Sheherazade-like, she was writing in order to keep their love alive. Fearful that he might be tiring of a woman approaching middle age and knowing his fondness for the writings of the divin marquis, Aury determined to compose a spicy narrative which might appeal to Paulhan’s sexual predilections. Though in his sixties by this time, Paulhan was known to have a high sex drive and a fondness for younger women. In grotesque parody of the party wallflower, the now completely objectified O has no more significance than a piece of furniture.Īury tells in the New Yorker interview how, the long-term mistress of Jean Paulhan, she conceived the book as a love letter to the celebrated author, critic and academician. By the final scene of the novel, O has apparently lost all humanity: wearing an owl-mask and led around by a chain attached to one of the rings in her labia, she is offered freely to guests at a party, though few show any real interest in her. Sir Stephen has O branded on her buttocks, and rings bearing his and her names are attached to her labia.
O is also physically attracted to two females, Jacqueline, a young model and Natalie, Jacqueline’s younger sister, both of whom she persuades to visit the château.
It seems at first that O’s submissiveness is motivated by her love for René, though during the course of her stay at the château, he ‘gives’ her to an English aristocrat named Sir Stephen, whose fatherly attentions are not without their attractions for her.
This process of enslavement involves being chained up in Gothic-style dungeons, frequent whippings and sexual penetration by a number of men, and the insertion into her anus of ever larger ebonite shafts in order to facilitate anal intercourse. The novel takes the form of a third-person narrative, recounting how a young woman identified as O, a Parisian fashion photographer, is taken by her lover, René, to a château in Roissy, where she consents to the gradual erosion of her personal identity and autonomy.
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