The History of BDSM Fiction and Romance
DEPICTIONS OF BDSM activities are carved into the walls of Egyptian pyramids, painted onto Greek urns, tiled into Roman mosaics, and illuminated in medieval manuscripts. It is no surprise, therefore, that BDSM fiction has a history almost as long as the history of the novel.
The term “BDSM” itself is a very recent one, established in the early 1990s. It is a combination acronym of a variety of connected sexual practices: B/D stands for Bondage/Discipline, D/S for Domination/Submission, and S/M for Sadism/Masochism. Bondage can include any sexual restraint, from the most vanilla of sex play with scarves and blindfolds all the way to elaborate rope bondage, rope suspension, and the Japanese erotic rope art, Shibari. Discipline ranges from the practice of “punishing” naughty submissives during encounters that often include roleplay, to specific fetishes like over the knee (OTK) spanking and caning. Domination, submission, sadism, and masochism are all both sexual practices and sexual identities. Domination and submission refer to power exchanges in which one partner is submissive to another, doing what they are ordered, usually (but not always) in sexual situations. Sadists are sexually aroused by inflicting pain on their partners, while masochists enjoy having pain inflicted on them.
Despite these activities’ apparent universality, the details surrounding them—how they are done, what society thinks of them, and what the people who do them think of themselves—all depend on the culture and the time in which they are performed. A sexual proclivity that is taken for granted in one culture might be completely alien to another culture, with different relationship expectations and sexual mores and even different technology. This means, of course, that the representations of these activities (stories, pictures, film, etc.) change over time and across cultures. These representations also build on each other, using conventions previously established by other representations. This affects not only how BDSM has been portrayed in novels over the last 250 years, but also how romance novels are structured and, most tellingly for a consideration of Fifty Shades of Grey, how BDSM and romance come together.
The early novel has a diverse ancestry, but it solidified into the form we recognize today in the early eighteenth century: specifically, in the 1720s, with Daniel Defoe’s character studies, Penelope Aubin’s adventure stories, and Eliza Haywood’s racy, explicit exposés; and in the 1740s, with Samuel Richardson’s extended character studies, Henry Fielding’s domestic adventure stories, and the demure stories of a reformed Eliza Haywood. Right in the middle of this flourishing of the British novel, John Cleland published the first pornographic novel in English, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748), much more famously known as Fanny Hill.
During the course of her sexual adventures, Fanny, a young prostitute, is introduced to a Mr. Barville, who was “under the tyranny of a cruel taste: that of an ardent desire, not only of being unmercifully whipped himself, but of whipping others.” On a “sudden caprice, a gust of fancy for trying a new experiment,” Fanny agrees to (paid) relations with Mr. Barville and they engage in mutual flagellation: Mr. Barville achieves satisfaction as Fanny whips him, but Fanny is only moved to sexual arousal after Mr. Barville finishes whipping her. She is not, “however, at any time re-enticed to renew with him, or resort again to the violent expedient of lashing nature into more haste than good speed.” That is, Fanny was game once but is uninterested in pursuing more after that first experience.
Mr. Barville, in modern parlance, is more masochist than sadist, but has enough switchy tendencies that he partakes in both sides of the activities. But of course, no one had that vocabulary in the eighteenth century. A few things to note about this short interlude: First, Mr. Barville is depicted as relying on the BDSM activity for sexual arousal and satisfaction. It’s not just something he enjoys doing; rather, it’s necessary for him. Second, he insists on doing it in an ethical manner, stressing the mutual consent of both parties. Finally, the activity is remarkable enough to be unusual for Fanny, but not disgusting to her, as when she later sees two men engage in anal sex.
In 1791, just more than forty years after Fanny Hill, the notorious French aristocrat Marquis de Sade published Justine; or, The Misfortunes of Virtue. The story reverses the typical eighteenth-century narrative of virtue rewarded because the more virtuous Justine is, the more misfortune—rape, imprisonment, sexual torture—she suffers. The novel makes explicit the fact that if she bent just a few of her strict morals, she would suffer fewer horrific attacks. In 1797, de Sade published a sequel: Juliette; or, Vice Amply Rewarded, the story of Justine’s sister. Unlike her virtuous and miserable sister, Juliette is utterly debauched sexually, completely amoral, and lives a happy, successful life. Contrary to the nonconsensual flagellation incident in Fanny Hill, de Sade’s narratives revel in the nonconsensual sexual torture and murder of innocents, especially early adolescent girls and boys. Because of his published writings, de Sade was imprisoned by Napoleon for the last thirteen years of his life, and after his death his family burned many of his unpublished manuscripts.
