Mellifluent Sexuality: Female Intimacy in Ann Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest

Pamphlets like Onania (1716), whose rate of reprinting exploded during the eighteenth century, became docents for ironically teaching and demonstrating erotic pleasures to readers, rather than expurgating them, as intended. As a result, the possibilities for pleasure reading were varied and many. I offer Ann Radcliffe's novel The Romance of the Forest (1791), as an extension of those autoerotic reading pleasures for an eighteenth-century audience. Radcliffe's novel veils the possibility of a masturbatory narrative with music and instrumentality. The lute, an instrument with diverse and erotic resonances in the eighteenth century, mediates these practices for Radcliffe's two heroines. In meditating on the lute's depiction, I trace the early modern history of the lute in literature and art, reflect on its connections to embodiment and erotic performance, and consider the ways musical performance becomes a site of female intimacy and pleasure, which complicates readings of public and private spaces. For Clara and Adeline, the autoerotic lute enables the blossoming of transgressive sexuality, despite the heteronormativity offered by the novel's ending.