Lewd and Notorious: Female Transgression in the Eighteenth Century (review)

The merits of Lewd and Notorious, and they are numerous, are at the outset hindered by the unfortunate overuse of the "transgressive." In its title and each subtitle of this collection the term "transgressive" is so overplayed that it comes perilously close to rendering whatever import the term once had completely barren. It is not surprising that the collection was born out of a 1994 ASECS panel, as several of the essays seem dated. The employment of the so-called transgressive in cultural history and literature has been the key to rendering eighteenth-century studies "sexy" for what is easily ten years. However, the majority of chapters are insightful and illuminating contributions to women's studies, sexuality and gender studies, and early modern cultural studies more generally.

The collection is divided into four parts: (1) "Transgressive Words"; (2) "Transgressive Images"; (3) "Transgressive Acts"; and (4) "Transgressive Fictions." The chapters in each part are devoted to describing how and to what extent particular eighteenth-century women pushed the limits of socially proscribed texts, characters, and social and sexual behaviors and mores.

The chapters in part 1 are concerned with language, particularly, the uses to which it was put in order to both substantiate and divest of meaning Enlightenment systems of gender difference. Part 2 is concerned with eighteenth-century visual representations of women, which ranged from the physically grotesque to the pitiful and repellent. All such images described in these chapters hinge upon socially unacceptable forms of female sexual behavior. Part 3 addresses women's gender performance and the effects of such performance upon social determinations of the severity of these women's "transgressive" acts. Finally, the chapters in part 4 examine the fictional representations of women who "transgress" the boundaries of the gendered social system and how they have been read by eighteenth-century and contemporary audiences. Ambitious as these chapters are, it is always useful to keep an eye on twenty-first-century agendas (or, in this case, twentieth-century ones) and the difficulty literary scholars have when reading eighteenth-century agency through a contemporary lens. Several of the chapters in this collection seem to fall victim to the tendency to read through a proscriptive contemporary lens, while others make unique contributions to eighteenth-century studies of gender and sexuality.

As Katharine Kittredge notes in her introduction, "all three of the chapters in Part 1 consider the ways that language could be used to investigate or subvert the dominant gender hierarchy" (9). The section begins with Susan Lanser's "Queer to Queer: The Sapphic Body as Transgressive Text." Deploying contemporary notions of "queer" identity, Lanser posits the origins of eighteenth-century understandings of same-sex desire. Reading texts such as the 1620 pamphlet Hic Mulier: or, the man-woman, Tractus de Hermaphroditus; or, a Treatise of Hermaphrodites (1718), as well as James Parson's 1741 Mechanical & Critical Enquiry into the Nature of Hermaphrodites, Lanser tracks the markers of so-called Sapphic identity from within (read biological) to outside the female body. Within this shift, Lanser suggests, "lies the socialbirth of the sapphist as a category of identity: a person visibly female, yet whose queerness is also visible in some kind of masculine marker" (34). By extension, she reads this moment as that which disallows the "feminine" female body a Sapphic identity.

Lanser looks to fiction to exemplify what she describes as the "queering of the homoerotic female body" (23). She reads The Travels and Adventures of Mademoiselle de Richelieu (1744), Fielding's The Female Husband (1746), the English version of Giovanni Bianchi's Breve Storia della Vita di Catterina Vizzani Romana (1744), an Ovidian poem entitled the "Sappho-an" (1749), and Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison (1753-54). Lanser's is by far the most ambitious chapter in the collection, and her goals transcend literary or historical inquiry, as she has set out and has quite successfully located an epistemological shift with multidisciplinary...