Venus in Furs Read online

  In 1967 the rock group the Velvet Underground reorchestrated the masochistic fantasies of Severin in the kinky rhythms of the song they called “Venus in Furs,” featured on the famous Andy Warhol banana album. It was also in 1967 that the philosophical critic Gilles Deleuze, in an important essay on Venus in Furs, sought to delineate the radical differences in style and strategy between Sacher-Masoch and the Marquis de Sade, and argued against associating them within the same sado-masochistic complex. Deleuze emphasized the aestheticism of literary masochism, its attention to works of art and dependence upon the invocation of artistic tableaux. The novella not only focuses on statues, but also introduces paintings and even photographs to assist the staging of the masochistic fantasy. According to Deleuze, “Women become exciting when they are indistinguishable from cold statues in the moonlight or paintings in darkened rooms. Venus is set under the sign of Titian, with its mystical play of flesh, fur, and mirror, and the conjunction of cold, cruelty, and sentiment. The scenes in Masoch have of necessity a frozen quality, like statues or portraits; they are replicas of works of art.”23 The uncannily incantatory powers of these artifacts within the novella suggest that it may be interpreted as part of the genre that has been labeled the “fantastic” by the structuralist critic Tzvetan Todorov.24 His concept of the fantastic stipulates interpretive suspense between supernatural explanation and illusionary imagination, as, for instance, when the reader remains uncertain about whether Sacher-Masoch’s statues and paintings possess magical powers or whether they are imaginatively invested with such powers by the overwrought protagonists. The notion of the fantastic is particularly valuable for considering a work like Venus in Furs, which is so fundamentally concerned with the psychological play of fantasy. In this regard, one can also discern in Sacher-Masoch’s work some of the same literary concerns that dominate the greatest novellas of the early twentieth century, such as Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, in which the hero is destroyed by dangerous romantic fantasies, framed in a struggle between Apollonian and Dionysian forces, or Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle, in which dreams and fantasies seem to overwhelm the urban bourgeois reality of the susceptible protagonist.

  “The most common and the most significant of all the perversions—the desire to inflict pain upon the sexual object, and its reverse—received from Krafft-Ebing the names of sadism and masochism,” wrote Sigmund Freud in his pathbreaking Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, published in 1905.25 Sacher-Masoch had died ten years before, in 1895, and Freud did not mention him at all, as if the concept of masochism had already completely displaced the literary oeuvre which inspired its formulation. Krafft-Ebing had made use of Sacher-Masoch’s name in order to generalize about a set of case histories, treating the author’s fiction in relation to those psychopathological cases. In fact, Venus in Furs gives some encouragement to such an approach, inasmuch as Sacher-Masoch sometimes presents Severin as a sort of case history.

  I was perched on a footstool at the feet of my Goddess, talking about my childhood.

  “And by then all these singular tendencies had already crystallized in you?” asked Wanda.

  “Yes indeed. I can’t remember ever not having them. Even in my cradle, as my mother subsequently told me, I was suprasensual.”26

  Continuing to take an analytic interest in his case, Wanda asks, “How did you develop this passion for fur?” Severin answers, “I already showed it as a child.” Furthermore, in the manner of the mock case history, Venus in Furs concludes with the patient proclaiming his cure. Indeed, Wanda, in a final letter to Severin, insists that she had always been thinking along therapeutic lines: “I hope that you were healed under my whip; the therapy was cruel but radical.”27 The cure is perhaps the least persuasive part of the fiction, as unconvincing as the Marquis de Sade’s occasional claim that he was making a case for virtue by demonstrating the monstrosity of vice. Sacher-Masoch’s literary fantasies were too evidently aimed at the artful gratification of himself, his hero, and perhaps his readers, for anyone to credit the conceit that Severin’s case history was supposed to publicize a cure for sexual pathology.

  The narrative critic Dorrit Cohn, considering Freud’s case histories, has demonstrated his sensitivity to the distinction between fictional and historical writing in the representation of his patients’ cases.28 Freud further deferred to that distinction when he adopted Krafft-Ebing’s abstract term for “masochism” without reference to Sacher-Masoch or his work. Rather, when Freud offered a literary instance of masochism in the Three Essays, he preferred to cite the most celebrated nonfictional case: “Ever since Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, it has been well known to all educationalists that the painful stimulation of the skin of the buttocks is one of the erotogenic roots of the passive instinct of cruelty (masochism).”29 It was in the Three Essays that Freud, the greatest Habsburg theorist of sexuality, incorporated the concept of masochism into the broader intellectual framework of psychoanalysis. While Sacher-Masoch believed that his own tastes were widespread, and Krafft-Ebing confirmed that the various perversions were not uncommon, Freud went further: “In view of what was now seen to be the wide dissemination of tendencies to perversion we were driven to the conclusion that a disposition to perversions is an original and universal disposition of the human sexual instinct and that normal sexual behavior is developed out of it as a result of organic changes and psychical inhibitions occurring in the course of maturation.” Freud found this universal perversity in “the multifariously perverse sexual disposition of childhood,” which he also sometimes called “polymorphous perversity.”30 Psychoanalytic theory thus made masochism, along with sadism, a basic element of the human instinctual heritage.

