Faking It: Virtue, Satire, and Pamela’s Virginity

Abstract

In this quote, the central satiric object of the Scriblerian farce Three Hours After Marriage (1717) laments his inability to verify his wife’s claims to virginity. Fossile, a medical doctor, has recently married a hyperbolically unchaste and deceptive woman. The action of the play takes place while he delays consummating the marriage until he can determine whether or not his wife is a virgin. With its scientific language, its tone of profound disappointment, and the hyperbole that indicates the speaker is being satirized, this lament suggests the failure of the Enlightenment to answer a man’s question about the sexual history of a woman. Fossile’s desire for a “symptom,” “pathognomick,” “token,” “prognostic,” or a “mark” (or even the ability to make an “enquiry”) suggests his obsession with the inscrutability of the female body and his frustration with the failure of science. His complaint is marked by a wistfully excessive desire for scientific evidence of virginity, by skepticism of the medical profession’s ability to provide such proofs, by a lament for the incompatibility of knowledge and sexual pleasure, and by a fear that the deceptive and inscrutable female body threatens masculine dominion.

Why is Nature so dark in our greatest Concerns? Why are there no external Symptoms of Defloration, nor any Pathognomick of the Loss of Virginity but a big Belly? Why, has not Lewdness it’s [sic] Tokens like the Plague? Why must a Man know Rain by the aking of his Corns, and have no prognostick of what is of infinitely greater Moment, Cuckoldome?¹