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holdmytesseract · 4 days

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For the drabble/blurb request

Character: magnus

Prompt: "you're ruling the way that I move and I breathe your air, you only can rescue me" from a song called cherish the day by Sade 🙂

Unfixable

Warnings: this got quite sad... 👀 angst, mentions of breakup, sad Magnus hours

Word Count: blurb

a/n: Thank you for the request! I really hope you like this lil' blurb! Kudos to @muddyorbsblr , who helped me along a bit! 🤗

He waited in the shadows of the building across from the house you lived in; too afraid to confront you right away. He hadn't gathered enough strength yet. And besides, he didn't want to scare you. So, he waited in the pouring rain until the light in your apartment flickered to life.

Magnus could already feel the rain soaking through his thin jacket, when he carefully crossed the quiet road.

Taking a deep breath, the young policeman entered the building, took the stairs which led to the second floor and came to stand in front of your door. For a good moment, Magnus just stared at the silvery doorknob; hesitating.

Should he knock? Should he just leave again?

He was on the verge of just leaving again, when somewhere from deep within his subconscious echoed a voice; urging him on to just knock. Man up, Martinsson. Just do it!

Before he was able to think twice about it, a shaking hand raised to knock against the door. Magnus' knuckles kissed the wooden surface and in that moment he knew it was too late to back down. His brain was too caught up with panicking - and therefore he didn't even notice how the door swung open. Only the sweet, angelic sound of your voice caused the warning bells in his head to fall silent.

"Magnus?"

He was very sure that at the call of his name, his heart jump over the cliff; free-falling and landing somewhere on cloud nine.

"What... What are you doing here?"

The blond haired man needed a moment to get a grip again. Puppy dog baby blue eyes met yours. "I-I..." Magnus started to stammer; fumbling with his hands nervously. "I'm sorry for just... barging in, but..." He sighed. "I can't forget you, Y/N. I know I screwed up big time, but please... I beg you... Please give me another chance."

You swallowed hard and took a deep breath. "Magnus... We talked this over so many times... I told you I can't do this a second time." Magnus squeezed his eyes shut; shaking his head. "I know, Y/N, but... You don't understand, I- Since months I feel lost. Falling down an endless abyss and you are the only one who can rescue me. I... I still love you."

His words hit you hard. You couldn't deny that they still sent a shiver down your spine, but- No... You reminded yourself. Not a second time.

"No, Magnus. I feel flattered, but we can't fix this. I'm sorry."

His heart broke right in front of you. You saw it - and it hurt you to the core. But you couldn't change the past or rewrite the future.

Carefully, you took his way too big hand in his and squeezed in a reassuring, apologising manner. "I'm sorry..." You whispered - and let go; your hand leaving his forever.

And before the pain could get unbearable, you took a step back and closed the door shut in front of Magnus.

You didn't see how the young man fought hard to hold back his tears - in vain. Or how his knees started to buckle; almost failing him as he found himself staring at the closed door once more. A door which would stay locked for him; not opening again.

Tags: @muddyorbsblr @mochie85 @asgards-princess-of-mischief @multifandom-worlds @jennyggggrrr @huntedmusicgardenn @hisredheadedgoddess28 @stupidthoughtsinwriting @fictive-sl0th @loz-3 @javagirl328 @icytrickster17 @jaidenhawke @eleniblue @lou12346789 @lady-rose-moon @km-ffluv @herdetectivetheorist @lokiforever @crimson25 @brokenpoetliz @cakesandtom @vanilla-daydreaming @kimanne723 @glitchquake @lulubelle814 @ijuststareatstuffhereok89 @buttercupcookies-blog @november-rayne @mandywholock1980 @lokidbadguy @smolvenger @vbecker10

#campfire sleepover #2k follower celebration #magnus martinsson #magnus martinsson wallander #magnus martinsson x reader #magnus martinsson x you #magnus martinsson x y/n #tom hiddleston characters

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nevarroes · 7 months

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Genuinely curious but why is cas "just like that" if not for bhaal? Dropped on his head as a child? Traumatic event? Thought marquise de sade was a comedy writer?

"thought marquise de sade was a comedy writer?" crying😭

no but this does actually have a reason 2 me but we are getting very into the "yes hes a murderer.... yes with the blood and stuff... yes he kills" (tell me u gyus saw that post. i lost it) area slowly with these questions... please do look away if really over-the-top backstory villains make u cringe thank yu...

anyways Cas (and his twin brother for that matter) was conceived in the depths of the Abyss not in the Nine Hells or the mortal plane which just kinda left him a bit errr... fucked up. Abyss-tainted if u will because that's what his parents always did call him🙏

so to me (while a little less so later on/in the current timeline) his demeanors and personality are really similar to average dnd demons. Striving for destruction (not necessarily interested in murder as an act but causing pain and suffering), vile perversion and just caring about his own desires really

#blakemail #yeah this mfer has a whole ass story thats not even connected to bhaal or baldurs gate im so sorry idk what im smoking #cas lore

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athanasius-symposium-of-writings · 16 days

Text

The Bird And The Man

Chapter Eleven

Rated: Explicit | Warnings: reader takes charge! good for them!, reader wears a dress (still gn!)

Ao3

Chapter Ten | Chapter Twelve (coming soon)

There are one hundred seventy thousand words in the English language, twenty-six letters in the alphabet, and yet they are all escaping you like fish running away when a rock is dropped in the pond. Scattering in all directions and you have even tried expressing your desire for him for late. A taste of ‘sin’ has awakened something within you一 As Marquis de Sade would probably say. Maybe? Maybe it seems unseemly but you tried doing research on sex and the science behind it when you were not in the manor. The person you were ghostwriting for wanted to explore romance and eroticism—Of course, when his father found out, that was scrapped.

‘In order to know virtue, we must acquaint ourselves with vice. Only then can we know the true measure of a man.’

You recall the quote from Marquis de Sade as you turn your head to the side and then peer down. The papers with the fantasies about Nightmare— Orpheus— Are under your bed in a small briefcase. Those words flowed out easily, still do when you think of him, about that night and…

Yet, you struggle!

You have done this before, ghost-wrote love letters for money on Valentine’s Day, yet you cannot write a letter for the man you love!

You turn your head back to grab the top of your head, angling down as you groan in frustration.

This is not working and it is killing you!

They say the best way to express love is with one’s talent, to create a piece to express emotions without having to speak.

You used your letters to Victor to express your want for a friendship and the man replied in kind with a steady flow of letters between you both. You think maybe friendly letters are easier than romantic ones… Yet, you have done it! For strangers… For people you have no clue about… For money to keep a roof over your head and food in your belly.

Why is it so hard?

You tried doing it again, but the words did not flow out. They keep being scratched out and rewritten repeatedly until you start crying in frustration.

Tears on the page ruined the ink that was drying, you felt at a loss when trying to think of what to write to Orpheus the greatest novelist of your time! The pages are scattered on your desk and it is a mess. The more you look at it, the more you stare at the many messy papers of words…

Then glance at the briefcase, back to the desk, then the briefcase. Then your heart started racing, a spark of inspiration— Not to write but to use the material right in front of me.

