British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
A Different Sade: Food for Thought
Thursday, 7 June 2007
A British Academy discussion evening convened and chaired by
Marian Hobson, FBA, Queen Mary, University of London
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The ironic encounters of the Marquis de Sade and Jane Austen
Caroline Warman, Jesus College, Oxford
Jane Austen and the marquis de Sade were contemporaries, although Sade was older than Austen by a generation (Sade was born in 1740; Austen in 1775). While Sade's writing debut preceeds Austen's by a decade, they were both busily writing and recasting their versions of the novel of female education during the 1790s, 1800s and 1810s until their respective deaths, Sade's in 1814, Austen's in 1817.[1] This novel of female education that they were both engaged in is defined less by its relationship to abstract intellectual development than education through sexual attraction. Moreover, they have a common identification of what is immoral (the libertine) which, despite the fact that Sade flaunts it and Austen rejects it, is no less similar for that. It is also a commonplace that Sade and Austen in their different ways ironise the gothic novel of sensibility, Sade by inverting the relationship of explicit to inferred terrors; Austen by undermining readerly expectation. Yet they are never paired, no doubt because Austen is a beloved and comfortable writer cherished by readers and academics, a reassuring feature of what passes for 'Englishness' and a stalwart of costume drama adaptations, whilst Sade is everything that is most uncomfortable: immoral, blasphemous and pornographic, a disturbing reminder of destruction and transgression, linked with the worst aspects of the French revolution, blamed for the holocaust (Queneau), for child abuse (it emerged at the trial of the Moors Murderers, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, that they read extracts from Sade to each other). The screen and theatrical adaptations, of which there have also been many, tend to pick up and develop these disturbing qualities, and 'uncostumed drama' would be a better label than the familiar and unchallenging 'costume drama'. So given these stark differences, why bring Sade and Austen together?
This essay is certainly not trying to argue either that Sade's and Austen's work is similar nor that their ideology or aims were. It is not darkly hinting that Austen was not as virtuous, nor Sade as debauched as they have been portrayed, and it is not saying that they knew of each other's work. Yet there are clear points of contact between their writings which should not be surprising given that they were both working with and in reaction to the same European novelistic tradition of suffering Clarissas, Julies and Mme de Tourvels.[2] In these novels of sensibility, the lingering spectacle of the demise of the beautiful heroine, a victim to love and desire, provides the raison d'être. The gothic novel is an extreme version of this tendency, fully drawing out the potential for piquant titillation, and which both Sade and Austen respectively criticise and satirise in the Idée sur les romans (1799) and Northanger Abbey (composed in 1798-9).[3] The ultimate aim of this comparison is to do something straightforwardly historicist in looking at their work side by side, and it is simply to replace Sade in his (European) context, as a derisive voice responding, alongside other derisive voices, to the extremity and innuendo of the gothic novel. And both Sade and Austen are characterised by a certain elegance of phrase which itself is part of their ironic arsenal. In 1800, for example, Sade was complimented for the 'elegant facility of his style.'[4] It could just as easily have been Austen.
Austen uses Northanger Abbey to ironise readerly expectations and to undercut their delusions; arguably Emma does this in another way, not only making the errors the heroine is led into by her novelistic imagination create the plot, but also by making intense emotional dramas out of unglamorous everyday encounters: the occasion of Emma's rudeness to Miss Bates and her subsequent shame is one such. Sade's technique is different: he replaces the excitement of innuendo with unbearably explicit pornographic description, thereby forcing the reader into an uncomfortable recognition of his or her tainted expectations. If we map the plot and characters of, for example, Les cent vingt journées de Sodome (1785) alongside Northanger Abbey, we should therefore not be too surprised to discover some parallels, and some moments in which the texts almost encounter one another. Readers of Les cent vingt journées know that four powerful men concert to kidnap not one but many young people, carrying them off to the remotest of castles, the château de Silling, where one by one they fall victim to the heroes' demented pleasures. None survive except those who turn into hardened libertines. Sade reinvents ideas of the extreme and the criminal in this text, mocking the absurd superficiality of the gothic blueprint. Austen hints at an identical scenario when, near the beginning of Northanger Abbey, the narrator comments with mock-suspense on Mrs Morland's attitude to her daughter Catherine's impending departure for Bath:
Cautions against the violence of such noblemen and baronets as delight in forcing young ladies away to some remote farm-house, must, at such a moment, relieve the fullness of her heart. Who would not think so? But Mrs Morland knew so little of lords and baronets, that she entertained no notion of their general mischievousness, and was wholly unsuspicious of danger to her daughter from their machinations.[5]
'Machinations' and 'delight'? Austen in using this very precise vocabulary of mechanistic pleasure and in alluding to sexually abusive power shows herself to be laughingly aware of sensualist currents within the sort of novel she is satirising, coming close to describing pornography such as Sade's.[6] Indeed, the way in which they characterise their virtuous heroines and their abusive male tormentors also - at moments – comes astonishingly close. Here is Justine, in trouble with the libertine Bressac:
Justine, weeping, knelt before the person who was seemingly protecting her: she swore to be obedient and to behave, but the ruthless Bressac, as unmoved by her joy as he had been by her pain, harshly replied: 'WE'LL SEE'.[7]
And here is Fanny, castigated by Sir Thomas Bertram for rejecting Henry Crawford's suit:
Self-willed, obstinate, selfish, and ungrateful. He thought her all this. She had deceived his expectations; she had lost his good opinion. What was to become of her?
