The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The 120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade

The Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom (1785) is a literary abyss—a work that dares readers to confront the darker recesses of human desire, power, and moral decay. Written in the stifling confines of the Bastille, this incomplete novel serves both as a harrowing testament to de Sade’s unrelenting imagination and as a polemic against the hypocrisies of 18th-century society. It is a text that defies easy categorization: part philosophical treatise, part pornographic chronicle, and part anarchic manifesto.

At its core, The 120 Days of Sodom is an unflinching exploration of the corruptibility of power and the fragility of morality. De Sade constructs a microcosm of depravity in the form of a remote château where four libertine protagonists—an aristocrat, a bishop, a judge, and a banker—subject victims to escalating acts of sexual and psychological violence. The narrative unfolds as a carefully curated litany of perversions, meticulously cataloged by de Sade in what might be described as a taxonomy of transgression.

The structure of the novel is both its most fascinating and frustrating feature. Divided into sections corresponding to the four months of the libertines’ debauchery, it begins with exhaustive descriptions of the acts committed, narrated by professional storytellers hired to stimulate the libertines’ appetites. However, the text is incomplete, leaving the final sections sketched out in bullet-pointed plans rather than fully realized prose. This fragmentary quality adds an almost postmodern layer to the work, compelling readers to confront its incompleteness as part of its meaning—a reflection of the chaos and futility inherent in unbridled desire.

De Sade’s language is stark and utilitarian, serving as a counterpoint to the grandiloquence of his contemporaries. He eschews the sentimentalism of Rousseau and the moralizing of Voltaire, instead adopting a tone that is clinical and detached. This stylistic choice reinforces the dehumanization at the heart of the text, transforming characters into archetypes and acts into data points. While this detachment amplifies the horror, it also exposes the novel’s philosophical underpinnings. De Sade does not merely document depravity; he interrogates the boundaries of freedom, arguing that the pursuit of absolute liberty—liberty unmoored from ethics or consequence—inevitably culminates in tyranny.

To dismiss The 120 Days of Sodom as mere pornography would be to miss its existential provocations. The novel operates as a grotesque mirror, reflecting the reader’s own complicity in a world where exploitation and cruelty are normalized. De Sade weaponizes disgust to force a reckoning with society’s moral failings, from the inequities of class and gender to the hypocrisies of religion and law. The libertines’ unchecked hedonism is not an endorsement but an indictment—a warning of the abyss that awaits when power is divorced from accountability.

Yet, the novel is not without its limitations. The relentless cataloging of atrocities risks monotony, and the absence of psychological depth in the characters can alienate readers seeking traditional narrative complexity. Moreover, its explicit content renders it inaccessible to many, ensuring its readership remains as niche as it is polarized.

Ultimately, The 120 Days of Sodom is a work that resists resolution. It is at once a masterpiece of transgressive literature and a moral quagmire, a text that demands both critical engagement and moral scrutiny. To read de Sade is to confront the uncomfortable truth that human nature, unshackled from societal restraints, can veer toward the monstrous. Whether one approaches it as a cautionary tale, a philosophical treatise, or an artistic experiment, The 120 Days of Sodom endures as a challenging, incendiary work that continues to provoke and perplex.

In the words of de Sade himself, “Either kill me or take me as I am, because I’ll be damned if I ever change.” His defiant spirit pervades this troubling, complex text—a work that, like its author, remains defiantly unyielding to moral or literary conventions.