Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century

In this thought-provoking and enjoyable study, Karen Harvey provides a reappraisal of changing gender identities and theories of sexual difference, using a variety of eighteenth-century erotic texts and images. ‘Erotica’, Harvey argues, emerged as a distinct genre of writing in Georgian England. Although sharing with pornography an interest with sex, erotica ‘depicted sex, bodies and desire through illusions of concealment and distance’ (p. 20). Thus, while pornography acted principally as an aid to masturbation, portraying sexual activity as realistic or explicit, erotica was characterised by ‘metaphor or suggestion, deferring or avoiding the sexual denouement’ (p. 22). For instance, works such as A New Description of Merryland (1741) by ‘Roger Pheuquewell’ (alias Thomas Stretser) and ‘Arbor Vitae’: Or the Natural History of the Tree of Life (1741) provided extensive descriptions of female and male genitalia respectively, using a variety of botanical, scientific, medical and geographical metaphors. Aimed primarily at an educated male readership, erotic texts allowed readers to engage in a culture of bawdy lasciviousness while maintaining the veneer of refined politeness: they yielded pleasures of the intellect and imagination as well as physical stimulation. Reading closely the ways in which erotic texts and images described male and female bodies and sexual activities, Harvey challenges the ways in which historians have conceptualised sexual difference in the eighteenth century. Her primary target is Thomas Laqueur, whose theory of a shift from a one-sex to two-sex model of sexual difference casts a long shadow over the history of the early modern body. While the medical and anatomical texts examined by Laqueur suggest that the sexes ceased to be defined in terms of similarity with more emphasis placed on fundamental sexual difference, Harvey argues that in eighteenth-century erotica ‘male and female bodies were imagined as distinctive and commensurable, as both different and the same’ (p. 81). Rather than following other eighteenth-century writings on gender in showing women to be passive and de-sexualised, authors of erotica often emphasised the mutuality of sexual desire. The shady enclosures and ‘soft opulence’ of the sexualised locations in erotica themselves resembled the female body, portraying sex as a ‘thoroughly feminised space’ (p. 173). Women's bodies were sites of desire, but also of fear and mystery. Strikingly, erotic authors were also ‘pioneers in the representation of the male bodies’ (p. 124). Erotica celebrated the beauty, size and vigour of male genitalia, and invested male bodies with mastery, authority and command. But it was not just the all-conquering phallus that was marvelled at in these texts; the botanical metaphors most frequently used in depictions of the male member emphasised receptivity and sensitivity as well as simply size. Harvey also shows how texts often compared British men's bodies with those of other races and nations, providing a way of articulating anxieties about Britain's place in the world and the strength (marked through sexual potency) of its population. As well as examining sexual difference, the book also analyses the spatial context of sexual encounters in erotica and anatomises the ways in which pleasure was constructed. Sensuality in these texts is revealed as being multifaceted, involving taste, smell, sound and touch. The result is an important insight into the sexual culture of eighteenth-century Britain that forces us to rethink concepts of gender difference at a time identified by historians as key to the formation of the ‘modern’ body. One might object that Harvey's critique of Laqueur is founded on an equally narrow set of elite sources targeted at a niche market. However, by paying close attention to the language and imagery of her sources, Harvey is able to situate erotic texts within eighteenth-century cultural practice and debate. In an exemplary chapter on erotica's audience, Harvey assembles evidence for numerous communities of readers, from the readers ‘implied’, or ‘imagined’ by the texts themselves, to the ‘actual’ men who enjoyed these texts, primarily in the company of others. This book will be required reading for students of eighteenth-century sex and gender, and of considerable interest for cultural historians of the period more generally

Aesthetics · Art · Linguistics · Literature · Metaphor · Pornography · Psychoanalysis · Reading (process · Sociology · Variety (cybernetics · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Philosophy · Psychology

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