Getting out of your slump, you get up and grab the briefcase, placing it on the bed. Opening with quick hands, you turn to your desk grab all the papers, and shove it in the briefcase.

Call of the Abyss has few plots of romance though it all ends in doom. Call of the Abyss the sixth book plot was a romance with the dark twist of the surviving lover willing to sacrifice the world to be with him. It is a sad story, as expected of the great Novelist Orpheus to create.

You hope he will appreciate this gesture of romance… Before you can regret this, you close the case. Your eyes go to the miniature clock on your checking the time, you have an hour to spare to get ready for your dinner date with the hunter.

You will make sure he knows all you have to bear is for him tonight.

You have been in this manor for maybe about a month or two, maybe longer as it is hard to tell time in this manor. You only knew time passed by as the events for holidays are celebrated. This is your first Christmas and New Year here, both of you are happy

He formally invited you to dinner in the tea room knowing everyone would not be in the connected manors. This only happens during events, near the height of the events. Lady Nightingale is one to enjoy parties and socialize, this allows it to happen more smoothly.

Nightmare greets you at the door when you knock on it in a specific pattern, he is wearing a dark formal long coattails suit with a purple vest to break up the dark colors. No hat, you noticed his long feathers look shiny and smooth down. A graceful bow before moving to the side letting you in.

He points to the briefcase and tilts his head causing you to giggle with excitement.

“A surprise.” A big smile on that face he adores.

Nightmare is taking in the beautiful sight of you, he is surprised you choose a gown. A rather risqué one you are proud to have obtained (you still are surprised you persuaded Lady Nightingale to give you this!).

But Nightmare is a gentleman, his hand never drifts lower from the middle of your back. Disappointing, you are hoping to skip dinner and go straight to dessert, yet it is sweet to see him courting you.

The tea table with a colorful choice of dinner that smells wonderful, the candles, a bottle of wine. A polite and aesthetically pleasing sight, just in many books you have read everything is to the letter. To letter by pulling up your chair for you to sit then pushing it in when you are comfortable. Sitting down, pouring you a drink, your eyes widening when he removes his plague doctor mask revealing his bird-shaped face.

You swear he seems shy about it.

“Orpheus…” The table is small and is leaning a bit over it allowing you to read up and touch his beak, “Oh, you are so handsome.”

His head tilts leaning his beak towards your hand, “You are breathtaking.” The two-tone voice is low and soft.

Dinner is pleasant, light on your stomach, it makes you antsy too. He brought the phonograph down here too to play music, to invite you to a dance. It is picturesque, romantic and you feel loved.

But if you want more, you need to express to him how much you need him.

The strike of midnight, the new year is here in the manor, and your body is on top of the creature when the grandfather clock upstairs goes off

You give him the suitcase, “Please open it.” It is better now or never, this is torturous for you.

Each page was read, all of your honest words on papyrus and ink, you are crossing the point of no return.

You both are. Nightmare knows there will be complications and consequences, he does not give a damn as each word cannot be taken back. You love him. Love him so much that you wrote your heart out to him.

“I love you, Orpheus!” Yelling at him when the anxiety got the best of you, “Allow me to love you in every manner possible!” Begging to properly, to finally, show him as he has shown you the weight of this love on your heart.

Your poor misfortune heart who has no clue about the dangers of tasting a Nightmare. Heaven or Hell, you likely would make the same choice no matter the outcome of the pain you will endure… So long as Orpheus holds your hand.

“Hypnos.” He catches you as you run into his arms, “My budding novelist.” You never saw yourself worthy of the title. You are simply a writer, nothing grand. “How your words touch me.”

“I want to touch you, Orpheus.” There you say to him with much urgency so he understands how much you want him, “There is not a moment in the night I do not think about you,” Pouring your heart out in words you hope to capture the desperation you are suffering.

“Show me.” The permission is granted.

The wine cellar is not ideal however it is fitting for the crime of passion, to embark on a path of love and lust, the Baron will be crossed— Not that Nightmare cares, you are stronger than either men will except of you.

“Show me it all.” Taking you to the nest he created innocently to indulge in holding you for the rest of the evening, but he sees it will have a duel purpose.

Nightmare holds you and guides you onto his lap, making himself comfortable and exposed for you to take your time with.

There you are looking above him as you straddle his hips. Quickly, eagerly, your dress is risen to your waist exposing the garter and stockings, your hands up zipping the back but the gown remains on as you are trying to tease him by only giving a pick.

The creature holds your hips, carefully, and he lays under you, his chest moving up and down. Puffs of hot air escape his exposed beak as you rock your hips, grinding your crotch against the growing bump of his pants.

Gentle, his touch has no weight to them.

“Stop fearing you will hurt me.” You whine as the wine in your system has made you bold, needy, begging for him to take you properly, “I want you. Please, share this with me, Orpheus.” Gasping when his hips move up, more stimulation, you moaned not realizing how sensitive you are from being so pent up.

It was not long ago he touched you yet your body yearns for him as if he has not touched you in years.

“I am addicted to you,” Moaning as your hands barely can keep you stable until you lay on his chest, “Needing you so much.” Your movements are not the best but he adjusts you with his hands, “Orpheus, please!”

In the wine cellar, you are tucked away with the bird man, the noise from outside not heard down here, the music playing softly in the background long forgotten. He created a small romantic spot, a perfect place for you both. The wine has made you bold. The wine has made him far more aware of his desires. This was going to be a night to bask in one another, for him to have you experience pleasure like before.

“Whatever you need, let me help you feel good too.”

#idv #idv x reader #identity v #identity v x you #orpheus x you #idv orpheus x you #orpheus x reader #nightmare x reader #idv nightmare #nightmare x you #identity v x reader #idv reader insert #idv orpheus #idv novelist #reader insert #idv x you #fanfiction

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ancientgreekyuri · 3 months

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~ Playlist for Diathesterius.

Genres: folk, neoclassical, world music.

Yoko Kanno - Mast in the Mist / KOKIA - Siuil a Run / Hajime Mizoguchi - Bathing Day / Yoko Kanno ft. SEKAI - Memory of Time / Cicada - Into the Ocean / Sasakure.uk ft. Asako Toki - Little Cry of the Abyss / Cicada - Remains of Ancient Trees / Kotringo - I Can't Bear How Sad It Is / Cicada - Here We Are! / Masakatsu Takagi - Nurse Them Make a Fire Feed Yourself Express Your Mirth / Sizzle Ohtaka - I Was Watching Summer / Sade - Love is Stronger than Pride / Rebecca Sugar - Love Like You / Masakatsu Takagi - Dance of Your Nature / KOKIA - Be As You Are / KOKIA - Melody of Love / Masakatsu Takagu - Rama

Listen here.