  In the case of the Wolf Man, who happened to be Russian, Freud explored the relation of masochism to sadism, castration anxiety, homosexuality, Christianity, and, of course, the Oedipal drama: “In his sadism he maintained his ancient identification with his father; but in his masochism he chose him as a sexual object.” In “The Economic Problem of Masochism” Freud argued that although the “pleasure principle” could make masochism appear “incomprehensible,” masochistic impulses were closely related to the death instinct. In “A Child Is Being Beaten” Freud remarked that “a sense of guilt is invariably the factor that transforms sadism into masochism,” and also explored the ways in which beating fantasies appeared to be conditioned by the Oedipus complex in both men and women. For Freud, the woman whose sexual fantasies are about bondage and beating, however deviously they may be revised or projected, is always governed by “the original phantasy in the case of the girl, ‘I am being beaten (i.e. I am loved) by my father.’ “31 Freud’s conception of masochism thus inevitably reflected both the intellectual insights and the cultural biases of psychoanalysis as a whole. By interpreting perversion as part of the “universal disposition of the human sexual instinct,” Freud made psychoanalytic sense of masochism, borrowing the term from Krafft-Ebing, while effacing the original significance of Sacher-Masoch.

  In the end Severin, claiming to be cured of his masochism, declares that from now on he intends to wield the whip: “Imagine the effect, however, on our fine, high-strung, hysterical ladies …”32 Thus Sacher-Masoch’s final impulse was to set Severin loose, with a whip, among the high-strung bourgeoisie of Habsburg society, in the hysterical echelons of Freud’s female patients, whether to stimulate their sense of sexual fantasy or shock them into complete collapse. Unmistakably, Sacher-Masoch regarded such a scenario in a comic spirit, and not with the requisite seriousness that Freud would bring to hysteria at the end of the century. It is Sacher-Masoch’s sense of play, evident from the first moment Venus sneezes, that makes him seem most alien to the serious studies of psychology, sex, and perversion, whether of Krafft-Ebing or of Freud. Venus in Furs was supposed to be part of a much larger literary project that Sacher-Masoch portentously called The Testament of Cain, but Severin seems almost lighthearted in his pursuit of torment. Sacher-Masoch, who died in the s
ame year that Freud published the Studies on Hysteria, invoked a Habsburg genius of an altogether different spirit when he proudly pointed out that he shared his birthday, January 27, with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Whatever the disparities of genius, one certainly feels that Sacher-Masoch in his fiction, like Mozart in his music, was having fun. Severin is often attuned to the comic aspects of his position, and even in the supremely brutal climactic scene he declares, “The situation was dreadfully funny—I would have laughed myself if it hadn’t been so desperately dismal, so degrading for me.” Sacher-Masoch took perverse pleasure in purveying his romantic fantasies, however humiliating, in Venus in Furs, and the author’s pleasure still communicates itself to a polymorphously perverse public. “You’ve aroused my most cherished fantasy,” says Severin to Wanda, but, a little later, she reformulates the issue, addressing him: “You’ve corrupted my imagination, inflamed my blood. I’m starting to enjoy all those things.”33 More than a century after the author’s death, and long after the dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy which conditioned his literary life, Sacher-Masoch’s masterpiece Venus in Furs continues to corrupt the imagination by its irresistibly seductive and artfully inflammatory sense of fantasy.

  NOTES

  1. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, trans. Franklin S. Klaf (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1998), pp. 87, 95–96, 109–10, 123, 125–26.

  2. Venus in Furs, p. 37.

  3. Wanda von Sacher-Masoch, The Confessions of Wanda von Sacher-Masoch, trans. Marian Phillips, Caroline Hébert, and V. Vale (San Francisco: Re/Search Publications, 1990), pp. 11–12.

  4. Venus in Furs, p. 82.

  5. Venus in Furs, pp. 95–96.

  6. Venus in Furs, p. 39.

  7. Bernard Michel, Sacher-Masoch (Paris: Editions Robert Laffont, 1989), p. 181.

  8. Krafft-Ebing, p. 98.

  9. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, A Light for Others and Other Jewish Tales from Galicia, trans. Michael T. O’Pecko (Riverside, Calif.: Ariadne Press, 1994), p. 7.

  10. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Souvenirs: Autobiographische Prosa (Munich: Belleville, 1985), pp. 16–17.

