A M E R I C A N C O N S E R VAT O R Y T H E AT E R
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PRESENTS
Venus in Fur
by David Ives
Directed by Casey Stangl
The Geary Theater
February 12–March 9, 2014
WORDS ON PLAYS
vol. xx, no. 5
Dan Rubin
Editor
Elizabeth Brodersen
Director of Education
Michael Paller
Resident Dramaturg
Shannon Stockwell
Publications Fellow
Amy Krivohlavek
Contributing Writer
Made possible by
Bingham McCutchen, Deloitte, The Kimball Foundation,
The Michelson Family Foundation, The Moca Foundation,
National Corporate Theatre Fund, The San Francisco Foundation,
The Sato Foundation, and Union Bank Foundation
© 2014 AMERICAN CONSERVATORY THEATER, A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Table of Contents
1
Overview of Venus in Fur
4
Answers to Your Questions about David Ives’s Venus in Fur
In the Style of David Ives’s Preface to All in the Timing
by Dan Rubin (except where quoted, in which cases, by
David Ives)
8
“There Are Tricks Here”
An Interview with Director Casey Stangl
by Dan Rubin
15
A Magical Blurring of Lines
An Interview with Costume Designer Alex Jaeger
by Shannon Stockwell
21
The Legacy of Sacher-Masoch
by Michael Paller
25
Sexual Masochism
The Most “Important of all Perversions”
by Shannon Stockwell
33
Power Play
Feminism, Sex, and Dominance
by Amy Krivohlavek
39
Aphrodite’s Revenge
by Dan Rubin
42
The Art of Love
Titian’s Venus with a Mirror
by Shannon Stockwell
44
A Venus in Fur Glossary
48
Questions to Consider / For Further Information . . .
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Overview of Venus in Fur
Venus in Fur opened off Broadway at Classic Stage Company in January 2010. Produced
by Manhattan Theatre Club, the show moved to Broadway in October 2011 (with a
different actor in the role of Thomas); it transferred to the Lyceum Theatre in February
2012 and played there for five months. Venus in Fur is the most-produced play in the
2013–14 theater season in the United States, boasting 22 productions.
Design Team of Venus in Fur
Scenic Design ................................................ John Lee Beatty
Costume Design ............................................ Alex Jaeger
Lighting Design ............................................ Alexander V. Nichols
Sound Design ................................................ Will McCandless
Characters and Cast of Venus in Fur
Thomas.......................................................... Henry Clarke
Vanda ............................................................. Brenda Meaney
Setting of Venus in Fur
A bare, rented audition studio in New York City.
Synopsis of Venus in Fur
Thomas Novachek has written a stage adaptation of the novel Venus in Furs, written
by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch in 1870. The two characters in his play, Vanda von
Dunayev and Severin von Kushemski, are staying at an inn in Carpathia, on the eastern
edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They meet when Vanda returns Severin’s copy of
Faust, which he left by the inn’s fountain near the statue of Venus. The book’s bookmark
is Titian’s painting Venus with a Mirror, which leads them to discuss Severin’s affinity for
Venus and fur—and his desire to be enslaved by a woman, a predilection he developed
after a childhood incident with his aunt, who whipped him as he lay on her fur coat.
Severin begs Vanda to let him be her slave. The adventurous woman agrees, drawing
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1
up a contract outlining the specifics of their relationship. Severin eventually becomes
dissatisfied submitting to Vanda, who confesses she is attracted to a Greek man named
Alexis, and threatens to kill her. Pleased with his forcefulness and fury, Vanda tells him
that he has finally become a man worthy of her. She admits that she is the one who
deserves to be dominated and punished for her harsh treatment of him. Vanda becomes
Severin’s slave.
After a discouraging day of auditioning actors for the part of Vanda, a frustrated
Thomas prepares to go home to his fiancée, Stacy, when the actor Vanda Jordan arrives,
very late but eager to audition. Despite his protests, she will not take “no” for an answer.
She admits she knows very little about the source material or the time period, but she
and the character she is auditioning for share the same name, and she even brought a
period-appropriate dress. She convinces Thomas to give her a chance. Moreover, she
convinces him to be her scene partner, playing Severin to her Vanda von Dunayev. They
read the first scene, in which Sacher-Masoch’s characters meet.
Despite himself, Thomas is impressed by Vanda, and he gets increasingly into the
role of Severin. As they continue reading, Vanda stops periodically to make observations
about the characters and the themes of the play. She suggests that the play is actually
about child abuse, which annoys Thomas, who prefers the story’s larger message to the
“trivial” social issues it might touch upon. For the most part, he is coy about his work,
refusing to answer Vanda’s questions directly, but eventually he becomes suspicious
about how insightful she is about her role and the story, about which she had earlier
professed ignorance. She also already knows a good deal of the lines by heart. He asks
about her background, and it is her turn to be coy.
Vanda comments that Thomas’s play doesn’t always match up with Sacher-Masoch’s
novel. For one thing, it is missing the opening scene, when Venus appears to Severin in
a dream. Thomas admits he didn’t know how to fit it in. With Vanda leading the charge,
they improvise a scene on the spot. In it, Severin resists the charms of the goddess, his
“oldest and dearest enemy,” despite the fact that she has brought mink especially to
appeal to his fur fetish. Severin accuses Venus of wanting to have power over him, to
put her “foot on [his] neck.” “But Severin,” she coos, “that is exactly where you want it.”
Still he resists. The enraged goddess leaves but threatens to return.
Following the success of this exercise, Vanda pointedly asks Thomas if he based
Severin on himself, but the playwright denies that he was shaped by a childhood
incident or that he currently has any interest in sadomasochism. He claims he simply
found the relationship between Severin and Vanda von Dunayev interesting. On the
other hand, he admits, Stacy (who has been calling throughout the night for updates
on when Thomas plans to be home) doesn’t like the story or the fact that her fiancé
is producing an adaptation of it. Vanda describes who she thinks Stacy is and how she
imagines Thomas’s relationship with her to be. She is eerily accurate, right down to the
breed of dog they own.
2
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They continue to read through the script until Vanda takes issue with the sexism at
the core of the story; the author seems to blame Vanda von Dunayev for mistreating
Severin, even though he is the one who pulls her into his kinky fantasy. Thomas and
Vanda argue about what Sacher-Masoch is saying, and Thomas, upset, resorts to calling
Vanda an “idiot woman.” He quickly apologizes for losing his composure while she
prepares to leave. He begs her to stay. She agrees, but the power dynamic is notably
different. She begins taking liberties with his script, replacing the name “Severin” with
“Thomas.” When the script calls for Vanda von Dunayev to pull a knife on Severin,
Vanda produces an actual knife and holds it to Thomas’s throat. This blurring of reality
and fiction continues later, when, in the middle of a scene in which Vanda von Dunayev
orders Severin to perform a number of degrading tasks, Vanda orders Thomas to call
Stacy and tell her he won’t be coming home that night. He obeys.
When they reach the moment in Sacher-Masoch’s story when the power switches
from Vanda von Dunayev to Severin, Vanda claims she doesn’t understand the
transition; she and Thomas switch roles: Thomas now plays Vanda von Dunayev and
Vanda is now playing Severin, who has become the master over his penitent mistress.
Vanda ties Thomas to a pipe in the middle of the studio. With her victim bound, she
tells him what she really thinks of his play’s misogynistic perspective: “You thought that
you could use me to insult me?” When he tries to defend his work, she slaps him and
orders him to thank her for it. He does.
3
Answers to Your Questions about
David Ives’s Venus in Fur
In the Style of David Ives’s Preface to All in the Timing
By Dan Rubin (except where quoted, in which cases, by David Ives)
Thank you for your letter about David Ives’s Venus in Fur. Here are the answers to your
questions:
1. The South Side of Chicago, in the steel-mill district. 1950. His father was a
machinist and his mother was a secretary. His love for theater baffled them.
2. Yes.
3. “Yes.”
4. Yes, he will, he’s been busy, he apologizes, he will soon, yes.
5. Piano “very, very badly” and church organ “even worse.”
6. He was nine or ten. He wrote it for his Cub Scout den. It was a 10-page adaptation
of a 300-page thriller called Mr. Strang that he found in his parents’ library. Sadly, he
only wrote one copy of the manuscript: after he learned his lines, he passed it off to
Johnny Stanislawski, who lost it. “It was probably my greatest work,” he laments.
7. No, probably not.
8. Catholic high school (“All boys, jackets and ties, four years of Latin, the works”),
then Northwestern University, and then, after a decade hiatus, Yale School of Drama,
but he says his true playwriting education was working on City Center’s Encores! series,
for which he adapted/reconstructed 33 neglected/forgotten/underappreciated musical
librettos. These complex acts of “literary ventriloquism” asked him to patch up shows
(sometimes unfinished and always in need of updating) so that audiences couldn’t see
where the original ended and his fix-up began. After 20 years of doing it, he retired from
this gig last summer.
9. “Accident.”
10. “I think Father Henkel did it. He was my English teacher in the rather peculiar,
old-fashioned high school I attended. . . . One particular afternoon Henkel was trying to
focus our young attentions on Emily Dickinson. Unfortunately for Henkel (and Emily
Dickinson), it was a warm spring day and we boys were feeling, well, boisterous. Faced
with chaos, he laid the textbook down, climbed up onto his desk, and stood on his head.
We all stopped horsing around and stared at him in stupefaction. Henkel then climbed
4
back down, picked up the book, and said, ‘Let’s get back to “Beauty be not caused—it
is.” On page 388.’ It was probably my first glimpse of the power of the theatrical: you
gather an audience, you do a headstand to get everyone’s attention, and then you’re
free to explore beauty, poetry, truth, the human condition, what you will. Now that’s an
education.”
11. In earnest? Sixteen. After seeing Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance, he went home
and started writing. At Northwestern he wrote deep existential dramas about death and
the meaninglessness of the universe (which he starred in, “naturally”). His parents came
to see a production: “My kid sister coolly informed me, ‘They really hated it.’ That’s the
sort of anger and betrayal that can keep you going into the next play.”
12. That’s really none of your damn business.
13. Ionesco, Beckett, and Pinter.
14. Paul Rudnick, Christopher Durang, and Simon Gray, because they know how to
tell a joke.
15. He had just finished a book of criticism by John Lahr, who was not yet the drama
critic of the New Yorker. Ives wrote Lahr, “naïvely and out of the blue,” to ask his advice:
“I’m a student at Northwestern and I have written this play that people think is pretty
good but I don’t know what to do with it.” Lahr told him to send it (the play was called
Canvas) to a man who had a Rockefeller Grant to produce new plays, who in turn gave
it to “America’s smallest and possibly worst theater” in Los Angeles. It was a storefront
with a pole in the middle of the stage: “Every seat was obstructed viewing.” But a
director from New York saw it and brought it to Marshall Mason at Circle Repertory
Company, which produced Canvas in 1972 and Ives’s following play, Saint Freud, in 1975.
16. Gin and tonics, with lime to prevent scurvy. Popcorn. Pemmican, beef jerky, and
peanut butter, “but not taken all together, of course.”
17. Because he didn’t really know what to do next. Because he had a terrific job as an
editor at Foreign Affairs magazine, but was staying up until four in the morning writing
plays that were “wildly ambitious and overpacked . . . interesting but pretty terrible.”
Because he swore that if by the time he turned 30 he wasn’t living the life he thought he
should be living he would take whatever means necessary to do so. Because a girlfriend
suggested he should. Because he wanted to go immensely into debt and write plays,
which he did for three years. By the end of his time at Yale, he “wanted to flunk out and
go back for another three years, but they don’t let you do that.” Instead, he got a movie
deal—and “all of the horrible things that implies.”
18. Money!
19. 1987. Words, Words, Words. Then Sure Thing.
20. The Manhattan Punch Line, “much reviled then, much missed now,” which
was essentially a Xerox machine and an artistic director named Steve Kaplan, both in
chronic states of nervous breakdown. It was “the kind of place where the shows have to
be good, because the bathrooms aren’t working.” In other words, paradise. Every year it
would host a one-act play festival that had some visibility because the New York Times
would review it. “Production values were minimal, so you were forced to write well.
5
You couldn’t hide behind the furniture because there wasn’t any.” All in the Timing is a
compilation of short comedies about “the weirdness of being alive” that Ives wrote over
the years at the Punch Line.
21. “‘Uncommercial.’” “‘It couldn’t possibly succeed.’” “‘It wouldn’t ever find an
audience.’” Finally, in 1993, Casey Childs at Primary Stages took a chance on it. All in the
Timing ran for 606 performances off Broadway, and by 1995 it had played at 52 theaters
across the United States and Canada. Primary Stages revived it last year to celebrate its
20th anniversary.