Art by @/goldenshrine | @/yummyeggy

#📜 muse's voice #🌺👑🐂 love in idleness #sorry i don't include spotify links but a lot of the music i put on these just isn't on spotify </3 #for this one i may be able to but i know for a fact i would have to omit kingfisher... hmm #if u listen to one song on this playlist please please please listen 2 Rama. not even saying that for diathesterius reasons #i just think its a gorgeous and moving piece of music

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lafcadiosadventures · 9 months

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Madame Putiphar Readalong. Book Two, Chapter XXIV:

An intimate/claustrophobic chapter this week, only just two characters in a room full of palpable tension. One of them will win this battle, but perhaps not the war. It is still extremely satisfying to see Debby’s psychological evolution, from silently suffering, too afraid to call attention on herself to being completely cold blooded and ready to defend herself.

detail of “Two ladies duelling with pistols”. Engraving, 1792. Wellcome Collection.

Gave de Villepastour decides to pay Debby a visit, to thank her for staying silence and not telling her husband his various instances of harassment and rape attempts. (and to give the whole thing yet another try)

To add insult to injury, Gave addresses Deborah as “countess” and “milady”, after having claimed to be unsure about her title when Patrick tried to prove he hadn’t murdered her (as we know, the truth is irrelevant to Gave, all that matters is powerplay)

Once again Gave approaches sex as a contract (the typical post 1700's libertine novel scene where the rake exposes the reasons for the waif to accept having sex, combining intellectual arguments, monetary persuasion, and a pedagogy against religious prudery, from Sade’s, Choderlos’ and Diderot’s rakes, to Balzac’s, and surely many more)

We are told this is happening at the same time Patrick was kissing Putiphar’s hem, which politically speaking, stresses the similarities and differences in their situations. In a metaphysical level it probably stresses their status as twin souls, predestined halves, they are both in danger at the same time, but as always, the political aspect is inseparable from the mystical and the heaviest here, the threat comes from aristocrats in a position to play with their would-be-food.

Gave continues to be gross and insulting (and stupid, interpreting Debby’s silence as his having a chance), Debby is surprisingly calm and in control. She reads though Gave too, asserting that he fears ridicule more than anything.

Gave retorts by offering Debby what he frames as the opportunity of a lifetime: being pimped out by him to the king himself (this will be extremely relevant in chapters to come), since Putiphar is “old” and Kings bore easily (or so Gave thinks, Pompadour was skilled at changing roles and staying relevant)

Debby is rightfully outraged, but why should the Marquis be respectful towards her, when he holds so much power over her in his hands? He kindly reminds her of the trial in Tralee. He can make an example out of Patrick with extreme ease... unless she agrees to let him fuck her.

It’s important that while Debby is disgusted, she arguments that she refuses because she trusts Villepastour to break his vow immediately as soon as he gets what he wants.

Villepastour replies with manipulation: Since he claims he has to dishonour himself if Deborah wants him to help Patrick, it’s only fair for her to be dishoured by him to return the favour (once again, transactional language, he only offers her “(...)un échange de déshonneur contre déshonneur”. He gets a good line after that, very “poésie du mal” to borrow from Balzac’s Lucien. Romantics loved an Aesthetic of Evil and this is a skilled example of that, even if Borel has not been interested in making Villepastour at all appealing:

“Believe me, be wise; let’s descend together in the abyss of evil, and let’s do it in our holiday clothes; let’s do it happily. One says the very bottom is covered in flowers where those who have dared reach its appalling edges and descended in its awful gorges get intoxicated with the rarest, proscribed pleasures. Let us not defy crime: it is, like certain women with an ugly mask, repulsive by its vulgarity; but often, just as with these women, it has secret beauties concealing ineffable pleasures as well.”

(tr. By @sainteverge )

“Believe me, be wise”: wake up from religious slumber that deprives you from “criminal”pleasures. A very Enlightenment argument. Which pleasures are labelled criminal? And by whom? Debby rejects his sadian/diderotian seduction techniques. She repeatedly claims it’s precisely religion which gives her the strength to reject his seduction and know he is not to be trusted. (which is extremely interesting. Borel reverses the Enlightenment reversal of the trope favouring religion endowing the waif with purity and strength. Let us keep in mind that Borel will defend Sade as a creative force later on, -a really brave stance, but more on that in the relevant chapter!!- )(SO. How does Borel feel personally about this type of scene, and about organized religion? Why does he chose to make his heroine a deeply catholic person? Is Debby’s trust in God undeserved? After all the narrator has also defined God as a torturer... who actively enjoys testing his most devoted follower’s faiths through suffering)

Gave also praises ugliness in women as a beauty that only the initiated can appreciate (makes me think of Hugo’s Josianne)(overall, a highly Romantic paragraph)

Debby rejects Villepastour, who decides if he cannot win her over intellectually he will this time have her by force. Not today. Debby pulls a pair of guns from under a cushion. She calmly asks him to leave and never to return since the next time he shows up she will kill him. There is fear and surprise in Gave, but even then he explicitly exposes the illuminist argument (which he has also used the time he broke into her home, with colonial undertones): he only wanted to help her! He wanted to extirpate from her mind the bourgeois morals and religious constraints entrapping it. And he jokes, the disgusting man dares to joke, that if he feels the “bellicose impulse” once more he will answer to her pistols with the armour and jousting weapons of his forefathers.

Debby is also keeping her cool. She attacks him right where it hurts him the most, his reputation and status as a nobleman:

“Monsieur the marquis, the deed seems hazardous to me, if I am to believe the chronicles; your ancestors were cleaning armours, but not wearing any.” Monsieur de Gave marquis de Villepastour was not expecting such a sharp comeback to his boasting; with his mouth clamped shut and a saddened air he walked out; and lady Deborah led him out with her pistols in hand and much politeness.”

(tr. once again by sainteverge)(read it here!!)

Extremely satisfying. And rare. A woman taking arms to defend herself? Seems rare to me, a person who has read a very limited ammount of authors of the period :P I can only think of Balzac's Laurence de Cinc-Cygne and the female spies in Les chouans.... there’s Fantine fighting back to her aggressor, and Madame Thenardier is also physically dangerous but is a different trope altogether...

#madame putiphar #long post #text post #lets hope tumblr works this time :>#i am repeating myself a bit here but #this is a mirror chapter to ones we have read before #only the ending is new

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majestativa · 1 year

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I don’t know how that girl can go straight from Balzac to Sade without falling into the vast abyss in between them. I don’t know, in simpler terms, how I emerged unscathed from that brutal encounter (have I?), but I know that it did indeed change my life. I like to refer to it as my ‘baptism by subversion’.

Joumana Haddad, I Killed Scheherazade: Confessions of an Angry Arab Woman

#Lebanese #Joumana Haddad #Honoré de Balzac #Marquis de Sade

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mariacallous · 1 year

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The first time I learned about “Loab,” it sent shivers down my spine. A strange dead-eyed ghoul that began haunting an AI image generator last year, Loab reminded me of a fiend I’d been tracking for years. One in a different medium, in a different era, and under a different name: the Marquis de Sade.

