification) O offers us a glimpse of what it is like to be embedded in French patriarchal society in the 1940s. When we look more closely at the dynamics underpinning this submission to read O as an agent who is complicit in her objectification, however, we begin to see her attachment to aesthetics not merely as a symptom of her objectification but as something that plays an important role in her process of self-making. As Paulhan notes in his introduction, aesthetics figure prominently in The Story of .O Attention to O’s wardrobe is an essential part of the narrative. This begins at Roissy, where she is given “a long dress with a full skirt, worn over a sturdy whalebone bodice gathered tightly at the waist, and over a stiffly starched linen petticoat.”11 In addition to its aesthetic charms, the outfit is designed to facilitate access to O’s body: “Every- thing that lay beneath [was] readily available.”12 When she returns to Copyright @ 2014. NYU Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Paris she wears more conventional clothing, but she is permitted to wear only what meets, first, René’s, then, Sir Stephen’s approval. While EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 2/18/2018 11:53 AM via THE NEW SCHOOL AN: 836539 ; Musser, Amber Jamilla.; Sensational Flesh : Race, Power, and Masochism Account: s8891047.main.ehost Objectification, Complicity, and Coldness 61 O willingly submits to her lovers’ fashion dictates, she is also a woman who is invested in appearance—not only her own but that of others. By trade, O is a fashion photographer. Susan Griffin argues that this fact locates O as “an extraordinary woman, a woman who transcends the tra- ditional social roles for women.”13 Indeed, this is an arresting profession to bestow upon a female character in France in the 1950s. Her status as a professional separates her from the aspirations of French postwar femininity, which expected women to be childbearing and domestic. Her career enables O’s independence—she lives alone and seems to be finan- cially solvent—and it allows her to play with the gaze. As a fashion photographer, O fixes the image of femininity for women. However, as Roland Barthes notes of Elle in the 1950s, fashion magazines portray femininity for men; he describes the magazine as a “feminine world...a world without men but entirely constituted by the gaze of man.”14 Barthes argues that this creation of an all-female space allows for illusions of female agency but that in reality men possess con- trol because they have priority: “Love, work, write, be business-women or women of letters, but always remember that man exists, and that you are not made like him; your order is free on condition that it depends on his; your freedom is a luxury, it is possible only if you first acknowl- edge the obligations of your nature.”15 In Barthes’s assessment, O’s professional autonomy is illusory.

Load more