Launching "Fanny Hill": Essays on the Novel and Its Influence (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Launching “Fanny Hill”: Essays on the Novel and Its Influences Clive Probyn (bio) Patsy S. Fowler and Alan Jackson, eds. Launching “Fanny Hill”: Essays on the Novel and Its Influences. New York: AMS Press, 2003. xix+364pp. US$82.50. ISBN 0-40463-541-5. Why is it that, after 250 years, hundreds of editions, ten film adaptations, and countless critical essays, we are "launching" this most notorious, clandestine, or "non-canonical" of eighteenth-century "pornographic" novels? This genre-crossing, decency-outraging, stylistically exuberant, formally egregious, and poetically effervescent display of Cleland's actual or fantasy male and/or bisexual gaze upon non-procreative, non-marital heterosexual and homosexual acts brought him dismay and embarrassment in his own lifetime. It now attracts the devoted attention of theorists, cultural analysts, teachers, and students, and it is the range and depth of responses that justifies the launch metaphor. If Bishop Thomas Sherlock blamed Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (and its kind) for a couple of earthquakes in 1750, one wonders if this novel causes anything more than a ripple in the contemporary torrent of pornography (including and especially the pornography of violence) that surrounds us in print and on screen. Here is a novel, written as a guilt-free epistolary memoir/confession/sexual manual, that has surely brought as much instruction as gratification or confirmation to many of its astonished readers: to such readers it may be a lamp rather than a mirror, and such readers are untroubled by its "real" or autobiographical values. So, perhaps, the most interesting thing about this book is indeed the question of the reader's response to it. Reading it in the classroom will never induce boredom, but it may be dangerous to your health—if you believe that literature is comforting, socially cohesive, redemptive, or a production of ideology shaped by a [End Page 149] dominant and class-based morality (what is here termed a "capitalist middle-class female subjectivity"). There is not much here for those readers who like their narratives to proceed via ambiguity to existential gloom. Again, it seems impossible to over-determine this extraordinary book. An inversion of Fielding's Amelia, that domestic Job in petticoats? A replacement of plot with theme and variation (serial erections in both cases)? Defoe's deadly mercantile Moll replaced with jouissance as a principle of living and writing? Or, in Kirsten T. Saxton's words, "an overproduction of its own erotic terms—a plethora of panting bodies and male machines" (342)? The aim of this collection of essays is "to enlighten every reader—scholar, teacher, and student—about this remarkable, and remarkably complex, literary work" (xiv). In terms of the variety of its critical range, helpful bibliographical information, critical luminousness, and points for further research, this is unquestionably a valuable and long overdue project. It includes (for the first time, as far as I know) extracts from some undergraduate written responses to aspects of the novel (342–52) that give pause for thought. From the evidence presented, these students are fortunate to have Kirsten Saxton as their tutor. Other essays in the volume read the novel as "a traditional pornographic text objectifying women and focussing only on male power and gratification" (Patsy Fowler, 49–50: in a particularly vigorous and instructive analysis); another has interesting things to say about Cleland's privileging of the visual over the verbal, and of the space between the "reality and metaphor" in what is called "genital Landscapes" (Marvin Lansverk, 104ff); there is a piece on Cleland's French sources, analogues, and translations of Fanny Hill (Sylvie Kleiman-Lafon); and several essays use the novel as a departure point for forays into its background (John Beynon writes on Sapphic erotics; Julie Peakman on tribadism and rituals of sexual initiation; Elizabeth Kubek's essay is on the history of the phallus and Fanny's penis-worship). Of rather less immediate relevance, but reaching further out, is Misty Anderson's excursus on Methodism; and the lengthy discourse on the question of Taste in Cleland, Hume, and Burke (by Jody Greene) tackles some basic aesthetic and moral articulations in the book. There is also an account on the novel's...