Fanny Hill Research Articles

Gender Dynamics, Social Norms, and Erotic Attitudes in Eighteenth-Century England: A Comparative Study of Anti-Pamela and Fanny Hill

This paper examines two influential novels of the 18th century, Eliza Haywood's Anti-Pamela and John Cleland's Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, to offer insights into the social norms, gender roles, and erotic attitudes of the time. Through a comparative analysis of the two works, this paper highlights their distinct literary traditions, concerns, and perspectives on the issues of eroticism, virtue, and gender relations. The study finds that while Haywood's Anti-Pamela critiques the excesses of the materialistic and libertine culture of the time, Cleland's Fanny Hill challenges the concept of virtue and decorum by emphasizing the complexities of human erotic desire. The paper argues that the two works offer unique and valuable perspectives on the social and cultural landscape of 18th century England, contributing to the ongoing debates on gender, social inequality, and erotic exploitation. This study provides a better understanding of the literary and cultural history of the 18th century and its relevance to contemporary discussions on the issues of gender and eroticism.

Klein, Ula Lukszo. Sapphic Crossings: Cross-Dressing Women in Eighteenth-Century British Literature

Klein, Ula Lukszo. <i>Sapphic Crossings: Cross-Dressing Women in Eighteenth-Century British Literature</i>

Recent Articles

Recent Articles

“[T]hat Monstrous Machine of his”: The Machine Metaphor in John Cleland’s Memoir of a Woman of Pleasure

Abstract John Cleland’s Memoir of a Woman of Pleasure (1748–49), commonly known as Fanny Hill, is regarded as the first pornographic novel in English literature. Its description of sexual activities is explicit but its language is not coarse. It employs a wide range of metaphors to refer to both sexual acts and genitalia and the metaphor used most frequently to refer to the penis is “the machine.” The machine metaphor will be the focus of this paper, which aims to argue that the machine metaphor carries two meanings. The first is the machine as one of military metaphors common in erotica since sexual acts have long been represented as battles. Female sexual pleasure, portrayed in this novel, depends on the state of being destroyed or conquered by a large machine. The second usage of the military metaphor suggests the strong affiliation between the penis and a hydraulic machine – the hydraulic penis—as this paper will call it. That is, female sexual pleasure is not only entwined with the state of being ruined but also with a fluid flow.

Beyond Victims &amp; Villains: Teaching Cleland With Haywood &amp; Behn

This essay explores strategies for teaching Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Fanny Hill) in the introductory literature classroom, and why it might be especially valuable to do so at a time when issues surrounding sexual violence, rape culture, and the politics of consent continue to be prominent inside and outside the college classroom.

La pornología como un instrumento epistemológico en "Fanny Hill", "Thérèse philosophe", el "Arte de putear" y las "Décimas a las prostitutas de México"

Al analizar textos dieciochescos como "Fanny Hill", "Thérèse philosophe", "Arte de putear" y las "Décimas a las prostitutas de México" identificamos un subgénero de la tradición pornográfica europea que se puede llamar pornología y que se interesa por entender, describir y analizar el fenómeno prostibulario. Este subgénero se transforma a partir del género de la voz narrativa o poética. El perspectivismo femenino o masculino expresa la experiencia sexual desde distintas atalayas, mientras que la pornología en voz femenina enfatiza el imperativo económico, la pornología en voz masculina enfatiza el imperativo sexual. El género de la voz desvela u oscurece las violencias sistémicas que son constitutivas de este oficio y el ethos de violencia sexual que rige la sociedad en la cual la prostitución florece. Por tanto, la pornología es una ventana que abre la literatura a la comprensión histórica de la prostitución en sus distintas dimensiones sociales, económicas y sexuales.

An Uneasy Pleasure: Representing the Dangers of Skin-to-skin Contact in Eighteenth-century London 'The William Bynum Prize Essay'.

This article considers the social function of contagious disease as moderator of class relationships in England during the first half of the eighteenth century and takes into account the ways in which the 'communicability' of the plague, great pox (syphilis) and smallpox (variola) was used by authors to crystallise social interaction and tension along class lines. The essay begins by examining the representation of the plague, syphilis and smallpox in the medical tradition, before shifting its attention to the practice of maritime quarantine, as laid out by Richard Mead in his Short Discourse Concerning Pestilential Contagion (1720). By foregrounding medical writing on contagion through skin contact, I suggest that pornographic texts such as John Cleland's The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Fanny Hill) (1748) had an interventionist function. Cleland is often charged with sanitising the true horrors of sex work in this period. This article proposes that if we take the time to appreciate the way infectious cutaneous diseases were believed to operate and spread we can recognise the moments in which he not only alludes to disease but invokes it for structural and thematic purposes. In proposing this, I am challenging the dominant interpretation that the problematic realities of eighteenth-century prostitution, especially disease, are subordinated to the narrative's greater interest in erotic pleasure.

