Frances Restuccia's reading of Story of O (1965) and Return to the Château (1971) begins with a challenge to those Foucauldian or Marxian literary interpretations that focus on the way that oppressive social forces construct subjectivity. Such readings, she argues, are anti- or nonpsychoanalytic because they reduce subjectivity to subjection and so often elide the part of subjectivity that resists subjection that potentially participates in the creation of something new or in the construction of one's own desire. Readings that deny the female's complicity in sadomasochistic desire may be attractive to feminists. But they tend to be the kind of readings that turn around and bite the hand that wrote them, because they entail a denial of any female subjectivity and agency and so make such heroines as O into pure dupes of patriarchal culture.