The Beauty of Nature and the Pastoral
(31 September 1995)
My argument in the following concerns itself with the dialogues Marquis de Sade's texts, especially part one of Juliette , form with gender, aesthetics and the pastoral tradition. My primary source for a comparison with de Sade's representations of gender is Gail David's (1991) “Coming of Age in the Renaissance Pastoral,” and I use T.W. Adorno's (1970) “The Beauty of Nature” to develop a comparison with de Sade's aesthetics.
For David there are two patterns in pastoral novels through and after the Renaissance. The first pattern exists in male-authored texts, where a male hero passes from a “masculine” urban home, to a “feminine” rural site, to return, rejuvenated and better adapted, to the urban home. The second pattern, which she identifies in female-authored texts, inverts the first pattern: a female hero passes from a “feminine” rural site, visits a “masculine” urban site, then returns to her rural home. Through both male and female patterns, the hero, who is marked by a propensity for development and change, comes to master his or her “other” side (for the male, to develop his/her “feminine” side, for the female, his/her “masculine side), and thus “come of age.”
Can we fit de Sade's Juliette to David's two patterns? Juliette is a companion text to Justine. Both texts recount the journeys of a woman through Sadean libertine sites, but while Justine traces the journey of woman as tragic victim, Juliette traces the journey of woman as heroic libertine. Though authored by a male, both have female heroes, and we can tentatively align them with David's second pattern, which she subdivides into two groups. She argues the first three of the texts she studies in the second pattern (Fanny Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen) have “happy” endings because they capitulate to patriarchy, the last three (Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot) have more “tragic” endings because they defy patriarchy and can conceive of no alternative. It is reasonable to say in this context that Justine is an extreme version of the later gothic texts David discusses, with patriarchy transformed into libertine society. It is here tempting to say that Juliette fits with the first group in that it has a kind of “happy” ending, but David's focus is a feminist one, and no feminist is happy to capitulate to patriarchy. Consequently, it is more accurate to stress that Juliette extends the gothic tradition because it does not capitulate so readily to patriarchal authority, and has a happy ending because it offers an alternative place for women, which much early gothic fiction did not.
Does de Sade also conform to the female-heroed texts' manner of inverting the male-heroed texts' movement from urban to rural to urban? Certainly, Juliette begins at the rural abbey, Panthemont, which we discover to be a libertine site, and later on, Juliette goes to the city, a where the corrupt politics of de Sade's libertines are at their most vile, where the hypocrisy of the society as de Sade sees it is to be found at its purest. However, de Sade does not offer one movement, from rural to urban to rural, he offers episodic movement which occurs ad nauseam , leaving us with the feeling that where he starts or ends makes little difference. What becomes evident is that while de Sade inverts, or subverts, David's patterns, including the pastoral dichotomy of the city as bad and the rural as good, he nonetheless allows vicarious experience of traditional pastoral categories. This is because the values of categories like masculine/feminine, urban/rural are displaced onto the difference between the libertine and victim, two immutable classes to which either men or wome n exist in urban or rural spaces. (I would add here, that, from de Sade's perspective, the tragedy in David's last three texts occurs only because they are narratives of “victims” (like Justine) who are discovering that they are unable to escape their class. Libertines (like Juliette) can find a social place, though, of course, not in the same sense as David's three first texts.)
For David, the male-hero is “propelled into the rural place by his frustrated desire for a young woman—goddess-like in her perfections and imaged mythically” (2) and in this sense the male hero is “a victim of love.” We might say the same of de Sade's heroines. Justine is a “victim of love” (or de Sade's version of it), but what we must remember is that, in de Sade's texts, the maiden is continuous with all other potential “victims,” a “class” that is, by its very nature, made to suffer according to the “love” of libertines. If the image of a dead, buried maiden functions for David to create frustrated desire in Sannazaro's text, in de Sade the maiden is buried because of (to augment) desire. The references to the underworld and Pluto in the texts David discusses, with associations of death/rebirth and suffering, exist so that death can join the gamut of romantic trials that faces the hero: the hero faces death for the sake of love, to (symbolically) bring back the maiden back from the dead, or to gain a lover who can replace the old one. Her death, which shapes his quest, what gives his life meaning. The parallel in de Sade's texts are the underground chambers, secret rooms and private meeting places, but the underworld is where we go for love. That is, the libertine does not try to remove the lover from Hades to some locus amoenus , but tries to keep her there: the underworld is the backdrop against which love, or Sadean romance, is enacted: the locus amoenus of his pastoral vision.
