| The 120 Days of Sodom | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Marquis de Sade |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
| Subject(s) | Sadism |
| Genre(s) | Erotic fiction |
| Publisher | Arrow Books (recent English edition) |
| Publication date | 1905 |
| Published in English |
Unknown |
| Media type | Print (Manuscript) |
| ISBN | 0-09-962960-7 (recent edition) |
| OCLC Number | 27011420 |
The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinism[1] (Les 120 journées de Sodome or l'école du libertinage) is a novel by the French writer and nobleman Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, written in 1785.[2] It tells the story of four wealthy male libertines who resolve to experience the ultimate sexual gratification in orgies. To do this, they seal themselves away for four months in an inaccessible castle with a harem of 46 victims, mostly young male and female teenagers, and engage four female brothel keepers to tell the stories of their lives and adventures. The women's narratives form an inspiration for the sexual abuse and torture of the victims, which gradually mounts in intensity and ends in their slaughter.
The work remained unpublished until the twentieth century. In recent times it has been translated into many languages, including English, Japanese and German. Due to its themes of sexual violence and extreme cruelty, it has frequently been banned.
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Sade wrote The 120 Days of Sodom in the space of thirty-seven days in 1785 while he was imprisoned in the Bastille. Being short of writing materials and fearing confiscation, he wrote it in tiny writing on a continuous, twelve-metre long roll of paper. When the Bastille was stormed and looted on July 14, 1789 during the height of the French Revolution, Sade believed the work was lost forever and later wrote that he "wept tears of blood" over its loss.
However, the long roll of paper on which it was written was later found hidden in his cell, having escaped the attentions of the looters. It was first published in 1904 by the Berlin psychiatrist Iwan Bloch (who used a pseudonym "Dr. Eugen Dühren" to avoid controversy). It was not until the latter half of the 20th century that it became more widely available in countries such as United Kingdom, the United States, and France. The original manuscript is currently located in the Bibliotheca Bodmeriana, Geneva, Switzerland.
The first publisher of the work, Dr. Bloch, regarded its thorough categorization of all manner of sexual fetishes as having "scientific importance...to doctors, jurists, and anthropologists." He equated it with Kraft-Ebbing's Psychopathia Sexualis. Feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir wrote an essay titled "Must We Burn Sade?", defending the 120 Days of Sodom because of the valuable light they shed on humanity's darkest side when, in 1955, French authorities planned on destroying it and three other major works by Sade.
On the other hand, another feminist writer, Andrea Dworkin, condemned it as "vile pornography" and its author as the embodiment of misogyny, especially as the rape, tortures and murders are inflicted by male characters on victims who are mostly (though not exclusively) female.
Noted Sade scholar Alice Laborde has charged Dworkin with "intentionally misreading the satirico-novelistic elements of the text." Instead, Laborde advocates a view of 120 Days of Sodom that stresses the signifying, as opposed to the symbolizing, function of Sadian language and person. The "misogynistic" elements of the text thus become, for Laborde, a method of both social critique and the re-invention of the French literary corpus.
Angela Carter discusses two of the characters at length and comments on Sade being a "moral pornographer" in her book, The Sadeian Woman.
Camille Paglia considers Sade's work a "satirical response to Jean-Jacques Rousseau" in particular, and the Enlightenment concept of man's innate goodness in general. Much of the sexual violence in the book draws from the notorious historical cases of Gilles de Rais and Elizabeth Báthory.
The 120 Days Of Sodom is set in a remote medieval castle, high in the mountains and surrounded by forests, detached from the rest of the world and not set at any specific point in time (although it is implied at the start that the events in the story take place either during or shortly after the Thirty Years' War, which lasted from 1618 to 1648).
The novel takes place over five months, November to March. Four wealthy libertines lock themselves in a castle, the Château de Silling, along with a number of victims and accomplices. They intend to listen to various tales of depravity from four veteran prostitutes, which will inspire them to engage in similar activities with their victims.
It is not a complete novel. Only the first section is written in detail. After that, the remaining three parts are written as a draft, in note form, with Sade's footnotes to himself still present in most translations. Either at the outset, or during the writing of the work, Sade had evidently decided he would not be able to complete it in full and elected to write out the remaining three-quarters in brief and finish it later.
The story does portray some black humor, and Sade seems almost lighthearted in his introduction, referring to the reader as "friend reader". In this introduction he contradicts himself, at one point insisting that one should not be horrified by the 600 passions outlined in the story because everybody has their own tastes, but at the same time going out of his way to warn the reader of the horrors that lay ahead, suggesting that the reader should have doubts about continuing. Consequently he glorifies as well as vilifies the four main protagonists, alternately declaring them freethinking heroes and debased villains, often in the same passage.
The four principal characters are incredibly wealthy men, who are libertine, incredibly ruthless, and "...lawless and without religion, whom crime amused, and whose only interest lay in his passions...and had nothing to obey but the imperious decrees of his perfidious lusts." It is no coincidence that they are authority figures in terms of their occupations. Sade despised religion and authority and in many of his works he enjoyed mocking them by portraying priests, bishops, judges and the like as sexual perverts and criminals. They are:
Their accomplices are:
The victims are:
There are also several cooks and female servants, those in the latter category later being dragged into the proceedings.
The novel is set out to a strict timetable. For each of the first four months, November to February, the prostitutes take turns to tell five stories each day, relating to the fetishes of their most interesting clients, and thus totalling 150 stories for each month (in theory at least; Sade made a few mistakes as he was apparently unable to go back and review his work as he went along). These passions are separated into four categories – simple, complex, criminal and murderous – escalating in complexity and savagery.
It is perhaps significant that Sade was interested in the manner in which sexual fetishes are developed, as are his primary characters, who urge the storytellers to remind them, in later stages, as to what the client in that particular anecdote enjoyed doing in their younger years. There are therefore a number of recurring figures, such as a man who, in the early tales, enjoys pricking women's breasts with pins and, at his reappearance in the tales in the 'murderous passions' category, delights in killing women by raping them atop a bed of nails. At the end of the novel, Sade draws up a list of the characters with a note of those who were killed and when, and also those who survived.
In the final vignette of L'Âge d'Or (1930), the surrealist film directed by Luis Buñuel and written by Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, the intertitle narration tells of an orgy of 120 days of depraved acts—a reference to The 120 Days of Sodom—and tells us that the survivors of the orgy are ready to emerge. From the door of a castle emerges the Duc de Blangis, who strongly resembles Christ, with his long robes and beard. When a young girl runs out of the castle, the Duc comforts the girl, but then escorts her back inside. A loud scream is then heard and he reemerges with blood on his robes and missing his beard.
In 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini turned the book into a movie, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma). The movie is transposed from 18th century France to the last days of Mussolini's regime in the Republic of Salò.