I expected a lot of sexual content from “Justine” - after all it's by the Marquis de Sade. Surprise surprise, its sexual content has little detail to it, and almost no profanity. What's more, this time there is some apparent moral disgust at certain erotic activities, particularly male homosexuality. Was the Marquis softening up?
Not really. Granted, the author's disregard for traditional morality is very much in evidence. It's about as close to a personal philosophy as he seemed to adhere to. But the slang terms for his favorite body parts do not appear here. That may be on account of the narrator's commitment to virtue, despite all the advice she gets to corrupt herself – this is not the sort of person who would indulge in vulgarities referring to certain body parts.
At the story's beginning, that narrator doesn't even appear. Rather, it starts with two young French sisters, the daughters of a successful merchant who endures bankruptcy and has to flee to London, upon which misfortune his wife dies and the girls move into a convent. Jeanette, the older, quickly takes on a number of lovers, and over a very few years gathers riches and position for herself. Her younger sister Justine, on the other hand, declines all possibility of doing the same, and Jeanette loses track of her until one day, on her way to one of her country homes to meet her current lover, meets up with a young woman calling herself Sophie in police custody for a number of crimes that she denies guilt for. If you'll permit me a spoiler, I'll give you three guesses as to who Sophie really is. Actually, make that two guesses, after you've asked yourself how it is that the named characters are Jeanette and Sophie; where did the title character go, hmm?
Sophie's story, as was the case with much of de Sade's output, gets rather repetitive. She goes through 18th century France from place to place hearing from various people that virtue draws nothing but pain and suffering, whereas crime brings the only reward we can expect in life. Sophie refuses to believe that, and continues to do whatever good deeds offer themselves. Lo and behold, every time she does something righteous or kind – every time she helps a person in need, for instance, or accepts help from someone when she is in need of help herself – the person in question gives her extraordinary cruelty almost immediately.
As I said, this happens four or five times over the course of the story's two hundred or so pages, and would be nothing more than a seemingly endless repetition of the same or similar events except for the periodic explication of the various characters' philosophy, which seems to have been de Sade's own. It states that virtue is not only ineffective, but in fact contrary to nature. Nature, he tells us, deliberately made humans unequal. In primitive days, humans were unequal in physical strength, whereas today they are unequal in wealth and power. Whatever the nature of the inequality, any attempt to require the powerful to support the weak is contrary to nature, and therefore dangerous at best, foolish at worst. This philosophy is, of course, mighty convenient for the rich and powerful, far less so for the poor and powerless, like our narrator.
It must be admitted that this philosophy gets a little repetitive too, coming out of the mouths of just about all the narrator's tormentors. On the other hand, the torments themselves provide us with a modicum of variety – not that we necessarily want to experience that sort of variety, but you take what you can get, especially from the Marquis de Sade, who spent most of his own life being punished for his ideas and tastes but never gave them up. So our narrator goes from nightly rape to hard manual labor to regular beatings and round and round again. She's not such a superhuman as to maintain perfect faith in virtue; she's human enough to ask from time to time why God would subject her to such torment for following divine law. She never does get an answer, but that's kind of the point.
There are sequences here that resemble those that appear in “The 120 Days Of Sodom”, the other de Sade work on the “1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die”, although as I said “Justine” contains almost no homosexuality, whereas the “120 Days” contains a tremendous amount. Apart from that, with all due respect to de Sade's writing skill, there's not much here that you can't find in one or more of de Sade's other work. If that's your taste, go for it. The availability of this material for those who like it is one of the advantages to living here and now as opposed to 18th century France. I, for one, am just as glad that with “Justine”, we have come to the end of de Sade's contribution to this list.
Benshlomo says, There are some subjects that just don't lend themselves to good storytelling.
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