性色書寫之鋒芒閃現：十八世紀文學天空中的性色文本星群

行政院國家科學委員會專題研究計畫 成果報告

性色書寫之鋒芒閃現：十八世紀文學天空中的性色文本星群

計畫類別： 個別型計畫

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執行期間： 92 年 08 月 01 日至 93 年 07 月 31 日 執行單位： 國立成功大學外國語文學系（所）

計畫主持人： 林明澤

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處理方式： 本計畫涉及專利或其他智慧財產權，1 年後可公開查詢

中 華 民 國 93 年 10 月 28 日

Between the Inane and the Monstrous:

Transformation in the Doubly Negative Conception of Female Sexuality In the Modern English Culture

Contrary to some tacit assumptions, patriarchy is not really an inflexible and thus invariable social system. Not only is it historically and culturally specific, but it often rises readily to social changes that threaten its old patterns of operation and modifies itself to accommodate these changes, sometimes even turning them to its consolidation. Consequently, the status of women under a patriarchy does not remain unchanged, either. Although all forms of patriarchy, being fundamentally male-centered, must involve subjugation of women, the extent and nature of the subjugation can vary quite widely. This dialectic between the unchanged basis and the changing patterns of operation provides an apt perspective for considering the vicissitude of women’s position in a patriarchal society as well as its causes and significance. One conspicuous aspect of the vicissitude concerns the problematic representation and regulation of women’s sexuality in the society. These matters are

“problematic” because many a patriarchal society has a contradictory relationship with the sexuality. On the one hand, the reproduction of the social system requires individuals to be born into it (necessarily through female sexuality) and incorporated smoothly into its

operation; on the other hand, the ways the sexuality demonstrates itself intrinsically questions the foundation of patriarchal system: i.e., continuation of male lineage. (For one thing, the birth of a child a certain period of time after a man has had sex with the mother does not really ensure his paternity.) To complicate the picture further, transgression against the patriarchal regulation of female sexuality usually brings pleasures to a great number of men living under the system, who thus now and then desire certain disturbances of the system that generally benefits them in other ways. This complex positioning of female sexuality in the patriarchal system is one main reason why men tend to look upon women as a “problem”; the system, after all, cannot come up with a “trouble-free” strategy in managing the sexual

potentials on the part of its female population. No matter whether or how the system explores or suppresses the potentials, the expression or non-expression of the sexuality seem inevitably either monstrous or inane (or both at the same time), for it may either threaten the men’s sense of gender superiority and the stability of the patriarchal system or may feed into the system as a sort of expendable and thus often trivialized material. At some historical moment a patriarchal society has more difficulty working through its contradictory demands on the female sexuality and therefore leaves greater elbowroom for female self-assertion;

however, at another moment men are better equipped with an array of sexual ideologies to assimilate most expressions of female sexuality into the operation of the patriarchal system.

The main thesis of the present essay is that the evolution of sexual ideology in the British society from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century witnesses such a transition from a more tolerant to a more repressive regime of female sexuality.

One may be a bit skeptical about such a generalized claim that “eighteenth-century English women were allowed a real measure of freedom” in sexual expression (Porter 15);

after all, literary representation should never be confused with or equated to historical reality, especially as far as topics of sexuality are concerned. Nevertheless, the Enlightenment ideal of rational and liberal consideration of ethical issues generally allows the British literati to be less dogmatic about sexual morality and more willing to speculate about the nature and ramification of human sexuality. Indeed, an empiricist or naturalist conception of sex encouraged many intellectuals to grant it an important place in the scheme of Nature (Porter 4). Besides, the rise of a new narrative genre, Novel, brought the focus of imagination from the idealistic world of the Renaissance romance to the mundane plane of people’s everyday life. The novelists eagerly experimented with the new narrative style in representing the various aspects of human existence, of course including sexuality. Indeed, despite the generally ascetic tendency of Christian ethics, sexual enjoyment was either affirmed or at

least recognized as one primary motivating force behind the characters of these early novels.

Even here, however, the representation of sexuality was not unproblematic.

