For the Love of Pleasure: Mary Ann Temple and American Erotic Fiction

Abstract

This essay discusses Mary Ann Temple, a rare example of domestically-produced pornographic fiction from the mid-nineteenth century. As an erotic sentimental novel, Mary Ann Temple promotes the active sexuality of a white middle-class young woman. Told from Mary Ann's point of view, the female narrative voice articulates erotic desire and demonstrates how a young woman expresses sexual agency and achieve a happy ending. Most surprisingly, Mary Ann Temple cultivates same-sex desire between women. The plot uses voyeurism to represent feminine desire for women's erotic bodies, and it renders salacious female desire for another woman's erotic submission through a whipping scene. Furthermore, the narrative arc creates episodic sexual encounters that focus on kissing, breasts, and fondling while simultaneously refusing men's sexual satisfaction and ignoring male anatomy. This structure creates space for depictions of desire between women as well as lesbian-like identification within the heterosexual pornographic scenes. As a result, Mary Ann Temple represents queer female sexuality not as part of a lurid, subterranean erotic, but rather lodged in the heart of bourgeois femininity and the mainstream form of the sentimental novel.