Technologies of Epistolarity and Embodiment in John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure

By focusing on the epistolary narrator in John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, this article shows that the eighteenth-century writing body is a hybrid form that can destabilize binary models of gendered embodiment. I first establish that the Memoirs’ epistolary narrator (rather than the narrated subject) is the primary participant in the book’s erotic scenes, and then situate these representations of sex in relation to the writing body described by eighteenth-century penmanship manuals. While previous accounts of the early modern penman have emphasized how the writing body was produced through a pedagogy that disciplined that body into abasement, analyzing the penman in Cleland’s pornography allows me to trace how this discipline could be perverted to create experiences of pleasure. In the Memoirs, these pleasures issue from scenes of erotic play that use disciplinary instruments and pedagogic technologies to shape the body into unstable new configurations: forms that exceed the limits of supposedly fixed categories of being.