Confessions of Wanda von Sacher-Masoch. (W. von Sacher-Masoch)

Onto our Elixir stage steps Wanda Rumelin, born in Graz, Austria in 1845. Wanda, was Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's wife. Her book is essentially an autobiography focusing mainly on the ten years she was married to Leopold, (the author of Venus in Furs, see below). Her life crossed the bridge between abject poverty and luxury, between happiness and pain and fear.

Wanda was not interested in being Leopold's 'Venus in Furs". However, she did play the role for him apparently nonconsensually. How does someone coerce someone else to be his "Venus in Furs", a beautiful woman wielding a whip?

All of Leopold's income was from his writing. For many years the main female characters in his works were very similar, all possessing the sadistic characteristics that he was obsessed with. Finally, it became apparent that the readers would soon become bored with this repetitive character. He needed to create different ones.

Leopold told Wanda that as long as he had no way to live out his fantasies, he would continue to write about them. If however, she would play out his fantasies with him, he would then be free of his obsession and could create other characters in his writing. She feared for their economic demise and so agreed.

Even so Wanda did not always cooperate. When she refused to cooperate with his desires, he simply stopped writing. After a few months, she knew their income would soon dry up so she would give in to him.

During the ten years of marriage Wanda met the political, social and literary elite of the period. She went from a destitute starving young woman to a wife, mother and woman of some stature and eventually returned to poverty. Her book is filled with absolutely fascinating vignettes about her experiences.

She recant's her and Leopold's ird encounter with crazy King Ludwig of Germany. Ludwig was the king that built the fairy tale castle that is on all the German travel posters. She tells of their adventures living with the Jewish and the gypsies in Hungary. There are wonderful descriptions of her friend, Catherine. Catherine was one of the few women who had economic freedom and so proceeded to live a flamboyant and capricious lifestyle.

Near the end of her book, Wanda synthesizes her feelings and thoughts about marriage, love and the state of women.

Wanda advocates contractual agreements between men and women instead of marriage. Divorce in Europe, then, meant her children could be taken away and there need not be any child support or alimony given to a woman who retained her children. Her thought was that a contract signed when a couple began their relationship would define how children would be supported in the event of separation. She was upset that the "feminist movement" was not pushing for the abolition of the institution of marriage.

She felt that women needed to realize that the sons they raised were future husbands and were at fault for raising sons that were not accepting their responsibilities for their families. If women raised their sons better things would change. She thought "The woman and the man will not be bound by law but solely by their will, their love and their friendship. There will be no more laws that reduce a woman's love to a duty and make her the property of the man. They will give themselves to one another freely and voluntarily, ... "

"Above all, the woman must have the right to leave a man whose lack of morality poses a danger to her and her children, without a judge being involved and her whole life put on trial."

Wanda said "To love oneself is important. Life will be better if one loves oneself better. And the love must be free of all social shackles, of all constraints, so as to be able to develop itself in all its beauty, and produce that which it alone can produce: noble human beings."

Venus in Furs (Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch)

First published in 1870, Venus in Furs gained for its author both notoriety and a degree of immortality when the word "masochism"--derived from his name--entered the psychiatric lexicon.

The novel describes the sexual obsessions of Severin von Kusiemski, a European nobleman with the desire "to be the slave of a woman." Severin finds his ideal of voluptuous cruelty in the merciless Wanda von Dunajew. Not simply a lurid tale of sexual perversion, nor a Victorian fantasy of antique decadence, Venus in Furs is a passionate and powerful portrayal of one man's struggle to enlighten and instruct himself and his world in the realm of desire.

Influential on Freud, Thomas Mann, and Arthur Schnitzler, Venus in Furs remains a classic literary statement on sexual submission and control. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895) was born in the Galician city of Lemberg. A novelist and poet, he is also known for his Stories of the Russian Court.