65
they go to a restaurant where Claire shames Anne, an
event often repeated (Claire shames Anne by ordering
her to raise her skirt, or lower her blouse, or by sticking her finger up A nne’s cunt); Claire shows Jean de Berg photographs in the artsy-craftsy sadomasochistic
tradition for which Anne modeled, except for the last
photograph, which is clearly a photo o f Claire herself;
Claire whips Anne; Anne sucks Jean de B erg’s cock;
Jean de Berg takes Anne to buy lingerie and humiliates
Anne and embarrasses the salesgirl by exhibiting A nne’s
whip scars which are fresh; Anne is given a bath by
Claire in Jean de Berg’s presence in which Anne is
almost drowned (erotically); it occurs to Jean de Berg
that he would like to fuck Claire —which causes Claire
to increase the viciousness o f her assaults on Anne;
Anne is tortured in the Gothic chamber and then ravaged anally by Jean de Berg; Jean de Berg goes home, has a dream about Claire, is awakened by a knock on
the door, and lo and behold! Claire has recognized her
true role in life (“ ‘I have come, ’ she said quietly”) 1 —
that o f Jean de B erg’s slave. He hits her, and she lives
happily ever after.
O f course, the above is again somewhat sketchy. I
did not mention that Anne was forced to piss in public
in the rose garden, or how she was nasty to Jean de Berg
in a bookstore (a crucial point —since she then had to
be punished), or how she fetched the whips herself, or
how she was made to serve Claire and Jean de Berg
orangeade before they stuck burning needles in her
breasts.
T h e characterizations have even less depth and complexity, not to mention subtlety and sensitivity, than the
66
Woman Hating
plot. Claire is cold and aloof. Jean de Berg describes
her:
Claire was very beautiful, as I said, probably even
more beautiful than her friend in the white dress. But
unlike the latter, she had never aroused any real emotion in me. This astonished me at first, but then I told myself that it was her impeccable beauty, precisely,
her very perfection that made it impossible to think of
her as a potential “conquest. ” I probably needed to
feel that some little thing about her, at least, was vulnerable, in order to arouse any desire in me to win her. 2
He later writes: “Her classic features, her cold beauty,
her remoteness made me think of some goddess in
exile.' 3 Here the female characterization is explicit:
vulnerability as the main quality of the human; coldness
as the main quality of the goddess. As in most fiction,
the female characterization is synonymous with an appraisal of the figure’s beauty, its type, and most importantly, its effect on the male figures in the book.
