SOURCE: "Another Look at the Sadean Heroine: The Prospects of Femininity," in Essays in French Literature, No. 13, November, 1976, pp. 28-43.

In the following excerpt, Williams analyzes the heroines in Sade's short stories and in his novel Aline et Valcour.

The figure of Justine and the multiple variations of the Justine legend lie at the core of Sade's output as a novelist, and offer a familiar pattern of themes central to Sade's perception of the qualities and realities of femininity. In this context, Sade's corrosive attack on sentimentalist modes, as reflected in the predilection of the period's fiction for the portrayal of a young lady's entrance into the world, has been exhaustively analysed in recent years. Yet, despite the stature of the legend in Sade's work and in subsequent criticism, the story of Justine is really no more than a point of departure. Events and ideas are deployed with...