This may not seem like an obvious connection to make. The Marquis de Sade, one of the most infamous names in all of writing, was an 18th century French aristocrat, a man known for debauchery and evading authorities, breaking out of prison and eluding his own public execution in 1772. Loab is very much a product of the modern age, the accidental creation of artist Supercomposite, who claimed to have “discovered” her in an AI text-to-image generator in April of last year. The two couldn’t be more different. Yet, what Sade’s writing showed humanity about their unspoken fascinations and what chatbots like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard unearth about similar interests seem all but destined to intersect. The question is: Who will be prepared for it?

Sade’s efforts to chronicle humanity’s—or at least his own—forbidden desires began, somewhat famously, in the bowels of the Bastille. In the late 1770s, after being locked away following a series of scandalous offenses, Sade became obsessed with putting quill to paper, resulting in a body of work so obscene that its author would be variously described as “the freest spirit who ever lived” and an “apostle of assassins.”

His most notorious effort was The 120 Days of Sodom, penned on a 40-foot scroll. Sade called the novel “the most impure tale ever written since the world began.” It tells the story of four wealthy degenerates who lock young subordinates in a castle and subject them to months of escalating depravity: incest, bestiality, coprophilia, necrophilia, disemboweling, amputation, cannibalism, and more. By the end of the novel, the chateau is awash in blood and body parts. Thanks to his writing, Sade became so deeply associated with cruelty he inspired the term sadism—deriving pleasure from pain.

While Sade believed the scroll was destroyed in the 1789 storming of the Bastille, in reality it embarked on a continent-spanning odyssey that involved underground erotica collectors, pioneering sex researchers, Nazi book burnings, scandalous Surrealist art, an audacious heist, international court battles and, most recently, a massive manuscript scandal in France. In fact, due to its horrid subject matter and the upheaval it’s been associated with, some authorities believe the scroll to be cursed.

Damned or not, the novel’s very existence is a mystery. Why would anyone have bothered with such a herculean effort at a time when the results could never be openly published? Who exactly was the man behind it? Was Sade a revolutionary, working to expose the rotten core of the aristocracy into which he was born? Or was he simply an unrepentant criminal, chronicling his own atrocities, committed or simply dreamed of?

In my research on Sade and the scroll, one explanation for its creation stood out: Sade, say some experts, endeavored to lay bare mankind’s most cruel and twisted desires. In his work, they argue, Sade was aiming to strip away the pretensions of other writing and plunge readers into the heinous depths of the human psyche. Literary critic Annie Le Brun put it bluntly when she described 120 Days of Sodom: “Suddenly, we have nothing left to hold onto, not even the uncertain parameters of self-awareness, which has disappeared unnoticed. Sade hurls us into the abyss we naively thought existed between the real and the imaginary, but which turns out to be the unbearable infinity of freedom.”

Le Brun’s words came back to me when I began reading about Loab. Take how Supercomposite explained her accidental creation of the terrifying image when she entered a series of negative prompts into a custom AI text-to-image model to push it as far away as possible from its starting point:

“You start running as fast as you can … You maybe end up in the area with realistic faces, since that is conceptually really far away from logos. You keep running, because you don’t actually care about faces, you just want to run as far away as possible from logos. So no matter what, you are going to end up at the edge of the map. And Loab is the last face you see before you fall off the edge.”

Once Loab emerged, she stuck around. When Supercomposite “crossbred” her likeness with other images, Loab would reappear in the results—often accompanied by depictions of violence, blood, and body parts.

To Supercomposite, this suggested that in this particular text-to-image model, Loab was associated with extreme negative concepts buried beneath all the things we usually think about: “Through some kind of emergent statistical accident, something about this woman is adjacent to extremely gory and macabre imagery in the distribution of the AI's world knowledge.”

Loab, it seems, is an example of how AI, unencumbered by a conscience or sense of decorum, is proficient at bringing to light the horrible human tendencies at which most people simply hint. In other words, the emergence of artificial intelligence has created a digital doppelgänger of the Marquis de Sade.

So here’s my prediction: As AI text generators become ever more ubiquitous in online conversations, search interfaces, and other forms of digital communication, the linguistic version of Loab, or whatever you want to call her, will emerge again and again. Either through intentional prompts or accidental word combinations, these programs will begin churning out ideas every bit as disturbing as 120 Days of Sodom.

The explicit content filters baked into these programs won’t completely stop the phenomenon. As 120 Days of Sodom and other works have long demonstrated, the written word is uniquely adept at circumnavigating arbitrary barriers placed in its way.

And unlike its forefather, this reincarnation of the Marquis de Sade won’t be so easy to lock away.

Some will surely use this development to further condemn AI, using it as one more example of how ChatGPT and its ilk are ushering in the end of writing. Others will likely propose new, sweeping forms of censorship, such as how France, birthplace of the Marquis de Sade and 120 Days of Sodom, is now proposing a nationwide pornography ban for all minors.

Such extreme reactions would be a mistake and would only make matters worse. Loab, after all, didn’t emerge out of thin air; she was simply a reflection of the fascinations and fears humans have fostered all along. Likewise, AI language generators shouldn’t be condemned for revealing the dark underbelly of the written word. Instead, learning from the ghosts in these machines could challenge the ways people communicate, and employ what they discover to craft new examples of human-generated art and literature.

Whether you consider the Marquis de Sade a sage or a villain, in some matters he had the right idea. Like it or not, dark temptations lie within everyone, and suppressing them isn’t always the answer. As the so-called “Divine Marquis” once said to justify his profligate ways, “Let us give ourselves indiscriminately to everything our passions suggest, and we will always be happy … Conscience is not the voice of Nature; do not be fooled by it, for it is only the voice of prejudice.”

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realityhop · 2 years

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Fantastic Fungi (2019) Myths & Monsters, “The Wild Unknown” (2017) “Adam and Eve with the Tree of Knowledge as Death” (1587)

“For centuries, knowledge has been pursued as a defense against truth.”

— Jacques Lacan, Seminar XIII (1966)

“We inherit from Greek philosophy the belief that knowledge is liberating, but the biblical myth of the Fall is closer to the truth.” — Heresies (2004) “[Lev] Shestov came to faith by way of radical doubt. But sceptical doubt, however radical, cannot bring the unlimited freedom Shestov demanded. What he wanted was to return to things as they were before the Fall, when all things seemed possible. But the Fall is the price of consciousness. There is no way back.” — Seven Types of Atheism (2018)

— John N. Gray

“God is not free to enact the law that renders Adam and Eve free. God’s name carries with it the prohibition, which is why it is impossible to envision a Garden of Eden with God and without prohibition. But the necessity of law disrupting the image of paradise is not a fact to be lamented. Genuine freedom is not compatible with a Garden of Eden lacking the prohibited tree. We can imagine the harmony of the prelapsarian world where there would be no negation, but we cannot even sustain this image. The moment we imagine how life would transpire in this world, we introduce negation. The prohibition simply makes us aware of the power of the negative and the freedom that it grants us. The prohibition opens up freedom because it introduces “no” into the signifying structure. […] The difficulty of confronting the nonsense of the prohibition in modernity is that a basic premise of modernity involves the rejection of non-sensical imperatives. Modernity craves sense. To modern ears, the primordial signifier sounds like a holdover from traditional society that has no place in the modern universe. But modernity cannot, any more than traditional society, do without its point of nonsense.”

