Story of O

Content Warning: This section discusses graphic sexual content, including depictions of bondage and sadomasochism, adolescent sexuality, and nonconsensual sexual encounters. The guide also refers to suicidal ideation.

“She so motionless and so silent, so denuded and so offered […] in a black car going she hasn’t the least idea where.”

This is a description of O’s state as she is being driven to Roissy after being picked up in a taxi in a Parisian park. On one level, this description captures O’s submissiveness, even before arriving at the mansion, and the fact that she does not know where she is being taken. On another level, though, the line can be read as a metaphor for the paradoxical position of O as the protagonist and primary subject, despite narration from a third-person perspective. Namely, that the novel is her “story,” yet she is seemingly so lacking in either identity or the independent will or motivation to drive it.

“But over and above these whippings […] never must you look any one of us in the face.”

At Roissy, the men explain to O the rules she must live by during her stay. She is forbidden from looking at any of the men in the face, especially when they are using her. One reason for this rule is to emphasize O’s subordinate position to them and her role as the object of the other’s gaze, not the originator of her own look or