Response to “The 120 Days of Sodom”

“The 120 Days of Sodom” is originally a French piece of literature, which was written during the French Revolution. At the time the author Marquis de Sade was imprisoned at Bastille prison, and therefore, had to write the piece largely in secret. Due to the storming of Bastille, Marquis de Sade had to hide and abandon the uncompleted piece. For most of the rest of his life Marquis feared the piece was lost permanently, but it was later found and published in the form of a semi-complete book. Marquis de Sade was known for writing pornographic literature and his acts of sexual deviancy, which put him under criticism by the public on multiple occasions. “The 120 Days of Sodom” exemplifies this nature in its most graphic and unrestricted form, which caused the book to be banned on multiple occasions throughout the world.

Despite the almost entirely pornographic content of the text, it helps provide an insight to the limits of how far the human mind can go. The novel describes how the sort of power and disgust that arises from carrying out the fetishes of the characters plays into their sense of pleasure. And this novel truly allows one to see how the mind of a merciless pervert functions.

However, beyond the obvious pornographic content, Marquis de Sade is able to provide a criticism of the nature and exploitation that the wealthy and the powerful carried out on those with less power. The book depicts how officials in power gained a sadistic pleasure from seeing others suffering in a degrading fashion, and they would never obtain full satisfaction from this endeavor. This lead to the characters continuing to try and find more disgusting and degrading fantasies to carry out. These forms of sexual torture seem to be a subtle allusion to the exploitation the bourgeois carried out on the working class, which led to the French Revolution that Marquis supported.

In conclusion, “The 120 Days of Sodom” does provide important information on the extents of the human mind and could be considered a complex criticism of the social structure of the late 1700s.