Roissy are distinguished by their sterility and bear no
resemblance whatsoever to any known goddess. No
mention is ever made o f conception or menstruation,
and procreation is never a consequence o f fucking. O ’s
fertility has been rendered O. T here is nothing sacred
about O ’s prostitution.
O ’s degradation is occasioned by the male need for
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and fear of initiation into manhood. Initiation rites
generally include a period of absolute solitude, isolation, followed by tests of physical courage, mental endurance, often through torture and physical mutilation, resulting in a permanent scar or tattoo which marks the
successful initiate. The process of initiation is designed
to reveal the values, rites, and rules of manhood and
confers on the initiate the responsibilities and privileges
of manhood. What occurs at Roissy is a clear perversion of real initiation. Rene and the others mutilate O’s body, but they are themselves untouched. Her body
substitutes for their bodies. O is marked with the scars
which they should bear. She undergoes their ordeal
for them, endures the solitude and isolation, the torture, the mutilation. In trying to become gods, they have bypassed the necessary rigors of becoming men.
The fact that the tortures must be repeated endlessly,
not only on O but on large numbers of women who are
forced as well as persuaded, demonstrates that the men
o f Roissy never in fact become men, are never initiates,
never achieve the security of realized manhood.
What would be the sign of the initiate, the final mark
or scar, manifests in the case of O as an ultimate expression of sadism. The rings through O ’s cunt with Sir Stephen’s name and heraldry, and the brand on her ass,
are permanent wedding rings rightly placed. They
mark her as an owned object and in no way symbolize
the passage into maturity and freedom. The same might
be said o f the conventional wedding ring.
O,
in her never-ending role as surrogate everything,
also is the direct sexual link between Sir Stephen and
Rene. That the two men love each other and fuck each
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other through O is made clear by the fact that Sir
Stephen uses O anally most o f the time. T h e consequences o f misdirecting sexual energy are awesome indeed.
But what is most extraordinary about Story of O is
the mind-boggling literary style o f Pauline Reage, its
author. O is wanton yet pure, Sir Stephen is cruel yet
kind, Rene is brutal yet gentle, a wall is black yet white.
Everything is what it is, what it isn’t, and its direct opposite. That technique, which is so skillfully executed, might help to account for the compelling irrationality
o f Story of O. For those women who are convinced yet
doubtful, attracted yet repelled, there is this schema for
self-protection: the double-double think that the author
engages in is very easy to deal with if we just realize that we
only have to double-double unthink it.
T o sum up, Story of O is a story o f psychic cannibalism, demonic possession, a story which posits men and women as being at opposite poles o f the universe — the
survival o f one dependent on the absolute destruction
o f the other. It asks, like many stories, who is the most
powerful, and it answers: men are, literally over women’s
dead bodies.
C H A P T E R 4
Woman as Victim:
The Image
The Image, by Jean de Berg, is a love story, a Christian
love story and also a story of Christian love. No book
makes more clear the Christian experience of woman
after the fall, as we know her, Eve’s unfortunate descendant. The Image, like the catechism, is a handbook of Christianity in action. In addition, The Image is an
almost clinical dissection of role-playing and its sex-
relatedness, of duality as the structural basis of male-
female violence.
It would be an exaggeration of some substance to
call the following a summary of plot, but what happens
in The Image is this: Jean de Berg, the auteur of The
Image, meets Claire, whom he has known casually for
many years, at a party; he has always been interested in
her, but her coldness, aloofness, and perfect beauty
made her lack the necessary vulnerability which would
have made her, in the veni, vidi, vici tradition, a desirable
conquest; Claire introduces him to Anne, Innocent
Young Girl Dressed In White, who, it turns out, is
Claire’s slave; they go to a bar where Anne is offered to
Jean de Berg; they go to a rose garden where Anne
sticks a rose by its thorns into the flesh of her cunt;
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Woman as Victim: The Image
65
they go to a restaurant where Claire shames Anne, an
event often repeated (Claire shames Anne by ordering
her to raise her skirt, or lower her blouse, or by sticking her finger up A nne’s cunt); Claire shows Jean de Berg photographs in the artsy-craftsy sadomasochistic
tradition for which Anne modeled, except for the last
photograph, which is clearly a photo o f Claire herself;
Claire whips Anne; Anne sucks Jean de B erg’s cock;
Jean de Berg takes Anne to buy lingerie and humiliates
Anne and embarrasses the salesgirl by exhibiting A nne’s
whip scars which are fresh; Anne is given a bath by
Claire in Jean de Berg’s presence in which Anne is
almost drowned (erotically); it occurs to Jean de Berg
that he would like to fuck Claire —which causes Claire
to increase the viciousness o f her assaults on Anne;
Anne is tortured in the Gothic chamber and then ravaged anally by Jean de Berg; Jean de Berg goes home, has a dream about Claire, is awakened by a knock on
the door, and lo and behold! Claire has recognized her
true role in life (“ ‘I have come, ’ she said quietly”) 1 —
that o f Jean de B erg’s slave. He hits her, and she lives
happily ever after.
