FIFTY SHADES OF DE SADE

 

Hundreds of years before Fifty Shades of Grey author E.L. James had women wanting to explore their “inner goddess” via the rope in the “Red Room of Pain”—and sent the purchasing of grey neckties, riding crops, whips and handcuffs soaring—French literary louche, Marquis de Sade, titillated, tortured and shocked readers with his sadomasochistic bondage-inspired books in a twisted but fever-dreamed life-imitating-art way. Sarah Hassan explores the infamous bondage bigwig: His methods, his books & how he unleashed the erotic chains of people’s imaginations—and paid dearly for it.

 

The mothers of America are in a bind: Fifty Shades of Grey, the erotic novel by British author E.L. James that has had the e-reading public hot and bothered since early January, has now inspired a spike in the sales of cotton and nylon rope in hardware stores—notably Lexington Hardware in New York’s traditionally vanilla Upper East Side—and in sex shops, where handcuffs, riding crops, whips and spanking powder are flying off the shelves. Babeland, a New York City-based sex shop, reports an 81 percent increase in visits to the bondage section of their website, and Brooks Brothers, the conservative outfitters of the wealthy working man, have been reaping the benefits of their popular eight shades of grey neck ties.

The novel, which is the first installment in a trilogy following the relationship between recent college graduate—and convenient virgin—Anastasia Steele and the seductive, damaged billionaire Christian Grey, is purple prose at its juvenile best, but the steamy sex scenes which utilize Grey’s penchant for BDSM have ensnared the imaginations of the thirty-something female readers who have stormed their local libraries in hot pursuit of the pornographic page-turner. What started out as James’ episodic Twilight fan fiction appearing on various blogs under the pen name “Snowqueens Icedragon” and later adapted into the “Master of the Universe” series, Fifty Shades became available via e-book and print-on-demand by The Writers’ Coffee Shop, a virtual publisher based in Australia. The discreet nature of e-readers and word-of-mouth recommendations of the naughty tale catapulted Fifty Shades into viral status, and by April Vintage Books revamped and released the trilogy in paperback, allowing newscasters to herald the arrival of “mommy porn” as the book made it onto the Nooks and Kindles of America.

While debates linger over the book’s merit to sexual abandon, starting with the permissive nature of Anastasia’s non-disclosed compliance to meet every one of Grey’s demands in and out of the bedroom, the politics of power and sex Fifty Shades attempts to tackle is not new in the world of letters. A conversation about sex, or who gets tied up and who does the tying, inevitably leads to a conversation about politics, and the combination of the two is perfect water cooler fodder for a somewhat anxious working and reading public. Like everything that appears new, bondage is, in fact, tried and true, the least original and more widely tested of kinks, arching back to ancient Rome and peppering the penny dreadfuls of the Victorian era.

 

MARQUIS DE SADE: PROVOCATEUR, PUNISHER, FANTASY INSTIGATOR

It all began in France and no one did it better than the man whose name originates the idea and very word of sadism, that notorious thinker and wolfish libertine of revolutionary France, Donatien Alphonse François—or better remembered as the Marquis de Sade. His works spanned the erotic, political, philosophical, and anti-religious, making an intellectual and volatile combination for some of the most violent fantasies ever penned on paper.

Born in the Condé Palace in Paris to Comte Jean-Baptiste François Joseph de Sade and Marie-Eléonore de Maillé de Carman, the Marquis was educated by his uncle, the Abbé de Sade, before attending a Jesuit school and then embarking on a military career that had him fighting in the Seven Year’s War. While living a life of scandalous abandon at his castle in Lacoste, the Marquis stayed close to Paris where he would regularly employ the services of prostitutes who he delighted in mistreating, so much so that the police began to take notice. Subsequent episodes involving kidnapping, sodomy, non-lethal poisoning and the fleeing of whomever he employed at his various chateaus, the Marquis’s debauched and dangerous track record caught up with him en route to visit his dying mother in Paris, a hoax invitation given that his mother had already died. He was arrested and imprisoned in 1772 at the Château de Vincennes where he managed to appeal his death sentence; nevertheless, a prisoner there until Vincennes close in 1784, after which he was sent to the Bastille. “They are killing the prisoners here!” he supposedly shouted from his cell window on July 2nd, 1789, just two weeks before the colossal storming of the Bastille, and while Paris was burning with the Revolution. The Marquis was transferred yet again, this time to Charenton, an asylum where he remained until 1790—and then subsequently returned in 1803 after being declared insane at his family’s intervention. While at Charenton, the ever-colorful de Sade took to directing his own theatricals performed by fellow inmates, an event extrapolated in Peter Weiss’s play Marat/Sade and in Doug Wright’s Quills, made into a movie of the same name in 2000 starring Geoffrey Rush as the leading libertine.

