Assessments
The first publisher of the work, Dr. Bloch, regarded its thorough categorization of all manner of sexual fetishes as having "scientific importance...to doctors, jurists, and anthropologists." He equated it with Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis. Feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir wrote an essay titled "Must We Burn Sade?", defending the 120 Days of Sodom because of the valuable light they shed on humanity's darkest side when, in 1955, French authorities planned on destroying it and three other major works by Sade.
On the other hand, another feminist writer, Andrea Dworkin, condemned it as "vile pornography" and its author as the embodiment of misogyny, especially as the rape, tortures and murders are inflicted by male characters on victims who are mostly (though not exclusively) female.
Noted Sade scholar Alice Laborde has charged Dworkin with "intentionally misreading the satirico-novelistic elements of the text." Instead, Laborde advocates a view of 120 Days of Sodom that stresses the signifying, as opposed to the symbolizing, function of Sadian language and person. The "misogynistic" elements of the text thus become, for Laborde, a method of both social critique and the re-invention of the French literary corpus.
Angela Carter discusses two of the characters at length and comments on Sade being a "moral pornographer" in her book, The Sadeian Woman.
Camille Paglia considers Sade's work a "satirical response to Jean-Jacques Rousseau" in particular, and the Enlightenment concept of man's innate goodness in general. Much of the sexual violence in the book draws from the notorious historical cases of Gilles de Rais and Elizabeth Báthory.
Read more about this topic: The 120 Days Of Sodom