Beckett’s Early Image of Sade: Dream of Fair to middling Women, More Pricks Than Kicks, and Sadism

Abstract

This article illustrates how Beckett’s engagement with the works and ideas of the Marquis de Sade in the early 1930s plays a role in shaping his earliest extended fictions, Dream of Fair to middling Women and More Pricks Than Kicks. It begins by delineating how Beckett’s jottings in the ‘Dream’ Notebook prove that he read Mario Praz’s La carne, la morte, e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica (1930) whilst writing his first novel, Dream of Fair to middling Women (1992, written 1930–32), before then assessing the evidence indicating that he was also familiar with Guillaume Appollinaire’s L’Œuvre du marquis de Sade (1909) at this time. Following this, the essay examines how Beckett’s knowledge of Sade’s works and ideas, as gleaned through the aforementioned secondary sources, influences Dream of Fair to middling Women and More Pricks Than Kicks (1934). It argues that Dream of Fair to middling Women’s portrayal of the Smeraldina and the Frica align with an essential sadistic tenet theorised by Praz: namely, that the sadistic individual, out of ‘necessity’, regards lovers and sexual beings as ‘monstrous creature[s]’ ( Praz 1970 , 152). Following this, the essay argues that there is a reduction in sadistic force between Dream of Fair to middling Women and More Pricks Than Kicks, which renders visible a potentially unexpected similarity between Apollinaire’s depiction of Sade’s opposition to the death penalty and the textual condemnation of vulgarised sadism in ‘Dante and the Lobster’. The essay then concludes by highlighting how the entrance of the above-mentioned notes into Beckett’s earliest extended fictions exposes the fact that Beckett’s interest in the artistic potential of sadism pre-dates his 1938 encounter with Sade’s Les 120 journées de Sodome, thereby emphasising how the shade of sadism saturates Beckett’s œuvre.