#Rhetoric of the Sublime

[ivan-fyodorovich-k]

I am going to attempt to describe a phenomenon that I think will be familiar to you and I want to try to give it a name.

It is a style of writing that has taken shape over the course of our time on this platform, a product perhaps of our high proportion of theater/art kids and the capacity of the platform to support longform text.

I'm going to propose the name "tumblr gothic" for what is, I think, a distinctive writing style. This is the melodramatic register tumblr uses when it wants to convey to you how serious, how scary, how truly horrifying something is. It uses a lot language like "no wait" and "you don't understand," describing in the purplest prose how seriously you need to take [thing]. [Thing] can be the latest natural disaster, the latest illness, the latest fire, the latest protest, the latest movement, the latest government misdeed, but whatever it is, nobody is talking about [thing], and nobody knows just how serious [thing] is. Often two or three or five people will chime in. At least one will be an expert, one will be a first- or secondhand witness, all will write in exactly the same register.

tumblr gothic.

[fideidefenswhore]

the take that we shouldn’t consider AB a feminist (and yes, that’s an anachronism, fwiw) because she was unpopular amongst women in her time is… very strange. like, that is not the thermometer by which to judge whether a woman or, really anything, was feminist (whether or not the person or whatever is well-beloved or popular amongst women… if it were, the real housewives franchise could be considered a feminist entity)

[beansie-mcgee-writes]

The Mystical Mountains of Appalachia

By Jennifer “Beansie” Gorham My dad comes from here and his dad and his momma… All the way back into the 1800s and they have quite the story to tell. Because there in the hollows are the familial roots but also the rot that can spread if left too long untended… Pale whisps of mist in the guise of smoke gracefully blanket over the smoothing edges of ancient mountain tops that, since their…

[radioactivewisdom]

“Men have sacrificed and crippled themselves physically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect women and children. None of their pain or achievement is registered in feminist rhetoric, which portrays men as oppressive and callous exploiters. 

Let us stop being small-minded about men and freely acknowledge what treasures their obsessiveness has poured into culture. We could make an epic catalog of male achievements, from paved roads, indoor plumbing and washing machines, to eyeglasses, antibiotics and disposable diapers. We enjoy safe, fresh milk and meat, and vegetables and tropical fruits heaped in snowbound cities. When I cross the George Washington Bridge or any of America’s great bridges, I think: men have done this. Construction is a sublime male poetry. When I see a giant crane passing on a flatbed truck, I pause in awe and reverence as one would for a church procession. 

What power of conception, what grandiosity: these cranes tie us to ancient Egypt, where monumental architecture was first imagined and achieved. A contemporary woman clapping on a hard hat merely enters a conceptual system invented by men. If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.” 

― Camille Paglia, "Sexual Personae" 1990

Just say you love p*nis, no need for the lengthy and easily disprovable quote.

[zerogate]

I am sure that many readers can relate if I say that learning about Byzantium feels like discovering the sunken civilization of Atlantis. You can read a thousand books about the “Middle Ages”, even do a Ph.D. in “Medieval Studies” (as I did), and hardly ever hear about Byzantium. And then, one day, when you thought you knew your basics about the turn of the first millennium AD, you read something like this:

At the turn of the first millennium the empire of New Rome was the oldest and most dynamic state in the world and comprised the most civilized portions of the Christian world. Its borders, long defended by native frontier troops, were being expanded by the most disciplined and technologically advanced army of its time. The unity of Byzantine society was grounded in the equality of Roman law and a deep sense of a common and ancient Roman identity; cemented by the efficiency of a complex bureaucracy; nourished and strengthened by the institutions and principles of the Christian Church; sublimated by Greek rhetoric; and confirmed by the passage of ten centuries. At the end of the reign of Basileios II (976-1025), the longest in Roman history, its territory included Asia Minor and Armenia, the Balkan peninsula south of the Danube, and the southern regions of both Italy and the Crimea. Serbia, Croatia, Georgia, and some Arab emirates in Syria and Mesopotamia had accepted a dependent status.

[...]

Byzantine revisionism starts by putting Constantinople back on the map. Throughout the Middle Ages, it was by far the largest city in the Christian world. According to Runciman, its population reached one million in the twelfth century, counting the suburbs. Its wealth deeply impressed all newcomers. In the twelfth-century French roman Partonopeu de Blois, Constantinople is the name of Paradise, a city of gold, ivory and precious stones. Robert de Clari, who was among the crusaders who sacked it in 1204, marveled: “Since the creation of this world, such great wealth had neither been seen nor conquered.” Up to that point, Constantinople was the greatest international trade center, linking China, India, Arabia, Europe and Africa.

