Aroused Yet Thoughtful: Readers in Eighteenth-Century Britain

When I offer my undergraduate course on the eighteenth-century novel, I call it “Realism, Pornography, and the Rise of the Novel: Defoe to de Sade.” Some of my colleagues regard this title as merely a cheap marketing ploy and a reflection of my own questionable tastes in the early novel and beyond. Kathleen Lubey demonstrates that this course title is more than that, since she explains that what we now take to be the eighteenth-century novel is preoccupied with representing sex in ways aimed at evoking a wide range of experiences in the reader, from moral reflection and edification, to enhanced self-consciousness, passions, sexual arousal, imagined sensual pleasure, licit marital sexual lives, an enhanced capacity for aesthetic pleasure, and the gratification of sexual desire through masturbation and other sexual activities. Indeed, Lubey is concerned to trace “a kind of pornographic zeitgeist” in eighteenth-century literature (25). For while sexual themes “do not exclusively or singularly structure any eighteenth-century texts, . . . they fuse with other efforts to understand human experience” and to improve taste, aesthetic judgment, and sensual experience (25). However, aware of the problems with the term “pornography” to describe texts that were written before this term entered the language, Lubey prefers the term “eroticism” to refer to the eighteenth-century “literary mode” that appeals to readers’ imaginations and that experiments “with formal and thematic strategies for describing sex that remain connected to some more general epistemological purpose” (29).

Lubey thus argues that the imperfect enjoyment poetry of Rochester and Behn shows not just that sexual imaginings sometimes fail to result in sexual gratifications—a fairly obvious point—but also that reading about sex in some cases fails to balance bodily pleasure with thought and moral edification (47). Restoration libertine poetry, therefore, confirms her general claim that authors from the long eighteenth century write about sex with the aim of exploring epistemological issues, the experience of reading, and the nature of mind. But this poetry also challenges what she sees as one of the major assumptions of the period’s eroticism, namely, that literature requiring readers to imagine sex effectively instructs them in morality and aesthetic taste.

Turning to Addison and Haywood, Lubey finds authors who describe erotic feelings, but who also conceive of the imagination as a faculty that both provides pleasure and serves instructive ends. In so doing, these authors “stabilize” the powers of the imagination that are so unruly in Restoration libertine poetry and that seemed so threatening in the epistemological sphere to empiricists such as Locke (74). Thus, she reads Addison’s Spectator essays on the hoop-petticoat and on the pleasures of the imagination as texts that present this faculty as one that “improves the rational mind” (72). Addison feels the imagination can do this because it permits the mind to take pleasure in sensation while at the same time improving its aesthetic sensibility and moral virtue (85). Lubey then considers Eliza Haywood’s own account of reading and her “amatory aesthetic” in the dedication to her novel, Lasselia (1723), and her 1726 treatise, Reflections on the Various Effects of Love. According to Lubey, Haywood urges women to seek imaginative erotic stimulation in books (such as her own novels) in order to understand the force of passion and sexual desire, and to avoid falling prey to seduction. Taking issue with those who see Haywood as a mere pornographer, Lubey claims that, by Haywood’s own account, her amatory fiction is based on the premise that “the body’s pleasures” achieved through an imaginative reading of her works “can uphold moral clarity regarding desire and seduction” (92). And in considering Lasselia and some of the tales from Reflections, Lubey finds that Haywood does indeed present descriptions of erotic scenes with the aim of reaching her “goal of instruction” (105) and forwarding her “theory of love” (97).

Lubey further supports her view of “the irreducible eroticism at the heart of the literary imagination in the age of...