— Todd McGowan, “The psychosis of freedom: Law in modernity” in Lacan on Psychosis (2018)

“A perverse subject desires to see any lack in the Other as one which can be filled. … Sade negates God, who is a metonymy for the limits of the Other of knowledge, by way of disavowal. André referred to Annie Le Brun’s book, Sade: A Sudden Abyss (1990), in his discussion of the function of Sade’s negation of God. Andre concluded that Sade’s “proliferation of blasphemy” functions to fill the “gaping hole that God, as signifier, leaves in reason.” From this conclusion it is apparent that Sade’s words of blasphemy function as a fetish to plug the lack in the Other.”

— Stephanie S. Swales, Perversion: A Lacanian Psychoanalytic Approach to the Subject (2012)

“In the master’s discourse, knowledge is prized only insofar as it can produce something else, only so long as it can be put to work for the master; yet knowledge itself remains inaccessible to the master. In the university discourse, knowledge is not so much an end in itself as that which justifies the academic’s very existence and activity.”

— Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject (1995)

“[A]ny decline in the force of institutions makes people vulnerable to information chaos. To say that life is destabilized by weakened institutions is merely to say that information loses its use and therefore becomes a source of confusion rather than coherence.” — Technopoly (1992) “Knowledge ..is only organized information. It is self-contained, confined to a single system of information about the world. One can have a great deal of knowledge about the world but entirely lack wisdom. That is frequently the case with scientists, politicians, entrepreneurs, academics, even theologians.” — Building a Bridge to the 18th Century (1999)

— Neil Postman

#unjustifiable #knowledge #nonsense #truth #freedom #information #God #mycelium #institutions #law

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dihydromorphinone · 7 months

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ᯓ ᡣ𐭩 in the shadows..

— kayn x reader, made this for my dearest friend @spierredalay i wouldn't be shit without u tysm for everything ilysm babes. <3 it's very short and i'm really disappointed in how it turned out but i was writing this and sleeping at once T__T

he lived in the shadows. he himself was a shadow. it was his home - no entity would be able to deprive him of the darkness. so, that's where kayn used to stay all the time. shunned from the very beginning of his existence, forced to cruelty at young age, the murkiness was something that he could count on. the dark was the only stable thing in his life, as it would never leave.

the whole ordeal with rhaast only doubled his gloominess. well, what else could he expect? with a war raging inside of him, demon-like creature trying to take over his body - there was no place for light. but even with the demonic creature possessing him, he found bits of comfort in the shadows. hearing the mocking laugh was way easier to ignore and bear without the light.

light could symbolise gods - and that was something that he'd stay away from. even though he defied his noxian roots and embraced the ionian culture, kayn still remained sceptic. gods have left him to rot, and that was obvious. which god would even allow this to happen? the wars, the destruction... which deity would be proud of such things happening under its watch? the logical answer is none, but even kayn, especially kayn knows that even the unbelievable things are bound to happen either way.

one of such things would be falling in love - the idea of stripping oneself of everything and giving all to the other person was a thought repulsing enough for kayn. there was no place to put trust into other person in his grim life. was he even capable of gentleness in the first place? an obvious answer - no. what if he lost control of himself and rhaast would permanently be in charge? the idea alone was hardy bearable, but thinking what would the cruel darkin do to his significant other... this was enough to make him reject all close relationships - except the one with his master, obviously. and soon, there was another exception.

you. even though he put walls all around him and he kept you as far away as possible, you didn't back down and still remained at his side, no matter how far he would go to do anything to make you realise he isn't good for you, but his playful façade only attracted you more. after all, even though he really wanted to be left alone and return to his comfortably numb darkness, kayn couldn't let go of his pride. but once, he went too far - almost slicing you with his scythe, stopping himself moments before disaster. seeing your terrified gaze made kayn feel something he never felt before; actual longing and pain. despite the darkin trying to argue, he threw the weapon away and engrossed you in his embrace.

and even though in the shadows it was just he, himself, alone - in the wisp of dark, the abyssal land; where no mortal eyes would reach and the luminosity prohibited from entering, as soon as you'll call his name you can be sure kayn will leave his chilly places he calls home to grant every of your wishes, even if it means leaving the comfort of his so-called home, though there is no place that he's rather be at than anywhere with you.

and from that day on - you've stepped onto the path of relentless pursuit of the greatness, but also of a world made purely out of shadows. being engulfed by the dark mist wasn't as bad as it may sound like, especially when the haze was accompanied by kayn's hands, touching your body in a way you'd never let anyone. on a particularly bad night, he would step out of the wall -with the dark, mystic fog sticking to him just like a tattoo- and lull you to sleep, whispering sweet nothings into your ear and delicately sliding his arms down your sides. nothing has ever been so soothing before, despite the sharpness of his corrupted arm.

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sanct-amor · 1 year

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A Paris, j'ai rencontré un jeune sicilien d'à peu près mon âge, 27 ans je crois. Malgré cette "vieillesse", il était encore étudiant en littérature à la Sorbonne, travaillant sur la traduction française de la Canzoniere de Pétrarque et sur la figure de Laure de Sade (il l'appelait "Laura de Noves") ; la Provence me rattrapait même dans la capitale.

Il admirait Proust, Baudelaire et Huysmans, comme moi. Je crois qu'il souhaitait faire une thèse sur Marcel. Quelle chance il avait de poursuivre ses études à cet âge, dans un domaine qui le passionnait. Moi, j'avais fait du droit. Le regrettais-je ? Je l'ignore toujours. Mais ça n'a jamais été ma passion.

Nicolo (c'était son nom) écrivait un roman, son premier jet. Je l'ai encouragé. J'avais moi-même écrit un premier roman, refusé par toutes les maisons d'édition. Qu'importe, je crois sincèrement qu'il était médiocre. "Par-delà les abysses", son titre rendait hommage à "Par-delà le bien et le mal" de Nietzsche. Je conserve son manuscrit dans ma bibliothèque, il m'est précieux.

J'ai montré certains de mes dessins à Nicolo (dont celui de Laure de Sade que j'avais inventé) ; il avait l'air intimidé. Est-ce que mon art effraie les gens ? Ce n'est pas vraiment l'effet que je recherche... Mais il avait l'air emballé par mon projet poétique "Amor Mundum Fecit", l'Amour a fait le monde.

C'était l'une des rares personnes avec qui je pouvais librement parler de mes passions, de la littérature, de l'art. Pourquoi ces personnes sont si peu fréquentes ? Peut-être devrais-je retourner à Paris ? Cette ville est probablement un aimant pour ce genre d'uranistes.

Je l'ai invité dans mon appartement, un Air bnb dans le 5ème, au sud du Panthéon. J'ignore ce qu'il s'est passé dans sa tête, mais Nicolo a complètement changé d'attitude. Il avait l'air timide et agité. Après avoir bu la tasse de thé vert que je lui avais offerte, il est parti en me parlant italien, de manière très forte alors qu'il devait être 2 ou 3 heure du matin. J'ai tenté de lui reparler sur instagram, mais il ne me semblait pas très loquace.

