163ELH 78 (2011) 163–188 © 2011 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

WHaT HaPPens WHen PornograPHy ends in Marriage: THe UniforMiTy of PleasUre in Fanny HiLL

by andrea Haslanger

Commentators on John locke’s definition of personal identity as psychological continuity have long wondered whether locke adequately accounts for gaps in memory. similarly, readers skeptical of the epis-tolary novel’s claim to exhaustive detail question whether Pamela’s fainting spells affect her ability to recall her experience. for locke as well as for Pamela, there are inevitably gaps in what the “i” is able to report. if one is asleep, or forgetful, or has a fainting spell, does this produce a blank spot? This kind of gap features prominently in anti-Pamelist texts, which treat it as an occasion for comedy and an excuse for injury. Shamela (1741), Henry fielding’s satirical riposte to samuel richardson’s Pamela (1740), mocks the epistolary conceit of reporting episodes during which the reporter was unconscious or otherwise absent. once shamela has “bescratch[ed]” Mr. b after he has snuck into bed with her and Mrs. Jervis, she relates: “i counterfeit a swoon. Mrs. Jervis then cries out, o sir, what have you done! you have murthered poor Pamela: she is gone, she is gone.——O what a difficulty it is to keep one’s countenance, when a violent laugh desires to burst forth!”1 fielding’s answer to the problem of how Pamela can relate an episode in which she was unconscious is that she was only, as it were, playing dead: the difficulty of relating senselessness is re-ally only the difficulty of keeping a straight face. but the problem of senselessness, or more precisely, the problem of blank spots in the experience of the “i,” persists more seriously in another anti-Pamela, John Cleland’s pornographic bestseller, Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748–49). fanny Hill manages to close many of the gaps of senselessness in her retrospective narration, but moments when she faints or goes “out of [her]self” remain aporias, insofar as the descriptions she offers are based not on her experience, but on others’ reports.2

an examination of how the first person fares in Cleland’s novel shows the stark limitations of the confessional “i” in a setting of sex work. More generally, it serves as a caution against imagining that the

164 The Uniformity of Fanny Hill

epistolary first person offers a faithful report of an individual conscious-ness. The homogeneity of the confessional voices that populate Fanny Hill—fanny’s as well as her fellow prostitutes’—shows that the “i” is not a sign of selfhood so much as a vehicle through which women express their adherence to a normative model of sexual function, in which any sort of sex, regardless of its specifics, is pleasurable. Fanny Hill situates character soundly between implied person and device, and though it does not go as far as denis diderot’s Les bijoux indiscrets (1748) or georges bataille’s Histoire de l’oeil (1928), which depict talking genitals and a roving eye, respectively, it offers a picaresque of bodies and their parts traveling from one encounter to the next.

Fanny Hill might seem like an anachronistic work: published in 1748–49, it is distinct both from the libertine tradition of seventeenth-century writers like rochester and from the pornographic efflorescence surrounding sade toward the end of the eighteenth century. Unlike earlier erotic works like L’académie des dames (1680), it is not in dialogue form, but presents itself as the memoirs of an orphaned girl who comes to london and gets swept up in the sex trade, ultimately marrying her first love. Fanny Hill can be called the first work of eng-lish prose pornography, as david foxton suggests; it cannot be called a great novel, despite attempts to recuperate it as such.3 However, it need not be dismissed as pure smut, or read only within the history of erotic and pornographic literature in the eighteenth century. This is because of its relation to the early english novel. it offers a crucial commentary on Pamela and on the marriage plot in general because it tests the ability of marriage to extend retroactive consent and excuse previous harm. it is, i want to suggest, a reductio ad absurdum of the marriage vow’s palliative power. because Cleland’s novel operates within different aesthetic parameters than richardson’s, it can depict sexual encounters far more graphically, and can expand upon what is only suggested in Pamela—a world of being watched all the time and having to be merry regardless of the circumstances—to show that comedy’s drive toward marriage and felicity can sanction remarkably grim encounters along the way. The anti-Pamelism of Fanny Hill, which challenges comedy’s claim to benevolence, shows that this early work of english pornography takes several of its defining formal features from the early english novel, and reveals the logic underlying them by taking them to extremes.

165andrea Haslanger

i. “oUT of Myself”: self-desCriPTion in Fanny HiLL

Fanny Hill is in two volumes, each of which takes the form of a long letter from fanny to an unnamed “Madam,” the first published in 1748 and the second published in 1749 and offered for sale with the first later that year. These letters chronicle the orphaned fanny’s career as a prostitute and its ultimate end in marriage to her true love and first sexual partner, Charles. Though Fanny Hill is written in the first-person voice of the title character and claims to offer an account from her point of view, it includes many instances in which the “i” narrates from an external point of view, or retrospectively describes moments in which fanny was senseless, moments which should, as mentioned above, constitute gaps in the “i.” fanny describes herself as “out of [her] own possession” when her physical experience renders her speechless or, in extreme cases, senseless (221). What distinguishes her description of these episodes is the fact that she seems passive or even paralyzed. a surplus of physical sensation disrupts her ability to reflect, in the instant, on what is happening to her. so, during her initiation into sexual pleasure with Phoebe, who makes a practice of “break[ing] young girls” for the trade, fanny reports:

i lay then all tame and passive as she could wish, whilst her freedom raised no other emotion but those of a strange, and till then unfelt, pleasure. . . . for my part, i was transported, confused, and out of myself. feelings so new were too much for me; my heated and alarmed senses were all in a tumult that robbed me of all liberty of thought. . . . i saw myself stretched naked, my shift being turned up to my neck, whilst i had no power or sense to oppose it; even my glowing blushes expressed more desire than modesty. (48–50)

The intensity of sensation fanny experiences casts her “out of [her]self” such that she describes seeing herself stretched out, her shift pulled up, from an external point of view. Here, as elsewhere in the novel, the first-person voice describes powerful sensation while simultane-ously occupying a position of distance. but the dislocation effected by pleasure is not simply perspectival; it is also in some regard mental. fanny is so overwhelmed by pleasure that she finds herself “robbed . . . of all liberty of thought.”

as fanny turns her attention to her own body, she frequently adopts the vantage of a partner or fantasizing observer. When she describes her breasts, for example, which she does quite frequently, she employs almost clinical language that combines the point of view of someone looking at her with a classificatory impulse that understands her body

166 The Uniformity of Fanny Hill

in the context of developmental stages.4 she not only turns a detailed eye on herself, but she describes herself as another might: her language is both scrutinizing and distant. This allows her, as a first-person nar-rator, mobility within the scenes of the novel. in itself, fanny’s ability to switch between internal and external perspectives is by no means a radical device, but rather a precondition of the watching-through-the-keyhole storytelling Cleland cultivates. it arguably has its roots in the amatory fictions of eliza Haywood and others, which, while told by a third-person narrator, employ the supplementary logic of supplying details that the characters themselves could not have experienced.5 When a first-person narrator like fanny Hill supplies these details, however, the situation becomes a bit more complicated, because her external perspective includes moments not simply of imagining herself being seen, but moments she does not consciously experience. sense-lessness is such a foundational component of Cleland’s representation of female sexuality that the pornographic imperative to tell all inevi-tably involves finding a way to account for moments when one is cast out of oneself. if fanny imaginatively supplies details and sensations she was effectively not present for, she fills in certain gaps, playing Haywood-style narrator to her character.