It is significant that woman writers figured forth at the inception stage of the novel genre and that major female novelists were audacious in their treatment of sexual themes. Aphra Behn and Delarivier Manley are among the conspicuous examples. In her dedication of the arguably first English epistolary novel, Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, Behn urged her dedicatee Thomas Condon to follow the example of the male protagonist Philander to “live then and love” (7). Behn’s gesture was curious because as a roman-à-clef, the novel intended to expose the scandal of Ford Lord Grey’s elopement with his sister-in-law, Lady Henrietta Berkeley as Silvia; however, Behn’s passionate panegyric on love at the end of the dedication leaves little, if any, space for an ironic reading:

. . . who can be happy without Love? for me, I never numbred those dull days amongst those of my life, in which I had not my Soul fill’d with that soft passion;

to Love! why ‘tis the only secret in nature that restores Life, to all the felicities and charms of living; . . . . (7)

The female writer’s daringly voiced yearning for love echoes Silvia’s wholehearted

admission to fleshy attachment to Philander, who “renounce[s] it all a fiction” that “true love is innocent,” as taught by “the Grave and Wise” (67). In Manley’s case, although she frames her narration of sexual escapades in The New Atlantis (also a roman-à-clef) within the condemnatory dialogues among such allegorical figures as Virtue, Justice, and Intelligence, several female characters are endowed with greater initiative in their pursuit of sexual pleasure. The first sexual encounter between the Duchess de l’Inconstant (an innuendo against Duchess of Cleveland) and Germanicus starts with her sneaking into the bedroom where he lies sleeping “in a dress and posture not very decent to describe” just after an afternoon bath (20). Not only does this scenario reverse the common masculinist one in which a man plays the offensive role in a sexual affair but Manley does not spare a luscious

description of Germanicus’ naked beauty—a rare case of female erotic gaze on male body as a passive sexual object. Even though this escapade is actually a trap set up by her lover the Count Fortunatus as an excuse to dump her, the Duchess remains undaunted in her assertion of equal right to sexual enjoyment when she is duly caught (23). These two novelists, therefore, are not afraid of representing the exhilaration and temerity women can show in exploration of their sexuality.

Such blithe animation as Behn and Manley respectively endow their sexually aware characters with does not mean that they can fully shake off one form of the doubly negative conception of female sexuality the patriarchal world imposes on these cases of transgression.

In Love Letters, when Mertilla discovers the incestuous connection between her sister and husband, she not only decries Silvia’s misconduct as “an unusual horrour” and “something monstrous” but, more importantly, warns against her inanity in holding the “lasting faith in sin”—i.e., the belief in Philander’s steadfastness in the illegitimate relationship (74). Since the Duchess in The New Atlantis serves as one target of Manley’s sweeping satire against the courtly corruption of the day, her manners are consistently portrayed as monstrous and deserve a no less preposterous end: upon the Count’s refusal to grant her a small loan for a gambling debt, “her resentment burst out into a bleeding at her nose, and breaking of her lace, without which aids, it is believed, her vexation had killed her upon the spot” (25). Indeed, both novelists are not idealistic or naïve in their compelling description of female sexuality but are acutely aware of how the sexuality gets absorbed in the economy of the patriarchal sexual politics. A highly instructive case comes from an episode in Manley’s novel, relating the amour between a Duke (actually Hans Willem Bentinck, first Earl of Portland) and Mademoiselle Charlot, who has been entrusted into his care since the death of her father. In the beginning he insists that “young Charlot [. . .] be educated in the high road to applause and virtue” (30); the way to ensure the feminine virtue is to banish knowledge and inclination concerning sexual love as far from her mind as possible (by monitoring her readings and

instilling ascetic principles). In other words, one ideological conception of female sexuality as non-expressive guides Charlot’s growth into an ideal womanhood, rendering her sexually ignorant or inane. The process takes a reverse turn when the Duke becomes infatuated with her chastity—which now ironically transforms into a new sort of sexual charm. When he starts exploring the sexual potential he once tried to suppress (now mainly by providing her with erotic readings), Charlot also begins to show petty signs of unwieldy (if not really monstrous) sexuality in the form of coquetry. After “the Duke [has] made her wise at his own cost,” (38) he violently draws her sexual maturation, which is moving away from his scheme of erotic enjoyment, back through one common tactic of patriarchal control over women—i.e., rape. Then Charlot yields herself wholeheartedly to the Duke’s sexual use of her person until her possessiveness tires him and drives him away from her company.