#Paris

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musegame · 1 year

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🩸 We’ve all been burned before during our time RPing, do you think any of those experiences have changed how you go about RP today?

The fact that I had to sit here and think about which one to tell is sad, bro.

Lets go with the origin of Sades' trust issues. I guess.

So! It was before I had found Touhou and right at the budding Naruto boom here in the west. I was a filthy magic ninja loving weeb and wanted to find more like minded idiots to be around. That lead me to Gaiaonline and forum rp soon after. The name of the guild I joined was called The Abyss Clan. Had fun at first, the owner and I ended up becoming good friends about a month or so in and the rest of the guildmates were...alright, I guess? Half of em were dumb racists and the others were power fantasy 12 year olds, but for the most part they dialed it down when you threatened to put your foot off in their ass.

Anyway, fast-forward to a year or so in, I think? My OC and another's were slated to get hitched for plot, yeah? Weeeeeell....their ex too offense to that and rather than pulling me aside and letting me know about these problems she choose to go full scorched earth and utterly blacklisted my name from that guild. Would've been nice if it stopped there but my private messages were filled with threats and shit from the same sorry kids I called friends two days back.

It's 2023 now and I've still never touched the Naruto fandom with a twenty foot pole.

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deoffal-mp-adm7000-n-s1-2022 · 2 years

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The 63, Part 7:

61. Taboo: This piece seems too self explanatory enough for anyone who even knows the most subtle things about fetish gear and has read the entirety of these captions up to now. With this being more of fetish play type visual to represent the idea of the taboo altogether it’s certainly more a Robert Mapplethorpe or Rick Owens type facade than the work that inspired it, as I was reading alot of Bataille while making this piece at the time, and his ideas on the taboo speak on the fact that the taboo is a naturally occurring and evolutionary response to how mankind handles it’s darkest elements. As in Eroticism (1957), Bataille speaks of time when our consciousness became so evolved that we started burying our dead and dressing more modestly when we realised just how confrontational the reality of nature could be, and that we became toilers and hard workers steeped in ritualistic practices to found civilised orders based on our fears of being totally one with nature again, in turn, wanting to avoid the very presence of mankind and it’s true nature as an animal and a pleasure seeking beast. Though I am paraphrasing and this image certainly isn’t primeval looking in anyway, this portrait speaks to our contemporary idea of the taboo, that of the darker and deeper secrets and controversial conversations of human history as always being reflected on the human condition, and in turn dangerous for the things they make sensible people question, yet they are always shrouded in this sense of an almost always sexual excitement, as if walking into the abyss can yield greater reward and satisfaction against the mundanity of work and civil culture.

62. Fleck: After all my notes on species superiority and how Lovecraft takes this topic and utterly demoralises it through his work, this piece is a rumination on said ideas, after all, he sees and accepts that humanity is a fleck of light in an infinite abyss of blackness, of which we are not entitled to be authorities over, and the potential to be alone in such a never ending space is such a ridiculous concept, as life is the most abstract concept in philosophy as it can exist in cells, bacteria, fungus, gases and dust, after all, how can we really be the standard for life and logic, when we are one out of billions of other species on Earth? And we only live for under a century on average, and most plant life can live much longer than we can just by feeding off of the nutrients in soil. It’s the most common theme in works of weird fiction and cosmic pessimism alike, as they both want to speak on the idea of existences more intelligent and advanced than humanity, while at the same time making sure that they are by no means just a humanoid that represents a higher state of man, avoiding god complexes and the average super hero stereotype that you see everywhere now. Pessimistic writers and their fictional counterparts in literature of heroes like Lovecraft all share one common goal, and that is to redefine the value we place on meaninglessness and our self-imposed suffering against it when creating dogmas to avoid it, they want to use meaningless to prove that creative and true philosophical thinking should not be limited to sensible human logic, nor should it biased towards humanity and it’s ego, it should always look beyond the pale and assumed to create new meaning out of nothingness, a new meaning that is capable of pushing past humanities distractions from their true fears found in the potential of the universe beyond us.

63. Shrink: It’s odd that this is the last image of this collection, as I only finished with this piece so that I could cap off another collection, while at the same time making it that my overall exhibition collection would equal 120, to make up for the failed ambition I had in Soma Volume 1 to make 120 pieces in tribute to Sade and my surrealist influences by proxy, of course I’ve massively over shot this number when totalling all the resolved materials, but it’s still an important foot note to me personally. Bar all that, this piece was based on my studies into the book ‘Morbid Curiosities’ by Paul Gambino (2016), Paul interviewed over 10 various collectors, all specialising in one area of collection in particular, some collect all Halloween costumes and Ouija boards, some collection murder weapons from crime scenes and paintings from serial killers, some collect wax medical figures and preserved human remains and the remains of animals too, but one thing that seemed eerily common, was the collection of shrunken heads, from circuses, indigenous tribes and from long dead explorers of the world who sold these trinkets like pop corn at a cinema. Paul’s opinion on artefacts such as these and what they represent, is that we often smother ourselves with images and objects that represent the finality of death and the truest of alternative, so as to break the taboo and find it’s presence comforting rather than alarming, and shrunken heads have just always sat in a strange zone between the uncanny and the humorous to me, as shrunken heads are often pocket size and yet still are the heads of people either executed or murdered out of spite, some people even being killed so their head can sold as a shrunken head in the history of colonialism. Shrunken heads are just so uncanny due to them being so cartoonish when it comes to representations of entropy and death generally speaking, acting almost as a caricature on how we shrink in the face of finality and it’s mortal connotations, making us into feeble being in it’s terrifying wake, so I drew a head as featured in Paul’s book and thought I would give it a place in this collection as it finished the body of work rightfully so.

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dwellordream · 2 years

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“Always existing as a possibility for the dangerous lover is a fall into the deeps of pure evil. Complete embitterment leaves no moral sense; it leads to rampant, glowing vengeance on the innocent as well as the guilty. All dangerous lovers must be on the fragile edge of this abyss in order to be truly dangerous. Many Gothic villains exist on this plane as do a particularly Victorian translation of the dangerous lover that connects him to an Iago tradition of purposeless malignity. A force for meaningless evil, for destroying the possibility of grace for others, for general, wholesale harm, Iago characters do not even have the excuse of psychologized misanthropy.

Their evil participates in a paucity of unique signification; it comes out of some impersonal force of destruction that resides outside reasoning and sense. Often, as in Othello, such absurdity of malevolence causes a concatenation of death and destruction; evil spins out of control, affecting a whole scene and all those characters within it. Iago characters open a wound in the world which, in the paradigm of the contemporary romance, is “healed” by the heroine’s love. The evil seducer fascinated the mid-nineteenth-century popular imagination in seduction narratives in the penny magazines of the 1840s and 1850s.

