Visions of Sadistic Women Sade

German Life and Letters 65:2 April 2012
0016-8777 (print); 1468–0483 (online)
VISIONS OF SADISTIC WOMEN: SADE, SACHER-MASOCH, KAFKA
A NNA K ATHARINA S CHAFFNER

(U NIVERSITY OF K ENT )
ABSTRACT
Invested with both fear and longing, the figure of the sadistic woman is always
double. At once castrating executor of the death-wish and object of desire, perverter
of the ‘natural’ order and a necessary agent in the male sexual imagination, she
embodies the ambiguous attitudes towards female sexuality that precipitated the
crisis in modern conceptions of gender. This essay explores three paradigmatic
literary representations of sadistic women in order to shed light not only on
specifically modern sexual fantasies and anxieties, but also on more general
cultural assumptions about what was deemed appropriate and what was understood
as pathological feminine behaviour in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. The sadistic woman violates both latent and overt gender stereotypes in
the most radical manner, and thus presents an ideal case study for exploring the
nature and function of these stereotypes. After briefly addressing theories of female
sadism in nineteenth-century sexological and twentieth-century psychoanalytical
discourse, I discuss Juliette (1797) by the Marquis de Sade, Venus im Pelz (1869)
by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, and a selection of Franz Kafka’s cruel women
figures, in particular in Der Verschollene (written in 1912–13, first published in 1927),
which not only reveals the influence of his literary predecessors but also presents a
characteristically tragicomic modernist vision of the female sadist.
Simultan mit Angst und mit Verlangen behaftet, ist das Konstrukt der sadistischen
Frau immer mehrdeutig: sie ist sowohl kastrierende Todeswunsch-Ausführerin
wie auch Objekt des Verlangens, Architektin einer Perversion der ‘natürlichen
Ordnung’ und unabdingliche Handlungsträgerin in männlichen Sexualfantasien.
Ihr Doppelstatus verkörpert die ambivalente Sicht der weiblichen Sexualität, die
die Krise moderner Geschlechterkonzeptionen vorangetrieben hat. Dieser Beitrag
untersucht drei paradigmatische literarische Repräsentationen sadistischer Frauen,
da eine Analyse dieser Darstellungen nicht nur Licht auf spezifisch modernistische
Fantasien und Ängste werfen kann, sondern auch auf allgemeinere kulturelle
Wertevorstellungen, die weibliches Verhalten als akzeptabel und pathologisch
definieren. Die sadistische Frau verletzt sowohl latente wie auch explizite
Genderstereotypen auf die radikalst mögliche Art und Weise, und ermöglicht
dadurch eine Analyse derselben. Nach einer kurzen Darstellung von dominanten
sexualwissenschaftlichen und psychoanalytischen Theorien über den weiblichen
Sadismus, die Ende des neunzehnten und Anfang des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts im
Umlauf waren, analysiere ich Marquis de Sades Juliette (1797), Leopold von Sacher-
Masochs Venus im Pelz (1869) und eine Auswahl von grausamen Frauenfiguren in
Franz Kafkas Werken, mit besonderer Betonung auf Der Verschollene (geschrieben
1912–13, veröffentlicht 1927). Der Verschollene weist den Einfluss von Kafkas
literarischen Vorgängern auf und präsentiert eine charakteristisch tragikomische
modernistische Vision der weiblichen Sadistin.

C The author 2012. German Life and Letters
C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2012
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
182 VISIONS OF SADISTIC WOMEN: SADE, SACHER-MASOCH, KAFKA
Radically upsetting stereotypical notions of femininity founded on

nurturing, caring, passive and submissive attributes, the figure of the
sadistic woman epitomises specifically modern anxieties about changing
gender roles. At the same time, she also features at the centre of
male masochist fantasies: she is the longed-for externalised punishing
agent, granting physical respite from psychological harm inflicted by self-
lacerating superegos. As chastising dominatrix, she punishes man for
enacting, and at the same time allows him to enact, his ‘feminine’ desires,
his passive and submissive strivings, which are deemed perverse inversions
of normative masculine behaviour. An object of both fear and longing, the
figure of the sadistic woman is always double. At once castrating executor
of the death-wish and object of desire, perverter of the ‘natural’ order and
a necessary agent in the male sexual imagination, her status embodies the
ambiguous attitudes towards female sexuality that precipitated the crisis in
modern gender conceptions.
This essay explores three paradigmatic literary representations of sadistic
women in order to shed light not only on specifically modern fantasies
and anxieties, but also on more general cultural assumptions about
what was deemed appropriate and what was understood as pathological
feminine behaviour. The sadistic woman violates both latent and overt
gender stereotypes in the most radical manner, and thus presents an ideal
case study for exploring the nature and function of these stereotypes.
After briefly addressing theories of female sadism in nineteenth-century
sexological and twentieth-century psychoanalytical discourse, I discuss the
two literary representations that have shaped cultural conceptions of cruel
women most substantially: Juliette (1797) by the Marquis de Sade and
Venus im Pelz (1869) by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. I then proceed to
analyse a selection of Franz Kafka’s cruel women figures, in particular in
Der Verschollene (written in 1912–13, first published in 1927), which not
only reveals the influence of his literary predecessors but also presents a
characteristically modernist vision of the female sadist.
SEXOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON CRUEL WOMEN
The modern perversions as defined by Sigmund Freud in his Drei

Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (1905), which include sadism, masochism,
fetishism, voyeurism and exhibitionism, have traditionally been viewed
as the domain of men rather than of women. With the exception of
lesbianism, nymphomania and erotomania, the so-called perversions in
the nosologies of nineteenth-century sexologists and in early twentieth-
century psychoanalytical discourse were predominantly modelled on and
applicable to male analysands. This is corroborated by the fact that
the majority of the case-studies concerning perversion featured male
subjects. Female sexuality was assumed to be passive and reactive, not

VISIONS OF SADISTIC WOMEN: SADE, SACHER-MASOCH, KAFKA 183
strongly developed and by nature masochistic in orientation. Women

were frequently diagnosed as hysterical, neurotic and frigid, but only
rarely as actively perverse. Freud’s view on this matter is representative
of a more general pattern: defining neurosis as the ‘negative’ of
perversion, he maintains that perversion and psychoneurosis are often
encountered in the same family, but are distributed amongst the sexes
in such a way that the male members are ‘positiv pervers, die weiblichen
aber der Verdrängungsneigung ihres Geschlechts entsprechend negativ
pervers, hysterisch [. . .], ein guter Beleg für die von uns gefundenen
Wesensbeziehungen zwischen den beiden Störungen’.1
The hetero-normative constructions of ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’
sexuality generated by nineteenth-century sexologists such as Richard
von Krafft-Ebing, which substantially shaped Freud’s own theories,
generally rest on essentialist assumptions about appropriate ‘female’ and
‘male’ behaviours and qualities. The sexological conceptions of perverse
deviations, then, are intricately bound up with questions pertaining to
gender roles. The gendered nature of perversions is particularly manifest in
the cases of masochism and sadism, which became increasingly important
in the cultural imagination at the end of the nineteenth century:2 both
Krafft-Ebing and Freud consider sadism and masochism to be master
perversions. Krafft-Ebing, who wrote the seminal study Psychopathia Sexualis
(first published in 1886) and whose views on the subject can be considered
as characteristic of his period, appropriated the terms from literary
discourse in 1890. He designates masochism as the ‘natural’ condition
of women, and male masochism as a pathological exaggeration of female
psychological elements, whilst he considers male sadism as an exaggeration
of the masculine sexual drive.3 The male masochist is relegated to the
realm of the pathological not just because he obtains libidinal gratification
from pain or submission, but primarily because he reverses gender roles
by adopting a passive and thus ‘feminine’ position in the sexual act. By
partaking in acts of gender inversion, male masochists pervert normative
masculinity. Krafft-Ebing even goes so far as to suggest that male masochism
is ‘ein Erbstück der “Hörigkeit” weiblicher Vorfahren’: ‘Er tritt so in eine –
wenn auch sehr entfernte – Beziehung zur conträren Sexualempfindung,
als Uebergang einer eigentlich dem Weibe zukommenden Perversion auf
1
Sigmund Freud, ‘Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie’, in Studienausgabe. Band V. Sexualleben, ed.
Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, and James Strachey, 10 vols plus suppl. vol., Frankfurt a.
M. 1982, V, pp. 37–145 (p. 139).
2
For a discussion of the socio-political and historical reasons for the growing preoccupation with
masochism, as well as its symptomatic status, see, for example, Suzanne R. Stewart, Sublime Surrender:
Male Masochism at the Fin de Siècle, Ithaca, NY 1998; John K. Noyes,The Mastery of Submission: Inventions
of Masochism, Ithaca, NY and London 1997; and Carol Siegel, Male Masochism: Modern Revisions of the
Story of Love, Bloomington, IN 1995.
3
See Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis. Mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der conträren
Sexualempfindung. Eine klinisch-forensische Studie, 8th , rev. and exp. edn, Stuttgart 1893, p. 137.

