To begin looking into this terrible, monstrosity of a text, I wanted to look into the background of the text for a change. I was thinking that maybe the background of the text wouldn’t be as disgusting and as vile as the text itself proved to be. 120 Days of Sodom was originally written by Marquis de Sade on October 22, 1785 and it was finished in 37 days while Sade was in prison in Bastille. He hid this text in his prison cell in a copper cylinder that was hidden in a crack in the wall. Once this text was found by a man by the name of Arnoux de Saint-Maximum and he sold the text, it went through a complete whirlwind throughout the years of being passed around, sold, or smuggled. As of the information from the book, the original copy is still in France where they are deciding who the rightful owner of the text should be after many shady transactions.
The book was, like previously stated, horrendous, and I believe the vile ideas of the book came from real life. Marquis de Sade was no stranger to a disturbing life, having that he himself definitely had one. He had a recorded history of assault, sodomy, affairs, incest, and in modern words molestation and exploitation of young children. Those are only the recorded items, so one theory that I believe could be true is that through his writing, de Sade actually told stories of his real life experiences. I think that maybe not all, but some of the stories he writes are things he had personally experienced. Another theory is if de Sade was writing real life stories of well known people around him. Scandals that not many people talked or wrote about, but events that were brushed under the rug and frowned upon to speak about. To conclude, there can be many ideas of how and why this book was written, and the context behind all of it.