Psychosocial Spaces: Verbal and Visual Readings of British Culture 1750–1820 by Steven J. Gores (review)

96 Books on prostitution, he pointsout,walk a fine line between moral condemnation and provocative celebration. Furthermore , in the undifferentiatedliterarymarketplace of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, books like Behn’s Love-Letters between a Nobleman and hisSisterandManley’sNewAtalantiscan stand next to Curll publications—not only Venus in the Cloister but alsoATreatise on the Use of Flogging in Venereal Affairs and Onanism Displayd. The cultural background and detailed analysis of the literary marketplace serve to create a context for Mr. Mudge’s fine criticism on the fiction. His readings of Moll Flanders, Pamela, and Shamela are as perceptive as his appreciations of Love in Excess, Fanny Hill, and The Monk. Indeed , applying the same techniques of close reading to the ‘‘literary’’ and the ‘‘pornographic’’ does a better job of supporting the thesis than do his broad accountsof culturalandliteraryhistory.The individual readings are extremely persuasive ; I came away almost convinced that ‘‘Monk’’ Lewis was a writer of genius . The Whore’s Story does an admirable job of prodding readers to rethink their inherited, nearly unconscious, differentiation between low and high, between obscenity and art, by tracing a history of the divide and questioning its accuracy. However, by substituting one oversimplified version of literary history for another , The Whore’s Story overargues its position. In Mr. Mudge’s account, Pride and Prejudice is a mediocre novel that rejects the bold experimentation of The Monk. Novels eschewing pornographic representations have explicitly rejected pornography, in Mr. Mudge’s view, and this is a very bad thing. The Whore’s Story’s impulse to reject historically contingent aesthetic hierarchies produces a new hierarchy favoring books that cross the lines Mr. Mudge dislikes. At the end of an investigation of the contemporary pornography industry in the United States, Frank Rich says that a ‘‘professional porn critic’’ he interviews ‘‘envisions a day when adult and Hollywood will converge’’ (New York Times Magazine, 2001). Rich suggests that ‘‘in a sense that’s already the case. . . . Moralists like to see in pornography a decline in our standards, but in truth it’s an alltoo -ringing affirmation of them. Porn is no more or less imaginative than much of the junk in the entertainment mainstream .’’ Much of the writing that Mr. Mudge explicates so skillfully might not be any better than the ‘‘junk’’ excoriated by Rich, but The Whore’s Story will encourage scholars to think through these issues in new and useful ways. George Justice Marquette University STEVEN J. GORES. Psychosocial Spaces: Verbal and Visual Readings of British Culture 1750–1820. Detroit: Wayne State, 2000. Pp. 223. $39.95. This book has a misleading title. It is not about ‘‘spaces’’at all, but rather about the ways certain emblematic eighteenthcentury artifacts and institutions—public gardens, sham ruins, portrait miniatures, circulating libraries, Claude glasses,novels —contribute to or reveal the complexities of eighteenth-century constructions of self. The abstract arguments that are supposed to serve as underpinning for discussion of ‘‘psychosocial spaces’’ are the least convincing of the book. For example ,Mr.Gores’sattempttolocatethese supposed‘‘spaces’’intime—the‘‘social’’ representing the present, the ‘‘historical’’ 97 the past, the ‘‘erotic’’ the future—makes very little sense to me, particularly since the ruin suddenly turns out to be erotic as well as historical. ‘‘Space’’ seems to mean something else every time he invokes it. (In fact, I would like to propose a moratorium on the use of ‘‘space’’ in literary criticism for the next fifty years or so. The only recent book I have read that actually uses ‘‘space’’ to mean anything spatial is Simon Varey’s Space and the Eighteenth-Century English Novel.) But, if we ignore Mr. Gores’s more abstract moments and concentrateonhisexamples , we find a lot of interesting juxtapositions . Though there is not much news in his discussion of the increased circulation of both printed and visual material in the eighteenth century, it does take on added significance when juxtaposed with circulation in the Rotunda in Ranelagh Gardens. In much the same way, the section on the actual construction of portrait miniatures illuminates the use of the miniature in both Fielding ’s Amelia and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein . His use of verbal/visual analogies , though sometimes a...