This suggests that the principle of consistency of character, to the extent that there is one, is not simply memory, as in locke’s definition of personal identity, but rather the actions performed by and visited on the body. Cleland’s novel might be thought of as a sexual picaresque, in which sex acts constitute the events of the story, or as a sexual au-tobiography, where the relevant events in one’s personal history are precisely the sexual ones.6 in either case, characters are important as agents, as participants in action, rather than as beings that express deep states of feeling that have to be communicated through language.7 They are moving bodies within the larger context of the story’s motion from encounter to encounter; true to their materialist setting, they work as machines. When considering the report of experience in a novel such as Fanny Hill, it is important to keep in mind that the selective principle at work, with few exceptions, is sex: participation in it, observation of it, relation of it. fanny Hill’s “i” is harnessed to the delivery of an impressive quantity of sexual detail, and while the novel contains not a single obscene word, it brims with euphemisms such as “favourite center of sense” and “wondrous treasure-bag of nature’s sweets” (117, 82). The sexual principle of selection governs the narrative’s descriptive style as well as its episodic structure, and more generally determines the distribution of attention in the narrative.

167andrea Haslanger

over the course of the novel’s two volumes, sexual descriptions are almost never spared. at moments, fanny’s scene changing is even clumsy: “To slip over minuties of no importance of the main of my story, i pass the interval to bedtime” (47). When fanny “gallop[s] post over the particulars,” the details she passes over concern emotions or non-sexual points of plot; they are superfluous, in other words, in relation to her commercial and romantic couplings (92). The specifics of how fanny’s partners arrive and depart are never given the same attention as these partners’ sexual organs and acts, which merit plentiful adjec-tives and comparison to statuary and landscape. Charles, who has to disappear for fanny’s career as a prostitute to commence, “was stopped on board of a ship, debarred from writing, and more strictly watched than a state criminal” (93). His removal from the story receives less attention than his penis: “but behold it now! crest-fallen, reclining its half-capped vermillion head over one of his thighs, quiet, pliant, and to all appearance incapable of the mischiefs and cruelty it had committed. . . . its whiteness, branched veins, the supple softness of the shaft. . . . the originals of beauty of nature’s unequalled composition” (82).8

The amplified attention given to impressive male specimens stands in radical contrast not only to characters’ arrivals and departures, but also to the minimal treatment of significant events like fanny’s miscarriage, of which she says, matter-of-factly, little more than, “i miscarried of the dear pledge of my Charles’s love” (93). from a first-person narrator who has vowed to “paint situations such as they rose . . . in nature” and has proven herself effusive on other topics, the truncation of detail and the absence of emotion stands out (39). The emphasis on the episodic structure of the story, which must charge on, demands a focus on visible or demonstrable effects, and places constraints on reports of internal states. or, more precisely, it construes feeling as something that is on the surface, visible to others: the body is a sufficiently expressive entity that its vocabulary of pleasure obvi-ates the report of internal states. fanny’s miscarriage can be explained as narrative expediency (a pregnant woman makes a poor prostitute), and the fact that she reports it in this fashion, without mentioning any details unrelated to “the prospects of action,” emphasizes pornography’s exclusion of private emotion.9 it is as if fanny has become a character to herself: something has happened to her, and she recounts it in the same way she might recount an event happening to someone else, with no claim to internal states.

The lack of room for accounts of private emotion in Fanny Hill at times seems to alienate the first-person pronoun from the implied

168 The Uniformity of Fanny Hill

person that is meant to anchor it. fanny Hill tells her own story, but there is no saying separate from doing: all narration must be harnessed to action, with the result that fanny’s character is constituted in and through her sexual encounters. and yet Fanny Hill is obsessed with pleasure and pain, especially the conversion of the latter into the former at the moment of defloration. if pleasure is a sensation that has externally visible manifestations, pain, to the extent it exists in Fanny Hill, ultimately has to be communicated to be known by others. The assumption that all feeling is sufficiently obvious as not to need articulating glosses over this distinction between pleasure’s obvious-ness and pain’s hiddenness in the world of materialist pornography. This gives rise to the paradox of pornographic narration: it requires the first-person voice to construct privacy and intimacy through the disclosure of a great deal of detail, but demands that first-person nar-rators not discuss pain or suffering at any length and so closes off a crucial function of the first-person voice as it relates to private sensa-tion. Characters must be imaginable as sexual agents, but they cannot attract attention that distracts from the constant repetition of sexual encounters, nor can they be imagined as permanently injured; to the extent that pain is admissible, it must turn into pleasure. at moments this renders fanny and her fellow prostitutes set pieces of a sexual encounter, objects that must be imaginable as persons.

ii. soCial sPeeCH: defloraTion, insensibiliTy, and PleasUre

When, in the opening lines, fanny writes, “Madam, i sit down to give you an undeniable proof of my considering your desires as indispensable orders,” she is answering the demand that she “recall the scandalous stages” of her life (39). of course, the attribution of this demand to the addressee, the anonymous Madam, is a device that locates the imperative to tell the story in another, and that allows fanny to claim that she is just following orders when she spares not a single sordid detail. but the emergence of the “i” under conditions in which desires become orders is an apt summary not only of the epistolary frame but of the work of the “i” in general.10 from the outset, Fanny Hill presents the first-person voice as a position that is always constituted in relation: in relation to an addressee, to a set of social conditions, to a framework of narrative conventions.11 The first-person voice is a social formation that situates one voice in the context of expectations and conventions. it works to pit the expectation that the “i” should convey something deeply private against a consistent frustration of that expectation.

169andrea Haslanger

The first-person voice emerges at the intersection between self-determination (i am what i say i am) and the conditions that enable this speech (the social ontology that provides the grounds for the first-person voice, that exists before it emerges and after it disappears). of pornography’s social orientation, frances ferguson writes:

Pornographic representations . . . have an even greater reliance on a social field, because they are not oriented toward statements of existence that can be broken down into attributes capable of being described. instead, pornographic representations foreground a process in which evaluation is as important as description; pornographic representations continually have an orientation toward society—even if only a virtual or imagined society.12

Pornographic self-narration, then, does not admit statements of being as such: there is no “i am” without an “i am bigger,” “i am more pro-miscuous.” What is shut off here is not simply states of being but also any sort of solitary identity. The pornographic self is the acting body in relation to other acting bodies; its existence relies on the presence of observers, whether immediate or imagined. for this reason, the constant presence of an audience is a crucial feature of Fanny Hill, both within the diegesis and between the novel and its reader. The social field of the novel, in other words, is evident within the narrative’s structure of disclosure and observation, as well as in its acknowledg-ment of the reader’s use of the text.13

The parameters that determine giving an account of oneself, then, are closely tied to the features of the social world.14 in Fanny Hill, they are determined most strongly by the twin forces of Cleland’s materialist view of motivation, grounded in physiology, and his depiction of sex work as pleasurable, if not elective; his domestication, in other words, of brothels into ersatz families. The mechanisms of pleasure allow bodies to feel without thinking, and therefore remove many of the distinc-tions that apply to sex acts outside of the materialist context (verbal consent becomes much less of a problem when pleasure is considered to be automatic). as a result, it is possible for fanny to represent the social bonds of commercial relationships as instinctual and personal, and to evaluate the success of these relationships in terms of physical pleasure rather than monetary gain. The first-person voice emerges out of this environment of domestic service, in which prostitution provides a convenient excuse for a steady supply of partners and positions, and demonstrates pleasure to be ubiquitous.