Constantinople must also be restored to its proper place in the timeline. Anthony Kaldellis writes:

Byzantine civilization began when there were still some people who could read and write in Egyptian hieroglyphics; the oracle of Delphi and the Olympic games were still in existence; and the main god of worship in the east was Zeus. When Byzantium ended, the world had cannons and printing presses, and some people who witnessed the fall of Constantinople in 1453 lived to hear about Columbus’s journey to the New World. Chronologically, Byzantium spans the entire arc from antiquity to the early modern period, and its story is intertwined with that of all the major players in world history on this side of the Indus river.

-- Laurent Guyénot, Byzantine Revisionism Unlocks World History

[whencyclopedia]

The Idea of the Sublime in the Enlightenment

During the European Enlightenment, a concept was developed in philosophy and aesthetics called the sublime. In the arts, literature, and the works of intellectuals, the sublime referred to the awe-inspiring capacity of nature and beauty, characteristics that artists and thinkers sought to replicate in their own work and even to apply to ethics.

The concept of the sublime involves the inherent conflict which comes from an appreciation of beauty with a feeling of awe, astonishment, and incomprehension of the eternal. Philosophers discussed this conflict and suggested that our aim should be the harmonious blending of reason with emotion, and so the sublime became an element of the great shift during the Enlightenment which saw reason come to replace religion as the dominant driving intellectual force.

Origins of the Sublime

The idea of the sublime was revitalised during the Enlightenment thanks to the translation of an ancient text by Boileau in 1672. This text, only rediscovered in 1554, was On the Sublime, then thought to have been written by Longinus, a Greek author of the 1st century CE. J. W. Yolton summarises Longinus' thoughts on the sublime as:

…that quality which gives a distinctive power to works of art and literature; it rest primarily on grandeur of ideas and the capacity for strong emotion, supplemented by certain features of rhetoric; sublimity is the echo of a noble mind and a passionate heart.

(508)

Although he is primarily concerned with poetry and oratory, Longinus also writes about the sublime in nature and how impressive natural features and phenomena like wide plains, rugged mountains, and powerful rivers can bring out in all (or most) of us a pleasure at beholding them and a clearer sense of and proximity to the divine.

The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy gives the following definition of the sublime: "The sublime is great, fearful, noble, calculated to arouse sentiments of pride and majesty, as well as awe and sometimes terror" (462-3). The sublime then creates a strange mixture of feelings like pleasure, awe, anxiety, personal insignificance, and even fear and terror; think of one's mixed emotions, for example, when standing above a precipice gazing down on a majestic Norwegian fjord.

The idea of the sublime in nature and the arts would capture the imagination of many writers, artists, and philosophers during the Enlightenment. The sublime, with its focus on immense grandeur and unfathomable meanings, seemed at odds with the progress being made by science where discovering nature's laws and order were the objectives of knowledge. Philosophers attempted to reconcile this conflict between emotion and reason and to show that the mind can indeed triumph over nature. A wide range of Enlightenment thinkers considered the sublime as part of their philosophy but here, in the interests of space and clarity, we will consider only three.

Continue reading...

[slumberwall]

The Hatred of Women

“Men have sacrificed and crippled themselves physically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect women and children. None of their pain or achievement is registered in feminist rhetoric, which portrays men as oppressive and callous exploiters.

"Let us stop being small-minded about men and freely acknowledge what treasures their obsessiveness has poured into culture. We could make an epic catalog of male achievements, from paved roads, indoor plumbing and washing machines, to eyeglasses, antibiotics and disposable diapers. We enjoy safe, fresh milk and meat, and vegetables and tropical fruits heaped in snowbound cities. When I cross the George Washington Bridge or any of America’s great bridges, I think: men have done this. Construction is a sublime male poetry. When I see a giant crane passing on a flatbed truck, I pause in awe and reverence as one would for a church procession.

"What power of conception, what grandiosity: these cranes tie us to ancient Egypt, where monumental architecture was first imagined and achieved. A contemporary woman clapping on a hard hat merely enters a conceptual system invented by men. If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.”

