‘A Language Set Free’? Sex and Trauma in Catherine Millet’s The Sexual Life of Catherine M.

Catherine Millet’s The Sexual Life of Catherine M.—originally published as La Vie Sexuelle de Catherine M. in 2001—has been regarded as a work of autofiction that should be considered an important experiment in writing which opens up new, affirmative spaces of female desire. This article reassesses these claims through a consideration of Millet’s writing about sex as a mode of confession, as discussed by Foucault in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, and through an understanding of her sexual life as a form of compulsive behaviour conditioned by repetition. Additionally, the article analyses a traumatic episode in the book that has previously gone unremarked, and how Millet’s account of her experience of sex and sexual relations is mediated through revery and fantasy. Taken together, these issues of compulsion, trauma and fantasy help to modify the prevailing view that The Sexual Life of Catherine M. is comprehensively affirmative of women’s desire.