Maris Tiller
FSEM – Forbidden Texts
09/09/2021
While 120 Days of Sodom is littered with sexual deviance and things that exist seemingly just to gross out the reader, Sade definitely has a point to make. I think the main theme of this book is simple: those who have a massive amount of wealth and power will ultimately exploit that power and corrupt those below them. You can see this throughout, in the stories that the old women tell where they service the most depraved desires of respected members of the community and the fact that the four main friends are a bishop, a judge, a duke, and a banker. Each represents a different aspect of the ruling class of France which Sade wants to critique as a corrupt form of power. In his own roundabout way, Sade is talking about the distribution of power in France. The message of Sade’s text is clear: all is corrupt.
I think the message still comes across in Sade’s text, however, the message is sort of undercut by knowing things about the author himself. Reading information on Sade, one would think he would be siding with the Libertines more than the victims. Even in the text there is some evidence for this. The suffering of the victims is not given center stage, rather the pleasure and corruption of the four men. Which, of course, is fine in a literary sense. Obviously, if corruption was his entire point, he would need to show that corruption. However, I think if Sade was more concerned about the exploitation of the underclass, then that would come through in his work.
One could look at any given instance of Sade critiquing and interpret it one of two ways. One: Sade is creating these outlandish instances of torture and corruption to critique a massive power imbalance in the society he lives in. Or two: Sade had personal grudges against the systems he is critiquing and thus is critiquing them with less of a concern for the betterment of society and more of concern for his own freedom. I am inclined to believe the latter. Remember, Sade wrote this while he was imprisoned. He was in prison multiple times throughout his life, mostly for various sexual exploits, some of which were similar to what the Libertines partake in. He was also not one of the underclass; he was born somewhat noble. It could be that he is railing against the justice system, the church, and other aspects of the ruling class because he is angry that he cannot do what he wants. And that is where I think 120 Days of Sodom falters. Sade the man and the text he wrote are somewhat in conflict with each other, making the text difficult to understand. Add that the text is mostly unfinished, since Sade lost the manuscript before he could properly finish it, then you have a very strange, inconsistent text which mostly exists only as a spectacle. One might still read it and take away some message, perhaps even one that Sade might have intended (though we will never know it), but for me it was mostly just a gratuitous slog of the absolute worst of human exploitation. And perhaps, in the end, that was truly what Sade wanted it to be.