Fanny Hill - Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
“Fanny Hill
– Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure” has been touted as one of the first
pornographic novels in history, but I am inclined to think that humankind has
always been obsessing about sex and so these stories has always been around.
For every new media that has appeared, pornography has been there from the
beginning, so why not novels?
“Fanny Hill”
is a first person narrative in retrospect of a woman, Fanny, who comes into the
city from some countryside backwater very young and all innocent. She is
quickly picked up by a brothel who can make a lot of money on selling her
virginity. This backfires when Fanny runs away with a young and handsome client
with whom she starts a very sexual relationship. Some month later he is
suddenly sent off to sea. Fanny becomes a held woman by an older nobleman,
which lasts until he ditches her and Fanny now becomes a member of a high-class
brothel until eventually she gets reunited with her original boyfriend.
This is not
a terrible interesting narrative, but it also merely serves as a vehicle for
describing Fanny’s many sexual encounters. You might have thought from the
above that this would be a terrible social indignant story about trafficking,
but rather on the contrary, Fanny embraces and enjoys all her sexual activity.
To her this is exciting stuff and something she craves and so, without shame,
guilt or regret she tells us of all her adventures.
It is surprisingly
liberal and certainly at the entirely opposite end of the spectrum of the
contemporary Samuel Richardson. Gone are all the prudence and talk of virtue
and the scare of sexuality. As a twenty-first century reader I cannot help feeling
that it is liberating reading this after all the constrained morality of contemporary
writers. You easily get the feeling that back then people where so estranged to
their sexuality it is a wonder they had children at all.
But then
again, reading this you get a nagging suspicion that this book is not about
presenting liberal ideas about sexuality, but simply sexual gratification. The
girls are always pretty, the men are very well endowed and the sexual act
always ends in mutual orgasm through penetration. We also manage to cover most
varieties of sexual encounters through orgies, cosplay, bdsm, rape fantasies,
female homosexuality, you name it. Only male homosexuality is frowned upon.
This is all recognizable from modern pornography and likely therefore serves
the same purpose.
As most
such texts it quickly gets boring. Sex is just one of those things that are
more interesting to do than to observe and it quickly gets repetitive. The
author tried to vary the language and consistently uses metaphors for the sexual
acts with great variety, but fundamentally it is the same thing happening over
and over again. Fortunately, this is not a long book.
The story
about the book is more interesting than the story itself. Through the centuries
this has been THE dirty book that people would look for or prosecute and it has
been at the center of much debate about sexuality and pornography. Incidentally
it was Fanny Hill that was instrumental in legalizing pornography in Denmark in
the sixties. If the ban on pornography had to be maintained then this book
should be outlawed, but the historical value of “Fanny Hill” made that absurd
and so the ban was lifted.