― Camille Paglia, "Sexual Personae" 1990

[zoiched]

just a (not so) little rant of mine about canonxoc pairings

(A quick clarification on the beginning: all of that said below DOES NOT APPLY to those who just see people shipping their OCs with canon characters and walk away in silence cuz that’s not just their cup of tea. I rly appreciate that guys)

TW: mentions of really harsh bullying

I grew up on 2010s fandom community and some of ya could possibly remember that those times shipping canonxoc pairings was something of big mauvais tone and a reason to drown a person in public shame, bully them and give their OC a Mary-Sue label just because they are shipped with canon char, and thank god fandom community grew up from it, weeeeell, almost.

I myself am Russian and I, therefore, come from Russian fandom community, where in some places and in some fandoms, canonxoc pairings are still said mauvais tone and cringe, and every OC shipped with canon gets called a Mary-Sue in instant just because of that. I’m a big canonxoc/selfshipping fan and apologist, and I myself have an OC to ship with canon for each of my fandoms. And because of my constant fear of being mocked and harassed by canonxoc and fandom OCs haters, I never posted my art and fanfics anywhere/never commissioned artists to draw my canonxoc ships for a long time cuz I KNEW haters would come for me (cheers for my nowadays friends from whom I get support and appreciation with my fandom OCs and canonxoc pairings, you guys and girls are the best, love ya). I felt ashamed and wrong for my desires. Geez, I was mocked for having a fandom OCs canonxoc shipping even around my friends, and one of them actually BULLIED me for that, saying “gurl you need yourself a man or a woman to have some descent fuk with them so you could forget your narcissistic(?!) desire to insert your OCs into canon and make them smash with canon chars, it’s just your desire to romantic and smexual practice that makes you keep doing so” (DAFUQ??? Even if we are accepting this stinky rhetorics just for a moment, then what’s the difference between shipping canonxoc and shipping canonxcanon or ocxoc if we are sublimating our romantic and smexual desires anyway???)

It took me to 10 years or so to become a grown ass 25yo woman who obtained an ability to shoo away those angry toddlers who are trying to be a self-proclaimed morality police and put me to shame because I have a fandom OCs and canonxoc ships. You don’t like it that much you come to bully me, call me cringe and call my OCs a Mary-Sues for being a fandom OCs/bring in ship with canon chars? Oh you sweetie pie, why dontcha write to Hirohiko Araki/Brendon Small/Nikolay Dybovsky/Thomas Grip/any other person created my fav piece of media to let them know that my stuff is cringe so they could write me a prohibition warrant for my canonxoc ships then? Or maybe you are just pissed off to see my female OCs being in shipping with male canon chars because of your internal misogyny? (I’m not a radical feminist, God forbid, but I’m here for all cis/cishet women who love man and are called “boring straights” and “normies” for such a desire). Or you want to stick on canon of the media like it’s holy? Or you just want to assert yourself in any ways possible? Lift up your self-esteem by accusing something you consider “bad and wrong”? Solve those problems anywhere else and not in my and any others canonxoc shippers expense. Grow up.

(I found this picture I don’t remember exactly where, so if you an author, DM me so I could credit you or remove this picture if you want me to)

[luxe-pauvre]

Our modern use of the word [sublime] suggests a kind of impeccable bliss. A sunset, a symphony, or a certain style of stupor. There is an enervated, narcotic air about the word which is at odds with its original sense. It derives from sub (‘up to’) and limen (‘threshold’), and thus evokes a sense of the mind being pulled to the limits of what it can experience or comprehend. For that reason, the Sublime was distinguished from the merely Beautiful in that the former was thought to contain a sort of terror. Awe is a helpful notion to more accurately conjure the mood. The word ‘Sublime’ was first presented around the first century AD by the philosopher and critic Longinus, to describe a style of rhetoric that overwhelmed its listeners. There is a sense of conflict, even violence, central to the idea; as the notion expanded and waned in later centuries, this dramatic element remained attached. Around the eighteenth century we in the West became particularly interested in how the natural world, in its vast and overpowering forms, offered us the experience of this capitalised Sublime. The worlds of painting, poetry and music grew captivated by the concept, and the resulting Romantic movement was drenched in the project to sublimate oneself into the grand swell of Nature. The Irish aesthetician and politician Edmund Burke wrote extensively about the Sublime around that time, drawing on these components of fear and trembling: he conceived of the Sublime as an emotional state characterised by a combination of terror and distance. Its exhilarating aspects could be explained by the fact we have stepped back from something that would be ‘alienating and diminishing’ were we to get too close. A certain remoteness from otherwise dangerous mountains, for example, gives them an aesthetic quality that brings pleasure, but one that is inseparable from the lethal potential of being caught among their treacherous and overhanging rocks. We seem to absorb into ourselves something of the greatness we perceive, Burke felt, as we experience the Sublime. In other words, although we are overwhelmed and diminished by it, we also swell in order to accommodate its size. We wander the Alps with Wordsworth, through his Prelude, finding that the mighty Sublime is not to be discovered in Nature as much as in the ‘unfathomed vapour’, the ‘awful Power’ of our own imagination. When we consider the stars on a clear night, we might feel the sweet aggrandisement which paradoxically attaches itself to how small they make us feel. We shrink and lose ourselves in something bigger, and thus we feel ourselves expand. As Philip Shaw points out in his survey of changing notions of the Sublime, our I feels disoriented, as does our searching eye: neither is certain where to place itself as it encounters the dizzying infinite.

