SOURCE: Seaboyer, Judith. “Sadism Demands a Story: Ian McEwan's The Comfort of Strangers.” Modern Fiction Studies 45, no. 4 (winter 1999): 957-86.

In the following essay, Seaboyer examines the significance of psychic trauma, violence, and the cultural landscape of Venice in The Comfort of Strangers.

Ian McEwan's The Comfort of Strangers operates on two levels. It is an unheimlich tale of gothic horror that turns on sadomasochism and ritualized murder, but at the same time—and I will focus on this aspect of the novella—it is an engaged meditation on the historical, cultural, and psychoanalytic narratives that uphold an economy Kaja Silverman terms the “dominant fiction [that] solicits our faith above all else in the unity of the family, and the adequacy of the male subject” (Male Subjectivity 15-16). This fiction, Silverman explains, manifests itself as “the ideological system through which the normative subject lives its relation to the symbolic...