Libertine Anatomies: Figures of Monstrosity in Sade's Justine ou les malheurs de la vertu

The marquis de Sade wrote three versions of the same narrative—Les Infortunes de la vertu in 1787, Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu in 1791, and La nouvelle Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu suivie de l’Histoire de Juliette sa soeur in 1797—more than doubling the length with each new one, as he added new episodes and radically expanded existing ones. A brief account of all three will explain why I shall focus on the second version.

The earliest version constructs a closed textual world where the young heroine’s Christian virtues systematically meet with ruthless punishment: harsh lessons of experience invalidate Justine’s moral principles, while, on a discursive level, the libertines’ eulogy of the authority of nature legitimizes an array of villainies. In this context, not only does Justine’s unflagging praise of morality appear as both irrational and imprudent, but her condemnation of the libertines’ social and sexual practices, far from providing sound argument against such behavior, serves ironically to emphasize the reasonableness of libertine comportment.

The second version introduces both qualitative and quantitative changes. The new episodes and expanded passages are not merely variations of Justine’s misfortunes: they give center stage to the libertine body. In addition to using both military and animal metaphors to describe the libertines’ participation in various orgies (as were used in the first version), Justine now uses a series of terms from the eighteenth-century’s anatomical lexicon. Indeed, her descriptions of libertine physiology become the point of departure for a dialogue on the implications of physical anomaly in humankind.

In spite of its expanded scale, La nouvelle Justine does not introduce a radically new perspective on the libertine body, particularly the body’s relation to the monstrous; but this last version replaces Justine’s first-person narration with a third-person narrative. In order to examine the emergence of a discourse on monstrosity within a dialogical framework, therefore, it is necessary to focus on the second version. That philosophical setting, where Justine engages in debate on the subject of various physical anomalies, best reveals Sade’s equivocal use of the monstrous: although abnormal physiologies serve as the basis of an extreme materialist ethics, Sade’s discourse of pathology—and its identification of the physical and thus moral écart—ultimately recognizes some of the norms that he seeks to refute.

Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu opens with Justine’s being taken to her execution for a crime she did not commit. At this moment, she is reunited after twenty years apart from her sister, Juliette; the reunion sets the scene, and becomes the frame, for Justine’s narrative of her experiences during two decades. Much of this chronicle recounts her defilement by a series of libertines who have submitted her to unbridled sexual cruelty beyond the imaginings of her protected childhood:

Si quelquefois mon imagination s’était égarée sur ces plaisirs, je les croyais chastes comme le dieu qui les inspirait, donnés par la nature pour servir de consolation aux humains, je les supposais nés de l’amour et de la délicatesse. J’étais bien loin de croire que l’homme, à l’exemple des bêtes féroces, ne pût jouir qu’en faisant frémir sa compagne. ¹

Much to Justine’s horror, the bestial fury of her captors was matched by corresponding physical abnormalities; and she underwent the appalling discovery that her tormentors had characteristics reminiscent of mythological hybrids: for example, Coeur-de-fer, a highway robber, was an “homme de trente-six ans, d’une force de taureau et d’une figure de satyre” (p. 46). Another of her abductors is “si velu [qu’] il ressemblait à ces faunes que la fable nous peint” (p. 367). More significantly, these carnal hybrids also possess unique anatomical structures that stimulate their erotic fury. Such is the case with Roland, the leader of a gang of counterfeiters:

cette partie qui différencie les hommes de notre sexe, [était] d’une telle longueur et d’une grosseur si...