Derren Brown, A Book of Secrets: Finding Solace in a Stubborn World

[mali-umkin]

I go to mass every Sunday now, and I always have to mentally prepare for what is going to be the most insane hour of emotional turmoil - feeling tears of joy run down my cheeks when the choir reminds me just how sublime and ethereal human art can be - looking at people in utter disbelief when they start saying God brings peace when tempest strikes and I wonder if we live in the same world and how deep in theology I should dig to actually find any of these 'human self-agency' arguments acceptable - feeling my blood boil in rage when people happily chant about their submission and beg to not be forsaken by their God - experiencing fear when they say 'life everlasting' and 'world without end' - feeling disgust when the King is mentioned and people start apologising for existing - pondering over the Bible while people pray in silence and thinking that rhetorically it holds many similarities with great epics and Irish mythology and what if the Fiana was our role model - observing people's smiles as they pray with their eyes closed and finding it an agreeable sight despite my 3rd République convictions - delighting in the rhymes of the Common Book of Prayer and internally rebelling over most of what it says - back to tears because the organ, choir and candles create an ensemble that I can only define as belonging to the category of Kantian Sublime and I suppose it is a good kind of language for those of us fierce atheists who think the divine is secular -

[housewarningparty]

.

I'll be honest with you dawg I don't think Shirley Jackson was a lesbian I don't think she was attracted to women. Certainly there are lesbian characters and themes in her work but I believe pretty strongly that those were interesting to her for their rhetorical value as symbols of freedom/autonomy from men. I think she craved close relationships with women, but if you know anything about her life you know that it has a lot to do with how she felt isolated (her famously agonized marriage + her famously agonized relationship with her mother + the fact that most of her social circle was compromised of her husband's friends)

I mean I definitely think that part of the reason lesbians and bi women connect so strongly to Jackson's work IS her preoccupation with female relationships and the way attraction to women/disconnect from men sometimes plays a role in that. But I don't think that was the author expressing a sublimated desire for women. I truly think she used queer themes to explore a sense of personal/cultural isolation.

Anyway whatever lingering questions I had about the matter were pretty soundly put to bed by A Rather Haunted Life. I think the record left behind is pretty consistent. Whatever!

[elusivedaydream]

Hymn to Duke Aim

Ave the Great Strong Duke Aim

You are Master of the Flame

From the Desert Winds of the South you arrive

Your nature of Solar Fire helps us to thrive

Body of a man with three heads you have

A serpent is one, yet another a calf

A man with two stars on your forehead

On a viper with firebrand, a dutiful warhead

Bestower of wit

Rhetoric

Writing skills and rhyme

Your creative inspiration is divinely sublime

Remover of every creative block

In personal matters, the truth you unlock

The number of officials you have is twenty-six

Approached with respect, you return with friendliness

Oh Duke Aim, most numinous muse

With your ever-burning flame please ignite my fuse

[grandhotelabyss]

Favorite Yeats poem? I can't get enough of him.

"Easter, 1916." He does everything he could do there; it's the greatest political poem in English of the 20th century. First, simply from a "craft" perspective, there is the propulsive but unobtrusive accentual (but not syllabic) meter, the pulsing three-beat line. Then the deceptively simple abab rhyme scheme—except that the even lines only ever off-rhyme. Sound mimics sense in this mingling of the beautiful and the terrible: our march song is never quite in perfect rhythm. We can never quite get the steps right as we march toward our sublime deaths. This isn't "The Charge of the Light Brigade."