My Life with Fanny Hill

My Life with Fanny Hill

“By the Author of Fanny Hill”

“By the Author of Fanny Hill”

An Uneven Luxuriance

An Uneven Luxuriance Elisabeth Sheffield (bio) Confessions of the Fox Jordy Rosenberg One World www.oneworldlit.com 352 Pages; Print, $17.00 Ostensibly a record of the real-life eighteenth-century English master thief and four-time Newgate escapee, Jack Sheppard, Confessions of the Fox is a book within the book—a lost manuscript "spotted" by eighteenth-century literature professor, Dr. R. Voth, at a university book sale. The stacks were being cleared out in preparation for a "big renovation" to provide space for "upper-echelon administrators," and the university has left the sale to fraternity volunteers, one of whom simply gives the "mashed and mildewed pile of papers" to Professor Voth. As no money is exchanged (as recorded by the university's surveillance cameras), when the actual "value" of the manuscript emerges, Professor Voth's possession of it becomes unauthorized, rendering him, like Sheppard, a thief. But well before Voth's ownership of the manuscript comes into question, clear parallels between the Professor and the Fox emerge. Both characters are biological hermaphrodites and trans men who take testosterone or "elixir," to rid themselves of their "tits," have vexed histories with all authority figures including their mothers, and fall for a certain type of "auto-didact" woman. Further, Sheppard's world is carefully constructed (or reconstructed) to reflect the scholarship in "decolonial and postcolonial studies, critical race studies, Marxism, and queer and trans theory" that Voth reads and cites. Thus the Bess of previous versions of the Sheppard tale ("unquestionably portrayed as white" though "London was not by any means a white city in the eighteenth century" Voth informs us) becomes the South Asian or "lascar" Bess Kahn. And when Jack, who has clearly not read his Foucault, fails to grasp the implications of the London authorities "polic[ing]" of the plague, Bess "sift[s] him silently into the subset of everyday Anglos—the ones who would never understand." Rosenberg's novel came out in 2018 and has since been well reviewed in prominent critical venues, including The New York Times and The New Yorker. For the most part, the emphasis in these has been on the Sheppard tale, which fills the majority of the novel's pages, at the expense of the Voth story, a literally marginalized, epiphenomenon of the footnotes. Besprigged with period underworld slang ("she blist'rs with Pleasure on his red rag), lively with "departure[s]" from and embellishments to the straight, white characters of what Voth terms "extant Sheppardiana," not to mention a rollicking, revisionist plot that includes a protocapitalist venture to capture and collect the sexual effluvia of criminals for profit, Sheppard's "confessions" provide much to engage. At the same time, however, they don't ring true, an issue that the novel acknowledges upfront, in Voth's foreword: the manuscript's "authenticity" is "indeterminate." The formal markers of its potential inauthenticity—the abbreviated paragraphs of the third person narration (rather than the first person of literary contemporaries cited in Voth's footnotes, such as Moll Flanders [1722] and Fanny Hill [1748]), the present-tense, opening flash-forward (as the manuscript begins with Jack at the scaffold), as well as various other stylistic and cultural anachronisms (e.g. "sifted him silently into the subset of everyday Anglos")—seem deliberate. In fact (spoiler alert), the perplexing ontological status of the manuscript is ultimately accounted for and justified by Voth's postmodern literary sleuthing. Still, I found my wishing, in the Sheppard sections, for more "genuine" heft in the main characters—Jack Sheppard and his companion, Bess Kahn. The latter seems to exist mainly to define Jack, both in moments that are clearly intentional, as when Jack, on hearing Bess say his self-chosen name for the first time, feels his consciousness sink "firmly—and with a heretofore unknown warm Pleasure—into his Body," but also in moments that seem less so. As in a scene where the point of view flits back and forth between Jack and Bess, between his thought (anchored in italics as if to demonstrate their deeper subjectivity: "Better not to touch her at all than repel her forever with a clammy paw") and hers ("What an odd bird he...

