She is expected to succumb to anyone her owner chooses. She is told how to dress, bathe, sit, sleep, eat and talk. She is never in control of her situations. Obviously the Story of O is criticized as misogynistic. In the end O realizes she is about to be abandoned and asks Sir Stephen if she can commit suicide and he consents. Despite her complete subservience, she is abandoned by both René and Sir Stephen.
When Sir Stephen decides she needs more training he takes her to Samois, where she is sexually and physically abused and mutilated to become a better servant. As his property, she is expected to succumb to him and his friends at any time.
Eventually O falls in love with Sir Stephen and agrees to become his, meaning she consents to being branded (literally) and pierced with his insignia. There she is trained to sexually serve the members of an elite group of men.Īfter training that involves gang rape, sodomy, bondage and flagellation, she is reunited with René, who promptly gives her to Sir Stephen. In short, the book is about O, a French woman who is brought to Roissy, a chateau-like brothel, by her lover René. Aury didn’t intend to publish the book but wanted to write her version of a love letter in which she played on the fantasies of Paulhan and the unfounded beliefs that women didn’t share those fantasies. Aury set out to prove him wrong and the result was the Story of O. She wrote the book when Jean Paulhan, her married lover who was a fan of the Marquis de Sade, claimed women couldn’t write erotica. That Aury, a refined, professional woman, could write such a novel only fueled the controversy.ĭiscrediting most theories about the book, Aury claimed the novel was simply a response to a challenge. And then, in 1994 a British journalist revealed the author’s identity, a French woman named Dominique Aury.
For decades readers and critics speculated on the author’s identity and debated the meaning of the novel. It is a sexually graphic, sadomasochistic novel that was published under a pseudonym in the 1950s. It’s easy to see why the Story of O was controversial and scandalous.
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