One Lady’s Fanny: A Discourse of Intercourse

Foucault’s declaration that, “power is not held, it is exercised” can be utilized as a link into the regulation of sex as an act and the discussion of the incitement of sex as seen in John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure and Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality. Moreover, this “incitement to discourse” by Foucault and his analysis present parallel streams in Memoirs that may suggest illumination of a codified language, censorship, regulation of sex as taboo, the power dynamic and more. Cleland’s novel can be analyzed through the philosophical lens of Foucault and further establish an interpretation of the role of sex, power, dialogue and a discourse of the meaning of sexuality. Furthermore, the public sphere that exists in Cleland’s Memoirs presents a dichotomy on the view of morality through the acceptance and condemnation of sexuality.

John Cleland presents a young woman and pits her in a world of sex where the body is recognized not as the carrier of future progeny, but the free cell of exploration and harbinger of pleasure. In a scene with Phoebe, Fanny Hill is chastised for attempting to cover up her body in what seemingly is an act of modesty on her part. Phoebe, in Foucaultian terms, cries “No! you must not, my sweet girl, think to hide all these treasures from me, my sight must be feasted as well as my touch” (Memoirs 12). The act of cover up is closely linked to Foucault’s idea of repression of sex and the body. In The History of Sexuality, “Discourse, therefore, had to trace the meeting line of the body and the soul…” (20). What Phoebe observes with her eyes is repressed by Fanny and recorded by Cleland. Cleland, in writing Memoirs deprecates his work as “a Book I disdain to defend, and wish, from my Soul, buried and forgot”. The author is clearly doing something here by mentioning it pains him to defend a work, even to his Soul. However, he is also driven to express his work. Under such compulsion, Cleland presents a work with Foucauldian implications on repression and the novel as sexual discourse. Through creative venues Cleland describes much of the body, the acts of the body, the differences of sexual orientation, and it is suggested that he does this using codified expressions. His rhetoric is censored even though he blatantly describes sexual encounter.

In order to contain and corral the subject of sex Cleland applies creative rhetoric that is codified “in order to gain mastery over it in reality” (History 17). Cleland does not exhibit the vulgar without the ambiguities of rhetorical “cover up”; his descriptions are poetic justifications to a rather taboo topic during the 18th c. Although Cleland was writing during the 18th c. Foucault recalls that “the seventeenth century, then, was the beginning of an age of repression” (17). Examples of Cleland’s poetic justifications and need for expression is carried out throughout the descriptions of sex and the body under the motive of discovery. Fanny recalls Phoebe’s sexual touch as “her fingers play’d, and strove to twine in the young tendrils of that moss which nature has contrived at once for use and ornament” (11). Why did Cleland not simply mention something along the lines of “Phoebe put her fingers inside of my cunt and made me hot”? There is something occurring here with language. Sex is subjected to language as Foucault mentions, but moreover creative language is pulling double-duty in the arena of cover-up and repression. Cleland will not express the sex act or its discourse outside of a creative rhetoric. He describes male genitalia as having “that store bag of nature’s prime sweets”; “that conduit-pipe”; “tender globular reservoirs” (83). Again, he utilizes Fanny as his agent of creative expression. She notices Mrs. Brown’s vagina and describes it as “the whole greasy lanskip lay fairly open to my view: a wide open-mouthed gap, overshadowed with a grizzly bush, seemed held out like a beggar’s wallet for its provision” (24). This description is poetic in its use of the female body’s genitalia and the metaphor of the wallet. Cleland is clearly utilizing a technique, which recognizes sex as taboo and covers it up, or represses it with a codification of language to describe it. By mentioning sex in this vein, he incites his readership, members of the public sphere. It is important to note that Foucault’s thoughts on the “incitement of sex” and the variant discourses of sex move beyond Cleland’s poetic discourse of sex. Though Foucault notices, “there was a steady proliferation of discourses concerned with sex,” Cleland’s Memoirs included, he progresses from this increase in “illicit” discourses and examines the climb “concerning sex in the field of exercise of power itself” (18). The subject of power then is subject to examination in conjunction with the subjugation of sex. This subjugation is what links Cleland’s Memoirs to a further analysis of the power dynamic.