However, it should be noted that throughout the affair Charlot is less monstrous than inane in her sexual expression; her sexual “awakening,” manipulated wholly for the Duke’s sexual enjoyment, does not inform her about another “system of amour.” This is a calculus of

eroticism based on financial and political concerns, and its principle Charlot’s confidante, the

“Countess,” represents in her advice “to push [Charlot’s] interest with him that he might marry her” or “to bestow no more favours, till he [pays] her price” (41). As the Duke eventually decides on a marital alliance (or, better, closes a business deal) with the Countess purely from the considerations of rank and fortune, Manley seems to suggest that the

Countess’s calculating mobilization of sexuality, though monstrous in the patriarchal

conception, affords a woman greater advantages of survival and prosperity under the hostile environment.¹

Manley’s lesson about female survival tactic based on a calculating control of sexuality seems to pass around the Countess’s counterparts and followers in many early

1 Though I do not quote or paraphrase, the foregoing discussion about Behn’s and Manley’s treatment of female sexuality is greatly indebted to Mudge’s analyses of the same novels in p. 5, pp. 128-135, pp. 141-147.

eighteenth-century novels. One such fictional figure worthy of further discussion is the titular heroine of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders. One critic already notes that though “Moll accepts without hesitation an idea of sexual libertarianism or even libertinism,” she is “never remotely salacious and reports her sexual encounters in straightforward prose” (Price 165).

The reason why Defoe plays down the aspect of erotic arousal in representing Moll’s sexual escapade lies not really in the ostensible concern over narrative decorum (to which both the writer and the fictional figure, though, pay lip services constantly), but in the awareness of the danger that sexual passion may draw an amorous woman into a disadvantageous position.

This is a hard lesson Moll learns from her first love affair, with the Colchester brother, which she literally survives as a “Distemper” of “being IN LOVE” (34). Her ensuing relationships with men, no matter as a wife, mistress, or even whore, are primarily based on financial concerns and conducted with a precision specific to commercial transaction. For example, Moll’s “marriage negotiation” with the Bank Clerk comes down to such detail as “Sign[ing]

and Seal[ing] a Contract” even though her “Heart [says] yes to this offer at first Word,” for it is important for this scheming wench to “play with this Lover as an Angler does with a Trout”

(110). Moll is sexually monstrous not because she loses control over some wild eruption of her sexual forces but because she is able to channel them into fulfillment of certain

“unromantic” purposes, which contradict the interests underlying the patriarchal sexual ideology. Despite a significant variation that will be discussed later, Moll’s strategy of social survival and advancement is adopted by Fanny Hill in John Cleland’s Memoirs of a

Woman of Pleasure and the burlesqued Pamela in Henry Fielding’s Shamela. Except for the

Fanny’s emotional involvement and its consequence: sexual indifference and financial gain on the one side and sensual attachment and loss of status on the other. Similarly, Shamela’s only “Slip” with Parson Williams, for whom she harbors genuine affections, only ends up the worst for the country lass—the birth of “a little one.” That is why her mother warns about her developing liaison with Squire Booby by reminding her of the whore maxim: “you should take care to be well paid before-hand, and not trust to Promises, which a Man seldom keeps, after he hath had his wicked Will” (282). This game Shamela takes one step further and with a higher stake; she is not content with the offer of being a gentleman’s “well-paid”

mistress but pushes her luck for the “respectable” status of being his wife. The “monstrous”

whore, of course, eventually has her “Vartue Rewarded.”

Although both

Shamela and part of Fanny Hill come as burlesques of Samuel

not-yet-but-to-be-explored mine. A line of “monstrous whores” from the Countess in Manley’s novel through Moll to Shamela and Fanny Hill generally follow the old libertine doctrine² in affirming the powerful presence of their sexuality before they manage to capitalize on it for various purposes. On the contrary, Pamela insists that her virtue,

implicitly conceived as her potential for sexual enjoyment, is forbidden form being explored and hence destroyed except under one condition—marriage, in which exploration of the potential paradoxically leaves the virtue intact, not ruined. Fanny’s observation on

maidenhead actually renders this idea of “virtue” in quite explicit terms: “that darling treasure,