We can go further: since there is always another woman or man to replace the dead, it is the “idea” of death—alongside other negative or transgressive “ideas”—which is important. This is because the “romance” between libertine and victim is, for de Sade, not just physical, but verbal , or semantic . As Roland Barthes argumes, de Sade's eroticism is linguistic, and its semantic units are the posture, operation, figure, episode and the “scene” or “seance.” What really differentiates the victim from the libertine is the latter's possession of speech, for the libertine agent controls the erotic “sentence”: his power to propound the philosophy of libertinism involves the ability to direct the erotic scene, to state equivalence between imagination and physical gratification. If the traditional male-hero of pastoral texts is inflamed by the love of a pure maiden , who is so idealised (through absence, death, through the imagination) he cannot get access to her, libertines are inflamed by the “pure maiden” as a semantic unit, one of many ideals (family, religion, innocence) that can be shattered. Someone may be having intercourse, but this is not important for de Sade; what must happen is for words like “mother,” “priest,” “sodomy” and “death” to be introduced. No lover exists in Juliette to be brought back to life from the underground (chastity intact and true love found); a victim is to be taken down, and all he or she holds pure—dignity, sexuality, humanity, spirit—defiled.
David argues that what must be held violate in the heroine's journey to and from the pastoral locus is chastity, “that uniquely female symbol for the maintenance of family honor and the potential for personal autonomy . . . If a maiden would grow into womanhood or become heroic, so the sub-text reads, she must leave home, take risks, submit to trials, and protect her chastity” (28-9). This is, to an extent, the case with de Sade's texts. True libertines such as Justine prolong the appearance of chastity (for example, Madame Devergier's herbs miraculously remake the hymen). This is because fellow libertines enjoy violating virgins, and so pay exorbitant sums of money for it. Furthermore, de Sade advised married libertine women to have affairs with as many men as possible, but only to be buggered, so as not to compromise their libertinage by becoming pregnant and compromising their relationship with their husband or master. So chastity in Juliette Sade takes an odd role. Virginity, though it denotes the breaking of the hymen in sexual intercourse, actually connotes all sexual activity and sexual motives or intentions, including sodomy. So in his fictions, sexuality in a broad sense is encouraged while the appearance of chastity in a specific and general sense is maintained: we may bugger the world and be honourable if it is not known, but if it is known, we lose our honour, so the hymen is merely a diversion. The greatest libertines maintain family honour (read chastity) through power : ideally , one is so powerful that no one dare publicly suggest that chastity is absent, even if it is plainly obvious. As Delbene tells Juliette , one should make sure that one has control over others: “give it satisfaction and when you need it the public will be on your side” (83). In de Sade, then, chastity is not taken away, it is imposed by the libertine; the hymen, which is metonymic of chastity, is the symbolic interface between pastoral libertinage and the rest of society. (We might go so far as to read it as a symbol of the artifice of the traditional pastoral.)
For David, the female pastoral narrates a woman gaining masculine powers so as to “introduce her own capacity for inflicting pain . . . [I]n the alien urban landscape women develop their own aggressive weapons, cunning and deceit” ( ). De Sade certainly masculinises the woman: she is to be assertive, to seek out sexual intercourse, to be “corrupt” “tainted” a “whore,” all those things that are offensive to the conventional Victorian notion of the woman as Virgin Mother, as faithful, asexual, nurturing, reproductive. as is evident when Juliette learns to steal, lie, and abuse others. Also, since Juliette learns to do these “masculine” things in the “rural” libertine retreat, de Sade simultaneously masculinises the pastoral. Second, de Sade feminises men—if only by privileging sodomy, which underlies de Sade's feminist politics—and feminines the urban because many libertine sites, which are the various locus amoenii of de Sade's vision, are sometimes located in urban spaces. Consequently, de Sade's pastoral invokes and subverts both of the patterns David outlines: men gain feminine aspects and women gain masculine aspects, and the values of the urban and rural are partly reversed, or compromised.
