Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading in Britain, 1660-1760 by Kathleen Lubey (review)

Kathleen Lubey, in this provocative and sometimes exciting study, attempts to explain the erotics of reading through the century following 1660. If there were a period of English literature in which erotics would offer the most appropriate ground for a study, this would surely be it. Lubey uses philosophical and proto-psychological material as an entrée into her topic, and at times she outlines key features of the reading experience that allow her to generalize about responses to a range of writing from Pepys and John Cleland to works in other genres by authors/artists such as William Hogarth.

Lubey is interested in how the reader processes erotic material, and she shows how imaginative responses to erotic writing can be used to instruct in both aesthetic and moral ways. She shows, for instance, how titillating moments in Pepys are used to instruct certain modes of self-control, how Mr B's sexual aggression in Pamela becomes the burden of the reader to recuperate, and how the pornographic imagination of Cleland challenges the reader to appreciate poetry and sex in a new way.

An astute reader, Lubey is especially attuned to rhetorical effect. She shows how writers contain the sexual matter that they present to the reader—the imaginative process that gives meaning to sensual detail beyond the mere described action. This can be erotic or moral, but as Lubey points out, erotic readings can have a moral purpose, as in a novel like Samuel Richardson's Pamela. Her study depends on a consideration of theories of the imagination, from John Locke to Joseph Addison, David Hume, and Edmund Burke. In the chapter focusing on Addison, Lubey makes her most persuasive points about reading as a form of pleasure—Addison describes it as an almost physical response—and about the process of reading as a form of erotic engagement. Later in the book, when she discusses various pornographic works and Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, Lubey writes more directly about how specifically erotic descriptions are experienced by the reader and what a writer like Cleland is trying to do by repeating erotic descriptions. She makes a compelling case for Cleland's "theory of the imagination's role in literary pleasure" (174), and in doing so helps to explain the literary accomplishment behind such works of pornographic excess. I think Lubey's study is smart, and she handles both the erotic texts and the philosophical contexts with care. I found myself assenting to a lot of what she said, and I found the entire book a pleasure to read.

Still, something was nagging at me while I read, and when I completed the book I realized what it was: I think I took the "eroticism and reading" of the title to mean the "eroticism of reading." That was my error, but the more I thought about it, the more useful I thought that second title could be. In other words, I think this book would have been even more valuable, especially insofar as it is attempting to explore the ways in which the imagination is engaged in reading a range of very different works, if it had risen to the challenge of explaining the ways in which all reading might be considered erotic. And by that I do not mean the ways in which reading erotic passages can be erotic—Lubey does a very good job of explaining that—but, rather, I would be pleased to hear about the erotics of reading any fictional scene. Surely there is something about reading, in the eighteenth century as well as today, in which the engagement of the imagination, the thrill of emotion, and the monomaniacal pursuit of one's desire—on the page, I mean—could be described in erotic terms. Lubey gets closest to this kind of analysis in her chapter on Addison and the pleasure of reading, and I wish she could have sustained...