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
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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67
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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Woman Hating
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
Woman as Victim: The Image
69
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