Eros Revived: Erotica of the Enlightenment in England and America

by Peter Wagner

, xiv, 498 pages with black and white illustrations throughout

512 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1988

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a big, meaty – wait, I can't say big and meaty when I'm talking about erotica. Well then: a…comprehensive, if sometimes a little stiff – no, no, not stiff. Um…a rigorously academic study of eighteenth-century erotic art and literature.

Although the word didn't yet exist, this is arguably the period when pornography as we know it came into being. It is also the period in which the novel as we know it came into being, and Peter Wagner suggests that this is not a coincidence. Society was developing new concepts of privacy and of subjective experience, and sexual impulses played into these things – along with a rich mix of Enlightenment ideals, libertine philosophy, and popular humour.

Just as the novel developed from earlier forms of prose – memoirs, dialogues, semi-factual ‘biographies’, lightly fictionalised letter collections  – so too did erotica. The ‘whore biography’ was an important subset of the popular criminal biographies of the period (I read one a few years back, Authentick Memoirs of the Life Intrigues and Adventures of the Celebrated Sally Salisbury, and it's still very readable); later this form would be borrowed by novelists, as with Defoe's Moll Flanders. Similar was the ‘whore's dialogue’, which typically involved one experienced woman ‘instructing’ a younger, more innocent friend – a motif that is common in all kinds of books of the time (Fanny Hill, Les Liaisons dangereuses), and for that matter remains so.

But the erotic tradition also drew on a whole fertile subsoil of contemporary nonfictional writing. Medical and para-medical texts, for instance, supposedly dealing with obstetrics or anatomy, could be a strange mix of genuine medical advice (such as it was then understood) and obviously titillating material, including, sometimes, a ‘readers' letters’ section about experiences with masturbation or adultery, which was probably about as genuine as its modern-day counterparts. Similarly, there was a huge market for trial reports of the ‘crim. con.’ (i.e. adultery) cases that were ‘almost a hallmark of the age’, and which were often written up in salacious detail (sometimes before the verdict was even in!). There's a direct line from this stuff to some of the tabloid reporting of today.

So a lot of this material was originally not being created as erotica, because the concept was not yet fully formed. The prurient instinct was well understood, of course, and capitalised on, but people approached it from many different directions, and with different motives and traditions in view. Much of it was there to serve specific purposes, generally class-based (a function, as Laura Kipnis has argued, that modern pornography also has) – there was a great deal of anti-aristocratic and anti-religious erotica, which in England took its cue from the material being produced over the Channel. This tied into the emerging Gothic tradition, and also had links with the French Revolution – Wagner discusses possible relationships ‘between the inherent moral revolt of pornography and political violence’.

For the French, erotica was more dogmatically an enactment of a specific ‘libertine’ philosophy, one which prioritised rationality over superstition and pleasure over morality. In extremis, these ideas led towards Sade, whose books at least, in context, have a sort of consistency to them, which as Wagner mutters allows them to be ‘better understood, although not necessarily appreciated’. The English approach was rather different, and packaged these concepts under a heavy patina of sentimentality – partly because realistic fiction had emerged from different places in the two countries:

Realism, in the English novel, came with middle-class authors writing for a bourgeois audience. In France, however, it was the tradition of vice and worldliness, recorded in fiction from Crébillon fils to Laclos, which contributed to the development of realism.

Hence, ‘overt moralism is one of the characteristic aspects of English erotica’. The classic monuments of Georgian porniness, like Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, are ‘thoroughly dominated by eighteenth-century bourgeois thought’: Fanny has a lot of acrobatic sex, but she also meets her true love, and it's notable that she has to leave the world of prostitution for this to develop in a way that is ‘more acceptable for a middle-class audience’.

Understanding these concepts gives a lot of new angles on more ‘serious’ (or at least canonical) writing of the time. A writer like Samuel Richardson (a ‘bigot at heart’, who wanted the works of Swift, Sterne and Pope to be burned) was essentially writing sublimated rape fantasies, and with Pamela he ‘couched in moralism what is basically an erotic novel’, Wagner suggests. If nothing else, looking at the erotica of the period ‘explains such recurring themes in the canon of “high literature” as chastity, virginity, seduction, adultery, and prostitution, to name just a few topics’. This in turn

can only help us to establish a better picture of the sexual ‘mentalité’ that affected the behaviour of such fictional heroes and heroines as Fielding's Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, Sophia, and Amelia, and Richardson's Mr B., Lovelace, Pamela, and Clarissa.

Wagner's book suffers a little from having only black-and-white illustrations, which leaves the sections on pictorial erotica rather lacking. But he makes up for that in the range of his sources and references – this is one of those satisfying studies where half the book by volume is just notes, so there is loads to check and follow up on if you're interested. A chapter on erotica in early America is particularly interesting, and now and then Wagner will make some mind-expanding throwaway comments (‘The codification of the sacrament of penance by the Lateran Council in the year 1215 proved extremely influential for the optimisation and valorisation of the discourse on sex because it helped develop the confessional technique’). It's also a good choice for a quarantine read, since there's no one around to look disapprovingly at what you're smiling at.

[Reid Luzzader · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not a collection of 18th-century erotica but an academic study of erotica from the time. Those looking for an erotic classic from this time and place should read Fanny Hill, with its likable heroine, and available in a number of editions. The author takes a tremendous amount of material and organizers it into categories. Almost all of the writing examined is ephemera. To my knowledge, very little of it is still read. Erotica could perform political functions, such as anti-aristocratic or anti-clerical writing. Some writing was dual-use, such as medical or pseudo-medical writings. True crime writings were very popular, especially if they contained a sexual element. Adulterers, cuckolds, and doctors were particular targets for satire, with women and male homosexuals especially badly treated. Much erotic literature in English was translated or inspired by French or Italian writings. There was a genuine libertine philosophy which glorified sex and free-thinking, again originating in France. The great 18th-century novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos gives a description of this type of character. Erotic poetry was often bad imitations of Roman poets such as Virgil, Martial, and Ovid. The author summarizes Fanny Hill as a “fusion of natural sexuality acceptable to a middle-class audience and an aesthetic framework incorporating the currents of sentimentalism”. The Marquis de Sade I have written about elsewhere. European erotica was easily available in America from the beginning of the 18th-century.