'I am very sorry,' said she inarticulately through her tears, 'I am very sorry indeed.'
'Sorry! yes, I hope you are sorry; and you will probably have reason to be long sorry for this day's transactions.'[8]
The characterisation and psychological dynamics of these scenes are identical: pliant, powerless and weeping young ladies, feeling intense anxiety at their perceived disobedience, implore the rigid, vengeful males responsible for them for forgiveness; the latters' intransigence perpetuates the dynamic. The scene ends without closure. In La nouvelle Justine, this is one of many scenes of this sort, humiliation being the recurrent motif. This is not the case in Mansfield Park, and the passage quoted is almost alone in its intensity, yet it is the (mistaken) neglect and scorn for Fanny which drives the book's moral plot (her initial abasement and humiliation are eventually reversed). Justine as a victim heroine also finds parallels in Catherine Morland: the narrative is similarly constructed through her and her responses to the situations in which she finds herself, and in each case it falls either side of the absurd, either through caricatural excess (Sade) or trivialisation (Austen). Here is Catherine Morland, inspecting a locked cabinet in the dark of the night:
So, placing the candle with great caution on a chair, she seized the key with a very tremulous hand and tried to turn it; but it resisted her utmost strength. Alarmed, but not discouraged, she tried it another way; a bolt flew, and she believed herself successful; but how strangely mysterious!- the door was still immoveable. She paused a moment in breathless wonder. The wind roared down the chimney, the rain beat in torrents against the windows, and every thing seemed to speak the awfulness of her situation.[9]
Here is Justine, who has just demonstrated rare initiative in escaping from her tormentors:
Imagine her amazement to not to feel anything beneath her feet but soft and yielding earth. She sank in it up to her ankles! The further she went, the more profound the darkness became. Curious to know the cause of this change in the soil, she prodded it: Great Heavens! What met her touch was the head of a corpse! 'Good God!' she cried in horror, 'this must doubtless be the graveyard where the executioners dispose of their victims […] This skull may belong to my beloved Omphale […]'[10]
Catherine is alarmed; Justine is amazed. Catherine is not discouraged; Justine goes on. Catherine is intrigued; Justine is curious. Catherine is breathless; Justine is horrified. The weather/the situation is awful; the darkness is profound. Catherine is completely deluded; Justine is only too accurate. The parallel character of the narrative is very clear, and the way in which the drama is created out of a moment-by-moment record of the heroine's sensations and expectations is identical.