O f course, the above is again somewhat sketchy. I
did not mention that Anne was forced to piss in public
in the rose garden, or how she was nasty to Jean de Berg
in a bookstore (a crucial point —since she then had to
be punished), or how she fetched the whips herself, or
how she was made to serve Claire and Jean de Berg
orangeade before they stuck burning needles in her
breasts.
T h e characterizations have even less depth and complexity, not to mention subtlety and sensitivity, than the
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plot. Claire is cold and aloof. Jean de Berg describes
her:
Claire was very beautiful, as I said, probably even
more beautiful than her friend in the white dress. But
unlike the latter, she had never aroused any real emotion in me. This astonished me at first, but then I told myself that it was her impeccable beauty, precisely,
her very perfection that made it impossible to think of
her as a potential “conquest. ” I probably needed to
feel that some little thing about her, at least, was vulnerable, in order to arouse any desire in me to win her. 2
&nbs
p; He later writes: “Her classic features, her cold beauty,
her remoteness made me think of some goddess in
exile." 3 Here the female characterization is explicit:
vulnerability as the main quality of the human; coldness
as the main quality of the goddess. As in most fiction,
the female characterization is synonymous with an appraisal of the figure’s beauty, its type, and most importantly, its effect on the male figures in the book.
Anne, who is, according to Pauline Reage, the other
half o f Claire, is sweet, modest, vulnerable, young,
demure (“Anne, for her part, had resumed the modest
demeanor of an object of lust” 4), and wanton. Claire
says that Anne creams at each new humiliation, at even
the thought o f being whipped. Anne appears to be Beth
from Little Women but is, in fact, a bitch in heat, her cunt
always wet—just like the rest of us, we are meant to
conclude. (Beth, remember, died young of goodness. )
Jean de Berg, representing the male sex, is—wouldn’t
you know it—intelligent, self-assured, quietly master-
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ful and self-contained when not actually in the act o f
ravaging, powerful and overwhelmingly virile when in
the act o f ravaging. One has no idea o f his physicality,
except to imagine that he is graying at the temples.
T h e relationships between the three characters are
structured simply and a bit repetitively: Claire, master —
Anne, slave; Jean de Berg, master —Anne, slave; which
resolves into the happy ending—Jean de Berg, master —
Claire, slave. T h e master-slave motif is content, structure, and moral o f the story. T he master role is always a male role, the slave role is always a female role. T h e
moral o f the story is that Claire, by virtue o f her gender,
can only find happiness in the female/slave role.
Here we are told what society would have us know
about lesbian relationships: a man is required for completion, consummation. Claire is miscast as master because o f her literal sex, her genitalia. Jean de Berg is her surrogate cock which she later forges into the instrument o f her own degradation. The Image paints women as real female eunuchs, mutilated in the first
instance, much as Freud suggested, by their lack o f
cock, incapable o f achieving whole, organic, satisfying
sexual union without the intrusion and participation
o f a male figure. That figure cannot only act out the
male role — that figure must possess biological cock and
balls. Claire and Anne as biological females enact a
comedy, grotesque in its slapstick caricature: Claire
as master, a freak by virtue o f the role she wills to play,
a role designed to suit the needs and capacities o f a
man; Claire as master, as comic as Chaplin doing the
king o f France, or Laurel and Hardy falling over each
other’s feet in another vain attempt to secure wealth
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and success. After all, The Image forces us to conclude,
what can Claire stick up Anne’s cunt but her fingers —
hardly instruments of ravishment and ecstasy. Biology,
we are told, is role. Biology, we are told, is fate. The
message is strangely familiar.
Pauline Reage, the major promoter of The Image as
a piece of metaphysical veracity, sees the function,
or very existence, of the man-master, as the glorification of the woman-slave. Her thesis is that to be a slave is to have power:
. . . the all powerful slave, dragging herself along the
ground at her master’s heels, is now really the god.
