Leather and Hyde: Recalling "O"

Leather and Hyde

Occasions
Recalling O
by Debra Hyde

A Sad Passing

With a dateline of Paris, May 2nd, the New York Times reported that Dominique Aury, better known to readers of erotica as Pauline Réage, had died on April 26th at the ripe old age of 90.

In writing her brand of erotica, she changed the course of a genre in the process.

The obituary was short and sweet, recounting how, despite French censorship, her 1954 novel Story of O won the Deux-Magots literary award in the following year, and went on to sell millions of copies in the decades since. The novel, it turns out, was an answer to her lover, French critic Jean Paulhan, and his personal challenge that Aury could not write erotica.

In her mid-forties, and afraid that she might lose Paulhan to a younger lover, Aury wrote. And in writing her brand of erotica, she changed the course of a genre in the process.

When I read about her death, I went into my bedroom, opened the second drawer of my dresser bureau, and dug my copy of O out from under my lingerie. Please understand, this act had some significance. As a reader and writer of sexual mores, I have piles of erotica and human sexuality books out in the open. My nightstand and a nearby small book case are littered with evidence of my explorations. Yet, somehow, Story of O remained hidden, squirreled away, as if it held such secrets that it couldn't see the light of day.

And perhaps it did hold deep secrets for me. I didn't read Réage's novel until last winter, in part because I had finally chosen to explore sexual submission, in part because I finally stopped resisting.

From every indication, Story of O is one of those books which marks the reader, which leaves him not quite, or not at all, the same as he was before he read it. - Jean Paulhan

(I have a habit of resisting trends; if everyone's doing it, I won't.) Reading it, though, required a bit of subterfuge: I took it on a very vanilla business trip, surrounded by very vanilla friends. From page one (or was it page five, where she gets used by four men?), I kept the book close to the vest, unable to put it down... yet equally unable to reveal it to my girlfriend/business peers. No doubt, the very act of covert reading led to its place in my lingerie drawer.

In his essay Happiness in Slavery, critic Jean Paulhan notes that, "From every indication, Story of O is one of those books which marks the reader, which leaves him not quite, or not at all, the same as he was before he read it." Indeed, this truth remains strong today.

Despite my BDSM experience as a top and dominant, I found Réage's novel captivating, its pages seeping with the nature of desire and desire explored. I found myself seeping, despite what my mind considered a lack of stroke prose.

Common Threads

I'm not alone in my admiration for, and attraction to, Story of O. As I asked authors, editors, and Compuserve forum friends, I found everyone who answered did so because O had touched them in some memorable way. Lori R, forum friend and perv-at-large, was fortunate to discover O as a young teenager. "I stole it out of my mother's nightstand," she recalled. "It had been given to her by her brother-in-law with the caution to not let the kids get hold of it." Lucky her -- she overheard the warning, went hunting for it, and found it. "It was the source of almost all my self-pleasuring from about the age of thirteen."

Consequently, Lori said she "desperately wanted at that young age for there to be a Roissy somewhere."

How people connected with O's world of Roissy and Sir Stephen turned out to be a common, recurring experience as I talked to others.

I knew that what I wanted, more than anything else in the world, was to be treated as O was by a woman like Anne Marie. - Michael

Michael, another Compuserve cohort, said he was mesmerized as he first read the book in the late 1960s. "I think I read it in one sitting," he said, "my excitement and awe mounting with each page." Submissive himself, he found himself aroused by the scenes in which O was whipped, tortured, and humiliated. And when he encountered the page in which Anne Marie tormented O, he recalled, "I knew that what I wanted, more than anything else in the world, was to be treated as O was by a woman like Anne Marie." The scene in the music room had particular staying power for Michael as he imagined "me on that dais, alternatively being punished by Ann Marie, O, and the other woman present."

Not only have readers connected with certain scenarios in the novel, but it also legitimized their sexual desires.

