Holly's Secret Garden

Sadism is not a name finally given to a practice as old as Eros; it is a massive cultural fact ---which constitutes one of the greatest conversions of Western imagination: unreason transformed into delirium of the heart, madness of desire, the insane dialogue of love and death in the limitless presumption of appetite

(Madness and Civilization, 210)

     In the film, Quills(鵝毛筆), Marquis de Sade is portrayed as a victim of social hypocrisy. Indeed he is, in the way he is tortured by the ward guardian, who makes a fortune by publishing his writings after he dies miserably in the asylum. Analyzed from the perspective of madness, Sade means more than a victim of Christian morality. He reveals the true essence of madness, as Madeleine, his devoted reader in the film claims, “You can't be a proper writer without a touch of madness, can you?”

     What is madness after all? Michel Foucault, a French philosopher, shed some light on this. It is “menace” and “mockery”, a “ridicule of men,” an “extreme self-attachment,” “fantastic invention” and “raging animality.” Sade is an outstanding combination of all these symptoms. First of all, Sade can be regarded as a “menace” or “mockery” of Christian theology. When the abbe accuses him of murdering Madeleine because his filthy words drive an inmate to kill her, he retorts, “Suppose one of your precious inmates attempted to walk on water and drowned. Would you condemn the Bible? I think not.”By mentioning the Bible, he is not only taunting its sacredness but also congratulating himself on his influential power as God. Like the Bible, his pornography is irresistible in its seductive power. Hereby, he shows the first sign of madness—the vain presumption about oneself. Another example illustrates his incurable illness of self-attachment: “Are your convictions so fragile they cannot stand in opposition to mine? Is your god so flimsey, so weak! For shame.” The “convictions” refer to the faith of Christianity, which emphasizes the importance of morality. This argument with the abbe implies that Sade is raising his banner of perversions against the moral teachings of God. He is inflated with pride, as he considers himself a stronger competitor in this battle of faith.

     Another argument with the abbe also embodies how he is disgusted with God: “Why should I love God? He strung up his only son like a side of veal. I shudder to think what he'd do to me.”In Sade’s view, the whole teachings of Christianity are based on hypocrisy, with God as the main exemplar. It’s only he, the erotic poet, that can grasp the truth of life: “I write of the great, eternal truths that bind together all mankind. The whole world over, we eat, we shit, we fuck, we kill and we die.” And he further justifies himself by saying that “[i]n order to know virtue, we must acquaint ourselves with vice. Only then can we know the true measure of a man.” Sade embraces his pornography as the true reflection of humanity. By recording the evil side of human nature, he exposes the true essence of virtue. Christian theology is nothing more than a moral treatise. His perverse writings, in contrast, are more effective in highlighting vice and virtue. In his opinion, the two are inseparable elements of human life; one cannot exist without the other. Here, the extreme self-attachment of madness finds full expression in Sade

     According to Foucault, “animality” is a distinct aspect of madness. Sade’s wife implores for the curing of her husband’s sickness by saying that “If you [the supervisor of the asylum] cure him, I mean really cure him, harness the beast that rages in his soul.” The “beast” implies Sade’s uncontrollable thirst for writing perversions. Such an appetite, as Sade himself confesses, is “involuntary, like the beating of my heart. My constant erection!” In other words, the desire for writing pornography is beyond Sade’s control. It’s the raging animality inside his heart that drives him to write and thereby to get constant erection. As animality protects the madmen from cold and hunger, Sade lives tenaciously with his clothes stripped off and his tongue pulled out. Deprived of all tools for writing, Sade spreads his shit on the dungeon wall. Even a short line written in shit will suffice his thirst for writing! The gnawing animality benumbs his sense of pain, coldness and hunger. He needs neither clothes nor food to survive. What sustains him is his perverse writing and unyielding heart against God. In his last breath, he swallows the cross, a symbol of redemption. This gestures proclaims that he will never stop his war against God.

     So, who is Marquis de Sade? A notorious porn writer, an advocate of liberalism, a radical atheist? Indeed, he is all of these. But most importantly, he is madness itself. Lodged in his heart is the contradiction of human appetites: vice and virtue, cruelty and the longing to suffer, mastery and slavery, desire and murder. All these violent emotions seethe in his writings, marking him an exemplar of the Foucaultian madness