Chapter Text
Justine’s tragedy lies in its characters’ complete inability to see any solution to this problem, the problem of civilization. When Dubois returns at the end of the story, she explicitly rejects insurgency:
When the general interest of people prompts them to do evil, it follows that he who will not be corrupted along with the rest must perforce rise up against the general interest. Now what happiness can a man a man expect if he is perpetually at odds with the interest of others? (Sade 1992: 122)
On an individual level she can recognize that
it is not the choice which a man makes between vice and virtue, my dear, which enables him to be happy, since vice, like virtue, is simply a manner of behaving towards others. It is therefore not a matter of following one rather than the other but simply of how one makes one’s way along the common path. (122)
But this has no collective dimension, and is in fact mobilized in favor of wholehearted dedication to evil – because it leads to prosperity within the current order.
Both good and evil, then, serve to perpetuate domination; all of the characters in the story mill about with no view to a better future. If virtue under siege is the core theme, it is vice which acts the part of moralist, succeeding no more in convincing its adversary than do the preachers of virtue. To Justine the partisans of evil manifest as mouthpieces of her conscience, reifying her belief that “Man is thus evil” (112) as a test for those chosen few steadfast in virtue. She abdicates responsibility even for her good, conceding to Dubois that they are “laws which Nature prescribes for me.” (126) To her, intransigence is not a choice, but a matter of essence; thus she brings herself to ruin over and over, throwing herself at the mercy of others, fishing for their sympathy and wallowing in self-pity when the foundations collapse. She is well and truly pathetic in her reliance upon others; not even her escapes are her own, but always a result of somebody else’s caprice. Crime, then, is rendered an entirely foreign object from which she is absolved; but of course ‘nature’ does not care, striking her dead when this subservience is finally rewarded.
Yet the partisans of vice are none the better. They may accept responsibility for themselves, but only by denying those aspects of life which are not conducive to immediate gain. They, too, are entirely subject to the whims of others, only they affirm this as a good. Justine reminds us that “out of fifteen wicked men whose company I was unfortunate enough to keep, fourteen have died shameful deaths.” (126) Gains within the world as it exists are transitory and inevitably turn to ashes in their mouths; there is no sense that their hedonistic stoicism extends further than affirmation of moments of triumph, as these are interspersed with wrath, disappointment, betrayal and boredom. There is no sense that they have expanded ‘pleasure’ across life, on the contrary they chase an outside; and their recognition that the law may catch up to them is an abstraction, for their worlds are made in pursuit of worldly permanence rather than timelessness.
The difference between the monastery and Silling is indeed vast, despite their similar form. For the former is simple sexuality seeking its own reproduction, while the latter destroys the world in a claim to totality; it is as much story as event, a fully closed off universe in free fall, where the whole of reality is reconstructed by the force of subjectivity. The monastery is entirely incorporated in the order of things, and dispersed at the whims of that order.
Justine illustrates insurrectionary hopelessness; those who wish for a better world would condemn revolt against the world, while those willing to revolt against the world direct their energies towards immediate gain. Both find themselves preserving the conditions which create their own miseries. The ironic conclusion is not Justine’s death, but Juliette’s conversion. Listening to her sister’s tale, her only conclusion is a change of allegiances from vice to virtue. All is left as it began, in its ordained place. We need to abandon the framework of this world, utterly destroy it to break free of the illusory light.