Enlightened Virginity in Eighteenth-Century Literature by Corrinne Harol (review)

84 prejudices, and with his account of British eighteenth-century people’s sensible conviction that their world depended on truth, I have wondered, while enjoying the book, whether this ‘‘resolutely empirical ’’ analysis of eighteenth-century reason does not remind me a bit too much of what I was taught about ‘‘The Age of Reason’’ at Cambridge in the 1970s. This does not mean embracing ‘‘runaway fixations’’ associated with, for example , Michel Foucault, who is criticized at greater length than Jameson. But possibly we might twist Smallwood ’s laudatory ‘‘blurb.’’ In being ‘‘as much a review of current trends and runaway fixations’’ as good eighteenthcentury history, Mr. Lynch perhaps risks bending the real terms of eighteenthcentury debate—though he cites faithfully —into our own less interesting ones. Telling the empirical truth, as good liars and some British empiricists know, is one of the best ways to deceive. John Vignaux Smyth Portland State University CORRINNE HAROL. Enlightened Virginity in Eighteenth-Century Literature. New York: Palgrave, 2006. Pp. viii ⫹ 239. $68. Ms. Harol explores virginity’s value, its construction, and its relation to other major issues typical of the period, such as the rise of the middle class and of the novel. The monograph surveys, alongside canonical works, largely unexamined religious tracts, medical manuals, ballads, and broadsides. The first half of Enlightened Virginity deals with largely nonliterary texts that help her set up a strong argument for later claims about the social, medical, religious, and literary issues surrounding virginity as it is written into The Rape of the Lock, Pamela, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, and finally Clarissa . Acknowledging that she is not listing the texts mentioned in the first half as influences on these canonical works so much as part of a larger cultural consciousness , she nonetheless makes interpretative leaps that strike me as farfetched and a little flat, as in her discussion of Pope’s Belinda: ‘‘Belinda confuses the symbolic with the literal, and she ‘overreacts’ (according to most undergraduates and not a few critics) because her hair is not her hymen and thus her dismay, as if she had been actually raped, is unfortunate and frivolous .’’ Here as elsewhere, Ms. Harol too easily brings the hymen into her discussions of less corporeal issues: that is, she invokes the hymen, assuming that its material ambiguity by default allows it to take on whatever function she (like the eighteenth-century authors she describes ) requires of it. Though this passage critiques other readers of the poem, Ms. Harol still substitutes the physical hymen for virginity. This metonymic relationship between the hymen and virginity underscores much of Enlightened Virginity, and even though the terms at times become difficult to disentangle, Ms. Harol does a lovely job of theorizing the terms and their relationship to the entwined corporeal and cultural realities of virginity. She explains how control over the legibility of the female body is a way for men to assert power and authority, and she provocatively uses this practice of reading—and writing—the virgin body as a process that transmutes, discretely but deliberately, during the period: ‘‘just 85 as medicine loses interest in virginity, we see an obsession, in literature, with virgins.’’ Describing virginity and the hymen as products of discourse, Ms. Harol foregrounds the hymen’s signifying power. In her careful theoretical groundwork , there are echoes of Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and Julia Kristeva. Her early references to Lévi-Strauss and Engels could have been complemented and extended with a mention of Gayle Rubin ’s feminist revision of their analyses of kinship structures, but Ms. Harol’s theoretical acumen distinguishes her scholarship. Perhaps most groundbreaking: she has playfully and provocatively constructed a study of virginity that does not seek to explain or taxonomize it but that instead allows virginity and its metonym the hymen to retain their changeability and contingency. Moreover, by concluding with a discussion of ‘‘Clarissa ’s exceptional infertility,’’ she suggests that virginity serves as something inimitable and impossible; engendering nothing, observable and measurable only (if then) in its absence, the virgin body becomes a sign in the midcentury novel that has not (according to Ms. Harol) assimilated the medical discourses antedating it. Instead, the novel’s analysis...