(Note: I intended this to be a short, sweet, dirty post about ha ha how lecherous the 18th century is. It got a little longer than that because I got distracted by Interesting. Just remember: the fact that I'm a ridiculous dork is part of my charm.)
The title of this post is my new favorite 18th century euphemism for Really Big Penis.
Well, I promised something uplifting (snrk) and hilarious to wash away the depressing of the previous post. And what, I ask you, could be better than a quick discussion of 18th century porn literature?
I mentioned earlier that I'd tried and failed to read Moll Flanders (oh, Defoe, I know you tried) and succeeded in devouring the Marquis de Sade (Crimes of Love. Misfortunes of Virtue is, incidentally, on my bookshelf. Waiting.) You may know, too, that my favorite book in the entire world is Les Liaisons Dangereuses (in English translation, due to I do not know French, but still it is fantastic.) I am, in other words, the biggest dork for 18th century sex in the entire world. But really, I finally got to the one I've been looking forward to since I bought it over spring break: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Or, Fanny Hill, if we're feeling lazy.
My goodness, ladies and gentlemen. There are just delicious stretchers all over the damn place. Even Sade did not reach this level of "oh my!" and he was writing 50 years later. (tsk tsk, Marquis.)
What is actually kind of legitimately interesting about sex in 18th century literature is the author's silly ways of getting around it. Fanny Hill is arranged as confession, and all her sex scenes are justified by "I just want to tell you the whole story, honest!" Furthermore, she's writing to a woman, not a man, which is probably really significant. Defoe and de Sade are funnier because they blame the reader. They basically say, "My book, even though it is full of sex, is also full of VERY IMPORTANT LIFE LESSONS. And if you find yourself getting turned on by the delicious stretchers that are just hangin' out all over the place then you, fair reader, are a PERVERT and it is so out of my hands. Go see a priest or something." And of course, Pamela and Les Liaisons and many, many other seduction narratives (though Les Liaisons does this fantastic thing with the parallel narratives and there's the tradition seduction of Madame de Tourvel but then the Marquise de Merteuil is like really fucking badass and goes outside the whole seduction trope and...oh, wait, no one really cares.) I say, many other seduction narratives are in the epistolary form (letters!) so the authors are like "ohhh, seeeeee, I just found these letters lying around. I guess I'll publish them! I didn't write them, so it's not my fault if they are a little tiny bit, you know, foul."
Back to Fanny Hill - while it lacks some of the genius that Les Liaisons displays, let us not be unfair: this book is steamy. Steamy as all hell. And yet, you get past the hot lesbian sex* on page 10 (no kidding.) and you're like "holy shit why did Oxford World's Classics publish this? This is clearly just straight up porn" and then you get to the (equally-if-not-more graphic) fat people sex and you are like "um. On the other hand, my sex drive just fled to Siberia." And then at some point after four really graphic steamy scenes you suddenly hit Plot. And you stick with Plot for an awfully long time.
Now, let's talk about how difficult the thing is to read. I actually came across an older edition that I was really tempted to buy because the cover did not have a naked lady and it had the Fanny Hill title a lot bigger. It's very difficult to read your naked lady edition because people give you funny looks and you have to be like no I swear this is a very historically significant, um, gender studies, um, it's the 18th century and it's just that....okay I'm sorry I'm sorry, yes, I'm reading porn in public! So, reading's been pretty slow considering it's like 120 pages long.
Secondly, Oxford World's Classics (my favorite of the publishers of the old things) has had a lot of fun with their explanatory notes. My favorite? "Natural philosophy is the 18th century term for the natural sciences, which Fanny explores with her vagina rather than her other five senses." For real, if I could just sit around and write snarky explanatory notes like that all day, I would hunker down and get a PhD in 18th century porn VERY IMPORTANT LITERATURE.
So I am really one of Not That Many People who is interested in the 18th century. It seems like when we read old stuff (for class or for fun) we usually read the middle ages or the 19th century (ugh. 19th century. Do not even get me started.) and thus completely miss this little gem of debauchery apart from Swift and Voltaire.
Next time (next time I wander into this whack job of a century): I will rant my ass off about the modern adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons, Cruel Intentions. You will hear about what HORRIBLE THINGS they did to my favorite literary character in the world.
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*Another interesting 18th century trope: in these seduction narratives (seduction narrative begins [I think] with Richardson's Clarissa**) there's a fantastic habit of having the old bawdy lady teach the young about-to-be-whore about sex/pleasure. In Pamela you saw the hint of that when she gets locked up in that house with Mrs. Whatsherface which was really the only decent part of the novel because at least Mrs. Whatsherface made funny dirty jokes. In Les Liaisons the Marquise de Merteuil hints at wanting to do that with Cecile, but then gets bored of her because she's stupid. In Fanny Hill...whoaaaa dude. Page ten. Everyone's naked and Fanny's learning...a lot...from an older no-longer-pretty-enough-to-be-a-whore woman.
** yes I just footnoted a footnote....so basically, Richardson got a lot of shit for having Pamela marry her seducer (it was a reformation of the rake narrative...okay, I'm not going to footnote that, but you know, rakes = creepy men). So in his next novel, he kills Clarissa after she is seduced. And so it begins. (Pamela, of course, was never seduced pre-marriage because Mr. B just keeps touching her bosom and then she faints. And then she wakes up "with [her] virtue intact." Right, honey.)
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