22. He got tired of having the word “clever” attached to his name.
23. Well, he has mused that “a long play is a B52 carpet bombing a city” while “a
short play is a single gun in the hand of a lone assassin.” He thinks the one-act play
is an incredibly difficult form because it requires such concentration and bareness, but
it presents an “extraordinary poetic opportunity for a writer.” It’s a lost art. The Punch
Line closed in the 1990s, and without a place to produce one-acts, Ives stopped writing
them. He also hates repeating himself.
24. “Love. What else?”
(Bell.)
“Human pain.”
25. No, he will never write plays with bells in them again. Ever.
26. Because he hates repeating himself.
27. Mark Twain, Cole Porter, Moss Hart, the Gershwins, George S. Kaufman,
Georges Feydeau, Baruch Spinoza, Molière, Pierre Corneille, Alexis Piron, JeanFrancois Regnard, Yazmina Reza, and, with Venus in Fur, Leopold Ritter von SacherMasoch.
28. A mad scientist.
29. The rights to Histoire d’O (Story of O), an erotic 1954 novel about sexual submission
written by Anne Desclos under the pen name Pauline Réage, were unavailable, so, “led
by process of association,” Ives reread Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s 1870 Venus im Pelz
(Venus in Furs). He enjoyed the fact that you never know what is going to happen next
or who is doing what to whom.
30. It sounds better without the s.
31. Sure.
32. Yes, he reads German. He also reads French, although not as well. And Unamunda,
obviously. (Porky Unamunda arf da linkwa looniversahl.)
33. A straightforward adaptation for four actors: two to play Severin and Vanda, two
to play all the side roles. His trusted friend, the actor/director Walter Bobbie, told him
it wouldn’t work: For one thing, it didn’t have anything to do with today. For another,
there is no way to put a sadomasochistic relationship onstage without it being ridiculous.
34. He says he doesn’t remember. Who can say where ideas come from . . . ?
35. “Does it ever strike you that life is like a list of answers, in which you have to glean
or even make up the questions yourself? Just asking.”
6
36. Once he realized he needed to put two modern characters in collision and
conversation with the adaptation he had already written, he wrote what is now Venus
in Fur in nine days, interweaving the contemporary story of a director/playwright
auditioning an actress to play Vanda into his original script. He said during an interview:
Part of the fun of working on this play was the ventriloquism of going from 1870
Europe to contemporary America. . . . I tried to exploit the theater because it is
about the theater. . . . To watch actors at work, to see them taking on a character,
and filling it out with themselves and things they know about the world, is an
extraordinary process. This play puts that process in front of people. Here you
have a playwright who has written something that he thinks he knows and
an actress who walks in “innocent,” and the two of them, with the material
between them—this little plutonium pill of concentrated knowledge—are
irradiated by that and things happen between them. This play shows what I
love about the theater: that incandescence that happens when two people spark
each other in some way.
37. Yes, he has called theater a “wacky masochistic business.”
38. Classic Stage Company in 2010.
39. No, he doesn’t say. I think she is. What do you think?
40. “If you look at English and American theater since Oscar Wilde, it is the most
amazing collection of plays since the fifth century BC, when Sophocles was retyping
at three o’clock in the morning. I’m talking about first-rate playwrights . . . a string of
masterpieces, all within 150 years, and we’re still going. I wake up every morning and say,
‘What a lucky son-of-a-bitch I am to be a playwright in this age when theater is still so
vital.’ . . . When you think of all the plays that are going to survive from The Importance
of Being Earnest to today, it is boggling and thrilling.”
41 a. “‘Sterquilinium magnum stude ut habeas’” (“‘Make sure you’ve got a nice big dung
heap’”; Cato the Elder, 200 BCE). b. “‘Si aqua in balnia non sit, fac sit’” (“‘If there’s no
water in the bath, put it there’”; Cicero, first century BCE). c. “‘Fail. Fail again. Fail
better.’”(Samuel Beckett, twentieth century CE). d. “I could say, ‘Don’t (1) let (2) the (3)
bastards (4) get (5) you (6) down (7).’ I’d rather just say: ‘Write write write write write
write write’” (David Ives, twenty-first century CE).
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“There Are Tricks Here”
An Interview with Director Casey Stangl
By Dan Rubin
“This is my David Ives year,” director Casey Stangl told A.C.T.’s company at the
meet and greet for Venus in Fur on the first day of rehearsal in February. Last fall she
directed the playwright’s adaptation of Pierre Corneille’s seventeenth-century play The
Liar—which uses contemporary vernacular but preserves the rhymed pentameter of the
original—for Antaeus Theater in Los Angeles. Other than the fact that both scripts
rely on centuries-old texts for their foundations, at first glance there seem to be few
similarities between the rollicking French farce and Venus, a suspenseful psychological
thriller set in present-day New York. “It’s pretty impressive the range Ives has as a writer,”
says Stangl. “Reading these two plays, I don’t think you would even know they were
written by the same writer if you didn’t already know.”
That said, there is a commonality that runs through the plays. Both are playful and
sexy, and both have a perhaps surprising degree of humanity to them. “The questions
that I discovered in The Liar are, ‘Who are we really? What secrets are we keeping
behind the front we put up to the world? How do we reveal them?’” Stangl explained.
This idea that mystery often surrounds identity is at the heart of Venus in Fur. “One
of the delights of the play is that it begins with Thomas complaining about the parade
of idiot actresses he’s seen all day, and then this woman, Vanda, comes in and is exactly
what he has just described,” says Stangl. “Then it becomes clear over the course of the
play that she’s not really who she says she is. But who is she? That’s the question that is
going to occupy our time in the rehearsal room.”
Vanda’s identity will take Stangl and her cast some time to unravel, because one of
the fun challenges of Venus in Fur is that there is no clear answer. The director points
out that it is a play about ambiguity. “In our culture today, we always want to put a label
on something. We want to put things in a box. We want to have an easy explanation for
people and their behavior. One of the things that this play is doing is resisting that urge
to name what a thing is.”
As intriguingly cryptic as Venus in Fur might be, we were pleased that Stangl had
some very unambiguous answers to our questions about her perspective when we
interviewed her a few days before rehearsals began.
8
David Ives has said that Venus in Fur is a play about the theater, and since the
setup is that Vanda has come to audition for Thomas’s play, I am curious what your
perspective is on what it’s like to be in an audition room?
It is absolutely a textbook power dynamic situation. In the audition room, unfortunately
for the actors, they are in a less powerful position. Most of the time, there are a lot of
people in the room, and when the actors walk in they don’t know who’s going to be
in there. They assume there will be a director, at least, but there can be casting people,
producers, artistic directors, interns. I’ve been doing auditions all this week for a play
that I’m directing in L.A. after I get back from directing Venus in Fur, and there are at
least four or five people in the audition room. It’s been interesting watching actors come
in and say, “Oh God, I didn’t know there were going to be so many people in here!”
For the director, auditioning can be a long process, so it can get tedious and you can
get tired. Depending on how many parts you’re auditioning for, you may be hearing the
same words over and over and over and over again. But I also find it valuable, because
it makes me hear the play over and over. I hear it with bad choices being made, with
choices I didn’t think about, and with good choices being made, and I always find I learn
something about the play and the characters through the repetition.
From a director’s standpoint, you want to love everybody who walks into the room.
Once you get to be at a certain level, you’re seeing, for the most part, pretty good actors.
So it’s not about whether or not they’re a good actor, it’s: “Do they fit this part? Do
they look right? Do they have the right energy? Do they have the right take on it?”
Sometimes somebody can come in and be different from what you were imagining, but
their take can be so interesting that they convince you to use them. It’s always about how
they fit inside the universe of the play. I think the more-experienced actors understand
that, and I think that’s the only way they can get through all the rejection that they go
through—they understand that they aren’t being rejected personally.
I’m always amazed at what I consider to be really bad mistakes that actors make in
auditions. There’s usually a reader, a person who’s reading opposite the actor. The readers
are just sitting in a chair. They’re not up on the stage acting with them. They’re just
neutral. The actor obviously uses the reader as a point of focus and as someone to react
to, but at the auditions that I just finished, I couldn’t believe how many people actually
physically tried to engage the reader—went over to them, bent over them, touched them,
kissed them. It was amazing. It’s such a bad idea to do that, because instead of watching
them do the part, I’m just sitting there thinking, “Why are you doing that?”
But there are some actors who really get it. They come in, they stand and deliver, and
they get that the audition is its own animal—it’s not so much, “What would I do with
this scene in the actual performance?” Actually, the Venus auditions were a good example
of that. The way we will ultimately perform the side [scene] I used for the Thomas
auditions in the play is very different from what I was hoping to see from people in the
audition, because I wanted to see the whole journey that the character goes on. Whereas,
when we actually perform that scene in the play, the actor has the whole play to go on
that journey, so we won’t go so far out with that monologue. In fact, that is exactly what
9
the guy I cast, Henry Clarke, said after the first time he read it. He said, “I don’t know
if that was too much. I probably wouldn’t do it that way in the play, but I just wanted to
give you something to react to”—which was exactly right.
On some level, auditions can feel so random. It’s so much about a match to the
room and a match to the universe of the play. The actor, I’m sure, feels like the director
is completely in the power position, but I also have people I’m answering to: artistic
directors and producers, and they have their own concerns. So it’s all just a big stew. You
put in the ingredients and hope that they come out well.
At the beginning of Venus in Fur, Thomas talks about how difficult it is to cast the
nineteenth-century Vanda von Dunayev. In an interview, David Ives echoed his own
play when he said it was much harder to cast the character of Vanda Jordan than it was
to cast Thomas. Was that your experience?
Actually, in our situation, it was more difficult to cast Thomas. I understand what Ives is
saying, that you want somebody with enormous presence and charisma and power, and
they have to be funny but they also have to have adept language skills—it’s a big palette
for that actress. But I think at this point in time, because the play’s been done before,
people know what the role is. They know what the demands of the part are.
Thomas is a little subtler. The Vanda part is huge. She’s got big emotions. She’s big,
she’s loud, she’s broad, she’s funny, and then becomes very much the opposite of that.
She goes to extremes, and extremes are always easier to do than smaller, subtler shifts.
Also, the female role is younger. The older the parts go, the shallower the talent pool
gets. Theater is a tough business, and the older actors get, the more they drop out. They
can’t sustain themselves. So young women are the demographic you’ve got the most of.
Also, it’s pilot season. In pilot season, it’s hard to cast theater because actors are trying
to be available for TV shows and film, where they make their real money. But beyond
the logistical aspects of it, I think the reason Thomas was harder to cast is because he
seems very intellectual and confident, but in fact has a lot of odd little insecurities and
vulnerabilities that end up leaking out at different points of the play. His is a subtler
journey.
You want to like Thomas, but then he says something that might be offensive, and
you’re not quite sure where you land on it. You’re not quite sure where he lands on it,
or if he knows what he sounds like.
Exactly. One of the things that’s so great about the play is how the power dynamic is
constantly shifting, and you find yourself siding with one person, and then you secondguess yourself: “Wait a minute, who is Vanda Jordan? How does she know all this
information about Thomas and his life? What is she doing here?” You don’t know where
your allegiances lie.
10
You said that actors have to deal with a lot of rejection and that theater is a tough
business. Ives once wrote that theater is “a whacky masochistic business,” which is
worth discussing considering the role of masochism in Venus.
Vanda has a great line, which I’m sure gets a laugh in any production anywhere: “Hey,
you don’t have to tell me about masochism. I’m in the theater!” We all know it’s really
hard work. It’s a lot of hours, a lot of time, a lot of giving of yourself—no matter what
part of the theater you’re in—giving of yourself as a person, as an artist, as a human being.
And it is not as well paid as any of the other arts. So your motivation is not about money,
it’s about the applause, or the accolades, or the intellectual thrill.
I think that a lot of people in theater have issues of insecurity. When you talk to
artists, you’ll hear them say some variation of, “Yeah, I’m just waiting for the day when
I show up to work and everybody understands that I’m a fraud and I don’t know what
I’m talking about.” To some degree that’s the human condition, for sure, but I think it’s
exacerbated in the arts, particularly in the theater.
Also, because theater is live, you’re at the mercy of other people’s approval. Obviously,
film and television are also at the mercy of other people’s approval, in the sense that
television needs good ratings and film needs people to buy tickets. But when you’re
making theater, the audience is out there giving you positive or negative feedback in
the moment, which makes it more of a masochistic activity. Every night actors put their
souls out there on the line. Whereas, if you make a bad movie, it’s done. It’s in the can,
and you don’t ever have to see it again. If you’re in a play and the play has received bad
reviews, you still have to go out there and perform it every night and do whatever you
do to get yourself up for that situation.
Venus begins in a thunderstorm: the lights flicker and suddenly Vanda arrives. It feels
almost like the beginning of a ghost story. Then, throughout the play, there are these
moments that seem almost fantastical. How are you going to deal with the surreal,
magical elements of the play? Do you understand them as such?