2 It is illuminating to note that among the readings Fielding prepares for Shamela to expose her monstrosity, one is the Manley novel, Atlantis; see p. 295.

that hidden mine, so eagerly sought after by the men, and which they never dig but they destroy” (39). This comparison between Pamela’s and Fanny’s conceptions of the “Jewel”

or “treasure” should be made with the understanding that it is Richardson, not Cleland, who first narrows the idea of “virtue” down to that of “chastity” and thus invests a heavily sexual overtone to the term (see Mudge 188). Besides, if Fanny and Shamela are putting up their

“vartues” for sale, it is because Pamela has first commodified her “virtue” in the marriage marketplace, according to Richardson’s bourgeois reward system. What really distinguishes the ideal “virtue” and corrupted “vartue” and thus enrages Fielding is not that Pamela is a real virgin and Shamela only pretends to be one, but that virtue should stay outside the circuit of economic exchange but is rendered commodifiable by Richardson. However, Richardson’s commodification of virtue does not simply coincide with the old libertine “system of amour”

upheld by the monstrous whore, as Fielding inaccurately understands it. The famous episode in which Pamela rejects Master B’s offer of conditions for becoming his mistress does not really mean that her virtue is “not to be sold” but should be purchased with a different currency, so to speak. Romantic love, which Pamela does harbor for Master B, is only a necessary but not sufficient condition for surrendering her person. What Pamela truly demands and Richardson idealizes in the novel is a new sort of sexual institution—that is, a legitimate marital alliance founded on sexual love. This new bourgeois institution thus challenged the old patriarchal sex ideology, upheld mostly by aristocracy, and intended to combine and rectify the two formerly separate approaches to female sexuality: a woman would either remain sexually inanely inside marriage for the sole purpose of producing legitimate heirs or display her sexuality wildly, thus getting recruited into the male libertine economy of sexual enjoyment.

The new female tactic of social survival and advancement which Pamela develops actually brings about some serious consequences as far as the ideal of female agency is concerned. On the one hand, when female sexuality becomes embodied in the shape of

virtue, it is subdued into something no more than a potential, awaiting its advantageous exploitation under a set of strict conditions; it thus has lost much of its efficiency as a weapon against patriarchal oppression and as a counter upon the negotiation table of sexual politics.

Except for the disastrous escape attempt (in which her sexual charms are involuntarily

invoked for securing Parson Williams’ assistance), Pamela remains mostly passive during her struggles against Master B’s sexual advances, which she can only counter with an irritating reiteration of her virtue argument; her forced confinement in Master B’s country estate is actually a metaphorical indication of her lack of resources in the parley with him. To make the situation even worse for the “virtuous” Pamela, her chastity can contribute to the

enthrallment of Master B only under the condition that it is heavily invested with erotic significance, actually regarded as a sort of sexual charm. Indeed, Pamela turns herself into a passive object loaded with sexual energy which she cannot put into voluntary use; for an aristocratic libertine there can hardly be a more convenient prey of sexual assault. The expectation of rape thus permeates the former part of the novel, and littered among Pamela’s ultra-moral arguments are semi-pornographic scenes of two attempted rapes and other petty indecencies, as the master’s roving hands are rarely kept off her breasts and waist. The inanity and monstrosity which Richardson may have intended to dispel from the old aristocratic conceptions of human sexuality actually returned to haunt the new sexual institution, which the bourgeois moralist probably designed out of his benign concerns over the “corrupted” sexual morale and “unfair” gender politics.

Although it is difficult to determine how far the immensely influential Pamela had helped popularize the scenario of “virgin in distress” in the later eighteenth-century fiction, a rapidly burgeoning sub-genre, the Gothic novel, relies very heavily on this scenario and indulges obsessively in the lurid but exciting representation of such inanity and monstrosity as supposed to surround female sexuality (Punter 47). Apparently following the tendency to extremism in the gothic narration, the two aspects of the negative conception of female

sexuality the writers invoke also bifurcate further apart in the depiction of female characters.

