Venus in Furs begins at the end. Ten years after the main events of the short novel, Severin presents to our unnamed narrator a personal document he's called Confessions of a Supersensual Man.
Most people who know of Venus in Furs also know that its author, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, gave his name to the condition we now call masochism. A superficial reading of the novel will do more than enough to show you why.
In terms of plot, Venus in Furs tells the tale of a man who gets exactly what he wants and discovers he doesn't want it. The Severin we meet framing the story at the beginning and end is not the same Severin we meet in Confessions of a Supersensual Man. He's a man who has gone through his deepest fantasies, seen them become all too real, and become someone quite different as a consequence.
Dreams haunt the novel from the start, where our unnamed narrator dreams he is talking to the goddess of love herself–dressed immaculately in furs, of course. In the novel's final catastrophe Severin notes that the feeling was like awakening from a dream.
Dreams are fantasies, and if Venus in Furs is nothing else, it is a masochistic fantasy. But when fantasies become real they also become agonizing, terrifying. We can have all sorts of fantasies about things we don't really want to happen. Walking through the self-checkout line at the grocery without paying for anything. Breaking a window. Applying a hammer repeatedly to the face of that one coworker.
And we can have other fantasies we indulge in private, just for a little bit of fun. (It's all right, none of this is real…)
But Severin is a man who wants to make his fantasies real. And he does. Which, even if his fantasies include putting his neck under a cruel woman's heel and making himself into her worshipful slave… is still a thing I think we can respect. At least in principle.
And anyway, he was young at the time. And he does learn better eventually.
A Return to Paganism
If the title alone didn't make it clear, Venus in Furs delights in classical antiquity. Severin, telling his story in the form of diary entries in the Confessions of a Supersensual Man, fancies himself a little poet. He's always making references to figures from Greek mythology and history. There are loving invocations of Circe, who turned so many men into pigs, and to the bull of Dionysus–a really lovely and torturous execution device Dionysus first tested out on the man who invented it.
And it really is lovely, there at the beginning of the novel. Poetical descriptions of nature in the little town in the Carpathians where Severin is staying. He's rented a room in a house belonging to a 24 year old widow who is reportedly very beautiful. And one day, posing beside a statue of Venus, he writes a few lines about how he would like to worship her.
A few days later, the widow's old servant appears, asking Severin to recommend some reading material for the widow. He lends her a few books… and would you believe it, he just so happened to leave the poem he wrote in the stack of books. By complete accident, of course.
He imagines he hears mocking laughter. And he imagines the beautiful woman is laughing at him.
This is a review, not a summary, so I don't want to go into the details of the budding romance. But there are some scenes and Severin comes out of them feeling ridiculous. He calls himself a donkey–quite a lot, actually, enough that you'd almost think he enjoyed it.
But I don't want to make fun of Severin too much, either. He's not kidding around with all his pagan talk. He's a man who still needs to become a man, really–and he's half-conscious of it, too, he calls himself a dilettante, a beginner in everything. And as the love blossoms between him and the widow–her name is Wanda von Dunajew–in a deeply perverse way you almost have to admire his commitment.
The Supersensual Man
So what is it about Severin?
What's fascinating in Venus in Furs is the way it interrogates the psychology of masochism. And it never does this better than in the early conversations between Wanda and Severin.
Wanda likes the idea of playing with being Severin's Venus in furs. She likes Severin, might even love him a little, and it amuses her to hear him talk about his ideals of love, his ideal woman, and so on. She even warns Severin now and again that he might be awakening something in her that ought not to be awakened.
But what is it about Severin? To hear him tell it, the reason he has the fantasies he has is because he's all too susceptible to the beauty of women. So strongly that as a boy he'd avoided women entirely out of a kind of terror–a feeling that women were too much for him. (There's a scene he describes where a servant girl tried to kiss him when he was young and he immediately fled the room.)
His aunt beat him when he was a boy–while she was wearing furs. A Countess whipped him when he was a boy–while she was wearing furs. And Severin has all sorts of explanations for why he has this fantasy about cruel women in furs… but it's easy to see where he got the idea.
Even after he's recovered from his fantasies, there's something a little too intense about Severin. At the opening of the novel our narrator tells us he has a reputation as an eccentric. That he lives precisely, as if by system, but every once in a while it seemed like he was about to run his head into a wall.
Severin is not the type who can calmly and rationally love a woman. He either loves not at all, or with the passionate, destructive intensity that gives Venus in Furs its driving force.
