The Libertine Hero and Heroine in the Novels of John Cleland

T h e L ib e rtin e H e ro a n d H e ro in e onmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA in th e N o v e ls o f J o h n C le la n d R A Y M O N D K . W H IT L E Y It is by now accepted as a m atterof course that the style of John Cleland’s Memoirs o f a W o m a n o f P leasure is echoed in the erotic un­ derground of nineteenth- and twentieth-century pornography. Cleland’s “mossy grots” and “marble columns,” like it or not, are ir­ retrievably linked to the Victorian heyday of the double standard and the closet libertine.1 Despite the logical disjunction between what Cleland made of his material and what subsequent, often in­ ferior authors did in copying him, this relationship—essentially one of imagery, not plot—still remains one basis on which scholars who harbor a moral disgust of his erotic contribution to eighteenth-cen­ tury fiction condemn Cleland’s skill as an author. Parallels of word­ ing and metaphor have also been used to link Cleland with impor­ tant authors; at least one critic2 has used such evidence to suggest M em o irs o f a W o m a n o f P lea su re as a forerunner of the violent, erotic literature of the Marquis de Sade. The problem with both these pro­ cedures is that they leave out of the question Cleland’s plot and char­ acterization, which are at once strikingly similar to ordinary contem­ porary practice in the novel and quite different from those elements in the works to which Cleland’s book is compared. 387 388 / ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA R A Y M O N D K . W H I T L E Y The several critics who have addressed these fundam ental elem ents in M em o irs o f a W o m a n o f P lea su re point out its parallelism with M o ll F la n d ers, its elem entof anti-Richardsonian parody, and its congru­ ency in general to the m ainstreamof the English novel at m id-cen­ tury.3 Their argum entsare im portant, but they tend to excuse rather than explain Cleland’s eroticism and they usually omit any consider­ ation of Cleland’s other novel about sex, M em o irs o f a C o xco m b , perhaps because, not being explicitly erotic, the work attracts little popular attention. Fortunately, Dr. Barry Ivker has provided a com­ parison of mid-eighteenth century English and French libertinism which is the most balanced pronouncement to date on Cleland’s ear­ ly novels. In establishing that “the emphasis on perversion in French libertine fiction is tied to a philosophical, theological and political radicalism which clearly attacks both Church and Crown in the name of individual freedom,”4 he briefly proposes both M em o irs o f a W o m a n o f P lea su re and M em o irs o f a C o xco m b as contrasting examples of English libertine writing. Their celebration of relatively un­ complicated heterosexuality, Dr. Ivker says, reflects not only the im­ position of reason and common sense on the absolute hedonism of the French libertine tradition in the eighteenth century, but also a most unrevolutionary acceptance of monogamy and the moral com­ monplaces that support it. In other words, Cleland, far from being merely salacious, is paradoxically a moral writer whose achievement represents something quite distinct from that of the ro m a n lib ertin . However, as the focus of Dr. Ivker’s article is upon a discussion of two contemporary literary trends, rather than the specific issues Cleland pursues in his novels, it remains to be seen exactly how the sexual mores of his two protagonists develop in the course of their experi­ ences and in what sense, precisely, they may be considered “libertine.” Of course, Fanny Hill and Sir William Delamore, her rakish male counterpart in M em o irs o f a C o...