I do see them that way, and I want Brenda Meaney, our Vanda, to participate in making
those decisions. There’s so much discussion in the play about ambiguity. There’s a
running joke where Vanda keeps saying “ambivalent” instead of “ambiguous,” so the
word “ambiguous” is used probably eight times in the play. That sense of ambiguity is
important to Ives. I don’t think we ever want to come down hard in any one direction as
to who Vanda is, or to suggest that there is only one possible interpretation an audience
member can come away with.
At the same time, Ives uses the natural phenomena you mention as an indication that
Vanda is more than she seems. The first version of the script that I was shown is the
rehearsal draft that they used for the Broadway run. Now there’s a second version, the
formal published Dramatists Play Service version, and it’s got quite a few small changes.
For a director, any little change is a clue as to what the playwright is thinking. In this
published version, there are probably 15 stage directions about thunder and lightning. In
11
the original version there’s a little bit of that. It’s always been there. But in the published
version, it’s even more spelled out. That’s telling me something. It’s clear that Ives is
telling me there is something that’s, as you say, magical or surreal, some element at work
here that’s blurring the lines between reality and fantasy.
I’m trying to achieve a lighting effect that makes it seem as if the audience can
see the rain on the window, because it would be great if the idea of natural elements
continued to be present in the room. What’s going on in the play is such a cerebral
activity. Even though the play is about masochism, it’s all words. Thomas is all in his
head. The idea of finding the elemental and primal in that is really important. The more
natural elements we can introduce, the better.
Our set, which is borrowed from the Broadway production, begins covered in fabric.
When the audience comes in, all they can see is this big covered shape. Then the first
moment of the play is this drape being pulled off to the sound of thunder. That is a very
theatrical, enclosed act of magic. It tells the audience, “Think about what you’re looking
at; not all is what it seems. There are tricks here.”
I’ll be trying to find the sweet spot that will have the audience members disagreeing
about who Vanda is as they leave the theater. I don’t want them to leave confused, but
there’s a place to be found where you can get differing interpretations, where people feel
like they’ve been given specific clues and come to a conclusion that is different from that
of their neighbors. That’s the goal.
What’s important is that Vanda is something more than what she seems.
Exactly. Whatever your personal conclusion is, it doesn’t really matter, as long as there is
the idea that there’s something greater at work here.
In the first draft of Venus in Fur, Ives didn’t have the contemporary relationship in the
play at all—it was just a straight adaptation of the 1870 novel. But he received some
feedback from his colleague Walter Bobbie—
Who ultimately directed the premiere.
Right—who said, “You can’t put a sadomasochistic relationship onstage without it
being ridiculous.”
Well, yeah! Because the second somebody whips somebody else, then where do you go
from there? I always find that whenever you’re trying to depict sex or violence onstage,
the trick is always to hold off on physicality as long as possible, because once you’ve
gone there, you run out of emotional real estate very quickly. Suddenly, it becomes just
watching somebody whip somebody for two hours. So what Ives ultimately did with the
play was really wise.
The characters talk about how the novel is set during a time when people were
repressed, for lack of a better word. Words really carried weight then—in a steamy
fashion. Ives uses that to his advantage with all of the stage directions that happen
12
Sound Designer Will McCandless on the Music
of Venus in Fur
2OdWR 7dSa UWdSa ca O Q]c^ZS ]T [caWQ SZS[S\ba W\ bVS Venus aQ`W^b bVOb OZZ]e
ca b] c\RS`abO\R eVOb bVS AOQVS`;Oa]QV ab]`g bVS ^ZOgeWbVW\bVS^ZOg
[SO\a b] SOQV ]T bVS QVO`OQbS`a BV][Oa bVS RW`SQb]` bOZYa OP]cb V]e VS
eO\ba b] caS ISO`ZgbeS\bWSbVQS\bc`g /cab`WO\ Q][^]aS`K /ZPO\ 0S`U¸a [caWQ
T]` bVS b`O\aWbW]\a /ZPO\ 0S`U RWR O Z]b eWbV b]\S bSQV\W_cS eVWQV Wa O
QV`][ObWQ aQOZS 7b¸a \]b RWOb]\WQ \]b VSOdWZg `]]bSR W\ O YSg EVS\ g]c VOdS O
a]\U bVOb¸a W\ O a^SQWTWQ YSg Wb UWdSa g]c O aS\aS ]T TO[WZWO`Wbg O\R Wb UWdSa g]c
O aS\aS ]T `Sa]ZcbW]\ Ob bVS S\R Pcb b]\S [caWQ R]Sa\¸b e]`Y bVOb eOg 7b
UWdSa g]c bVWa TSSZW\U ]T PSW\U c\P]c\R 7b a]c\Ra OZ[]ab ZWYS eVOb g]c e]cZR
VSO` W\ O aca^S\aS []dWS ]` O V]``]` TWZ[ G]c¸`S \]b ac`S eVOb¸a U]W\U b]
VO^^S\ BVS`S¸a a][S a]`b ]T c\SOaW\Saa a][SbVW\U c\aSbbZSR O\R bVOb¸a V]e
BV][Oa Wa W\bS`^`SbW\U eVOb¸a U]W\U ]\ W\ bVS ab]`g VS¸a ORO^bSR BVWa [caWQ
W\RWQObSa bVOb bVS`S¸a bVWa ab`cUUZS W\ bVWa ^ZOg b] TW\R O POZO\QS ]T ^]eS` 7 Z]dS
bV]aS bVS[ObWQ `Sa]\O\QSa
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9Waa bVS P]]b ]T aVW\g aVW\g ZSObVS`
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Ab`WYS RSO` [Wab`Saa O\R Qc`S VWa VSO`b
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EVW^ZOaV UW`ZQVWZR W\ bVS RO`Y
ASdS`W\ g]c` aS`dO\b Q][Sa W\ PSZZa ^ZSOaS R]\¸b T]`aOYS VW[
Ab`WYS RSO` [Wab`Saa O\R Qc`S VWa VSO`b
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7dSa ZSOdSa Wb
when Thomas and Vanda are reading the play-within-the-play together. They’ll say, “He
takes the coffee,” and then they indicate the movement, which sets up a nice little visual
vocabulary with simple activities. That gets set up rather nicely, so that when she actually
ties him up, or earlier when she actually pulls out a knife, it’s quite shocking. We have an
actual physical act instead of just words. I think that’s pretty effective.
13
You mentioned that Walter Bobbie directed the first production. What do you think a
female director brings to this play that is different from a male perspective?
As a female director, I’m used to being in rooms full of men. I’m used to dealing with
power dynamics. In most cases, it’s not blatant. In most cases it’s extremely subtle
and completely navigable. But I will say, as a woman, you bring a different set of life
experiences into the room: what it’s like to be discounted, what it’s like to have to prove
something, the idea that our sexuality and our personal eroticism can be threatening.
That’s a different perspective than men have—not better, just different. I think it’s
awesome to have this play directed by a woman, but I saw the production on Broadway
that Walter Bobbie directed and it was brilliant. Nobody owns this play in that regard.
But I do think that it’ll be a fun exploration of those gender issues.
There are interesting power dynamics that aren’t about male/female but are about
director/actor. As a director, I crack up at some of the things Thomas says as a firsttime director. He says, “Yeah, I’ve got the music all planned out.” It won’t get much of a
laugh in the audience, but that’s a big rookie mistake. You don’t want to tell your sound
designer, “Here’s our music!” Also, Thomas says he’s directing because the directors he’s
worked with as a playwright never get it right. He reveals his own insecurities in those
lines. He has no idea that he’s doing that, but that’s what’s going on.
You saw the original production of Venus: as a director, do you watch shows thinking
about what you would or would not do as a director? As you’re preparing to go into
rehearsal, do you think back to the Broadway production?
I try not to see plays that I want to direct, because I don’t want to get another production
in my head. I happened to see Venus in Fur because I was in New York at the time and
it had gotten quite a lot of attention. I had terrible seats when we saw it. I was way up
in the nosebleed seats and I missed at least 30 percent of the words. If there’s anything
that’s in my head from that performance, it’s that I want to make sure the audience hears
all the words. The language lets you know where you are in this play, when we are in the
play-within-the-play and when we’re not. In the beginning, it’s clear when we’re doing
the play that Thomas has written that Vanda is auditioning for and when we’re back with
present-day Thomas and Vanda again, but as we get further and further into the play, the
lines between those two worlds start to get intentionally blurrier. Sometimes I think the
audience may not always be entirely sure when we’re in and when we’re out—which is, of
course, exactly what’s happening to the characters themselves.
14
A Magical Blurring of Lines
An Interview with Costume Designer Alex Jaeger
By Shannon Stockwell
At the opening of Venus in Fur, we see Thomas alone onstage—dressed as a professional,
but not a “businessman.” He rants on the phone to his fiancée about the women he’s
seen at the auditions that day: “They bring along props, whole sacks full of costumes.
And whatever happened to femininity? Bring along some of that, please. Young women
can’t even play feminine these days. Half are dressed like hookers, half like dykes. I’d be
a better Vanda than most of these girls, all I’d have to do is put on a dress and a pair of
nylons.”
Suddenly, Vanda enters looking like a drowned rat, emerging from the storm that
rages outside. She wears a soaked raincoat and carries an enormous bag, which is filled
with exactly what Thomas was just complaining about: costumes. She’s brought a
vintage 1870s dress, a fur stole, and a pair of thigh-high boots, which she makes Thomas
put on her. Thoughtfully, Vanda has not only brought costumes for herself, she’s also
brought a few for Thomas: a gentleman’s frock coat and a servant’s livery. Strangely, they
fit him perfectly.
This two-person, one-act show is certainly a departure from costume designer Alex
Jaeger’s typical fare at A.C.T., where he most most recently designed two shows with
large casts: Major Barbara and Arcadia. Though it is a smaller show, the costumes are a
crucial element in building the surreal world of Venus in Fur. We sat down with Jaeger
to learn more about the intriguing items inside Vanda’s bag.
What is the importance of each of the costumes in Vanda’s bag, and how does each
piece transform the characters?
This play deals with various realities happening at the same time. There’s the audition,
then there’s the play that they’re working on, and sometimes it seems like the situation
transforms into either a performance of that play or the relationship between the people
in the nineteenth-century story of the play. I think the costume pieces that Vanda brings
with her help blur those lines, because it would be harder to go on that journey if they
were just in their modern-day clothes, especially because she arrives in such an extreme
outfit.
15
There’s also a magical aspect of the
costumes, in that the clothes that Vanda brings
for Thomas—supposedly she’s never met him
before and she doesn’t know what he looks
like—fit him perfectly. They actually comment
on that in the play: he’s not sure if she’s really
just meeting him for the first time or if she’s
been following him—we don’t know who she
is and what the reality of the situation is. So
it’s fun to keep people guessing and not be
definitive about it. That’s what we’re trying to
do with these costume pieces.
Auditioners don’t like it when actors bring
actual costume pieces with them to the audition,
so the beginning, when Vanda does just that, is
a joke. But then they get more and more into
working on the play, and he finds out that she’s
strangely brought clothes for him, too, and we
wonder, How much did she plan ahead?
How period-appropriate are the costume
pieces?
The clothes are fairly appropriate to the period.
They will appear to be period clothes, but if
you really had something now from that period
it would be pretty tattered, because it would be
more than 100 years old. Vanda says that the
dress she has brought in is from the 1800s, yet
it looks new. That’s what I was saying before
about the magic of it: maybe she’s conjured up
these clothes that are from 100 years ago.
What kind of research did you do when
approaching this play?
The pieces are pretty specific because the
characters talk about them, so the research
was fairly straightforward. I just looked at
silhouettes from the late nineteenth century.
1]abc[S`S\RS`W\UaT]`BV][OaO\RDO\ROPg
Q]abc[SRSaWU\S`/ZSf8OSUS`
16
Then there’s the practicality that stuff has
to go on and come off very easily onstage. Also,
[director] Casey [Stangl] was very interested in
the dress having a transparent quality, so that
when Vanda is in it we can still see her S&M
clothing underneath. So that influenced the
choices that had to be made as far as fabrics
were concerned.
But, again, it was straightforward as to what
we needed. It’s all listed right in the script:
Vanda says, “I’m wearing a mini skirt, I’ve got
the dog collar, I’ve got the frock coat, here’s a
white dress, here’s the fur.” So I had my list of
what I needed from the text.
You are building the period dress; are there
any costumes that you found or pulled?
The modern-day costumes we can just purchase.
We are building the white period dress, and
then we’re just going to see if we can find the
frock coat in stock. I don’t think we’re going
to have to build anything other than the white
dress at this point.
You mentioned the white dress being
transparent so we can see the S&M gear
underneath. What is that saying about
the dichotomy in this play between the
contemporary scene and the world of the 1870s
play-within-the-play?