Foucault affirms that “power is not held, it is exercised.” According to this affirmation power is not merely contained, but by noticing its exchanges one can then analyze its implications. Foucault describes power through sex, “An institutional incitement to speak about it, and to do so more and more; a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail” (18). What followed from this proliferation was the repressive mechanism of discretion. Discretion working alongside taboo became censorship. Foucault continues with, “rather than a massive censorship, beginning with the verbal proprieties of the Age of Reason, what was involved was a regulated and polymorphous incitement to discourse” (34). Cleland’s protagonist exists within this “incitement to discourse” and her account speaks volumes to the reader beginning with the subject of power. Fanny Hill is without power at the beginning of the novel. When Fanny runs away with her Adonis, Charles, power transfers from Mrs. Brown. This reiterates the power dynamic that power cannot be contained, but exercised. The placement of sex throughout the novel continues to be exercised even though ownership has been transferred. Moreover, in exercising sex you transfer power, and as such both sex and power can be described as being more than “held” regardless of its morbid attempts at sexual agitation. In fact, because of this exercise of sex and power many, according to Foucault, “since the eighteenth century […] has not ceased to provoke a kind of generalized discursive erethism” (32). Cleland knows and uses his discourse to play into the morose descriptions of such sexual agitations described by the various partners of sex his protagonist encounters. For instance, when Mr. Barville applies the whip to Fanny’s body in order to produce sensation a number of allusions to Foucault are possible. These exist as power being transferred, discursive erethism utilized, and sex is not only produced, but exercised and experienced. Fanny Hill experiences her body, her sex, and even her minimal shifts from the power exchange; i.e. Mrs. Brown thru Charles thru Mrs. Cole and back to Charles. It can be analyzed then that Fanny’s experiences, according to Foucault, do “not multiply apart from or against power, but in the very space and as the means of its exercise” (32). Power is indeed a dynamic displayed time and time again throughout Cleland’s Memoirs.

The meaning of morality and sex exists in the agency of the public sphere. Foucault mentions the need for “A policing of sex: that is, not the rigor of a taboo, but the necessity of regulating sex through useful and public discourses” (25). Sex existing as secret only exists to break free and proliferate to the outskirts of containment. Sex must therefore be addressed in a discursive method that does not bring about its incitement. Foucault suggests confession. Taking Foucault’s thoughts on the “incitement of sex” beside Cleland’s Memoirs suggests a need for regulation in order to justify its placement to morality. Moral thinking during the 18th c. was still disposed to keeping sex as a subject of secrecy and as Foucault mentions “confession”. However, because authors like Cleland took to describing the sex act this too required a “policing” effort. No more so than its author disclaiming his disdain for the work. Again, he expresses his disposition by mentioning his soul. He claims that he had written, “a Book I disdain to defend, and wish, from my Soul, buried, and forgot”. Well, the problem is that it was not buried and forgot! In fact, it became arguably “the most famous erotic novel in English”. Why? The author wrote about sex, thereby inciting its discourse; the public that shunned the book incited its discourse; the public that condemned the discourse of sex betrayed their affinity to talk about it, describe it, condemn it, and ultimately shun it; the moral sphere repressed it, but needed to confess it. This dialectic is what I believed Cleland utilized in writing his Memoirs. Cleland, by expressing in writing, a secret topic, exposed it for what it was, an agency for public discourse (sex, that is, not his novel).

The novel is simply a medium or for lack of a better term, a tool, to incite. The subject of sex in being repressed allowed for escape via a readership that Cleland was sure to know existed. The society of Mrs. Brown, Fanny Hill, Charles, Phoebe, and others, though fictional, exist as a possible by product of a repressed society. What society? A society existing in the novel that possibly mirrored its audience (readership). Does that mean that someone had to write about it? Not necessarily, but then another genre would have arisen accounting for sex much like the modern executive does at the water-cooler. Perhaps then sex must be discoursed, though it is being discussed. Foucault, I believe states it best:

What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret. (35)

This need of the public sphere to exploit and incessantly chat about sex proves their willingness to produce a typology for the “sex talk,” or better-stated “incitement of [sexual] discourse”.

Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure utilizes his sexual puppet Fanny Hill to express his incitement to an 18th c. public sphere, and by so doing justifies his codified rhetoric as analyzed alongside Foucault’s The History of Sexuality. The result suggests that morality is both existent and condemned in the agency of the public realm.