Pornography and Social Justice

Once upon a time, 1857 was "the year." It was the year of Lord Campbell's Obscene Publications Act and the same year that Madame Bovary went on trial in Paris. As years go, it was more prominent than most, its events significant enough to allow historians of pornography a place from which to look back at Edmund Curll and the origins of the legal controversy over obscene literature and, at the same time, forward to the famous trials of The Well of Loneliness, Ulysses, and Lady Chatterley's Lover, what we now consider that last, embarrassing hiccup of Victorian moralism. Dragged into prominence by Walter Kendrick's The Secret Museum, 1857 had other virtues as well. It anchored a legal history that made it easier to understand why the word "pornography," a mid-nineteenth-century neologism, might be significant and how it was that the debates about "pornography" had become an ongoing dilemma. That this dilemma connected easily to key works of the period, like Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, and more broadly to emerging ideas about "literature" as a collection of inherently valuable national gospels, ensured its relevancy. Scholars connected the history of pornography to the rise of the novel and a changing literary marketplace; they sought explanations from Foucault's History of Sexuality and his ideas about the repressive power of nineteenth-century medical-moral discourse; and—all the way along—they retained an interest in the sexual politics of pornography, its penchant for objectification and flagrant misogyny. They also considered how its treatments of human sexuality may have contributed to those of our own cultural moment, to the stories that we continue to tell ourselves about bodies and pleasure. For scholars of the eighteenth century, this last inquiry began by considering how sexually explicit works from the period were inflected differently by their different generic hosts. Scholars sought an origin story that acknowledged tangled roots: bawdy poems and songs, prurient medical manuals, obscene travelogues, scandal novels, divorce proceedings, criminal biographies, all these confirmed the importance of Kendrick's insistence that the word "pornography" tends to oversimplify and can itself become the single greatest obstacle to our understanding of the term.No one is more familiar with this backstory than Kathleen Lubey. Although she is not particularly interested in the kind of scaffolding that legal history provides, she is very much interested in shifting attention away from 1857 and back to the origin stories of the eighteenth century that make it knowable. Her first book, Excitable Imaginations (2012), brilliantly complicated our understanding of British eroticism between 1660 and 1760. With an eye to the relevant connections between literature and philosophy of the period, she demonstrated that arousal and epistemology could go hand in hand, and that authors and readers of the period were far more sophisticated in their approach to the material than we have generally assumed. In particular, she joined the history of sexuality to the history of reading in such a way as to acknowledge the oppressive realities of patriarchy without assuming the absence of agency. Her recent book, What Pornography Knows, picks up many of these same concerns even as it proffers a new and bold argument: that pornography can be, and in fact was, a site of social protest; that its hybridity, especially in the eighteenth century, worked against the simpleminded narrative pleasures it was evolving toward; and that historians need to read the texts in question, specifically their sex scenes, with a focus on and an understanding of genitalia and their significance. This last point may be her most surprising and useful contribution to the scholarship. Reminding readers first of the cultural power afforded to genitals by the institutional practices that affected property and its transmission (implicating chastity and defloration as fetishes of the most powerful sort), she insists that we need to ask to whom the genitals in question actually belonged. Then, and only then, can we begin to sort the power dynamics of penetrative sex and the significance of self-stimulation: "Social identity," she insists, "is invented and forged through genital action" (17). Thus, key scenes in midcentury proto-pornographic fiction can take on disruptive properties and demonstrate that not all men and women at the time were appreciative of or in agreement with status quo sexual conventions. Or, as Lubey puts it, "Pornography protests binaries, divisions, and hierarchies, circulating skeptical, anti-heteronormative discourse that we only can perceive if we entertain the possibility that pornography does not endorse the actions it displays" (7). Entertain that possibility, she argues, and we quickly come to realize that pornography and social justice—and specifically pornography and feminism—may not always have been antithetical (8).In keeping with its thesis, What Pornography Knows follows an