When it comes to the erotic, it is the past that has shock value
The rumour last week that Royal Holloway, University of London, had removed John Cleland’s Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure from its reading list for fear of offending students sparked outrage. Another sign of the curtailment of academic freedom! Students are “snowflakes”, far too easily hurt!
In fact, as Dr Judith Hawley, the university’s professor of 18th-century literature, clarified, it had never been on her course, so it couldn’t have been “banned”. But Fanny Hill is so sexually explicit it is basically pornography – a delightful sort, but pornography all the same. And just because it’s nearly 300 years old does not make it any the less shocking, but rather more so. For despite the sexualising tendencies of the internet, we have in some ways become more prudish in recent times.
Take this description of a man’s nethers from Cleland’s book. Its graphic detail is expounded on at a length that would be simply beyond the ken of today’s readers: “I saw, with wonder and surprise, what? Not the plaything of a boy, not the weapon of a man, but a maypole of so enormous a standard, that had proportions been observ’d, it must have belong’d to a young giant… such a length, such a breadth of animated ivory!” The description goes on. Yet the modern translation would be but two words. I’ll leave you to guess them.
Cleland represented a world in which full enjoyment of the birds and bees was considered essential. As yet unshackled by the 19th-century idea that women were chaste angels of the house, or our current preoccupation with perfectly hairless, toned bodies, those who could, did. And with gusto. Celebrative accounts of this unfettered economy of pleasure, such as Cleland’s, can be startling, even unsettling.
We don’t need to go back to the 1740s to measure our relative prudery: as recently as the Seventies naked bits were flaunted from every mainstream publication in the land. Young people may be inundated with sexualised material today, but when it comes to the erotic, it’s the past, not the present, that has real shock value.