Enlightened Virginity in Eighteenth-Century Literature (review)

That the histories of sexuality and the novel are complexly intertwined is a commonplace of eighteenth-century studies. In recent years, the narratives we have told about these twin histories have been increasingly structured as narratives of subversion that have challenged the hegemony of the realist novel and the heterosexual domesticity with which it has been held synonymous. Corrinne Harol’s excellent Enlightened Virginity demonstrates just how impoverished these narratives are if they fail to account for the vexed role that virginity—that most apparently normative and nonthreatening sexual behaviour—played in the eighteenth-century literary and cultural imagination. In fact, virginity—difficult to prove and easy to feign—emerges here as anything but normative and nonthreatening. Locating textual representations of female sexual abstinence in terms of epistemological debates about “the materiality of objects and the efficacy of signs,” Harol’s study reveals virginity to be the unstable (or, as Mandeville puts it, “ticklish”) foundation upon which patriarchal society strove and struggled to establish its legitimacy (9).

Readers expecting a comprehensive survey of virginity across the period may be disappointed by Enlightened Virginity’s tight chronology. This is an eighteenth century beginning in 1685 and ending in 1750, or, more precisely with the publication of John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748–49). These dates mark what Harol persuasively presents as a “very specific chapter in the history of virginity and patriarchy” that was forged in response to the cultural developments wrought by “the ‘long’ English Reformation” and the growth of “the new science” (5). The narrative arc of this historical chapter is one of conversion, the story of how the suspect Catholic virgin was transformed into the chaste Protestant daughter fetishized in the sentimental novel and its pornographic other. As virginity became ever more central to the systems of value upheld by eighteenth-century culture and the eighteenth-century novel, Harol demonstrates, its currency came to lie less in its literal value and more in its metaphorical value as a “a sign and a precondition” for a number of “abstract” virtues, including “purity, originality, ... constancy, and, most importantly, marriageability,” that underpinned new configurations of political and moral authority (9).

After sketching the political, religious, scientific, and literary contexts that frame the book, chapter 1 opens with an illuminating discussion of the figure of the nun in later seventeenth-century pornographic texts, amatory fictions, anti-Catholic propaganda, and political theory. Harol contends here that the monarchical crises of the 1680s, around which anxieties surrounding “virginity, sexuality and religion” converged, made the virgin “particularly ripe for political exploitation and redefinition” and necessitated her conversion by the Protestant political ascendancy (22). Through the reimagining of the nun’s (politically contentious) “will” and “desire,” the ideal of “chaste marriage” came gradually to supplant “sexual asceticism” and, in the process, became the bedrock of the new Protestant state. But the nun’s conversion was not unopposed. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the work of an unlikely literary coupling. Via ingenious readings of Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal (1695) and Aphra Behn’s The History of the Nun (1689), Harol finds common ground between these authors in their shared concerns for “the psychological, social, and ... spiritual implications of the permanent loss of models of female desire that are based on ascetic, individual, or communal, rather than romantic and sexual, means” (56).

Chapters 2 and 3 (“The Hymen and its Discontents” and “Hymen Humor”) focus, respectively, on the medicalization of virginity in midwifery manuals and anatomical texts and on the infiltration of the discourses they proliferated into popular literary forms, including the ballad. If “virgin anatomy,” Harol argues, offered “a way of working out power/authority issues between men, specifically between those who have access to the anatomical secrets of the female body and those who have sexual access,” then the hymen (a notoriously unreliable sign, most commonly manifest in “its demise”) undermined this power and thus scientific authority itself (69–70). (The...