The Whore's Story: Women, Pornography, and the British Novel, 1684-1830 (Ideologies of Desire)
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 0195135059
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This fresh and persuasively argued book examines the origins of pornography in Britain and presents a comprehensive overview of women's role in the evolution of obscene fiction. Carefully monitoring the complex interconnections between three related debates--that over the masquerade, that over the novel, and that over prostitution--Mudge contextualizes the growing literary need to separate good fiction from bad and argues that that process was of crucial importance to the emergence of a new, middle-class state. Looking closely at sermons, medical manuals, periodical essays, and political tracts as well as poetry, novels, and literary criticism, The Whore's Story tracks the shifting politics of pleasure in eighteenth-century Britain and charts the rise of modern, pornographic sensibilities.
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Had literary patronage given way to a competitive market, but the novel, that suspect newcomer on the literary scene, had proven surprisingly successful and potentially dangerous to young, aspiring poets. Predictably, both WOMEN WRITERS, GOTHIC NOVELS, ROMANTIC POETS 97 Wordsworth and Coleridge evidenced distrust of the novel. In his 1795 Lecture on the Slave- Trade, for example, Coleridge noted the political dangers of a novelinduced "sensibility": True Benevolence is the only possible Basis.
Most famously by Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding—makes it difficult to recognize and appreciate other "realisms" of the early eighteenth century. As I shall argue more fully in chapter 4, this passage, like The New Atalantis as a whole, foregrounds women's sexual experience with honesty and candor while retaining throughout a cynical awareness of the political ends that that experience must serve. Neither the sensual details lovingly compiled nor the objectified male so carefully rendered can.
Flip to the published "Key" to discover the real identities of the participants. In other words, Henry Jermyn pretends to be John Churchill; Germanicus pretends to be the Count; Manley pretends to be the innocent translator of an ancient text; and we pretend to be the disinterested "judges" of someone else's immoral activity. The New Atalantis was successful because this multileveled masquerade proved agreeable to all. The Duchess is of course punished for the boldness of her passion. First, the.
To be passionately beloved but the gods, because they alone were perfect. . . . He recommended modesty and silence, that she should shun all occasions of speaking upon subjects not necessary to a lady's knowledge. . . . But his strongest battery was united against love, that invader of the heart; he showed her how shameful it was for a young lady ever so much as to think of any tenderness form a lover, till he was become her husband: that true piety and duty would instruct her in all that was.
Was indeed the in- VENUS IN THE MARKETPLACE 165 FIGURE 13. Edmund Curll, A Treatise of the Use of Flogging in Venereal Affairs (1718). © The British Library. famous Venus in the Cloister, whereas the other was a pseudo-medical manual, also a translation, published a full seven years earlier, A Treatise of the Use of Flogging in Venereal Affairs (1718). But Curll's trip to the pillory had nothing to do with either book, and therein lies another curious story. First, however, it is necessary.