In 1869, almost eighty years after de Sade’s novels were published, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch published his infamous novella Venus in Furs, a fictional representation of Sacher-Masoch’s relationship with his mistress Fanny Pistor. In the novel, as in real life, after the hero convinces his mistress to dominate him cruelly, they go on a trip together to Florence, during which the hero enacts the role of manservant and is abused by his mistress, even as she disdains him. While the relationship is consensual, male submission is seen as a weakness and the heroine eventually finds another man to whom she wants to submit. The novel makes clear this ending returns the genders to their expected, “normal” societal roles. This return at the end of the novel to “normalcy,” to the way things are “meant” to be, becomes an enduring structure in BDSM fiction and romance (and is prominent in Fifty Shades of Grey itself).
A generation later, in 1886, psychologist Richard Krafft-Ebing published his Psychopathia Sexualis, in which the terms “sadism” and “masochism” were used for the first time in a scientific context. Krafft-Ebing appropriated these terms, obviously derived from the names of the most famous authors of each practice, from the code used in newspaper advertisements by people looking for like-minded partners—a nineteenth-century version of Craigslist. Psychopathia Sexualis was a notable addition to the explosive growth of psychology and psychoanalysis at the end of the century that attempted to examine and explain the vagaries of human sexuality. No matter how medicalized these terms have become, however, it is important to remember that they derived first and foremost from literary representations, from writers who had the courage to share their fantasies—no matter how disturbing—with the rest of the world, shaping all future representations of those fantasies. Then as now, literature functions as an outlet and a framing mechanism for sexual desire.
Despite—although some argue because of—the sexual repression of the Victorian era, there was a veritable flood of erotic novels about BDSM activities in the second half of the nineteenth century. Besides Venus in Furs, one of the most famous was The Whippingham Papers, a series of poems, plays, and stories about flagellation, published anonymously in 1887. Many of these stories were set in English schools, in which corporal punishment was practiced. In fact, caning, birching, and spanking were so associated with British schoolboys and their later adult sexual practices that they became known as the English Vice. As the preface to The Whippingham Papers states, “The propensity which the English most cherish is undoubtedly flagellation … this vice has certainly struck deeper root in England than elsewhere.” Algernon Swinburne’s anonymously written contribution to the Papers, a ninety-four stanza poem, “Reginald’s Flogging,” gives us a taste of this culture:
“And how do you like it, Fane?” he says, “does it sting? does it sting you, Fane?”
Oh, fain was Reggie to rub his bottom,
To rub it with his shirt;
As he laid the rod on Reginald’s bottom,
“Does it hurt, my boy, does it hurt?” he says,
“Eh, Reggie, my boy, does it hurt?”
The first six cuts on Reggie’s bottom
He hardly winced at all;
But at every cut on Reggie’s bottom
You could see the salt tears fall, my boys, the thick tears gather and fall.
But wae’s my heart for Reggie’s bottom,
When the seventh and eighth cuts fell,
The red blood ran from Reggie’s bottom,
For Reggie was flogged right well, my boys, for his bottom was flogged right well.
The next three cuts on Reggie’s bottom,
They made it very sore,
But at the twelfth it was bloody and wealed,
And he could not choose but roar, poor boy, he could not choose but roar.
However, for almost a hundred years after the publication of Venus in Furs, most of the flood of stories and poems and plays were only available for reading audiences who knew to look for them and who knew where and how to find them. It wasn’t until 1954 that another BDSM story became famous enough to become a part of the public consciousness: Pauline Réage’s Story of O. Réage was the pseudonym of Frenchwoman Anne Desclos, who wrote her sadomasochistic fantasies in an attempt to keep the sexual interest of respected French literary critic and publisher Jean Paulhan twenty years into their affair. He encouraged her to publish the novel and wrote a preface. In 1955, Story of O won the prestigious French literary prize the Prix des Deux Magots, given to provocative works outside the mainstream. The controversy this created and the speculation over the novel’s true authorship kept it at the center of public attention both inside and outside France: for a while, it was the most widely read French novel in the world.