For one thing, it's not public rhetoric, or not just public rhetoric. There is the quiet, personal opening of the first stanza, the "I" in its humble self-deprecatory historical setting, when we know what modern life and all its calculating mediocrity meant for Yeats. Then, enacting in language the transformation it proposes of public life, the first appearance of the refrain lifts the poem into epic.

In the second stanza, we find an epic catalogue of the flawed vessels of historical force, made more poignant by a knowledge of what it probably took for Yeats to praise MacBride ("a drunken, vainglorious lout") who had, in his mind, robbed him of Maud Gonne. Small-nation politics lends itself to such gossip. "Great hatred, little room," as he had it elsewhere. But that farce is past. Comedy has turned to tragedy in the national epic of the uprising.

But this, again, is poetry: not propaganda. You don't write the best political poem of the 20th century by celebrating emancipatory violence without subtlety, without nuance, without irony. Here we have the irony of a conservative revolution—again, recall the etymology of Tory—revolution not as the forward movement of history, as the benighted progressive thinks, but rather as the obdurate force that blocks history from engulfing the whole of the lifeworld. He sounds oddly like Benjamin here, as well as like Eliot, showing how vain it is to explain the most serious art and thought by shallow labels like left and right. "Enchanted" as it is, though, the stone is also opposed to nature, to the "living stream" figured most vividly in the prospective mating of hen and cock. As in "Sailing to Byzantium," another favorite, Yeats is worried about the conflict between the art and the life, between raw life and the artifice of eternity. The refrain does not appear, the poem's own flow broken.

Our bard, who as a member of the Protestant upper class favored negotation with England rather than violent revolt, expresses misgivings. Homer didn't have misgivings, for all that Yeats would later want to model himself on Homer's "unchristened heart." He has misgivings about more than just resistance tactics. He identifies with women, he fears for the nation's children, for the nation's very soul. The trope of the stone becomes disenchanted, no longer the Arthurian romance's source of political power but the Old Testament's hardness of heart, inviting divine chastisement. The cause of the revolutionaries itself comes into question for a moment. Was their violence part of the vanity, part of the "motley," with which the poem began? Have we really ever left the comedy, the 18th-century farce? But the motive spiritualizes the event: "excess of love." We think of Antigone, we think of Lear. Tragic heroism is still heroism. And in conclusion, the epic catalogue proper, before the refrain comes around again for our cyclic poet, itself changed utterly: "terrible beauty" no longer a political slogan but the aesthetic credo that will guide the rest of the poet's work out of the bee-loud glade and the Celtic Twilight and into "the desolation of reality," "gaiety transfiguring all that dread," the gaiety that is the achievement of form in the midst of terror.

[livingobserver]

As was expected, I have been loosing Followers as I changed gears to include sharing what I might just otherwise tuck away in my "Likes". Which I do not share openly, for one reason or another. It is unavoidable that the "Likes" section be of most interest to Data Collection. That being what it is. I'm still not sharing a lot of what I "Like" on Tumblr. But I am sharing MORE of what I "Like" and that...., as expected has chased a few off and probably more will Follow. It is of little matter except that those that remain are those I would most want to share Tumblr with. I hope not to offend and chase YOU off. But as I have said and warned, I am not going to concern myself with hair trigger sensitivities. I just don't care to deal with that anymore. Truth being..., that I could enjoy Tumblr just in Following and not have any Followers. But it is so much better to engage with others that are and continue to Follow. Your support and criticism, is of value. The Feedback in Likes and Re-Blogging is very interesting and I do watch the "Activity" closely. I see you and how you feel about what I am sharing. Maybe, as much as the Data Analyzers do. So..., anyway thanks for not jumping ship just yet, as others are leaping overboard. Very Interesting in any regard. Thanks for being patient as I expose myself more thoroughly. C'mon it ain't THAT bad. Is it. (rhetorical questions do not require a question mark)

Yeah this is much as I'm ever going to expose myself anywhere on the NET. So relax I'm not gonna go crazy on ya'. :) But you will see more of the Beauty I see in all things. The fascination I enjoy, without inane fear, in the "Dynamic Sublime" of Living Observation.

[lafcadiosadventures]

Madame Putiphar Readalong. Book Two, Chapter XVII:

A violent, claustrophobic chapter where the home becomes a jail (warning: this chapter deals extensively with sexual coercion and attempted rape)

Jean-Honoré Fragonard, preliminary sketch for The Bolt

Once again the what is pretty simple, and it’s all about nobles and power abuse:

The marquis play acts to fool Debby into letting him into her house.

