Amatory Pleasures: Explorations in Eighteenth-Century Sexual Culture by Julie Peakman (review)

A collection of essays previously published in scholarly journals and collections, this attractively designed volume gives general readers access to the sweep of Julie Peakman’s research on sexual practices and attitudes in the eighteenth century. Wishing “to avoid self-indulgent over-theorizing or using convoluted language” (xvi), she provides succinct explanations of the analytical frameworks employed by other scholars on whose work she draws and bases most of these studies on eighteenth-century erotica. Researchers and teachers of the history of sexuality should also find inspiration for further inquiries in contemplating the patterns that recur in the various forms of sexual writing during this period.

The first chapter considers marriage, prostitution, and same-sex sexuality in a global context, with attention to the impact of colonization and the slave trade. The influence of religion stands out in prevailing European attitudes and the activities of missionaries. Moving on to further consider the rules that divide the normative from the perverse, chapter 2 demonstrates the persistence of theological ideas even as developments in science and medicine brought new categorizations and treatments. The final essay in this section, one that has not appeared in print before, addresses the “culture of blaming and shaming” (41). Peakman examines the proliferation of publications on trials for sodomy, adultery, and rape in England that spread alongside anti-Catholic exposés of perversions within monasteries and convents, often translated from the French. She sees this addition to crime literature as a new method of policing and controlling a broader range of behavior facilitated by the growth of the publishing trade.

The middle section of the book is particularly thought-provoking for the way that it concludes with a study of the friendship between Emma Hamilton and Queen Maria Carolina of Naples, sister of Marie Antoinette of France. This essay follows three chapters that in turn investigate whore biographies, autobiographies, and John Cleland’s 1748–49 novel, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. A courtesan who elevated her status by marrying the British ambassador at Naples, Hamilton gained even more notoriety for her performances of “attitudes” (classical poses), many captured in the paintings of George Romney, and her affair with Admiral Horatio Nelson. In this piece, Peakman, who published a biography of Hamilton in 2005, focuses on the political impact of her friendship with the queen of Naples and her role in helping the royal family flee from the French. The previous chapters suggest how different her life might have been had she not married Sir William Hamilton. In chapter 4, a revised version of the introduction to her edited collection of whore biographies, Peakman observes the contradictory messages resulting from the impulse to celebrate the picaresque lives of these rebels with the obligation to issue salutary warnings to young women. She argues that this literature must be viewed in the context of prescriptive literature decrying the problem of prostitution and delineating the dangerous side of this life. In the scandalous memoirs discussed in the following chapter, prostitutes took on personas that reflected the inconsistent positions found in the biographical treatments: “the Wronged Daughter; the Educated Hostess; the Fallen Women; the Chaste Ideal; the Coquette; the Spit-Fire; the Temptress; and the Vengeful Whore” (85). Although promising lurid escapades, these memoirs only contain allusions to sexual acts rather than anything graphic. In contrast, the fictional memoirs of prostitutes, primarily Fanny Hill, analyzed in chapter 6, feature explicit descriptions of sexual initiation, defloration, and flagellation. Peakman underscores the erotic excitement produced by flouting the blood taboo in the latter two stages of the fictional prostitute’s life as the passive virgin was transformed into the sexually voracious female flagellant.

Offering further explanation of this preoccupation with blood in eighteenth-century pornography, the third section begins with an article assessing the impact of humoral theory on perceptions of gender and sexuality. While the medical literature described the dire results of the four bodily humors becoming out...