den Mann.’4 Male masochism can thus at least in some cases be viewed as a
rudimentary form of contrary sexual feeling, as partial ‘effeminatio’.
The male sadist, in contrast, merely exaggerates ‘natural’ male qualities,
in particular the active, aggressive, penetrative and conquering drives,
which are inflated to such an extent that they acquire the status of the
‘Masslose und Monströse’.5 Similarly, female masochists merely perversely
exaggerate what is normal:6
Beim Weibe ist die willige Unterordnung unter das andere Geschlecht
eine physiologische Erscheinung. In Folge seiner passiven Rolle bei
der Fortpflanzung und der von jeher bestehenden socialen Zustände
sind für das Weib mit der Vorstellung geschlechtlicher Beziehungen
überhaupt die Vorstellungen der Unterwerfung regelmässig verbunden. Sie
bilden sozusagen die Obertöne, welche die Klangfarbe weiblicher Gefühle
bestimmen. [. . .] Als feststehend kann aber wohl angenommen werden, dass
eine Neigung zur Unterordnung unter den Mann (die ja als erworbene
zweckmässige Einrichtung, als Anpassungserscheinung an sociale Thatsachen
gelten kann) beim Weibe bis zu einem gewissen Grade als normale
Erscheinung sich vorfindet.7
Although Krafft-Ebing’s general view of women is dubious when viewed

from a contemporary perspective, based as that view is on essentialist
assumptions regarding what were then considered to be the biological
‘facts’ about women, he also tentatively gestures towards a constructivist
argument when acknowledging in passing that women’s social conditions
and in particular their financial dependence on men might be causally
related to sexual dependency: ‘Dazu kommt endlich noch, dass das
normale Verhältniss, wie es Gesetz und Sitte zwischen Mann und Weib
geschaffen haben, weit davon entfernt ist, ein paritätisches zu sein und an
und für sich schon überwiegende Abhängigkeit des Weibes genug enthält.’8
Interestingly, Krafft-Ebing has very little to say on the subject of female
sadism, which is treated in a stunted subchapter, where he argues that
sadism hardly ever occurs in women, since it is a pathological exaggeration
of male sexual traits, and that the social and psychological impediments
that prevent people from acting out their perversions prove even harder
to overcome in the case of women than in that of men. In the 1893
edition of Psychopathia Sexualis, he only cites two clinical examples of female
4
Ibid., p. 144.
5
Ibid., pp. 60–1.
6
Alison Moore rightly points out that sadism in men and masochism in women were frequently
conceived of as ‘aberrations of excess, a kind of perverse exaggeration of a gendered order of
normalcy’ in sexological discourse, as a form of ‘hyper-normativity’ which ‘parodied normal gender
roles’ (Alison Moore, ‘Rethinking Gendered Perversion and Degeneration in Visions of Sadism and
Masochism, 1886–1930’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 18/1 (2009), 138–57 (140, 151)).
7
Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, pp. 134–5.
8
Ibid., p. 140.

sadists, and instead lists historical characters, including Valeria Messalina

and Katharina von Medici, and refers to literary representations of the
phenomenon. In an extended footnote he discusses Kleist’s Penthesilea
and also mentions Sacher-Masoch’s Venus im Pelz, Ernst von Wildenbruch’s
Brunhilde and Rachilde’s La Marquise de Sade.9
Following Krafft-Ebing, Freud also defines sadism as a perverse
exaggeration of the ‘normal’, ‘male’, aggressive libidinal drives, and
initially conceived of masochism as a derivative of sadism, as sadism turned
against the self. After his conceptualisation of the death drive in ‘Jenseits
des Lustprinzips’ (1921), however, he revises his theory of masochism. In
‘Das ökonomische Problem des Masochismus’ (1924), he posits masochism
as a primary phenomenon, distinguishing between erotogenic, feminine
and moral masochism. Erotogenic masochism refers to the physiological
mechanism that allows for the transformation of pain into pleasure, whilst
moral masochism denotes the enjoyment of suffering and guilt more
generally, precipitated by a masochistic ego deriving pleasure from being
punished by a sadistic superego. Feminine masochism pertains to men
only, for Freud, too, assumes that women are by nature masochistic.
It refers to men obtaining libidinal gratification from the adoption of
the ‘naturally’ passive position of women in the sexual act, and from
abasing themselves before a cruel, imperious figure of authority. In Freud’s
framework, as in Krafft-Ebing’s, conceptions of sadism and masochism are
shaped by essentialist assumptions about gender.10 By and large, however,
Freud is not very interested in female masochists – ‘“Ein Kind wird
geschlagen”: Beitrag zur Kenntniss der Entstehung sexueller Perversionen’
(1919) being the exception – and he has nothing to say about female
sadists.
By abandoning all passive, motherly, emotional and caring impulses and
indulging in what were traditionally considered ‘male’ prerogatives, such as
selfish pleasure-seeking, cold-blooded reasoning, the sexual celebration of
cruelty and violence, domination and objectification of the other, and often
crime and even murder, the female sadist violates essentialist conceptions
of gender-appropriate behaviour in the most radical manner.11 Some critics
9
Cf. ibid., p. 89, n. 1.
10
For discussions of the gendered nature of the perversions and specifically female perversions, see
Louise J. Kaplan, Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary, New York and London 1991;
Estela V. Welldon, Mother, Madonna, Whore: The Idealization and Denigration of Motherhood, London
1988; and Emily Apter, ‘Maternal Fetishism’, in Perversion: Psychoanalytic Perspectives – Perspectives on
Psychoanalysis, ed. Dany Nobus and Lisa Downing, London and New York 2006, pp. 241–60.
11
For discussions of the fascination with femmes fatales, murderesses and warrior women in German
literature and the visual arts, and their important role in the cultural imagination of gender, see, for
example, Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius, ‘Constructing the femme fatale: A Dialogue between Sexology
and the Visual Arts in Germany around 1900’, in Women & Death: Representations of Female Victims
and Perpetrators in German Culture 1500–2000, ed. Helen Fronius and Anna Linton, Rochester, NY
2008, and Sarah Colvin and Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly (eds), Women and Death 2: Warlike Women in the
German Literary and Cultural Imagination since 1500, Rochester, NY 2009.

thus celebrate literary female sadists as harbingers of female liberation, as

proto-feminist activists who demand not just political but sexual equality.
However, the representations of female sadists to be analysed below are
much more multifaceted than such simplistic readings suggest: not only do
they shuttle between horror and fascination, male fantasy and male anxiety,
gender-politically radical and reactionary cautionary tales, but literary form
and modernist devices render even these vacillations ambiguous.
SADE’S JULIETTE: PHILOSOPHER OF SADISM
Opinion is divided on the question of whether the Marquis de Sade

(1740–1814) was a rampant misogynist or a proto-feminist.12 It is a fact,
however, that the majority of torture victims in Sade’s fictions are female,
and that his primary hate-object, surpassed only by religion, is mothers,
whom he holds exclusively responsible for perpetuating the existence of the
human race. Vaginas, breasts, pregnant bellies and infants are consequently
subjected to the cruellest tortures imaginable, whilst both male and female
anuses – unisexual orifices from whence no offspring can emerge – are
generally treated more leniently. La Philosophie dans le boudoir (1795),
for example, culminates in a characteristically atrocious act of violence
against the mother, who is sexually assaulted with a giant dildo by her own
daughter, and is subsequently infected with syphilis before her vagina is
stitched up.13 La Philosophie dans le boudoir is also the story of an education,
an anti- or rather um-‘Bildungsroman’, at the centre of which the making
of a female sadist is presented – fifteen-year-old Eugénie de Mistival, who is
initiated into the philosophy and practice of libertinage.
It is Juliette, however, the eponymous heroine of the second part of La
Nouvelle Justine, ou les Malheurs de la Vertu, suivie de l’Histoire de Juliette, sa
sœur [ou les Prospérités du vice] (1797), who is Sade’s most famous female
sadist. The 1200-page picaresque novel, which shows female vice, crime and
sadism triumphant, is the counterpart to the more famous third version of
the Justine novels, whose heroine is the archetypal, unchangingly virtuous
victim, a female Candide who is subjected to ever more atrocious crimes.
In Juliette, the concoction of philosophy and action, and the fact that
libertinage is as much an intellectual as a sensual affair, is as apparent as
in La Philosophie dans le boudoir . Juliette, Justine’s sadistic sister, who chooses
vice and a life of crime and debauchery over virtue, is admired by her male
and female libertine peers for her intellect, her capacity to philosophise
and her absolute ruthlessness. Significantly, Juliette tells her own story,
12
Andrea Dworkin, for example, embraces the former position, whilst Angela Carter advocates the
latter: see Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, London 1981, and Angela Carter, The
Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History, London 2001.
13
Marquis de Sade, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings, tr. and comp. by Richard
Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse, New York 1965.

