"Married His Cook to Massach": Masochistic Fiction in Ulysses

In 1909, Joyce traveled to Dublin where he heard a rumor that his beloved Nora may have betrayed him with another man.¹ The pain that he suffered from this doubt about her faithfulness changed him forever, and may be seen as the origin of a new direction in his fiction toward themes of sexual jealousy and cuckoldry. However, another equally important event occurred on this visit, one that would shape Joyce's imagination in an even more profound way. On this same journey, he first became acquainted with the work of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.² This was probably not by coincidence, as his despair over Nora perhaps led him to roam the city streets and peruse some of its less reputable bookstores.³ At that time, the Paris publisher Charles Carrington had been sending many of his English translations of European pornographic literature across the English Channel for sale in the territories under British rule, where he knew there was a market for flagellation erotica, in particular.⁴ Around this time, Joyce obtained Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs, which was available in its first English translation produced by Carrington.⁵ Richard Ellmann identified the book as a significant model for Ulysses and demonstrated that it was the basis for Bloom's masochistic fantasies in "Circe" (JJ 369–70), as well as a major source for the novel's philosemitism.⁶ Yet all subsequent discussions of Joyce's use of Venus in Furs have relied on the anachronistic translation by Savage, which was not published until after Joyce had already drafted "Circe,"⁷ or else on even later translations.⁸ In fact, no one has yet established with any certainty whether Joyce had read the story in German, French, or English because we know from his own library inventory that he had copies of titles by Sacher-Masoch in German and Italian (JJ 786). Consequently, Joycean commentators and critics have merely pointed to similarities of detail or plot in Ulysses, rather than parallels of language.

A clear reference to Venus in Furs in a letter to Nora during Joyce's 1909 Dublin trip pinpoints our earliest evidence for his knowledge of Sacher-Masoch's notorious tale, when in October he expresses his desire to send her "a splendid set of sable furs" (SL 172).⁹ This rather specific and unique wish implies that Joyce had by now read the work, and it is quite possible that he acquired the Carrington edition around this time, rather than at home in Trieste, where this particular English version would have been scarcer. Indeed, as Shechner has observed, these letters mark a shift in Joyce's view of Nora, whom he had only two years before depicted more innocently in his collection of poems entitled Chamber Music (1907):

Needless to say, this was not the proper attire for the curious grave beauty of Chamber Music. After five years of marriage, the aristocratic ingénue of Jim's adolescent imagination had at last given way to a new image of the ideal woman, Venus in furs.

(66)

Another sign of Sacher-Masochian influence in these letters may be seen in the precise phrasing of Joyce's confession to Nora in which he fantasizes about being flogged by her: "Not in play, dear, in earnest" (SL 188). This is reminiscent of Wanda's differentiation between pretend and real submission in Venus in Furs. As she explains more than once to Severin, she does not do role play (101–2, 133, 267–68, 270), and even makes him sign a contract to be her actual slave. Eventually, she announces: "The play between us is at an end now … now it is real earnest" (184). In "Circe," this becomes: "No more blow hot and cold … Henceforth you are unmanned and mine in earnest" (U 15.2964–65).¹⁰

The exact edition that Joyce had read and later used for Exiles and Ulysses is confirmed by his next specific reminiscence of Venus in Furs in his notes to Exiles, where the name "Sacher Masoch" explicitly appears as one of the play's...