The Original Erotic Novel

The Original Erotic Novel

Jul 13 2013 @ 6:36pm

Ruth Graham provides a brief history of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, or “Fanny Hill,” the 18th-century novel that, in the 1960s, challenged the Supreme Court to defend the literary merits of so-called “pornographic” texts:

The 1749 novel … depicts a broader range of sexual experiences than any available book written before it in English, and, for that matter, than almost any major novel written since. The plot follows a newly orphaned 15-year-old as she makes her way to London, falls in with a madam and some prostitutes, enthusiastically embraces her new career in “profit by pleasing,” and finally marries the man who deflowered her. But the plot is merely a rickety scaffolding for what is essentially a series of explicit sexual encounters that the heroine either gleefully performs—”what floods of bliss! what melting transports!”—or witnesses through a variety of far-fetched spy tactics. …
[T]he legal victory for “Fanny Hill” did more than just improve the novel’s reputation. [Scholar Hal] Gladfelder calls the obscenity trials of the 1960s some of the key cultural events of the decade. “Some people will think for worse, and others will think for better, but it did sort of open the floodgates,” he said. “It was like a melting iceberg. There was nothing left to justify prosecuting or censoring these books.” Law enforcement around obscenity is now primarily concerned with child pornography, and the only other major restrictions on adult pornography have to do with where it is displayed and advertised. Today, obscenity charges for text-based materials, let alone historic literature, are almost unheard of.
More than 250 years after “Fanny Hill” boosted its author out of debtors prison, the book still has the capacity to shock. As [assistant attorney general William I.] Cowin noted in front of the Supreme Court, after the first 10 pages of the novel, “all but 32 have sexual themes.” But “Fanny Hill” would not have survived so long if it were merely scandalous in 18th-century terms: It remains revolutionary today because, as English critic Peter Quennell wrote in the introduction to the 1963 edition, “It treats of pleasure as the aim and end of existence.” Yes, Fanny issues a perfunctory ode to virtue at end of the novel, but she isn’t punished for her past vices, and we sense she’ll continue to enjoy herself. The man she first loved—and first loved sleeping with—returns to marry her, and he’s rich, too. “Fanny Hill” is a novel narrated by a woman who gets to have it all: sex and love, experience and stability.