unlike Eugénie and Justine, who in La Nouvelle Justine has been stripped
of her own voice. Like Eugénie, Juliette is educated in the principles
of libertinage by both female and male characters, and eventually turns
into an instructor figure herself, deriving pleasure from the philosophical
corruption of others. At the beginning of the novel, she embraces Sade’s
doctrine of absolute egotism, as well as the idea that women are ‘born
to fuck’, that pleasure is their only aim in life, that procreation is a
despicable act and that charity, pity and sympathy are dangerous crimes
against nature. Conducting harrowing tortures, murders and crimes in the
course of her adventures, which take her from France to Italy and back
again, she becomes at least as dispassionate and cold-blooded as her male
counterparts. Always prioritising her own pleasure and material gain above
all else, the female philosopher of evil unflinchingly sacrifices friends,
husbands, her father, daughter and finally her sister.
Female companions join the bisexual Juliette in her debaucheries,
which include torture, incest, bestiality, cannibalism, poisoning, betrayal,
infanticide, parricide and a multiplicity of sexually motivated murders.
Most important are the blood-thirsty necrophiliac Countess Clairwil and
the sorceress Durand, who are her equals in the art of evil. The women
in Juliette’s sadistic sisterhood discharge like men, take delight in nothing
but crime, murder and the pain of others, and attempt in all they do to
‘blend bloodshed and fuckshed’.14 Clairwil’s favoured victims are men: ‘I
adore revenging my sex for the horrors men subject us to when those
brutes have the upper hand’, she declares, and thus constitutes an early
version of the dominatrix-as-castrating-feminist stereotype.15 Durand has an
obstructed vagina and is equipped with a massive phallus-like clitoris, which
allows her to penetrate her victims like a man, and, owing to her skills in
mixing poisons, takes the libertine hunger for destruction to the level of
genocide by unleashing the plague in Italy. In Angela Carter’s words, whilst
Durand ‘cannot make babies, she can make corpses’.16
Juliette returns with amazing riches and social prestige from an extended
looting tour of Italy, in the course of which she encounters corrupt kings,
despots, the Pope and other socially powerful figures, most of whom she
robs and betrays, and looks forward to a life of material comfort and
limitless depravity in France. Her virtuous sister Justine, in contrast, who
is amongst those who listen to Juliette’s life story, which she tells to a
small circle of friends in her country manor, is sent out to perish in a
thunderstorm at the end of the narrative.
Upon her return to France, Juliette sacrifices her own daughter for
a moment of pleasure, an act she commits together with her former
patron and educator Noirceuil in a scene involving the torture and murder
14
Marquis de Sade, Juliette, tr. Austryn Wainhouse, New York 1968, p. 814.
15
Ibid., p. 294–5.
16
Carter, The Sadeian Woman, p. 112.

of Noirceuil’s own children, a gruesome parody of marriage, the laws

of kinship, and the stability of gender. This act of infanticide, Carter
argues, represents ‘Juliette’s annihilation of her residual “femaleness”; it
is, psychologically and emotionally, the climax of her career’.17 By throwing
her daughter into the fire and burning her alive, she frees herself entirely
from any customary human responses. Here, Carter presents the violation
of the maternal role of women as the ultimate transgression. However,
she also points out that it is a man – Noirceuil – who instigates this final
act of ‘defeminisation’.18 This leads her to a more subdued assessment of
the alleged feminist ideology in Sade’s representations of libertine women:
‘The Sadeian woman, then, subverts only her own socially conditioned role
in the world of god, the king and the law. She does not subvert her society,
except incidentally, as a storm trooper of the individual consciousness.’19
However, a lack of commitment to the greater social good is a strange
charge to level against a Sadean libertine, who is by definition a-social,
regardless of her or his gender. Why should the female libertine be
concerned with social transformation and improving the lot of her fellow
women, when disregard for the well-being of others is one of the key
principles of libertinage? All libertines – male and female – wholeheartedly
embrace the doctrine of sovereign egotism. In that respect, Juliette is
completely on a par with her male counterparts.
Whilst Juliette has been read as an unambiguously proto-feminist novel
by Guillaume Apollinaire, for example, who considers her a female role
model, the intellectual and sexually liberated ‘New Woman’ of the future
who ‘will take wing and will renew the universe’,20 John Phillips lists a
number of reasons why such readings are problematic. First, he claims, both
Juliette and her girlfriends ‘are quite simply male surrogates’, Juliette being
a projection of Sade’s male psyche.21 Although anatomically female, Juliette
‘masculinizes herself both physically and mentally’.22 This is, according to
Phillips, because her reproductive potential is underplayed, because she
is devoid of any maternal instincts, straps on artificial phalluses, enjoys
active penetration and prefers female victims. Juliette thus ‘shares all the
behavioural traits and sexual preferences of her male sodomist associates’,
and, in a more general sense, ‘displays attitudes and characteristics
more recognizably male than female: promiscuous, goal-orientated,
and prioritizing reason over emotion, she is “l’impossible Monsieur
Juliette”, a woman conceived in terms of male fantasies and objectives’.23
17
Ibid., p. 98.
18
Ibid., p. 99.
19
Ibid., p. 133.
20
Quoted from John Phillips, The Marquis de Sade: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford 2005, p. 101.
21
Ibid., p. 101.
22
Ibid., p. 103.
23
Ibid., pp. 103–4.

Gilles Deleuze argues in a similar vein that the pleasures and projects Sade’s
female heroines enjoy ‘are all in imitation of man’.24
It is true that Juliette radically thwarts gender stereotypes, and that she
embraces traits that have traditionally been viewed as ‘male’. However, this
does not (as Deleuze and Phillips argue) make her a ‘male surrogate’:
this assumption presupposes an essentialist view of ‘male’ and ‘female’
qualities, which is in itself always based to a greater or lesser extent on
culturally produced gender norms, such as the notion that all women are
born with ‘maternal instincts’. Sade puts precisely such assumptions about
‘natural’ gendered behaviour into play in Juliette, where the female sadists
in particular appear as androgynous, trans-gender creations. Moreover,
Juliette’s sadism is predominantly manifest in a philosophical attitude –
her intellect is thus privileged over her body. It is these gestures that align
Sade’s gender politics with modern conceptions and which constitute some
of his most radical transgressions. Moreover, it is only logical that Sade’s
savage attack on Rousseau’s idea of the natural goodness of man should
also include the undoing of the idea of the natural goodness of woman,
which is, for some readers, even more difficult to stomach as it blatantly
contradicts essentialist assumptions about gender. Here I partly agree with
Phillips, who argues that it is ‘less Juliette’s acts that we find shocking than
the fact that they are committed by a woman’.25
Juliette, at least on a literal textual level, is not presented as pathological,
but rather celebrated as a new type of sexually liberated and self-made
woman, who rejects stereotypically feminine procreative, emotional and
motherly attributes in favour of a pure, cold-blooded rationality and a life
of selfish pleasure-seeking. It is Justine who is pathologised and represented
as the ‘perverse’ sister, frigid and self-righteously masochistic, deluded
and stubbornly unemancipated, impervious to change through experience,
and a religious maniac. However, the narrative mode complicates Sade’s
seemingly modern sexual politics considerably: since we can never be
entirely sure what is satire, what is ironic, and thus what is celebrated
and condemned in the Sadean textual universe, even the overall status of
the sadistic and the masochistic female ultimately remains ambiguous –
they are pawns enacting a complex philosophical doctrine the definitive
meaning of which can never be fully pinned down, not least because it
is presented in fictional form and articulated by a host of characters who
often disagree with each other.
Horkheimer and Adorno, for example, interpret Sade’s œuvre as a
cautionary tale, as a stern warning against the inherent dangers of
Enlightenment reason taken to its logical conclusion. Viewed from that
perspective, Juliette is not a harbinger of female liberation, but a ghastly
allegory of the horrors of the Enlightenment project unchained: the last
24
Gilles Deleuze, ‘Coldness and Cruelty’, in Masochism, New York 1991, pp. 7–138 (p. 59).
25
Ibid., p. 110.

bastion of life-giving goodness in a corrupt world – woman – has turned

into a force even deadlier than those generated by her male peers. The
fundamental and ultimately irresolvable doubleness of his representations
and propositions is perhaps where the true sadism of Sade’s texts is
to be located: the ambiguities generated by the narrative mode keep
readers suspended between mutually exclusive interpretative choices and,
viewed in conjunction with his proto-Butlerian gender conceptions and his
alignment of female sadism with a philosophical stance, establish Sade as a
modernist avant la lettre.26
VIOLENT AESTHETICISING AND FICKLE FETISHES: LEOPOLD VON

SACHER-MASOCH’S VENUS IM PELZ
Whilst the implied readers of Sade’s texts are both men and women –
Sade famously stipulated that mothers should prescribe La Philosophie
dans le boudoir to their daughters – Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s
(1836–1895) implied reader in Venus im Pelz (1869) is more overtly male.
At first glance, Sacher-Masoch’s iconic tale appears to be a cautionary one
that warns against the dangers of submitting to fickle women. In Venus im
Pelz, the inversion of gender roles instigated by the Galician nobleman and
landowner Severin von Kusiemski, who harbours masochistic longings and
prompts his new female acquaintance, the rich widow Wanda von Dunajew,
to play the role of the dominant mistress, is rectified in the end: Wanda
finds a man who is worthy of dominating her – which is what she wanted
all along – Severin is ‘cured’ by a final act of physical and psychological
cruelty and henceforth chooses to be hammer rather than anvil, and
the ‘natural’ pattern of men dominating women is thus reinstated. But,
like Sade’s, Sacher-Masoch’s gender politics are more complex than they
seem.
First, the core narrative is framed. At the beginning, an unnamed first-
person narrator falls asleep whilst reading Hegel, and dreams of receiving
a visit from a fur-clad marble statue of Venus, with whom he philosophises
about the war between the sexes, Hellenistic pleasure-seeking and the
coldness of Northern-bourgeois Christian morality. The goddess of love
speaks of antique ‘Heiterkeit’ and free love, which, she argues, the children
of modernity, the ‘Kinder der Reflexion’, are no longer able to handle.27
As Michael C. Fink points out, the frame functions as a mise en abyme of
the main narrative, and anticipates the metastatic pattern of infection and
corruption of the imagination that is generated by narratives, paintings
26
See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, New York 2006.
27
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus im Pelz, with illustrations by Gerd Mackensen and a study on
masochism by Gilles Deleuze, Frankfurt a. M. 2003/4, p. 19.