He has Patrick arrested just to get him out of the way because he plans to force his wife into having sex with him and wants to be undisturbed.

The How:

It’s worth noting how supremely uninterested in the glamour of the seducer/libertine Borel is. Villepastour is always portrayed as a pathetic and ridiculous little manipulator. We have been told he’s handsome. But when we “see” him, nothing about him is appealing. His ridiculous way of speaking and his theatrical antics overpower that. He's not shown as an initiator/debunker of the puritanical bourgeois morality he accuses Debby of (she is an aristocrat, but he forgets that because in being Irish, or rather, not being French, she is provincial. A "savage" even...) He is no Dolmancé, freeing the nubile young woman from the chains of catholicism and the constraints of an unnatural sense of morality. He is a manipulator who uses the excuse of liberation as a tool (one the tools in his rather clumsy, tbh! rhetorical arsenal)

We could say Villepastour mimics the threefold strategy of the Knights in the prologue. A bit like the devil trying to tempt Christ in the desert with new strategies when he’s rebuked, he too changes his approach. The first is what he tried at mass: guilt tripping Deborah because she’s too beautiful. She is to blame for that beauty. He is a victim of her charms and in deep pain, etc. So: he lies to break into her home, but it’s all her fault, really, he was driven to it by a madness (which the narrator denies). That technique weirdly, almost works. Borel uses some “common sense” stereotypes about how women’s minds work -which is honestly beneath his better creative critical thinking moments- bc all women are vain and touched when any handsome man just drops to his knees and confesses their love, etc. However. Things get interesting re: Debby’s characterization again FAST. Since Villepastour is overly confident when Deb asks him to stand, she quickly recovers her cool and dryly asks him to leave because he annoys her.

Assorted potentially interesting things:

Villepastour calls Deborah a “sublime metamorphoses” (remember the song of the nightingale welcoming her to France, and the possibility of it linking her with Philomela?)

Villepastour is compared to a wolf, same as Patrick was before. It doesn’t seem terribly significant, just a standard allusion to the wolf as an aggressor of innocence -> the flock of sheep with its religious implications. I’m just trying to see if the wolf metaphor is consistently positive in the novel -the wolf like attitude is what drove Patrick to freedom earlier- but it doesn’t seem to be so.

Villepastour weaponizes Deborah’s fear of ruining her reputation against her. He knows she fears to call out for help because potentially people could think badly of her. The fact that her neighbours wouldn’t believe her story is very likely (she is foreign, she is very beautiful, she is not very well known yet since she arrived in France only a few months ago... she might not have solid bonds with her neighbours yet, and we know victim blaming is a thing)(Maybe Debby would be less reluctant to shout out nowadays,,, but  I don’t need to say victim blaming is still a thing and a victim could still prefer to suffer alone than endure public scrutiny)

He locks the doors and the windows. She is a prisoner inside her own home (right now, the home of her dreams which was a promise of independence and freedom and a new life has become a jail.... Borel does not understand the home as a safe haven... social evils can permeate it’s walls and it can became as hellish a dungeon than those in the scariest cell at Château d’If or Bicêtre or any of the bagnes)

Villepastour persists: the sooner she lets him rape her, the better for her since he can leave the house while it’s still dark and her reputation will be unharmed. He then uses passion and the revealing of unknown pleasures as a bait, he claims to see she is aroused by him. (but, needless to say,  even if that were true --Debby does not deny it-- it’s irrelevant, she has chosen not to sleep with him and is being forcefully coerced)

Then he tries the illuminist approach of the sadian libertine: he takes the guise of an educator and a destroyer of prejudice/religious obscurantism. A bringer of freedom. Interestingly enough, since Villepastour sees Debby as a savage, (he has called her “farouche”, referred to her customs as “sauvage”, and her footwear as “babouches”, which she could be wearing, but he could also be framing her as an ““exotic”” odalisque) a strange kind of a savage, somehow riddled with bourgeois morality, this takes colonialist undertones: the civilized, illustrated French nobleman needs to take this woman from a culture he deems inferior, by force if necessary, and set her free from the morality/lack of enlightenment that’s trapping her. Only he can unlock her full potential. If she became his Gallatea, she could crush the hearts of any french aristo of her choice, become the highest ranking courtesan in Versailles...