In other words, the sexually inane are reduced further down to the state of inactive sufferings when they confront the threats of patriarchal oppression or Machiavellian villains; on the other hand, the sexually monstrous either figuratively or literally pass beyond the boundaries of humanity when they exercise unrestrainedly their rights to and capacity of sexual

enjoyment. One excellent example of the inane type is the heroine of Ann Radcliffe’s

Mysteries of Udolpho, in which Emily literally waits and weeps more than five hundred

Though Matthew Lewis in his gothic narrative The Monk would not afford his sexually inane figure Antonia such good luck of escaping Ambrosio’s solely libidinous design on her, Antonia is definitely a more quintessential embodiment of the Richardsonian female “virtue”

than Pamela herself not only because her closely monitored nurture renders her absolutely ignorant of sexuality but because her inanity, coupled with an overflowing sexual aura her excessive chastity paradoxically endows her with, exposes her more readily to violent sexual

exploration. Antonia’s modesty, especially after the monk gets “used to” it, no longer

“command[s] the same respect and awe”; instead, he is prompted to possess this “principal charm” or better, to “deprive her of [it],” thus “infusing corruption into Antonia’s bosom”

(Lewis 257). Her modesty as source of charm is therefore understood purely in the senses that it attracts violent male responses aiming at “deprivation” of it and that it vanishes once it is possessed. Unlike Pamela, the exploration of Antonia’s sexual potentiality does not happen within the institution of marriage, so the “deprived” charm of feminine virtue is not miraculously restored, as ensured in Pamela’s marital alliance with Master B. The sudden surge of revulsion Ambrosio experiences about Antonia right after her violation proves how ridiculously “virtue” or “chastity” as a sort of sexual potentiality may work against itself under most circumstances (Lewis 385). Antonia’s eventual rape and murder realize the dark side of the “virgin-in-distress” scenario and bespeak the failure of the Richardsonian

bourgeois project of developing a more acceptable sexual institution than the old libertine one.

Sexual inanity, as Lewis conceives it from the exemplar figure of Antonia, does not really ends up as “virtue rewarded” but becomes one ready way leading a woman to her “ruin” in the patriarchal world, where male sexual aggressivity is considered a norm.

But it is also no longer acceptable for the female characters to return to the old practice of calculating manipulation of their own sexuality because they would be despised as not just less than female, but even less than human. The only such female character in the Radcliffe novel, Laurentini, who resorts to this ruse for winning back and securing the affections of a lover that has deserted her, figures forth as the rumored ghost haunting the Udolpho Castle for the greater part of the narrative; her true identity is revealed only at the very end when she comes forward as a shocked, repentant, dying old nun, with her life story elliptically told like a marginal note. Again, just as Lewis creates an exemplary figure of female sexual inanity in Antonia, so he presents a no less archetypal figure of female sexual monstrosity in Matilda, who literally transforms herself from a passionately inspired Madonna, then a shrewdly

casuistic sorceress, finally to the Devil’s treacherous agent, as she not just initiates but manipulates her sexual relationship with Ambrosio. The new bourgeois ideology of feminine virtue could no longer make sense of such an outrageous outburst of passions as Matilda’s and therefore relegate it to the inscrutable realm of the diabolic to forestall further consideration of the socio-cultural significance of such form of female sexuality.

However, even if the bourgeois sexual ideology could not make sense of the monstrous aspect of female sexuality, it may try to develop a different strategy of containing the

sexuality for possible exploitation, not just relegating it outside the sexual institution lest it may return to threaten the bourgeois patriarchy; after all, the political and social turmoil in the wake of French Revolution seemed to make this horrible vision real enough. The early nineteenth-century British society could not dispel the fear of an imminent revolution similar to the one that had raged across the Channel primarily because the upper and middle classes could neither grasp the socio-economical causes of this unprecedented upheaval in European history nor grapple with related problems even if they understood the causes. Under such highly stressful situation, it seemed natural that the “anxious men sought simple explanations for frightening problems” (Trudgill 32). Signs of moral corruption which the ruling classes believed could be found “rampant” among the “masses” were singled out as evidence of their propensity to anti-social evils while supporters of the Establishment found themselves decent and restrained. From moralistic discourses of the anti-revolutionary camp of the time, there gradually emerged a so-called “triangular sexual myth”—with “the middle classes’ privileged position embodied . . . in a saintly feminine virtue,” the “imagined ambition of the masses embodied . . . in a rampant sexuality,” and “the threatening plots of the revolutionary embodied . . . in a flagrant, and perhaps deviant, immorality” (33). While female sexual purity was so obsessively affirmed as a cornerstone of the Establishment, it did not follow that the figure of sexually transgressive woman became unimaginable, but the old, calculating type of “whores” who displayed sexual charms only for the sake of material gains and social