The novel tells the tale of a beautiful Parisian fashion photographer who is taken by her lover to Roissy, an estate run for the benefit of an exclusive club of men. There she willingly submits to beatings, abuse, humiliation, and oral, vaginal, and anal sex with any of the men who inhabit or visit the chateau. By the end of the book, after being passed from her lover René to his English mentor Stephen, and then on to a number of Stephen’s associates, O is utterly debased—naked, pierced, branded, masked, and treated purely as an object by those around her—but is transcendently happy, although not unambiguously so.
In 200 years of novels that explore BDSM topics, conventions emerged, and were adapted and built upon. As with Fanny Hill, O consents to everything that happens to her. As with Venus in Furs, the story tells of relationships. Desclos’ innovation is deep character development, to the extent that the novel is more bildungsroman than love story, depicting O’s emotional journey and exploring the erotic process by which O finds fulfillment and happiness—even ecstasy—in her voluntary submission. In comparison, Fanny Hill’s tale, in typical early eighteenth-century fashion, is one of individual erotic scenes strung together without much connection between them and with little development of the character experiencing them. Neither de Sade’s Justine nor her sister Juliette learns anything during the course of her story: they are merely the object lessons in their creator’s twisted morality tales. The couple in Venus in Furs are not happy in their desires. In comparison, although it is unclear at the end of the book whether O is passed to yet another master or whether she dies, over the course of the story she grows and changes and finds a form of contentment, her own happy ending within herself. None of these books, however, are romance stories.
After O’s success in the 1950s, the 1960s and 1970s offered four separate narratives of BDSM relationships that impacted the public imagination in very different ways. First, in 1966, John Norman published Tarnsman of Gor, the first of a twenty-seven volume series of science-fiction/fantasy stories about the planet Gor, on which is practiced a deeply hierarchical sexual Master/slave dynamic between men and women. These novels gained a cult following, resulting in BDSM practitioners still today who call themselves Goreans and try to follow the precepts set out in the novels.
Second, beginning in 1972, Avon Books started publishing blockbuster historical romance novels (often called “bodice rippers”). The first of these books, published and marketed in innovative ways, was Kathleen Woodiwiss’ The Flame and the Flower; the second, in 1974, was Rosemary Rogers’ Sweet Savage Love. The blockbuster historicals grew from this start and became so popular that in the late 1970s, they accounted for a quarter of all books printed (just as the Fifty Shades trilogy accounted for 20 percent of all books sold in the second quarter of 2012). The blockbuster historicals were not explicitly BDSM-focused, but they certainly exploited many of the same conventions that make the Fifty Shades trilogy so popular: the virginal heroine; the older, domineering alpha male hero; the heroine’s sudden sexual awakening, matched with the hero’s sexual obsession; a focus on sexual violence; and finally the complete reformation of the hero for the sake of his love for the heroine.
Third, 1978 saw the publication of Nine and a Half Weeks, Elizabeth McNeill’s memoir of her D/s affair with a stranger, in which she finds herself as debased by and as dependent on her lover as O does. However, rather than finding any transcendence in the relationship, McNeill’s character is deeply unhappy and, after the eponymous nine and a half weeks, finds a way to escape. The novel, of course, was made more famous by the well-done film of the same name from 1986 with Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke that became a cult classic.
Finally, starting in 1979 and finishing in 1980, the iconic gay Leather magazine Drummer serialized John Preston’s Mr. Benson, a fascinating mirror image of McNeill’s story. In it, young Jamie meets the eponymous Mr. Benson in a random bar, and the story relates their adventures as they establish and explore their D/s relationship. Unlike the characters of Nine and a Half Weeks, Jamie and Mr. Benson accept, explore, and enjoy their BDSM desires, use it to build a relationship together, and through it achieve their happily-ever-after ending. As a result, this story of two deeply kinky gay men finding themselves and each other in their BDSM play is the first BDSM romance as we understand the genre conventions today.
