Marquis de Sade, Justine (1791)
[this is from a while ago, and not quite finished, but I am posting anyway, just to move on]
In Sade’s Justine, the eponymous young heroine, known as Therese for most of the tale, suffers more or less creative moral and sexual depredations of an almost endless cast of highway robbers, perverted monks, thieves, landowners, counterfeiters, and officials, most of whom have enormous penises and a fondness for anal sex. Almost pathologically virtuous from birth, Therese/Justine refuses to stray from her attachment to Christian virtues, even as this attachment repeatedly leads her into the hands of depraved libertines (she rescues three or four of her tormentors from death, only to find herself imprisoned and abused by them). Her apparent virtue incites the libertines whom she serves not only to abuse her sexually, but also to lecture her on the vanity and uselessness of her attachment to virtue. Thus almost every episode includes a lengthy tract on the productive/creative nature of crime, the uselessness and inexistence of God, the state of nature and of natural desires, etc.
Most of the narration is framed as the story of her life told by Therese to two wealthy lovers, Madame de Larsange and Monsieur de Corville, as she stops at an inn on her way to her undeserved execution for murder, arson, and theft. In her narration, Therese does not spare the titillating and/or revolting details, though she asks her auditors several times if they wouldn’t rather avoid hearing them. Madame de Larsange is in fact Justine’s sister Juliette, who upon the death of their parents took the opposite course from Justine’s and went deliberately into prostitution, libertinage, and murder, earning riches and a title in the process. After Justine’s story is told, her sister’s influential lover secures her release; however, she dies after being struck by lightning in the abrupt finale, triggering Juliette’s complete repentance.
The point I’d like to pause over is the role of the conventional Sentimental scenarios and expectations in the novel. Justine is the victim of a natural piety and a belief in the universal sentimental foundation of human character which underlies and redeems even the most hardened criminal. The novel works explicitly against earlier notions of character, present in novels and philosophy alike, that asserted, for example, that even criminals recognize the necessity of justice to sociality by holding to an honor code among themselves.
In Justine, libertines claim to be driven and limited by nothing other than their self-interest, defined as the search for maximum pleasure. More often than not, they succeed not only in enjoying the bodies of others in arbitrary and harmful ways with total impunity, but also in attaining money, security, and status – that is, there is no separation necessary between long-term and short-term “pleasures” that define Weberian Protestant-capitalist “prudence” and Freud’s “reality principle”.
I would need to know much more to even try a hypothesis, but I would be interested in connecting this “imprudent,” unbound self-interest with the history of both capitalism and sentiment. A common view of the period (I think this is a common view. I might easily be wrong) sees the emergence of sentimentalist discourse as in part the creation of a new mode of public behavior amenable to the fluid exchanges and mutual dependencies of the market. For example, David Solkin, in Painting for Money, reads Shaftesbury’s praise of familial virtues as models for public behavior as the reconfiguration of the values guiding public life, from “republican” austerity and duty to familiarity and sociability. Now following this very tenuous thread, what Sade seems to be dramatizing is the untrammeled and terrifying desires unleashed upon the figure of the perfect, virtuous, high-bourgeois sentimentalist by a range of figures, most of whom are, or were once, titled noblemen. I may be exaggerating this trend, but if I remember correctly, even such third estate figures as the sadistic (!) doctor who kills his own daughter for the sake of science eventually rise to be doctors to the king, i.e. “transcend” their origins.
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