Novel Virgins: Libertine and Literary Pleasures in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure

Abstract

John Cleland’s pornographic novel Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749) presents itself—or perhaps it masquerades—as an anti-Pamela: libertinism replaces chastity as the route to marital and financial happiness in this scandal-plagued account of the career of a fictional prostitute. The narrator and protagonist, Fanny, is not a prostitute with a heart of gold. That is, our heroine does not display an admirable dissonance between material circumstances and sentimental development. Rather, Fanny’s career is marked by prodigious sexual pleasure and financial success, and it culminates in the ultimate emotional reward: marriage with her first love/r. Neither sentimental victim nor emotionally virtuous exemplar, Fanny thrives, at least to some extent, due to her uncanny propensity for physical regeneration: her ability, despite smallpox and multiple episodes of acrobatic and painful sex, to remain unmarked. Similarly, her sexual adventures are converted into a pleasurable text by her linguistic inventiveness: her flair for creating ever more extravagant euphemisms for body parts and sexual acts. In short, Fanny’s narrative depends upon both experience and novelty, or upon repetition and its disavowal. As such, it is, like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) a novelistic response to empiricist philosophy. And, just as in Pamela, the heuristic for thinking through empiricism is, not coincidentally, female virginity.