Pious Times and Priestcraft Begin Again: The Upright Sexuality of the Enlightenment

In the devil-may-care opening to his wry biblical allegory Absalom and Achitophel, John Dryden alludes to "pious times" prior to the advent of "priestcraft," during which loopholes in the holy law permitted King David and his cohorts to enjoy penalty-free voluptuous lives even after Eden. In those bygone days, sex, "when Nature prompted," was fun. When "Nature" needed supplementary "prompting," pornography presumably served as the prelude to pleasure. Unfortunately, Dryden, along with all the versifying gentlemen who entertained England's merry monarch, seems to have erred in assuming that boudoir diversions had recreational value. If the latest books on eighteenth-century amorous pastimes are to believed, eroticism is hard work and serious business. Sex involves "engaging" with Enlightenment, or calculating social values, or investigating print culture, or performing—perhaps the wrong word—any of a thousand demanding tasks. Eroticism in this burned-out eighteenth century requires justice, rectitude, toil, and commitment. Old-fashioned practitioners of sexual indulgence—those hedonists whose scandals filled eighteenth-century periodicals or whose orgies enlivened the pages of Ned Ward, or William Beckford, or the marquis de Sade—have apparently been retired into stud service in order to open positions for those who regard sex as a tool for reform.

Most everyone who remains on the south side of sainthood has experienced the universality of the erotic, whether drifting into a sexual fantasy during a dull conference paper, or encountering frolicsome animals while wandering the zoo, or being seized by a lusciously preemptive thought while engaged in a seemingly absorbing task. Sex and sexuality pop up everywhere—which is as much as to say that those who study sex must choose which of its many aspects to analyze. Long eighteenth-century works such as Venus in the Cloister or Memoirs of the Voluptuous Conduct of the Capuchins, for example, show how sex-enhanced satire contributes to religious controversy; treatises such as Dr. James Graham's Eccentric Lecture on the Art of Propagating the Human Species, or Dr. John Armstrong's The Œconomy of Love, tackle scientific and demographic issues, such as the stabilizing of the population during depleting wars; still other works, such as Onania, lose sight of their erotic topic while exploring new literary genres such as the epistolary narrative. Many non-pornographic works, whether John Sedley's amorous poems or Henry Fielding's comical characterizations of life in roadside inns, carry some degree of erotic charge. Much is to be learned by studying the ways in which critics and historians select and organize eighteenth-century treatments of sex: by ranging from the aestheticism of a Jean Hagstrum, through the puckishness of a Robert Maccubbin, through the freakishness of a George Rousseau, through the encyclopedic, computer-assisted curatorship of an Alex Pettit, and then, at last, on to the three recent books offered up by Peter Cryle and Lisa O'Connell, Sophie Carter, and Frances Ferguson.

In Libertine Enlightenment: Sex, Liberty, and License in the Eighteenth Century, in Purchasing Power: Representing Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century English Popular Print Culture, and in Pornography, The Theory: What Utilitarianism Did to Action, the aforementioned authors focus on the three p's: prostitution, pornography, and promiscuity. The more comical aspects of human sexuality&—for example, the "four f's" of flirtation, fornication, folly, and fun—have been excluded from their studies, as have purely literary or aesthetic concerns (for example, no mention is made of Renaissance traditions of amorous writing). One can sometimes accurately judge a book by its cover...