I think Casey is making a really interesting
choice: during the earlier period, if somebody
were into S&M they would still dress very
properly in public. Today, if you’re into it, you
can walk around San Francisco in leather.
You don’t have to hide. So I think it’s very
interesting that in putting on this very sweet,
lacy, white dress we can still see the intention
underneath it in the black leather clothing. It’s
fun and it speaks to a changing social tolerance.
17
We’ve seen everything on reality TV. S&M is
not so shocking to us anymore.
You designed Arcadia for A.C.T. last season.
It also moves between two different time
periods onstage. What is it about that kind of
play that attracts you as a costume designer?
It’s certainly fun. The “time travel” element is
very different in the two plays. Arcadia is such
an epic story, and it actually spans the time. It
has the theme of physics and a more scientific
approach. Venus is more magical. Again the
lines are blurred: even though we are in modern
day and the play doesn’t actually go back in
time, sometimes we want the audience to
forget that we haven’t gone back in time.
It’s really fun to be able to do both periods
at once. In Arcadia, for the most part, the
characters [from different time periods] were
separate from each other, but in Venus, it’s the
same actors [playing the characters from both
time periods]. So trying to find things that
express the essence of characters that are more
than 100 years apart is challenging and fun. I
think it’ll be fun for the audience, too.
Near the end of the play, the two characters
switch roles and clothes, Thomas taking on
the female role in the play he wrote. How do
you go about building costume pieces that fit
two different actors, especially when one is a
man and one is a woman?
They don’t need to fit the other actor
particularly well, but in this case, it should work
out because the two actors are similar in height.
The costume switch is more about reinforcing
the psychological shift that is happening—
the balance of power that shifts. We have
this societal notion that the person in men’s
clothing is going to have power.
I’ve been doing some research on different
kinds of consensual relationships that have a
18
master/slave dynamic, and there are a lot of
theories that the slave has equal or more power
than the master because the slave is choosing
to take on that role. Again, it’s blurring those
lines: is modern-day Vanda actually taking the
power, or is that something that is happening in
the play they’re rehearsing? It keeps everybody
guessing.
Do you, as a costume designer, have any
insight as to what fur signifies?
It’s such a primal thing, the feel of fur. There’s
nothing else in this world that feels like fur.
It’s so soft and tactile. They’ve actually done
studies about people with anxiety and illnesses,
and stroking fur can lower your blood pressure.
It’s so sensual. It’s also very visceral: they’re
dead animals, you know? It’s soft and it’s
luxurious, but it’s also a dead animal. That
duality is in the play: it’s something that is very
carnal and, on the other hand, very comforting
and soft.
What was considered sexy clothing in the
Victorian era?
I think they touch on it a little bit in the play.
There are a couple of lines referring to how
“sexy” was much more psychological then.
Throughout time, different parts of the
body have become erotic. In the eighteenth
century, women wore these very low-cut gowns
and their boobs were pushed up. Breasts were
not all that erotic at that time, but ankles were,
and if you flashed your leg a little bit, that
would be like somebody flashing their boobs
now. It goes in cycles. Victorian times were
notorious for being very covered up. A lot of
it was the silhouette, the corseting—it was
considered pretty erotic. It was a time when
there was a lot of underground erotic literature.
It’s when those “French postcards” started,
19
with the nude photographs. There was a lot of
erotic art.
Where does current BDSM [bondage and
discipline/dominance and submission/sadism
and masochism] fashion come from?
It’s been around for quite a while now. I think
there’s a certain kind of strength and durability
in leather, and again, it’s another dead animal,
so it’s carnal. Whips and the various tools are
often made out of leather, so I think there’s
a tie-in there with the clothing. As far as the
extreme heels and extreme corseting, there’s a
certain amount of commitment that goes into
that. It proves that you’re dedicated to this
lifestyle, because it takes years to corset your
body down to the proportions. It also ties into
restricted breathing and autoerotic asphyxiation.
If a dominatrix is wearing those high, high,
high heels—besides their being beautiful as art
pieces—they can make her much taller than the
man. Also, you can’t really run away in them,
so once you’ve got those on, you’re pretty much
committed to staying there through whatever
the scenario is.
20
The Legacy of Sacher-Masoch
By Michael Paller
If Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836–95) walked into the theater today, he’d be surprised
to know that his reputation, such as it is, revolves around one slim novel written in 1870,
Venus in Furs (he used the plural). He’d also be dismayed, on two counts: first, that the
rest of his large output has been forgotten; and second, that the one work that hasn’t
is remembered only for the outré sexual predilection of its hero, a Galician gentleman
named Severin. Sacher-Masoch considered Venus to be an important document about
the relations between men and women, not pornography. He was certainly unhappy
when, in 1893, the German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing borrowed his name
to coin the term “masochism,” describing a person who desires being “completely and
unconditionally subject to the will of a person of the opposite sex; of being treated by
this person as by a master, humiliated and abused.”
Raised mostly in Prague, Sacher-Masoch was born in Lemberg, the capital of Galicia,
on the far eastern edges of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Lemberg is now Lviv; that
part of Galicia is now Ukraine). At his father’s wish, he obtained a law degree, though he
was more interested in literature and the theater. His first post was as a history teacher at
the university in Graz, Austria, and his first book, published in 1857, was a highly dramatic
account of the sixteenth-century revolt against the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. At
about the same time, he began writing fiction, and in 1860, after two successful novels, he
gave up teaching and turned full time to a literary life.
By the time he died, he’d written 15 novels, dozens of stories, and several volumes of
criticism. In some literary circles he was considered the heir and equal of Turgenev; critics
praised his collection of Jewish tales for their sharp observation, brilliant characterization
and dialogue, and warmth and sympathy for his subjects, the poor Jewish inhabitants of
the villages and towns of Galicia. Indeed, while he became a cosmopolitan literary man
who lived in Vienna and Berlin, Sacher-Masoch (who wasn’t Jewish but whose oft-stated
sympathy for Jews led many to think he was) found much of his creative inspiration in
the Eastern Europe he knew as a child.
The Legacy of Cain
His interests, though, were far-reaching. They included the pressing need for
governmental reform and concerns about the rise of militarism (especially in Germany)
21
and the eradication of poverty. He envisioned a United States of Europe with equal
rights for women and Jews, the abolition of private property, a morality centered on
altruism, and an acceptance of a wide range of sexual practices. The work he was most
celebrated for in his lifetime, an ambitious multiwork compendium called The Legacy of
Cain, took in all of this and more. His purpose in writing this gigantic cycle of novels,
novellas, and stories, he said, was to “illustrate the universal struggle for existence” across
all human activity.
The legacy of Cain’s murder of Abel, as Sacher-Masoch saw it, included Love,
Property, the State, War, Work, and Death. Each of these was to be the subject of an
individual volume, each volume consisting of six tales of various lengths, from stories to
novels. The first five would illustrate the reality of each of these topics as experienced in
daily life; the sixth would present the ideal condition, yet to be attained. Venus in Furs
was the fifth entry in the volume on Love, preceded by a comparatively sympathetic
portrayal of homosexuality called Plato’s Love. (Sacher-Masoch completed only the
volumes on Love and Property, which together comprised 11 novels.) The multistory
approach had its uses beyond expressing his political and social beliefs. It gave him a
structural reason to write repeatedly about love and sex, which he did, inside and outside
The Legacy.
Art Imitating Life Imitating Art
Sacher-Masoch didn’t have to look beyond himself for Venus’s inspiration. Years after
its publication, he recalled a childhood episode that he said accounted for his desire to
be beaten by a woman wearing fur. He had surprised his aunt, wearing a “green velvet
jacket trimmed with squirrel,” in an assignation with her lover. As a punishment, she
threw him on the carpet and whipped him. The experience, he wrote, “became engraved
on my soul as with a red-hot iron.” In Venus, Severin tells a similar story. The novel’s
action also closely mirrors Sacher-Masoch’s experience with his mistress, a widow
named Fanny von Pistor, whom he met a year or two before writing Venus. Like Severin,
Sacher-Masoch traveled with her to Italy under the name “Gregor,” wearing a servant’s
uniform and traveling in a third-class train coach. As in the novel, he signed a contract
pledging to be Fanny’s slave for six months, while she promised to wear fur “as often
as practical and especially when being cruel.” A photograph of the pair of them bears a
striking resemblance to the painting described early in the novel: Fanny, in furs, reclines
on an ottoman holding a whip in her left hand, while Sacher-Masoch kneels at her feet.
When the novel was published, he received a fan letter from a woman named Aurora
Rümelin. It was, she wrote in her memoirs, such a shameless letter that she scarcely
believed she could write, let alone mail, it. She signed it “Wanda von Dunajev,” the
name of Severin’s nemesis, love, and mistress. Sacher-Masoch responded immediately
and they met. When they married soon after, Aurora assumed both Wanda’s name and
sexual persona. She and Sacher-Masoch drew up a contract, very similar to the one
in the novel and referred to in the play: Sacher-Masoch pledged to be Wanda’s “slave
22
Contract between Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and
Wanda von Dunajew
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23
lying in the dust.” She, in turn, could exercise “the greatest cruelty,” in return for which
he agreed to kiss the foot that kicked him. The final clause reads, “If ever you can no
longer bear my domination, and the chains become too heavy for you, then you must kill
yourself—I will never give you your freedom.” Alas for her, it was Wanda who eventually
could not put up with their life. She found fulfilling her duties as a mother to their
children and a dominatrix to her husband too exhausting. Sacher-Masoch moved on
to another woman, as in the novel Wanda moves on to another man, and they divorced.
Sex and Literature
When Venus was published in the Love volume of The Legacy, the liberal Vienna journal
the Neue Freie Presse denounced it and Sacher-Masoch, whom it called a nihilist and a
communist. Beyond that, however, there was little public uproar about Severin’s sexual
obsession with whips and furs. Perhaps, as an anonymous critic writing in the Times
Literary Supplement put it a 100 years later, “the Gothic quality of his fictions about
splendid viragos and their self-sacrificing worshippers fitted into the folk traditions of
the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.” That is, Western European readers weren’t bothered
by masochistic sexual practices in literature when performed by the barbarian inhabitants
of Eastern Europe, where Venus begins—at a resort in the Carpathian mountains.
Of course, for centuries Europeans had been reading accounts of sexual practices,
several of which they’d never admit to wanting to try themselves. The first use of the
word dominatrix in literature occurred in the tenth century, when it was used by the
nun-poet-playwright Hroswitha. She didn’t employ it within a sexual context, but as
the scholar Jeremy Hugh Baron points out, she used it in her poem about the Virgin
Mary to describe a “fragile woman who is victorious and a strong man who is routed
with confusion.” The first-century Satyricon is a smorgasbord of sex scenes; The
Canterbury Tales and The Decameron are replete with them. Sexual whippings turn up
in Restoration plays from the obscure The Virtuoso to the better-known Venice Preserved,
in which a senator asks a courtesan to spit in his face and kick and whip him. Fanny
Hill, published in 1748, has been called the first example of pornography in the form of
a novel, and the first one in England to describe flagellation in detail. The nineteenth
century brought Europe the explicit poetry of Swinburne and Baudelaire, to say nothing
of the pornography of de Sade. So it’s not surprising that readers took the sexual content
of Venus in stride.
So why has Sacher-Masoch been forgotten? Some critics suggest it’s due to our
refusal, until well into the twentieth century, to take seriously the literary treatment of
a whole range of sexual practices. Others have argued that his writing just wasn’t very
good. In either case, what’s true is that Sacher-Masoch never hid his kind of desire from
the public, and his insistence that it was a legitimate subject for serious literature—along
with his interest in social justice generally—made him an activist for understanding and
equality before his time. Perhaps that’s his real legacy.
24
Sexual Masochism
The Most “Important of all Perversions”
By Shannon Stockwell
It was Austrian psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing who coined the term “masochism”
in his 1886 masterwork, Psychopathia Sexualis. Often hailed as the father of sexology,
he was the first to classify psychosexual “disorders.” He took the name from his fellow
countryman, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, author of Venus in Furs. Krafft-Ebing
defined masochism as:
A peculiar perversion of the psychical vita sexualis [sexual life] in which the
individual affected, in sexual feeling and thought, is controlled by the idea
of being completely and unconditionally subject to the will of a person of
the opposite sex; of being abused. This idea is colored by lustful feeling; the
masochist lives in fancies, in which he creates situations of this kind and often
attempts to realize them.
Psychopathia Sexualis is a collection of descriptions of Krafft-Ebing’s patients who
had what he considered abnormal sexual fantasies, which also included homosexuality,
pedophilia, fetishism, and sadism. The case studies in the chapter on masochism
include information about when the patients first experienced a masochistic fantasy,
what their fantasies consisted of, and how the fantasies affected their everyday life and
relationships. They often provided a physical description of the patient that pointed out
any abnormalities that might have hinted at a biological source for the fantasies; for
example, “At first sight there was nothing remarkable in the patient’s appearance; but his
pelvis was abnormally broad, the ilia [pelvic bone] were flat, and the pelvis, as a whole,
tilted and decidedly feminine.”
