Sixty Years On: The (Transatlantic) Scandal of “Submissive Agency” and the Afterlife of O

Abstract

ABSTRACTWhen Histoire d'O was published pseudonymously in 1954, shortly after Beauvoir's defense of Sade, its status as a female-authored sadomasochistic text created something of a stir. Reactions to the American translation (1966) were even stronger and focused more on the perceived anti-woman bias of the novel. While Sontag defended it on the basis of its literary quality, anti-porn theorists and campaigners such as Dworkin and Millett objected strongly to its representation of a passive woman subjected to multiple instances of physical and mental abuse.This study looks at environmental factors that arguably determined responses to the book in France and in the United States, such as cultural attitudes to pornography and resistance to the wave of “porno chic” of the 1970s and 1980s. How is the notion of self-mortification as a form of agency perceived in two very different cultures?