Melissa M. Mowry. The Bawdy Politic in Stuart England, 1660-1714: Political Pornography and Prostitution. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. viii + 173 pp. $79.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7546-4157-5.
Reviewed by Jad Smith (Department of English, Eastern Illinois University)
Published on H-Albion (June, 2005)
Sexual Politics in Late Stuart England
Meticulously researched and richly detailed, Melissa Mowry's The Bawdy Politic contributes significantly to a growing body of scholarship concerned with the relationship of politics and pornography during the late Stuart period in England.[1] Mowry argues that following the Restoration, royalist satires of prostitutes and bawds increasingly aligned these "common women" with republicanism (p. 1). More than just a smear campaign intended to defame a competing political ideology, these polemics--which Mowry characterizes as "political pornography"--produced specific cultural and juridical effects. For instance, they mediated the identity of the "common woman," transforming her reputedly transgressive body into a "royalist emblem" of the threat that radical republicanism posed to the stability of the crown (pp. 1-2). Such symbolic violence against prostitutes and bawds sometimes lent itself to actual violence, as in the case of the Bawdy House Riots of 1668, which found angry Londoners wreaking havoc upon the city's East End brothels; however, the chief purpose of this royalist sexual politics was to secure the "homosocial hierarchy among men upon which the Stuart regime's economic and political stability depended" (p. 7), and thereby to quash the democratic potentialities that republicanism harbored. The main claim of The Bawdy Politic, in Mowry's own words, is that "these sexualized representations of 'common women' argued against equal and open access to power not only through the conventional synecdoche between household and kingdom, but also through shrewd explorations of the economic and social impact royalists believed implicit in universal suffrage and the 'subject's liberty'" (p. 1).
Throughout her study, Mowry effectively demonstrates the importance of the "common woman" to late seventeenth-century disputes about the possible nature and extent of political enfranchisement, tracing the figure of the bawd from Restoration to Exclusion Crisis to Glorious Revolution. Not until the 1690s, she suggests, did the symbolic significance of the "common woman" begin to fade. In that decade, growingly entrenched Whigs and Tories shifted the focus of the debate about political enfranchisement to "issues of class and natural disposition" at the same time that emerging moral narratives associated with the reformation of manners reconstructed the bawd's body as a site of depravity (p. 9). Despite its eventual displacement, Mowry argues, "political pornography" had far-reaching implications, not in the least because it had paved the way for the rise of liberalism in England (pp. 6-7).
Mowry widely consults and deftly engages with literary and historical scholarship on her subject, and her original research encompasses previously overlooked satires, including such broadsides as The Prentices Answer to the Poor-Whores Petition and The Poor Whores Complaint to the Apprentices of London, as well as archival legal documents related to the Bawdy House Riots and to prostitution in London. One chapter shows how bawdy politics supported the Restoration and the loyalist agenda by aligning the crown with common law and republicanism with the disorderly bodies of "radical figures from the civil wars," including Henry Marten and Mother Creswell (p. 45). Another examines pornographic political satires and Middlesex Sessions rolls, using them to reveal how the 1668 Bawdy House riots forced a compromise between royalists and "wealthy radicals" (p. 63), and divvied up the blame for "political radicalism between London's apprentices and the City's whores" (p. 61). In one chapter, Mowry tackles the question of how "liberalism survived the Restoration to flourish under the Williamite regime of the 1690s" (p. 80). She asserts that as the popularity of individualism grew, particularly during the 1680s, royalists themselves fostered liberalism, chiefly by using "pornographic representations of bawds to appropriate the new entrepreneurial individualism for the Crown" (p. 80). Another chapter contends that around the time of the Exclusion Crisis, "the prostitute" was consolidated and deployed as a sexual identity. This identity formed "part of a strategy to contain the democratic implications" of the radical idea that every person owned his or her own labor and constructed the prostitute's labor as invalid within a patriarchal conception of morality (p. 106). In a final chapter, Mowry suggests that it was not until the 1690s that the symbolic significance of the "common woman" began to fade (pp. 139-140).
Although Mowry locates her topic at the "conjunction of cultural representation and cultural practice," implying a balanced account on these two fronts, questions of representation receive short shrift within her primarily historical study (p. 1). Restoration and early eighteenth-century satires are typically replete with irony, paradox, and complexities of voice, and imbued with the epistemological and political confusions of a culture in a profound state of transition. Mowry offers little discussion of satire's formal characteristics, and in her argument, this representational mode figures principally as an unproblematic vehicle for propaganda. With scant textual evidence, for instance, Mowry reads apparent contradictions in the late Stuart print culture's portrayal of the bawd as a royalist conspiracy or "masquerade" designed to heighten the effectiveness of the royalist critique of radicalism (p. 14).
Her approach to pornography evinces a similar problem. Following Frances Ferguson, Mowry attempts to point out the limitations of the critically dominant "scopophilic definition" of pornography, which emphasizes the representation of "sexual acts" (p. 3).[2] In her view, this definition limits historical and cultural inquiry into the nature of pornography as a material practice. Thus, she opts to define pornography functionally, as a mode of "intimate and personal" representation that intrudes upon the "social" logic of public space in order to disrupt shared identities (e.g., republicanism), in particular by causing rifts in such identities along gender lines (pp. 3-4). While the move to complicate and broaden critical understandings of pornography through attention to cultural practice is admirable, it here falters. When Mowry asserts that "The Bawdy Politic asks what argument the pornographic body is being used to settle, rather than focusing on whether a given text is pornographic or merely titillating, erotic or obscene," she begs the question of what makes a body or a mode of representation pornographic in the first place (p. 3). Her functional definition of pornography becomes a way of displacing the problem of representation rather than a way of reimagining it within a nuanced conception of material culture.
A worthwhile read, The Bawdy Politic offers much to literary critics and historians interested in the politics and pornography of the late Stuart era. Learned, provocative, and exhaustively detailed in its presentation of historical evidence, Mowry's study moves scholarship toward a balanced approach to the topic even though it does not fully realize such an approach itself.
Notes
[1]. See, for instance, Sharon Achinstein, "Women on Top in the Pamphlet Literature of the English Revolution," Women's Studies 24 (1994): pp. 131-164; Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); James Grantham Turner, Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London: Sexuality, Politics, and Literary Culture, 1630-1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Rachel Weil, "Sometimes a Scepter is Only a Scepter: Pornography and Politics in Restoration England," in The Invention of Pornography, 1500-1800: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, ed. Lynn Hunt (New York: Zone Books, 1993), pp. 125-156. For Turner, see Melissa Mowry, "Review of James Grantham Turner, Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London: Sexuality, Politics, and Literary Culture, 1630-1685," H-Albion, H-Net Reviews, October, 2002, URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=224871037026090.
[2]. See Ferguson's "Pornography: the Theory," Critical Inquiry 21 (1995): pp. 670-695.
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Citation:
Jad Smith. Review of Mowry, Melissa M., The Bawdy Politic in Stuart England, 1660-1714: Political Pornography and Prostitution.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10700
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