Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading in Britain, 1660–1760 by Kathleen Lubey (review)

According to the dust-jacket copy, "Excitable Imaginations offers a new approach to the history of pornography." But only a few pages into the introduction, it becomes clear that this is really not the book's subject at all, even if some pornographic works, or texts with pornographic moments (such as Richardson's Pamela), have an important role to play. Nor does "eroticism," signaled in the book's subtitle, mean quite what we might expect it to mean. Here "eroticism" is a protean term, or what Ms. Lubey calls "a diffuse category." The term is defined so often, in fact, and with such variations in emphasis, that it is not easy to say exactly what it does mean; this may be, however, a calculated risk on the author's part. Rather than a distinct genre or subject matter, "eroticism" as used in this book is a form of interaction among authors, texts, and readers that involves exciting the imagination in order to produce various sensory, affective, ethical, and epistemological effects. Ms. Lubey's claim is that such eroticism was a vital, even defining feature of a wide range of literary genres in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: from sexual and amatory fiction (as we would expect) to philosophical and aesthetic treatises. Although I was not, in the end, convinced by such categorical assertions as that "literature from 1660 to 1760 depends on the reader bringing imaginative pictures of sex to their encounters with texts"—all literature? all readers?—Excitable Imaginations is provocative, sometimes frustrating, but often daring and original, and Ms. Lubey's close readings are subtle and sharp.

As set out in the introduction, the book's design pairs literary with philosophical texts in four case studies that "chronologically trace an ongoing articulation of the potential outcomes—and pitfalls—of erotic reading." The first chapter pits Locke and other empiricist philosophers (on the body and senses as the source of all knowledge) against Rochester and Behn, whose "disappointment" poems portray bodies and imaginations in which overexcitement leads to a loss of control and a collapse of the ideal of rationally governed pleasure. The second chapter reads Addison's essays on the pleasures of the imagination in relation to Haywood's fictions of sexual danger, arguing that both authors conceive of imaginative engagement as akin to erotic arousal, and that, for both, such "warming" is essential to the training and elevation of the mind. In the third chapter, Ms. Lubey juxtaposes (very brief) overviews of Hume and Cheyne on the necessity of governing the imagination and bodily desires with two little-known pornographic texts that both parody philosophical discourse and propose, albeit ironically, that sex conduces to an increased degree of self-awareness in character and reader alike.

This leads into an extended reading—the most assured section of the book, in my view—of Pamela, casting new light on this most familiar text by showing how Richardson "circulates pornographic possibility" in the near-rape scenes as well as in the pages leading up to the heroine's wedding-night, in order to guide readers on how to distinguish between illicit and licit sexualities. In her fourth chapter, Ms. Lubey conjoins Cleland's Woman of Pleasure and Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty, arguing that both deploy the promise of erotic pleasure as a vehicle for training the reader's or viewer's imaginative capacity, an essential "supplement," in Cleland's words, that can "give life" to a text's "colours where they are dull, or worn with too frequent handling." Finally, a brief coda on Burke's Enquiry and Smith's Moral Sentiments argues that both authors' models of the imagination as an aesthetic or ethical faculty are indebted to "the eroticism of early novels"—in particular, "the heightened reflexivity constructed by texts as they detail bodies mobilized by passion."

I have called Ms. Lubey's four chapters "case studies" (not her term) in order to suggest...