In Divorcing by Susan Taubes (1969), the protagonist Sophie is trying to get a divorce. She is an abject woman by all measures and the book was described in a contemporary New York Times review as suffering from “the with-it cat’s cradling of lady novelists.” Sophie doesn’t really know what she wants from life. She’s in Paris in the throes of an affair, trying to puzzle meaning out of her existence. Being married to a famous scholar (her husband Ezra) gives her some uneasy sense of identity and then becomes unbearable. Ezra talks too much, picks arguments, and then wears her down in slow and painful circles until she lets him win. Afterwards, he’s sated. We sense this is an erotic pleasure for him.
Divorcing is heavily entangled with Freudian psychoanalysis. Ezra’s desire towards Sophie is convoluted by his sadism. He wants her to be more abject, to beg him to fuck her or beat her, to delight in being reduced to nothing. Sophie understands the exercise intellectually but is incapable …