The Sodomite in Fiction and Satire 1660-1750 (review)

REVIEWS 245 305), un Emile au féminin, qui saurait enfin proposer à unejeune fille «l'éducation la plus complète possible» (pp. 293-94). Pour qui sait que l'héroïne est retenue prisonnière par son père adoptif, contrainte de porter une suppliciante ceinture de chasteté durant toutes ses années d'adolescence, surveillée et abusée de toutes les manières au point que, brisée à la mort de son Pygmalion, elle se retire dans un couvent, il paraît pour le moins rapide de présenter cette formation comme celle,«idéale, prônée par le philosophe de Genève» (p. 294) et comme accordant «à la femme Gautonomie intellectuelle et sexuelle que lui refuse la société» (p. 305). Une comparaison avec Thérèse philosophe ferait ressortir sans peine le conformisme de Mirabeau, et son dirigisme sexuel. Signalons d'ailleurs que la citation de La Courtisane Anaphrodite qui fait état d'un personnage de femme barrée, loin de renvoyer à une «anomalie peu courante» (p. 126), est tirée absolument mot pour mot de Thérèse philosophe précisément (voir Romans libertins du xvuf siècle, éd. R. Trousson [Paris: Laffont, 1993], p. 631) et qu'il s'agit donc d'un roman plagiaire qui reprend de vieilles ficelles. V. van Crugten-André se donne pour but, modestement, d' «ajouter un chapitre manquant à l'histoire du roman français» (p. 51). On doit convenir qu'elle y réussit et que son ouvrage ne passera pas inaperçu, même s'il suscite d'utiles débats théoriques. C'est en vain du reste que l'on peut attendre la «somme» sur le libertinage du xvme siècle tant ces romans suscitent de passions contradictoires et d'interprétations divergentes: il est sans doute conforme à l'esprit de cette littérature d'encourager le débat et de décourager la normalisation académique. Anne Richardot Université de Montréal Cameron McFarlane. The Sodomite in Fiction and Satire 1660-1750. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. ix + 216pp. US$45.00 (cloth); US$16.50 (paper). ISBN 0231-10895-8. Cameron McFarlane's book is a welcome and much-needed addition to queer studies of Britain in the eighteenth century. Earlier studies have taken two different approaches, historical and literary. The first, represented chiefly by Randolph Trumbach's work, has unearthed the history of same-sex relations during the period. As McFarlane rightly notes, writers taking this approach have usually used sources carelessly by treating works produced in a highly polemical context as transparent fact. The second, literary approach has tended to examine representations of affective relationships between men which may or may not be physically consummated. (Indeed, in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Between Men, the absence of overt sex is central to her analysis.) The literary approach has recognized the sodomite as a commonplace in Restoration and Augustan literature. Yet it has usually been less interested in the sodomiteper se than in the emergence of a 246 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 11:2 supposedly more modern representation ofthe homosexual. McFarlane's book differs from these two approaches by looking neither for real sex between men nor for the start of modern homosexual representation. Instead, he concentrates exclusively on figures explicitly identified as sodomites in the period's fiction and satire. Although many ofthe works that McFarlane discusses have already been mined by other critics, his originality lies in recognizing that sodomitical representation did not reflect a prior historical reality but belonged to a well-established set of conventions. McFarlane's first chapter, "Sodomitical Practices," is a fine account of them. As he argues, the sodomite was an all-purpose "other," a target for every variety of prejudice: "The plotter or secret conspirator, the insurrectionary , the foreigner, the papist or Jesuit, the corrupt government minister, the crafty stock-jobber, the enervated and supercivilized indulger in luxury, the freethinking libertine—all were, at one time or another, connected with sodomy and the sodomite" (pp. 30-31). Although the figure of the sodomite was nothing new to the late seventeenth century, the Restoration provided new problems and anxieties that could be projected...