We should note here that in traditional pastoral texts, the male with feminine attributes is differentiated from women, and the female with masculine attributes is differentiated from men. But de Sade's “wholes” are not merely “composed” of the two sexes, they transgress acceptable margins within the individual. Ideally, a male with feminine attributes knows when to act feminine and when to act masculine, but de Sade's “whole” figures act out inappropriate gender roles at the wrong time, especially during sex, that biological moment which usually reinforces sexual difference. The reason for this is that, unlike in the traditional pastoral which, in trying to alleviate the sense of fragmentation and alienation in the urban space, seeks for coherent, “whole” identities, the desire in Juliette is for a identity which shares the movement, the transformation, the undifferentiated and amoral flux of Nature. This is obvious when Juliette says to Delbene: “But what shall become of me? . . . I am afraid of this darkness, this eternal annihilation scares me?” (49), and Delbene assures here this darkness and annihilation in the primordial, undifferentiated mass is good, liberating and Natural. De Sade's movement between urban and rural, or between libertine and non-libertine space, then, functions analogously to the endless romantic pulps with which women are saturated to prove that being feminine reaps a reward and women always gain true love; but de Sade must prove, despite the continual reminders in the real world that we have fixed identities, that Nature's king/queendom as he sees it is still valid. for the libertine does not discover him or herself, he/she discovers only that he/she is a libertine (or a victim who functions only to serve libertines' desires). Though each libertine has his/her own fetishes, it is mere content. Each libertine speech is the same, and the goal of each libertine is to “drown in fuck” and lose his or her identity, including gender.
This issue of gender relates de Sade's “pastoral” texts to aesthetics. For David, the female pastoral involves the heroine developing through “that formative stage in a young woman's development, when she is barred from any real sexual outlet, sexual striving seem to be relegated into masochistic and compensatory channels such as these” (30). David gives the example of Sidney's new arcadia, where the heroine Pamela is “ambushed by twenty men and carried as [a] prisoner[] to Cecropia's castle,” which is an emblem of Pluto's abode, an inaccessible place, people by “Hellish monsters,” where death and rebirth are combined, in being tortured, she turns this into the self-discipline needed for mastery of the self: while not sexually excited, she displaces it into masochistic, compensatory channels.
Sublimation links, conceptually, with the notion of art as projection, that “natural process by which one's impulses, fantasies or other tensions that are unacceptable or intolerable in oneself are attributed to others” (9) or other things. Projection includes wish-fulfillment: if we are imprisoned, we dream of freedom; if hungry, we dream of food; from a masculine site we project our sense of the absence of the feminine (through ideal, mythic women); from a libertine site we project the absence of the victim (through philosophy); and from an urban site, we project the of absence of the rural. In a sense, “projection” narrates our desire, and art, and serves to make our condition tolerable by denying our mental/physical discomfort. Hence, the common explanation of the pastoral as a projection of an ideal from an imprisoning “urban” locus. Adorno's “The Beauty of Nature” provides a means of considering how de Sade's Nature compares with the “projection” of the traditional pastoral.
Adorno argues that the concept of Natural beauty was repressed by art. He says that, for Hegel, Nature was a source of Truth, an other-spirit in transition to human-spirit. Beauty of Nature was for man, with the Rationalistic logic that if our Ideals are human, then art as man-made must be privileged over nature: it is nature's deficiency to speak for Man that justifies art's beauty. Nature is pre-aesthetic, without spirit: only when man's spirit is breathed into it does it gain an aesthetic property, though at that point it ceases to be Nature. Adorno argues that nature can also be beautiful, and in saying this questions the definition of aesthetics. What is beauty? What can be beautiful? Everyday landscape is typically a combination of art, artifact and nature, inter-relating in complex ways. “Objects of art are man-made, while natural objects are not, and . . . objects of art are intended primarily to be experienced aesthetically while artefacts have essentially utilitarian functions” (17).
