Le Petit Mort

[plrumme]

In Huxley's Brave New World he writes of Calvin Stopes and His Sixteen
Sexophonists. At one point in the song 'There ain't no Bottle in all the world like that dear little Bottle of mine', when the whole group reaches the climax, all of the Sexophonists 'wailed like melodious cats under the moon, moaned in the alto and the tenor registers as though the little death were upon them'. A brilliantly funny passage, but it contains a riddle.

Do you, or does perhaps anyone else, know if in Huxley's day the expression 'le petit mort' was used to mean the experience of dying it
is said we all have when we have an orgasm?

Would be glad for any insight.

[big_yellow_kingswood]

I seem to remember a reference to that phrase as coming from a shakspearian play.

Still, that reference was a Kid'n'Play movie...

[TVS]

I've heard the expression (the little (feminine) death) in reference to the big O before. The first time was in an Xmen comic. Gamit called some woman le petite mort. Imagine the scandal when Wizard magazine mentioned that it was a slang term for an orgasm.

[Lisa-go-Blind]

Kind of off-topic, but I've heard that "le petit mort" is only used as slang for orgasms in English-speaking countries, even though it is in French. It supposedly means nothing to the French beyond the literal meaning.

Can any French/Canadian/Belgian/Algerian/Senegalese people verify this?

[Max Carnage]

So here I am reading book 9 of A Series of Unfortunate Events, and I come across (no pun intended) this passage that made me do a double take:

"Like most French expressions--"ennui," which is a fancy term for severe bordom, or "la petite mort," which describes a feeling that part of you has died--"deja vu" refers to something that is usually not very pleasant...." I had to go online to verify that "la petite mort" meant what I thought it meant.

Geez, I love Lemony Snicket!

[The Chao Goes Mu]

Yep, Le Petite Mort, "the little death" refers to either male or female orgasm.

[Exapno Mapcase]

I found several sites that claimed that the French erotic novelist Georges Bataille invented the term, for his novel Madame Edwarda.

Here is the Google translation of one such page.

[eunoia]

un mort - a dead man

une morte - a dead woman

une mort - a death

le petit mort - the short dead man

la petite mort - "the little death", used in French as well as a euphemism for orgasm, probably of literary origin