advancement had disappeared from the literary imagination. This happens because the new strategy of containment amounts to a different version of the doubly negative conception of female sexuality, wherein the two problematic aspects of the sexuality do not just bifurcate in separate representations, but may conflate in one figure. In other words, a sexually

monstrous woman must be equally inane at the same time, and she can thus be more easily understood or constrained by the bourgeois patriarchy. Such a woman commits atrocious offenses against the sexual norms for women of her time not out of materialistic concerns but out of some misguided, overindulgent conception of romantic love. So, paradoxically, she commits such “love crimes” as disrupting her lover’s marital relationship or killing his wife so that the “love criminal” herself could marry the man; this scenario seems an eerie

re-affirmation of the marriage institution. Failure to secure attentions from the man she is sexually aiming at does not only spell a bungled maneuvering of the sexual relationship but means a cause of psychological devastation. Both Laurentini in Mysteries of Udolpho and Victoria in Charlotte Darce’s Zofloya are good examples of this form of female sexuality in which monstrous acts in dealing with romantic relationships are driven by inanely expressed passions for either inconceivable or impossible love objects, who are more likely to detest their love-maddened women than otherwise. Laurentini should know that Marquis de Villerois’s estrangement from her is an inevitable outcome of their collaboration in poisoning his wife; few men, after all, would form a new marital “alliance” with a known criminal of murder after he has just ended the previous one by killing the spouse who was suspected of a lighter crime like adultery (Radcliffe 659). Probably no tactic to engage the affections of a man already in love with another woman is more preposterous than Victoria’s, whereby she assumes through Zofloya’s magical assistance the appearance of Henriquez’s beloved, Lilla (whom Victoria has already kidnapped and murdered) in order to spend one night with the man (Darce 219-21). Sexual monstrosity is no longer represented as deriving from a woman’s “shameless” exploitation of her own sexuality for social and material interests but

from an inordinate outburst of sexual passions for a man who never fails to desert her.

Such representation of “monstrous” female sexuality, despite its seemingly violent clash against the patriarchal demand for female modesty, does not really endow the woman with independent agency. Since she is overwhelmed by passions which override all other realistic concerns, she can be easily steered into a self-defeating position by forces that usually work on her in a pretty unsophisticated manner; this supposedly “defiant” female monster is actually no less inane and tractable in the patriarchal society than a submissive middle-class wife. In this view, Darce’s Zofloya, one last major work of the so-called first-wave gothic revival, is not just a female replica of Lewis’ The Monk, though critics usually argue that the villain heroine Victoria models after Ambrosio and Zofloya after

Matilda, so to speak. For example, unlike Ambrosio, whose status and authority as an abbot already ensure his initiative in the progress to moral corruption, Victoria, as Darce clearly points out at the beginning of her narration, emerges totally as a product of her

environment—her evil inclinations are actually cultivated by her parents’ over-indulgence and her mother’s bad example. Besides, no matter how deeply Ambrosio relies on Matilda’s advice or casuistry in deciding on plans of moral outrage, he himself demonstrates the will and power to carry them out, but both Victoria’s murderous schemes and means of their implementation need to be proffered by Zofloya, who thus plays a more than accessory role in bringing about Victoria’s destruction. Indeed, as one critic observes, “Zofloya seems to have absorbed all of Victoria’s will, motivation and desire” (Kelly xxvi). Even though she can grow really monstrous in expressing her sexual demand and jealousy, she remains no less inane about her own sexuality; she is actually disoriented in her pursuit of sexual pleasure, and the realization of her each capricious wish does not empower her to overthrow the patriarchal control or to build sensual individualism (as the calculating whore of the previous century would have done); her dependence on Zofloya as a masculine protector only deepens along with her disengagement from the familial bonding with her husband. Therefore, no

matter how great the damages the sexually inane monster wreaks on those around her, Victoria poses no real threat to the patriarchal institution she lives under and is already effectively segregated from it even before the Devil decides to terminate her criminal career.