170 The Uniformity of Fanny Hill

The social orientation of pornographic narration takes on particu-lar significance at the beginning of the second volume, when fanny joins Mrs. Cole’s brothel and participates in a “party of pleasure,” at which several prostitutes from the “little family of love” relate their loss of virginity (131). These stories serve as the prelude to communal observation of several couples having sex, and also set the stage for fanny’s first encounter in this setting.15 They provide a particularly pronounced example of how sexual selectivity governs self narration: two of the three prostitutes make explicit reference to ending their narrations before they otherwise would because they have conveyed the relevant sexual detail (131). emily says, “these are all circumstances which pass the mark i proposed, so that here my narrative ends,” (137) and Harriet concludes:

Here, according to the rule laid down, i should stop; but i am so much in motion that i could not if i would. i shall only add, however . . . i met my young ravisher several times after, who . . . would have married me; but as the accidents that prevented it, and their consequences which threw me on the public, contain matter too moving and serious to introduce at present, i cut short here. (143)

Harriet’s remarks highlight how the sexual memoir can truncate au-tobiography when it becomes “too moving and serious.” They dem-onstrate a tension between sex narration and self narration that runs throughout Fanny Hill. Whereas fanny’s story concludes in marriage, and therefore ultimately allows the representation of her conjugal felicity, the stories of these minor characters conscientiously skip over details of sentiment. The similarity between the prostitutes’ defloration stories suggests that the discourse of extreme pleasure may demand a standardization of the first-person report in certain regards.

What is made particularly clear by the collection of defloration stories is that sexual autobiography entails describing and account-ing for senselessness: two of these three stories involve being “out of sense” or literally unconscious, and the third, “abandoned” to the transports of pleasure (148). retrospective narration positions these women as observers of their own experience in a way that renders the unnarratable, narratable: as pain turns to pleasure, thanks to the reliable workings of the materialist body, the problem of describing a scene in which one is unconscious or otherwise insensible falls away. both emily and Harriet awake in great pain, ready to cry out, which would seem to provide the grounds for a first-person account that is able to make a unique claim to harm. However, this is not the case;

171andrea Haslanger

emily and Harriet awake too late, and cannot cry out, or not in time. emily says, “i was so much out of my usual sense . . . i lay utterly passive, till the piercing pain roused and made me cry out: but it was too late” (137), and Harriet relates:

[i]n a deep swoon . . . i did not come to myself till i was roused out of it by a sense of pain that pierced me to the vitals, and waked me to the most surprising circumstance of finding myself . . . taken at such an advantage in my unresisting condition that he had actually completed his entrance into my body so far that, weakened as i was by all the preceding conflicts of mind i had suffered, and struck dumb by the violence of my surprise, i had neither the power to cry out, nor the strength to disengage myself from his strenuous embraces. (140–41)

neither emily nor Harriet offers verbal consent: emily because the country boy she sleeps with does not wait for her answer, Harriet because she has literally fainted. but more importantly, neither pro-duces the verbal “hue and cry” of protest that represents a crucial piece of evidence for a rape charge to be pursued in court. in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, sir William blackstone cites sir Matthew Hale’s assertion that a witness is unlikely to be believed if the following are true of her:

[i]f she be of evil fame, and stand unsupported by others; if she concealed the injury for any considerable time after she had opportunity to complain; if the place, where the fact was alleged to be committed, was where it was possible she might have been heard, and she made no outcry: these and the like circumstances carry a strong, but not conclusive, presumption that her testimony is false or feigned.16

emily and Harriet’s silence is significant on two levels, then: it un-dermines their legal claim to injury, and it subordinates their physi-cal pain to the pleasure they describe it turning into. speech has no purchase on behavior driven by instinct, and to the extent that emily and Harriet later articulate their experience of pain, it is in the larger context of shared pleasure. Pain does not here provide the grounds for a first-person report that communicates the specificity of one per-son’s suffering: situated in a paradigm of female sexuality that relies on repetition and similarity to standardize pain (note that both emily and Harriet refer to piercing pain and being roused), it becomes the mark of normal sexual experience rather than the grounds to claim experience specific to one’s person.

172 The Uniformity of Fanny Hill

The guaranteed conversion of pain into pleasure not only delays the conditions of narration—speech is not available as an index of harm during the moment of defloration, or to the extent that it is, it is not efficacious in stopping harm—but makes the conditions of narration uniform for all women of pleasure. The uniformity of first-person narration of sexual experience, which is the primary form of experience that gets reported in Fanny Hill, demonstrates that giving an account of oneself in the first person requires a strong degree of self-standardization. The conditions of saying “i” in Fanny Hill, in other words, require characters (and the majority of speaking characters are women) to conform to a model of sexuality in which pain is the price of entry into the pornographic idyll, but is never acknowledged as such.

The reason it cannot be acknowledged as such is that the first-person voice depersonalizes experience by requiring it to be described within accepted frameworks that standardize it under the banner of pleasure. if the force of calling a brothel a “little family of love” is to conceal bonds of economic necessity or coercion as bonds of genetic and amorous relation, the force of grounding the “i” on a harm that can never be fully articulated as such is similar. The defloration stories that emily, louisa, and Harriet offer share the explanatory logic of fanny’s. fanny is more direct, however, about the physical injury it causes. The scene recalls Pamela’s habit of throwing her petticoats over her face when she wants to absent herself from a particular situation:

i could have screamed out; but unwilling as i was to alarm the house, i held in my breath and crammed my petticoat (which was turned up over my face) into my mouth, and bit it through in the agony. at length, the tender texture of that tract giving way to such fierce tearing and rending, he pierced something further into me: and now, outrageous, and no longer his own master, but borne headlong away by the fury and over-mettle of that member now exerting itself with a kind of native rage, he breaks in, carries all before him, and one violent merciless lunge sent it, imbrued and reeking with virgin blood, up to the very hilts in me: then! Then! all my resolution deserted me; i screamed out and fainted away with the sharpness of the pain; and (as he told me afterwards), on his drawing out, when emission was over with him, my thighs were instantly all in a stream of blood that flowed from the wounded torn passage. (78)

The language of injury is both hyperbolic and serious here: when fanny calls Charles the “murderer of my virginity,” she presents her defloration as an act of violence (78). The parenthetical “as he told

173andrea Haslanger

me afterwards” not only explains how fanny knows that she immedi-ately bled, but also makes it clear that Charles persisted after fanny had fainted. fanny’s subsequent remark that she “arrived at excess of pleasure through excess of pain” summarizes the logic of the loss of virginity, but does not entirely neutralize the question of whether it is permissible for someone to have sex with a partner who has fainted or is in some regard senseless (80). fainting seems to be part and parcel of the experience of defloration, but even so, the experience fanny has with Mr. H——, her next partner, highlights the likeness of defloration and rape: “recovering from a trance of lifeless insen-sibility,” fanny relates, “i found him buried in me . . . a death cold corpse could scarce have had less life or sense in it” (97). one cannot simply take a body’s apparent willingness as a sign of a mental state. but this is what the initiators of sex in Fanny Hill (who are primarily but not exclusively men) do: they disregard cries, blood, and fainting, and take their ability to continue having sex as a sign that the other party is willing. The justification for an episode such as the one with Mr. H——, who has paid fanny’s debts to her landlady in exchange for the use of her body, is not the transactional nature of prostitution, nor a discourse of detachment, nor the polymorphousness of readerly fantasy. rather, it is Cleland’s use of materialist physiology, which pos-its bodies as motivated by instinct, and suggests that all sex conduces towards pleasure. on the materialist model, sex cannot be harmful or unpleasurable. Materialism seems to obviate concerns such as rape; whether it succeeds at doing so is another question entirely.

