How to Do the History of Pornography: Romantic Sexuality and its Field of Vision

Bradford K. Mudge, University of Colorado at Denver

Notes

* Acknowledgment: I would like to thank my spring 2004 Critical Theory class for their enthusiasm and assistance. Thanks go as well to my colleagues Jeff Franklin, Jake York, and Philip Joseph.
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¹ Foucault writes of this mid-century transformation: "Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy into a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul.  The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species" (43).  This argument occasioned a firestorm of criticism.  One of the more nuanced responses is David Halperin's How to Do the History of Homosexuality.

My point is that "pornography" made its first official appearance during the same period and must be considered an important and related event.  According to the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, the word "pornography," a neologism from the Greek, entered the language  in 1857.  That same year, Lord Campbell's Obscene Publications Act became the first English legislation to target specifically "obscene" materials.  In the same way, in other words, that discussions of homosexuality served to normalize middle-class, heterosexual relations, discussions of pornography served to reinforce the legitimacy of "literature" proper.  The boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate literature began to be patrolled with unprecedented enthusiasm. While Lord Campbell was railing against obscenity in London, for example, over in France Flaubert was in court defending Madame Bovary against charges of immorality.  Such public scrutiny would have been unthinkable a hundred years earlier.  This essay is an attempt to tease the prehistory of these mid-century transformations more fully into view.
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² Sexually explicit materials from before 1900 have been until recently very difficult to access.  There are now two modern sources.  The first is Alexander Pettit and Patrick Spedding's Eighteenth-Century British Erotica; and the second is my own Sex and Sexuality, Parts 3 and 4, Erotica 1650-1900 from the Private Case.
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³ See, in particular, Terry Eagleton's The Function of Criticism and Literary Theory: An Introduction.  Eagleton's explanation of the "rise of literature" was as influential as it was convincing.  In The Function of Criticism, he writes:

Seen historically, the modern concept of literary criticism is closely tied to the rise of the liberal, bourgeois public sphere in the early eighteenth century.  Literature served the emancipation movement of the middle class as an instrument to gain self-esteem and to articulate its human demands against the absolutist state and a hierarchical society. (10)

⁴ Jameson's article finds an important predecessor in Walter Benjamin's famous essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."  There, Benjamin expresses concern that the "aura" of the original–which encourages engagement with history and tradition–is eroded by reproductions that serve only to confirm the status of art as commodity.
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⁵ The reference is to Jean Baudrillard's Simulations. I explain my debt to his work more fully in the last section of this essay.
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⁶ My Secret Life can with assurance, although not with certainty, be attributed to Henry Spencer Ashbee, the Victorian bibliographer whose collection of pornography now forms the core of the famous Private Case Collection at the British Library.  See Ian Gibson, The Erotomanic: The Secret Life of Henry Spencer Ashbee. For an extended discussion of "pornotopia," see Marcus, pp. 265-86.

The central issue for Marcus, and the one that I challenge, is pornography's fundamental difference from literature.  His conclusion argues at length that pornography is literature's irreconcilable nemesis: if literature is the complex exploration of human existence, then pornography is the simpleminded reduction of humanity to a single function.  Locked into the very categories he inherits from the Victorians, Marcus insists that pornography's "governing tendency in fact is toward the elimination of external or social reality" (44).  Historical insignificance follows as a matter of course.
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⁷ "[W]e know," Marcus concludes, "that pornography is not literature":

First, there is the matter of form.  Most works of literature have a beginning, a middle, and an end.  Most works of pornography do not. . . . 

In terms of language, too, pornography stands in adverse relation to literature.  Although a pornographic work of fiction is by necessity written, it might be more accurate to say that language for pornography is a prison from which it is continually trying to escape.  At best, language is a bothersome necessity. . . .

Even in its use of metaphor, pornography can be seen to differ from literature. Although the language of pornography is highly metaphoric, its metaphors regularly fail to achieve specific verbal value. . . .

