Reading the theme of voyeurism in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure through a microscopic eye, I try to extend the argument to the psychoanalytic lens of the Lacanian gaze and a postcolonial perspective by deconstructing the binary.
- Introduction
- Comparison of the fate of prostitutes
- The binary between public and private
- A microscopic view and the gaze
- Text
- Bibliography
Introduction
Fundamentally different from other works in the 18th century, John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure opens a vista for the bright future of a prostitute, deviating from the conventional standard of the period. The uniqueness will be clearer when it is compared with other contemporary works. In this article, I will develop discussions from three perspectives as follows:
- How the fate of a prostitute in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure is different from other works.
- Introducing that the microscope might have made an impact in the literary field, and how we can observe the detail of the text by using a microscopic eye.
- Based on the theme of voyeurism, extending the argument to the psychoanalytic lens of the Lacanian gaze and a postcolonial perspective by deconstructing the binary.
For further study, I would suggest the possibility that this unique outcome could be a satiric strategy to camouflage an ideology of that time.
Comparison of the fate of prostitutes
For further study, I would suggest the possibility that this unique outcome could be a satiric strategy to camouflage an ideology of that time.
Lewis Walpole Library Digital Archive【Search terms: prostitution】
A Harlot’s Progress, Plate 1, William Hogarth
In Plate 1, Moll’s arrival in London is portrayed. The brothel-keeper who has something like syphilitic lesions on her face, as if to be a foreshadowing of Moll’s destiny, is trying to drag her into prostitution. It is said that a pile of pans that is almost falling down symbolizes Moll’s fall. A portrayal in Plate 1 is sufficiently similar to Fanny’s situation of how she met Mrs. Brown in London after the death of her parents.
Secondly, let’s take a look at Plate 6 to see the outcome of prostitution.
A Harlot’s Progress, Plate 6, William Hogarth
Moll has died of syphilis, and her whore mates are gathering for her funeral wake. A boy who is probably Moll’s son is innocently playing by the coffin. Men on each side of the painting are trying to make sexual advances on women by underestimating them as prostitutes. In Hogarth’s paintings, the chaotic social issues of the 18th century are dramatized by the bare satirical paintings. The hopeless destination of a prostitute girl being affected with syphilis is depicted.
By contrast, in Cleland’s novel, Fanny’s life after the end of her prostitution is full of hope. As she narrated at the end of the novel, her life will be going on as a healthy wife and mother who can “bestow a legal parentage on those fine children (186-187)”. Compared to the widely accepted destination of prostitution represented by Hogarth’s paintings, why has Fanny reached the conclusion of a happy ending? In this light, can we regard Fanny as a reliable narrator?
The binary between public and private
Given that Fanny is an unreliable narrator, we might be able to observe an ideology camouflaged behind her narrative. For further understanding of this hypothetical viewpoint, I would like to focus on the concept of a public nature in the 18th century. The concept of publicness of the time is built on the tension between openness and closedness, which can be summarized as follows:
Openness Closedness
Coffeehouses (public social places) ➡ Elite private member clubs
Fanny as a prostitute (a public woman) ➡ Treasuring the private spiritual domain
Publication of an epistolary novel ➡ Disclosure of privacy
Letters (external communication tools) ➡ Internal communication tools between two I’s:
(a writer and a recipient) (a subject of writing and an object of being written)
As mentioned above, the prosperity of the coffeehouse culture which promotes public social places has simultaneously been producing private places such as members-only clubs for gentlemen, as binary oppositions. Ostensible free sociability could have not existed without the exclusive class consciousness that secures private domains behind.
The leadership struggles between two forces around the privacy might be a significant viewpoint to unmask Fanny’s narrative; for, those two forces are deconstructed in the text of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. The central element of Fanny as a public woman has been pushed to the periphery, and her private spiritual domain which used to be a marginalized element has alternatively taken the place of the center at the end of her prostitution.
A microscopic view and the gaze
In the first place, an epistolary novel itself is a mediating tool to sneak a peek into the privacy of others. In the case of Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, for example, Mr. B actually has stolen and read Pamela’s letters. Stealing a peek into someone’s private life involves an aspect of voyeurism, which is metaphorically parallel to the voyeuristic behavior of peeking into the sexual activity of others in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.
Under voyeuristic circumstances, there must be a relationship between the subject of giving gaze and the object of being gazed. As an extension of this relationship, Joseph Addison, for example, has reversed the relationship between the subject and the object in his publication of The Spectator. Seen through the writer’s lens, he has observed readers and society as a spectator from the outer frame while he stepped into the center of them. It is reasonable to say that Addison has successfully applied a microscopic eye to observe society through The Spectator. Calling himself Mr. Spectator, he equates the lens with the text and regards the privileged person who manipulates the lens as the author. It is not unreasonable to suppose that the visual culture of microscopes has given a great impact on the 18th-century literary field since Vesalius’ achievement of the anatomy of the human body in the Renaissance period.