Man and Woman
Severin eventually comes clean to Wanda that what he really wants is to become a woman's abject slave–her slave in particular.
Wanda thinks this is a dumb idea. Part of the tragedy of the novel is that she really does love Severin at the beginning. She's not at all into it, but she goes and gets a whip to try out whipping him. She really doesn't like it and tries to get him to kiss her and be normal–but he's like, "No, you have to whip me!" Eventually she gets so mad at him that she actually starts to enjoy whipping him, and this is one of the points where she's like, "We should really stop this, I don't like what you're awakening in me."
And you can imagine this story working out with Severin and Wanda having a slightly kinky but more or less standard relationship. But Severin is determined to run his head into the wall.
They talk about getting married but Severin's still on his whole "make me your slave" kick. And Wanda tells him she could only ever really marry a man who could dominate her, anyway. That he really doesn't need to be afraid of his desire quite so much.
Oh and by the way, why not sign this piece of paper where you agree to be my slave and that your name isn't Severin anymore, it's Gregor–and while we're at it go ahead and write a suicide note so I can kill you if I feel like it?
Yes, that actually happens. And yes, he wears a uniform and goes around like her servant and sleeps in the cold, cold servant's quarters in hotels at night.
And the whole time Severin's suffering through this and he's like, "I love her so much, why's she treating me like shit when I told her I wanted her to treat me like shit? Why's she so cruel when I told her I love cruel women?"
If you wanted, you could read Venus in Furs as a kind of Kafkaesque nightmare, or a black comedy where the protagonist wants to be miserable, turns out to be miserable, and finally realizes he doesn't like it. And in a perverse way Wanda is just doing exactly what Severin wants–she loved him at the beginning and it's just his commitment to the whole "slave" bit that eventually makes her hate him.
The German Painter
Speaking of Severin awakening things in Wanda. Throughout the novel, there's this constant undercurrent where Wanda's talking about how cruel it is that women are expected to go on loving men when the feeling of love is gone. (Reminder that this novel was written in the 19th century, when marriage was more than a piece of paper.) And she's hinted now and then that she might stop loving Severin and decide to take a lover. And really rub it in his face the whole time, make Severin (now Gregor) deliver him messages, drive him around in the carriage, and all that.
Which excites Severin because of course it does. But it also horrifies him and he thinks she'll never really do it.
Which is around the time the German painter comes around. Severin's worried about him at first, but it turns out he's an idiot.
What happens with the painter comes about because Wanda has Gregor give her a bath one day. So there's a whole "look but don't touch" thing going on there, but when Gregor looks in the mirror he sees the two of them and says, "This needs to be a painting."
And Wanda says, "You know what, you're right. Let's have the German painter paint us like this."
So they do. They change things around a little–Wanda has a whip now, and she has her furs draped over her shoulders. And Gregor is lying on the ground kissing her feet.
For a while the German painter just stares and doesn't say anything. But then he just shrugs and starts drawing sketches so he can make a painting. On a whim, Wanda whips Gregor a couple of times.
Which sets up for the most hilarious line in the whole book, where the painter just looks at Wanda and asks, "Will you whip me too?"
Which she does. And the German painter really likes it, but Wanda thinks he's a donkey and even Gregor thinks he's a donkey. So he finishes his painting but he's gone as soon as that's finished.
The Greek
The incident with the Greek is what finally shows Severin he really needs to change his life. And because it's pretty good and it's kind of the culmination of the whole novel, I won't give it up here.
Except for a couple of remarks. First of all, this Greek isn't exactly the most stable personality out there. He used to be a soldier for a while, fighting the Turks, and he's been praised all around for being a great warrior and for being extremely racist against Turks. But apparently he also went to Paris dressed as a beautiful woman and pulled it off so convincingly that a guy threatened to kill himself if he couldn't be with her. And he just answers by saying, "Then you will have to follow through on your oath, for I am a man."
Wanda's a big fan, Severin not so much.
Eventually the story reaches its dramatic and humiliating climax. (Only the story reaches its climax, that is. Not Severin.)
On the whole, Venus in Furs is a gem. If you're a man with even the tiniest inclination in that sort of direction it can help with self-understanding. Beautifully written, with some exquisite symbolic work I've barely even touched here. The only characters who feel genuinely fleshed out are Severin and Wanda, but since that's what we're all here for, it hardly matters. The plot is simple but deep.
Highly recommended. Plus it's short, so you can't miss.
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