The Whore's Story: Women, Pornography, and the British Novel, 1684-1830 (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS139 intensely psychological, and as cosmopolitan as European culture got until very recent times. Indeed, German romantic novels look a lot like the postmodern, post-boom novels splendidly surveyed in the essay (more pragmatic than theoretical, but very welcome) by Doris Sommer and George Yudice that McKeon includes. But then even the eighteenth-century novel (or the English or French romantic novel) also looks profuse if you take it whole and do not prune it down to a single type, with a single tradition and a single theory. My history would be chronological, diverse, and restlessly inventive, not achronological and systematically three-staged. At the end, I hardly know whether to extol McKeon's work for its massive integrity or castigate it for its massive perversity. Dialectically, these two qualities go hand in hand. Massive it is in any event, superbly energetic, uniquely powerful. Any user will quibble about some individual selection or other, but it is difficult to imagine any single collection coming out more comprehensive and representative than this one is. The editing is scrupulous if perhaps too discreet: one French word in Henry James is glossed, but sentences ofFrench stand naked elsewhere, as does Keith Cohen's typo dating Hegel's Aesthetics to 1801, and as do numerous allusions to works and authors students might like help with. The introductions are condensed essays , not presentations. As in "real life," students will have to work hard to confront the texts, and at least as hard to reckon with McKeon's reflections . There is no relaxing into mere content here; everything moves in the most demanding sphere of ideas. It should be a great pedagogical exercise for students to struggle with texts and introductions conjointly, in a constructively critical and dialectical spirit. I look forward with anticipation to assigning Theory oftL· Novel: A Historical Approach when I next teach a seminar on the topic. Marshall Brown University ofWashington Bradford K. Mudge. The Whore's Story: Women, Pornography, and the British Novel, 1684-1830. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. xiv + 276pp. $56. ISBN 0-19-513509-9. We have come a long way since 1982, when Paul-Gabriel Boucé kicked off what might be termed the serious, scholarly research about pornography in its Enlightenment embedding with his seminal volume of essays entitled Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain. At the threshold of the third millennium , Bradford K Mudge does not need to waste even a word of "apology" 140EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION15:1 for selecting this subject—and rightly so. But some of the pioneering scholars of the 1980s and 1990s still faced a strong critical wind, especially from more conservative colleagues. For example, during my own research for Eros Revived: Erotica oftL· Enlightenment in England and America (1988), first written as a doctoral dissertation, I had to bear with equanimity the sneering glances and remarks of librarians and colleagues alike. One would have thought that, to quote Bob Dylan, "the times have been a-changing," especially after the works of such eminent scholars as Steven Marcus ( TL· Other "Victorians," 1966), Walter Kendrick (TL· Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture, 1987), Robert Darnton (TL· Forbidden Best-Sellers ofPreRevolutionary France, 1995), and Lynn Hunt (TL· Invention ofPornography, 1996)—which Mudge lists as influential for his own study. But perhaps this attitudinal change concerns English-speaking countries, especially North America, more than central Europe. A persuasively argued scholarly monograph and a good read, Mudge's study proves that the field of eighteenth-century erotica is far from exhausted as an area of research. Drawing upon modern feminist debates about pornography and patriarchal oppression, The Whore's Story: Women, Pornography, and the Britüh Novel, 1684—1830 attempts to understand women 's contributions to the erotic narratives of the Enlightenment. Mudge argues that we have generally ignored women's participation in the rise of modern pornography and its importance to the cultural identity of Georgian and Victorian Britain. Part 1 of the book is concerned with "Popular Culture and the Emergence of the Modern State"; in the three chapters that make up this half of the study, Mudge traces the growth of a new literary marketplace and looks at middle-class attempts to adjucate narrative...