Encompassing a voyeuristic aspect, the dramatization of sexuality seen through a microscopic eye is woven in the text of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure behind Fanny’s rhetoric. The dramatization of sexuality in this text must begin with magnifying one’s sense and memory from a microscopic viewpoint. It is to gaze into the depths of the world which is invisible by bare eyes.
Transcending the ability of the eyes as a visual organ, what we can see through a microscopic eye is a concept manifested by the gaze. In the extension of Lacanian thought, the gaze must reflect the desire of objet petit a; as necessary, the final paper can cover this discussion in more detail. Therefore, the sexuality woven in the text is not merely the dramatization of what you have actually witnessed, but the concept that you have perceived through a microscopic eye or the Lacanian gaze, which has an ability to transform reflecting the desire of an observer.
Considering that Cleland might have been acquainted with Alexander Pope since his father was a friend of Pope, excerpts from An Essay on Man can be raised as possible contentions to observe a potentiality for applying the microscopic optical theory to literature.
Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, in Four Epistles, Edinburgh, MDCCLI, 1751.
The speaker of An Essay on Man poses a question, “Why has not man a microscopic eye? (Pope, 8)”. Since James Thomson also uses the term, “microscopic eye (Thomson, 45)” in The Seasons, we can observe the permeation of this idea in the literary texts.
Returning to the text of Pope, the speaker tries to seek the point where “No glass can reach (Pope, 10)”, transcending the “Vast chain of being (Pope, 9)”. What the speaker of the poem has found at the end of the gaze is depicted in the speaker’s discovery of the place of happiness on page 35. Highlighted part on page 35 in the text of An Essay on Man appears to represent Fanny’s perspective she has reached in the end; however, what we can see at the end of the microscopic eye might be a satire shaped by the form of disguised ideology. To support this idea, for example, we will see that Pope’s “Vast chain of being (Pope, 9) has become a reversal in the text of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Fanny states as follows:
I had now, through more than one rent, discovered and felt his thighs, the skin of which seemed the smoother and fairer for the coarseness, and even the dirt of his dress, as the teeth of negroes seem the whiter for the surrounded black;...(John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, p.162)
Fanny’s view toward the boy reflects an exploiter’s perspective of colonialism; by capturing the boy’s sexuality, she is symbolically depriving the possession of his own property/ body by the gaze. Thus, black and white are reversed, and the boy is sexually awakened for the first time through intercourse with Louisa and acts as if he is a noble savage on the bed. This is the very moment that the standpoint of both parties is dramatically reversed. Thus, Fanny vicariously experiences the possibility that the exploiter can switch places with the exploited.
Fanny states that she has finally been ruled by Charles’ “plea of love (186)” at the end of the novel; however, contrary to her claim, it is Fanny that has actually ruled Charles in favor of his love. Taking advantage of the marriage system, Fanny colonizes Charles’ psychological domain as his symbolical father or Lacanian concept of the Name-of-the-Father, rather than his wife. It is because he was once forced to leave England because of his father, but could return to his homeland in a legitimate way through his marriage with Fanny.
The same holds for Fanny’s reason for her marriage, for what facilitates Fanny to shift from a public woman to a wife could have been driven by her class consciousness on the subconscious level; it is just like the case of a coffeehouse which produces a public space on the other side of a private space driven by exclusive class consciousness. Fanny’s explanation of the reason for her marriage is justified by Charles’ power of love; however, on the flip side of her explanation, her class consciousness could have functioned as a driving force to make her legitimately join the upper nobles.
Text
John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure; edited with an introduction and notes by Peter Sabor, Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Bibliography
Addison, Joseph. The Spectator, ed. Henry Morley, Vol. 1, (No. 21, Saturday, March 24, 1711), London: George Routledge and sons, Limited, 1891.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/12030/12030-h/SV1/Spectator1.html
Ibid. , Vol. 2, (No. 281, Tuesday, January 22, 1712), London: George Routledge and sons, Limited, 1891.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/12030/12030-h/SV2/Spectator2.html
Ibid. , Vol. 3, (No. 445, Thursday, July 31, 1712), London: George Routledge and sons, Limited, 1891.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/12030/12030-h/SV3/Spectator3.html
Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an inquiry into a category of Bourgeois society, translated by Thomas Burger in association with Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989. PDF.
Hogarth, William. A Harlot’s Progress, Plate 1, Lewis Walpole Library Digital Archive.
http://findit.library.yale.edu/catalog/digcoll:2808298
Ibid., Plate 6, Lewis Walpole Library Digital Archive.
http://findit.library.yale.edu/catalog/digcoll:2807180
Lacan, Jacques. “The Split Between the Eye And the Gaze”, “The Line and Light”. The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. London : Karnac Books, 2004. pp.67-78, 91-104. EBSCO host.
Nicolson, Marjorie. “The Microscope and English Imagination”, Science and Imagination, 155-234. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1976.
Pincus, Steve. “Coffee Politicians Does Create”: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 67, No. 4 (1995): 807-834, The University of Chicago Press, JSTOR.
Pope, Alexander. An Essay on Man, in Four Epistles, 1751. ECCO.
Thomson, James. “Summer”, The Seasons, 37-89. ECCO.