Case Number 57, that of a 37-year-old married man, is particularly enlightening,
because, unlike the other case studies, the patient himself wrote the report. The man
could never admit to his wife that he had masochistic fantasies, so when his desire
became unbearable he visited prostitutes to fulfill his need—moments that he and
Krafft-Ebing referred to as “attacks.” More than being sexually fulfilling, these visits
provided emotional comfort: through them, he learned his desires were not all that
strange. The patient wrote “According to my experience, the number of masochists,
especially in big cities, seems to be quite large. The only sources of such information
25
are—since men do not reveal these things—statements by prostitutes, and since they
agree on the essential points, certain facts may be assumed as proved.”
“The More Smartly He Is Whipt, He Rages the More Eagerly”
The early history of masochism is elusive. The Kama Sutra, written in ancient India
between 400 BCE and 200 CE, contains a chapter titled, “Of the Various Modes of
Striking, and of the Sounds Appropriate to Them.” Other than this chapter, however,
evidence of masochism remains rare in ancient texts. Sadism, on the other hand, was
popular—even if not necessarily sexual, there have clearly long been those who derive
pleasure from causing physical pain to others, evidenced everywhere from the gladiatorial
fights in ancient Rome to the torture devices of the Middle Ages. Sex historian Julie
Peakman theorizes that the prevalence of sadism and the relative absence of masochism
in early societies may be due to the fact that, because illness was so common and effective
painkillers did not yet exist, pain was a regular occurrence for people, and therefore
neither thrilling nor exotic. It’s also possible that sexual masochism was practiced, but it
was considered to be so shameful that no one talked or wrote about it.
Masochism finally made a significant appearance when German physician Johann
Heinrich Meibom published A Treatise on the Use of Flogging in Medicine in Venery in
1639. In the essay, Meibom cites Giovani Pico Della Mirandola (1463–94), an Italian
renaissance philosopher, who observed:
There is now alive a man of a prodigious and an almost unheard-of kind of
lechery, for he is never inflamed to pleasure but when he is whipt; and yet he is
so intent on the act, and longs for the strokes with such an earnestness, that he
blames the flogger that uses him gently, and is never thoroughly master of his
wishes unless the blood starts and the whip rages smartly over his limbs. This
creature begs the favor of the woman whom he is to enjoy, brings her a rod
himself, soaked and hardened in vinegar a day before for the same purpose, and
entreats the blessing of a whipping from the harlot on his knees; and the more
smartly he is whipt, he rages the more eagerly, and goes the same pace both to
pleasure and pain—a singular instance of one who finds a delight in the midst
of torment; and he is not a man very vicious in other respects, he acknowledges
his distemper and abhors it.
Meibom, after recounting a few more anecdotes of this not-so-“singular” pleasure
in torment, proposed a biological explanation for the popularity of flogging among
“shameless wretches”: because they had so much sex, they ran out of sperm more often
than other men, and being beaten on the back “warms the semen in the kidneys, which
causes sexual excitement when it reaches the testicles.” At the end of the seventeenth
century, German physician Christian Frantz Paullini noticed a flaw in this theory: it
didn’t explain why some females enjoyed flogging as well. Paullini proposed that perhaps
26
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beating the back warmed blood in the kidneys and sent it to the genitals, which would
explain arousal in both sexes.
Allusions to masochism can be found in Shakespeare’s plays. Antony and Cleopatra
contains a reference to a “lover’s pinch, which hurts but is desired,” and Helena in A
Midsummer Night’s Dream pleads to the object of her unrequited affections:
I am your spaniel, and, Demetrius,
The more you beat me, I will fawn on you.
Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me,
Neglect me, lose me, only give me leave,
Unworthy as I am, to follow you.
Indeed, Krafft-Ebing’s Patient 57 supposes that the masochist’s “ideal is the position of
a dog or horse.”
Erotic writing flourished in the eighteenth century. In 1749, John Cleland published
the erotic novel Fanny Hill, a scene of which contains flagellation; Fashionable Lectures:
Composed and Delivered with Birch Discipline, first published in the 1750s, is about
dominant women beating men, usually with birch branches because of their flexibility.
27
The Marquis de Sade’s erotic novels were the most notorious. De Sade, the namesake
of “sadism” (also coined by Krafft-Ebing), was infamous for his pain-inducing sexual
practices. The French libertine started writing when he was 23 years old, by which time
he was already well known in several brothels for his violent behavior during sex. De
Sade was what Krafft-Ebing would call a “true sadist,” in that many of the things he
did were nonconsensual. (Krafft-Ebing believed that a “true sadist” could never achieve
satisfaction with a partner who consented to being abused.) De Sade spent several
years in prison for his sex crimes, as well as his outspoken government opposition. His
anonymously published novels—such as Les 120 journées de Sodome (120 Days of Sodom,
1785), Justine (1791), La philosophie dans le boudoir (Philosophy of the Bedroom, 1795), and
Juliette (1797)—document his sexual penchants and fantasies. Most readers reacted to
them with disgust, but some found freedom within the philosophy of the books, which
questioned the idea that behavior could be judged “natural” or “unnatural.” De Sade
believed that people felt pleasure if they acted according to nature, and therefore all acts
that bring pleasure must be, by definition, natural. By the nineteenth century, however,
de Sade’s novels were widely banned. They would not be reexamined until the 1930s.
De Sade’s writing was condemned, but in the next century, violent sex was thriving in
bedrooms and brothels. Among men of nineteenth-century Western culture, there was a
growing interest in the “flagellatrix,” a prostitute that specialized in beating male clients.
One of the most famous of these flagellatrixes was an English prostitute named Theresa
Berkley, who invented “the Berkley Horse” in 1828. This was essentially an upright board
to which a man would be strapped and beaten. By 1836, the invention had netted Berkley
a profit of ten thousand pounds, quite a large sum of money for the era. In considering
why the upper-class Victorian man was so keen on being subjugated and humiliated by
a woman, historian Deborah Lutz suggests that because he was “required to maintain a
steady stream of productive energy, with a strong handle on his women, the lower classes,
his servants, he found release in giving up his masculine role of responsibility.”
The Science of Sex, Science of Pain
By the end of the Victorian era, there was no denying the prevalence of sexual
masochism, which Krafft-Ebing was the first to document in a scientific context. After
the publication of Psychopathia Sexualis, interest in deviant sexuality surged. Several of
Krafft-Ebing’s colleagues began giving the subject their attention. German doctor Albert
von Schrenck-Notzing coined the term “alolagnia” to describe the erotic desire for pain
in 1892. He suggested that perhaps there was some kind of link between the stimulation
from pleasure and the stimulation from pain. In a later edition of Psychopathia Sexualis,
Krafft-Ebing denied that alolagnia and masochism were the same. The “essence” of
masochism, he said, “consists of the lustfully colored consciousness of being subject to
the power of another person.” At its core, masochism was emotional, not physiological.
In 1902, German neurologist Albert Eulenburg published Sadism and Masochism,
which drew upon evolutionary theory, supposing that “the inclination towards cruelty
28
[is] deeply implanted in human nature as one of the fundamental instincts.” British
sexologist Havelock Ellis, most famous for writing the first medical text in English
about homosexuality, discussed sadomasochism in his 1903 book Love and Pain, in which
he argued that men are sadists and women are masochists. This was only natural, he
suggested, since it fit their gender roles in everyday society, in which men were in control
and women followed orders. Importantly, he insisted on the normalcy of a degree
of sadomasochism. Like Eulenburg, he pointed to evolutionary biology to prove his
point—male animals cause pain, while female animals submit. Therefore, relationships
that had some elements of sadomasochism were not to be viewed as problematic.
Sigmund Freud, with his revolutionary psychoanalytic theories, called sadomasochism
“the most common and important of all perversions.” He was instrumental in moving
the conversation away from evolutionary biology, proposing that masochistic tendencies
stemmed from childhood experiences in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905).
Opposing Theories of Cause
Among sexologists at the turn of the twentieth century, much of the debate about
sadomasochistic tendencies revolved around their origin. Were they learned behaviors?
Were they congenital? Did they have roots in evolutionary biology? Early sexologists
and psychologists disagreed as to the cause of the behavior, but generally they all
tended to agree that sadomasochism was a disorder. Even Ellis, who felt that traces
of sexual violence might be found in “normal” couples, felt that extreme elements of
sadomasochism might signify deeper mental issues.
It wasn’t until American sexologist Alfred Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in
the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953) that the
scientific community started to view sexually deviant behavior differently. Neither
studies explored sadomasochism in detail, but these revolutionary texts expanded the
idea of what should be considered “normal” sexual behavior. Of course, the impact
of Kinsey’s findings only went so far, and most medical and psychiatric professionals
continued to believe that sadomasochism was a pathological disease. It was listed as
a disorder in the 1968 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)
II—along with homosexuality, pedophilia, and necrophilia. The following year, however,
American anthropologist Paul Gebhard, an associate of Kinsey, published Fetishism and
Sadomasochism, which was the first study that denied the notion that sadomasochism was
pathological. Since then, most scientists have come to agree with his findings.
Theories behind the root causes of the tendencies still vary, however. Some scientists
have observed that certain pleasure-causing chemicals, like dopamine, are released in the
brain during painful experiences. This finding suggests that pain and pleasure are related
to each other on a biological basis, reinforcing Schrenck-Notzing’s early-twentiethcentury hypothesis.
Others suggest life experiences impact whether or not a person will be drawn to
masochism, as Sacher-Masoch depicts in Venus in Furs. In a 1999 article for Psychology
29
Today, sexuality researcher Meredith Reynolds explains that childhood events can shape
adult sexual lives. For example, if children are taught to feel shame about their bodies
and desires, they may learn to disconnect themselves from those urges or to suppress
them. When these children become adults, they might feel they can only truly enjoy sex
when they are not in control of it, when they are not responsible for it and, therefore,
cannot be ashamed of it. However, she points out that the effects of childhood tend to
“wash out” as the adult gains more sexual experience.
Some psychologists think that masochism is a form of escapism. Social psychologist
Roy Baumeister asserts, “Masochism is a set of techniques for helping people
temporarily lose their normal identity.” Western society, he explains, places very high
importance on individual identity and success, which can lead to feelings of pressure and
stress. Masochistic sex and role playing become a vacation from the anxieties of everyday
life. “The satisfaction gained from S&M is something far more than sex. It can be a total
emotional release,” Baumeister argues.
Consent and Legality
Sadomasochism has historically been something of a legal gray area due to the issue of
consent. In 1967, a man named Dr. Marvin Samuels recorded himself whipping another
man who was bound and gagged. He intended to send the film to the Kinsey Institute,
hoping it would aid in their research. The film developing company, however, brought
the film to the police, which led to the police searching Samuels’s home and arresting
him. The victim could not be identified so there was no complainant, but Samuels
claimed that the other man was a masochist and had consented to the treatment—had,
in fact, insisted upon it. Nonetheless, he was convicted of aggravated assault. The court
asserted:
The purpose of the aggravated assault statute is to prohibit one person from
severely injuring another and thus, except in cases involving ordinary physical
contact or sports, consent of the victim is no defense. Moreover, since it is a
matter of common knowledge that a normal person in full possession of his
mental faculties does not freely consent to the use, upon himself, of force likely
to produce great bodily injury, the alleged consent is largely ineffective.
Perhaps the most famous legal case dealing with sadomasochism and consent was
the Spanner Case. In 1990 in the United Kingdom, a group of 42 gay men was arrested
after police found a video featuring them engaging in sadomasochistic sex. The police
believed the video to be so violent that someone had surely been killed, and they
launched a full-scale murder investigation that cost taxpayers four million pounds; at
the time, it was one of the most expensive investigations in the history of the Scotland
Yard. It revealed that none of the men in the video had died, or even sustained any
serious injuries. Nonetheless, the men were charged with assault occasioning actual
bodily harm. Some were sentenced to up to four and a half years in prison. Even the men
30
Annual Gay Pride Parade in Rome, Italy !–/\b]\WOB`WQO`WQ]2S[]bWf1]`PWa
who had played submissive roles in the video (those who were beaten or humiliated)
were charged with aiding and abetting assault—on themselves. In the United Kingdom,
sadomasochism is still illegal “if it results in marks or injuries which are more than
transient and trifling.” The law in the United States allows consent to personal harm in
only three circumstances: one, if the injury isn’t serious or lasting; two, when the injury
is a “reasonably foreseeable hazard” of a “lawful athletic contest” or other legal activity;
or if the “consent establishes a justification for the conduct” in question.