Debby recognizes how Villepastour changes strategies, and mocks him for it (she quickly recovers from her anguish and terror of being trapped by a sexual aggressor, and recovers her sang froid)

Villepastour is a highly theatrical, ridiculous man (1st thing he does when he breaks into the apartment is open his cloak to reveal his Green Suit of Seductions™) now, while he’s groping Debby, he pulls out some pornographic book from his pocket. (interestingly, Borel cites a sculptor, not an erotic illustrator of the period. Steinmetz considers his working in erotic etchings to be “unlikely”, However, Clodion was interested in joyful, softly erotic scenes mimicking the Hellenistic baroque)

Borel’s narrator takes an anti pornography stand at this point* -he calls the era in which he lives disgusting for its ubiquitous consumption of pornography. Anti pornography will return as a theme in a frankly fantastic scene with Debby later on.

(I take this chance to recommend the 2016 Korean movie The Handmaiden,  which has a very similar scene of female liberation. The film touches lots of the same themes in Madame Putiphar, including Sade, mental asylums, sexual slavery, torture, totalitarianisms/colonialism, the home as a prison, even cultural colonialism via language and clothing... it’s the closest we might have to an actual Putiphar adaptation without being one)

(*I say at this point because he’ll touch the subject of pornography under a positive light later on, in his defence of Sade as an artist, and an attack on hypocrisy of those who claim to hate him but devour his work avidly)

Debby is disgusted by the book, and by the man. She can finally bear him no more, and threatens him with yelling for fire. Something in this “little savage” becomes suddenly frightening for Villepastour. He states: He’d rape her right then, if he were not frightened of being beheaded by her like Holofernes by Judith. But he promises: she will be his victim.

[lacefuneral]

“Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain” by Declan Kavanagh (2017)

"There are a particular Gang of Sodomitical Wretches in this Town, who call themselves the Mollies, and are so far degenerated from all masculine Deportment, or manly Exercises, that they rather fancy themselves Women, imitating all the little vanities that Custom has reconcil'd to the Female Sex, affecting to Speak, Walk, Tattle, Curtsy, Cry, Scold, and to mimick all Manner of Effeminacy, that ever has fallen within their several observations; not omitting the Indecencies of lewd Women, that they may tempt one another by such immodest Freedoms to commit those odious Bestialities, that ought for ever to be without a Name." -Edward Ward, A Compleat and Humorous Account of All the Remarkable Clubs and Societies in the Cities of London and Westminster - In documenting this culture, Ward promotes as much as he denounces, with his exposition of club life showcasing the pleasures as well as the moral hazards of urban clubs. However, at times the presentation of club life is more firmly couched in a vocabulary of disgust and moral panic, with the description of the effeminate Mollies providing one such notable instance. As Chris Mounsey points out, it is unclear whether Ward's "discomfiture" is genuine or more to do with the fact that he is "trying to hide his actual participation in [Molly] practices behind pretended disgust." Although Ward's description of the Molly house is a slight and unstable passage on which to build readings of the eighteenth-century queer subject, the entry has nonetheless been widely cited by scholars since the emergence of lesbian and gay historical studies. The first scholarly analysis of eighteenth-century effeminacy is to be found in historical writings based on early lesbian and gay studies published in the aftermath of the gay liberation movement of the 1970s. This analysis offered the persecuted Molly as a historical figure for a movement that sought to redress the discrimination experienced by modern gay men. - Moreover, their type of effeminate sexual excess is most problematic for its almost sublime refusal of description: "those odious Bestialities, that ought for ever to be without a Name." description of the Molly club is important for its explicit conflation of effeminacy with the sodomitical; in designating some club men to be Mollies, Ward names and fixes same-sex desire even as he negates the Molly's queer affect by stating that this desire among men ought to remain nameless. In spite of this rhetorical maneuver, Ward affirms male effeminacy as code for sodomitical lust, thus expanding, but also anchoring, the terms of signification for the effeminate. Previously considered to be a moral failure, the effeminate man was now also the suspect sodomite. As Anthony Fletcher argues, having been long associated with “unmanly weakness, softness, delicacy and self-indulgence," effeminacy's exclusive association with homoeroticism only occurred when sodomitical vice began to be understood in gendered terms. Yet, the homoerotic potential of men's relations with each other-sodomitical sex-is exactly what remains obscured in Ward's description of the effeminate Mollies.