iii. MeCHaniCal PleasUres: MaTerialisM and sex Work

as fanny enters into sex work, her body responds mechanically to a set of stimuli, and “the rage and tumult of [the] senses” takes over (80). in a typical description of a later encounter, fanny says:

all my animal spirits then rushed mechanically to that center of attraction, and presently, inly warmed and stirred as i was beyond bearing, i lost all restraint, and yielding to the force of the emotion, gave down, as mere woman, those effusions of pleasure, which, in the strictness of still faithful love, i could have wished to have held up. (101)

When fanny becomes “mere woman,” she becomes a responsive body that behaves independently of her wishes (“i could have wished to have held up”) and that functions as it should. To be “mere woman”

174 The Uniformity of Fanny Hill

is to have the mechanics of pleasure overwhelm restraint or objection, and to have the body inevitably respond to sexual stimulus, whether from a customer or a lover. Pleasure not only interrupts reflection, but makes it potentially superfluous; it makes it impossible—and ostensibly unnecessary—to think or speak. as a result, it erodes any claim to the intentional nature of one’s sexual experience, because it presents the body as overriding the mind. The problem of sex work in Fanny Hill, then, is that the conception of bodiliness and bodily function in the novel produces a radical disjunction between sex (which happens between categories of bodies, such as “mere woman” and mere man) and voice (which, at least grammatically, is meant to be a singular entity referring to itself).

The subordination of mind to body, and of singular body to type of body in moments when fanny is “robbed . . . of all liberty of thought” (48) associates Cleland’s account of physiology with the materialist conception, set forth by la Mettrie in l’Homme Machine (1748), of the body as driven by mechanism. la Mettrie forwards the view that “The human body is a self-winding machine, a living representation of perpetual motion,” protected by its instincts and reflexes.17 The “springs of the human machine . . . cause all natural, automatic, vital and animal movements,” and are responsible for us leaping “mechanically in terror when one comes upon an unexpected precipice.”18 as leo braudy has suggested in his groundbreaking article, Fanny Hill can be read as a “defense of the materialist view of human nature popularized by the publication of l’Homme Machine.”19 but Fanny Hill adapts material-ism in ways that interfere with reading it as genuinely, unabashedly materialist. While the term “machine” does forge a connection between Cleland’s portrayal of physiology and la Mettrie’s claim that the hu-man body is a machine, Cleland’s machine is the penis, whereas la Mettrie’s is the entire body. and though Cleland employs mechanical language to describe female pleasure, only well-endowed men merit the term “machine.”20

This microcosmic—or rather synecdochic—materialism makes the machine in Fanny Hill a way to describe differentiation rather than indifferentiation. Many of the descriptions of machines focus on their power to harm: for instance, fanny recalls “That fierce erect machine . . . that threatened no less than splitting the tender victim,” “that ter-rible spitfire machine,” and “its disproportion to that tender part of me, which such an over-sized machine was fit to lay in ruins” (68, 82, 110). la Mettrie’s materialism, in contrast, cannot conceive of sex as injurious, not only because its understanding of mechanism is neither

175andrea Haslanger

anatomically localized nor gender-specific, but also because it insists that natural instinct not only protects from harm, as when we jump back from a precipice, but conduces toward good. The man-machine, in fact, is naturally inclined toward moral good: “To be a machine, to feel, think, know good from evil like blue from yellow, in a word, to be born with intelligence and a sure instinct for morality, and yet to be only an animal, are things no more contradictory than to be an ape or parrot and know how to find sexual pleasure.”21 eradicating the distinction between animal behavior and moral conduct, la Mettrie suggests that humans are intuitively good. While sexual instinct and moral instinct are part of the same organic tendency toward the plea-surable and the good in l’Homme Machine, the stance that all pleasure conduces toward good in Fanny Hill is a utopianism that conceals the uneven distribution of bodily force and that diverts concerns about coercion by presenting sex as impulse or instinct.22 Though Fanny Hill is a work of fiction, not philosophy, it offers a set of premises about the body’s material operations from which certain conclusions follow. Without presenting a philosophical argument per se, it examines materialism’s fundamental assumption that instinct is by definition good. in the process, it shows that la Mettrie’s account is based on a problematic mutuality: when one creature feels an instinct toward another, the other creature must return it for materialism to function as la Mettrie describes. but as fanny’s experiences with several of her customers demonstrate, mutuality cannot be guaranteed in a set-ting of sex work.

The presence of materialist vocabulary and physiology in Fanny Hill, in other words, does not neutralize the issue of sex work, nor does it resolve senselessness’s impediment to speech. The distinction between la Mettrie’s machine, which is every living body, whether man or animal, and Cleland’s, which is the penis, has important consequences. in la Mettrie, each machine is sufficiently similar to every other machine to enable a state of natural law, “a feeling that teaches us what we must not do on the basis of what we would not like someone else to do to us.”23 The invocation of the golden rule, which also provides the grounds for kant’s categorical imperative, shows a benevolent force behind the goodness of the universe.24 in Cleland, however, Christianity becomes a target for libertine jokes: the shared understanding of the golden rule is unavailable, and the machine oc-cupies a community not of other machines, but of female genitals that are described as landscapes and still-lives.25 Though it is tempting to interpret the ravaging of these landscapes by male machines as a trope

176 The Uniformity of Fanny Hill

of industrialization, the mechanism of the penis-machine is strictly materialist and organicist, and is not to be understood as a technology in the industrial sense. nevertheless, the representation of women’s bodies as landscapes—“i threw myself into such a posture upon the couch as gave up to him, in full view, the whole region of delight, and the luxurious landscape round it”—presents them as aesthetic objects, on the one hand, and natural resources, on the other (113). it renders them not only as objects, but as surfaces. The materialism present in Cleland’s novel does not radically equalize male and female sexual experience—Cleland’s man-machine is, quite literally, a man-machine—but it does present bodily function as more important than reason in ensuring successful sexual encounters. This tests the limits of materialism’s claims to benevolence, and brings to the fore the issue of whether it has a provision for harm.26

iv. MUTe MasTery: HarM’s relaTion To sPeeCH

Fanny Hill represents sex as causing pain, bleeding, speechlessness, and senselessness, but while it employs hyperbolic terms to describe being “fixed, nailed, with his home-driven wedge,” it does not obviously conceive of blood or outcries as indicating injury (154). Under the ban-ner of the materialist claim that sex cannot be harmful, the novel depicts speechlessness and senselessness as signs of pleasure’s transports. no onus falls upon the initiator of sex, then, to stop if his or her partner is not speaking or is protesting, or if she is bleeding. The novel does not acknowledge the possibility that sexually incurred pain may not be a form of pleasure but may in fact be a genuine form of harm. bodily function predominates over communicative reason so thoroughly that the latter is not necessary for sex. This is perhaps most obvious in the episode in which fanny helps her friend and fellow prostitute louisa seduce a flower-selling simpleton who cannot speak. “good-natured dick,” as this young man is called, possesses “the idiot’s standard of distinction,” nature’s compensation “for doing so little for his head” (199). because dick cannot make change for louisa’s half-crown—he makes “signs [to] explain his inability, in place of words”—louisa promises that she will give him his “due” if he comes upstairs (197). fanny agrees to assist louisa, and over the course of the encounter, dick gains physical control of louisa as his instinct takes hold. This transition is not one from sensation to reflection or reason, but from passivity to activity; his body dictates his responses throughout, and he is described as “instinct-ridden” (201). at first, “he did not know

177andrea Haslanger

which way to look or move; but tame, passive, simpering, with his mouth half open, in stupid rapture, stood and tractably suffered me to do what i [fanny] pleased with him,” but then later, after louisa has cried out in pain:

[i]t was too late; the storm was up, and force was on her to give way to it. for now the man-machine, strongly worked upon by the sensual passion, felt so manfully his advantages and superiority, felt withal the sting of pleasure so intolerable that, maddening with it, his joys began to assume a character of furiousness, which made me tremble for the too tender louisa. He seemed at this juncture greater than himself; his countenance, before so void of meaning or expression, now grew big with the importance of the act he was upon. in short, it was not now that he was to be played the fool with. (200)

if good-natured dick’s idiocy is momentarily overturned by his display of sexual prowess, it is possible to infer that physical function supplants rationality as the measure of health and normalcy.27 but even if this scene makes it clear that the “man-machine” does not rely on reason, it does not precisely ally the instinctual with the good: it portrays the body’s operations as menacing and even alienating—that is, as separat-ing body from intentional states of mind—and as the cause of injury. louisa cries out that she is “hurt beyond all bearing” and “invokes” fanny “to her rescue,” but fanny cannot help, and dick, “insensible of louisa’s complaints,” does not desist (200–201). louisa’s protests go unheeded, such that she is “obliged to fight the match out, if she died for it” (201). because the scene predictably resolves into pleasure, it does not address louisa’s cries or the fact that the encounter moots the possibility that dick or louisa was raped. it demonstrates that neither speechlessness nor cries present an obstacle to sex; neither is taken to indicate a problematic mental state, largely because material-ism subordinates the mind to the body, and cannot conceive of them being in contradiction.28

but in Fanny Hill the fact that sex is more often than not sex work displaces natural law in favor of an evaluative standard in which pay-ment for pleasure excuses harm. What is peculiar here, however, is that louisa pays dick: while the most explicit claim to harm is louisa’s, this episode is plausibly one in which louisa rapes good-natured dick. What begins as male rape turns into female rape as nonconsent shifts to ungovernability, and finally into overwhelming, consensual pleasure. The inevitability of pleasure takes the place of consent: it justifies louisa’s initiation of the encounter and dick’s persistence through

178 The Uniformity of Fanny Hill

louisa’s cries, and allows both of these potential rapes to be dismissed. This episode uses the impossibility of raping a man to show the impos-sibility of raping a woman. in the process, it demonstrates that neither a sign of bodily injury (such as facial expression of pain) nor a verbal report of it (such as a cry) can be taken as a true indication of injury. This means that neither partner is equipped to decide whether the other is experiencing injury, and even if he or she attempts to express his or her own injury through language, it will not be interpreted as a true claim to harm.29 Materialism does not have a provision for sexual harm because it rests on an assumption that sexual harm is by definition impossible.

The conversion of potential harm into pleasure is secured by fanny’s narration of the scene: she notes dick’s initial confusion and silence, and also records louisa’s cries that she is hurt, but goes on to em-phasize dick’s furious joys and louisa “suffer[ing] with pleasure and enjoy[ing] her pain” (201). The turn to pleasure reprises the logic of the loss of female virginity, which recuperates pain as pleasure. The fact that fanny, rather than louisa, gives an account of this, dramatizes the separation between the logic that converts pain into pleasure, on the one hand, and the experiencing body, on the other. The separation of voice from character becomes particularly pronounced, given that good-natured dick cannot speak and louisa goes “wholly out of her mind into that favourite part of her body . . . there alone she existed”: fanny relates the experience of these characters when they are not in a position to speak (201).

What this demonstrates is that the work of the first person in Fanny Hill is not subjective report, but rather that of retrospectively producing the conversion of pain into pleasure, harm into good; in other words, producing the discourse of pleasure so powerful and universalizing that it continues uninterrupted in its parade from one idyll to another. The tension throughout the novel between claims to a first-person report that is autobiographical and subjective, on the one hand, and the larger imperative that sexual encounters adhere to a model of pleasure regardless of possible harm or coercion, on the other, tethers the first-person voice to a form of narrative necessity that at times truncates its story.

v. CoUnTerfeiT HarM, infliCTed syMPaTHy

The question of harm as it relates to sex work arises primarily, though not exclusively, in scenarios that mimic defloration. Though

179andrea Haslanger

the details of particular encounters vary, the outcomes do not: sex almost always concludes with pleasure and frequently with payment, and this payment is often offered up as compensation because the sex act in question demands injury or the appearance of injury. among fanny’s many clients and partners, there is an older gentleman for whom fanny pretends to be a virgin, struggling violently against his advances. once they have had sex and he has fallen asleep, fanny takes a blood-soaked sponge from the top of the bedpost and applies it to her thighs and the sheets under her. The fake blood shows virginity to be an alienable property, in the sense that it is not necessarily physically integral to a body, and also in the sense that it can be sold.30 it stands in contrast to the real blood of the other defloration scenes, all of which occurred before fanny and the other prostitutes entered sex work, suggesting that the injury that occurs in prostitution is either feigned or recuperated through payment, or both. That fanny’s client derives a sense of satisfaction from the false sign of injury demonstrates that the prostitute’s body can counterfeit harm, but also that genuine harm, in the context of prostitution, can be understood as counterfeit. This becomes complicated because it allows for the conversion of genuine injury into feigned injury, and vice-versa, making it impossible to distinguish between the two.

fanny addresses this most directly when she reflects on her deci-sion to see Mr. barvile, who can only experience pleasure by whipping and being whipped. “[W]hat then,” fanny wonders, “should move me to subscribe myself voluntarily to a party of pain, foreknowing it such? Why, to tell the plain truth, it was a sudden caprice, a gust of fancy for trying a new experiment” (181). Payment, of course, is another reason, but in addition to being well remunerated for agree-ing to take on Mr. barvile, fanny becomes aroused after having been whipped. she reports that the whipping was painful, and brought her to the edge of unconsciousness, but that “the smart of the lashes was now converted into such a prickly heat, such fiery tinglings, as made me sigh” (187). in this scene, injury is transformed not simply into the occasion for pleasure, but also the occasion for pity. fanny calls barvile’s flaccid penis a bird, and describes herself as moved by the “piteous sight” of barvile’s bleeding behind (184). What is so peculiar about fanny’s pity for barvile and for herself (she is a “victim led to the sacrifice”) is that it seems to be employed to situate the sadism of the encounter in a gentle or pastoral setting (182). The discourse of pity often invokes suffering without evident cause, so it can involve a prisoner or an injured animal and can focus on the effects of suffering

180 The Uniformity of Fanny Hill

without worrying particularly about the causes. To remove cause from the scene here means removing the intention of the agent who inflicts harm, that is, making the person holding the whip purely an instru-ment rather than an intending and therefore a guilty party in the harm. ferguson’s remark about sadean sadism as “the process of recogniz-ing harm to another as a kind of prosthetics of agency,” in which the visible injury of the suffering body shows the agency of the author of the harm, is reversed in this scene.31 The process of recognizing harm to another is much more like an abdication of agency here; it diffuses accountability into pity, which atomizes emotion without locating it in individual subjects or harnessing it in any way to responsibility. The radical incommensurability between the feeling of physical sensation, inflicted by lashes, and the feeling of pity, produced by observation that disavows the hand holding the whip, shows pornographic senti-mentality utterly unable to redress physical harm.

on some level it is wholly unsurprising to find that the first-person voice in Fanny Hill operates under a strict principle of sexual economy that has little patience for extraneous feelings and little interest in creating structures of accountability for harm. and while the Memoirs’ language of wonder and amplification might seem anything but eco-nomical, its descriptive strategies are functionalist in much the same way that the use of the “i” is. if the work of the “i” is, as we have seen, that of situating accounts of experience within a discourse of pleasure that demands a strong degree of uniformity, then it evacuates itself of any claim to particularized feeling. This generates the discourse of pity and sentiment, and also directs attention away from responsibility and blame. The effect is twofold: not only are the characters within pornography not particularly differentiated, but their generic quality, their fungibility, reveals the link between generic character and the demands of the genre.