and sculptures.28 Upon awakening, the narrator visits his friend Severin,
in whose house he finds a painting depicting his dream-Venus in furs,
which he has seen before and which has inspired his reverie. Pressed by the
narrator to relay the story behind the painting, Severin hands his friend
a manuscript, a first-person account of his experiences with the woman in
the painting, which constitutes the main body of the novella. It ends on a
didactic note, with Severin’s own interpretation of his adventures in the art
of submission.
Second, the sexual politics of the novella are complicated by various
mirroring devices and intertextual references to cruel women in paintings,
myths, legends and literary works, such as Judith and Delilah, as well as to
statues and historical figures, all of which reinforce some of the core themes
of the text: the relationship between real life and fantasy, and the infectious
impact of the world of representations on the erotic imagination. It is
no coincidence that the narrative commences with a sexual-philosophical
fantasy inspired by a painting.
Third, Wanda’s status is typical of that of fictional sadistic women more
generally: she seemingly vacillates between idealised male fantasy object
and a character with agency in her own right. In many instances it remains
ambiguous whether she is role-playing or whether she has acquired a
genuine taste for sexual cruelty.
Severin, as we learn from the embedded manuscript entitled
‘Bekenntnisse eines Übersinnlichen’, is a dilettante painter, poet and
musician, who suffers from a supersensual temperament. The fact that
he is a ‘Geistesmensch’ and a ‘Phantast’, a hypersensitive aesthetic type,
is important and forms part of his pathological make-up – his penchant
for idealisation and aestheticisation, and the relentless privileging of his
imagination over reality are the poetic ‘sins’ beaten out of him in the course
of his journey towards a post-polymorphously perverse state of sexual
maturity. Severin persistently attempts to mould reality in such a way that
it corresponds to his sexual fantasy. In particular, this includes a reverse-
Pygmalion move – he manipulates Wanda into suppressing her individuality
in favour of playing a role and subtly compels her into conforming to his
Venus ideal. In the process, he reduces her to a sexual type. He is not
interested in her true personality, but solely in the attributes with which he
equips her and which he fetishises: above all capriciousness, cruelty, furs,
Russian hats, whips and power.29
28
Michael C. Finke, ‘Sacher-Masoch, Turgenev, and Other Russians’, in One Hundred Years of
Masochism: Literary Texts, Social and Cultural Contexts, ed. Michael C. Finke and Carl Niekerk,
Amsterdam and Atlanta 2000, pp. 119–37 (p. 126).
29
On the fetishistic attraction to fur, Freud famously remarkes: ‘“Pelz” verdankt seine Fetischrolle
wohl der Assoziation mit der Behaarung der mons Veneris’ (Sigmund Freud, ‘Drei Abhandlungen zur
Sexualtheorie’, p. 65). However, fur of course also evokes animals, and thus aligns women with the
realm of the bestial and the body.

Wanda, who at the beginning appears to be genuinely in love with

Severin, explicitly allows him to choose between her ‘real’ self and his
fantasy vision of her: Severin is offered a probation year, after which she
promises to marry him if he turns out to be the man she wants. The other
option she proposes is to embody his ideal – a different, temporally limited
arrangement:
‘Sie wissen, daß ich in einem Jahre Ihnen meine Hand reichen will, wenn
Sie der Mann sind, den ich suche’, entgegnete Wanda sehr ernst, ‘aber
ich glaube, Sie würden mir dankbarer sein, wenn ich Ihnen Ihre Phantasie
verwirkliche. Nun, was ziehen Sie vor?’
‘Ich glaube, daß alles das, was mir in meiner Einbildung vorschwebt, in Ihrer
Natur liegt.’
‘Sie täuschen sich.’
‘Ich glaube’, fuhr ich fort, ‘daß es Ihnen Vergnügen macht, einen Mann ganz
in Ihrer Hand zu haben, zu quälen –’
‘Nein, nein!’ rief sie lebhaft, ‘oder doch’ – sie sann nach. ‘Ich verstehe mich
selbst nicht mehr’, fuhr sie fort, ‘aber ich muß Ihnen ein Geständnis machen.
Sie haben meine Phantasie verdorben, mein Blut erhitzt [. . .].’30
This paragraph displays a masterful example of the art of masochistic

manipulation: clearly Severin wishes Wanda to realise his fantasy, but he
needs to pretend to himself that it is her own fantasy, a paradox that
constitutes a core dilemma for every masochist. The illusion that Wanda is
acting out of her own free will is imperative, whilst Severin also wills her to
act in accordance with his strictly scripted choreography. Albert Koschorke
thus rightly concludes that ‘Masochism only functions as a mystificatory
enterprise’:31 the male masochist must at all costs invest the other with
power, agency and control, and disavow the knowledge that the punishing
party only externalises and executes his desire for castigation. Krafft-Ebing
was aware of this contradiction the masochist faces, which frequently results
in disappointments in real life: when masochists arrange for a punishment
scene,
tritt sogar oft mehr oder minder deutlich eine Enttäuschung ein, und zwar
jedes Mal, wenn die Absicht des Masochisten nicht gelingt, sich durch diesen
bestellten Vorgang die Illusion der ersehnten Situation (in der Gewalt des
Weibes zu sein) zu verschaffen, so dass ihm das mit der Procedur beauftragte
Weib nur als das executive Werkzeug seines eigenen Willens erscheint.32
The scene above also makes explicit the violence done to the woman in this
particular sado-masochistic set-up. Severin chooses role-play over genuine
30
Sacher-Masoch, Venus im Pelz, pp. 69–70.
31
Albrecht Koschorke, ‘Mastery and Slavery: A Masochist Falls Asleep Reading Hegel’, tr. Joel David
Golb, MLN , 116/3 (2001), German Issue, 551–63 (563).
32
Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, p. 100.

intimacy, a carefully controlled script over the risk that comes with the
acknowledgment of real otherness. Capriciousness – the quality he most
fears in women – is also his ultimate fetish. Ironically, whilst prescribed
and thus controllable fickleness is the key constituent in his masochistic
choreography, it primarily serves the function of avoiding the vicissitudes of
real-life relationships. It is only appropriate that Wanda ends up as a framed
and aestheticised object: literally so in the picture, and metaphorically in
the embedded narrative.33 It is, furthermore, telling that Severin is initially
in love with a Venus statue made of stone – an ideal empty canvas or
projection surface.
Severin soon fashions Wanda into his ideal mistress: he urges her to draw
up a sado-masochistic contract, in which he grants her absolute power over
his own life. Initially reluctant to treat him cruelly, Wanda gradually grows
to enjoy her role – or so it seems. Wanda is much more overtly a male
masochist’s fantasy object than Juliette, and her behaviour is to a large
extent shaped and determined by men. The Greek hedonistic ideas about
the importance of pleasure, the changeability of love and the necessity of
female autonomy, which she pronounces at the beginning, are the result of
her father’s and late husband’s educational efforts; her dominatrix stance
is adopted at the explicit request of Severin and initially only serves the
function of satisfying his fantasy; later, when the boundaries between game
and reality become blurred, she repeatedly asserts that it was Severin who
awakened her lust for domination and power:
‘Es ist keine Laune mehr!’ rief sie.

‘Was denn?’ fragte ich erschrocken.
‘Es lag wohl in mir’, sprach sie ruhig, gleichsam nachsinnend, ‘vielleicht wäre
es nie an das Licht getreten, aber du hast es geweckt, entwickelt, und jetzt, wo
es zu einem mächtigen Triebe geworden ist, wo es mich ganz erfüllt, wo ich
einen Genuß darin finde, wo ich nicht mehr anders kann und will, jetzt willst
du zurück – du – bist du ein Mann?’34
The denial of role-playing is of course a constitutive part of it, and

makes it more ‘pikant’. However, constantly calling his virility into question,
the submissive and effeminate Severin soon appears genuinely to attract
Wanda’s anger, presumably for upsetting the ‘natural’ order: ‘“Ja, du mußt
Sklave sein, die Peitsche fühlen – denn ein Mann bist du nicht”, sprach sie
ruhig, und das war es, was mir so an das Herz griff, daß sie nicht im Zorne,
ja nicht einmal erregt, sondern mit voller Überlegung zu mir sprach.’35
Eventually, Wanda turns Severin into her pageboy, forces him to wear a
uniform and changes his name to Gregor, a common servant’s name at the
33
Cf. Finke, who makes a similar argument in ‘Sacher-Masoch, Turgenev, and Other Russians’, pp.
132–4.
34
Sacher-Masoch, Venus im Pelz, p. 95.
35
Ibid., p. 97.