It might be thought that one clear and unproblematic way of separating the two writers would be in their understanding of what is moral and what is not, Sade being an atheist, a blasphemer, a pornographer of cruelty and Austen being a Christian who has clear standards of behaviour and good taste.[11] Yet the two meet in their common acceptance of where the boundary between moral and immoral lies, and despite the fact that their narrative routes lie mainly on opposite sides of the border, there are moments when they cross over. Mansfield Park is the obvious example of this, and Mary Crawford would seem to adhere rather closely to Dolmancé's advice to the budding libertine Eugénie:
'Be extremely free with men; be disrespectful of religion, be impudent: far from being alarmed at the liberties they take, […] allow them to do whatever entertains them so long as it doesn't compromise you.'[12]
Mary is all of these things, as well as pretty and charming, and only disapproves of her brother's flight with Maria Bertram insofar as it compromises him. In the following passage, she is restrained only by Sir Thomas whose power in action we have already seen:
[Mary Crawford], no longer able in the picture she had been forming of a future Thornton, to shut out the church, sink the clergyman […] was considering Sir Thomas, with decided ill-will, as the destroyer of all this, and suffering the more […] from not daring to relieve herself by a single attempt at throwing ridicule on his cause.[13]
It is intriguing moreover to consider that these libertines seem to come in sibling couples: Mary and Henry are devoted to one another and to each other's interests, and exercise an almost irresistible seductive influence over those around them. La philosophie dans le boudoir's Mme de Saint-Ange and her brother the chevalier de Mirvel are a similar pair, although they have better success in their seduction plans than the ultimately foiled Mary and Henry. It is significant that they are the only characters in the novel who employ French terminology, and doubly so that it is always used to allude to pleasure of some sort. 'It will all be for his 'menus plaisirs' says Henry when speculating on Edmund's probable income as a clergyman (p.549); in almost the same speech he describes Fanny's improved appearance: 'her 'tout ensemble' is so indescribably improved!' (p.550). Mary, in her letter to Fanny about Henry and Maria, asserts that 'Henry is blameless and despite a moment's étourderie thinks of nobody but you' (p.666). The only other character who regularly uses French terms is the less well-known but even more villainous Lady Susan, from Austen's early epistolary novel of that name. Thwarted in her plans by an unwanted revelation on the part of one of the people she is trying to manipulate, Lady Susan writes that 'This éclaircissement is rather provoking' (Lady Susan to Mrs Johnson, letter 33, p.1271). If we remain in any doubt as to the associations with the French language, it is cleared away by our moral guide Mr Knightley, who says of Frank Churchill: 'No, Emma, your amiable young man can be amiable only in French, not in English' (p.770). French may well be the language of seduction and immorality for Austen, in ways that no doubt refer explicitly to Laclos more than to anyone else, yet her depiction of the outlines if not the lurid details of libertine behaviour clearly accords with Sade's and shows their work to be considering similar topics and to be using similar tropes and characters while presenting (of course) opposing conclusions and moral prescriptions.
It may in fact look as if the obvious conclusion to draw is that what Austen is ironising and criticising is the Gothic and the libertine together, and that this means that Sade's work, unknown as it may have been to her, was naturally a part of what she was targetting. And to a certain extent this is right, but only for as long as we consider Sade not to be treating the Gothic and the libertine with ironic derision himself. When we look at the ways in which both authors ironically frame their narratives, their approaches converge once more.
'Voluptuaries of all ages and sexes, it is to you alone that I offer this work'[14] claims the author on the first page of La Philosophie dans le boudoir, adding that 'mothers will prescribe this book for their daughters' – the joke here is on the inversion of proscribe and prescribe. On the last page of Northanger Abbey, Austen's narrator plays a similar game:
I leave it to be settled by whomsoever it may concern, whether the tendency of this work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny, or reward filial disobedience.[15]
While this twin ironisation of the moral tale should not blind us to the very real differences between them (pornography may be ironic, but it's still pornography), it seems clear that there are more convergences, parodies in parallel and common tropes between Sade and Austen than we might ever have supposed. They share a common inheritance in the novel of sensibility and its gothic and moral offshoots. And surely we understand each author better for having looked at them through the lens of the other: in seeing how precisely and knowledgeably she alludes to libertinism, we see how wrong it is to limit Austen to a parochial and rigidly polite English scene, cut off from developments further afield; we see how sharp she is, how much she knows. Similarly we see how false it is to suppose that Sade himself is a transgressive one-off, a deranged pornographer and libertine, listening only to his own body and its destructive libido. When we look at him next to Austen, we see how he shares the ironising wit and detachment more commonly associated with her. There are important points of contact between Sade and Austen: their ironic re-working of the absurdities of the gothic novel, the foregrounding of readerly expectations, the stock of characters drawn from and the way they are shown to relate, and the morality/ libertinism polarisation. But, I say again, we shouldn't be surprised by this: Sade and Austen were active at the same time; they shared a cultural context which was clearly more influential than the differences between their biographies and social backgrounds would have us believe.
Bibliography
Sade, Œuvres, ed. Michel Delon (Paris: Gallimard Pléiade, 1990-98) 3 vols.
Sade, Les Crimes de l'amour, nouvelles héroïques et tragiques précédées d'une Idée sur le roman, ed. Michel Delon (Paris: Folio Gallimard, 1987).
Jane Austen, The Complete Novels, introduction by Karen Joy Fowler (New York: Penguin, 2006).