vi. Fanny HiLL as anTi-PaMelisT: Marriage, irony, and exCePTionalisM

at some point, the question inevitably arises of how we classify Cleland’s novel. The twentieth-century publication history of Cleland’s novel suggests as vexed a reception as the eighteenth.32 Censored and yet widely read in both centuries, Fanny Hill’s canonical status is uneasy at best. scholars called to testify during the obscenity trial in 1966 spoke on behalf of its literary qualities, and the U.s. supreme Court ultimately ruled the novel non-obscene.33 The novel itself claims its legitimacy as morally educative literature in its “tail-piece of moral-

181andrea Haslanger

ity” (223). but while the legal terrain admits the formulation either/or—either obscene or not obscene—the apparent exceptionalism of Fanny Hill, in terms of its descriptive style and generic affiliation, is not resolved by the question of obscenity or non-obscenity, nor by its tail-piece of morality. Tail-piece is, after all, a joke about tail: at the very moment fanny solemnly declares her turn to virtue, she undermines the seriousness of her tone.34

as suggested above, this argument situates Cleland’s novel in relation to the marriage plot as it is set out in Pamela. The narrative frame of Fanny Hill, which supplies the barest introduction (being orphaned) and conclusion (being married) to bookend fanny’s sexual adventures, raises the question of how marriage and reproductive sexuality relate to prostitution and harm, and in turn of how sexual coercion is employed in and by the marriage plot. When fanny, reunited with Charles, “in the bosom of virtue . . . gather[s] the only uncorrupt sweets,” that is, when she enjoys monogamous sexuality within marriage, she records her newfound pity for “those who, immersed in gross sensuality, are insensible to the so delicate charms of virtue, than which even pleasure has not a greater friend, nor vice a greater enemy” (223). Her turn to virtue happens so suddenly and is delivered so cursorily that it cannot help seeming tacked on. Can marriage, as a conduit for virtue, offer a late-breaking legitimation of the novel’s depiction of graphic sexuality and sexual injury? in other words, is the force of the happy, moralizing ending sufficiently great as to defuse fanny’s history of sex work?

fanny’s invocation of virtue is meant to carry the force of the performative, as if saying it makes it so, but even if it is plausible enough to imagine the extension of virtue into the future, it is more challenging to understand its relation to the past. fanny acknowledges this directly:

you laugh perhaps at this tail-piece of morality, expressed from me by the force of truth resulting from compared experiences: you think on it as the paltry finesse of one who seeks to mask a devotee to vice under a rag of a veil, impudently smuggled from the shrine of virtue, just as if one was to fancy oneself completely disguised at a masquerade, with no other change of dress than turning one’s shoes into slippers; or as if a writer should think to shield a treasonable libel by concluding it with a formal prayer for the king. (223)

What fanny describes here is not simply the skepticism of the reader who sees her turn to virtue as an implausible conversion, but also the structure of the marriage plot that involves, on the way to marital

182 The Uniformity of Fanny Hill

virtue, many stops for vice. Treasonable libel that concludes with a formal prayer: this might describe pornography that ends in marriage, or, more generally, marriage as an end that justifies a wide range of means. despite the fact that fanny claims that her heart has been engaged by Charles since she first met him, her marriage to him at the end of the novel does not erase her history, nor does it retroac-tively confer legitimacy on her career as a woman of pleasure. fanny, after all, brings a fortune to the penniless Charles, and their marriage is the novel’s final transaction. This ends the inexhaustible string of sexual adventures that had comprised fanny’s life as a prostitute; it replaces non-reproductive sexuality with family life, and, at the very last moment, exchanges a narrative that had, up to this point, been structured around sexual episodes, with a narrative structured around the reproduction of family life. fanny’s tail-piece of morality concludes with a mention of Charles taking a walk with their son through the bawdy-houses to warn him away from vice. The “scenes of debauchery” are harnessed to ostensibly didactic ends: they are not described in any greater detail, which suggests both the narrative’s exhaustion and the fact that sex has been restored to a procreative act that happens off-stage (224).

if the marriage plot domesticates sex by harnessing it to the repro-duction of moral subjects—the son who shuns the brothel because it “nauseate[s] a good taste”—it does not fully neutralize all of the previous episodes that associate sex with pain or harm or unconscious-ness (224). it subtly shifts sexual self-regulation (a form of virtue) to the province of men; fathers’ instruction of sons relies on the bawdy houses being stocked with prostitutes. even though the marriage plot reunites fanny with her true love and uses this almost providential turn of events to bring home the point that moral subjects constitute themselves through proper relation to sex, the bulk of the novel shows that this sort of self-making is not exactly available to prostitutes. The novel attempts to make amends for this in part by partitioning the emotional from the physical, but this does not resolve the larger issue that the very idea of moral self-making through a proper relation to sex assumes a degree of freedom unavailable to fanny and the other prostitutes in the novel. fanny and her fellow sex-workers are moved from partner to partner by chance and accident; they are subject to demands of variety and repetition that make it impossible for them to control their sexual lives.

The failure of companionate marriage to entirely smooth over the injuries fanny incurs as a sex worker can be seen as a commentary on

183andrea Haslanger

how forcefully the conjugal imperative motivates certain works, and what it permits them to run roughshod over in the process. if marriage, held as a goal, sanctions the conversion of infelicity into felicity—the basic turn of comedy—then it is all the more notable that Fanny Hill claims to perform this conversion effortlessly, while at the same time demonstrating the difficulty of performing the conversion entirely. Marriage cannot actually make all previous harms or coercions consen-sual, not simply because of fanny’s large number of partners (she can only marry one of them), but more pressingly because Cleland’s novel reveals this very sort of conversion as a device, even while capitalizing on it to legitimate pornographic content.

even if Cleland’s novel may not require marriage to work this way, to extend its proscenium back in time, the richardsonian account of virtue, harm, and marriage, as set out in Pamela, is specifically impli-cated here. in Pamela, marriage rewards virtue and repairs, or even erases, harm.35 While the injuries visited on Pamela before her mar-riage are nowhere near as stark as those fanny suffers, the extremity of Cleland’s presentation of the marriage plot exposes its basic logic so clearly that it becomes impossible not to notice the legitimation of injury it attempts to broker. Fanny Hill’s anti-Pamelism, then, lies most importantly in its commentary on the very form of the marriage plot.36 its criticism of Pamela is less a question of virtue as opposed to “vartue,” or of confession’s self-generating detail, than a question of how marriage as an institution, or rather a device, can perform a narrative deus ex machina without revealing that the grounds of its authority may not be as stable as they seem.37 fanny’s remark about her marriage as a tail-piece of morality encapsulates the place of the marriage plot in comic novels: marriage secures the path toward happiness and is the crucial conclusion to the comedy, but it is also a joke. it is a joke because it seems as improbable as it does inevitable, but also because it sweeps prior disagreements and injuries under the carpet. The logic of the pornographic turn is, uncoincidentally, also the logic of marriage: when a man and a woman become one in the eyes of the law, their status as one person—which is presented in the mar-riage plot as their mutual happiness—takes the place of consent. Put simply, marriage in Pamela does the same thing as pleasure in Fanny Hill: both perform conversions of discord into concord, injury into the impossibility thereof. The complications of giving an account of oneself that are manifest in Fanny Hill, specifically the requirement that any woman telling her story must tell it in a way that adheres to the mate-rialist model of pleasure, make it impossible for the first-person voice

184 The Uniformity of Fanny Hill

to articulate a claim to harm that is received as true. Cleland’s novel contextualizes this erosion of the first person—this depersonalization of the first person—within the larger structure of the marriage plot, suggesting that, when taken to extremes, marriage, and its attendant ideology of happy companionship, has an uncomfortable relationship with discomfort.

