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Histoire(S) De Catherine M.: Echoes Of “O” And The Difference Of “I” In La Vie Sexuelle De Catherine M., Adrienne Angelo

The Coastal Review: An Online Peer-reviewed Journal

This article compares Catherine Millet’s La vie sexuelle de Catherine M. (2001) to another work of erotic “fiction:” Pauline Réage’s Histoire d’O (1954). The scandal surrounding the publication of both works focused on the taboo subject of sexuality, and more significantly, on the role of the female author in writing such a graphic work. While Réage’s fictional account of one woman’s sexual experiences is told through a third-person narrator, Millet describes her own experiences in the first-person. However, the continual multiplication of this first-person narrator complicates a reading of her work that would presuppose that one is reading an autobiographical …