Exploring female sexuality and female agency in Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland (1748)

Exploring female sexuality and female agency in Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland (1748)
 

 Active female sexuality always represents female agency: that is why it is feared. 

A discussion

Gender “norms” dictated the eighteenth-century female as modest, demure and virtuous. Active female sexuality transgresses these social boundaries, proving women capable of traits outside those prescribed by a patriarchal society, and can therefore be seen as a symbol of strong female agency. This essay argues that although female sexuality can represent female agency, in Fanny Hill it is contained within a male fantasy, rendered tame and unthreatening for male readers. 

Questions of active female sexuality and female agency become increasingly complex in a narrative centred on prostitution.  Although Margaret Mitchell acknowledges Cleland’s emphasis on ‘the role of free will in Fanny’s decisions’, she argues that  ‘her feminine nature itself and the threat of poverty’ also ‘contribute significantly to her career choices’ (Mitchell 306). If active sexuality is born out of economic necessity, does it still represent free female agency? Orphaned and vulnerable, Cleland’s heroine is taken into the care of Mrs. Brown, who immediately carves out her future as a prostitute. She is deprived of choice, valued as a commodity to be sold without consultation solely because of her sex. Thus, before Fanny has become aware of her sexuality, she willingly puts her fate into the hands of Mrs. Brown. This suggests that it is when she is at her most sexually innocent, that she holds the least agency.                                                                    

And yet, can the life of a prostitute offer her any more agency than this? Exchanging sex for money, the prostitute denies herself individual identity; she becomes ‘an acting body in relation to other acting bodies’ with her poverty or wealth dictated entirely by others (Haslanger 169). Felicity Nussbaum suggests that a prostitute loses even the status of “woman” in eighteenth-century England; she is ‘a species set apart from women’ (100).  By these accounts, prostitution not only denies female agency through economic dependence but denies one’s identification as a woman. If a prostitute is ‘a species set apart from women’, can their sexual activity still represent female agency? Hence, why the sexual agency of prostitutes was not considered threatening to the eighteenth-century man; it exists in a separate domain from, and therefore cannot extend to, respectable women.       

 In Fanny Hill, however, John Cleland’s representation of Fanny is more like a middle-class lady than a prostitute. Fanny’s prostitution doesn’t take place in dark and degenerate rooms amongst the common masses of London; her career is established through ‘reputable’ families, ‘domestic flock[s]’ (Cleland 13, 91). Moreover, a sense of monogamy underscores her sexual partnerships, more reminiscent of marriage than prostitution. Transitioning from Charles to Mr. H Fanny expresses guilt at her infidelity, becoming ‘embitter’d with the consciousness that [she] was no longer worthy of him’ (Cleland 66) and Fanny’s reaction upon discovering Mr. H’s exploits with her maid, ‘turning away the wench’, seeking revenge, resembles more closely a scorned wife than a kept mistress. Even at Mrs. Cole’s, where sex is performed unashamedly in front of a selected audience, ‘it was an inviolable law for every gallant to keep to his partner’, and Fanny, especially, adheres to this code, rejecting all propositions out of ‘attachment to [her] own [partner]’ and loyalty to her friends (Cleland 119).  Cleland situates Fanny in respectable houses, domestic families, and monogamous relationships with all the furnishings of bourgeoisie ‘grandeur’ and ‘luxury’ (Cleland 124, 91). The protagonist herself is furnished with the values of a respectable woman; with her ‘natural disposition to modesty’ and moral responsiveness to infidelity or betrayal (Cleland 125). In short, the reader cannot help but find that Cleland’s portrayal of prostitution ‘breathe[s] an air of decency, modesty and order’ (Cleland 91). If Cleland writes the whore into respectable society and ‘collapses the distinction between [prostitute and middle-class women]’, the sexuality of his prostitutes can be read not as that of a degenerate ‘species’ or irrelevant bodies but as that of women. Consequently, the agency afforded to them through their sexual activity must be representative of female agency (Mitchell 314).                                                                                 

Ruth Yeazell notes ‘though his heroine earns her living as a whore, Cleland manages to make … sex in the novel seem motivated by free choice rather than by compulsion’ (112). If this is true, not only does Cleland present Fanny as a middle-class woman but he erases her status as prostitute, authenticating her sexuality. Her sexuality is not purely for men or for financial gain, but for herself; it is an expression of her agency. I, however, propose an alternative: that Fanny Hill offers only a screen of female agency, behind which sits the male author. This semblance of female agency is created and reiterated through a discourse of feminine pleasure and desire. Emphasis is placed on female rather than male enjoyment of sex with repeated references to the ‘critical ecstasy’, ‘seat of pleasure’, and  ‘exquisite sensation’ enjoyed by women (Cleland 29,16). The ‘desires’ of Fanny – which ‘all pointed strongly to their pole: man’ – are so continually alluded to that it almost creates a complete sense of sexual agency (Cleland 30). This is later compounded by the reminder of Fanny’s freedom of choice: she is ‘perfectly at [her] liberty to refuse the party’ (Cleland 109). The combination of Fanny’s pleasure, desire and apparent freedom work together to support Yeazell’s observation that ‘all the sex in the novel seem[s] motivated by free choice’; and yet on closer inspection that the sex only ‘seem[s]’ motivated by free choice is an important discretion to make (112).    

