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A review by sinceremercy
Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland
2.0
I didn't like this book as much as my classmates did, and I only finished volume 2 a month after class ended (woops). I was never able to get past the impression that this was an older man writing a teenage girl having sex; unlike Pamela, she never felt like a believable character. However my classmates disagreed with me on this and part of that is I guess the genre (porn).
While this novel seems much more in the tradition of French hedonism, it in fact clings to the English bourgeois tradition in some surprising ways. The novel argues that pleasure is pleasure, that sexual love, while separate from romantic love, can coexist with it, and that vice can lead to virtue. Fanny even "reforms" a man who has a fetish for virginity, a kind of subversion of the trope of the gentleman reforming the prostitute. However, men who have fetishes (such as the sado-masochist client) are still depicted as having something fundamentally wrong with them and are physically/mentally unhealthy. And Fanny, after spying on two men having sex, is so furious at their "criminal" actions that she runs to try to summon the whole house against them, apparently intent on a lynching. So much for pleasure being pleasure.
On the other hand, she does this only after watching them the whole time, with the act described in the same erotic detail as other acts, and the men do manage to escape, so...
While this novel seems much more in the tradition of French hedonism, it in fact clings to the English bourgeois tradition in some surprising ways. The novel argues that pleasure is pleasure, that sexual love, while separate from romantic love, can coexist with it, and that vice can lead to virtue. Fanny even "reforms" a man who has a fetish for virginity, a kind of subversion of the trope of the gentleman reforming the prostitute. However, men who have fetishes (such as the sado-masochist client) are still depicted as having something fundamentally wrong with them and are physically/mentally unhealthy. And Fanny, after spying on two men having sex, is so furious at their "criminal" actions that she runs to try to summon the whole house against them, apparently intent on a lynching. So much for pleasure being pleasure.
On the other hand, she does this only after watching them the whole time, with the act described in the same erotic detail as other acts, and the men do manage to escape, so...