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

This book assembles previously published articles by Julie Peakman under the headings "Norms and Anomalies," "Erotic Women: Fact and Fiction," and "Exploring Bodies." Although there is no overarching argument, the method and direction remain consistent over the course of the book: Peakman examines varieties of sexual experience through a range of print sources, primarily "erotica" and "pornography," genres she defines in an avowedly common-sense way that may not satisfy those looking for theoretical rigor. Themes and arguments recur: for example, Peakman demonstrates in several different contexts that erotic or pornographic texts in eighteenth-century Britain were as likely to be sexually and socially conservative as radical, particularly with respect to women's place in the world. Although Peakman does not assert it as a general truth, she appears to assume that women were perceived as sexually rapacious across the period. In that, she differs from those historians of sex who have located in the eighteenth century a broad cultural shift from a belief that women are sexually insatiable to an understanding that they are either sexually passive or even constitutionally devoid of desire. Instead, Peakman tends to present sexuality in the eighteenth century as relatively stable while also accounting for contemporary scientific discoveries; for example, she also points out how often older mentalities endured. Although she does not make this point directly, the erotic texts she highlights preserved long-standing fantasies about women's frightening or admirable sexual appetites, so the cultural shift that other historians see may, in fact, not appear in this material.

Despite deriving most of its information and subject matter from literary sources, the book positions itself as history rather than literary criticism; this stance could limit its influence on historians and literary critics alike. Following in the footsteps of Roy Porter, the prolific historian of medicine who was her mentor, Peakman promises to eschew "self-indulgent over-theorizing" (continuing the late Porter's resistance to Foucault in particular) and to provide "straightforward language [and] stories of people" instead (xvi). While the chapters of Amatory Pleasure all originally appeared in academic venues, Peakman throughout demonstrates her desire to reach a wider readership, recognizing the appetite that exists for well-researched and informed discussions of the history of sexuality. In seeking to appeal to both non-specialist and specialist audiences, Amatory Pleasures employs anecdotes and topics familiar from popular histories that play up the "bawdy" British eighteenth century: Casanova's story of the courtesan Kitty Fisher contemptuously eating a sandwich with a would-be client's £50 note as meat; details and illustrations of salacious "criminal conversation" trials; and a chapter on Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Fanny Hill).

However, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure—and Kitty Fisher, for that matter—appears as far more than the source of titillating examples of eighteenth-century lewdness. In two chapters grouped under the "Erotic Women" heading, Peakman calls on her earlier work as editor of the eight-volume Whore's Biographies in the Long Eighteenth Century to analyze examples of life-writing about and (perhaps) by celebrity sex workers. Peakman usefully details the pressures exerted by genre and sexual conventions, mining the biographies of well-known courtesans including Fisher, Fanny Murray, Nancy Dawson, and the autobiographies of Margaret Leeson, Harriette Wilson, and Julia Johnstone for information about sexual tropes and female strategies. Although these chapters do occasionally devolve into plot description, they focus on the mutually informative circuit between these examples of life-writing and fiction. They thereby complement and complicate the reception of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure and related works as novels.

In the "Norms and Bodies" section, Peakman explores the representations of "perverse" sexual appetites and actions, again directly and indirectly illuminating important aspects of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Just as she appeals to common sense on the topic of genre and promises to use "straightforward language," Peakman turns to "contemporaneous influences" and the standard of "the ordinary...