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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Woman Hating
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,