Fanny Hill, Lord Fanny, and the Myth of Metonymy

Abstract

her 1989 essay, Fanny's Fanny: Epistolarity, Eroticism, and the Transsexual Text, Julia Epstein states that [njumerous commentators have pointed out that the name Fanny Hill literally means mons veneris and that John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748-49) has come to be known 'simply' as Fanny Hill in part as acknowledgement of this metonymy.1 Epstein also observes that Anal intercourse is the only sexual act [Fanny] refuses to perform. . . . The 'fanny,' in other words, is the one bodily site the memorialist protects.2 Similar claims concerning the obscene meaning oi fanny have also repeatedly appeared in discussions of Henry Fielding's satirical dedication of An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews (1741) to Miss Fanny, &c. Unfortunately for Epstein and a host of other commentators, there is no evidence whatsoever that, in the eighteenth century, fanny had the two meanings she suggests. In fact the evidence is to the contrary. Consequently, it is highly unlikely that any of the fictional eighteenthcentury Fannys were named with the intention of suggesting the female sexual organs, however specified or identified (vagina, genitalia, pudenda, vulva, mons veneris, or mons pubis) or the male or female buttocks