time, which Kafka alludes to in ‘Die Verwandlung’, a work that features

many other intertextual nods to Sacher-Masoch, including a picture of a
Venus in furs. Ostensibly developing a taste for active flagellation, Wanda
whips Severin until he bleeds on numerous occasions.
Wanda’s costumes reflect her supposed inner transformation, and her
shifting cultural alliances: initially she wears light-coloured, floating gowns
evoking ancient Greek robes, then gradually dresses in a more Russian
manner, choosing darker and stronger fabrics and imperious Cossack hats.
She comes to resemble Catherine the Great ever more closely, and chooses
blood-red colours and black for her final outfits.36 At the beginning, she
is associated with light-hearted pleasure, hedonism and sensuality, and
subsequently with ice, death and finally the most imperious amongst female
predators, a lioness.
Towards the end of the novella, Wanda delivers Severin into the hands
of her new fur-wearing, leonine Greek lover, Count Alexis Papadopolis,
a declared despot and racist, who subjects Severin to a humiliating
thrashing, accompanied by the sound of Wanda’s lascivious laughter. When
Severin first sees the Greek, he intuitively understands that this man is
capable of dominating Wanda, ‘und ein Gefühl von Scham seiner wilden
Männlichkeit gegenüber, von Neid, von Eifersucht’ overcomes him. ‘Wie
ich mich so recht als den verschraubten schwächlichen Geistesmenschen
fühle!’37 There is a distinctly homoerotic dimension to this climax, as the
Greek cross-dresses, is adored by both men and women, and clearly appeals
sexually to Severin. The final scene, however, allegedly cures Severin of his
masochistic longings:
Apollo peitschte mir die Poesie heraus, Hieb für Hieb, bis ich endlich in
ohnmächtiger Wut die Zähne zusammenbiß und mich, meine wollüstige
Phantasie, Weib und Liebe verfluchte.
Ich sah jetzt auf einmal mit entsetzlicher Klarheit, wohin die blinde
Leidenschaft, die Wollust, seit Holofernes und Agamemnon den Mann
geführt hat, in den Sack, in das Netz des verräterischen Weibes, in Elend,
Sklaverei und Tod.38
Severin’s masochism is once again related to his poetic and artistic tastes:
he sees himself as a useless, pseudo-artistic wimp, who blushes with shame
when facing the warfaring, dominating ‘real’ man; hypersensitivity and his
overactive imagination are the primary agents of his demasculinisation.
Significantly, it is not the sadistic woman but the virile man who ultimately
36
Cf. Monika Treut, Die grausame Frau. Zum Frauenbild bei de Sade und Sacher-Masoch, Basel and
Frankfurt a. M. 1984, pp. 148–9. Treut, following Deleuze, also argues that Wanda passes through
the three gynaikocratic phases outlined by Johann Jakob Bachofen, whose work Sacher-Masoch was
familiar with. See pp. 176–80.
37
38
Ibid., p. 192.

beats the ‘sin’ out of him, the sin being ‘poetry’, and who cures him
of his aestheticising tendencies.39 Poetry and masochism are linked, the
privileged imagination being the bridge between the two, and it is
ultimately fantasy that is exorcised in this scene.40 After this humiliating
but therapeutic experience, Severin briefly dreams of becoming a soldier
and embarking on real, ‘virile’ adventures, but instead returns to his ageing
father ‘und lernte, was ich bisher nicht gekannt, und mich jetzt gleich
einem Trunk frischen Wassers labte, arbeiten und Pflichten erfüllen’.41 No
longer an artist and no longer a victim of his infantile perverse fantasies,
he matures into a fully functional and socially responsible, properly
‘masculine’ citizen.
Sacher-Masoch’s narrative ends on a cautionary note, which features
an explicitly spelled-out moral, a warning against any inversions of the
‘natural’ power relationships between the sexes. The moral, in Severin’s
opinion, is this:
‘Daß das Weib, wie es die Natur geschaffen und wie es der Mann gegenwärtig
heranzieht, sein Feind ist und nur seine Sklavin oder seine Despotin sein
kann, nie aber seine Gefährtin. Dies wird sie erst dann sein können, wenn sie
ihm gleich steht an Rechten, wenn sie ihm ebenbürtig ist durch Bildung und
Arbeit.
Jetzt haben wir nur die Wahl, Hammer oder Amboß zu sein, und ich war
der Esel, aus mir den Sklaven eines Weibes zu machen, verstehst du?
Daher die Moral der Geschichte: Wer sich peitschen läßt, verdient,
gepeitscht zu werden.’42
Here, Severin diagnoses a state of perpetual gender warfare that will last
until true equality between the sexes is established. Until then, both men
and women can only choose between the role of whipper and whipped.
Wanda, who played the former role in their relationship, did so only at
Severin’s bidding, but was looking for a man worthy enough of dominating
her all along: ‘Das Weib verlangt nach einem Manne, zu dem es aufblicken
kann, einen – der so wie du – freiwillig seinen Nacken darbietet, damit es
seine Füße darauf setzen kann, braucht es als willkommenes Spielzeug und
wirft ihn weg, wenn es seiner müde ist.’43 However, whilst in her desire to
39
The irony of ‘Apollo’ doing the curing is not lost on Fink: ‘Here the curious paradox by which the
pathological craving for a whipping is cured through whipping finds an analogue: the god of poetry
(and medicine) cures Severin of poetry’ (Fink, ‘Sacher-Masoch, Turgenev, and Other Russians’,
p. 126).
40
Deleuze claims that there ‘is no specifically masochistic fantasy, but rather a masochistic art
of fantasy’ (Deleuze, ‘Coldness and Cruelty’, p. 72). Fink argues that Severin presents us with a
‘metapoetics of masochism’, as his manuscript is essentially about the mechanism of a dangerously
overactive fantasy itself (Fink, ‘Sacher-Masoch, Turgenev, and Other Russians’, p. 133).
41
42
Ibid., p. 197.
43
Ibid., p. 180.

submit to someone worthy and superior to her she is ultimately similar to

Severin, she seems to exist principally to gratify the male masochist’s wishes,
not as a perverse character in her own right. According to Deleuze, Wanda
passes through three stages: initially a hetaera, an anarchic proponent of
free love, who gives herself to whom she pleases, she is fashioned into a
dominatrix figure by Severin, and becomes ‘truly’ sadistic only in the third
phase, when she forms an alliance with the sadistic man and discovers her
own ‘virile sadistic impulse’.44 However, what Deleuze, like Holger Rudloff,
Monika Treut and even Fink, appears to miss is that the Greek and the
final whipping in fact are at the centre of Severin’s fantasy:45 from the very
start he dreams of being delivered into the hands of his dominatrix’s lover.
The final act of ‘betrayal’ and Wanda’s desertion are not merely entirely in
line with Severin’s masochistic script, but constitute its climax. Betrayal and
faithlessness are as essential in his fantasy scenario as is the whipping, if not
more so; they are the psychological counterpart to physical torment, means
to induce suffering of the soul. Before becoming her slave proper, Severin
discloses his true fetish object: ‘ich habe Ihnen schon wiederholt gesagt,
daß im Leiden ein seltsamer Reiz für mich liegt, daß nichts so sehr imstande
ist, meine Leidenschaft anzufachen als die Tyrannei, die Grausamkeit, und
vor allem die Treulosigkeit eines schönen Weibes’ [emphasis added].46
In real life, Sacher-Masoch advocated the political and social equality of
women. He supported the suffrage movement and criticised the gender
politics of his times, which, like Severin in Venus im Pelz, he held responsible
for the state of perpetual warfare between the sexes.47 Whilst writing
the novella, Sacher-Masoch was involved in a sado-masochistic contractual
agreement with Baroness Fanny von Pistor, which resembled the one he
describes in Venus im Pelz. Sacher-Masoch, who unlike Severin was never
‘cured’ of his predilection, later tried to realise the fantasy of enslavement
and betrayal depicted in Venus im Pelz with his first wife Aurora Angelica von
Rümelin, to whom he was married for ten years and whom he urged to call
herself Wanda. According to Rümelin’s memoir, Sacher-Masoch fetishised
unfaithfulness in real life, too, attempting to turn art into life not only by
making her wear furs and wield the whip, but by constantly searching for
a ‘Greek’ with whom she was to have an affair. Rümelin claims she did not
enjoy being coerced into the role of dominatrix, and that Sacher-Masoch
44
Deleuze, ‘Coldness and Cruelty’, p. 48. Holger Rudloff repeats Deleuze’s view: ‘An der Seite eines
Sadisten wird sie selbst zur Sadistin’, he writes, ‘begeistert läßt sie Severin auspeitschen’ (Holger
Rudloff, Pelzdamen. Weiblichkeitsbilder bei Thomas Mann und Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Frankfurt a. M.
1994, p. 28).
45
Fink talks about the ‘extracontractual, and really real whipping at the hands of the Greek’ (Fink,
‘Sacher-Masoch, Turgenev, and Other Russians’, p. 125).
46
Sacher-Masoch, Venus im Pelz, pp. 64–5. See also p. 85.
47
Between October 1881 and September 1885, Sacher-Masoch, who was also a philo-Semite, edited
a Leipzig-based journal called Auf der Höhe. Internationale Revue, which championed feminism and
Jewish rights. Cf. Barbara Hyams, ‘Causal Connections: The Case of Sacher-Masoch’, in One Hundred
Years of Masochism, pp. 139–54 (p. 144).

