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  • Sade
  • John Phillips

Sade criticism has a long and colourful history dating back to the 1790s when Citoyen Sade published anonymously his shocking bestseller, Justine, ou les Malheurs de la vertu, and its even more scandalous sequels, La Nouvelle Justine and L’Histoire de Juliette. However, it was not until the 1920s that his work really began to be taken seriously by writers, artists, and philosophers.1 The post-1945 period in particular has seen an exponential growth in critical work, accompanied by a fascination with the Marquis’s eventful life. More than twenty biographical studies on Sade, many in English, have been published since the 1960s.2 Some of these are less sympathetic to their subject than others: Bongie’s is a good example of a wellresearched and argued biography that is highly critical of its subject, while Du Plessix Gray’s tends to present Sade in a more favourable light. And since the early 1970s many editions of letters between Sade and his family, friends, and lawyers have appeared, which have only increased interest in his life and loves.3 The relatively recent discovery of correspondence between the Marquis and his sister-in-law, Anne-Prospère de Launay, with whom he had a tempestuous affair in his late twenties, is an important addition to the corpus of correspondence.4 These letters reveal for the first time the depth of the couple’s mutual love, and the astonishing news that Sade made an attempt on his own life as a result of their separation. The Sade that emerges from this correspondence is a fiercely romantic [End Page 526] young man, capable of extremes of love and déception amoureuse — in short, a ro-mantic hero worthy of Constant or Chateaubriand.5

As the private letters and published biographies illustrate, Sade is a divisive figure. Indeed, for David Coward he is a cultural myth: an ancestral folk hero to anti-conformists, and a bogeyman to defenders of moral values and social structures.6 It is unsurprising, then, that over the decades the morally judgemental approach in criticism has never really disappeared. Andrea Dworkin, for instance, condemns Sade for representing women as sex objects.7 Other female critics, taking their cue from Simone de Beauvoir’s famous early essay,8 have published more sympathetic readings. Notable among these are Béatrice Didier, Nancy K. Miller, Angela Carter, and Jane Gallop.9 Annie Le Brun, co-editor with Jean-Jacques Pauvert of his 1980s edition of the Œuvres complètes,10 is notable for adopting an overtly and aggressively antifeminist stance, her overall aim being to put the body back into the text.11

In counterpoint to these more partisan readings, structuralist criticism focused exclusively on the text as a linguistic object, thus avoiding moral issues. Roland Barthes, for instance, famously read Sade’s works as a closed universe of discourse.12 Philippe Roger, Marcel Hénaff, Joan DeJean, Michel Delon, and others have, in effect, continued Barthes’s approach, analysing the narrative as a fictitious construct.13 And most recently of all, Jean-Christophe Abramovici’s homage to Sade follows the Barthesian tradition in focusing on key motifs and linguistic features.14 In so doing, Abramovici’s absorbing analysis shows that Barthes’s theoretical, language-centred approach can still prove illuminating.

Of course, not all of Sade’s works have enjoyed the same degree of critical attention. His eighteen plays represent a significant body of writing, including examples [End Page 527] of all the principal genres of eighteenth-century theatre (comedy, drama, melodrama, and tragedy), and yet there have been relatively few critical studies of this important corpus, with only two major books on the subject. Sylvie Dangeville refutes the conventional view of a clear and uncrossable divide between Sade’s libertine or obscene novels and his ‘respectable’ writings, into which latter category the plays fall, convincingly representing all of his output as a unified whole, driven by the overriding Sadian dynamic of desire.15 Focusing on the role of the spectator, Thomas Wynn also argues convincingly for the re-examination of Sade’s neglected theatrical output.16

By contrast, Sade’s libertine novels, which finally achieved the status of...

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