Kink Communities, Fifty Shades of Grey, and BDSM Today
Around the time of Gebhard’s study, the term BDSM—bondage and discipline,
domination and submission, and sadomasochism—came into use. During World
War II, there was a surge in “leather culture,” a fetish that often involved elements
of sadomasochism, mainly among communities of gay men in major U.S. port cities,
especially San Francisco. In defiance of the popular stereotype of the effeminate gay
man, the aesthetic of leather culture was hypermasculine, inspired by the macho vibe of
the military and motorcycle gangs. It was spread by the artwork of Tom of Finland and
several erotic pulp novels and introduced into the mainstream by musicians like Judas
Priest and The Village People, who used the style as part of their stage personas.
Today, there are countless BDSM and “kink” communities. There are handbooks
that contain extensive glossaries covering such terms as “dom” (a person who likes
to dominate), “sub” (a person who likes to be submissive), and “safe word” (a word
previously agreed upon by all parties involved to indicate an unacceptable level of
31
discomfort). Despite the aggression that is encouraged, these communities are often
fierce advocates of safe sex, consent, and communication. Furthermore, the groups are
not just for meeting people to have sex with; many members find them to be a safe space
in which they can discuss their sex lives without being judged.
Recently, BDSM was thrust into the mainstream when E. L. James’s erotic romance
trilogy, Fifty Shades of Grey, was published in 2011 and climbed to the top of the New
York Times best-seller list, in spite of wide criticism of its amateur writing style and
graphic representation of the BDSM “lifestyle.” BDSM communities also reject the
series, claiming the relationship it depicts is unhealthy and an inaccurate representation
of the fetish. Compared to the descriptions found in the work of de Sade, the scenarios
in Fifty Shades of Grey are tame. Nevertheless, some suggest that the trilogy has led many
women (and some men) to discover a kind of sexual freedom, similar to the kind de Sade
thought was possible in the eighteenth century.
Due to the growing acceptance of BDSM, there is debate as to whether or
not sadomasochism, among other paraphilias, should remain in the DSM. Some
sadomasochists, such as therapist Dr. Margaret Nichols, claim, “There is no justification
for considering paraphilias ‘illnesses’ in real life. Where is the harm to the individual
or to society at large, beyond offending some people’s sensibilities?” But when the
entries for paraphilias were reviewed for their inclusion in the DSM V, released in 2013,
it was decided that masochism should be kept, because, according to the American
Psychological Association (APA), “there are a very small number of cases where
masochistic fantasy and behavior result in severe harm or even death.”
At the same time, the APA also says that many healthy and psychologically functional
people practice masochism. Currently, it is listed as a disorder, but only if the masochistic
thoughts lead to nonconsensual behavior, or if they cause the patient significant personal
distress. As Stephanie Saunders, the current interim director of the Kinsey Institute for
Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction says, “A lot of behaviors that are scrutinized
because they are seen to be marginal are really a part of the continuum of sexuality and
sexual behavior”—just as Patient 57’s prostitutes knew more than 100 years ago.
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32
Power Play
Feminism, Sex, and Dominance
By Amy Krivohlavek
A bright, beautiful young woman, charmed by her handsome lover, becomes enmeshed
in a cycle of sexual bondage, domination, and submission. She willingly surrenders to
shocking sexual acts that redefine her place in the world and transform her life. It’s
romance gone bad, in the naughtiest sense of the word. From the page to the screen,
this plot has propelled many stories, but few as ferociously—and with as captive an
audience—as two novels at opposite ends of the American sexual revolution: Story of O
and Fifty Shades of Grey.
Published in France in 1954—and in an English translation in 1965—Story of O
(originally published as Histoire d’O under the pseudonym Pauline Réage by author
Anne Desclos) trails its title character into a complex web of submissiveness, in which she
“serves” multiple masters who discipline her and draw her into extreme sexual situations.
Despite winning a French literary prize, the salacious book prompted authorities to
bring obscenity charges against the publisher; they were later dropped, but a publicity
ban went on for years. When the book found its way to the United States, feminists
immediately lashed out against its normalization of violence against women. In his New
York Times review, Albert Goldman warned, “Pauline Réage is more dangerous than the
Marquis de Sade.” Her brazen language, he worried, would usher readers into the darker
corridors of their psyches. Despite these feverish objections, Histoire d’O became one of
the most widely read volumes in France.
Decades later, in 2011, British author E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey rocketed to the
top of the best-seller lists. It tells the story of another woman, Anastasia, who becomes
tethered—and later, even married—to the complicated, sexually dangerous Christian
Grey. Feverishly devoured for its racy sex scenes (dubbed “mommy porn” for its escapist
popularity among the middle-aged suburban set) and skewered for its inelegant prose,
Fifty Shades of Grey (eventually expanded into a trilogy) has become a modern-day
publishing phenomenon, outselling even the Harry Potter franchise across the globe.
These lurid French and British novels were eagerly consumed by readers in the
United States, bookending a period during which sex emerged from behind closed doors
(and from between twin his-and-her beds). As the prudish sexuality of the 1950s erupted
into the sexual revolution of the 1960s, sex itself was dragged into the light, examined,
33
seized, abdicated, and then finally reclaimed by feminists. In the 1950s, Lucy and Desi,
a happily married couple, kept their decorous distance by sleeping in separate beds on I
Love Lucy; by 2014, in our post–Sex and the City age, marriage is no longer required (or
even, sometimes, desirable) for a couple to end up tangled in the sheets.
The last 60 years saw the rise and fall of the second and third waves of feminism, a
tidal movement through which the concept of sexual freedom ebbed and flowed through
a prism of politics, demonstrations, and popular culture. In her 2012 cover feature for
Newsweek in response to the popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey, Katie Roiphe explores
the relationship between the gains women made during this period and the continued
popularity of sexual fantasies of domination:
It is intriguing that huge numbers of women are eagerly consuming myriad and
disparate fantasies of submission at a moment when women are ascendant in
the workplace, when they make up almost 60 percent of college students, when
they are close to surpassing men as breadwinners, with four in ten working
women now outearning their husbands, when the majority of women under
30 are having and supporting children on their own, a moment when—in hard
economic terms—women are less dependent or subjugated than before.
As women have progressed toward equality, a liberated femininity, and a sexual freedom
that knows few bounds, why are some still tethered to a narrative of objectification and
seduced by the fantasy of being dominated in their most personal space?
In the United Stages, the activists of the first wave of feminism, roughly from 1830
until women won their right to vote in 1920, borrowed rhetoric from the abolitionists
and were concerned chiefly with gaining equality for women in public and civic life—
including the right to divorce and own property. There was little time for theorizing
about desire. As the second wave began to stir in the mid 1960s, it was clear that sex
would remain on the periphery. The introduction of the birth-control pill caused a
revolution, but not a sexual one: it did not lead to an increase in promiscuity (as many
feared it would), but it did give women control over their reproductive lives, which in
turn allowed them to shape their professional and civic lives to a new degree.
In her seminal work, The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, Betty Friedan wrote,
“The core of the problem for women today is not sexual but a problem of identity—a
stunting or evasion of growth that is perpetuated by the feminine mystique.” Prescribed
into the role of mother and wife, women wielded power in the home, but even there
it was limited. There were no laws protecting women against spousal rape, divorce was
financially devastating, and a woman was not even allowed to open a credit card in her
own name. The next wave of feminism was advancing directly toward the domestic
realm.
In more radical offshoots of the movement, men became the enemy, the obvious
target in women’s fight to gain equal footing, both in the home and in the workplace,
where sexual harassment was rampant. A heterosexual woman’s alliance with a man,
then, even sexual, was called sharply into question. Friedan worried about the conflict in
34
The Sky Is Now Her Limit' Pg0caV\SZZQ]c`bSag:WP`O`g]T1]\U`Saa
feminists who were also intimately involved with men. “This is not a bedroom war,” she
exhorted a crowd at a New York rally in 1970, as she retired as president of the National
Organization for Women, “this is a political movement, and it will change the politics.”
Friedan’s words proved prescient, as the second wave of feminism—which ebbed out
with the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982—ushered in a new generation
of women with expanded opportunities. By directly and fiercely confronting many of the
issues that threatened women, however, second-wave feminists unwittingly transformed
themselves into an almost puritanical force that left the idea of sex itself a bit anemic.
Yes, women had been oppressed by a patriarchal system (and by men themselves).
And the second wave had proven vital in fighting rape, domestic violence, and sexual
harassment. But then, where could—or should—a feminist heterosexual woman find
sexual pleasure? The personal had become political, but now women were forced to
rewrite their romantic scripts.
35
As noted by Susan Faludi in her 1992 feminist touchstone, Backlash: The Undeclared
War Against American Women, the 1980s were feminism’s “backlash” years, as the
conservative media undermined women’s rise to power in the 1970s, unleashing un-sexy
media exploitation of Monica Lewinsky, Anita Hill, and Lorena Bobbitt and running
sensational, alarmist headlines about how women’s gains were threatening the family
unit. If this was the legacy of their mothers, whose feminism sounded an alarm against
patriarchy, the younger generation was ready to reclaim sex as power—and, even,
enjoyable—striding away from the black-and-white mentality of their feminist forebears
to relocate the pleasure lost in the rejection of their oppressors.
The voice of this “postfeminist” movement sounded off sharply with Katie Roiphe,
herself the daughter of a famous second-wave feminist mother, Anne, who in the early
1990s dared to ask the most controversial of questions: What if the rape-crisis movement
(and fear of rape on college campuses) was an invention of second-wave feminists that
unnecessarily cast women in the role of helpless victim? Her jaw-dropping thesis was
presented first in a 1991 New York Times op-ed piece, “Date Rape Hysteria”; next in
an aggressive New York Times Magazine essay, “Rape Hype Betrays Feminism”; and
finally in a widely read book, The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus.
Arguing that statistics about rape were wildly overblown and overdramatized, Roiphe
condemned older feminists for exchanging women’s sexual agency for a culture of fear
with their “neo-puritan preoccupation” with women’s “victim status.” Second-wavers,
predictably, reacted with anger at the entitlement of one of their daughters; even if
she had not been raped herself (and benefited from rape-crisis centers), they reasoned,
Roiphe, with her Ivy league education, had absorbed the progressive spoils of feminism
and should be grateful for its gains—and for the women who had won them.
In her book Sister, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild, Deborah
Siegel captures this rupture in feminism, a legacy splintered by divergent opportunities
and perspectives. “The feminist rebellion against sexism had somehow been rerouted,
perceived by many as a war against sex,” she writes. “Instead of the avant-garde
movement that once promised less restriction and more fun, feminism had become
conflated with victimology, sexual protectionism, humorlessness, and rules.” In Roiphe’s
view, second-wavers “were as old-fashioned and constraining as corsets and stays.”
The gains of second-wave feminists undoubtedly led to swifter career tracks and
personal growth, but in response to their stodgy prescriptions about sex, postfeminists
wanted to shake off the outdated rhetoric and reclaim their sexuality, despite inherent
power dynamics. In her landmark Sexual Personae, published in 1990, Camille Paglia
worried that “feminists, seeking to drive the power relations out of sex, have set
themselves against nature.” At the same time, theorist Sandra Lee Bartky confronted
the dilemma facing feminists whose sexual desires were at odds with their sexual politics,
querying, “What is a politically correct sexuality, anyhow?” In her work of the period,
she investigates the dissonance in the life of a woman who is both opposed to patriarchal
oppression but who wishes to be dominated sexually:
36
For the feminist, two things follow upon the discovery that sexuality too
belongs to the sphere of the political. The first is that whatever pertains
to sexuality—not only actual sexual behavior, but sexual desire and sexual
fantasy as well—will have to be understood in relation to a larger system of
subordination; the second, that the deformed sexuality of patriarchical culture
must be moved from the hidden domain of “private life” into an arena for
struggle, where a “politically correct” sexuality of mutual respect will contend
with an “incorrect” sexuality of domination and submission.
There is no easy resolution to this dilemma, because, Bartky concludes, it is impossible
to “decolonize the imagination.” In the end, she finds, the entrenched power divisions
of patriarchy are simply too strong to surmount, and to push women into a politically
correct sexuality would be divisive. Her restrained nod toward women’s participation in
a sexuality of domination is not the most auspicious call to sexual arms, but it had the
effect, at the very least, of continuing the conversation.
Instead of taking aim at the patriarchy, then, the postfeminist generation gazed
suspiciously at other feminists. By 1992, a majority of college students refused to identify
as feminists at all. “I’m not feminist, but . . .” became a popular mantra, as young women
clung to their rights even as they resisted an identification with the buttoned-up
ancestors who had fought so hard for their liberties. Having absorbed feminism’s gains,
postfeminists nonetheless refrained from engaging in the language against patriarchy and
victimhood. As Siegel notes, “In the 1970s, feminists insisted on sexual difference between
men and women and launched a targeted attack on male power, domination . . . sex
discrimination, and sexual double standards. But in the early 1990s, as popular feminist
writers like Roiphe and others turned their critical gaze on their predecessors and each
other, the emphasis on patriarchal domination and control faded into the backdrop.”