innovative structure, one that tracks a midcentury bawdy novel—The History of the Human Heart (1749)—as it migrates from its point of origin through several different Victorian editions up to the 1960s and to its rather surprising reappearance as a pulp novel. This backstory, the subject originally of a 2015 essay in ELH, allows Lubey not only to follow key changes in the copytext and to analyze the implications of deletions and inflations, but also at the same time to situate each new edition within its historical context. The close readings of the new editions provide evidence for how and why they evolved. In her first chapter, "Genital Parts," Lubey argues that "women's statements of resistance to penetrative intercourse with men are a common feature in key scenes of midcentury fiction" (31) and that authors of the period "replay moments where women's genitals manage to dispute and disrupt schemes of sexual conquest, and as a result, make plain the social relations that underwrite such efforts. When genitals, becoming things, threaten to 'stop working' in expected ways—when their penetrative use is refused, as in fictional representations of virginal sex—vaginal parts tell us stories about their imbrication in social relations" (53). One such story attends the use of dildos, which "are part of a non-binary economy that eliminates anatomical penises—and with them, the feminine disenfranchisement they enforce—from a penetrative sexual economy" (64). Put another way, "When the penis is imagined as a dildo, the penetrating object is decoupled from the masculine tasks of amassing property and absorbing women's personhood" (69). With copious references to contemporary texts and illustrations, Lubey prepares readers for the close readings to follow and for her account of the ways in which eighteenth-century pornography was gradually and eventually pruned of its most disruptive, "feminist" features.Chapters 2 and 3 do the heavy lifting. In chapter 2, "Feminist Speculations," Lubey picks up The Human Heart, together with related examples from the period, and reads them closely and carefully, chiefly with the intention of understanding their sex scenes in relation to the editorial apparatus that intrudes upon them. We follow the history of Camillo, a Shropshire boy (his name notwithstanding), from conception to marriage, through a variety of picaresque adventures, while paying particular attention to the editor's introduction and to the variety of digressive, "speculative" footnotes that accompany the main story. The compelling example here is an episode at a London bagnio where Camillo and his friends witness "posture girls" collectively masturbate and ejaculate into wine glasses for the men to drink. For Lubey, this becomes the primal scene, "paradigmatic" for the ways in which it interrupts "men's pursuit of women's bodies with precise genital description, philosophical paratext, women's statements about the ramifications of sexual labor, and uncertainty about masculine sexual performance" (96). The "paratext" in question is a long footnote where the editor challenges the author's assumption of modesty as a "natural" feminine attribute. Lubey explains that the footnote "distracts from the descriptions of sex acts unfolding above it on the page; it strikes a speculative tone that contrasts with the sequential account of Camillo's experience; and it isolates what would seem a minor point ('natural' is a passing adjective) and bloats it into a concept available for deep questioning" (100). Crucial enough to be discussed in the introduction and mentioned throughout the book, this scene becomes for Lubey a rich and representative moment in pornography's history "when texts addressing sexual matters were not entirely differentiated from other forms of literature, and long before a distinct market for pornography existed, and where descriptions of sex acts served as vehicles for discussions of perception, science, ethics, and feminism that unfold instead of—or in competition with, or in service of, or parallel to—erotic satisfaction" (102).Chapter 3, "The Victorian Eighteenth Century," tracks what happens when The Human Heart is picked up by William Dugdale, James Reddie, and Henry Ashbee, editors and collectors who wanted and needed the original to perform in accordance with their very different ideas of what it should be. Lubey explains that "handling messy, multipurpose narratives from the eighteenth century," these editors built strategic deletions and inflations that, even if aiming to simplify sexual content, continue to tell varied and competing stories about the field of sexuality. Abridgements and additions were made to these source texts at all levels—text, sentence, binding—and reveal editors' meticulous recrafting of narrative to create works densely populated by sex scenes. Booksellers' serialization, antiquarianism, and modernization expand sexual description and reduce social reference, creating the kind of specialized narratives we associate with modern pornography by condensing into genital description, I