Fanny Hill and the Legibility of Consent

Fanny Hill and the Legibility of Consent

Three Russian Tales of the Eighteenth Century: "The Comely Cook," "Vanka Kain," and "Poor Liza" ed. by David Gasperetti

Reviewed by: Three Russian Tales of the Eighteenth Century: "The Comely Cook," "Vanka Kain," and "Poor Liza" ed. by David Gasperetti Melvyn New Three Russian Tales of the Eighteenth Century: "The Comely Cook," "Vanka Kain," and "Poor Liza," ed. and trans. David Gasperetti. DeKalb: Northern Illinois, 2012. Pp. ix + 238. $24.95. The three short fictions collected here were all written toward the end of the century and hence beyond the usual Scriblerian purview. The story "Poor Liza" is, however, one of the best brief works inspired by Sterne's sentimentalism; the other two novels exhibit the reach of early eighteenth-century fiction into Russia well into the nineteenth century. Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826), the author of "Poor Liza" (1793), was immediately recognized in Russia as an imitator of Sterne, both because of his first work, Letters of a Russian Traveller (1791), a sentimental journey, and because he published his own critical high praise of Sterne: "O incomparable Sterne! … At what learned university were you taught to feel so tenderly?" Mr. Gasperetti's translation of "Poor Liza" is the first I have read, and as an imitation of Sterne it is excellent (I am unable to evaluate its excellence in relation to the original). Almost a "backstory" to the mournful Maria in both Tristram Shandy and Sentimental Journey, it tells of the seduction of a peasant girl Liza (and almost certainly Karamzin had access to Sterne's letters to Eliza and the invented collection of her responses), her abandonment, her discovery that he has married another, and her suicide. Karamzin's sentimentalism is straightforward (unlike Sterne's) but very effective. He captures especially the use of dashes, pauses, apostrophes, exclamation points, and above all, tears, to convey emotion-laden scenes; and he interjects his narrative voice most opportunely: "My heart is bleeding at this moment. … I gaze toward heaven, and a tear rolls down my face. Oh! Why did I not write a novel instead of this melancholy history." One would have hoped that Karamzin's specific relationship to Sterne would have been noted by Mr. Gasperetti, but he opts instead for a generalized discussion, where Sterne is listed among many others, from Richardson to Macpherson, Rousseau to Goethe. While it is obvious that Sentimentalism swept the continent, in the instance of "Poor Liza" the direct relationship to Sterne needed to be emphasized. In addition, the division of literary history into a "rationalist, objective view of the world that served as the touchstone of the Neoclassical movement" being replaced by a "cult of feelings" where "emotion now takes precedence over reason" seems rather naïve and dated. Also damaging to this edition is Mr. Gasperetti's fixation on Bakhtin and the carnivalesque, perhaps natural for a Russian scholar but developing into a nervous tic, both in the introduction and in the annotations. Put simply, Mikhail Chulkov's "The Comely Cook" (1770) is the story of a young widow who manages to rise in society [End Page 185] by means of her cunning, her amorality, and her sexual freedom; the subtitle is frank: "The Adventures of a Debauched Woman." Without doubt, it does have a small element of Bakhtin's carnivalesque in it, but only insofar as one would find the same at work in the fictions of Behn, Manley, Haywood, and Defoe—limiting myself to the English tradition. Surely the assertion that the novel is invested "with the ethos of the carnival" which "insinuates itself into virtually every step his heroine Martona takes" is an exaggeration; and the argument is not helped by "carnivalesque rhythm," a plot like a "carnival Ferris wheel," a "carnivalesque heroine" and the "mutability of the carnival," all in the same paragraph. To be sure, as Mr. Gasperetti notes, Martona does not have the social complexity of Moll, but that probably suggests more about Chulkov's limitations as an author (as clearly outlined by Mr. Gasperetti) than his engagement with the politics of carnival; put another way, Martona's story is Fanny Hill's, although under a stricter censorship. Similarly, Matvei Komarov's "Vanka Kain" (1779) is based on a historical figure, a thief and murderer in Moscow who eventually turned into a government...

A Burkean Analysis of the Sublimity and the Beauty of the Phallus in John Cleland’s Fanny Hill

In the tradition of the bildungsroman, the two volumes of John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748–49) conveniently divide the main character’s sexual initiation into peri...

