Abstract
Erotica developed its own sexual utopias in which landscapes were depicted in the form of a woman’s body. Anatomical details were used to depict these ‘other worlds’ whilst reflecting both classical and contemporary images of landscapes and gardens. Within these erotic settings, the body was depicted in various specifically constructed forms: an agricultural landscape in which the female body is depicted as the soil/nature; a geographical terrain in which a woman’s body represented a whole country (as seen above); the female body represented by a ship within a seascape; and a male archaeological body represented within a neoclassical setting.
Near the Fort is the Metropolis, called CLTRS [clitoris]; it is a pleasant Place, much delighted in by the Queens of MERRYLAND, and is their chief Palace, or rather Pleasure Seat; it was at first but small, but the Pleasure some of the Queens have found in it, has occasion’d their extending its Bounds considerably.
Anon, A New Description of Merryland1
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Notes
Anon, A New Description of Merryland (London, E. Curll, 1741), p. 15. This and Merryland Displayed were probably written by one of Curil’s hacks, Thomas Stretser, the author of the prose version of Arbor Vitae.
Leonard Barkan, Nature’s Work Of Art: The Human Body as Image of the World (New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1975), p. 2.
Barkan, Nature’s Work Of Art, p. 4.
Robert Erickson, “‘The Books of Generation”: Some Observations on the Style of the British Midwife Books, 1671–1764’, in Paul Gabriel Boucé (ed.), Sexuality in EighteenthCentury Britain (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1982), pp. 74–94.
Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book, or the Whole Art of Midwifery Discovered Directing Childbearing Women How to Behave Themselves in Their Conception, Breeding, Bearing and Children (London, Simon Miller, 1671), pp. 40–2.
See chapter 4, particularly with reference to Merchant and Jordanova.
Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (London, Methuen, 1965); Peter Mathias, The First Industrial Nation, 1700–1914 (London, Methuen, 1969); E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1968); Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (London, Penguin, 1982).
W. G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1955).
Geoff Ward (ed.), Romantic Literature. From 1790–1830 (London, Bloomsbury, 1993), pp. 235–6.
See John Aitkins, Sex in Literature: Vol. IV. High Noon: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, John Calder, 1982), p. 91.
A New Description of Merryland, pp. 12–13.
Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (London, Penguin, 1990), p. 262; Keith Thomas, Religion and Decline of Magic (London, Penguin, 1991), pp. 223, 760. Henry Coley in the 1690s was said to be selling astrological signs at four shillings each to servant girls as a contraceptive.
Linda E. Merians (ed.), The Secret Malady. Venereal Disease in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Lexington, University of Kentucky Press, 1996).
Christopher Hibbert, The Personal History of Samuel Johnson (London, Pimlico, 1998), p. 50.
G. Tolias, British Travellers in Greece, 1759–1820 (London, Foundation of Hellenic Culture, 1995).
J. Ward-Perkins and A. Claridge, Pompeii AD 79. Treasures from the National Archaeological Museum, Naples and the Pompeii Antiquarium, Italy, cat. no. 218. Quoted in Ian Jenkins, “‘Contemporary Minds”: Sir William’s Affair with Antiquity’, Ian Jenkins and Kim Sloan (eds.), Vases & Volcanoes (London, British Museum Press, 1996), pp. 40–64. Also see Kim Sloan, ‘“Observations on the Kingdom of Naples”: William Hamilton’s Career’ in ibid., pp. 24–39.
G. S. Rousseau, ‘The Sorrows of Priapus: Anticlericalism, Homosocial Desire, and Richard Payne Knight’, in Rousseau and Porter (eds.), Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment, pp. 101–53.
Janet Browne, ‘Botany for Gentlemen. Erasmus Darwin and The Loves of the Plants’, Isis, No. 80 (1989), pp. 593–612.
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© 2003 Julie Peakman
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Peakman, J. (2003). Sexual Utopias in Erotica. In: Mighty Lewd Books. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230512573_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230512573_6
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