But even as Roiphe and her followers declared themselves apart from the history of
feminism, a third wave of feminists emerged to continue to fight for the importance
of feminism in the modern age, but with a rebranded image. Like the postfeminists,
third-wave feminists dismissed the rigidity of the second wave, instead encouraging
the ideals of “tolerance, ambiguity, individuality, fun, and an embrace of sexuality, irony,
and contradiction,” writes Siegel. Rebecca Walker, daughter of famous feminist author
Alice Walker (and goddaughter of Gloria Steinem), embodies this crossover feminism:
“We change the face of feminism as each new generation will, bringing a different set
of experiences to draw from, an entirely different set of reference points, and a whole
new set of questions.” Unlike the postfeminists, third-wave feminists still believed that
women’s social, political, and economic equality was far from won—and crucial to keep
fighting for.
And what about sex? By the late 1990s, feminism and individuality had combined
to create a “feminist machisma,” or the “feminist badass.” This new sexual bravado
has continued through our current cultural moment, epitomized by pole dancing,
stilettos, and, recently, the sexually rapacious dance style known as twerking (brought
37
to the attention of the mainstream by pop star Miley Cyrus). But, feminists worry,
is this display of reclaimed sexuality, this new “empowerment,” just another path to
self-objectification? From the somewhat ditzy, light feminism of Ally McBeal to the
brazen bra-baring performance style of Madonna, recent decades have, indeed, been
a confusing period of female representation in mainstream media. In the early 1990s,
BUST: The Magazine for Women with Something to Get Off Their Chests became an
important cultural site for capturing these contradictions—just as the term “grrl” entered
the lexicon, sparking a culture of healthy, active rage as women continued to find ways
to reassert their sexuality and themselves.
The contradictions and questions continue to percolate. In the 1980s, Bartky
referenced the “fantasies of victimization” that have followed women throughout history,
pointing to the moment when Rhett Butler sweeps Scarlett O’Hara up the stairs in Gone
with the Wind, an act that left many women swooning but was, in fact, a romanticized
portrayal of marital rape. “A thorough overhaul of desire is clearly on the feminist
agenda,” she wrote. “The fantasy that we are overwhelmed by Rhett Butler should be
traded in for one in which we seize state power and reeducate him.”
And yet, despite the subsequent ascendance of women to positions of political power—
whereby, in theory, reeducation might be possible—these fantasies of domination
continue to hold women in their grip, as evidenced by Fifty Shades of Grey’s hypnotic
power to keep them reading toward the (next) climax. Is it pure escapism? Fantasy?
Adventure? Or is this push-pull of domination a way of locating a new form of balance?
In her analysis of Fifty Shades, Roiphe echoes Bartky’s remarks decades later. The
act of surrender, she argues, brings with it a freedom that is a welcome antidote to the
pressures of power, and desire often burns apart from the neat rhetoric of feminism.
It is perhaps inconvenient for feminism that the erotic imagination does not
submit to politics, or even changing demographic realities; it doesn’t care about
[Hanna Rosin’s 2012 treatise] The End of Men or peruse feminist blogs in its
spare time; it doesn’t remember the hard work and dedication of the suffragettes and assorted other picket-sign wavers. The incandescent fantasy of being
dominated or overcome by a man shows no sign of vanishing with equal pay
for equal work, and may in fact gain in intensity and take new, inventive—or
in the case of Fifty Shades of Grey, not so inventive—forms. You can experience
it without claiming responsibility, without committing to actually wanting it.
Perhaps it’s telling that, some 50 years after Story of O made its scandalous debut, Fifty
Shades of Grey arrived, sans pseudonym, in the full light of day. Its fantasies, Roiphe finds,
have “a natural appeal to both our puritan past and our post-ironic present”—and are
ready to be investigated, surrendered, and claimed by the next generation of feminists.
SOURCES AO\R`O :SS 0O`bYg Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of
Oppression<SeG]`Y(@]cbZSRUS'')9ObWS@]W^VSµBVS4O\bOag:WTS]TE]`YW\UE][S\(EVg
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Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild <SeG]`Y(>OZU`OdS;OQ[WZZO\ %
38
Aphrodite’s Revenge
By Dan Rubin
Golden Aphrodite. Celestial Aphrodite. Laughter-loving Aphrodite. Beautiful. Radiant.
The weaver of wiles and the mother of love, Aphrodite is the goddess of desire and
passion; ravenous lust, sex, and wantonness; the heart, but also the loins. In the Near
East, she was Astarte. In Rome, she was Venus.
In the ancient Greek tradition, Aphrodite was born out of revenge. Uranus, primeval
god of the sky and father of the Titans, cast his insurgent sons, the Cyclopses, deep into
the unforgiving Underworld. In retribution, the angry mother goddess, Gaia, persuaded
Cronus, youngest of the Titans, to lead an attack on his father. While Uranus slept,
Cronus castrated him with a quick flick of his flint sickle and threw the dismembered
parts down to earth. From the places where the god’s blood touched the ground came
forth Furies, giants, and tree nymphs. Where the flesh landed in the Mediterranean Sea,
the water began to foam. Soon after, Aphrodite emerged. “An awful and lovely goddess,”
according to the seventh-century BCE poet Hesiod, she rose from the water and walked
ashore, first on the small Greek island of Cythera and then on the island of Cyprus
farther east. Where her shapely feet touched the ground, flowers grew.
Carried across the waves by the Western Wind and adorned with gold by the
Seasons, Aphrodite reached Mount Olympus. As she entered the assembly of the gods,
it was immediately apparent that she would be trouble. In a room of divine beauties, all
eyes were on her. “Each one of [the gods] prayed that he might lead her home to be
his wedded wife, so greatly were they amazed at the beauty of violet-crowned Cytherea
[Aphrodite],” sings an ancient Homeric hymn. Assessing the situation, Zeus quickly
married off his adopted daughter to the steady-but-lame god of the forge, Hephaestus.
This infamously mismatched pairing pushed Aphrodite into a series of adulterous affairs.
The most notorious of these was with the war-hungry god Ares, but her promiscuity
extended to other Olympians: Hermes, Poseidon, and Dionysus.
Aphrodite could incite and direct desire as she pleased. Aside from three goddesses
(the warrior Athena, the huntress Artemis, and the eternal virgin of the hearth, Hestia),
no one was immune to her intoxicating charms. “Of these three, Aphrodite cannot bend
or ensnare the hearts,” the Homeric hymn continues. “But of all others there is nothing
among the blessed gods or among mortal men that has escaped Aphrodite. Even the
heart of Zeus, who delights in thunder, is led astray by her; though he is greatest of all
and has the lot of highest majesty, she beguiles even his wise heart whensoever she pleases,
39
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and mates him with mortal women, unknown to Hera.” Annoyed to be the victim of
Aphrodite’s whims, all-powerful Zeus shamed the goddess by making her fall in love with
a series of mortals. These included the beautiful Adonis (whom Aphrodite reluctantly
shared with the goddess Persephone) and the Trojan hero Anchises.
When duly honored, Aphrodite could be a powerful ally. Famously, during the
Judgment of Paris, the Trojan prince gave her a golden apple inscribed with the phrase
“To the fairest,” infuriating the goddess’s competitors, Hera and Athena. As a reward,
Aphrodite granted Paris the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen.
As told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Greek prince Hippomenes prayed to Aphrodite
for assistance in his pursuit of the princess Atalanta: “Come, lovely Cytherea, prosper the
deed I dare and with thy grace nourish the flame of love that thou hast lit.” Aphrodite
looked favorably on the invocation: “A kindly breeze wafted his charming prayer; it
moved me,” she admitted. Soon Atalanta was his.
When Pygmalion, king of Cyprus, fell in love with an ivory statue he had sculpted,
he prayed to Aphrodite. The cold stone came to life.
On the other hand, Hades hath no fury like Aphrodite scorned. Aphrodite gave
Helen to Paris, but Helen was already married to the Greek king Menelaus. Years
earlier, Menelaus had promised to sacrifice 100 head of cattle to Aphrodite should he
win Helen’s hand. Following the wedding, however, the king failed to honor his pledge,
and the wrathful goddess sent his trophy wife to Troy—igniting the epic Trojan War.
Helen’s father, the Spartan king Tyndareus, likewise neglected to honor the goddess.
Both of his daughters (Helen’s sister was Clytemnestra, the betrayed wife of Agamemnon,
who watched her husband murder her daughter) were cursed with unlucky marriages.
When king Theseus’s son, Hippolytus, devoted himself to the chaste goddess Artemis,
an insulted Aphrodite bewitched his stepmother, Phaedre, causing her to be seized with
40
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a wild passion for her stepson. The playwright Euripides captures Aphrodite’s venom in
his play Hippolytus: “Those that respect my power I advance to honor, but bring to ruin
all who vaunt themselves at me. For even in the race of gods this feeling finds a home,
even pleasure at the honor men pay them. And the truth of this I soon will show; for
that son of Theseus . . . calls me vilest of the deities. Love he scorns, and, as for marriage,
will none of it. . . . For his sins against me, I will this very day take vengeance.” Phaedre
suffers beneath “love’s cruel scourge” until she confesses her desire to Hippolytus, setting
into motion events that lead to their gruesome deaths.
Narcissus spurned all those who would love him, so Aphrodite made him fall in
love with his own reflection; she then transformed him into a flower. Herakles seduced
Aphrodite’s lover Adonis, so the goddess plotted the hero’s demise at the hands of his
wife. When the young, beautiful sea god Nerites rejected her advances, Aphrodite
turned him into a shellfish. On the island of Rhodes, she inflicted madness on Halia’s
six arrogant sons. On Cyprus, she transformed the Kerastai, a murderous group of native
men, into savage bulls and the Propoitides, an insolent group of women, into stone.
When Aphrodite seduced the Trojan Anchises, she hid her divinity so as not to scare
him away. The morning after, upon discovering that the woman lying next to him on his
bed of bear and lion skins was the goddess of beauty, Anchises was duly overcome with
terror. He knew that when mortal and immortal intertwine, it is often at the mortal’s
peril. He prayed to her for pity. Aphrodite comforted her one-night stand: she promised
him no harm, and she promised him a great son—Aeneas.
But should Anchises boast of their indiscretion, all bets were off. “Refrain from
naming me,” she warned the man. “Avoid the rage of the gods.” And then she
disappeared into the windy sky.
41
The Art of Love
Titian’s Venus with a Mirror
By Shannon Stockwell
Oh, mirror, I envy you only because of her . . .
Alas! I would like to trade my place with yours
—Serafino dall’Aquila, 1502–16
Aphrodite/Venus is one of the central figures in art history. She was the subject of the first
known sculpture depicting a nude woman. Depicting the goddess having just disrobed
and about to bathe, one hand modestly covering her pubic area, Aphrodite of Cnidus was
sculpted by Praxiteles in 350 BCE. This “modest Venus” has inspired generations of
artists. In Botticelli’s famous painting Birth of Venus (1486), she covers herself with her
loose hair, adding to her ethereality and sensuality. Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1548) depicts
Venus in a similar pose but reclining; this inspired Manet’s Olympia (1865), which critics
at the time condemned as vulgar. Manet in turn inspired Mel Ramos’s Manet’s Olympia
(1974), a completely modernized Aphrodite.
The goddess usually appears in paintings and sculptures in one of two ways: as
Venus Coelestis (“Celestial Venus”) or Venus Vulgaris (“Natural Venus”). The emphasis
of Venus Coelestis is on her divinity; she is depicted nude only to reinforce her
otherworldly transcendence of the material world. Conversely, Venus Vulgaris lives
in the realm of the material and sensual. Although the viewer knows the woman in
the painting is the immortal goddess of love, something about her suggests that she is
mortal—and, thus, attainable. It is Venus Vulgaris who appears in Titian’s Venus with a
Mirror, painted in 1555, which Severin von Kushemski keeps as a bookmark in SacherMasoch’s novel Venus in Furs.
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) was born around 1490 in the Italian Alps and moved to
Venice when he was just a boy to learn the art of painting. His teacher was Giovanni
Bellini, the official painter of Venice. By 1510, Titian had established himself, and after
Bellini’s death he took his place as the official painter of the Venetian Republic. He
became internationally famous, painting portraits of such members of nobility as Holy
Roman emperor Charles V, Philip II of Spain, Francis I of France, and Pope Paul III. A
master of many genres of painting, from portraits to nudes to mythological and religious
scenes, he died in 1576.
42
Venus with a Mirror is
Sonnet 45 of Petrarch’s
one of Titian’s more famous
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Renaissance standards of
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iridescence of the cupids’
wings—is evidence of Titian’s
mastery of the brush stroke.