. . . Literature is largely concerned with the relations of human beings among themselves; it represents how persons live with each other, and imagines their feelings and emotions as they change; it investigates their motives and demonstrates that these are often complex, obscure, and ambiguous. . . .  All of these interests are antagonistic to pornography.  Pornography is not interested in persons but in organs.  (278-281)

Like the main character of My Secret Life, Marcus's "pornography" embodies a deviance whose power is in direct proportion to the legitimacy of that against which it is measured.
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⁸ Kendrick has a lengthy discussion of "pornography" as a nineteenth-century neologism from the Greek: "writing by or about whores."  Although his argument is particularly well formulated, he is not the only scholar to make the claim.  See also Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France; Lynn Hunt, The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800; and my own The Whore's Story: Women, Pornography, and the British Novel, 1684-1830.
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⁹ Kendrick's contention that "pornography" names an argument not a thing rewrites Eagleton's well-known introduction to Literary Theory in which he maintains that "literature" does not name an stable category of uniformly consistent aesthetic objects.  That introduction, entitled "What is Literature?", concludes:

If it will not do to see literature as an 'objective,' descriptive category, neither will it do to say that literature is just what people whimsically choose to call literature.  For there is nothing at all whimsical about such kinds of value-judgement: they have their roots in deeper structures of belief which are as apparently unshakeable as the Empire State Building.  What we have uncovered so far, then, is not only that literature does not exist in the sense that insects do, and that the value-judgements by which it is constituted are historically variable, but that these value-judgements themselves have a close relation to social ideologies.  (16)

The same, Kendrick argues, is true of "pornography": it is, like "literature," an infinitively variable construct over which social forces vie for control of the cultural space.
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¹⁰ Important to Hunt's chronology is Ian McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795-1840, pp. 204-321. McCalman dates modern pornography quite specifically: after the Queen Caroline trial in 1820, pornographers broke away from their radical politics and began marketing obscene materials whose exclusive purpose was sexual pleasure.

More recently, Lisa Zigel's Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England, 1815-1914 confirms both McCalmon's chronology and Kendrick's definition.  She goes on to provide an extremely valuable analysis of Victorian pornography and its entanglements with what she calls the "social imaginary," that mental construct which is a society's understanding of its own possibilities.
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¹¹ For example, in a recent and generally very helpful collection, Launching Fanny Hill: Essays on the Novel and Its Influences, numerous authors use the word "pornography" without qualification to describe Cleland's novel.  In fact, Patsy Fowler, one of the editors, admits that she "read[s] it as a traditional pornographic text objectifying women and focusing only on male power and gratification" (49-50).  Deployed anachronistically, "pornography" creates the text it describes and renders invisible Cleland's subtle satire.
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¹² For an introduction to the diverse offerings of the period, see When Flesh Becomes Word: An Anthology of Early Eighteenth-Century Libertine Literature; Julie Peakman, Mighty Lewd Books: The Development of Pornography in Eighteenth-Century England; and Peter Wagner, Eros Revived: Erotica of the Enlightenment in England and America.
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¹³ Examples abound.  Consider David Loth, The Erotic in Literature; and Charles Rembar, The End of Obscenity: The Trials of Lady Chatterly, Tropic of Cancer, and Fanny Hill By the Lawyer Who Defended Them.  More recently, Julie Peakman and Peter Wagner have catalogued the offerings of the eighteenth century, and Walter Kendrick has rethought the legal history.
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¹⁴ See, for example, Susan Cole, Pornography and the Sex Crisis; Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women and Intercourse; Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, Pornography and Civil Rights; Susanne Kappeler, The Pornography of Representation; and Catherine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified.

For a different and more recent perspective, see Jane Juffer, At Home With Pornography: Women, Sex, and Everyday Life; and Laura Kipnis, Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America.
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¹⁵ One of the best is Marvin Lanserk's "'Delightful Vistas': Genital Landscapes in Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure" in Launching Fanny Hill, pp. 103-123.

All discussions of voyeurism in book or film have to mention Laura Mulvey's pioneering work on the gaze in cinema.  She is well known for identifying a "male gaze" in contemporary film that rigorously assigns sight (and narrative) to male subjectivity, the object of which is then most often female.  See Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures.
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¹⁶ Masturbation here confirms an irrepressible sexual nature that must find release.  In the logic of the narrative, the act is neither dangerous or deviant; instead, like her Lesbian experiences, it is preliminary to the most satisfying interaction of all: intercourse between heterosexual lovers.  Cleland rewards Fanny with marriage, but this fairytale ending works to serve satiric ends and is not meant to suggest that the finest of physical pleasures are reserved for the marital bed.  For a splendid history of masturbation, see Thomas Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation.
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¹⁷ For an account of Cleland's revision of this scene in his subsequent novel, Memoirs of a Coxcomb (1751), see The Whore's Story, pp. 223-226.
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¹⁸ What Linda Williams pointed out in her study Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the 'Frenzy of the Visible'—that contemporary pornographic cinema is obsessed with the visual representation of female pleasure—is also true of Cleland's novel.  In fact, a sound argument could be made that the entire novel coheres in its pursuit of and tribute to the female orgasm.  In this episode, Fanny describes Louisa:

never was a girl constitutionally truer to the taste of joy, or sincerer in the expressions of its sensations, than she was: we could observe the pleasure lighten in her eyes as he introduced his plenipotentiary instrument into her. . . .                       (151)

