A Film Canon

Fully prescient of the erotic novel’s proclivity for “uniformity of expressions and adventures”, Fanny Hill presents sexual intercourse as the logical conclusion of (female) ‘sensibility’, thereby translating the eighteenth-century preoccupation with sympathetic extension into a voyeuristic fascination with the moment at which pain is converted into pleasure, lust into love, and rape into rape-fantasy – most explicity in the fetishistic value placed upon virginity, or at least upon the spectacle of “virgin gore”; most graphically in a scene in which Fanny's buttocks – one of the novel's most exotic topographies, only provisionally charted and colonised – are lashed until they bleed; but perhaps most pervasively in a conjunction of impossibly tight orifices and impossibly large members that renders the final condemnation of sodomy on practical grounds (“it was not in nature to force such immense disproportions”) somewhat disingenuous, insofar as that act simply culinates the book’s whole economy of proto-Sadean torture-pleasure – the "second maidenhead" that Fanny associates with a particularly taxing encounter. In the process, the phallus becomes the pretext for a dizzying array of aesthetic registers – the seat of a physiological aestheticism, or a reclamation of aisthesis from aesthetics: ‘sex for sex’s sake’ – all of which are ultimately subordinated to sublimity (“I found it too true...that objects which affright us, when we cannot get from them, draw our eyes as forcibly as those that please us”), ensuring that Fanny’s most intense experiences tend to reduce her to a cowering, devouring gaze; or, alternatively, conflate oral and ocular registers, perhaps explaining the relative disinterest in the mouth, or at least its transplantation to the subsidiary spectacle of the clitoris, and its own welcoming, hyperbolic gaze, which acts as primary sensory anchor for the rest of the body. It also explains the particular attention paid to Fanny’s position as voyeur – again, culminating with the final, sodomitical spectacle – as well as the ekphrastic ingenuity with which Cleland sets up and differentiates his tableaux, artfully fusing their chivalric, "golden age" symmetries with the carnivalesque squalor with which mutual orgasm temporarily and blissfully obliterates class distinctions, "...as no condition of life is subject to revolutions more than that of a woman of pleasure."