Notes
[1] Their dates are as follows:
Sade (1740-1814)
1785 Les cent-vingt journées de Sodome (pub.1904)
1791 Justine ou les malheurs de la vertu
1795 Aline et Valcour; La Philosophie dans le boudoir
1797 La nouvelle Justine
1799 Oxtiern; Les Crimes de l'amour with L'Idée sur les romans
1812 Adélaïde de Brunswick
1813 La Marquise de Gange; Isabelle de Bavière
Jane Austen (1775-1817)
1793-4 Lady Susan
1795-6 Elinor and Marianne (pub. as Sense and Sensibility 1811)
1797 First Impressions (pub. as Pride and Prejudice 1813)
1798-9 Northanger Abbey (pub. 1817)
1814 Mansfield Park
1815 Emma
1817 Persuasion
[2] Richardson, Clarissa; or the history of a young lady (1747-48); Rousseau, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761); Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782).
[3] Sade refers to the gothic genre which he associates with Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796) and with Mrs Radcliffe in his Idée sur les romans (Les Crimes de l'amour, nouvelles héroïques et tragiques précédées d'une Idée sur le roman, ed. Michel Delon (Paris: Folio Gallimard, 1987, p.42). References to Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) occur throughout Northanger Abbey, see in particular Jane Austen, The Complete Novels, introduction by Karen Joy Fowler (New York: Penguin, 2006), p.975 (vol 1, ch.vi); p.1062 (vol. 2, ch.x).
[4] Miramond complimented Sade for 'l'élégante facilité de votre style' as he refused to take the play under discussion, Le boudoir (letter, Miramond to Sade, le 25 Vendémiaire an VIII [1800]), letter reprinted in the introduction to Le boudoir, Le Theatre de D.A.F. de Sade (Paris Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1970), vol. 2, p. 89. For more on Sade and Austen's respective styles, see Philippe Roger, Sade: la philosophie dans le pressoir (Paris: Grasset, 1976) and D.A. Miller, Jane Austen, or the secret of style (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003).
[5] Northanger Abbey, p.964 (vol.1, ch.i).
[6] Needless to say, she didn't know about the existence of the Cent-vingt journées as in fact no one knew of it, and so far as Sade was concerned, it had been lost during the storming of the Bastille in 1789. On the ways in which mechanistic and epicurean thought meets in Sade, see Jean Deprun, 'Sade philosophe' in Sade, Œuvres, ed. Delon, vol. 1, p.lix-lxix, and C. Warman, Sade: from materialism to pornography (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2002), especially chapter 2, 'Sensationist materialism,' p.21-57.
[7] ' Justine se jette en larmes aux genoux de celui qui parait la proteger; elle jure d'etre soumise et de se bien conduire: mais le barbare Bressac, aussi insensible a la joie qu'a la douleur de cette chere enfant, lui dit durement… "NOUS VERRONS"; et l'on marche. ' La nouvelle Justine, Œuvres, ed. Delon, vol.2, ch.12, p.472. All passages translated from Sade in the course of this essay are by Caroline Warman.
[8] Mansfield Park, p.600 (vol.3, ch.i).
[9] Northanger Abbey, p.1045 (vol. 2, ch.vi).
[10] ' Plus elle avance, plus l'obscurité devient profonde. Curieuse de connaître la cause de ce changement du sol, elle tâte: juste ciel ! c'est la tête d'un cadavre qu'elle saisit ! ' Grand Dieu ! s'écrie-t-elle épouvantée, tel est ici, sans doute, on me l'avait bien dit, le cimetière où ces bourreaux jettent leurs victimes […] Ce crâne est peut-être celui de ma chère Omphale […]. ' La nouvelle Justine, ch.12, p.815.
[11] Reliable and stimulating explorations of their respective ideological positions with respect to religion and politics are to be found in Annie Le Brun, Soudain un bloc d'abîme, Sade (Paris: Pauvert, 1986) and Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).
[12] ' […] soyez de même extrêmement libre avec les hommes, affichez avec eux l'irréligion et l'impudence; loin de vous effrayer des libertés qu'ils prendront, accordez-leur mystérieusement tout ce qui peut les amuser sans vous compromettre […] ', Dolmancé to Eugénie, La philosophie dans le boudoir, Œuvres, ed. Delon, vol. 3, p.66 (3ème dialogue). The translated version I give above omits the word ' mystérieusement ' (mysteriously) as it does not illuminate the discussion at hand.
[13] Mansfield Park, p.561 (vol.2, ch.vii).
[14] ' Voluptueux de tous les âges et de tous les sexes, c'est à vous seuls que j'offre cet ouvrage ', La philosophie dans le boudoir, p.3.
[15] Northanger Abbey, p.1090 (closing page).