Ever since I remember, I have always used some form of power exchange fantasy in masturbation. I had no words for it, no framework, and O was the first book to provide that. - Caroline

Michael recalled, "It was the beginning of my discovery that my sexuality was 'different' than other hetro males, and the power of the book encouraged me to pursue D/s further."

Caroline, a relative newcomer to our Compuserve forum, remembered encountering the movie version of O in the mid-1970s, and the book somewhat later. Like Michael, it provided a meaningful backdrop to her sexuality. "Ever since I remember, I have always used some form of power exchange fantasy in masturbation," she told me. "I had no words for it, no framework, and O was the first book to provide that."

The novel helped her find a language for both submission and sexuality, and even today, how Story of O impacted her has strong significance for her. "Tears well up in my eyes as I recall the times of anxiety, loneliness, and uncertainty," she admitted. "For all its flaws, it was literature like O that provided guideposts and reassurance in those early, formative years."

Story of O even had its affect on readers who don't embrace BDSM sexuality. When I asked Maxim Jakubowski, editor of the multi-volume anthology The Mammoth Book of Erotica about his familiarity with Réage's novel, he had a perspective slightly different from others'. While he didn't connect with O's degradation, he did admit that the novel "opened my mind, I dare say, to possibilities beyond what one would today term 'vanilla sex.'" Jakubowski did find the book arousing and still considers it fascinating. Beyond that, he told me that it influenced him only enough to produce a parody "of it and its myriad imitators since," that he wrote under a pseudonym.

Hmmm. An O parody? Now that's something worth tracking down!

Late Bloomers

In the course of asking around, I was delighted to discover that I wasn't the only person who had only recently read O. Cecilia Tan, publisher of the celebrated Circlet Press books and author of the recently released anthology Black Feathers, said she read it only after publishing her early Circlet Press titles, when she needed to expand her mail-order offerings.

The book distilled and codified so much of the submissive female fantasy, that everything that has come since (like Anne Rice's Sleeping Beauty) has been, in some sense, an echo. - Cecilia Tan

"My first impression," she recalled, "was: have I read this before?" The novel seemed familiar to her but she had no memory of encountering it while sneaking porn with friends as a kid.

Then, a keen realization struck her. "The book distilled and codified so much of the submissive female fantasy, that everything that has come since (like Anne Rice's "Sleeping Beauty") has been, in some sense, an echo," she decided. "It was a watershed work in that way."

Echo. I like what Cecilia said there. Story of O has echoed through the years, now a good 44-year run. (Coincidentally, Aury was 44 when she wrote the book and took cover as Réage.) The fervor of censorship long over, today you can find this novel in mainstream bookstores like Borders or Tower Books, and access to Réage's daring-for-its-time prose is far from furtive. Even better, the book's extreme and brazen depiction of a woman's giving all as she gives herself, remains as powerful today as those many decades ago when she first composed the work as a love letter to one man. Little did she realize that its words would speak so directly to countless people over the coming decades, that it would speak to their longings and to the fantasies that boiled within.

Thank goodness that it did.

Afterwords

For an exhaustive look at Dominique Aury, her literary life, and how her relationship with Jean Paulhan led to the creation of Story of O, run (don't walk!) to your library for the August 1st, 1994 issue of The New Yorker. Author John de St. Jorre out-did himself in capturing Ms. Aury and the avante-garde times in which she lived, so much so that I cannot recount much of it here and do it justice in the process.

About the Author

Debra Hyde is a mostly submissive switch who lives in New England with her husband, two children, three cats, and a dog. She says she is "well-owned and well-loved" by a very special Master, and shares a unique triangle with him and her somewhat submissive husband.

"When England Calls," one of Debra's short stories, graces the pages of the recently published Mammoth Book of Historical Erotica. She is currently working on a number of others, as well as the Great American Leather Novel. Her BDSM work has been previously published on the Internet by Leather Online and Section 12, but Leather and Hyde was her first regular column, originally hosted by About.com's BDSM site and relocated here with her kind permission.

Debra also maintains a personal Weblog called Pursed Lips and can be reached at 75222.2150@compuserve.com... but no junk mail or "Wannas," please.