Belle de Jour by Joseph Kessel
Séverine Serizy is a beautiful and naïve young woman, happily married to Jean.
But she doesn't enjoy sex – she dutifully allows Jean his conjugal contact, but her own enjoyment is non-existent.
However, when she hears from a friend that a mutual acquaintance has been spending days as a prostitute in a Paris brothel, it's an idea that grows in Séverine's own head until, eventually, she heads to a brothel that she has heard mentioned and finds work as Belle de Jour ('lady of the day').
There, she finds the experiences that give her the sexual pleasure she has never before known. And although she refuses to work after 5pm, so that she can be back home in time for her husband's return from work, she is constantly drawn back to the twilight, sleazy world.
Her love for Jean remains as strong as ever – in some ways, stronger – but tragedy can only be just around the corner.
Joseph Kessel's 1928 novel is best known from Luis Buñuel's famous 1967 film starring Catherine Deneuve. But where that specifically portrayed Séverine as needing sado-masochistic play in order to find release, the novel is more subtle. It could be SM, but then again, it could simply be rougher sex that she's getting at home. The only thing that is clear is that she longs to be 'taken'.
But no matter how it is portrayed, this isn't really an 'erotic' novel. The point is not to arouse the reader sexually, but to arouse in the reader an understanding of the sexual needs of women. It posits an idea that female sexuality is not simply a 'pretty pretty' business, where women only 'do it' for their husbands, but that women themselves have real, earthy sexual needs and desires.
In may ways, it's a harbinger of Erica Jong's "zipless ****" (from Fear of Flying, 1973), with the oh-so-daring and provocative idea that a woman can enjoy sex for its own sake, without emotional strings.
What grated for me personally, was the jacket note that says that the novel "blurs the lines between feminism and female sexuality". That alone suggests that Kessel's novel, and the many attempts since to explore female sexuality, have failed – at least in terms of the ridiculously crass implication here, that women's sexuality is somehow at odds with feminism (as though 'feminism' is one homogenous vein of thought anyway), if it involves anything with a man that is less than obviously vanilla.
Such a limited and limiting idea is akin to the kind of prudish attitude that Kessel himself was attempting to tackle all those years ago.
Séverine Serizy is a beautiful and naïve young woman, happily married to Jean.
But she doesn't enjoy sex – she dutifully allows Jean his conjugal contact, but her own enjoyment is non-existent.
However, when she hears from a friend that a mutual acquaintance has been spending days as a prostitute in a Paris brothel, it's an idea that grows in Séverine's own head until, eventually, she heads to a brothel that she has heard mentioned and finds work as Belle de Jour ('lady of the day').
There, she finds the experiences that give her the sexual pleasure she has never before known. And although she refuses to work after 5pm, so that she can be back home in time for her husband's return from work, she is constantly drawn back to the twilight, sleazy world.
Her love for Jean remains as strong as ever – in some ways, stronger – but tragedy can only be just around the corner.
Joseph Kessel's 1928 novel is best known from Luis Buñuel's famous 1967 film starring Catherine Deneuve. But where that specifically portrayed Séverine as needing sado-masochistic play in order to find release, the novel is more subtle. It could be SM, but then again, it could simply be rougher sex that she's getting at home. The only thing that is clear is that she longs to be 'taken'.
But no matter how it is portrayed, this isn't really an 'erotic' novel. The point is not to arouse the reader sexually, but to arouse in the reader an understanding of the sexual needs of women. It posits an idea that female sexuality is not simply a 'pretty pretty' business, where women only 'do it' for their husbands, but that women themselves have real, earthy sexual needs and desires.
In may ways, it's a harbinger of Erica Jong's "zipless ****" (from Fear of Flying, 1973), with the oh-so-daring and provocative idea that a woman can enjoy sex for its own sake, without emotional strings.
What grated for me personally, was the jacket note that says that the novel "blurs the lines between feminism and female sexuality". That alone suggests that Kessel's novel, and the many attempts since to explore female sexuality, have failed – at least in terms of the ridiculously crass implication here, that women's sexuality is somehow at odds with feminism (as though 'feminism' is one homogenous vein of thought anyway), if it involves anything with a man that is less than obviously vanilla.
Such a limited and limiting idea is akin to the kind of prudish attitude that Kessel himself was attempting to tackle all those years ago.
