Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

A novella that was originally part of the epic series Legacy of Cain by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs is an exploration of the themes of sado-masochism and female dominance in a time when the terms had yet to be conceived. The main character dreams of the goddess Venus wearing furs while he speaks to her about love. Unable to let go of the fantasy, he reads a book that tells the story of Severin and Wanda, a couple involved in a sado-masochistic relationship. Severin enslaves himself to Wanda, who treats him with ever-increasing brutality and disdain. The novel was translated into English in 1921 by Fernanda Savage, and has been adapted multiple times for film and theater. In 2013, it was adapted for film again into a French movie by the same title, based on the 2010 play by American playwright David Ives, which was in turn inspired by this classic.

Venus in Furs

To you nature seems something hostile; you have made devils out of the smiling gods of Greece, and out of me a demon. You can only exorcise and curse me, or slay yourselves in bacchantic madness before my altar. And if ever one of you has had the courage to kiss my red mouth, he makes a barefoot pilgrimage to Rome in penitential robes and expects flowers to grow from his withered staff, while under my feet roses, violets, and myrtles spring up every hour, but their fragrance does not agree with you. Stay among your northern fogs and Christian incense; let us pagans remain under the debris, beneath the lava; do not disinter us. Pompeii was not built for you, nor our villas, our baths, our temples. You do not require gods. We are chilled in your world.

The almighty Lord hath struck him, and hath delivered him into the hands of a woman.

What am I really, a little dilettante or a great big donkey?

Again I am sitting in my honey-suckle arbor, reading in the Odyssey about the beautiful witch who transformed her admirers into beats. A wonderful picture of antique love. 

The ideal which I strive to realize in my life is the serene sensuousness of the Greeks—pleasure without pain. I do not believe in the kind of love which is preached by Christianity, by the moderns, by the knights of the spirit. Yes, look at me, I am worse than heretic, I am a pagan. 

The battle of the spirit with the senses is the gospel of modern man. I do not care to have a share in it.

So you too are one of those who rave about modern miserable hysterical feminine creatures who don't appreciate a real man in their somnambulistic search for some dream-man and masculine ideal. Amid tears and convulsions they daily outrage their Christian duties; they cheat and are cheated; they always seek again and choose and reject; they are never happy, and give never happiness. They accuse fate instead of calmly confessing that they want to love and live as Helen and Aspasia lived. Nature admits no permanence in the relation between man and woman. 

I felt there was something sacred in sex; in fact, it was the only sacred thing. In woman and her beauty I saw something divine, because the most important function of existence—the continuation of the species—is her vocation. To me woman represented a personification of nature, Isis, and man was her priest, her slave. In contrast to him she was cruel like nature herself who tosses aside whatever has served her purposes as soon as she no longer has need for it. To him her cruelties, even death itself, still were sensual raptures.

…all the women whom the pages of history have recorded as lustful, beautiful, and violent women like Libussa, Lucretia Borgia, Agnes of Hungary, Queen Margot, Isabeau, the Sultana Roxolane, the Russian Czarinas of last century—all these I saw in furs or in robes bordered with ermine.

“Were you less virtuous, you would be completely sane."

Venus in Furs quotes

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