Body Art: The Nature of Art, Vision and the Body in Sacher-Masoch and Bataille

While sexual aesthetics reign supreme in the relationships found in both Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs and Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye, the two texts approach the concept of vision and the body in quite different manners. While Severin demands theatrical copulation in an attempt to experience sex as art, the narrator of Bataille’s novella engages in exhibitionism in order to effectively act out his transgressions against laws and moral codes. In both Venus in Furs and Story of the Eye, visual perception of the body is imperative in achieving the aims of the characters, however radical or perverse they may be. 

The importance of vision is evident from the beginning of Sacher-Masoch’s tale; Severin’s drive towards enslavement is inspired when he views a stone statue which he claims to love “passionately with a morbid intensity; madly as one can only love a woman who never responds to our love with anything but an eternally uniform, eternally calm, stony smile” (Venus). From this moment on Severin’s passion for art above life is obvious to the reader; his relationship with Wanda, stemming from his longing for this marble idyll, is essentially a manifestation of his desire to transform crude, ugly life into beautiful, refined high art. Severin characterizes himself as having an “excessively developed aestheticism” (Venus), which instigates his flight from modern society into the arms of Countess Wanda, who embodies both the physical perfection and the frigidity found in the marble statue.