SOURCE:"Sade," in Identity and Ideology: Diderot, Sade, and the Serious Genre, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1991, pp. 105-30.

In the following excerpt, Hayes examines the role of conflicting ideologies in Sade's plays and novels, concentrating in particular on his disruption of structure and meaning.

The plays have known a strange history, even among the many odd histories of Sade's texts. Refused by theater directors, hidden in libraries, walled up in a room of the Sade family chateau, censored even by the editor of Sade's complete works, the plays might be thought to contain a message as bitterly powerful as anything in the novels or in the drama they indirectly inspired, Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade. Great was the general disappointment when the eighteen sentimental pieces were published in 1970, and even the most positive accounts of them tended to skim over them in order to arrive at the "theatricality" of...