With the prevalence of stricter conceptions of sexual decorum in the British literary world since Queen Victoria came to the throne, explicit representation of sexuality started to withdraw from the discourse of so-called “public” novel. The new doubly negative

conception of female sexuality (as inane and monstrous simultaneously), now coming to underlie the bourgeois sexual imagination over the “whore,” was voiced and circulated primarily in the domain of underground discourse, especially the just fully-fledged

pornography, which evolved into its modern form around the mid-nineteenth century (Loth 105). In order to create the fantasyland of boundless sexual enjoyment that Steven Marcus aptly calls “pornotopia,” the pornographic fiction of course needs to push the patriarchal strategy of doubly negative conception up to a higher level of efficiency. The problematic female sexuality is not simply contained by the bourgeois patriarchy but further exploited for a new economy of male sexual enjoyment. This sexual economy actually derives from the reverse side of the Richardsonian ideal eroticism: union with an uninitiated virgin who is endowed with sexually potent “virtue.” Now the new erotic scenario is that a libidinous man enjoying a certain position of social dominance seeks out a naïve girl and “breaks” her into a sexually eager but docile plaything—either through rape or cajolery. An ideally conceived benefit of this sexual economy is that the girl’s newly tapped sexual energy would rise in forceful and bountiful flows to meet his demands while her retained naïveté would ensure her obedience to his manipulation. The doubly negative quality of female sexuality then miraculously transforms into a “positive” element and facilitates the operation of the new sexual economy. A historian of Western erotica points out that “the mania for deflowering virgins runs like a thread through English erotica, especially the Victorian period,” and he speculates that “some underlying peculiarity of the time, either psychological

or social, was the cause of its fascination” (Kearney 107). The economy of male sexual enjoyment founded on the new doubly negative conception of female sexuality could be identified as this “psychological or social peculiarity” of the Victorian erotic imagination.

A pornographic fiction dated in the early Victorian age called The Lustful Turk renders quite lucidly the erotic scenario mentioned above, as the narrator focuses relentlessly on the

“magical” moment when the sexual energy lying dormant under a woman’s virginity is suddenly released to an overflowing extent. The English lady Emily, who has been

abducted on her trip to India by an Algerian corsair ship and presented to the Dey of Algiers as a gift, now faces the horrifying fate of her defloration, and she is even more horrified at how her will to chastity is unexpectedly overtaken by an unfamiliar surge of her own sexuality at the critical moment:

Nature, too powerful nature, had become alarmed and assisted his lascivious

proceedings, conveying his kisses, brutal as they were, to the inmost recesses of my heart. On a sudden new and wild sensations blended with my shame and rage, which exerted themselves but faintly. In fact, [. . .], in a few short moments his kisses and his tongue threw my senses into a complete tumult; an unknown fire rushed through every part of me, hurried on by a strange pleasure; all my loud cries dwindled into gentle sighs and spite of my inward rage and grief, I could not resist.

(18)

Emily’s previous ignorance of her own sexuality does not disperse with this forced

“awakening” but instead continues to blindfold her with the delusion that the Dey alone can bring forth such “exquisite” enjoyment to her. This misconception, quite common to a female newly initiated to sexual pleasure, reconciles her to the position as an obedient but responsive recruit to his harem. As a spokesman for this Victorian economy of male sexual enjoyment, the Dey alludes to the paradoxical nature of virginity as a double sign of sexual absence and potential and theorizes about its productive use with an agricultural metaphor:

If the land is properly cultivated, it will always produce its crops. So it is with lovely women. Rid them of their virginity, enjoy them properly; it is wonderful to observe the rapidity with which the seed of pleasure will thrive and quickly yield a rich harvest to the happy cultivator. (121)

This scenario of working on virgins for sexual yields seems so desirable that it is imagined to go on infinitely, as the “plot” (if the word can still apply here) of an erotic tale “La Rose d’Amour” (serialized in a Victorian pornographic magazine called The Pearl) absurdly demonstrates. Its narration consists purely of a long series of defloration scenes, in which the sole male rapist plucks virginities all the way from the British home soil to Turkey, with every new victim willingly joining the growing harem he drags along. These perfectly obedient and responsive “beauties” are thus ironically reduced to a collection of sexual dolls, with blurry features and indistinctive temperaments, just like most female “characters” in other pornographic fictions.

