Memoirs of a Fall Quarter of Pleasure

This quarter got me to think about broader contexts and new research projects that could include Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. It also made me super happy that you all seemed to be on board with my crazy ideas of film commentary and magazine interview as critical practice: thanks friends! There is sure to be more off-the-wall critical production in the future.

Here are my four takeaways from the work we’ve done together this quarter:

1. Check out American literature as a place for more sexy texts in the 1700 and early 1800s. Elizabeth Dillons’ “The Secret History of the American Novel” had many points of intersection with the work I’d like to do, but I’d not even thought about trying to get more transatlantic in project scope. Reproduction, the novel, the metropole, race, libertines… there are so many avenues to explore across the sea! Who knows what comparative readings these texts could unlock? 
2. Cool kids revise their past work. Nancy Armstrong’s frank discussion about her initial oversights in reading Foucault made me think about how important rereading is for critical work. Now I keep thinking about the idea of revision, much as Desirée mentioned in her last post. Not only should we reread primary texts and criticism, but our own work too. Change happens and it’s often super fruitful. 
3. Make an erotic literature survey course. I want to teach the class that I started to build in our teaching posts (here and here) someday. I will not give into the urge to start drafting a dream syllabus until this quarter’s papers are done… as much as I may want to. All ideas as to material are welcome.
4. Production is everywhere, everytime. “The Circle of Life” isn’t just about lions, Hamlet rewrites, and the savannah. It’s also about legitimate production and a denial of those who refuse to reproduce. Memoirs, I never knew you and The Lion King had so much in common. Averyl’s and Jessica’s comments in particular made some great connections between things that, on the surface, have absolutely nothing in common.

Refusal of the Totality

Carnal desires, both sexual and alimentary

Reading the chapter from Tompkins’s book – Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19^th Century – made me strangely hungry. I also couldn’t help but think of Hsuan Hsu’s lecture the other week on paleofiction and race. If wheat, as followers of Grahamite thought proclaim, makes people moral and balanced, what would they say about those who follow paleo diets or are gluten free today??? Are they simply masturbating ALL THE TIME?

But back to Thompkins, teaching, and Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.

A satirical brothel scene from 1784 via the British Museum. More party, boobs, and booze, less food.

I’d want to dig into the imperialism that Tompkins connects with food, the connections of “diet and racial supremacy,” as well as issues of gender and control (54). The role of women connected to food ties into my previous post about capitalism and prostitutes. Here, though, Tompkins explains Graham’s concerns with food and women, specifically the role of matron as producer of bread and thus sustainer of the domestic order (71). This matron figure contrasts with the girl whose “excessive lasciviousness” Graham describes just a bit strangely (79). She doesn’t eat right, so no amount of moral instruction could prevent her from “self-pollution” and trying to get with the dudes. In other words, excessive sexuality is a threat to this moral code.

Let’s say we’re still in my upper division undergrad course on erotic literature from the 1600s to today. Since the class would be looking at texts from the 19th-century, just as Tompkins does, I’d use her ideas to influence a class devoted to food and erotica. In preparation for class I’d ask students to find one or two instances of food in the text and how they see it being used. They could pick from Memoirs or one of the other books we would have read by then.

I’d then put students in pairs or groups of 3 (depending on class size) and have them share what they came in with to each other. We’d then attempt to classify the different usages of food in the texts and see if there was any pattern in terms of time or space. Since I don’t have that syllabus written (yet), here are some examples from Memoirs:

• PLOT DEVICE: When Fanny sees Charles, the love of her life, for the first time, he’s sleeping off a night of drinking in the brothel’s parlor. Next to him “still remain’d the punch-bowl and glasses, strow’d about in their usual disorder after a drunken revel” (34). Here drink equals negative excess/decadence, but is also the means through which Fanny meets the man she will eventually marry. And it allows her to escape Mrs. Brown’s awful brothel.
• METAPHORIC: Fanny talks about “that store bag of nature’s prime sweets” when feeling up one of her many lovers as well as the “balsamic sweets” of ejaculate during sex with Charles (83, 42). The dizzying round of sex Fanny and Charles have their first day together is also described as a “feast” (43).

There are also lots of dinners in the text, though they are served by others and never made by Fanny. She is not a bread-maker or baker. Breakfast, if mentioned, is chocolate. Clearly she is a lady of excess whose passions are inflamed, perhaps in part by the exotic foods she eats.

After looking at these usages in the texts themselves, class would conclude with a broader discussion of the relationship between food, sex, and power, connecting the texts we’d read through this lens of eating.

I don’t think I would necessarily have the students read this selection, but would pull out some of Tompkins examples to share with them. If it was a grad seminar, they’d get the chapter paired with a 19th-century text. If I was feeling clever, I'd make sure people had brought food to share so that we weren't all starving by end of class.

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.)

A menage à trois with Foucault, Maisie, and Fanny

Today we sat down with Fanny Hill and Maisie Beale to talk about their texts in light of Michel Foucault’s “The Mesh of Power.” What follows is a real, unadulterated look at the behind-the-scene dynamics in What Maisie Knew and Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.

Bethany Q & Jess K: Foucault says that “Delinquency is useful.” Discuss how you see that in your text.

Maisie B: My parents, Ida and Beale, my step parents Mrs. Beale and Sir Claude, even Mrs. Wix who claims to be wholly committed to my happiness, are ultimately driven by an intense desire to transgress societal bounds to experience bodily pleasure, both the visceral feeling of satisfied emotion and also baser pleasures that as an adolescent I still know little about. You know, Foucault says, “In any case, the politics of sex will install itself within this whole politics of life that will become so important in the 19th century” (7). My mother embodies the delinquency of extramarital sex, a taboo in the 19th century and an intricate part of why my text is so deliciously naughty; she is often in a “violent splendour...like that of some gorgeous idol described in a story-book” (53). This causes her, however, to “break out into questions as to what had passed at the other house between that horrible woman and Sir Claude” (53) among other odd behaviors, and this delinquency, her inability to extricate her emotions from her drive for pleasure, causes her to become the villain of the text. I slowly but surely lose all desire to be with her, and you, my readers, follow suit.