blackmailed her into doing it by threatening to stop working, to abandon

her and their children and to find other women to play the part.48 All of
these activities, she maintains, constituted violations of her nature, and
she even uses the word ‘Vergewaltigung’ to describe the duress she felt
subjected to: ‘Immer wieder versuchte er mir die Seele auszusaugen, um
sich zu bereichern. Nun aber war es anders geworden mit mir – ich wehrte
mich gegen die Vergewaltigung und in diesem Kampf erstarkte ich.’49
Sacher-Masoch, it seems, exercised in real life a form of psychological
violence similar to Severin’s, one that is manifest in the act of aestheticising
and objectifying the woman, in fashioning her into a stereotype. Deleuze
is right in asserting that a masochist could never tolerate a truly sadistic
torturer. Rather, the masochist needs to be able to mould and manipulate
the ‘special’ nature of the woman who enters into an alliance with him,
‘to educate and persuade’ her ‘in accordance with his secret project’.50
Interestingly, Severin is partly aware of the hatred and fear of women
that drive his desire for punishment: addressing Wanda, he confesses ‘Wir
sind solche Gegensätze, die sich beinahe feindlich gegenüberstehen, daher
diese Liebe bei mir, die zum Teil Haß, zum Teil Furcht ist.’51
As the boundaries between role-play and reality become ever more
blurred, it remains one of the novella’s unresolved ambiguities whether
Wanda becomes actively cruel in her own right, deriving jouissance from
her actions, or whether she simply tries to fulfil Severin’s fantasy until
the very end, possibly with the intention of curing him, as she claims in
her final letter to him. ‘“Ich habe alles nur getan, um deine Phantasie
zu erfüllen, nur deinetwegen”’, Wanda repeatedly asserts; but this, too,
might just be a strategic move.52 The reader thus becomes implicated in the
core predicament of the masochist – the uncertainty about the question
of agency: who is controlling whom? And where is one to draw the line
between fantasy, role-play and reality?53
KAFKA’S TRAGICOMIC FEMALE SADIST: VISIONS OF A SEXUAL

ILLITERATE
According to Gustav Janouch, Kafka once proclaimed that ‘Der Marquis de

Sade [. . .] ist der eigentliche Patron unserer Zeit.’54 A number of scholars
have also established Sacher-Masoch as an important influence on Kafka, in
48
Cf. Wanda von Sacher-Masoch, Meine Lebensbeichte, Berlin and Vienna 1906.
49
Ibid., p. 422.
50
Deleuze, ‘Coldness and Cruelty’, p. 41.
51
52
Ibid., p. 137.
53
See ibid., pp. 136–7.
54
Gustav Janouch, Gespräche mit Kafka, Frankfurt a. M. 1951, p. 78. However, as is well known, the
reliability of Janouch’s accounts is at best questionable.

particular in relation to ‘Die Verwandlung’ (1912, first published in 1915),

in which the picture of a Venus in furs plays a pivotal role in precipitating
Gregor Samsa’s downfall.55 Elizabeth Boa, moreover, in her excellent
article ‘Karl Rossmann, or the Boy who Wouldn’t Grow Up: The Flight
from Manhood in Kafka’s Der Verschollene’, draws a number of convincing
parallels between Der Verschollene and Venus im Pelz directly.56 A concern with
sado-masochistic dynamics permeates Kafka’s entire œuvre, and is above
all manifest in his preoccupation with guilt, shame and punishment, as in
‘Das Urteil’ (1912, first published in 1913), in ‘Die Verwandlung’, in his
torture-redemption fantasy ‘In der Strafkolonie’ (1914, first published in
1919), and, of course, in the whipping scene and the humiliation of the
merchant Block in Der Proceß (1914–15, first published in 1925). There are
also traces of Sade’s and Sacher-Masoch’s conceptions of sadistic women in
Kafka’s œuvre, and a specifically modernist take on female sexual cruelty is
apparent in a number of his works, especially his first unfinished novel, Der
Verschollene (1912–13, first published in 1927 under the title Amerika). As we
have seen, Sade’s notion of female sadism hinges primarily on coldblooded
reasoning, philosophical perversity and the rejection of the maternal and
procreative function, whilst in Sacher-Masoch’s case it is above all associated
with fickleness, unfaithfulness and sudden vacillations between coldness
and cruelty. Both of these conceptions, in particular the latter, can be
detected in Kafka.
As I have argued elsewhere, Kafka’s fictional universe is sado-
masochistic:57 many of his protagonists, particularly in Der Proceß und
Das Schloß (1922, first published in 1926), willingly prostrate themselves
before invisible sources of power, father-god substitutes, the earthly agents
of which are capricious and unpredictable. All social relationships are
precarious and subject to sudden transformations – characters can fall from
grace and slide down the social ladder for the most trifling transgressions
if these displease a figure of authority. The act of submitting to these
authorities is frequently invested with homoerotic masochistic pleasure.58
55
See Peter Bruce Waldeck, ‘Kafka’s “Die Verwandlung” and “Ein Hungerkünstler” as Influenced
by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’, Monatshefte, 64 (1972), 147–52; F. M. Kuna, ‘Art as Direct Vision:
Kafka and Sacher-Masoch’, Journal of European Studies, 2 (1972), 237–46; Mark Anderson, ‘Kafka
and Sacher-Masoch’, Journal of the Kafka Society of America, 7 (1983), 4–19; and Sabine Wilke, ‘ “Der
Elbogen ruhte auf dem Kissen der Ottomane”: Über die sado-masochistischen Wurzeln von Kafkas
Der Process’, Journal of the Kafka Society of America, 21 (1997), 67–78.
56
Elizabeth Boa, ‘Karl Rossmann, or the Boy who Wouldn’t Grow Up: The Flight from Manhood in
Kafka’s Der Verschollene’, in From Goethe to Gide: Feminism, Aesthetics and the French and German Literary
Canon, 1770–1936, ed. Mary Orr and Lesley Sharpe, Exeter 2005, pp. 168–83.
57
See Anna Katharina Schaffner, Modernism and Perversion: Sexual Deviance in Sexology and Literature,
1850–1930, Basingstoke 2011.
58
Deleuze argues that the masochist is contemptuous and insolent in his apparent obsequiousness
to the law: ‘his apparent obedience conceals a criticism and a provocation. He simply attacks the
law on another flank. [. . .] We all know ways of twisting the law by excess of zeal. By scrupulously
applying the law we are able to demonstrate its absurdity and provoke the very disorder that it is
intended to prevent or conjure’ (Deleuze, ‘Coldness and Cruelty’, p. 88).

Josef K. and K. in particular are pawns in a game they do not understand,

playthings not of the gods but of their supposedly cruel deputies. They
operate in the space between the individual and intangible constructions
promising redemption, which might or might not exist and which might or
might not be within the reach of those who seek access.
Whilst the official mediator figures are almost exclusively male, they are
often driven by lust or otherwise dominated by women.59 To mention just a
few examples: the ancient law-books in Der Proceß are of a sado-masochistic
pornographic nature; the law-student and the investigative judge have only
the washer-woman on their mind; Leni and the advocate form a sadistic
alliance in which Leni serves as dominatrix and mediator between the
advocate and his clients; the castellan’s son in Das Schloß is in love with
and debases himself in front of Gisa, the cruelly indifferent schoolteacher;
Klamm might or might not have been Frieda’s and the landlady’s lover;
Sortini writes an obscene letter to Amalia who refuses him, thus instigating
the social downfall of her family; and there are many other similar cases
in point. Whilst most positions of power are occupied by men, women
nevertheless determine their movements indirectly.
Another recurring motif in Kafka’s œuvre is perverse reasoning:
characters generate endless interpretations of events they cannot
understand. The attempt to make sense of the world logically has become a
device for self-flagellation and leads frequently into hermeneutic paralysis –
the different, mutually exclusive readings of the ‘Vor dem Gesetz’ parable
and the incessant exegetic U-turns of the subterranean creature in ‘Der
Bau’ are just two of many examples of speculative paradoxical standstill.60
Attempts to establish causality between events, to understand motives, to
decode signs, meanings and behaviours – in short, to master the world
rationally – seem a futile enterprise, and this is enacted formally in
Kafka’s deployment of free indirect speech, indiscernibly shifting narrative
perspectives and conflicting accounts of a constitutionally slippery ‘reality’.
Whilst perverse reasoning in Sade is manifest at the level of content
and in the rhetorical refutation of humanist principles and basic ethical
assumptions, the perversity in Kafka is to be located at the level of form –
what his fictions contest in a characteristically modernist manner is the
possibility of stable meaning-making as such. Perverse reasoning, however,
is the domain of both men and women in his œuvre, and is not limited to
sadistic women; rather, it is an intrinsic feature of his narrative technique
more generally. Kafka’s textual constructions as such are ‘sadistic’ in
59
The court, Josef K. complains to the prison chaplain, consists ‘fast nur aus Frauenjägern [. . .].
Zeig dem Untersuchungsrichter eine Frau aus der Ferne und er überrennt um nur rechtzeitig
hinzukommen, den Gerichtstisch und den Angeklagten’ (Franz Kafka, Der Prozeß, Frankfurt a. M.
1999, p. 224).
60
I explore this point in more detail in Anna Katharina Schaffner, ‘Kafka and the Hermeneutics of
Sadomasochism’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 46/3 (2010), 334–50.

