O, too, exists only as an object for the men who control her, under whose gazes she attains a momentary grasp on solidity.Īt times, Desclos’s words recall another honorary Parisian writer: Jean Rhys, whose roughly contemporaneous novels of lost, voiceless women carried the same echoes of lonely, inner emptiness while in the distant thrall of powerful – but indifferent – men. For Sartre, perhaps most memorably in his 1944 play Huis Clos, hell was other people not simply the fact of having to live and work alongside them, but that one might be said to exist only, and exclusively, in the confines of others’ perceptions. Was he suggesting that slaves ought to be content with a good master, or was he fantasising about his own personal relationships? Did he, perhaps, enjoy the illusion that he was the master – and his wife and mistress the slaves?ĭesclos was known to be a particular fan of Proust, but writing in Paris during the 1950s it is likely that she was also influenced by the likes of such left bank luminaries as Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The precise point Paulhan intended to make is not altogether clear – or perhaps it is only too clear. When the book was ultimately published, Paulhan prefaced it with a short essay entitled Happiness in Slavery, a supposedly true account of slaves on a Caribbean plantation in 1838 who, once emancipated, preferred instead to remain enslaved. Speaking, saying anything – that was the difficult part. Unlike Atwood’s novel, however, the women in O are complicit in their humiliation – even if the possibility of genuine consent is nuanced throughout:Ĭonsent, O was telling herself, consent wasn’t the difficult part, and it was then she realised that neither of the men had for one instant anticipated the possibility of her not consenting neither had she. Somewhat foreshadowing Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale, Reage paints a world in which absolute power is enacted by men upon women. Set in 1950s Paris, O consents to become her lover Rene’s slave, and is “given” by him to be the property of another man, whom we only know as “Sir Stephen”.

Story of O is quite literally the story of a young professional woman called O.

It was only after the author’s death in 1998 that Pauline Reage was revealed to be Anne Desclos, whose cautiousness regarding her identity was further underscored by the fact that she had also been known as Dominique Aury. Like Fifty Shades, the book was epoch-making and like Fifty Shades, the book was published pseudonymously. In 1954, a woman using the pseudonym Pauline Reage published a slim volume bearing the title l’Histoire d’O (Story of O). Many years before the Fifty Shades franchise was conceived came its singular predecessor.

Books like 50 shades of grey exetcpt