argue, the philosophical speculation, gender critique, and feminist insight that characterized eighteenth-century source texts. (124)Explaining in her own way, in other words, how 1857 became a watershed year, Lubey goes on to connect the editing of The Human Heart and its companion text, The Child of Nature, to adaptations of works by Rochester and Cleland, and in so doing makes a detailed and convincing argument for rethinking the history of British pornography and the complex ways it engaged gender stereotypes and social justice. Her focus on genitals and their interaction is as bold and unorthodox as her reliance on book history is solid and reassuring. Together they make for a compelling, if not irrefutable, argument.The fourth chapter, "Uncoupling," once again follows The Human Heart, this time telling the story of the faux liberation pornography of the 1960s. Diligent sleuthing on Lubey's part takes us to Peter Fryer and his more renowned pseudonym, "James Graham," (appropriately chosen in honor of the "sex therapist," who marketed the electrified, magnetized "Celestial Bed") and to the pulp porn that used purportedly genuine historical texts to sell readers—especially women—on purportedly timeless ideas of sex and sexual pleasure. "Across Human Heart's long life," Lubey writes, we see pornography narrow into a vision of hetereomasculine pleasure imposing itself serially on diminished women; but importantly, we see that this plot was originally conceived as a dubious one, impinged upon by contingencies, internally self-questioning, and speculative about its own hypocrisies. Pornographic narrative transforms across this history from a site of confusion and debate into a stricter, stabler vision of men's unchallenged expression of sexual right—precisely the privilege that was coming under fire in second-wave feminism. (183)Appropriately, given her reliance on bibliography, Lubey weaves into this account the controversial history of the Private Case. Along with the last transformation of The Human Heart, in other words, we get the backstory of how the collection of obscene materials at the British Library was acquired, how it was housed and cataloged, and who was allowed access. One kind of liberation narrative gets juxtaposed to another. This then sets up a treatment of the rise of anti-pornography feminism with which the chapter ends. A nuanced analysis of the voices on both sides allows Lubey to foreground the importance of genital action both to the history of pornography and to its cultural moment.What Pornography Knows is a wonderful addition to the scholarship, and I would be surprised if it did not quickly become an important landmark for those in the field. Even so, however, it is not always an easy book to read. I found myself most troubled by a tendency to argumentative overreach that too often simplified and generalized an argument that, at crucial junctures, wanted more subtlety and nuance. At its most innocuous, this "overreach" manifested as what Lubey describes and defends as "clarifying anachronism," entailing the use of words like "pornography" and "feminism" to describe eighteenth-century texts and their events. Statements like "The Victorian editors wanted nothing to do with the original feminist content of eighteenth-century pornography" (152), are precisely to her point and evidence of her argument's efficacy. On the other hand, however, I am bothered because such statements also elide distinctions that may be useful, distinctions that help differentiate genre and content and emphasize complexity of effect. There is something to be said, in other words, for descriptors like "obscene satire," "erotic fiction," "proto-pornographic novels," and the like. More serious were the few occasions where the argument seemed to look past obvious objections rather than incorporate them. Lubey argues for the importance of women's sexual autonomy as represented in scenes that resist, evade, or complicate heteronormative penetration, scenes that might depict instead masturbation, dildos, or sex between women. That such scenes may signify a kind of social protest is undeniable, but so too is that many if not most are being staged for the male observer, who is sometimes a character present, sometimes a voyeur hidden, and sometimes, if not always, the reader for whom the scene was devised. My point is not that this objection is in any way a fatal flaw, which it most certainly isn't, but rather that it easily could have been acknowledged and incorporated to the benefit of the larger argument. The scope and perspicuity of that argument, the solid scaffolding of book history, and the impressive knowledge with which the whole is bolstered ensure that my own objections will remain quibbles. In sum, although 1857 retains its prominence, although "pornography" is no less the tricky neologism that it always has been, our origin story, the way we have come to understand the ubiquity of modern pornography in terms of its eighteenth-century beginnings, that story has been changed and most decidedly for the better.