  11. Sacher-Masoch, Souvenirs, pp. 23–24.

  12. Venus in Furs, pp. 7, 12, 40–41.

  13. Venus in Furs, pp. 3, 9.

  14. Marquis de Custine, Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia (New York: Anchor Books, 1990), p. 96.

  15. Carl Felix von Schlichtegroll, Sacher-Masoch und der Masochismus (Dresden: Dohrn, 1901), p. 5; Michel, pp. 130–31.

  16. Venus in Furs, pp. 50, 52, 73, 75.

  17. Krafft-Ebing, p. 87.

  18. Krafft-Ebing, p. 113.

  19. Appendix, Venus in Furs, pp. 121, 122.

  20. Wanda von Sacher-Masoch, p. 37.

  21. Venus in Furs, pp. 96–97.

  22. Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 118.

  23. Gilles Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” in Masochism (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 69.

  24. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975), pp. 24–40.

  25. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 7 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953), p. 157.

  26. Venus in Furs, p. 30.

  27. Venus in Furs, pp. 35, 118.

  28. Dorrit Cohn, “Freud’s Case Histories and the Question of Fictionality,” in The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 38–57.

  29. Freud, Three Essays, p. 193.

  30. Freud, Three Essays, pp. 231, 239.

  31. Freud, From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (Wolf Man), in The Standard Edition, vol. 17, p. 63; “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” in The Standard Edition, vol. 19, pp. 159, 164; “‘A Child Is Being Beaten’: A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversions,” in The Standard Edition, vol. 17, pp. 189, 202.

  32. Venus in Furs, p. 119.

  33. Venus in Furs, pp. 114–115, 37, 38.

  SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

  Unfortunately, very little of Sacher-Masoch’s work is available in English translation. There is a good English edition of Sacher-Masoch’s Jewish tales, called A Light for Others and Other Jewish Tales from Galicia, translated by Michael T. O’Pecko (Riverside, Calif.: Ariadne Press, 1994). There is also a peculiarly published English edition of Wanda’s memoirs, The Confessions of Wanda von Sacher-Masoch (San Francisco: Re/Search Publications, 1990). The 12th edition of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis is available in English (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1998), with a lengthy discussion of masochism (pp. 86–143). There is an English biography of Sacher-Masoch, called The First Masochist, by James Cleugh (London: Anthony Blond, 1967), but the more recent French biography, Sacher-Masoch, by Bernard Michel (Paris: Editions Robert Laffont, 1989) is much better. The German edition of Sacher-Masoch’s autobiographical writings (which were originally published in French) is called Souvenirs: Autobiographische Prosa (Munich: Belleville, 1985). The essay by Gilles Deleuze on Venus in Furs, “Coldness and Cruelty,” is a classic of criticism, published in Masochism (New York: Zone Books, 1991). There are also interesting scholarly essays by Gertrud Lenzer, “On Masochism: A Contribution to the History of a Phantasy and Its Theory” (Signs, Winter 1975, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 277–324); and David Biale, “Masochism and Philosemitism: The Strange Case of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch” (Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 17, 1982, pp. 305–23). There are good brief treatments of Sacher-Masoch in Bram Dijkstra’s Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), in chap. 11; and in William Johnston, The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), in chap. 15. For background on Eastern Europe there is Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), chap. 2, “Possessing Eastern Europe: Sexuality, Slavery, and Corporal Punishment.”

  VENUS IN FURS

  God did punish him and deliver him into a woman’s hands.

  Judith 16:7

  I had a charming guest.

  Opposite me, by the massive Renaissance fireplace, sat Venus: not, mind you, some demimondaine who, like Mademoiselle Cleopatra, had taken the pseudonym of Venus in her war against the enemy sex. No: my visitor was the Goddess of Love—in the flesh.

  She sat in an easy chair after fanning up a crackling fire, and the reflections of red flames licked her pale face with its white eyes and, from time to time, her feet when she tried to warm them.

  Her head was wonderful despite the dead stone eyes, but that was all I saw of her. The sublime being had wrapped her marble body in a huge fur and, shivering, had curled up like a cat.

  “I don’t understand, dear Madam,” I cried. “It’s really not cold anymore; for the past two weeks we’ve had the most glorious spring weather. You’re obviously high-strung.”

  “Thank you for your spring, but no thanks,” she said in a deep stone voice and instantly sneezed two divine sneezes in quick succession. “I truly can’t stand it and I’m beginning to grasp—”

  “Grasp what, dear Madam?”

  “I’m beginning to believe the unbelievable and comprehend the incomprehensible. I suddenly understand Germanic female virtue and German philosophy, and I’m no longer amazed that you northerners are unable to love—indeed, haven’t got the foggiest notion of what love is.”

  “Permit me, Madam,” I replied, flaring up. “I have truly given you no occasion.”

  “Well, you—” The divine being sneezed a third time and shrugged with inimitable grace. “That’s why I’ve always been lenient with you and even visit you every so often although I promptly catch cold each time despite my many furs. Do you rec
all our first meeting?”

  “How could I forget it?” I said. “You had rich, brown curls and brown eyes and red lips, but I immediately recognized you by the contours of your face and by that marble pallor—you always wore a violet velvet jacket lined with vair.”

  “Yes, you were quite enamored of that attire, and what a good pupil you were.”