Sally Mitchell describes the repetition of these narratives in magazines such as the Pioneer: the story would include an aristocrat who would seduce a lower-class girl, usually ruin her, then disappear, or be punished by remorse. Clearly a class allegory and certainly a reaction against Byronism, these narratives represent the dangerous lover not as an unquiet soul searching for absolution or death, but rather as only dangerous (but still titillating in his dangerousness). Mitchell also points to numerous sensation novels that contain seduction narratives, such as A. J. Barrowcliffe’s Normanton (1862), The Soiled Dove, Jessie’s Expiation (1867), and James Malcolm Rymer’s The White Slave (1844–45).

Iago-like antiheroes often serve, for the Victorians, as transgressors of the social norm, whose punishment leads to a reaffirmation of normative reason. Ellen Wood, in East Lynne (1861), creates the heartless rake Frank Levison who vilifies the dandy. Unlike the most successful dandies of the Regency, Levison vulgarly overdresses. Not only does he have “perfumed hands” and “dainty gloves,” but “He would wear diamond shirt-studs, diamond rings, diamond pins; brilliants, all of first water” (97). Like the dandies of the Silver-Forks, he runs into debt living a high and frivolous life, and he also tries out politics. Yet in many ways he is unsuccessful as a dandy; while he seduces many women, he finally becomes merely a source of harm for those around him.

His seduction of Lady Isabel (Mrs. Carlyle) points to the didactic thread of the novel; such idle, wasteful, and cruel men are harmful to society as a whole. Motivated by no purpose, Levison seduces various women; he divides families and even commits murder. He does these things without any sort of magnetism, personal power, or clear desire. As a purely transgressive force, he still does not create a serious rift or interruption in given norms, as a rebellious Romantic would seek to do, but rather serves only to uphold the generally understood moral structure based on heterosexual marriage and monogamy. While we might bring this antihero into a Sadean discourse, in this sense he is not Sadean.

Sade seeks to outrage, as Pierre Klowossowski asserts, and to outrage is, among other things, to establish a site of singularity in the midst of the general geography of society, a unique stance in the center of universal reason. “With this principle of the normative generality of the human race in mind, Sade sets out to establish a counter-generality that would obtain for the specificity of perversions, making exchange between singular cases of perversion possible” (Klowossowski, 14). The Victorian antihero, on the contrary, can always be recuperated into a heterosexual discourse of crime and punishment.

He may stand out starkly in his dangerous eroticism initially, but as the novel draws to a close, he is punished, chastened, and somehow brought under the shadow of propriety. Following the bifurcated erotic structure of many Victorian novels, East Lynne centers on the two-lover motif. The heroine has two possible erotic outlets; she is drawn in two directions and she is forced to choose: one lover represents the propriety of the secure gentleman situated in steady society (Mr. Carlyle) and the other the abyssal secretiveness of the lost stranger, generally utterly villainous (Levison).

To some extent reminiscent of the relationship of the Gothic heroine to the villain and her lover as discussed in chapter 2, this paradigm usually posits, similarly and not surprisingly, the villain as the more deeply fascinating and sexually attractive of the two for the heroine. We have only to think of Linton and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights for a classic study of the confusion of this duality for the heroine and its possibility for tragically pulling her into unlivable fragments.

Anne Humpherys theorizes about the way the Victorian gothic has taken up and rearranged the Gothic villain, using some pieces in one prototypical character, and others in a different one. In the early Victorian gothic, one type of villain, as Humpherys explains, is created as a kind of Byronic hero who doesn’t commit a deep crime or sin but still feels a misanthropic guilt and melancholy (like the later Vivian Grey, Rochester, and the many less dangerous contemporary romance dangerous lovers, especially in the “sweet” genres), and the other acts in villainous ways yet doesn’t contain the psychological depth of the Gothic villain.

This second type—which Humpherys calls the melodramatic villain—generally acts the part of the villain in the Victorian twolover motif, although the variations of this character abound. Steerforth in Dickens’s David Copperfield (1846) can be classed as just such a rootless and depthless evil-doer: why does he do it? We never really know. Steerforth begins by condescending to David when they are children at Salem House, and such a domineering and dictatorial manner, with his upper-class appearance of experience and knowledge, immediately charms the slavishly passive and class-obsessed David.

David precipitously falls in love, and their homoerotic relationship blinds David to Steerforth’s savage sadism—generally worked against those of lower classes, such as the schoolteacher Mr. Mell whom Steerforth torments because his mother lives on charity in an almshouse. Yet Steerforth holds this charm, the charm of cultural capital, which creates the self-ease and assurance David always wishes he had.

“There was an ease in his manners—a gay and light manner it was, but not swaggering—which I still believe to have borne a kind of enchantment with it. I still believe him, in virtue of his carriage, his animal spirits, his delightful voice, his handsome face and figure, and, for aught I know, of some inborn power of attraction besides (which I think a few people possess), to have carried a spell with him to which it was a natural weakness to yield, and which not many persons could withstand” (124–25).

The entrancing nature of the dangerous lover comes from his power and the desire for immolation at the feet of the beautiful God who demands prostration. Steerforth enchants numerous people in this manner, most fatally Emily. Emily could choose the simple, honest, working-class Ham (and even David appears as a possibility for a time), but she instead falls under the spell of the “demon lover”—the impossible, devilishly eroticized Steerforth. Unlike the pure Byronic hero who is fallen and survives as a failure, a character like Dickens’s Steerforth once fallen must die to the narrative, be effaced by it rather than transcend it or hold its immanent meaning.

In Dickens’s story of two lovers, both flawed, Dombey and Son (1847), Edith comes to have a choice between her husband, Mr. Dombey, who stands for the frigidity of an obsession with business and money—his coldness freezes all those around him—or Carker, who can be placed firmly in the Iago tradition. With his melodramatic flair, he is a theatrical, gestural dangerous lover who seems to have no interiority, hiding his abyss behind his large grin and debonair façade. Like many antiheroic lovers, he holds steadily to a mask that controls his emotions and hides the chilling emptiness inside.

“He had his face so perfectly under control, that few could say more, in distinct terms, of its expression, than that it smiled or that it pondered” (457). A kind of cat or predatory animal, he “pounces” on his victims and, metaphorically, tears them up. “Coiled up snugly at certain feet, he was ready for a spring, or for a tear, or for a scratch . . .” (387). His divining cleverness and sensitivity to the subtle emotions and desires of others complicates him and explains how he is able both to repulse and to enchant the women in the novel, specifically Florence, Alice, and Edith.

While these women all come to hate Carker, he represents for each of them the beauty of a Sadean mind. Florence’s reaction to him, while never that of a lover, expresses strongly his hypnotic qualities: This conduct on the part of Mr. Carker, and her habit of often considering it with wonder and uneasiness, began to invest him with an uncomfortable fascination in Florence’s thoughts. A more distinct remembrance of his features, voice, and manner: which she sometimes courted, as a means of reducing him to the level of a real personage, capable of exerting no greater charm over her than another: did not remove the vague impression. And yet he never frowned, or looked upon her with an air of dislike or animosity, but was always smiling and serene. (385)

Florence’s “wonder and uneasiness” has an undeveloped erotic aspect to it; she responds to his mysterious otherness with a kind of queasy desire to be mastered. Similarly, Carker’s seduction of Alice appears at first to have made her his worst enemy, but she suddenly relents when it comes to the possibility of Carker’s death. Edith’s response to Carker initially seems to be merely a proud desire to use him as a tool for revenge: running away with Carker will punish Dombey for his sadistic treatment of her. And Edith punishes Carker as well by only pretending she will become his mistress and then renouncing him when he has become a means for escape.

