Write the power: Spivak, Cleland, and fun with who gets to speak

Gayatri Spivak’s “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography” isn’t an obvious pairing with Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. But the connections with women in both texts, as well as Nancy Armstrong’s “Gender Must Be Defended,” work together to create the basis for what could be a really fun lesson.

First off, I want to acknowledge that Spivak and Cleland don’t completely match up in time and space (although he did spend a significant amount of time in India… I really need to read more of Fanny Hill in Bombay in order to flesh out this argument). Spivak points out that theory “cannot produce universals,” though it can “produce provisional generalizations” (17). It’s important to recognize that no theory is universal or one-size-fits-all; those who don’t (as she explains in more detail on the following pages) end up with huge gaps in their analysis. For example, Marx is great, but his working-class subject doesn’t map completely onto the subaltern subject here (14-15). In other words, check yourself before you wreak your theory (and yourself). Articulating where the gaps lie will help in better understanding how they effect your analysis.

So now the fun part: Let’s say it’s an upper division undergrad course on erotic literature from the 1600s to today.

I’d use Spivak’s discussion about how “the subaltern’s view … cannot be recovered” as a way to set up some context for Memoirs (12). Those who get to write have power and Fanny writes her own story, making sure it’s not forgotten. Yet, much like these peasants whose “view of the struggle will probably never be recovered,” the majority of sex workers in 1700s London were streetwalkers whose views were also not recorded in a way we can access today (Spivak 12). There are many 18th-century writers who talk about seeing women in the streets, being harassed by them (thanks Boswell), but much of the prostitute narrative, fictional or not, concerns women who work indoors and have a higher-class, often regular, clientele. The lack of voices from less-educated folks makes reconstructing a rounded historical context difficult, especially since so many texts are anonymous. I’d then lead us into looking at how else Cleland’s text seems idealized and what historical evidence from less fortunate/well-off prostitutes does to our interpretation of Fanny’s narrative. For example, hardly anyone gets pregnant and Fanny never gets VD – she is far from typical for her time. Just as this authentick 18th-century edition of Cosmopolitan indicates.

Another teaching point would come from Spivak and Armstrong’s talk about the role of women as exchange objects, not subjects in and of themselves. I would give my students some readings from Claude Lévi-Strauss and Gayle Rubin on this topic, then use it as a lens to look at the relationships within Memoirs. The fact that women don’t function “properly” as exchange objects is one of the problems with prostitution. We’d use these readings to look at Cleland’s Memoirs in comparison with texts we’d already read in the class, such as Charles Walker’s Authentick Memoirs of the Life, Intrigues, and Adventures of the Most Celebrated Sally Salisbury (1723) and Eliza Haywood’s The Anti-Pamela (1741). It would be a way to consolidate what we’d been working on before, then set us up for whatever our next readings would (like de Sade or something equally fun).

(I’d also want to do something with how Armstrong explicitly talks about revisiting and revising her ideas from before (530-31) as a tool for revising papers and thinking critically. But that’s another topic for another time.)