University of Chicago

noTes

i would like to thank Jim Chandler, Markman ellis, Jonathan lamb, sandra Macpher-son, Tom stern, and robin valenza for their thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this essay. i have also benefitted from the insights of members of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-Century Cultures Workshop at the University of Chicago, who read this with care.

1 Henry fielding, Joseph andrews and Shamela, ed. Judith Hawley (new york: Penguin books, 1999), 18.

2 John Cleland, Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, ed. Peter Wag-ner (new york: Penguin books, 1985), 49. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number.

3 see david foxton, Libertine Literature in England, 1660–1745 (london: The book Collector, 1964), 45. i use the term pornography to designate not simply writing about prostitution but the depiction of explicit sexuality in a manner that prioritizes sex over all other aspects of the story.

4 fanny first describes her breasts during her encounter with Phoebe: “My breasts, if it is not too bold a figure to call so two hard, firm, rising hillocks that just began to show themselves or signify anything to the touch” (48). she later nods to the reader’s imagination directly: “My bosom was now bare, and rising in the warmest throbs, presented to his sight and feeling the firm hard swell of a pair of young breasts, such as may be imagined of a girl not sixteen, fresh out of the country, and never before handled” (76–77).

5 When, in Love in Excess, d’elmont enters Melliora’s chamber to find her talking in her sleep, he steps toward the bed, and she, still sleeping, throws her arm around him, saying, in her sleep, “o d’elmont, cease, cease to charm to such a height—life cannot bear these raptures” (eliza Haywood, Love in Excess [Peterborough, ont.: broadview, 2000], 116). Melliora is unaware of her action and her speech, and yet it is reported as a validation of d’elmont’s advances, because it purportedly shows her hidden desires. While the logic of the situation may not be available to Melliora, it is available to the narrator, who supplies the actions and words that concretize her desire.

6 for a point of comparison, the descriptions of london prostitutes offered in Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies: or Man of Pleasure’s Kalendar (london: Printed for H. ranger, 1773) practice a similar sort of sexual biography, offering up basic details of prostitutes’ life stories within accounts of their appearance and services, always with an eye to the client’s appraisal of them. Though the alphabetically ordered list is written in the third person, it shares obvious similarities with fanny’s self-evaluative prose. some of the listings offer life stories in miniature, for instance that of Mrs. Pr—-ch—-d, alias br—-n:

185andrea Haslanger

This lady is a native of sussex, from whence she was seduced by a son of Mars, and coming up with him to london, resigned the full possession of her charms. a few days, however, saw her at home again, but, inveigled by one of her own sex, (who betray more women than ours) she returned to london, and fortunately fell into very good hands, the gentleman from who she takes her name, which is about six years since. . . . When she first came to town, she was remarked for a handsome likeness of lady sarah bunbury; but, by a miscarriage and a child, her face has rather lost its plumpness, and acquired a greater delicacy. she has fair hair, a good skin, and pleasing features. The warmth of her bosom is a better recipe for impotency, than every stimulus and provocative the whole material medica can furnish. she can wake to life the fleeting sluggish spirits, and give to age itself the vigor even of youth; and he, who rises from her bed, finds himself only tired, not cloy’d or satiated. (32–33)

Harris’s List makes explicit what is only ever implicit in Fanny Hill: the fact that these descriptions are written by and addressed to men. The candid physical assessments offered up by Harris’s List hew surprisingly closely to the prostitutes’ descriptions of their own bodies in Fanny Hill, with the important exception that descriptions in Fanny Hill are always favorable, whereas those in Harris’s List are not. Though i do not know of the existence of such lists from the 1740s—1773 is the earliest list in the british library’s holdings, and Hallie rubenhold refers to a list from 1761 in Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies: Sex in the City in Georgian Britain (gloucestershire: Tempus, 2005)—it seems at the very least plausible that fanny’s sexual autobiography is stylistically indebted to similar lists, both in terms of its descriptive vocabulary and its use of a slender autobiographical frame. i am grateful to a fellow participant at the 2010 british society for eighteenth-Century studies conference for calling Harris’s List to my attention.

7 This could be said of most characters in early novels. However, pornographic ac-tion focuses primarily on contact between bodies, and is distinct from the wider field of action in other early novels.

8 The aesthetic vocabulary continues throughout and can be seen to anticipate the burkean sublime and beautiful. on the aesthetics of anatomical descriptions in Fanny Hill, see Mark blackwell, “‘it stood an object of Terror and delight’: sublime Mas-culinity and the aesthetics of disproportion in John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure,” Eighteenth-Century novel 3 (2003): 39–63. on the phallocentrism of Fanny Hill, see particularly nancy k. Miller, “i’s in drag: The sex of recollection,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and interpretation 22 (1981): 47–57, and elizabeth kubeck, “The Man Machine: Horror and the Phallus in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure,” in Launching Fanny Hill: Essays on the novel and its influences (new york: aMs, 2003), 173–97.

9 susan sontag, “The Pornographic imagination,” in Styles of Radical Will (new york: Picador, 2002), 66. ruth bernard yeazell gives an excellent reading of how fanny’s body possesses an instinct that guards it from unwanted pregnancy: “like a fantastic version of the english heroine who is free to converse with men because she is unconsciously guarded by her modesty, fanny’s body is free to engage in its kind of conversation because its modesty knows when not to conceive” (Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English novel [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991], 109). The idea that the body can make decisions for itself—and the related notion that it can operate

186 The Uniformity of Fanny Hill

properly without complete mental faculties—is supported by the mechanical language throughout the Memoirs as well as the episode with good-natured dick.

10 on the use of the female confessional voice and the sleight of hand it accomplishes, see robert Markley, “language, Power, and sexuality in Cleland’s Fanny Hill,” Philo-logical Quarterly 63 (1984): 343–56.

11 To be clear, i do not see this as a utilitarian formation; i think Fanny Hill is an intermediate stage between the voyeuristic watching-through-the-keyhole format of amatory fiction and the more starkly evaluative organization of later pornography.

12 frances ferguson, Pornography, The Theory: What Utilitarianism Did to action (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004), 9.

13 among the most obvious nods to masturbatory pleasure is fanny’s statement: “i must therefore trust to . . . your imagination and sensibility the pleasing task of repair-ing to it by their supplements, where my descriptions flag or fail: the one will readily place the pictures i present before your eyes; the other give life to the colours where they are dull, or worn with too frequent handling” (129).

14 for an analysis of how the social world places constraints on first-person speech, and how giving an account of oneself involves dispossession, see Judith butler, Giving an account of Oneself (new york: fordham Univ. Press, 2005).

15 see Fanny Hill, 132, 131.16 sir William blackstone, Commentaries on the laws of England, 9th ed., 4 vol.