Yet Edith’s attraction to him is certainly more subtle and varied, as Humpherys argues convincingly; it is an attraction of similar temperaments, and in their relationship we see Carker as a handsome and sensual man. Carker’s erotic villainy places him firmly in the trajectory of the dangerous lover, and yet he does not stand radically outside as a blackened, world-decimating type such as Manfred or Heathcliff. While there are moments when the reader is persuaded to identify with him because he is shown to have an interior life, Carker’s evil never holds an erotic sublimity.

When Maggie Tulliver first meets Stephen Guest in Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), she sees in him “the half-remote presence of a world of love and beauty and delight, made up of vague, mingled images from all the poetry and romance she had ever read, or had ever woven in her dreamy reveries” (311). Stephen Guest’s “diamond ring, attar of roses, and air of nonchalant leisure, at twelve o’clock in the day” and his characterization as “the graceful and odiferous result of the largest oil-mill and the most extensive wharf in St. Ogg’s” (193) mark him as the idle dandy, backed by cultural and economic capital.

The erotic intensity Maggie feels in his presence comes not only from his figure symbolizing an aestheticized and ideal world but also from his very inaccessibility and taboo status as her cousin Lucy’s lover. His dangerousness stems from the way he envelops a lost and thus paradisiacal world for Maggie who is drawn to him as she is drawn to other self-destructive rebellious passions. We have seen these desires at play in her childhood, in the scene where she cuts off her hair or when she runs away to live with the gypsies. “Something strange and powerful there was in the light of Stephen’s long gaze, for it made Maggie’s face turn towards it and look upwards at it” (357).

Stephen Guest’s seduction of Maggie comes from his selfish and spoiled misdirection rather than a deliberate desire for another’s harm—the motivating influence of characters like Carker and Steerforth. Stephen has the ability to take a position on the margins of the moral world of the novel, as Neil Roberts suggests; “he is the useless product of other men’s labour” (99). He is certainly a force exterior to Maggie’s world, a stranger to her experience up until the moment she meets him; and it is this strangeness that intoxicates Maggie. When she succumbs to “that strong mysterious charm which made a last parting from Stephen seem the death of all joy” (379), Maggie finally closes the book on the possibility of being accepted into the society of St. Ogg’s: she dooms herself to an exiled state, full of sadness, wasted lives, lost causes.

The Mill on the Floss, not surprisingly, contains the two-lover motif, but Eliot divides the Byronic hero/villain into two men, equally unfit to be proper lovers for Maggie. While not exactly a melodramatic villain, Stephen does become the seducer. Philip Wakem takes the place of the more proper lover in the lover’s triangle because of his deep love for Maggie and the fact that he is romantically unattached (although because of their families having quarreled, their relationship is also impossible), yet he represents the kind of lover Humpherys discusses in her schema. Because of his hunched back, he feels he has been “marked from childhood for a peculiar kind of suffering” (271). He has a Byronized melancholy torment about him without having committed any crimes, and his deformed figure marks him as marginalized and Cain-like.

One text we must locate in this history because of the way it weaves together many of the threads we have been following is Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). While not exactly a two-lover narrative, Wilde’s novel skillfully combines the Silver-Fork narrative (at its most didactic) and the seduction narrative. Dorian Gray works as an important transitional figure in the dangerous lover trajectory; he represents the philosophy of the dandy with his worship of the beautiful, yet he is also a destructive seducer and rake, driving numerous women and men to ruin and suicide.

As Basil remarks, “Why is your friendship so fatal to young men? There was that wretched boy in the Guards who committed suicide. . . . There was Sir Henry Ashton, who had to leave England, with a tarnished name. . . . What about Lord Kent’s only son, and his career? . . . What about the young Duke of Perth?” (147). Dorian, akin to the vampire, the rake of the seduction narrative, and Gothic villains, ruins lovers in order to feed his desire for all types of tabooed and marginal experiences, to further his attempts to reach the depths of selfish pleasures and abasement.

This spiral towards “sin” begins with the dandy’s divination of materiality—food, wine, clothing, art. Fashion, by which what is really fantastic becomes for a moment universal, and Dandyism, which, in its own way, is an attempt to assert the absolute modernity of beauty, had, of course, their fascination for him. His mode of dressing, and the particular styles that from time to time he affected, had their marked influence on the young exquisites of the Mayfair balls and Pall Mall club windows, who copied him in everything that he did, and tried to reproduce the accidental charm of his graceful, though to him only half-serious, fopperies. (127)

But the “worship of the senses” is not enough for him; he wants to live a new “hedonism” that will explore every kind of passionate experience. The dandy in his purist form shows no true passion; his highest achievement is to be bored with all that is exquisite and sublime. But finally Dorian goes down a very different path from the Silver-Fork dandy: he revels in the corruption, the vacuity at the heart of beauty. Beauty only reaches its highest culmination when it touches death and decay. As an Aesthete, Dorian is also a late Romantic. “There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful” (143).

Even in Thackeray’s critique of the dandy in Vanity Fair he is never a force for evil. Basil Hallward, drawn by the aesthetic experience of gazing on Dorian’s still-beautiful person, tells Lord Henry about the kind of seduction Dorian is able to practice. “When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale. A curious sensation of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with someone whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself” (6).

The homoeroticism of the narrative points to the way Wilde’s representation of the “dangerousness” of our hero comes from society’s fear of same-sex desire. Clearly Dorian’s evil influence on men and his later punishment by disfiguration and death is shot through with homophobia. The secret expression of his sin, locked away in the attic, has much to do with a figurative meaning of being in “the closet”—forced to hide one’s desires and sexual activities. Never redeemed by love as a contemporary romantic antihero would be, Dorian dies, a self exhausted by passionate experience that is never enough to fulfill him.

Dorian’s Gothic double—a painting which changes to reflect his evil deeds while his own appearance remains youthful and innocent-looking—has Dorian’s sins and evil deeds inscribed on its face. Like many other dangerous lovers, such as the Cain-like Byronic figure, Dorian’s unspeakable interiority is marked on an exterior surface, the painting. Thus the existence of the unrepresentable relies on a surface inscription, which could be read by anyone.

Basil sums up this central truism that drives the plot: “Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face. It cannot be concealed. People talk sometimes of secret vices. There are no such things. If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even” (146). Of course, when the inscription is destroyed, the man is destroyed, pointing again to the paradoxical play of surface/depth of the dangerous lover.”

- Deborah Lutz, “The Absurdity of the Sublime: The Regency Dandy and the Malevolent Seducer (1825–1897).” in The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative

#gothic #literature #romanticism #deborah lutz #the dangerous lover

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