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Epilogue: The Return of the Repressed
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The greatest men, those of the first and most leading taste, will not scruple adorning their private closets with nudities, though, in compliance with vulgar prejudices they may not think them decent decorations of the staircase or saloon. John Cleland, Fanny Hill I am in the habit of reading at breakfast, but I found that Les 120 Journées was the only book that I could not face while eating. Edmund Wilson, “The Documents on the Marquis de Sade” I n 1957, the year of the Roth decision and therefore the turning point for the legal definition of obscenity in the United States, Jean-Jacques Pauvert was convicted in France on approximately the same grounds on which Flaubert and Baudelaire had been charged one hundred years earlier. His crime was the publication of four novels by the Marquis de Sade, three of which had originally been published in the 1790s. One of the more unexpected turns taken by the history we have been considering is that as that history was drawing to a close, as became all but inevitable after the Chatterley trials, the last big literary obscenity trials in France and the United States involved the publication of works dating from the eighteenth century. Both Sade’s novels and John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, more familiarly known as Fanny Hill, have now been fully canonized , easily available, for instance, in various “classic” editions in various different languages. Much more than any of the works we have previously dealt with, these books are pornographic according to almost anyone’s standards. Almost anyone, that is, with the exception of those who have a professional stake in maintaining otherwise. In his preface to the Penguin Classics edition of Fanny Hill, for instance, Peter Wagner works hard to argue Epilogue The Return of the Repressed 221 that Cleland’s work “deserves a place beside the novels of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett” in the eighteenth-century canon (16). He also insists that if the novel “acquired a bad name and was relegated for more than two centuries to the realm of ‘pornography’, it was mainly because of the illustrations,” which were added to later editions (15). (This last is a resourceful variant on the old line that one reads Playboy for the Nabokov interviews and not the pictures.) Similarly, many Sade scholars, taking a cue from Guillaume Apollinaire and, later on, intellectuals such as those who went to court to defend Pauvert’s publication of Sade’s works in 1957, argue that even the most sexually and violently explicit of his writings are not pornography but a hybrid of art and philosophy that is important in itself and also key to an understanding of the Enlightenment, human nature in general, and even some of the more horrifying events in twentiethcentury history. To the casual reader, however, both Fanny Hill and most of Sade’s works fall unmistakably under the rubric of hard-core pornography. These two cases represent, in their different ways, the final frontier of acceptable indecency. The fact that they have both been vigorously defended as nonpornographic demonstrates the extent to which even when apparently pornographic works become classic the categories of “pornography” and “classic” are still viewed as mutually exclusive. Cleland’s novel, first published in two volumes in 1748–49, was for a very long time the most famous pornographic novel in English. In mutual denunciations of their respective books as opportunistic pornography, for instance, Nabokov and Edmund Wilson each at different times accused the other of having written a new Fanny Hill in Memoirs of Hecate County and Lolita respectively. Cleland’s work is pornographic not only in the colloquial use of the term but in the strict sense as well: “pornography” literally means “prostitute-writing”—that is, writing either about or by prostitutes —and Cleland’s novel responds to both meanings suggested by this etymology.1 Written in the form of a former prostitute’s memoirs, it is an extended narrative of sexual activities of various sorts, alternatively participated in, observed by, or recounted to the eponymous narrator. It contains scenes of masturbation, lesbianism, sodomy, flagellation, fetishism, and general copulation. It contains, moreover, little else, although it is famously free of obscene language, employing throughout a charmingly (or offensively, depending on one’s viewpoint) metaphorical vocabulary rich in “truncheons,” “instruments,” and “steeds” on the one hand, and “soft pleasure-conduits” and “genial seats of pleasure” on the other. Fanny Hill does not pretend...