ABSTRACT
La Marquise de Sade opens with a powerful and significant scene that metaphorically establishes Mary Barbe's sexual development and prefigures the gendered power relations that are to be challenged throughout the text. P. Caplan explains that the first theorists to propose that women were naturally and inevitably masochistic were psychoanalysts, who believed with S. Freud that biology is destiny and that women's bodies ultimately dictate what happens in their minds and feelings. Women's bodies, they felt, held the seeds of their biologically determined masochism. Krafft-Ebing, who first introduced the terms "sadism" and "masochism" into psychiatric literature in 1882, claims that the woman's "passive role in procreation" naturally leads to her masochism. J. Twitchell, who has worked extensively on the study of vampires, posits that blood-drinking, as a way to partake of another's energy, was the logical extension of what seemed a causal nexus between blood and vigour; for, as this fluid left the body, death entered.