However, in practice the three slip and slide. Nature is, from a western view, non-human, non-cultural, non-artistic; from a, say, pantheistic view it includes the human, the cultural, the artistic; art sometimes means all human cultural activity, at other times it is high-art constructed by an elite; in some cultures, art is part of work, with the capitalist division of work and leisure, production and consumption, art is divided from work; some artworks are artefacts, some artefacts are artworks, so the aesthetic status of anything depends upon who is viewing it: “whatever the criteria of the aesthetic may be, it cannot be found by trying to delimit a special class of objects.” This is exactly de Sade's argument regarding the personal nature of desire. De Sade admits that the scope of “what delights” is broader than in traditional pastorals, and there is usually a rational explanation in the history of one's subjectivity for one's fetishes, and de Sade offers explanations for shit, urine, the penis, vagina and sperm as aesthetic objects (Barthes speaks of sperm as equivalent to the orator's art: “Saint-Fond's discharge was brilliant, audacious, passionate,” etc). Nature is not the empty page on which we project our inspirited desire, or with which we make the art which expresses that desire; in Juliette , Nature is the very blood and guts of desire and art.
Adorno argues that natural beauty is defined by its sublimity, its “indefinability”: particular cultural artifices (artwork, belief, illusion) must always contend with alternative realities or perspectives (other “artifices,” and Nature's brutal reality). Nature undermines cultural artifice, shattering the safe “reasonable” frames with which we surround ourselves. That is, when we are threatened by Nature, or History, or the world in general, as an enveloping force, we project our desires for control, for harmony, for convention, onto some artistic form. Adorno, a Marxist, is concerned to expose this artifice because of the ideological or philosophical implications, from a historical; de exposes artifice because he thinks its illusions are cowardly and counter-productive, causing misery. De Sade rigorously opposes the empty idealisation of Nature which is characteristic of the Christian pastoral, whose “empty rhetoric” denies or masks the “truths” of Nature, either through deliberate misguidance or ignorance. The metaphorical priests, as Shepherds of the Lord are thus, for de Sade, either hypocrites, liars and buffoons, or they are “false” priests, libertines who masquerade as moral but are only Shepherds to Nature. They tame no one and nothing, and herd, not cattle, but women and other fetishes, barking after them to impose some order on their desire, so as to (impossibly) systematically explore the whole, infinite scope of transgressions, of possibilities. Poggioli says that the ideal shepherd practices poverty, humility and grace in a quest for innocence and happiness, and is not obsessed with temptation nor guilt and is free from a sense of sin. Sensuality is extended to sobriety, frugality and simplicity, like the early epicureans more than the stoics and cynics that formed the ideal for Christian restraint. De Sade's is likewise a quest for happiness, for his “shepherds” have no sense of guilt or sin. The difference is that de Sade's “shepherds” are not epicureans in the original sense, which states that we should refrain from excess pleasures that will create unpleasure in the future. The criticism of later epicureans is that the best pleasures (love, friendship) will not be had if we refrain from the possibilities of displeasure, which are, in any case, impossible to predict, and De Sade's libertines, taking this to the extreme, are as prepared to suffer as they are prepared to feel pleasure. Thus Delbene says as much to Juliette. “When I refrain from interfering with their [others'/victims'] sufferings, it is because I myself have learned to suffer, to endure suffering, and alone . . . [I]t is for us to develop the strength necessary to withstand the trials she [Nature] holds in store for us” (99). De Sade thus refuses to “frame” happiness, desire and aesthetics in the way of the pastoral tradition, acknowding only the ambivalent society of Nature.
However, de Sade does reinscribe pastoral aesthetics in one way. David says that a subtext underlying Cecropia is that “unless constrained by the faculty of reason, ripened fruit will grow “rotten” and passion will untimely consume itself, spend itself on its own unbridled excess” (48). In Juliette, pleasure requires order: “Let's impose some order on the scene” “dispose the group” “arrange everything” “execute a new scene” “everything falls into place” and so on (27). De Sade frames desire, but the frame, the order, is merely a means to (impossibly) systematically exhaust the infinite possibilities, and each frame is interchangeable. As Barthes says, de Sade's semantic units can be recombined, creating endless permutations, hence indicating not only exhaustiveness (a desire to achieve all, trying to “drown in fuck” panic-nature), but reciprocity , the ability for perpetual inversion, for interchangeability, which makes it hard to pin down subject/object, victim/master. In Juliette , Nature's beauty is in its ability to transgress any limit, to un-define any definition that is posed—that is, while preaching relativism and posing his philosophy and aesthetic as “the” truth his Nature is still in a sense, if not “undefined” then “un-defining.”
