eyes wide shut + venus in furs - “a cloak lined with ermine”

I recently read the original Venus in Furs novella by Sacher-Masoch and was struck by something I don’t think I’ve ever seen mentioned in connection to Eyes Wide Shut. As I’m sure y’all can relate to, I’ve always been haunted by Leelee Sobieski whispering “you should buy a cloak lined with ermine” to Tom Cruise in the costume shop, so when the narrator in Venus first mentions his sexual fantasy about a cruel woman in a “kazabaika” lined with ermine I immediately thought of that scene. Come to find as I read on there are probably two dozen references in the book to women in cloaks lined with ermine (it’s hard to find a translation but i’m pretty sure a kazabaika is also a type of cloak). It’s probably the most frequent image in the novella besides the whip, lol. I wouldn’t go so far as to say the EWS line is definitely a reference to VIF, but I’ve never seen that specific phrasing used other than in those two media. And I think there’s a lot of connection between the two when you’re looking for it.

For anybody not familiar, Venus in Furs is a story by an Austrian writer named Sacher-Masoch, whose life/work inspired the word “masochism” in reference to a sexual fetish for pain and humiliation. It’s from a similar time period and setting as Traumnovelle—late 1800s Austria. The book is basically a long sexual fantasy about the narrator being dominated and enslaved by a beautiful woman who whips and abuses him while wearing furs. There’s also a fair amount of philosophizing about relations between the genders, man vs woman, etc—as there is in Eyes Wide Shut. The thrust of the book’s argument is that sexual love always takes the form of domination/submission, and a woman instinctively wants domination over a man unless she’s truly in love with him, in which case she wants to submit. Infidelity/disloyalty also comes into play as one of the ways women naturally dominate and humiliate men they don’t respect. Again… very similar to much of the film’s theme.

From the book: “But it also depends on whether I am willing to risk it with you,” she said quietly. “I can easily imagine belonging to one man for my entire life, but he would have to be a whole man, a man who would dominate me, who would subjugate me by his innate strength, do you understand? And every man—I know this very well—as soon as he falls in love becomes weak, pliable, ridiculous. He puts himself into the woman’s hands, kneels down before her. The only man whom I could love permanently would be he before whom I should have to kneel.

From the screenplay: Just the sight of him stirred me deeply and I thought if he wanted me, I could not have resisted. I thought I was ready to give up you, the child, my whole future. And yet at the same time - if you can understand it - you were dearer to me than ever, and I stroked your forehead and kissed your hair, and at that moment my love for you was both tender and sad.

I think it’s striking how much resonance there is between the two themes. And again I really can’t overstate how often VIF uses the phrase “a [cloak/cape/coat] lined with ermine,” it’s seriously everywhere in the book. Arthur Schnitzler was an influence on Freud, while Sacher-Masoch influenced the sexologist Kraft-Ebbing; they wrote around the same time and on similar subjects, so I can definitely imagine Kubrick reading the latter during his work adapting the former. Anyone else read/watched both? Does my theory on the source of that line hold water? I’m interested to hear what people think (and if anyone else even cares this much about what that line might mean haha)