Fanny H: Michel talks about prostitution in his presentation, though he focuses much more on pimps than what happened on the streets and brothels of London in the 1740s. The madame or bawd was a bigger menace for women like me. Acting out delinquency allowed me to become rich. And we don’t have room here to talk about the delinquency of people who kept my banned text in print or illustrated it with such graphic images.

But delinquency also let me get revenge. Mr. H— had his way with my maid Hannah about seven months into our relationship (68). As I say in my book, “my pride alone was hurt, my heart not.” Maybe I should have made him pay for his “stooping to such a coarse morsel” financially, but I decided to pay him back in “the same coin” (70). Mr. H— had just taken Will into his service, a young country boy with eyes that were “naturally wanton” and often carried messages between the two of us (70). Lucky me Will had a “not the play-thing of a boy, not the weapon of a man, but a may-pole of so enormous a standard, that had proportions been observ’d, it must have belong’d to a young giant” (72). Unluckily Mr. H— discovered us in much a similar position as I’d seen him with Hannah; even though I explained to him that it was his own behavior I’d taken as a model, he still broke off our relationship (86). So breaking the rules was useful in the short term, but had longer repercussions than I intended at the time.

JK & BQ: How does the commodification of pleasure play out in your respective texts and how does pleasure tie into your exercise of power?

Fanny H: There was Mr. Barvile who liked to be whipped and whip others; he paid me well to wield the lash and be lashed in return (143). After our time together Mrs. Cole (who ran the best, most collective-feeling, brothel in London) knew I was a girl “after her own heart, afraid of nothing” (153). Then I had clients like the old man who wanted to brush my hair and sometimes put kid gloves on my hands, but nothing else.

Pleasure’s a dangerous thing. But after toying around with women in my innocence, I knew that having a man with a “large engine” was key to my sexual and economic happiness. It’s why I was so excited when Charles came back into my life. But that’s another story.

Maisie B: It is hard for me to be completely aware of my intent, or in other words try to decipher what kind of specific pleasure I derive from being with Sir Claude. I do know that my intense desire to have Sir Claude all to myself causes me to manipulate the situation whenever I see him. Because he loves me and is also conflicted about how he loves me (am I his child? his “old woman” as he likes to call me, wise beyond my years? A commodity to use in his ongoing battle with my mother and two governesses?), I use this to my advantage. I even once thought I had won – Sir Claude and I spent the day together when he asked me to give up Mrs. Wix to live with him and Mrs. Beale, but he for a moment was clearly desirous of giving me everything I wanted in the world; namely, to be only with him. We almost left forever together for Paris, and “it was the most extraordinary thing in the world.” In that moment I had the most excruciatingly pleasurable experience when I thought I had won, and when my hopes were promptly dashed, I knew I “had fallen back to earth [and] the odd thing was that in [my] fall [my] fear too had been dashed down and broken. It was gone” (252). In that moment I gave Sir Claude an ultimatum – I would give up Mrs. Wix if he would give up Mrs. Beale. But I played my hand wrong.

BQ & JK: Foucault posits that power is a restrictive and negative force in Western society. How is power a driving force in your text? Is it a “mesh” as described by Foucault?

Maisie B: When my parents initially were divorced, I became a pawn in their quest for power over each other. Not knowing any better, I acted as a shuttle for their negativity as I relayed nasty messages to one and then the other, back and forth again and again until I became exhausted by my inability to decipher their intent. This certainly had the unintended effect of causing in me “a feeling of danger.” Desirous of control, I realized I had an “inner self” capable of “concealment” (James 13). In retrospect, I can see that my parents were trying to exercise their power over me and each other by constantly surveilling this untenable situation. I suddenly refused to facilitate this power struggle: I determined that I “would forget everything...would repeat nothing, and when, as a tribute to the successful application of [my] system [they] began to [call me] a little idiot, [I] tasted a pleasure altogether new…[I] spoiled their fun, but [I] practically added to [my] own” (13).

You also asked if it’s a mesh? Yes, absolutely, my parents were trapped in a society dictating that they love me and one another according to the ‘perfect family model,’ but my mother was never an angel. When that paradigm collapsed, I became a pawn in their army, but one who wasn’t trained and so learned to deploy my weapons with the utmost subtlety. And so, they gave up on me. Was it the right choice? I still can’t say.   

Fanny H: Power is everything. Even a hymen is powerful in my story. I pretended to be a virgin after going to Mrs. Cole’s brothel and got much more money from that night than I would if he thought I was already deflowered. That man thought that I was not touched, only pure, and got more satisfaction from the knowledge that he was ruining girls than I think he did from the actual act of penetration. How’s that for power and pleasure working together?

But those are just happy memories. The power I lacked when coming to London as a country innocent wasn’t as pleasant; it led me to accept a job with Mrs. Brown that wasn’t at all what she promised. A terrible old man paid 50 guineas to take my maidenhead but couldn’t get it up – then I ran off with Charles. So there’s obviously lots of power with sex and money in my story. At the end the fact that I’m rich allows me to marry Charles; he’d lost all his money but still had his status as a gentleman. Now we’re just a happy family with kids and I’m the picture of a virtuous wife. Even I can’t see all the strands that make up the mesh of our power.