Works of de Sade
Literary works
Many of Sade's works contain explicit and often repetitive descriptions of rape and countless sexual perversions, often involving violence and transcending the boundaries of the possible. Sade's libertines founded their philosophy on a purposeful flouting of moral norms and a hatred of religious ethics. In nature, they say, the strong win and the weak lose; therefore all laws and ethics, designed as they are to protect the weak, are seen as unnatural.
In 1782, while in prison, he completed the short Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man, expressing his atheism by having the dying libertine convince the priest of the mistakes of a pious life.
The novel The 120 Days of Sodom, written in 1785 but not completed, catalogs a wide variety of sexual perversions performed on a group of enslaved teenagers and is Sade's most graphic work. The manuscript was believed to have been lost during the storming of the Bastille and the book was not published until 1904.
In 1787 he wrote The Misfortunes of Virtue, an early version of Justine which was published in 1791. It describes the misfortunes of a girl who continues to believe in the goodness of God despite persistent evidence to the contrary. The companion novel Juliette (1798) narrates the adventures of Justine's sister, Juliette, who chooses to reject the teachings of the church and adopt an amoral hedonist philosophy, resulting in a successful, fulfilled life.
The novel Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795) accounts the lascivious education of a privileged young lady at the dawn of womanhood, culminating in the rape and mutilation of the girl's mother. The work is structured as a play and is concise, witty and engaging; the archetypal Sadean characters are, here, used most effectively. The book contains a lengthy political pamphlet Frenchmen! One More Effort If You Wish To Be Republicans! in which Sade advocates for a utopian form of socialism. He states that laws against theft are absurd: they protect the original thieves, the wealthy, against the poor who have no option left but theft. He also argues that the state has no right to outlaw murder if it continues to sanction institutionalized murder in the form of executions and war. Laws against blasphemy are seen as pointless: they are not needed if God doesn't exist, and if He does, he surely won't be petty enough to care about minor attacks. The pamphlet was reprinted separately for distribution during the The French Revolutions of 1848 .
In Aline and Valcour (1795) he contrasts a brutal African kingdom with a utopian island paradise. This was the first book published under his true name, as opposed to previous pen names.
In 1800 he published a four-volume collection of short stories titled Crimes of Love. In the introduction, Reflections on the novel, he gives general advice to writers and also provides a critique of gothic novels, especially of The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis which he considers superior to the work of Ann Radcliffe [1]. One notable story in the collection, Florville and Courval, has itself been called "gothic" and revolves around a young woman who is unwittingly entangled in a web of incest.
While incarcerated again at Charenton, he completed three historical novels: Adelaide of Brunswick, Isabelle of Bavaria and The Marquise de Gange.
He also wrote several plays, most of them unpublished. Le Misanthrope par amour ou Sophie et Desfrancs was accepted by the Comédie-Française in 1790, and Le Comte Oxtiern ou les effets du libertinage was performed at the Théâtre Molière in 1791.
Several letters from prison to his wife were preserved and published in 1998 as Letters from Prison. Some of them show a bizarre and paranoid obsession with the hidden meaning of numbers.
See also [ Storielle Racconti e Raccontini ]
- See also
Chat rooms • What links here • Copyright info • Contact information • Category:Root