Even where Fanny appears to hold sexual agency, I argue that the male-dominating language that pervades the descriptions of sex in the novel undermines it. The passiveness of the metaphors for female genitalia ‘soft passage’, ‘yielding entry’, ‘tender opening’, declare it the natural and submissive landscape upon which man’s ‘machine’, ‘weapon’ and ‘battering-piece’ might ‘cleave’, ‘plough’ and ‘attack’ (Cleland 43, 76, 73, 29, 155, 75, 42) . In contrast to the masquerade of agency created through the discourse of Fanny’s desires, I argue that the females of the novel actually undergo a complete loss of agency during sex. This is demonstrated by their physically ‘faint[ing] away’, succumbing to ‘lifeless insensibility’ or being mentally ‘robbed of all liberty of thought’; they are reduced to ‘a body that behaves independently of her wishes … inevitably respond[ing] to sexual stimulus, whether from a customer or a lover’ (Cleland 100, 61, 17) (Haslanger 174).                                                                                        

If Fanny cannot obtain “true” agency through sexual activity, can she achieve it in other ways? Voyeurism is heavily present within Fanny Hill. Illicit erotic encounters are espied through ‘peep hole[s]’, through ‘curtains’, from ‘closets’, ‘crevices’, ‘partitions’ and doors left ‘a-jar’(Cleland 68, 28, 32) . The sheer frequency of voyeuristic scenes normalises the presence of onlookers, it becomes plausible to the reader that every private rendezvous is vulnerable to exposure. Whilst this may work to titillate and heighten the novel’s eroticism it simultaneously situates the language of surveillance firmly within the text; effectively bringing Foucault’s panoptic discipline to the private sphere of the bedroom. Panopticism is a form of social control; surveillance forms self-disciplining citizens who, aware of their own visibility, behave according to societal norms, whilst authority and power lies with the invisible observer. Can the language of surveillance empower Cleland’s protagonist, who predominantly acts as voyeur? Concealed from the objects of her gaze, Fanny adopts the authority of the panoptic tower. In these instances, the sexual desire that induces her to seek out stimulating scenes is the medium through which she obtains agency; she is free from the sense of visibility which might otherwise constrain her.                                        HHH                              

However, the illusion of female agency in Fanny’s voyeurism is shattered when it encounters men. In the one instance where it might extend to a tangible role of power, Fanny fails to assert her authority:  'The criminal scene they acted, I had the patience to see to an end, purely that I might [carry out] instant justice […] I jumped down from the chair, in order to raise the house upon them, but […] I fell senseless on the ground […] [and they] had more than the necessary time to make a safe retreat.’ (Cleland 150) 

When Fanny’s female agency, and indeed her sexuality, does not conform to men’s desires, it is compromised: she falls ‘senseless’ to the ground before she can assert her authority in ‘instant justice’.  This same pattern weaves itself throughout Cleland’s novel. For example, after witnessing Mr. H with her maid, Fanny takes her revenge by seducing Will and entering into an affair driven by desire, subverting her role as prostitute and adopting that of master: ‘I forced him …to receive money enough to buy a silver watch’ (Cleland 83). However, this apparent agency collapses when she is discovered by Mr. H. Unlike Fanny, Mr. H not only witnesses the “crime” but exacts the punishment, ‘Mr. H.....sat down on a chair whilst we [Fanny and Will] stood like criminals under examination’, dismissing Fanny and sending Will away (Cleland 84).                                                                                                      

Ultimately, Fanny Hill is a novel that represses female agency even as it portrays it. The novel is comprised of scenes where the protagonist repeatedly demonstrates and wields female agency through her sexuality yet representations of sex are simultaneously underpinned by values of male dominance. The male author effectively writes female agency into a male fantasy; the erotic text becomes a space where female sexual agency poses no threat as it always conforms to the desires of men. I argue then, that Fanny Hill is a text that creates the illusion of female agency through sexuality. Desire conceals economic necessity, pleasure conceals pain, and female agency is tolerated only so far as it does not clash with the desires of men. One only has to look at the larger narrative frame to see this emphasised: a female author – Fanny – writes for the female reader – ‘Madam’ – but this exists only within the larger picture of a male author writing for male readers; female agency and sexuality in Fanny Hill is bordered on all sides by men and so becomes only a tame illusion of the real thing.  

PLEASE NOTE:   Exploring female sexuality and female agency in Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland (1748) by Annabelle May Hawkes is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

WORKS CITED 

Cleland, John. Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 2000. Print. 

Haslanger, Andrea. "What Happens When Pornography Ends in Marriage: The Uniformity of Pleasure in Fanny Hill." ELH 78.1 (2011): 163-188. Print. 

Mitchell, Margaret. "Dreadful Necessities: Nature and the Performance of Gender in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure." Women's Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal 32.3 (2010): 305-324. Print. 

Nussbaum, Felicity. Torrid zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century Narratives. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1995. Print. 

Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991. Print.