(london, 1783), volume 4, section 15, pages 213–14. as for the question of whether a prostitute can legally claim to be raped, blackstone notes that civil law does not offer this provision, whereas the law of england does: “The civil law seems to sup-pose a prostitute or common harlot incapable of any injuries of this kind. . . . [T]he law of england does not judge so hardly of offenders, as to cut off all opportunity of retreat even from common strumpets” (4.15.212–13). The principle of “hue and cry” as it relates to rape cases designates the victim’s responsibility to make noise to alert neighbors and passerby, who are then expected to pursue and try to apprehend the perpetrator. falsely raising an alarm is considered a punishable offense. Hue and cry more generally refers to the principle that witnesses, not just victims, of a crime should raise a hue and cry to call attention to the crime and to assist others in pursuing the perpetrator. The instance of rape, however, makes it the victim’s responsibility to raise the hue and cry, and Hale’s remark that a woman who does not shout in protest, though she is attacked in a place where she might be overheard, is likely guilty emphasizes the complications of this particular formulation.

17 Julien offray de la Mettrie, Man a Machine and Man a Plant, trans. richard a. Watson and Maya rybalka (indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1994), 32.

18 la Mettrie, 62.19 leo braudy, “Fanny Hill and Materialism,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 4 (1970):

22. 20 The single exception to this is louisa, whose experience of pleasure turns her

into “a machine” in the episode with good-natured dick; i discuss this in the follow-ing pages.

21 la Mettrie, 71.22 Margaret C. Jacob argues, to the contrary, that materialist pornography has an

equalizing force, in that it extends “force and motion,” previously the sole province of “virile engines,” to women (“The Materialist World of Pornography,” in lynn Hunt, ed. The invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800 [new york: Zone books, 1993], 164).

187andrea Haslanger

23 la Mettrie, 53.24 To be clear, this is not to suggest that la Mettrie’s text is religious, only that it

invokes principles that have religious origins.25 for example, the language that describes fanny’s initiation into Mrs. Cole’s

brothel mocks religious ceremony: “after dinner, Mrs. Cole, seconded by the young ladies, acquainted me that there was a chapter to be held that night in form, for the ceremony of my reception into the sisterhood, and in which, with all due reserve to my maidenhead that was to be occasionally cooked up for the first proper chapman, i was to undergo a ceremonial of initiation they were sure i should not be displeased with” (133).

26 braudy is sensitive to Cleland’s novel as a possible critique of la Mettrie: “but when sexual excitement begins, she [fanny] seems to lose both will and self. is Cleland therefore arguing against la Mettrie and asserting that sexuality is a threat to mind and personality?” (30).

27 d. Christopher gabbard implies that this scene liberates good natured dick from the lockean insistence that being human requires outward form combined with inner reason when he notes, “[T]he representation of dick’s mental disability challenges the belief that reason and language supply the basis for a superior mode of being” (“from idiot beast to idiot sublime: Mental disability in John Cleland’s Fanny Hill,” PMLa 123 [2008]: 377). gabbard’s reading, while sensitive to definitions of idiocy like locke’s that suggest that those with mental disability are not completely human, fails to engage the persistence of the problem of language in the scene.

28 la Mettrie’s materialism is a monist system: it understands living beings as mecha-nistic matter. some critics see it as a development of descartes’ writings about the body, even though it is so clearly anti-dualist; this claim is based on descartes’ notion of mechanism and the body as machine. see, for example, lenora Cohen rosenfield, From Beast-Machine to Man-Machine: animal Soul in French Letters from Descartes to La Mettrie (new york: octagon books, 1968).

29 Here, a parallel emerges between the materialist world of Fanny Hill, which cannot conceive of non-consent, and the strand of argument in contemporary feminism that claims that pornography silences women by virtue of controlling conditions of speech. rae langton employs speech act theory to describe how pornography can produce “illocutionary disablement,” which blocks a woman’s speech from accomplishing the action she intends: “although the appropriate words are uttered, with the appropriate intention, the speaker fails to perform the intended illocutionary act” (“speech acts and Unspeakable acts,” Philosophy and Public affairs 22 [1993]: 293–330, 315). This is especially relevant to the expression of non-consent, for if there are not conditions in place where “no” is understood as a refusal and taken as one, the illocutionary act will fail. in pornographic situations of illocutionary disablement there is no way to express non-consent, because everything is parsed as consent: “‘no,’ when spoken by a woman, does not count as an act of refusal” (321). Though Cleland’s protagonists rarely say “no”—they are too busy fainting—langton’s argument is nevertheless relevant because of the similar restrictions created by pornographically determined felicity conditions (the conditions that allow an illocutionary act to succeed), and by the materialist account of the body as a pleasure machine. a situation in which there is no way to express non-consent, like an understanding of the body that equates all sex with mutuality and pleasure, renders rape unrecognizable. langton goes on to suggest that pornography determines the felicity conditions of women’s speech acts more generally. i do not follow her in this; my claims are limited to the felicity condi-

188 The Uniformity of Fanny Hill

tions of the work of pornography itself. a different approach to speech act theory and Fanny Hill can be found in scott J. Juengel, “doing Things with fanny Hill,” ELH 76 (2009): 419–446. Juengel reads Cleland’s novel alongside his Dictionary of Love and later linguistic treatise, The Way to Things by Words, and to Words by Things (1766) to suggest that “Cleland’s pornographic novel trades on a similar kind of radical nominalism [as J. l. austin’s How to Do Things with Words], wherein illocutionary force constitutes the truth of pornography, which aims to collapse the distance between body and knowledge, sign and signified” (427). Cleland’s pornographic interests are undoubtedly illuminated by his linguistic fascinations, and vice versa: pornography’s investment in vivid and immediate representation finds an analogue in the desire to make language function as directly as possible, to trace words back to their “‘original formation, big with meaning’” (429). but given that the Dictionary of Love glosses silence as consent (as Juengel expresses it, “a coquette who says ‘nothing’ ‘says full enough,’ and indeed ‘gives consent’”), the connection between Cleland’s work and speech-act theory eventually leads to the issue of felicity conditions in works like Fanny Hill, and in turn to arguments such as langton’s (439).

30 elsewhere, fanny describes her false virginity as “that trinket of mine, which bears so great an imaginary value” (60).

31 ferguson, 69.32 The publication history of Memoirs is detailed in an appendix to foxton, 52–63.33 see Memoirs v. Massachusetts, 383 U.s. 413 (1966).34 “Tail-piece” is also a term that refers to an engraving placed at the end of a chapter

of book. The OED documents the use of “tail” meaning penis or, more commonly, pudendum, as dating back to the fourteenth century, and cites an example from a letter of alexander Pope’s. “Tail” is often used in rochester’s poems as well. oxford english dictionary, s.v. “tail.”

35 To be schematic about it, Pamela’s virtue is recognized by marriage, whereas fanny arrives at virtue through marriage.

36 ann louise kibbie takes the fact that the novels “resemble each other only in the most telegraphic summary: small-town girl makes good” as evidence for the fact that Memoirs is not a pornographic satire of Pamela, suggesting instead that the relation between the two novels lies in their different conceptions of property. she argues that both novels position their heroines between two competing models: a marketplace model (changing) and an estate model (stable) (ann louise kibbie, “sentimental Properties: Pamela and Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure,” ELH 58 [1991]: 561). While kibbie’s economic reading of the novels sheds light on their different understandings of economy and exchange, it needn’t be the case that Fanny Hill reproduces all the plot points of Pamela to be a satire of it. such details as the mention of a client called Mr. b—- seem to suggest that Pamela is in fact a target of Fanny Hill.

37 shamela constantly refers to vartue to mock Pamela’s piety about virtue. for instance, she says to Mr. b, “i value my vartue more than all the World, and i had rather be the poorest Man’s Wife than the richest Man’s Whore” (28). see also field-ing, 23, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31.