Sigmund Freud spoke of female psychosexuality as ‘a dark continent’ and The Story of O is one of the most famous explorations of it...


It is a simple story about a very complex thing — a woman submits herself entirely to her passion, undergoing in the words of Jean Paulhan, ‘almost as many tortures as there are prayers in the life of ascetics who inhabit the desert’ at the hands of her lover and his accomplice the cold-hearted English aristocrat ‘Sir Stephen’. Inside this act of self-abnegation —for O is not a sexual abuse victim but a willing, even fanatical participant in degrading acts — is revealed, to the reflective reader, a whole series of behaviours, feelings and subjective experiences.


It is hard to read O without being affected by it — hence its notoriety amidst the mass of would-be erotic writing that merely rehearses the superficial, ‘visible’ aspects of sexuality. O instead trespasses into the inner dimensions of the psychology of passion. The exaggerated fairy-tale scenario of O — a sort of S/M parallel universe of chateaux, locked rooms, wierd parties — is a laboratory where passion is broken down into its components, including narcissism, the wish to be desired, the will to take a rest from identity and the desire to merge — the deep passion of O has a much more complicated structure than simply ‘masochism’.


O collaborates with her lover to experience an infinite and engulfing passion in which he is overshadowed, like a worker-bee feeding his bloated Queen. The simplistic views of feminine passivity and virile activity are undermined; in the world of O it is O who is the most alive and the one who decides — the whole game ultimately rests on her will.


Although on the surface The Story of O is a text-book of the perverse if we allow ourselves to be carried away by its ‘stubborn magical spirit’, as Paulhan calls it, it becomes a rare manual for the exploration of the inner dynamics of every kind of sexuality and a rich essay on the vital themes of self-annihilation in the Buddhist or Stoic sense; in short it will offer some a glimpse of the road to liberation and enlightenment.

‘Beneath those stares, beneath those hands, beneath those sexes which raped her, beneath those lashes which tore her, she sank, lost in a delirious absence from herself which gave her unto love and loving, and may perhaps have brought her close to death and dying.’ p34