Much like I ended up with a library paperback that included both collections of Nin’s erotic short stories, to get de Sade’s Justine, I ended up with a book that included 150 plus pages of critical and biographical introductions and two philosophical dialogues before getting into two moral tales, one of which, finally, is Justine. But I haven’t gotten to her yet and decided to write up Philosophy in the Bedroom now.
The plot entails a cast of characters, including an upper class brother and sister, Madame Saint Ange and Chevalier, their homosexual friend Dolmance, a couple of household servants, and the mother of a fifteen year old girl who the first five characters intend to convert to the glories of deviant sex. This young girl, Eugenie, hates her mother; her father conveniently is St Ange’s lover (but then again who isn’t?).
Beneath this plot, de Sade is taking the philosophy of the European Enlightenment to its absurd nth degree. At a time of revolutions, when royalty and religion were overthrow and the principles of liberty extolled, de Sade displays the natural urges of man is being as violent as Mother Nature at her most disastrous. Apology or explanation is needed to excuse the violence and ravages of man, replicating devastating climate or animals red in tooth and claw. If the philosophy of the time starts by advocating a natural man, than to de Sade, one can argue there is no punishable evil, that all appetites are benign, and that an individual’s personal pleasure reigns supreme, without regard to partners, family or large society. Morals and ethics, like organized religions, are constructs and as such are dispensable and not innate.
Essentially, de Sade has left out the equality and fraternity from the French flag. Dolmance personifies this dominance of the fulfillment of the ego. He is an absurd stage director, positioning all the others in the boudoir lest no appendage or orifice goes unaddressed. It reminds me of a string of 1960’s pop beads, although in sacrilegious passionate utterance, he compares the string of bodies to a rosary. Others’ willingness and depravities are not executed by their own wills, but under his instruction. They might be satisfied, but they are neither initiators nor concerned with mutual, reinforced desires. Dolmance assumes an importance of a cardinal or a lord of lust. While allegedly initiating Eugenie into an august group of fiends, Dolmance instead uses her for his own lust; St Ange uses her to debase her lover’s wife.
Solidifying this philosophical bent of man versus man in a power struggle for dominance, de Sade inserts an anti-religion, anti-morality, anti-sentiment polemic. It is not that the characters are flagged and need a chapter to recover from their satiety. This is not a tangent but the focus of the story.
After reading a bit farther into this collection, I read the dedication for Justine to de Sade's long term mistress. He tells her in it that unlike other novels for moral edification, aiming to instruct people in virtue, his story will depict the triumph of vice as a way to startle virtuous readers into knowing full well what lures and temptations they will be subject to ... as best to avoid them. I am still not sure whether de Sade's disclaimer rings true. Especially in POTB, Eugenie is not morally or intellectually strong enough to avoid falling prey. If this be farce, the naive reader needs a docent.
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