More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
‘A rare thing, a pornographic book well written and without a trace of obscenity’ Graham Greene
‘A remarkable piece of work’ Harold Pinter
No woman there possessed keys either to the doors or to the chains, or to the collars or to the wristbands, but each man carried a bunch of skeleton keys: there were three of them, one for all the doors, another for all the padlocks, the last for all the collars and bracelets.
The more he subjected her to, the more important to him she would become. The fact he gave her to others was proof thereof, proof in his eyes, it ought to be proof also in hers, that she belonged to him.
For a long time he had desired to prostitute her, and it was gladly he now discovered that the pleasure he reaped from it was greater than he had even dared hope, and increased his attachment to her as it did hers to him, and that attachment would be the greater, the more her prostitution would humiliate and soil and ruin her. Since she loved him, she had no choice but to love the treatment she got from him.
Previously, she’d always dressed soberly, as working girls do when their work resembles men’s work, but so cleverly that sobriety seemed quite right for her; and owing to the fact that the other girls, who constituted the very object of her work, had clothing and adornments by way of occupation and vocation, they were quick to detect what other eyes might not have seen.
she glanced at the dressing-table mirror and saw her reflected gaze: bold, mild, and docile.
Consent, O was telling herself, consent wasn’t the difficult part, and it was then she realized that neither of the men had for one instant anticipated the possibility of her not consenting; neither had she.
At Roissy she had felt herself to be as one is at night-time, deep in a dream one has dreamt before and which begins anew: sure that the dream exists, sure that it will come to an end, one would like to have it end because one’s afraid of being unable to bear it, and one would like it to continue because one’s afraid of not finding out how it all ends.
she waited all by herself, motionless, feeling more exposed in the solitude and in the waiting more prostituted than she had felt when the two men had been there in the room.
She considered herself fortunate, was happy to find that she was important enough to him to enable him to find pleasure in outraging her, as believers thank God for having humbled them.
She knew it too, and knowing it was the measure of her defeat, she knew she was beaten and that it pleased him to force her to scream.
It wasn’t at all that she was seeking to give herself the impression of being on a par with men, she wasn’t trying, by means of masculine behaviour, to compensate for some female inferiority she didn’t in the slightest feel.
The power she acknowledged her friends to have over her was, at the same time, the guarantee of her own power over men. And what she asked of women (and didn’t repay them, save in such small measure), she was happy, and found entirely natural, that men imperiously demand of her. Thus was she simultaneously and at all time the accomplice of both women and men, and stood only to gain with each.
O felt him watch her the way an animal-trainer keeps an eye on the animal he has trained, watchful to see that the animal, upon whose performance his honour is at stake, performs well;
the essential reason for her anxiety was exactly what it always was: this state of being dispossessed of her own self. The only difference was that this dispossession had been brought home by the fact that she no longer had any space all to herself in a place where she had been wont to retreat
This the while she fought not to admit (and yet trembled as she imagined), the immense joy she would have in seeing Jacqueline at her side, like her, naked and defenceless; like her.
She felt it important to make each girl who entered her house and who thus entered an entirely feminine society sense that her condition as a woman would not lose its importance from the fact that, here, her only contacts would be with other women, but, to the contrary, would be increased, heightened, intensified.
Was she then a thing of stone or wax, or a creature of some other world, and was it that they thought it pointless to try to speak to her, or was it that they didn’t dare? It was not until daybreak and after, when all the dancers had departed, that Sir Stephen and the Commander, rousing Nathalie, who was asleep at O’s feet, had O get up, led her to the centre of the courtyard, detached her chain and took off her mask: and, laying her down upon a table, possessed her, now the one, now the other.
