The Bawdy Politic in Stuart England, 1660–1714

Political Pornography and Prostitution

Melissa M. Mowry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351894135
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

With this original study, Melissa Mowry makes a strong contribution to a provocative interdisciplinary conversation about an important and influential sub genre: seventeenth-century political pornography. This book further advances our understanding of pornography's importance in seventeenth-century England by extending its investigation beyond the realm of cultural rhetoric into the realm of cultural practice. In addition to the satires which previous scholars have discussed in this context, Mowry brings to light hitherto unexamined pornographies as well as archival texts that reveal the ways in which the satires helped shape the social policies endured by prostitutes and bawds. Her study includes substantial archival evidence of prostitution from the Middlesex Sessions and the Bridewell Courtbooks. Mowry argues that Stuart partisans cultivated representations of bawds and prostitutes because polemicists saw the public sale of sex as republicanism's ideological apotheosis. Sex work, partisans repeatedly asserted, inherently disrupted ancestral systems of property transfer and distribution in favour of personal ownership, while the republican belief that all men owned the labour of their body achieved a nightmarish incarnation in the prostitute's understanding that the sexual favours she performed were labour. The prostitute's body thus emerged in the loyalist imagination as the epitome of the democratic body politic. Carefully grounded in original research, The Bawdy Politic in Stuart England, 1660-1714 is a cultural study with broad implications for the way we understand the historical constructions and legal deployments of women's sexuality.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Those of us living in an Anglo-American context at the beginning of the twenty-first century surely are not surprised that pornography and politics intersect.¹ During the past twenty-five years, the mere mention of pornography has been enough to incite vituperative condemnations from political activists on both the right and the left as it is variously burdened either with the disintegration of bourgeois family relations, conservative morality, the dignity of political office, or the often violent degradation of women’s identity and agency. Such responses, though, beg the crucial question I seek to answer here. How did the pornographic body—predominantly, but by no means exclusively, female—come to be so politically contested?

My question is obviously historical, but it is also a question located at the conjunction of cultural representation and cultural practice. As its title indicates, I have situated The Bawdy Politic’s investigation during the late Stuart dynasty, a period when novelists like Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, and Eliza Haywood kept the prostitute at the forefront of England’s cultural imagination. But the late Stuart period in English culture was also defined by resurgent, sometimes violent, expressions of proto-democratic, populist sympathies and ongoing struggles over the limits of crown power. Events like the 1668 Bawdy House Riots, during which mobs tore down much of east London, and the protracted Exclusion Crisis (1680-1684), during which Charles II revoked London’s charter as punishment for the City’s attempt to abrogate crown authority, rocked England’s fragile post-civil war sense of political stability. In important ways these conflicts were defined by the long-standing antagonism between court and commons, but they were also defined by the use of pornographic satires to vilify the vestigial remnants of civil war radicalism, what crown partisans like Roger L’Estrange characterized as the ‘People’s Power.’² At first subsequently, but then necessarily, the pornographic body emerged at the center of these debates that would eventually resolve the contours of the bourgeois public sphere and the liberal social contract.³ The Bawdy Politic is a study of those political pornographic representations and the way their narrative paradigms enabled the rise of modern liberalism by constructing the identities of underclass urban women as democracy’s degraded purveyor. Examples of the degradation to which royalists believed democracy would drive England, these sexualized representations of ‘common women’ argued against equal and open access to power not only through the conventional synecdoche between household and kingdom, but also through shrewd explorations of the economic and social impact royalists believed implicit in universal suffrage and the ‘subject’s liberty.’

But before I move on to a fuller explanation of the ways in which the pornographic body functioned as a royalist emblem of democracy, I want to address the thorny methodological hurdles faced by those of engaged in the process of demystifying early modern pornography. Prominent among those hurdles is an awareness that we must attend carefully to questions of how we examine the past, how we construct past meaning, and what counts as evidence. But before we can even address those matters, we must tackle the vexing question of how to define pornography. Conventionally, both consumers and scholars have lumped pornography together with obscene and erotic representations under the assumption that all are designed to produce an illicit masturbatory response in consumers. The assumption has become so entrenched that it shapes the very historical narrative by which we account for pornography’s origins.

Until quite recently, literary critics and historians alike have viewed pornography as the decadent, largely apolitical discourse of an elite aristocracy that emerged during the late Renaissance from a single continental origin.⁴ Dominated by the age’s most notorious libertines, the earl of Rochester (1647-1680) and the marquis de Sade (1740-1814), early modern pornography has been construed, much like its contemporary heirs, as the medium of guilty personal pleasure circulated among private coteries, riven with anxieties about discovery and prosecution. Indeed, this account has sustained a good deal of credibility from the fact that pornography was a dangerous undertaking through most of the seventeenth century, particularly in European countries where the Catholic Church still exercised considerable influence and was able to prosecute such representations as moral transgressions. Thus, pornographers like the ill-fated Ferrante Pallavicino often found themselves before church courts, at times pleading for their lives.⁵

As a number of scholars have argued recently, however, that conventional wisdom omitted some of early modern pornography’s most important features, most notably the fact that the majority of Renaissance pornography was anticlerical in sentiment. Through the end of the eighteenth century, subsequent pornography continued to marshal biting political and social critiques. Lynn Hunt’s work on French revolutionary pornography has revealed both the eagerness and the skill with which Jacobin pornographers deployed the genre as antiaristocratic invective, portraying its subjects as ‘impotent, riddled with venereal disease and given over to debauchery.’⁶ When leveled against Marie Antoinette, such caricatures became critical to undermining the patriarchal monarchy’s nationalist paradigm as they prompted people to ask how a king who ‘could not control his wife or even be sure he was the father of his children’ could claim his ‘subjects’ obedience’?⁷ In sharp contrast to Renaissance pornography’s furtive circulation, much Jacobin pornography circulated publicly and prolifically, becoming, in effect, a liaison between liberal politics and a public sphere to which revolutionary forces had long been denied access.⁸ By the end of the eighteenth century pornography had significantly undercut the credibility of aristocratic privilege and played a vital role in modernity’s emergence.