In A Natural History of the Romance Novel, literary critic Pamela Regis defines eight essential narrative elements of a romance:
- Problem in society or with the protagonists that the romance narrative will help solve
- Meeting between protagonists
- Attraction between protagonists
- Barrier preventing protagonists from finding their happy ending immediately
- Point of Ritual Death or the Dark Moment, at which it looks like all hope of a happy ending is lost
- Recognition as to what can overcome the Barrier, solve the problem, and keep the protagonists together
- Declaration of love between the protagonists
- Commitment between the protagonists to stay together, usually a marriage, sometimes a betrothal, sometimes just a verbal agreement
Almost every romance novel will have each of these elements. They might not play out on the page in front of the reader, they might be more or less important to the specific narrative, they might happen in a different order—but to be considered as such, every romance must have all of the elements. And a romance that is specifically a BDSM romance must explore Regis’ elements particularly through, by, and with one or more of the kinky sexual practices encompassed in the combination BDSM acronym. Rather than using a kinky activity merely as spice in a sex scene, as a standard erotic romance might, in a BDSM romance the kinky activity must be integral to the characters’ individual emotional trajectories and to the successful relationship they build together. This is what Preston’s Mr. Benson provided for the first time: the story of a BDSM relationship in which the lovers achieve a happy ending together because of their kinky explorations with each other. With Mr. Benson, BDSM fiction—a category that includes all fiction that uses BDSM activities and identities as integral to the narrative—added a subgenre of BDSM romance fiction. Of course, it can also be said that romance fiction added the subgenre of BDSM romance, even if it took a while for the genre to notice the addition, considering the separation of gay Leather publishing from mainstream mass-market romance publishing.
In 1983, the year Mr. Benson was published as a stand-alone novel, Anne Rice, writing as Anne Rampling, published Exit to Eden, a heterosexual BDSM romance. The novel explores a female Dominant/male submissive dynamic, an unusual pairing in fiction. Unlike Venus in Furs, there is a happy ending, a fulfillment that can perhaps be traced to the influence of the women’s movement. Also in 1983, but as A.N. Roquelaure, Rice published The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, the first of a trilogy of BDSM fantasies based on fairy-tale conventions. Her goal with the Sleeping Beauty books was to strip them of everything except the pure exploration of sex. Using the fairy-tale format, she could ignore character development and motivation and believable plot to focus instead on sexual fantasies that would appeal specifically to women. While the trilogy has a nominal happy ending—in that Sleeping Beauty, after many sensual tortures and much sexual training, marries a prince—the happy ending is rather beside the point. The fairy-tale nature of the books and the lack of both character development and a clear hero mean that the books, although influential in BDSM fiction, can’t truly be considered BDSM romance.
In the 1990s, the focus on positive portrayals of female sexual fantasy heralded by Rice’s books became a veritable flood of erotic literature for women. Pure erotica, without a romance narrative line, flourished, particularly at new publishing houses like Black Lace, which opened in the UK in 1993. Erotic romance also exploded as a genre, both through new publishers like Red Sage, which opened in the US in 1995 with the publication of its first Secrets anthology, and through established houses releasing full-length novels of erotic romance. Authors like Susan Johnson and Robin Schone, for instance, hit the New York Times bestseller lists with their erotic historical romance (Schone’s first book begins with the heroine thrown back through time and into a different body during a masturbatory orgasm). Publishing company Kensington released highly successful erotic romance anthologies starting in 1999.
As erotica and erotic romance flourished, BDSM-focused fiction also carved out a niche for itself. In 1993, Laura Antoniou published The Marketplace, the first of a series of novels about a secret worldwide society of BDSM practitioners who train and sell consenting sexual slaves. The first novel follows four slaves through their slave training, examining their desires and needs to be sexual slaves and their experiences as they succeed—or fail—in their training. In 1995, future romance author Pam Rosenthal, using the pseudonym Molly Weatherfield, published Carrie’s Story. Rosenthal claims to have wanted to write a novel with “creative sex laced with intellect, voice, and irony.” The story very much reads like a cross between Story of O, McNeill’s Nine and a Half Weeks, and Rice’s Sleeping Beauty: a woman in New York City narrates—with a typical New Yorker’s sarcasm—how she finds herself in a BDSM relationship in which she explores submission and pony play. She consents, she very much enjoys herself, but she’s very conflicted about the activities her lover helps her to explore, especially as they seem to conflict with her own feminist feelings. Neither Antoniou’s nor Weatherfield’s books are romance according to Regis’ essential elements, but they both explore relationships, develop fully rounded characters, are deeply erotic, and expand the boundaries of BDSM fiction.