So what is the nature of de Sade's pastoral? Think of it this way: the food in de Sade's texts rejuvenate the libertine from blood and semen loss so that he/she can continue libertinage just as the rural in traditional pastoral rejuvenates the individual so he/she can return to the city. In de Sade, however, the locus amoenus exists in both the country and city while at the same time it appeals to a pastoral notion of retreat, of an idealised “other” place. It can be read as rejuvenating the libertine who can then proceed to do other things in life (even the greatest libertines, while they try to become self-sufficient, rejuvenating in their own locus, must venture out to maintain a fortune, or assist other libertines, if only to maintain their libertinage); or, better yet, the city, the sites of power, the resources in the country to be exploited, are all the structural equivalent of the food that rejuvenates the “spent” libertine. In short, the locus amoenus of Juliette is a pastoral interlude that rejuvenates itself . In a sense, de Sade's pastoral interlude functions like Davis' traditional pastoral journey, forcing the Sadean heroine to integrate “masculinity” and “femininity” in a new way. For de Sade, the natural state in a state of nature is libertinage; that is, the locus horriblis is the Natural social relation, and predates social institutions. The opposition between virtue/vice, rich/poor, victim/libertine is merely an additional resource for the libertine, and the greater the extremes, the greater the transgression. The pre-social, the pre-division, is the goal of the libertine, and so the locus horriblis' greatest horror for society is that it seeks not only to transgress and/or exclude society, but utterly destroy it, to return to a point in time before any of the social institutions which defined the virtues being transgressed were defined.
But this un-doing is not merely regressive, or destructive, it is ironic and critical. In the city—where individual desires are repressed by a Hobbesian social contract—we often find an experience of mutual distrust, a paranoid outlook of suspiciousness. Since everyone is a potential criminal, or someone who can take away some of the freedom we have compromised, we should act as if everyone was a criminal and guard our reputations to minimise the possibility of other people conceiving us as criminal. Terror becomes displaced and diffused through the population with everyone a potential conspirator against everyone else. Everyone desires to be beyond suspicion, to gain power and access to the panopticon. This, arguably, is not only a negative description of de Sade's utopia, it is a condemnation of the society which stimulated the ‘need' for de Sade's utopia, and which forced him to project his particular Nature. De Sade's desire dissolves the boundaries between people but simultaneously tries to preserve the ego-defensive walls which make the crossing of such boundaries a source of anxiety. We can relate this to Poggioli's definition of the pastoral as dramatising how public duty and social mores often stop lovers uniting, passion from being fulfilled, leading to a protest against societies repression and/or an assertion of the impossibility of realising absolute erotic anarchism, all of which undermines the pleasure principle which states: “what delights is lawful.” The pastoral thus tries to resolve or reconcile the conflict between passion and social rules, but de Sade actually wins the conflict by privileging the code that “Nature's single precept is to enjoy oneself at the expense of no matter whom” (52) (see also (99)). De Sade accepts no boundary in his search for pleasure.
De Sade's pastoral, then, does not appeal to the essential ‘Nature' of anything except for the division between victim and libertine, which is merely a formal necessity of his presiding philosophy: male/female, country/city are all seen as artifice in his Nature. Nature is its own justificaton, and needs no explanation, no mediation. In de Sade's own words:
The universe runs itself, and the eternal laws inherent in Nature suffice, without any first cause or prime mover, to produce all that is and all that we know; the perpetual movement of matter explains everything: why need we supply a motor to that which is ever in motion? . . . I discern no start, no finish, no fixed boundaries, this universe I see only as an incessant passing from one state into another, and within it only particular beings which forever change shape and form (43).
Works Cited
Adorno, T.W. “The beauty of nature.” Aesthetic theory. Trans. C. Lenhardt. Eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984. (Orig. Ger., 1970.)
Barthes, Roland. Sade, Fourier, Loyola. Trans. Richard Miller. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. (Orig. Fr., 1971.)
David, Gail. Gender and Genre in Literature: Female Heroism in the Pastoral. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1991.
Marquis de Sade. Juliette. Trans. Austryn Wainhouse. New York: Grove Press, 1988.
