Karen Harvey. Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. viii + 261 pp. $80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-82235-0.
Reviewed by Jennine Hurl-Eamon (Department of History, Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario)
Published on H-Albion (June, 2006)
Gender in Eighteenth-Century Erotica
Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century uses more than one hundred erotic texts (dubbed "erotica") to explore gender and sexuality in eighteenth-century England. Karen Harvey makes an important distinction between "erotica" and "pornography." Though the former term is often used to refer to the entire gambit of the literature of sex and titillation, Harvey re-defines it for her own purposes. "Erotica," in Reading Sex, is "material about sexual pleasure which depicted sex, bodies and desire through illusions of concealment and distance" (p. 20), in contrast to pornography, which depicts sex much more explicitly. Historical attention has traditionally been focused upon the latter, but Harvey convincingly demonstrates the value of focusing upon literature that cloaks images of the body and sex in metaphors. By understanding the symbolic language of eighteenth-century erotica, Harvey is able to unearth a wealth of new evidence of discourses around the body, sexuality, and gender in English culture.
She begins by exploring the contexts within which erotica was produced and read in eighteenth-century England. Such material is understandably surrounded by many silences, which Harvey navigates very cautiously. She does not allow herself to speculate too widely about the authors or readers of erotica, concluding that the most likely candidates for both were middling men. Erotica's subtle depictions of sex through the symbolic language of geography, botany, and the like anticipated an educated audience, and the few accounts of erotic literature being read depict gatherings of intellectual males. Harvey ventures to acknowledge in a footnote that it was "likely that a second-hand market in erotic books existed and allowed greater access" (p. 41), but her ultimate goal is to establish erotica as a middling masculine genre. The book goes on to offer insights into notions of sex differences in erotic literature, focusing in turn upon its depictions of female and male bodies. It then recounts the way that space and movement were represented, with some interesting comparisons to the medical, botanical, and other scientific writing of the age. Finally, Harvey considers the notion of pleasure in erotica. She discerns a strong element of feminine modesty running through the literature, which modifies Roy Porter's image of enlightenment culture as more shamelessly pleasure-seeking.
The nature of her research has allowed Harvey to question many of the current meta-narratives surrounding the body and gender in the eighteenth century. Unlike the neat linearity of many histories depicting this period as the birth of modernity, Harvey convincingly argues for a more circular narrative. Most significantly, she raises doubts about Thomas Laqueur's widely accepted theory that the model of the two-sex body had fully transplanted the early modern notion of a single-sex body in the eighteenth century. Theories of conception in erotica simultaneously depicted Aristotelian versions alongside newer dual-sex models throughout the eighteenth century. In fact, in erotic literature, these visions of conception "resist a chronological pattern" (p. 86).
The depictions of space in eighteenth-century erotica also augment current orthodoxy on the gendering of space in the modern world. In contrast to histories by Peter Borsay, Miles Ogborn, and others that show a growth in middle-class male (and concurrent decline in female) freedom of movement, the sexualized spaces in erotica traditionally belonged to women. Harvey warns us not to equate this with female empowerment however, because the scenarios usually portrayed men as forcibly entering female space, closely paralleling narratives of sex, where phalluses invaded vaginas. Harvey explores the undercurrent of violence in early modern representations of intercourse, but concludes that male "force appears as a manifestation of a yearning to experience these [female] spaces rather than a desire to destroy" (p. 174).
Harvey also tackles Laqueur and the many women's historians who argue that the 1700s saw the advent of asexual femininity. Erotica depicting women as libidinous seductresses, commonly associated with the preceding early modern period, was still being read at the end of the eighteenth century. In this she is somewhat less convincing, as it is hardly surprising that the literature of male sexual fantasy would refuse to wholeheartedly adopt notions of women as asexual mothers. Thus, her point that breasts continued to be eroticized at the end of the eighteenth century, rather than being depicted only as instruments of lactation, cannot fully counter the broader cultural histories that chart the rise of the sexually passive mother as a feminine ideal.
Indeed, as a history of women, Reading Sex falls slightly short of the mark. Though Harvey recognizes that "assessments of representations … must be forged in the masculinist context of erotic culture, not assumed contexts of women's actual identities or lives" (p. 105), she devotes substantial space to analyses of femininity from these sources. The book would have been stronger if it had confined itself more visibly to the history of masculinity, or if it had combined its sources on erotic literature with other sources that discussed female sexuality outside of the realm of male fantasy. Harvey makes fleeting mention of contemporary women novelists at a few points in the narrative. She also introduces testimony from rape and adultery cases in the chapter on movement, but these are taken from secondary sources. Her decision to concentrate on court testimony dealing with non-consensual sexual encounters further skews the image of female sexuality in the book. Admittedly, accounts of female sexual fantasy (or even of direct female sexual experience) for the eighteenth century would be very difficult to find, but in order to more fully deserve its categorization as a history of both genders, Reading Sex needed to consider other sources. A more equitable attention to female-authored romances, or to archival accounts of women's sexual experiences in bastardy or matrimonial case records, might have enabled Harvey to better accomplish her goal.
This criticism should in no way be taken as saying that the book is under-researched, however. Harvey has marshaled an impressive array of printed primary source materials in her history of erotic culture. Reading Sex is also an admirable interdisciplinary history, drawing upon a wide variety of secondary sources which range from anthropological research on menstruation to psychoanalytic accounts of male bodies. She places the erotic culture of England in the wider context of Europe, showing an awareness of the rich historiography already present for eighteenth-century French pornography in particular. The book is beautifully written, and Harvey does an excellent job of making complex theoretical concepts accessible to readers.
While it may be somewhat weak as a history of feminine sexuality, Reading Sex is invaluable as an addition to the growing literature on the history of masculinity in early modern Britain. In contrast to conventional women's histories that compare the changing image of the feminine body with a normalized, unchanging masculine body, Harvey shows that much more complexity existed in erotic depictions of the male form. Indeed, eighteenth-century erotica was riddled with anxieties over men's bodies. Broader worries over British military prowess in the 1700s found its way into sexual literature, which stressed the importance of male potency. Sexual vigor and men's fertility was stressed even more than penis size, and thus erotica ridiculed the elderly body in favor of the younger more virile male.
Ultimately, Karen Harvey is able to tease out some very valuable insights from unwieldy sources. Reading Sex is an important contribution to the history of masculine sexuality and the complex interplay between contemporary scientific/medical theories of the body and popular male sexuality.
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Citation:
Jennine Hurl-Eamon. Review of Harvey, Karen, Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11838
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