Erotic romance author Emma Holly has the distinction of being the first to combine the subgenres of erotic romance and BDSM fiction. In 1999, she published two BDSM romances with Black Lace: Velvet Glove follows a male Dominant/female submissive couple, while The Top of Her Game follows a female Dominant and her male lover (but not submissive). While both books explore the BDSM desires of the characters, together and apart, at the end of both novels, but especially The Top of Her Game, the couples have “normalized” their relationships, eschewing their BDSM identities and most of their kinky activities. While not necessarily “cured” of the “need” for BDSM activities, the characters retreat from seeing BDSM as part of their individual identities and as essential to their romantic relationships and will admit only to perhaps using it to add flavor to their future sexual interactions. This structure hints at the much more focused rejection of BDSM “perversion” that we find in the Fifty Shades trilogy, in which Christian is cured of his need for alternate sexual expression by his partner’s healing love and happily-ever-after commitment.
Although BDSM literature and erotic romance existed in parallel universes during the 1990s and came together momentarily in Emma Holly’s novels, they didn’t truly marry until the innovation of digital publishing at the start of the new millennium. Ellora’s Cave was the first and most successful of the digital presses of the early 2000s dedicated to publishing erotic romance. Started in November 2000 by Tina Marie Engler because she was unable to sell her sexually explicit erotic romances to traditional print publishers, Ellora’s Cave—with its digital-only business model, stable of authors with few other places to publish, and readers with few other places to buy what Ellora’s Cave sold—quickly became a multimillion-dollar-a-year company, establishing a business model that’s still growing today—a model that E. L. James took advantage of when she first published Fifty Shades of Grey with a small digital and print-on-demand publisher. Digital publishing expanded the erotic romance genre—usually set historically—into contemporary, paranormal, and futuristic settings. It also greatly expanded the market because of easy accessibility to an online audience who were no longer restricted by dependence on bricks-and-mortar stores’ willingness to stock potentially controversial books.
In 2002, Ellora’s Cave published their first novel by Joey W. Hill, probably the most well-known author—some would even say the founder—of BDSM romance. Hill was one of the first, and is certainly one of the most successful, erotic romance authors to use BDSM to construct both the identities of her main characters and the trajectory of their romance narratives. In Hill’s novels, the BDSM play is not simply consensual, but practiced by characters who are individually BDSM-identified, to the extent that the barrier to the happy ending is often precisely that the characters need to recognize and accept how deeply rooted their BDSM identities are in their identities as a whole. That is, unlike Holly’s characters and unlike Christian and Ana in the Fifty Shades trilogy, Hill’s protagonists cannot achieve their happy ending without integrating it with their continued BDSM identification. Hill’s most famous and critically acclaimed book is Natural Law (2004), the story of female Dominant Violet and her submissive lover Mac Nighthorse, who not only solve the mystery of a serial killer who is stalking male submissives, but also grow individually and together through their BDSM play with each other.
In the decade since the beginnings of digital publishing, erotic BDSM romances—and the digital houses that publish them—have become an essential part of the romance publishing landscape. As such, while E. L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey might be unique in capturing the imagination of so many people, it is by no means unique to the world of fiction. The trilogy takes its inspiration not only from the characters and—to a lesser extent—plot of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, but also from centuries of literary exploration of BDSM practices, identities, and relationships. Rather than being unique, it uses the well-worn and much-loved conventions of romance fiction, BDSM fiction, and BDSM romance.
The barrier to the full expression of love between Christian and Ana is Christian’s apparent identification as a Dominant and sadist and his stated need for BDSM sexual activity. But rather than growing individually and together through their BDSM sexual exploration, Christian is saved from his “perversions” by the love of pure, virginal Ana, who helps him realize that he doesn’t actually require BDSM activities to be fulfilled. Much as the happy ending of romance has been rewritten countless times, so, too, has this exploration of BDSM. However, the journey is the thing, not the ending, and it is a journey that the many millions of readers of the Fifty Shades trilogy have taken and enjoyed.
SARAH S. G. FRANTZ is Associate Professor of English at Fayetteville State University in North Carolina, and President of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance. She has published academic articles on Jane Austen, J. R. Ward, Suzanne Brockmann, Joey W. Hill, popular romance fiction, and BDSM romance. She has coedited (with Katharina Rennhak) Women Constructing Men: Female Novelists and Their Male Characters, 1750-2000 and (with Eric Murphy Selinger) New Perspectives on Popular Romance Fiction: Critical Essays (McFarland, 2012). She is also a freelance romance fiction editor and BDSM manuscript consultant at Alphabet Editing.