The man is only her priest, living in fear and trembling
of her displeasure. His sole function is to perform the
various ceremonies that center around the sacred object. 5
With the logic indigenous to our dual-role culture, the
slave is here transmuted into the source of power. What
price power, one asks in despair. This is truly the source
of the male notion of female power—since she is at the center
of his obsession, she is powerful; no matter that the form
her power takes is that she “drag herself along the
ground at her master’s heels. ”
The man, Reage instructs us, has the illusion of
power because he wields the whip. That illusion marks
for Reage the distance between carnal knowledge and
what is, more profoundly, true:
Yes, men are foolish to expect us to revere them when,
in the end, they amount to almost nothing. Woman,
like man himself, can only worship at the shrine o f
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that abused body, now loved and now reviled, subjected to every humiliation, but which is, after all, her own. The man, in this particular affair, stays in one
piece: he is the true worshiper, aspiring in vain to
become one with his god.
The woman, on the contrary, although just as much
of a true worshiper and possessed of that same anxious
regard (for herself) is also the divine object, violated,
endlessly sacrificed yet always reborn, whose only joy,
achieved through a subtle interplay of images, lies in
contemplation of herself. 6
Having noted in the last chapter Reage’s extraordinary
facility with the double-double think, which she uses
here with her usual skill, I must take exception to her
conclusions. It is surprising that the worship o f the
divine object, the woman as victim and executioner,
should involve any external mediation, especially that
o f a male priest. Surely if woman is so willing to be the
giver and the offering, if as “the divine object, violated,
endlessly sacrificed yet always reborn” her “only joy. . .
lies in contemplation o f herself, ” a man is extraneous.
Surely, with such divine endowments and attendant
satisfactions, she need not be coaxed or seduced into
whipping or mutilating herself (“And yet it is usually the
men who introduce their mistresses to the joys o f being
chained and whipped, tortured and humiliated. . . ” 7),
or initiating other women, who serve as a substitute or
mirror image or other half. Men often insist that women
are self-serving, and indeed, Claire is Anne’s priestess.
Both execute their roles effectively. No male figure is
required mythologically unless Jean de Berg would play
the eunuch-priest, that traditional helpmate o f the
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priestess, an honor no doubt not intended for him here.
Conversely, only men have been permitted to serve
male gods; eunuchs and women, synonymous here,
have been strictly excluded from those holy rites. The
proper conclusion therefore is that man, not woman, is
the divine object of The Image: he is the priest; he serves
a male god in whose image he was created; he serves
himself. Were that not the case, woman, as the worshiped, would serve herself, instead of serving herself up like turkey or duck, garnished, stuffed, sharpened
knife ready for the ritual carving. That a man becomes
the master of the master means, despite Reage’s assertions
to the contrary, that women should serve men, that women are properly slaves and men properly masters, that men have the only meaningful power (in our culture —that power allied to and defined by force and
violence), that men created in the image of the Almighty
are all mighty. Single-single think brings us closer to
the truth in this instance than double-double think.
The Image is rife with Christian symbolism. One of
the more memorable sequences in the book takes place
in a rose garden chosen by Claire as the proper proscenium for Anne’s humiliation. In the rose garden, Claire directs Jean de Berg’s attention to a specific
type of rose, special in its perfect beauty. Claire orders
Anne to step into the flowerbed and to fondle the rose,
which Anne handles as though it were a moist, ready
cunt. Claire orders Anne to pick the rose and to bring
it to her, which Anne does, though not before she feebly
protests that there is a prohibition against picking the
flowers and that she is afraid of the thorns. Anne’s
hesitation necessitates punishment. She is ordered to
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lift her dress while Claire first strokes Anne’s cunt with
the rose, then jabs the thorn into her thigh and tears
the flesh very deliberately. Claire kisses Anne’s hands as
a poetic drop o f blood flows. Claire then pushes the
stem o f the rose into A nne’s garter belt. T h e thorn is
caught in the lace, and the flower is fastened, an adornment fraught with symbolic meaning. Even Jean de Berg finds the performance a bit overdone:
I answered that it was indeed a great success, although perhaps rather overburdened with symbols, in the romantic and surrealist traditions. 8
T h e rose as a symbol has powerful occult origins.
Eliphas Levi says o f it:
It was the flesh in rebellion against the oppression
o f spirit; it was Nature testifying that, like grace,
she was a daughter o f God; it was love refusing to be
stifled by the celibate; it was life in revolt against
sterility; it was humanity aspiring towards natural
religion, full o f reason and love, founded on the
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