Psychoanalysis of Christian Grey

In the recent times, literature has witnessed the rising of a very different and vague genre called Erotic Literature. Though there have been traces of such works since the emergence of novel, for example, John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748) or more popularly known as Fanny Hill, in 1791, Marquis de Sade (French) published Justine or Misfortunes of Virtue and in 1869 Leopold von Sacher-Masoch published his infamous novella Venus in Furs and so on . Later in the nineteenth century, psychology developed as a concrete science and the intricacies of the human mind were meticulously deciphered. The implications of this new science were largely visible in the world of literature and Psychoanalysis became one of the major sources of interpretation of text and striking connections were unveiled. One of the most recent pieces of work that certainly created a ripple in the contemporary literature of the world is the trilogy of Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L James which became an enduring structure in bondage, discipline, dominance, sadism, submission and masochism (BDSM) fiction and romance. In this intriguing novel, the protagonist Christian Grey is a young entrepreneur who is interviewed by Anastasia Steele, the female protagonist, as the novel proceeds a relationship blooms between the two which eventually lead to the unravelling of the 50 shades of Christian Grey. Grey turns out to be a sadist and Ana his new found girl. His peculiarities in performing the sexual activities and his perfection at BDSM compelled some of the critics and psychoanalysts to diagnose him with a mental disorder that is sexual sadism. Similarly, Karl Jabag claims to find symptoms of post-traumatic stress due to his disturbing past. His unnatural obsession with sadistic action convey the character's relation with terms like oedipal complex, denial, sublimation, internal conflicts, pleasure principal and so on, and thus making him a dear character to do a case study on for psychoanalysts by profession or by passion.

Fanny Hill and the “Laws of Decency”

This essay discusses John Cleland's novel The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748/9, better known as Fanny Hill), in the context of eighteenth-century obscenity law and the law of search and seizure. To explain why obscenity could have been treated as a criminal offense at all, the essay discusses prosecutions against writers and actors from the later seventeenth century through Cleland's time, showing how the criminality of the offense was taken for granted (circa 1670-1700), then rejected (in 1708), and then rationalized (in 1727). Cleland's novel, notable for resorting to metaphorical and euphemistic language so as to avoid rank words, was nevertheless easily covered by the rationale offered in Curll (1727), but his case was never brought to trial. While some have thought that this circumstance is mysterious and requires explanation, in fact obscene works were rarely prosecuted at this time, and the decision even to begin proceedings against Cleland is more notable than the decision not to go to trial. Cleland implied, in some of his letters, that he believed his circumlocutory language should have excused him from prosecution, but his stronger argument would have involved the process that led to his arrest: the investigation proceeded by means of a general warrant, a device that would be criticized in the litigation after the 1763 Wilkes prosecution, which in turn influenced the prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures in the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution. Along the way, the essay discusses several famous but inaccurate claims about the prosecution of Cleland and his publishers (e.g., that Cleland was paid to stop writing obscene novels, and that his publishers made a fortune from the book), and also includes a list of eighteenth-century editions of Fanny Hill.

Fanny Hill in Bombay: The Making and Unmaking of John Cleland by Hal Gladfelder (review)

GLADFELDER, HAL. Fanny Hill in Bombay: The Making and Unmaking of John Cleland. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. 311 pp. $54.95. Hal Gladfelder's deeply researched and thoughtfully assembled biography of John Cleland makes good on its promise reopen [his] writing in all its messiness of being written (4). Cleland here is an eccentric figure who strategically navigated eighteenth-century print culture and politics. Gladfelder's exhaustive work with primary documents provides a welcome supplement to William Epstein's 1974 biography, which dealt sketchily with Cleland's career beyond Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Gladfelder does devote substantial time in the third and fourth chapters to this most famous of Cleland's works. The first of these situates the novel within the discourse on sodomy, suggesting Cleland and his contemporary Thomas Cannon, author of Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated and Exemplify'd, explored the category not to vilify same-sex intercourse but to portray erotic desire as a range of non-normative sexual behaviors. (Cannon's pamphlet is extant only in legal transcriptions, and Gladfelder's ample quotations provide unprecedented access to this lost work.) In these writings, eros turns the body topsy-turvy, and desire and its objects are distanced from restrictive moralistic and heteronormative paradigms (77). Gladfelder's reading of Cleland's sodomy scene, which has received so much critical attention, is the most persuasive and textually attentive treatment I've encountered, acknowledging echoes of anti-sodomy stances but showing ultimately that its continuities with heterosexual scenes challenge eighteenth-century distinctions between natural and unnatural desire. The fourth chapter argues that Cleland's prose fiction. Woman of Pleasure in particular, unseats familiar conventions of the early English novel in favor of experimenting with new instructive modes: repetition and folly. In sum, Gladfelder provides a thick and comprehensive account of Woman of Pleasure, parsing its internal sexual deliberations with as much care as its engagement with literary culture more broadly. But perhaps most importantly, this book examines Cleland's entire career, from his first Bombay clerical writings to his late linguistic and political tracts. Rather than try to account for the sources and works covered--Gladfelder's research in this regard is exhaustive--I'll offer here what I found to be the most transformative revelations. First, Gladfelder's work with Cleland's correspondence brings to life an articulate, bold, erratic, even volatile personality. Advocacy for Indian citizens in 1730s Bombay, humble self-defense following Woman of Pleasure's publication, desperate applications to his mother for an early inheritance--his various legal negotiations show him to be alternately persuasive, self-pitying, and ferocious. …