Yet even revisionist historians who have illuminated continental pornography’s political connotations remain haunted by the convention that ‘truly [sic] modern pornography,’ is defined as those ‘mass-produced texts or images devoted to the explicit description of sexual organs or activities with the sole aim of producing sexual arousal in the reader or viewer.’⁹ The apparent unshakability of this premodern/modern dyad has created serious problems for most scholars of eighteenth-century English literature who have little reason to suppose that any but those texts most rigidly adherent to the modern scopophilic definition could be construed as pornographic. As a result, historians of English literary culture between the Restoration and the French Revolution have tended to limit their studies of pornography to texts that either visually represent or graphically describe sexual acts, as does John Cleland’s classic pornographic novel, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748).

Yet it is precisely in terms of these familiar texts that the prevailing method of defining pornography begins to collapse. For modern pornography’s enabling conceit—its promise to consumers that they will be granted access to a pleasurable world of erotic conquest and consummation applies equally and easily to the novel’s exploration of private lives.¹⁰ Although both pornography and the novel clearly were among the discursive forms that shaped the modern individual, privatized and driven by desire and acquisitiveness, few scholars would concede that the two genres are the same in either method or intention.¹¹

If the sexualized pleasure of covert looking does not sufficiently distinguish either premodern or ‘truly modern’ pornography from other genres, what does? The question is far less esoteric than it seems superficially, particularly for those involved on both sides of the censorship debate. Indeed, I argue here that debate and polemic are precisely the features of pornography to which both literary and historical scholars need to attend more carefully. Pornography is not, as the premodern/modern dyad presumes defined by a specific content. Rather, it is a site of cultural contest, as Walter Kendrick has pointed out, ‘nam[ing] an argument, not a thing.’¹² As such, pornography suggests a significantly different set of questions than we have been accustomed to ask about it. The Bawdy Politic consequently asks what argument the pornographic body is being used to settle, rather than focusing on whether a given text is pornographic or merely titillating, erotic or obscene. Not only does this question shift our attention from pornography’s identity to its function, but it also has the added virtue of neutralizing charges of anachronism often leveled at studies of premodern and early modern sexualized representations whose forms appear very different from those of modern pornography. Unlike identity, function is a historically contingent category capable of acknowledging that the use to which a given genre might be put often changes in response to the political needs of the moment.¹³

One of the most striking uses to which this ‘functionalist’ insight has been put recently is Frances Ferguson’s effort to retheorize modern pornography outside the scopophilic model. Appropriating Katherine MacKinnon’s argument that ‘pornography is significant only insofar as it involves acts,’¹⁴ Ferguson contends that pornography differs from obscenity and erotica insofar as it is involved in the argument over who should have free and open ‘access to the group economies created by … environments’ like work and school.¹⁵ Pornography, Ferguson continues, ‘reread[s] the minimal agreements of modern public spaces as if they ought always to resolve themselves into private compacts.’¹⁶ In other words, what makes sexual representations pornographic is that such representations, otherwise understood to be intimate and personal, are introduced into a space otherwise acknowledged to be public and shared. Thus intruding on public spaces, pornography effectively eliminates the very ‘publicness of the public sphere’ as the intimate and personal nature of sex overwhelms the corporate, social relationships ordinarily understood to govern such spaces.¹⁷ For instance, pornography’s logic of social interaction presumes that anyone objecting to the appearance of its sexual representations in the workplace has a personal conflict with his or her coworkers, not that rules guaranteeing full and equal access to places of employment have been violated. As such, pornography is designed to corrode any sense of shared identity or social obligation by pitting coworkers against one another.

The implications of Ferguson’s work are profound. Most obviously, her insights help delimit the argument over enfranchisement that pornographic bodies are used to settle as they prompt us to ask whether a given sexualized representation limits access to social institutions through which political power is allotted like work, school, and government, rather than whether the representation is explicit or obscene. More critically for this project, Ferguson also charges us to recognize that pornography itself is a material practice linked to the public policies that organize and define social relationships of power, present and past.¹⁸ For in identifying pornography as the site of an argument about the limits of democracy, she opens up the complex tapestry of historical formation, returning us to the politics of seventeenth-century England, not eighteenth-century France.

Sharon Achinstein, Ann Hughes, Lois Potter, James Grantham Turner, and Susan Wiseman have made convincing cases that English political pornograp...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Women and Gender in the Early Modern World
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Bawdy Politic and English Common Law
• 3 The Specter of Corporate Identity and 1668
• 4 Monstrous Mothers: Property and the Common Law
• 5 Jades at Livery and Other Prostitutes
• 6 A Citizen’s Duty and ‘Common Justice’
• 7 Coda
• Bibliography
• Index