It does not mean that the Victorian system of breaking virgins will not produce cases of aggressive female sexuality; however, such more forceful expressions of erotic desire usually feed no less readily into the bourgeois economy of male sexual enjoyment. After all, the female figure endowed with strong sexual power is not adequately enlightened with the possibility and means to turn it into her advantage in the gender politics. A pornographic novel dated at the middle of the Victorian age, The Autobiography of a Flea, plays on a similar scenario mentioned above—this time a child-like virgin Bella is half threatened and half cajoled into the sexual embrace of a Catholic priest, Father Ambrose. Instead of being simply broken into an inane sex object like Emily in The Lustful Turk, Bella undergoes “a sense of change,” as the flea narrator calls it, at one turning point of her sexual career (i.e., the first incestuous night with her uncle):

Passion had asserted itself in her character; strong sexual emotions had been awakened, and had been also gratified. Refinement of indulgence had generated

lust, and lust had rendered easy the road to unrestrained and even unnatural gratification. (80-81)

If this representation of “monstrous” female sexual assertion seems to hark back to, say, Manley’s depiction of the Duchess’s equally relentless quest for sensual enjoyment, one may stop short at this comparison by the question: whose “unrestrained and even unnatural gratification” is the narrator talking about? Just of Bella’s own? The answer becomes clear a few pages later, where the reader sees how assiduously Bella plots and executes her friend Julia’s seduction for the priest’s and uncle’s sexual enjoyment—this is a gesture of sexual subservience no true female libertines like the self-assertive Duchess would ever stoop to. Besides, even if the system of breaking virgins goes wry and produces a real sexual monster, her relative ignorance about the potential transgression her sexual assertion poses to the patriarchal dominance renders her monstrosity quite innocuous, as no more than a case of nymphomaniac insanity. A story from another Victorian pornographic magazine, The

Boudoir, provides a rare instance of such “insanity” when a bridal virgin transforms herself

She was a demon at the game now, once thoroughly roused, and to judge by her sighs and screams of delight was spending almost every second till she fairly exhausted her husband, who rolled of her body in spite of all endeavours to keep him on the go, and lay fairly vanquished beneath his rampant bride, who at once in triumph straddled over him, and transfixed his still stiff pego in her insatiable chink, riding him with all her might, till with an oath at her randiness he threw her off, and declined any more of it for a while. (161)

All the seeming horrors on the husband’s part and temporary triumph on the wife’s can be effectively dismissed by his “oath at her randiness” and outright refusal of her further

advances. The Victorian bourgeois sexual ideology ensures this ultimate dominance of men over their women in the “game” of erotic politics, as this grim fact is proved by many more

scenes of men’s sexual assaults against virgins in Victorian pornography, who are simply denied the power to accuse the rapists of “randiness” and refuse their forced sexual initiation.

Although an exact correspondence between reality and fiction does not really exist, certain ideological conceptions of socio-cultural phenomena bridge over the two seemingly separate realms. Just as fiction creators, whether knowingly or not, derive their

understandings of the world from these ideological elements, so the fictional works reinforce among their readers a sense of “truthfulness” about the observations these works make of the world. Modern pornography, a slavish imitator of its Victorian ancestor in almost every way, has contributed more substantially to the formation of contemporary ideologies and

imaginations over sexual politics than people generally dare to admit. Thus, the doubly negative conception of female sexuality, as inherited from the Victorian bourgeois sexual ideology and now widely accepted in the modern society, renders many people powerless to imagine expressions of the sexuality that are neither inane nor monstrous. This constraint in erotic imagination effectively hinders many women’s access to their own sexuality for

achieving a fairer pattern of gender interaction and freer mode of life. Although it lies beyond the power of a literary critic and historian to come up with better alternatives to the dominant conception of female sexuality, a critical analysis of this heritage from the Victorian sexual ideology may help disperse its delusive aura of “truthfulness” and disrupt this

patriarchal control over female sexuality. The critical effort may contribute to the work of clearing the ideological field for the formation of a different gender politics.

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