Fanny Hill in Bombay: The Making &amp; Unmaking of John Cleland

Fanny Hill in Bombay: The Making &amp; Unmaking of John Cleland

Fanny Hill in Bombay: The Making and Unmaking of John Cleland by Hal Gladfelder

Fanny Hill in Bombay: The Making and Unmaking of John Cleland by Hal Gladfelder

Lady Vane Revisited

Lady Vane Revisited Neil Guthrie In Tobias Smollett, Scotland’s First Novelist: New Essays in Memory of Paul-Gabriel Boucé, the vexed question of the authorship of the “Memoirs of a Lady of Quality” in [End Page 29] Peregrine Pickle is addressed by O M Brack, the editor of the volume.1 This is no longer vexed, apparently; as the publisher’s blurb for the collection has it, Brack has established “beyond reasonable doubt” that Smollett was the sole author of the “Memoirs,” rejecting previous theories that the author was Lady Vane herself, John Shebbeare, Daniel MacKercher, or John Cleland.2 The focus of this note will be on the continued viability of Cleland as a candidate. One does not disagree lightly with the founding and textual editor of the Georgia edition of the works of Smollett, but to establish a fact beyond reasonable doubt is an onerous standard of proof, and there does still seem to be room to question Brack’s conclusions on the basis of both circumstantial and textual evidence. As has already been noted elsewhere, an anonymous advertisement in the London Advertiser, and Literary Gazette of March 19, 1751, for what is probably a phantom pamphlet made the link between Lady Vane’s memoirs and John Cleland’s fictional Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure: “This Day is Published, / (Price Sixpence) / A LETTER from FANNY HILL to Lady V-. / Printed for T. H. and sold by the Booksellers.”3 The anonymous advertiser was not the only person who remarked on the parallels: the second edition of The History of Pompey the Little (1751) added the following observation, not found in the first, “on modern novels and romances”: Thus we have seen the memoirs of a lady of pleasure and the memoirs of a lady of quality; both written with the same public-spirited aim, of initiating the unexperienced part of the female sex into the hidden mysteries of love; only that the former work has rather a greater air of chastity, if possible, than the latter.4 Admittedly both this and the announcement in the London Advertiser may simply be drawing a parallel between the lives and morals of the two women (one fictional, one mostly not), rather than suggesting that their stories were composed by the same pen—although Coventry does also suggest congruence of authorial intent. Other circumstances make Cleland’s authorship of the “Memoirs” at least possible: Smollett’s rush to complete Peregrine Pickle, his friendly relations with Cleland, Cleland’s precarious position after the suppression of his novel and his release from debtor’s prison. There are also parallels of title, theme, and plot between the two works.5 In spite of Brack’s assertion to the contrary, there is still reason to suggest that the style of the “Memoirs” is as much like Cleland’s as it is like Smollett’s. In his review of Tobias Smollett, Scotland’s First Novelist in these pages, Melvyn New says that “Mr. Brack conclusively demonstrates that ‘Memoirs’ everywhere reflects markers of Smollett’s style” but goes on to say, “what or whose original text he reworked, if any, seems to remain open to question.”6 Brack relies mainly on textual evidence for his attribution of the “Memoirs” to Smollett alone. He was, of course, in a better position than almost anyone to judge Smollett’s prose style, but the way in which he does so for the purposes of his essay is odd. Having identified some of the mannerisms of Smollettian writing (about which more in a moment), Brack then gives “several examples of Smollett’s style taken from the ‘Memoirs’”—thereby begging the very question he ostensibly sets out to answer and merely stating that the “example” of Smollett’s style is also typical of his writing.7 This is not enough to persuade. [End Page 30] Two typical mannerisms of Smollett’s style are the use of two words, wholly or partially synonymous, where one would do, and alliterative build-up. True enough, but they are as typical of Cleland: At length, the tender texture of that tract giving way to such fierce tearing and rending. … my heart, which had been so...

HAL GLADFELDER. Fanny Hill in Bombay: The Making and Unmaking of John Cleland

HAL GLADFELDER. Fanny Hill in Bombay: The Making and Unmaking of John Cleland