Rings and Whips: the secret architecture of Pauline Réage’s Histoire d’O
This talk looks at Histoire d’O, both the novel and the film, as a carefully built symbolic system centered on ritual submission, secrecy, and personal transformation. Briefly reviewing Reage’s biography and scandal, it also explores the repeated use of rings, whips, masks, and thresholds as parts of a shared initiatory language. By placing the book and the film within the cultural context of the 1950s and 1960s, the talk sheds light on why the work was so shocking in its time—and what deeper structures and secrets it was revealing.
Speaker Bio:
Rosemary Thorne (she/her) is a bilingual Spanish writer, translator, and researcher specializing in horror and the occult, based in Madrid, Spain. Born in 1968, she became a member of the Horror Writers Association (HWA) in 2019 and soon thereafter began serving as Co-Chair of the HWA International Chapter, a role she continues to hold. She also served as a juror for the prestigious 2023 HWA Lifetime Achievement Award.
She writes her horror fiction primarily in English, which she regards as the most welcoming language for the genre. Her first novel, El pacto de las 12 uvas, was published in December 2021. She has also translated Edward Lee’s The Bighead into Spanish for Dimensiones Ocultas Press.
An active essayist, her recent work focuses on the analysis of literature, cinema, and visual art through an occult and esoteric lens.
Curated & Hosted by
Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience, Lena’s New Book – Mythical Creatures in Scandinavian Folklore is now available on Amazon
Don’t worry if you can’t make the talk live on the night – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day