Of his extensive body of work, Venus with a Mirror may have been one of Titian’s
favorites: the original remained in his studio until his death, more than 20 years after he
painted it. Perhaps he simply kept it to use as a model: he and his assistants produced
15 copies and variants. But Venus’s reflection in the mirror engenders an ambiguous
relationship with the viewer, and, by extension, the artist. Her reflected gaze appears
to be aimed at the viewer. If Titian imagined that Venus was staring at him, it might
explain his attachment to the painting—it certainly contributed to Severin’s obsession.
In fact, because of the common Renaissance association between mirrors and beauty
(and therefore love), many artists portrayed Venus gazing into a mirror at the viewer:
Rubens did so in Venus Before a Mirror (1614–15), Velázquez did so in The Toilet of Venus
(also known as The Rokeby Venus; 1647–51), and Carracci did so in Venus Adorned by the
Graces (1590–95). In Italy, the theme goes back to the complaint of Petrarch (1304–74) to
the mirror that held the face of his beloved Laura in “Il mio adversario” (“My Enemy”),
Sonnet 45 of his collection The Canzoniere. The trope became so associated with the
goddess, however, that other such instances of it in paintings, photography, and film are
referred to as “the Venus effect.”
While the mirror in Titian’s painting creates the impression that the viewer has
stumbled upon Venus in her boudoir, it also gives her a powerful presence. Though we
catch her in a private moment, she is unashamed. She meets our eye in defiance, not
bothering to turn away, deciding whether or not it is worth her time to acknowledge us
mere mortals.
43
A Venus in Fur Glossary
on the other hand, makes gratification
of sensual appetites his chief concern.
Therefore, this seemingly oxymoronic
phrase describes someone who is
rigorously dedicated to pleasure.
Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite Austrian
composer Alban Berg (1885–1935)
wrote atonal and 12-tone music that
remained true to late nineteenth-century
Romanticism. He was part of Vienna’s
cultural elite, and in 1913 two of his
Five Songs on Picture Postcard Texts by
Peter Altenberg premiered there. The
performance caused a riot and had to be
halted; the work was not performed in
full until 1952 and its full score remained
unpublished until 1966.
Lyric Suite is one of Berg’s betterknown compositions. He composed the
six-movement piece for string quartet
between 1925 and 1926. Secretly, it was “a
small monument to a great love”—the
clandestine, forbidden, and hopeless love
between Berg and the married Hanna
Fuchs-Robbetin. “The work stands as
a powerful expression of the deepest
passion and tragedy, a gripping evocation
of the inner world of a great composer and
a tortured man,” writes Mark Steinberg,
violinist for the Brentano String Quartet.
Aspasia Aspasia was one of the most
beautiful and educated women of the fifth
century BCE. Born in Miletus, an Ionian
Greek settlement on the coast of western
Turkey, she moved to Athens, where she
became the consort of Pericles, the city’s
democratic leader. This caused a scandal
when Pericles divorced his wife and took
up residence with Aspasia, but the couple
remained unmarried. Moreover, at a time
when women were expected to remain
unseen and unheard, Pericles consulted
his companion as an equal and made no
effort to prevent her from mixing with
powerful men.
The Bacchae Dionysus (Bacchus), son of
Zeus and the mortal Theban princess
Semele (daughter of Cadmus), is the
riotous god of wine and vegetation,
festivity and pleasure, often depicted as an
effeminate, long-haired youth. Semele’s
sisters denied his divine origin, so he
drove them mad. The frenzied women
Ascetic Voluptuary An ascetic person
practices rigorous self-discipline and selfdenial; the term can also refer to someone
who is religiously strict. A voluptuary,
44
went to live in the wilderness outside
Thebes.
Written by Greek playwright
Euripides in 406 BCE, The Bacchae is
the tale of Dionysus returning to Thebes
in mortal form to establish his rites.
His full-mortal cousin king Pentheus is
waging war against Dionysus’s divinity
by arresting his followers, the Bacchae,
and the god will not rest until he proves
“to him and all the race of Cadmus that
[he is] a god.” He convinces Pentheus to
dress as a woman so that the king can spy
on the Bacchae. The crazed women, led
by Pentheus’s own addled mother, Agave,
fall upon the man and tear him apart. The
play ends when Agave returns to the city
presenting Pentheus’s head, which she
believes is the head of a mountain lion,
to Cadmus.
Judith Beheading Holofernes$ Pg
/`bS[WaWO5S\bWZSaQVW
She brings his head back to Bethulia in a
sack. Leaderless, the Assyrian forces fail
to take the city.
The Book of Judith The Book of Judith
is an apocryphal book of the Bible,
accepted as canon by some religions and
rejected by others. It tells the story of
the Assyrian general Holofernes, who
surrounds the Jewish city of Bethulia and
cuts off its water and food supply. The
city’s elders decide to surrender, but the
beautiful widow Judith takes matters into
her own hands. She leaves the city and
finds Holofernes, whom she promises
“the way by which he can ascend and
take possession of the whole hill country
without a single one of his men suffering
injury or loss of life.” Smitten with Judith
and celebrating his imminent victory,
Holofernes drinks “more wine than he
had drunk at any time in one day since
he was born.” Judith is left alone with
the general in his tent, and while he is
in a drunken stupor, she decapitates him.
“Somewhere in Carpathia, on the
eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire” The Austro-Hungarian Empire
existed from 1867 to 1918. It dissolved
after World War I and became modernday Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, Bosnia
and Herzegovina, Croatia, the Czech
Republic, and Slovakia; it also contained
land that is now part of Serbia, Romania,
Italy, Montenegro, Poland, and Ukraine.
Carpathia is a mountainous region that
ranges over modern-day Ukraine, Poland,
and Slovakia.
“Citizens of Corinth!” This is probably
an allusion to Euripides’ Medea, in which
the title character begins her first speech:
“Women of Corinth!” In the play, Jason (of
Jason and the Argonauts) decides to leave
45
she is widely recognized as one of the
greatest characters in the dramatic canon.
his sorceress wife, Medea, for Creusa,
the daughter of Creon. Rather than let
her husband exile her and her two sons,
Medea murders Creusa, Creon, and her
boys. She then flies away in a winged
chariot with the bodies of her sons.
Marlene Dietrich (1901–92) A German
American film actress who became
famous in the 1920s, Dietrich is commonly
believed to be one of the prototypes of
the femme fatale. Critic Kenneth Tynan
said of her: “She has sex, but no particular
gender. She has the bearing of a man;
the characters she plays love power and
wear trousers. Her masculinity appeals to
women and her sexuality to men.”
Deestangay An Americanized form
of the French word distingué, meaning
“distinguished.”
Faust A popular character in the Western
literary canon, Faust is a necromancer
or astrologer who sells his soul to the
devil Mephistopheles in exchange for
knowledge. The legend is a conglomerate
of popular medieval traditions that became
associated with an actual individual during
the sixteenth century: Faustus, whose
career as a pseudoscientific mountebank
can be traced through various parts of
Germany.
The Faust Book of 1587 is the earliest
collection of these tales. There have been
several interpretations of the legend
since. The two-part play Faust, by Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe, that Severin reads
in Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, was
completed in 1831.
Messalina A lascivious or scheming
woman. The term comes from Valeria
Messalina (20–80 CE), wife of Roman
emperor Claudius, who was notorious for
her infidelity and debauchery.
“‘The overturning of a dragonfly’s wing,’
to quote one of the Greeks” Severin
quotes the Greek poet Simonides of
Ceos (556–468 BCE), who wrote, “You
who are a human being, / Never say
what tomorrow will bring, / Nor when
you see someone prosper, how long
this will last. / For change is swifter
than the changing course of the widewinged fly.” Only fragments, like this,
of Simonides’ extensive literary career
survive, most of them short. His threnoi,
songs of lamentation used for funerals,
were particularly famous in antiquity.
Hedda Gabler Hedda Gabler is the
titular character of Norwegian playwright
Henrik Ibsen’s play, which premiered in
1891. Hedda’s boredom with her marriage
and jealousy of a peer lead her to be cruel
and destructive, ultimately encouraging
an ex-lover to kill himself beautifully and
lending him one of her prized pistols to
do so. She also burns the only manuscript
of his best work. Complicated and rich,
at once the play’s heroine and antagonist,
“Pompadour/Borgia” Jeanne-Antoinette
Poisson, marquise de Pompadour (1721–
64), was one of the “preferred” mistresses
of King Louis XV, who built the Petit
Trianon Palace for her. Poisson’s middleclass origins attracted criticism in
aristocratic circles, but she managed to
46
get her brother appointed superintendent
of the king’s buildings, and even after
she ceased to be the king’s mistress in
the early 1750s, she maintained great
influence over the king. She introduced
young girls to the court, oversaw new
construction, and, above all, played a
prominent role in France’s artistic life.
Lucrezia Borgia (1480–1519) was an
Italian noblewoman and an instrument
in the crimes of the infamous Borgia
family, specifically through a long series
of politically advantageous marriages
arranged by her corrupt and scheming
father, who became Pope Alexander VI
in 1492.
Caspian Seas. Kazakhstan is a country in
Central Asia, bordered by Russia, China,
Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan,
and the Caspian Sea; it is east of the
Caucasus.
Sable (Martes zibellina) is a kind of
weasel, highly valued for its fur, which
feels soft to the touch regardless of the
direction in which it is stroked. Sable is
found throughout northern Asia, once
spanning the area from Scandinavia
to northern China. Its population was
severely reduced because of extensive
hunting in the early twentieth century;
now hunting is only allowed by licensed
persons, and fur farms have been
established to allow wild populations to
replenish.
Screaming Mimi’s Opened in 1978,
Screaming Mimi’s is a “highly curated”
vintage-clothing store in New York.
Tristan and Isolde A precursor to the
famous love triangle of King Arthur,
Lancelot, and Guinevere, the legend of
Tristan and Isolde (sometimes called
Iseult) is the story of a love between a
knight and a princess who is destined to
marry the knight’s uncle, the king.
Supersensualist A translation of
the German word übersinnlichen as
“extremely or unusually sensual,” the word
can also be translated as “metaphysical,”
“paranormal,” or “supernatural.” In the
novel Venus in Furs, Severin’s manuscript
is titled “Bekenntnisse eines Übersinnlichen”
(“Confessions of a Supersensual Man”),
which is a reference to Mephistopheles’
quote in Goethe’s Faust: “Du übersinnlicher
sinnlicher Freier, / Ein Weib nasführet dich!”
(“Thou supersensual sensual woer, / A
woman leads you by the nose.”)
“Venus in Furs” Lou Reed based his song
“Venus in Furs” on the Sacher-Masoch
novel. The Velvet Underground released
it in 1967 on their debut album The Velvet
Underground & Nico.
Victorian Teutonic The Victorian era
extended from around 1830 (the end
of the Romantic period in Britain) to
1901. Teutonic means characteristic of the
Teutons, an ancient Germanic people.
“It’s Tartar, isn’t it. Caucasian sable.
Probably from Kazakhstan” Tartar is a
Turkic ethnic group, now found mainly
in the Tatar Republic of Russia and parts
of Siberia and central Asia. The Caucasus
is a region at the border of Europe and
Asia, situated between the Black and
47
Questions to Consider
1. This production of Venus in Fur begins with a drape being pulled upwards off the set.
How is this different from pulling open the curtain at the top of the show? What impact
did this gesture have on you, and how did it set the tone for the rest of the show?
2. In what ways is Venus in Fur a play “about the theater”? What does it say about theater?
3. What moments of the play could be interpreted as “magical”?
4. How does the contemporary relationship in the play mirror the nineteenth-century
relationship in the play-within-the-play, and in what ways do they diverge? When does
the line between the play and the play-within-the-play begin to blur?
5. In what ways do both Severin and Thomas disrespect the goddess Venus?
6. When do you begin to question Vanda Jordan’s identity? Who do you think she really is?
For Further Information . . .
Bartky, Sandra Lee. Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of
Oppression. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Cleugh, James. The Marquis and the Chevalier: A Study in the Psychology of Sex as
Illustrated by the Lives and Personalities of the Marquis de Sade and the Chevalier von
Sacher-Masoch. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972.
Euripides. Bacchae, Paul Woodruff, trans. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 2011.
———. Hippolytus. Timberlake Wertenbaker, trans. New York: Faber & Faber Plays, 2009.
Ives, David. All in the Timing. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
———. The Liar. Adapted from the comedy by Pierre Corneille. Hanover, NH: Plays
in Print, 2010.
———. Venus in Fur. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011.
Krafft-Ebing, Richard von. Psychopathia Sexualis. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24766.
Lutz, Deborah. Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism. New York:
W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.
Peakman, Julie. The Pleasure’s All Mine: A History of Perverse Sex. London: Reaktion
Books, 2013.
Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von. Venus in Furs. Fernanda Savage, trans. Teddington,
Middlesex, UK: Echo Library, 2006.
Siegel, Deborah. Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
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