Aesthetic Sexuality: A Literary History of Sadomasochism

201 Pages·2013·3.113 MB·English

by  Romana Byrne

Aesthetic Sexuality
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Aesthetic Sexuality:
A Literary History of
Sadomasochism
Romana Byrne
NEW YORK • LONDON • NEW DELHI • SYDNEY
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Bloomsbury Academic
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Bloomsbury is a registered trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
First published 2013
© Romana Byrne, 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any
information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the
publishers.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining
from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or
the author.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Byrne, Romana.
Aesthetic Sexuality : a Literary History of Sadomasochism / Romana Byrne.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4411-0081-8 (hardback)
1. Sex in literature. 2. Sadomasochism in literature. I. Title.
PN56.S5B97 2013
809’.933538--dc23
2013029974
ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-0081-8
ePDF: 978-1-4411-8358-3
ePub: 978-1-4411-5879-6
Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
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Contents
Author’s note vi
Acknowledgments vii
1 Introduction 1
2 Universal perversion and the laws of judgment: the Marquis de Sade 17
3 Brutal beauty: Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads and Mirbeau’s Le Jardin
des supplices 41
4 Tragic self-shattering I: Nietzsche’s aesthetics 75
5 Tragic self-shattering II: delirious materialism in Bataille’s L’Érotisme
and Histoire de L’œil 89
6 Tragic self-shattering III: mortifying metaphysics in Réage’s Histoire
d’O and Berg’s L’image 109
7 Sadomasochism as anti-aesthetic theater 127
8 Conclusion: fashioning BDSM today 159
Works cited 177
Index 190
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Author’s note
All quoted italics in this book belong to the original text. The use of square brackets
around ellipses indicates my own omission of words within a quote. The absence of
square brackets reflects the quoted author’s own use of ellipses. All translations from
French to English are my own, unless specified otherwise.
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Acknowledgments
I began writing this book in early 2007 in Melbourne, Australia, and finished in early
2013 in Toulouse, France. It surely would not exist without a certain assemblage of
people. I must begin by extending thanks to David Bennett and Clara Tuite for their
instrumental intellectual support throughout the writing of this book, particularly in
its early stages. I am grateful to Lisa Downing and Peter Cryle for both reading an early
draft of the manuscript and offering an insightful and helpful critique. David, Clara,
Lisa, and Peter have all been especially generous and encouraging throughout the years
in which this book was written. Ken Gelder and Karmen MacKendrick have also read
and offered me their thoughts on various parts of this book, and Carolyne Lee has been
a dear and helpful counsel in countless ways. Dion Kagan, Jasmine McGowan, Alison
Horbury, and Louise Sheedy composed an indefatigable band of reading group
members and later, workshop partners, who provided constant recourse to critical
discussion and general delight. I am especially grateful to Dion, who was there, with his
friendship and formidable editorial advice, from the very beginning.
My research was funded for three-and-a-half years by the Australian Government.
In 2010, the Faculty of Arts and the School of Culture and Communication at The
University of Melbourne provided financial assistance for an archival research trip to
the United States, from which the book has benefitted.
I am thankful to Fabrice de San Mateo and Philippe Roland for their assistance with
the trickier parts of the French to English translations. Thanks must also go to my
editor at Bloomsbury, Haaris Naqvi, who has been immaculate in his guidance and
help in producing this book. Just as crucial in a different way has been the support
given to me by a family that I’m lucky and proud to have: my parents David and
Cristina Byrne, and my brothers Robert and Alex. May Lauren Catanchin know my
gratitude for her inimitable excellence, such an inspiration to me throughout the years
in which this book came into being. When in the cage of lions, Lauren, you helped me
learn to speak lion. Enfin, je remercie profondément mon merveilleux amour, Philippe
Roland, pour tout, tout simplement. Ce livre, c’est pour toi.
Much of the material from Chapter 6 first appeared as “Nietzsche’s Aesthetics and
Pauline Réage’s Story of O,” in Papers on Language and Literature, v. 48, no. 2, Spring
2012. Reprinted by permission. Copyright © 2012 by The Board of Trustees, Southern
Illinois University, Edwardsville.
Material from Chapter 3 is forthcoming as “Sadistic aestheticism: Walter Pater and
Octave Mirbeau” in Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, printed with
permission of Wayne State University Press.
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Introduction
“Scientia sexualis contre ars erotica, sans doute.”1
To best understand the concept of aesthetic sexuality, let us first revisit one of the most
well known and important expositions in sexuality studies. In refuting the hypothesis
that sex has been repressed since the seventeenth century, the first volume of Michel
Foucault’s The History of Sexuality outlines how the late nineteenth century’s scientia
sexualis—a pervasive network of institutional discourses and practices founded upon
scientific positivism and techniques of confession in the domains of pedagogy, family
relations, law, medicine, and psychiatry—consolidated the characteristics of sexuality
in the West.2 Sexuality was constructed as a natural, inborn, and permanent function of
the body subject to acquired or congenital pathologies of a psychological and
physiological nature, “a natural order of disorder” (44). “Sexuality” signified a truth to
be discovered and analyzed (69), a construction that transformed sexual acts once
performable by anyone into indicators of a certain type of person, producing a “new
specification of individuals” (42–3). Sexual acts and desires became involuntary
manifestations of a particular biological or psychological cause. Yet the science of
sexuality, Foucault stipulates, is only one form of the “two great procedures for
producing the truth of sex” (57). To contrast with the scientia sexualis, Foucault
introduces the ars erotica, in which sexual pleasure is not considered in terms of
forbidden or permitted experience and knowledge but is valued and assessed according
to its quality and intensity; the erotic art is learnt through practice and experience,
developed under conscious, masterful will (62). Crucially, according to Foucault, the
West, equipped with its scientia sexualis, “possesses no ars erotica”; he argues that the
latter belongs to Eastern cultures, and cites “China, Japan, India, Rome, the Arabo-
Moslem societies” as possessors of an ars erotica, referring to pre-modern Italy (57–8).
Foucault qualifies this statement by adding that the “ars erotica did not disappear
1 Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité 1, La volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 94; “scientia
sexualis versus ars erotica, no doubt.”
2 Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality Volume 1, trans. Robert Hurley
(London: Penguin, 1998), 68.
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