John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure: Literary Voyeurism and the Techniques of Novelistic Transgression
Philip E. Simmons, Lake Forest College
Volume 3, no. 1, October 1990
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ABSTRACT
If the emerging novel of the mid-eighteenth century developed new means of constructing and manipulating its readership, much may be gained by studying the novel in one of its most blatantly manipulative forms. This essay examines John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, the first pornographic novel in English, under the hypothesis that on the level of narrative technique its transgressions are not peculiar to pornography, but rather are widely shared by the emerging novelistic discourse as a whole. Central to this novel’s manipulating strategy is the development of a voyeuristic narrative that becomes a powerful means of representing and constructing the reader’s subjectivity. By exploring the way in which the voyeuristic narrative functions, we can better understand the dynamic nature of voyeuristic distance, and begin to see voyeuristic involvement with the text as the quintessential experience of novel reading. In the case of the pornographic work written by a man, it becomes particularly clear how the voyeuristic narrative can serve as a means of constructing and controlling representations of female subjectivity, in response to male anxieties and desires about sex and power.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Libertinism” include:
Shocked Sensibility: The Nerves, the Will, and Altered States in Sade’s L’Histoire de Juliette
by SEAN QUINLAN (ECF 25.3, Spring 2013)
Rétif, Sade, and the Origins of Pornography: Le Pornographe as Anti-Text of La Philosophie dans le boudoir
by AMY S. WYNGAARD (ECF 25.2, Winter 2012-13)
Communal Sexuality: Mutual Pleasure in Sade’s La Philosophie dans le boudoir
by KATE PARKER (ECF 25.2, Winter 2012-13)
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