that they incessantly stimulate, excite and then withhold hermeneutic

resolutions.
Kafka, however, also aligns the notion of sadistic fickleness with women
directly. The grotesquely overweight singer Brunelda in Der Verschollene
is one of very few examples where a source of power is, first, visible
and tangible, and, second, represented by a woman: powerful because
of her sexual allure, social status and her riches, characterised by erratic
changeability regarding her affections, attachments and moods, she is a
typically capricious force in Kafka’s universe of hermeneutic uncertainty.
She is, furthermore, one of many in a line of female figures who punish,
subjugate and physically castigate Karl Roßmann, the seventeen-year-old
protagonist. Karl resembles Sade’s Justine in that he is a prototypical victim
figure who remains unchangingly naı̈ve, upon whom experience has no
effect, and who, without any immediately apparent fault of his own, slides
ever further down the social scale, until he ends up at the bottom of a sado-
masochistic constellation in Brunelda’s service, as the slave of the slave of
her slave. It is, of course, of symbolic significance that in the ‘Teater von
Oklahama’ chapter, Karl voluntarily adopts the slave-name ‘Negro’.
From the very beginning, Karl is victimised by physically superior women:
it is telling that on his arrival in the New York harbour area he is greeted
by a statue of liberty who aggressively brandishes a sword rather than
a torch. Karl is abandoned and sent into exile by his parents ‘weil ihn
ein Dienstmädchen verführt und ein Kind von ihm bekommen hatte’
[emphasis added] – note the accent on female agency here.61 Johanna
Brummer – the name, which designates a big, buzzing insect and now
means ‘juggernaut’, already suggests her crude physical force – lures
Karl into her bedroom where she practically rapes him, he having no
understanding of what is taking place. The heterosexual encounter, about
which the reader learns from Karl’s perspective, is presented in distinctly
anti-erotic terms as an ugly, sordid and purely physical activity. Much like
the encounters between Frieda and K. in Das Schloß, one of which takes
place on a filthy, beer-stained pub-floor, it contrasts starkly with the spiritual
purity of same-sex erotic moments, such as when Karl plays with the stoker’s
hand or when K. admires Barnabas’ tight, white outfit. Brummer does the
thrusting; Karl is her passive victim, adopting what Krafft-Ebing would call
a ‘female’ position in an act that reads like a parody of the rape of a virgin:
Würgend umklammerte sie seinen Hals und während sie ihn bat sich zu
entkleiden, entkleidete sie in Wirklichkeit ihn und legte ihn in ihr Bett,
als wolle sie ihn von jetzt niemandem mehr lassen und ihn streicheln und
pflegen bis zum Ende der Welt. [. . .] Dann legte sie sich auch zu ihm und
wollte irgendwelche Geheimnisse von ihm erfahren, aber er konnte ihr keine
sagen und sie ärgerte sich im Scherz oder Ernst, schüttelte ihn, horchte sein
61
Franz Kafka, Der Verschollene (Amerika), Frankfurt a. M. 1999, p. 9.

Herz ab, bot ihre Brust zum gleichen Abhorchen hin, wozu sie Karl aber nicht
bringen konnte, drückte ihren nackten Bauch an seinen Leib, suchte mit der
Hand, so widerlich daß Karl Kopf und Hals aus den Kissen heraus schüttelte,
zwischen seinen Beinen, stieß dann den Bauch einigemale gegen ihn, ihm
war als sei sie ein Teil seiner selbst und vielleicht aus diesem Grunde hatte
ihn eine entsetzliche Hilfsbedürftigkeit ergriffen. Weinend kam er endlich
nach vielen Wiedersehenswünschen ihrerseits in sein Bett. (pp. 35–6)
What becomes apparent here, in addition to the grotesque and abject

nature of the heterosexual encounter, is Karl’s ‘crime’, the reason why
he attracts the anger of so many women: ‘Karl hatte aber keine Gefühle
für jenes Mädchen’, and she is no exception – he is and remains entirely
indifferent to the charms of the opposite sex (p. 35). He is also sexually
illiterate, persistently misunderstanding signs related to things sexual. The
‘Geheimnisse’ Johanna Brummer wishes to elicit from him are of an erotic
nature; her investigation of his heart indicates her suspicion that he is
emotionally and sexually dysfunctional.
Next in line of punishing females is Klara, Pollunder’s daughter.
Pollunder is a business friend of Karl’s rich senator uncle, whom Karl visits
against the wishes of his newly discovered relative, with whom he could have
lived happily ever after, but who expels him for this act of disobedience.
Again, Karl proves entirely impervious to female charms:
das amerikanische Mädchen gefiel ihm nicht, trotzdem er sich sie [sic]
durchaus nicht etwa viel schöner vorgestellt hatte. [. . .] Einen Rock, der
so fest wie der ihre den Körper umschlossen hätte, hatte er noch niemals
gesehn, kleine Falten in dem gelblichen, zarten und festen Stoff zeigten die
Stärke der Spannung. Und doch lag Karl gar nichts an ihr und er hätte gern
darauf verzichtet auf ihr Zimmer geführt zu werden [. . .]. (p. 69)
Klara, however, does not suffer Karl’s rejection lightly, and attacks him
physically: first she attempts to push him out of the window, and then
carries him around in her room. Karl subsequently embraces her in an
act of self-defence. Yet again, he fails to understand sexual response and
innuendo:
“Lassen Sie mich”, flüsterte sie, das erhitzte Gesicht eng an seinem, er mußte
sich anstrengen sie zu sehen, so nahe war sie ihm, “lassen Sie mich, ich werde
Ihnen etwas Schönes geben.” “Warum seufzt sie so”, dachte Karl, “es kann ihr
nicht wehtun, ich drücke sie ja nicht”, und er ließ sie noch nicht los. (p. 73)
Next, Klara uses jiu-jitsu techniques to drive Karl across the room to a sofa,
where, like Johanna Brummer before her, she proceeds to throttle him and
threatens to slap him, intimating that only suicide would be an appropriate
response to his destroyed honour:

“Wie wäre es”, fragte sie dabei, “wenn ich Dich zur Strafe für Dein Benehmen
einer Dame gegenüber mit einer tüchtigen Ohrfeige nachhause schicken
wollte. [. . .] es verlockt mich geradezu riesig Dich zu ohrfeigen so wie Du jetzt
daliegst. Ich werde es wahrscheinlich bedauern, wenn ich es aber tun sollte,
so wisse schon jetzt, daß ich es fast gegen meinen Willen tun werde. Und
ich werde mich dann natürlich nicht mit einer Ohrfeige begnügen, sondern
rechts und links schlagen, bis Dir die Backen anschwellen. Und vielleicht
bist Du ein Ehrenmann – ich möchte es fast glauben – und wirst mit den
Ohrfeigen nicht weiterleben wollen und Dich aus der Welt schaffen. Aber
warum bist Du auch so gegen mich gewesen. Gefalle ich Dir vielleicht nicht?
Lohnt es sich nicht auf mein Zimmer zu kommen? (pp. 73–4)
Rejection and lack of sexual interest are what incite Klara to physical
violence against Karl. Like Brummer, she is represented as a literally
suffocating, irrational and illegible force – Karl does not understand
anything about her behaviour.
Whilst Klara’s motivation for castigating Karl is revenge, Brunelda’s
cruelty is of a different order. The obese singer resides with Delamarche
and Robinson, Karl’s former travelling companions who have brought
him nothing but predicaments and caused his dismissal from the Hotel
Occidental, where he was working as a lift-boy. The Frenchman Delamarche
is now Brunelda’s submissive lover, and the Irishman Robinson their
slave. Clumsily endeavouring to satisfy Brunelda’s whims, they live in
sexual bondage in a filthy, crammed one-room apartment – a chaotically
chthonian, ‘feminine’ space cluttered with dust, hairs, piles of garments
and textiles, and useless trinkets. Brunelda is erratic and capricious, and
perpetually vacillates between the roles of helpless child-woman, sexual
seductress and cruel dominatrix, often breaking into shrill hysterical
screaming fits that last for hours. In her abrupt mode-shifting, she both
resembles Sacher-Masoch’s Venus-in-furs ideal and is a caricature of the
moody, emotional, highly-strung diva figure.62 When Delamarche bathes
her, for example, she complains that he sponges her either too hard or not
hard enough. The manner in which she demands her perfume, which is
at once self-pityingly melodramatic and commandingly authoritative, aptly
illustrates her shuttling between helpless, seductive, angry and threatening
registers:
“Ich werde krank von dieser Wirtschaft, Delamarche, und werde ganz gewiß
in Deinen Armen sterben. Ich muß das Parfüm haben”, rief sie dann sich
aufraffend, “ich muß es unbedingt haben. Ich gehe nicht früher aus der
Wanne ehe man es mir bringt und müßte ich hier bis Abend bleiben.” Und
sie schlug mit der Faust ins Wasser, man hörte es aufspritzen.63
62
Cf. Boa, ‘Karl Rossmann, or The Boy who Wouldn’t Grow Up’, 177–8.
63
Kafka, Der Verschollene, p. 279.

