SOURCE: "The Marquis de Sade and the Discourses of Pain: Literature and Medicine at the Revolution," in The Languages of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought, Clark Library Lectures 1985-1986, edited by G. S. Rousseau, University of California Press, 1990, pp. 291-330.

Morris is an American literary critic who has also published studies on eighteenth-century English poetry. In the following excerpt, he explores Sade's use and transformation of contemporary ideas about pain and the social and political implications of this aspect of Sade's work

My purpose in this essay is to explore Sade's literary treatment of pain, especially as his works consume and transform the conventional vocabularies in which pain was discussed. Foremost among these vocabularies—which included theology and libertinism as well as law—was medicine. Thus my specific focus will concern Sade's transvaluations of medical knowledge. Sade did not simply appropriate a scientific vocabulary borrowed from...