Story of O

Story of O, erotic novel by Anne Desclos, first published in French (Histoire d’O, 1954) under the pen name Pauline Réage, itself a pen name for Dominique Aury, a French writer and translator who was a respected member of the literary establishment but who gained her greatest fame in 1994 when it was confirmed that she was the author, under the pseudonym of “Réage” (meaning, in French, a neighborhood or district) of this erotic best-seller. It was then revealed that Aury was in fact yet another pseudonym for Desclos. The French government brought charges of obscenity against the book’s publisher in 1955, and a ban on publicizing the book or selling it to minors lasted until 1967. The controversial work has been frequently criticized by feminists as a glorification of the abuse of women. The protagonist’s name “O,” in the opinion of many, reflects (among other things) the objectification of women.

“Réage”—a name invented specifically for The Story of O—was apparently told by her lover, the literary publisher Jean Paulhan, who was an admirer of the sadistic Marquis de Sade, that no woman could ever write an erotic novel. The Story of O was her response, begun as a series of erotic letters to Paulhan. This work, one of the most thorough and challenging ripostes ever made in a lovers’ quarrel, is distinguished less by its plot—about a beautiful fashion photographer called O who is forced to become a sex slave to a secret society of men and who is beaten and branded and eventually coaxed into enticing other women to become sex slaves—than by the manner of its prose, in particular the control exercised by Desclos in her depiction of O’s private musings and reflections during and after her all too complicit, if reticent, submission to acts of torture and humiliation. Writes Desclos, “Consent, O was telling herself, consent wasn’t the difficult part,... Speaking, saying anything—that was the difficult part.”

The intense erotic effect is achieved by a kind of mismatch between language and psychological content. If the language were made to imitate the full violence of O’s mental and physical suffering, it would often be shattered and reduced to an incoherent scream. Instead, the prose is constrained by Desclos and proceeds unruffled and at an unvarying pace through a series of degraded sexual episodes, leading eventually to the disappearance of O behind yet another mask, that of an owl. The most tightly fitted mask is style itself.

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The Story of O is a shocking novel and at the same time a masterfully boring one; wrote Russell Baker in the New York Times, “Unarguably the dullest dirty book ever written, it set pornography back fifty years.” The deep erotic joy of suffering, it tells us, is rooted in the terror of boredom, a theme that allows readers to approach the novel as a work of existentialist literature and social commentary, albeit a minor one, rather than of mere erotica.

Curiously, when in 1965 Grove Press published Story of O in the United States, the translation was credited to Sabine D’Estrée—itself a pseudonym for Richard Seaver, a well-known editor and publisher who had been a Fulbright Scholar in Paris in the early 1950s. Seaver, who died in 2009, never admitted to the subterfuge, instead writing in a translator’s note, “Story of O, written by a woman, demands a woman translator, one who will humble herself before the work and be satisfied simply to render it, as faithfully as possible, without interpretation or unwanted elaboration.” By the end of the 1960s the Grove edition had sold 450,000 copies.