“By my makeup and temperament I wasn’t really prey to physical desires,” she once said. I’m sorry.
The women, often powerful in their professional lives, who have these “bents” find, I am told, their experiences of exchange of control and being “possessed” by a lover to be highly exhilerating, liberating and freeing!These predilections that some of us have are with us for whatever reason, as drives that others do not have or understand.
In midlife, Aury was a respected figure: an influential editor, a writer, and a jury member for various literary prizes.
Then again, it can also make you insane.It seemed inconceivable that a woman with such a drab exterior could explore a sexual compulsion that drove her protagonist toward oblivion.As the author once revealed, the character O actually began as Odile, the name of a close friend who’d once been deeply in love with Albert Camus. Aury slept in his room each night for four months, until his death at eighty-three in October, 1968. Indeed, as one reviewer noted, the more O is brutalized, the more “perfectly feminine” she becomes.
She did so as “Pauline Réage,” and was able to provide honest answers about her life and work, [and her philosophical views on art, sex, war, feminism, and more without disclosing her true name or getting too specific with her personal anecdotes.
(Some insisted, wrongly, that she chose the name because it sounded like the French for “Reacting to Paulhan.”)As for “Réage,” she’d supposedly stumbled upon it in a real estate registry. If anything, Aury seemed conservative, even severe—and to look at her, you might assume that her sexual fantasies would be as stimulating as staring at a dusty library shelf.The glaring incongruity between her work and her personal life was not lost on Aury. Rene eventually returns, tells O that she is to be taken back to their home, and prepares to leave with her. She’d earned the Légion d’Honneur; she had translated into French works by authors such as T.S. Atheism makes this a very hard question to answer.Now, the existence or non-existence of God is an empirical question which I won’t examine here. The enchanting enchanted him.”) One friend of Aury said that after Paulhan died, “She pulled back from the world and lost her short-term memory.”It’s clear from St. Jorre’s New Yorker profile that this “small, neat, handsome woman with gray hair and gray-blue eyes” never recovered from the loss, and led a fairly solitary life in his absence. In these terms our private sexual lives are not “social” and to the extent that we are consenting adults our practices can neither be deemed anti-social.
As O's submission deepens and becomes more extreme, the novel simultaneously deepens its thematic explorations of the relationship between surrender and freedom, the nature and demands of love, and the spiritual aspects of sexual desire.The Story of O begins as O is taken by Rene, referred to repeatedly as "her lover", to an isolated chateau in the French countryside, where she is ritualistically and repeatedly subjected to the constant, at times violent, sexual desires of the men there.
Look around you. 'O' is so strikingly different that it would be hard to transfer the senses and emotions from the written page to the screen.. but it is a good attempt. And we’re constantly working to produce a magazine that deserves you—a magazine that is a platform for ideas fostering justice, equality, and civic action. When he excitedly asked if he could find a publisher for her work, she agreed on the condition that her authorship remain hidden, known only to a select few. From some of the comments enunciated here I find it a bewildering concept that sexual practices between consenting adults can be “social” or, as commented in this case, “anti-social” in this day and age and thus practices that open themselves to control and potential prohibition.Surely our sexual practices take place behind bedroom doors and are thus hidden and non-transparent? Initially, because many French booksellers assumed that the novel had been banned, they tended to conceal it under the counter—thus ensuring that sales would be poor.
Story of O, erotic novel by Anne Desclos, first published in French (Histoire d’O, 1954) under the pen name Pauline Reage, 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," of this erotic best-seller. The multiple mysterious ambiguities embedded in the Story of O are one of its intrinsic strengths -- part of what makes it so darkly alluring and provocative.
For her, the manuscript was simply a long letter that had to be written. And as someone who does have a BDSM side that is kept distinctly separate from everyday life, the last paragraph of this article resonated as well.
(Paulhan once insisted that “fairy tales are erotic novels for children.”) Think of Alice falling down the rabbit hole, or the magic wardrobe leading to Narnia. Describing her first real-life exposure to male anatomy, she said, “I found that stiffly saluting member, of which he was so proud, rather frightening, and to tell the truth I found his pride slightly comical. (Later, she recalled Paulhan’s extraordinary passion for life.
“The story of Scheherazade, more or less.”The content of the novel was graphic, but the author’s prose was highly controlled, disciplined, and spare.
“Existence filled him with wonder,” she said.
For her part, O is at first determined to remain as emotionally faithful as she can to Rene. “She knew all about the name and was enchanted,” Aury said. Not true for all, to be sure, but the dichotomy between that and the rest of my life (where I am fully confident and assertive) is one that I do enjoy.