Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture

The ‘identity’ of eighteenth century England has provoked much debate, with discussion often turning on the relative vibrancy of features displaying ‘modernity’ or the lingering aspects of an ‘ancien regime’.3 The polite vision of Langford and the Enlightened, liberatedworld seen by Porter share an emphasis on the eighteenth century looking forward. Yet these are contrasting pictures: on the one hand, we see a time of control and restraint; on the other, a time of freedom and licence. The allure and distinctiveness of eighteenth-century erotic culture – centring on erotic texts and images and comprising particular modes of cultural practice – was its ambiguous relationship to both aspects of eighteenth-century England. Erotic culture promised sexual gratification of a kind, but unbridled pleasure flew in the face of eighteenth-century restraint. The tone of eighteenth-century erotic culture, therefore, was not one of reckless sexual frenzy. Instead, producers of erotic material rendered depictions of sex and bodies hazy, and cloaks of metaphor and suspended denouements forged a decorous distance between reader and text. This stylistic temperance was accompanied by embargoes placed on the type of liaison in which characters