After Karl has been coerced into Brunelda’s, Delamarche’s and

Robinson’s service, Robinson tells him his tale of sorrow. As the slave
of Brunelda’s slave, Robinson has to perform menial tasks and is mostly
confined to sleeping and eating on a small balcony, but is satisfied with his
lot as long as he can dwell in Brunelda’s vicinity and voyeuristically feed
on her appearance. The high points of his dog-like existence are the rare
occasions when she knocks him on the cheek. Still completely under her
spell, he enthuses about the moment he first laid eyes on her: ‘Aber wie
schön sie ausgesehn hat, Roßmann! Sie hat ein ganz weißes Kleid und einen
roten Sonnenschirm gehabt. Zum Ablecken war sie. Zum Austrinken war
sie. Ach Gott, ach Gott war sie schön. So ein Frauenzimmer! Nein sag mir
nur wie kann es so ein Frauenzimmer geben?’ (p. 234)
Well aware of his desires, Brunelda mercilessly taunts Robinson for her
amusement: forever trying to lure him into the room when she is bathing,
she and Delamarche throw Robinson into the tub when, for once, he does
follow her siren call. She then scolds him for being shameless for days after
the event, whilst at the same time trying to seduce him back in all over
again: ‘“immer wieder hat sie gesagt: ‘Jetzt warst Du aber schon lange nicht
im Bad bei mir’ oder ‘wann wirst Du mich denn wieder im Bade anschauen
kommen?’”’, reports Robinson. ‘“Erst bis ich ihr einigemal auf den Knien
abgebeten habe, hat sie aufgehört. Das werde ich nicht vergessen”. Und
während Robinson das erzählte, rief Brunelda immer wieder: “Robinson!
Robinson! Wo bleibt denn dieser Robinson!”’ (p. 276).
Brunelda has yet another slavish devotee, her ex-husband, a cocoa-
producer who is still in love with her although the singer turned
inexplicably against him, now reacting violently and with contemptuous
disgust whenever he is in her vicinity or secretly leaves her gifts. On
one occasion, she throws a bottle at him and breaks his front teeth; on
another, she spits and tramples on and then does things to one of his many
expensive presents too disgusting for the narrator to mention. According
to Robinson, this ex-husband ‘möchte viel Geld dafür geben, wenn er so
hier auf dem Balkon liegen dürfte, wie wir’ (p. 237).
Unlike Delamarche, Robinson and her ex-husband, however, Karl
has absolutely no sexual interest in Brunelda, and remains completely
unaffected by her supposed charms. When they first meet, she forcefully
presses him against the railings of the little balcony and rests her not
inconsiderable weight on him, supposedly so that she can watch a
procession taking place in the street below. Once again, there are sexual
connotations in the scene, of which Karl is unaware:
Und unter großen Seufzern, unruhig und zerstreut, nestelte sie an Karls
Hemd, der möglichst unauffällig immer wieder diese kleinen fetten
Händchen wegzuschieben suchte, was ihm auch leicht gelang, denn Brunelda
dachte nicht an ihn, sie war mit ganz anderen Gedanken beschäftigt. [. . .]
“Wie gefällt es dir, Kleiner?” fragte Brunelda, die sich eng hinter Karl

hin- und herdrehte, um mit dem Gucker möglichst alles zu übersehen.

(pp. 250–2)
Here, Kafka’s use of free indirect discourse creates a comic effect that is
present in many other scenes, too: the pronouncements that Brunelda
is preoccupied with anything but Karl, and that her reason for wiggling
and rubbing herself up against him from behind is to get a better view
of the street, reflect Karl’s limited perspective and constant hermeneutic
misjudgements, which are predominantly caused by his persistent blindness
concerning all things sexual. As Karl remains unresponsive to her attempts
at seduction, Brunelda finally grows angry and commands him to prepare
the bed for the night.
In a later chapter fragment Karl transports Brunelda in a large handcart
covered with cloth from their former flat to another establishment,
which might or might not be a brothel. As Der Verschollene is
unfinished, assumptions about possible further plot developments and the
dénouement must remain speculative. It is the case, however, that Kafka
notes in a diary entry dating from 30 September 1915: ‘Roßmann und
K., der Schuldlose und der Schuldige, schließlich beide unterschiedslos
strafweise umgebracht, der Schuldlose mit leichterer Hand, mehr zur Seite
geschoben als niedergeschlagen.’64 Given the patterns of vengeful women
that line Karl’s path in the completed parts, and the proleptic function of
the sword-brandishing liberty-statue, the idea that Karl’s fate might have
resembled that of Orpheus, who similarly shunned women and preferred
the company of men, does not seem completely unlikely. Had Kafka
completed Der Verschollene, Karl might indeed have died at the hands of
one or more infuriated sexually rejected Maenad-figures – as punishment
for his lack of (hetero)sexual inclinations and his erotic illiteracy.
Kafka’s vision of the sadistic woman seems at first to be the most classically
misogynistic on the level of content: Brunelda, in a stereotypical and, if
compared to Sade, backward-looking manner, is associated with emotional
fickleness, irrationality, the chthonian and the body. To make matters
worse, all of this is stripped of its erotic appeal. There is nothing redeeming
about the cruel woman when she is devoid of sexual allure, as she is in
the eyes of Karl Roßmann, who can only see the abject side of feminine
physicality and the ominous dimension of female capriciousness. However,
mode and narrative perspective come into play here, too: the unflattering
vision of the cruel woman is predominantly Karl’s, and the discrepancy
between his world-view and those that are suggested by other narrative
voices ultimately produces a tragicomic effect.
64
Franz Kafka, Tagebücher III: 1914–1923, in Gesammelte Werke in zwölf Bänden, ed. Hans-Gerd Koch,
Frankfurt a. M. 1994, XI, p. 101.

CONCLUSION
Of the three authors considered here, Sade’s vision of the female

sadist is the most radical and modern in gender-political terms, as he
aligns women with philosophical and intellectual, not just emotional and
sensual, perversity, which constitutes a far-reaching attack on the kind of
stereotypical and essentialist thinking that traditionally relegates women
to the realm of the body and attests to their fundamentally irrational
constitution. Whether the sadistic cruelty that results from this stance is
ultimately celebrated or critiqued, however, cannot be determined owing
to the proto-modernist ambiguity of Sade’s narrative mode.
Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in furs is predominantly a facilitator, a necessary
agent in his main character’s masochistic fantasy. The uncertainty as to
whether Wanda has genuine sadistic agency in her own right, whether her
cruelty is ‘authentic’ or just role play, forms an integral component of the
sexual fantasy of the main character. This ambiguity, however, is preserved
formally and structurally in the novella as a whole, so that the reader shares
and, in fact, re-enacts Severin’s dilemma. Sacher-Masoch also seems, at
least tentatively, to gesture to an awareness of the violence inherent in
the act of aestheticising and manipulating an object of desire to make
it fit into a stylised fantasy script. This can be read as a meta-comment
on the mechanisms of sexual fantasy, and, by implication, literature more
generally, as both are the product of a rigidly formalising imagination,
which by definition also violates that which it shapes aesthetically.
Kafka, finally, takes the ambiguity created by formal devices such as mode
and narrative perspective to new extremes. In the eyes of the sexually
dysfunctional beholder Karl, the erotic allure of the sadistic woman has
become incomprehensible and grotesque. Indeed, Kafka’s curiously a-
sexual modernist portrayal of the sadistic woman tends much more than
those of his predecessors towards the comic rather than the tragic. Stripped
of her sexual appeal, the sadistic woman has become an absurd character,
but has not entirely lost her menacing power and her association with
death, as the structural instabilities of emotional attachments and the
consequences of upsetting figures of authority frequently lead to fatal
outcomes in Kafka’s cosmos.


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German Life and Letters 65:2 April 2012

0016-8777 (print); 1468–0483 (online)

VISIONS OF SADISTIC WOMEN: SADE, SACHER-MASOCH, KAFKA

A NNA K ATHARINA S CHAFFNER

Radically upsetting stereotypical notions of femininity founded on

SEXOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON CRUEL WOMEN

The modern perversions as defined by Sigmund Freud in his Drei

strongly developed and by nature masochistic in orientation. Women

Although Krafft-Ebing’s general view of women is dubious when viewed

sadists, and instead lists historical characters, including Valeria Messalina

thus celebrate literary female sadists as harbingers of female liberation, as

SADE’S JULIETTE: PHILOSOPHER OF SADISM

Opinion is divided on the question of whether the Marquis de Sade

of Noirceuil’s own children, a gruesome parody of marriage, the laws

bastion of life-giving goodness in a corrupt world – woman – has turned

VIOLENT AESTHETICISING AND FICKLE FETISHES: LEOPOLD VON

Wanda, who at the beginning appears to be genuinely in love with

This paragraph displays a masterful example of the art of masochistic

‘Es ist keine Laune mehr!’ rief sie.

The denial of role-playing is of course a constitutive part of it, and

time, which Kafka alludes to in ‘Die Verwandlung’, a work that features

submit to someone worthy and superior to her she is ultimately similar to

blackmailed her into doing it by threatening to stop working, to abandon

KAFKA’S TRAGICOMIC FEMALE SADIST: VISIONS OF A SEXUAL

According to Gustav Janouch, Kafka once proclaimed that ‘Der Marquis de

particular in relation to ‘Die Verwandlung’ (1912, first published in 1915),

Josef K. and K. in particular are pawns in a game they do not understand,

that they incessantly stimulate, excite and then withhold hermeneutic

What becomes apparent here, in addition to the grotesque and abject

After Karl has been coerced into Brunelda’s, Delamarche’s and

hin- und herdrehte, um mit dem Gucker möglichst alles zu übersehen.

Of the three authors considered here, Sade’s vision of the female

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