Copyright
Will McMorran;Published On
2025-09-24Page Range
pp. 27–82Language
- English
Print Length
56 pages
1. Looking and Touching with Eugénie
- Will McMorran (author)
Chapter of: Sensing Violence: Reading with the Marquis de Sade(pp. 27–82)
Taking a short story by Sade entitled ‘Eugénie de Franval’, this chapter focusses on the senses of sight and touch. It begins by exploring the myth of Pygmalion in Ovid and eighteenth-century retellings of Ovid before turning to Sade’s reimagining of the myth as a story of incest. Focussing on a scene in which Eugénie performs as a living statue for a libertine, Valmont, it examines what Sade’s story has to tell us about the embodied nature of our aesthetic experiences. As well as Valmont’s somatic reaction to this spectacle, this chapter reveals the sensory responses of twenty-first-century readers to this scene as reported in questionnaires. Drawing on eighteenth-century theories and practices of viewing statues, and nineteenth-century concerns about Pygmalionism, or ‘statue love’, the chapter turns from looking to touching before addressing more recent anxieties about pornography.
Contributors
Will McMorran
(author)Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Queen Mary, University of London
Will McMorran is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London. He has published several articles and book chapters on Sade and the history of his reception, and has edited and translated two of his works: 'The 120 Days of Sodom' (2016) for Penguin Classics with Thomas Wynn, which was awarded the Scott Moncrieff Prize, and The Marquise de Gange (2021) for Oxford World’s Classics. His work as a translator has also included several stories for 'The Penguin Book of French Short Stories' (2022), and Philippe Brenot’s graphic history, 'The Story of Sex' (2016).