Here, as elsewhere in the novel, the emphasis is placed on the "truth" of her "joy."
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¹⁹ The text is unequivocal:

it is to be noticed that, though all modesty and reserve were banished [during] the transaction of these pleasures, good manners and politeness were inviolably observed: here was no gross ribaldry, no offensive or rude behaviour, or ungenerous reproaches to the girls for their compliance with the humours and desires of the men.  On the contrary, nothing was wanting to soothe, encourage, and soften the sense of their condition to them.  Men know not in general how much they destroy of their own pleasure, when they break through the respect and tenderness due to our sex, and even to those of it who live only by pleasing them.  And this was a maxim perfectly well understood by these polite voluptuaries, these profound adepts in the great art and science of pleasure, who never showed these votaries of theirs a more tender respect than at the time of those exercises of their complaisance, when they unlocked their treasures of concealed beauty, and showed out in the pride of their native charms, ever more touching surely than when they parade it in the artificial ones of dress and ornament. (157-58)

I stood before my judges in all the truth of nature. . . .(159)

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²⁰ The centrality of French materialist philosophy to Cleland's project is outlined in Leo Braudy's well-known essay, "Fanny Hill and Materialism."
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²¹ For an account of Cleland's tasteful pleasures, see Jody Greene, "Arbitrary Tastes and Commonsense Pleasures: Accounting for Taste in Cleland, Hume, and Burke," in Launching Fanny Hill, pp. 221-65.
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²² I would like to think that Gamer's argument is related to my own treatment of gothic pleasure, "The Man With Two Brains: Gothic Novels, Popular Culture, Literary History," PMLA 107 (1992): 92-104.

Also relevant here are four recent essays on sexuality and The Monk.  See Steven Blakemore, "Matthew Lewis's Black Mass: Sexual, Religious Inversion in The Monk"; Wendy Jones, "Stories of Desire in The Monk"; Clara McLean, "Lewis's The Monk and the Matter of Reading, in Women, Revolution, and the Novels of the 1790s; and Clara Tuite, "Cloistered Closets: Enlightenment Pornography, the Confessional State, Homosexual Persecution, and The Monk."

See also D. L. Macdonald, Monk Lewis: A Critical Biography.  Macdonald's work is a welcome revision of Lewis Peck's Life of Matthew G. Lewis.  Of particular interest is the treatment of Lewis's alleged homosexuality and his parents' disastrous marriage.
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²³ Ambrosio is modeled on the character of Montoni in Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho and anticipates Schedoni in The Italian (1797).  Ambrosio differs in that his crimes all originate in lust; he is a character who is motivated, from beginning to end, by sexual passion.  For a classic treatment of Gothic excess, see Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, pp. 53-94.  Praz situates Ambrosio within romanticism's larger fascination with Satan and his rebellious energies.
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²⁴ Compare with Peter Brooks, "Virtue and Terror: The Monk," ELH 40:2 (1973): 249-263.
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²⁵ Two standard works on Austen have influenced my reading.  See Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, pp. 197-218; and Lillian Robinson, Sex, Class, and Culture, pp.  178-193.  See also, Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen, A Life; and Clare Tuite, Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon.

No discussion of sexuality in Austen can avoid Jill Hedyt-Stevenson's work.  Best known for her essay, "'Slipping into the Ha-Ha': Bawdy Humor and Body Politic in Jane Austen's Novels", Hedyt-Stevenson argues convincingly for a sexual innuendo crucial to Austen's fiction but largely ignored by commentators.   For a reading of sexuality in Pride and Prejudice, see her forthcoming book Jane Austen, Comedies of the Flesh, Chapter 2.
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²⁶ For an insightful treatment of Lydia and Wickham, see Tim Fulford, "Sighing for a Soldier: Jane Austen and Military Pride and Prejudice," Nineteenth-Century Literature 57:2 (2002): 153-178.
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