Imagining Sex: Pornography and Bodies in Seventeenth-Century England by Sarah Toulalan (review)

264 wich, George Bubb Dodington and John Wilkes, which are not used in any significant way to develop conclusions about the clubs they belonged to or the nature of that activity. At best, Ms. Lord asserts, ‘‘boys will be boys.’’ There is also no real engagement with recent scholarship on masculinity and male sociability in the eighteenth century. Members of rakish groups may not have been acting ‘‘against accepted social and moral norms’’ as much as conforming to their own expectations of gentlemanly leisure activity. The book is ostensibly about ‘‘hell-fire’’ clubs, but is often just about clubs (the Beefsteaks); and sometimes not even about clubs at all, as in the case of the Kingdom of Dalkey, an island in Dublin Bay where the public went for picnics (or maybe revolutionary activities). She also distressingly resorts to sweeping, completely unsubstantiated generalizations. A few examples: ‘‘Society was becoming more materialistic and consumer-orientated. Conspicuous consumption of luxury goods and alcoholism increased and there was a general rejection of the Church’’; ‘‘The [Wig] club faded out in the 1830s as its members grew older and more respectable , and the Victorian age was ushered in when certain standards were expected from social leaders;’’ ‘‘Modern Britain was being established [in the 1840s], and there was no room in it for hell-fire clubs, as this was a society more family orientated, and much more commercial than in the eighteenth century.’’ Statements like these might be appropriate for a high-school text, but not a scholarly monograph. The conclusion of Ms. Lord’s book is no better. There are errors, too. Elizabeth I did not ‘‘bestow’’ the crown on James VI because he was a Protestant; he inherited it. A married woman was not her husband’s property; her property was, mostly. Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768) is misdated to 1766. The ‘‘Panty’’ (Pantagruel) of Crazy Castle was the Revd. Robert Lascelles, not Henry Lascelles. A troll through the references reveals other mistaken names: ‘‘Daniel Stott’’ (Statt), ‘‘P. Bond’’ (Richmond P. Bond), ‘‘Lewis Jones’’ (Louis C. Jones). In light of the more significant weaknesses of the book, these are probably not just typos and further undermine the reader’s confidence. Ms. Lord says that most previous work on hell-fire clubs offers ‘‘a great deal of speculation . . . and not too many facts.’’ This describes her own book. Neil Guthrie Toronto SARAH TOULALAN. Imagining Sex: Pornography and Bodies in SeventeenthCentury England. Oxford: Oxford, 2007. Pp. 300. $125. Consistently challenging feminist and psychoanalytic readings of the sexual perception and function of women in seventeenth and early eighteenth-century English society, Ms. Toulalan’s wellresearched monograph maintains that focusing on cultural contexts of pornographic works rather than theoretical frameworks, produces a better understanding of sex and sexual titillation: namely, that sexual pleasure leads to conception. Since she stresses an analysis of cultural and historical contexts—‘‘texts should thus be interpreted and made sense of through early modern comprehension of bodies and how they work, rather than through the lens of modern psychology’’—it seems odd, even con- 265 tradictory, that she chooses a term, ‘‘pornography,’’ coined in and overburdened with, as she acknowledges, nineteenth and twentieth-century associations . Nevertheless, since ‘‘sexual literature . . . encompassed a very wide range of styles,’’ she contends, we should ‘‘redefine both our understanding of the term . . . as well as our understanding of the nature of that pornographic material.’’ Apart from this discrepancy, Ms. Toulalan ’s interesting readings of passages and pictures, challenge feminist and psychoanalytic readings by underscoring humor and playfulness: ‘‘In this early modern literature the penis is not represented in the symbolic sense that psychoanalysis has suggested, as the phallus , rather it is imagined in its physical reality, and with a degree of playfulness and pleasure that subverts any interpretation of such humour as clearly misogynist .’’ Some evidence works against her, as she admits, because women did not write these works, nor were their responses to them sufficiently documented : ‘‘While erotic images of women may be intended for—and in this period , commissioned by—heterosexual men, this cannot preclude women’s enjoyment of them’’; and ‘‘[a]necdotal evidence , albeit from a slightly earlier period , suggests that women at this time...