 

 

THE HEDONISTIC VIRGIN: JUSTINE

Though containing only seven prisoners when it was sacked, the walls of the Bastille housed memories tempestuous and ripe with rebellion. The original fit-to-be-tied virgin was Justine, the tragic, comely title heroine of de Sade’s imprisoned imaginings written in 1787 in the span of two weeks. Justine, known in the original French as Les infortunes de la vertu, tells the tale of two orphan sisters: one bad, Juliette, and one good, Justine, and the unfortunate journey Justine endures in the pursuit of righteousness. Rape, torture, corruption, and murder abound in the psychosexual narrative, ripe with stabs at clerical order and political corruption. Justine is no less a slave to francs than Anastasia Steele is to Grey’s own abiding wealth and the sadistic appetite that comes with it. Women, according to the rules of de Sade, are always expected to pay their dues, even if their only crime is having a body worth ogling while men are greedy animals, slaves to their own lust and tendency for violence—after all, this was a bloody time in France. In short, he demands that we cease to live for anything less than pleasure and hedonism and resistance is futile; good girls always go bad despite their intentions to the contrary. Even monks need their sex slaves to tie up and flog from time to time, and every robber on the road demands payment from their victims.

 

 

RED ROOM OF PAIN & A MAN IN CHAINS

Before James had women wanting to explore their inner goddess via the rope in the “Red Room of Pain,” de Sade delighted in nicknaming that which makes a woman a goddess—what hides between her legs: The “temple of Nature,” the “winking eye of god,” and the “Venus mound,” saturate the pages of de Sade’s bawdy tales. While history has intended to accuse the Marquis of being a woman-hater, the very violent misogynist who would decry a woman taking control of her sexual decisions, his ideas, both political and philosophical, point to the contrary. His stress of the individual over the state, his value of nature as a mistress needing no direction other than herself, and sex as just and good as any other appetite we engage in, are still revolutionary ideas. “Never lose sight of the fact that all human felicity lies in man’s imagination,” he would quip. “And that he cannot think to attain it unless he heeds all his caprices. The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries.”

It was this imagination that had de Sade once again arrested. Napoleon Bonaparte demanded the immediate arrest of the anonymous author of Justine, the book he called “the most abominable book ever engendered by the most depraved imagination.” This was, effectively, the end of the line for him. The Marquis found himself behind bars until the end of his life. His written legacy was consider a scandal to his family who sought to bury his name until a journalist approached Comte Xavier de Sade in the 1940′s and brought the “Divine Marquis” once again to light. Doubtless, Fifty Shades will endure the secrecy suffered by the works of Justine, Juliette, 120 Days of Sodom, and miles of other manuscript pages penned by de Sade. Yet how nice for James, that mother of teenagers living safely in London, to spin her fantasies behind the computer screen while the Marquis published in exile and under the watchful eye of Death, bearing the mark of insanity behind prison walls. Therein lies the proof, dear reader: no one knows bondage like a man in chains.

 

 

KINKY KINDLE READING FROM THE MARQUIS

Juliette: Imaginatively bizarre sexual adventures punctuated by philosophical and theological digressions written in vivid detail. The fever-tortured prose makes Lolita seem like a kindergarten tale.

 

Justine: A 12-year-old maiden sets off to make her way in France, who is kidnapped and forced to become a sex-slave and subjected to countless orgies, rapes and other abuses—all by savage monks in a monastery. It all ends badly for Justine with a perfect storm of depression and a wicked bolt of lightning.

 

120 Days of Sodom and other Writings: Set in a remote medieval castle, high in the mountains, and surrounded by forests, four wealthy perverts lock themselves in a castle, along with a number of victims and accomplices, to listen to various tales of depravity from four prostitutes—which inspire them to engage in similar activities with their victims.

 

 

 

Sarah Hassan is a New York City-based writer, editor and cultural critic. She wrote about the life and scandals of Colette for TREATS! issue 3, and regularly contributes to Artwrit and The Herald. She is also an accomplished dancer and performer, and serves on the guest faculty at Sarah Lawrence College.