SOURCE: "Fanny Hill and Materialism," in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1, Fall 1970, pp. 21-40.

… I felt every vessel in my frame dilate—The arteries beat all chearily together, and every power which sustained life performed it with so little friction, that 'twould have confounded the most physical precieuse in France: with all her materialism, she could scarce have called me a machine—

Laurence Sterne—Sentimental Journey

Fanny Hill presents an uncomfortable problem to both the theorist of pornography and the historian of literature; it has too broad a sense of social milieu and literary tradition for the writer interested in describing the "pure" elements of pomography as a literary genre, and it has too much erotic content for the literary historian to treat it with much seriousness. Its world is not so completely "hard core" as are the worlds of those nineteenth-century works that so obviously spring from it. The atmosphere of Fanny Hill is too exuberant and Fanny's character too vital for either to be part of that gray, repetitive world that Steven Marcus has named "pomotopia."

Now that Fanny Hill has been generally available for a few years and the first furor of its republication has died down, Cleland's work seems far more central to "above ground" trends in eighteenth-century literature and philosophy than could be previously appreciated. The particular aspect of Fanny Hill I would like to explore in this essay is the relation of the novel to the materialism that was part of the most advanced philosophical thought of Cleland's time—the philosophic naturalism more familiarly advocated by Helvetius, d'Holbach, and especially Julien Offray de la Mettrie in his l'Homme machine. I would like to entertain the hypothesis that there is some relation between the view of sexuality presented fictionally in Fanny Hill and the view of human nature presented in more discursive philosophical form by La Mettrie in l'Homme machine. Fanny Hill might then be interpreted not only as a polemical attack against Richardsonian ideals of moral and sexual nature, but also as a defense of the materialist view of human nature popularized by the publication of l'Homme machine only a little over a year before.¹

L 'Homme machine was published in Leyden late in 1747 and was quickly seized by the authorities. Although it was not immediately known that La Mettrie was the author, the secret came out rapidly and La Mettrie fled Holland in January of 1748, taking advantage of an invitation from Frederick the Great to come to Berlin. Meanwhile, his publisher, Elie Luzac, despite a promise to the authorities to deliver all copies for destruction, succeeded in clandestinely putting out two more editions in 1748. In Europe the book's success was rapid and lasting. It reached England soon after its first appearance. A first translation appeared in 1749 and two more in 1750; the first erroneously ascribed l'Homme machinie to the Marquis d'Argens, the second and third to La Mettrie.²

One difficulty in appreciating the importance of La Mettrie's work is our own lack of sympathy with the idea (or even the hypothesis) that man is essentially a machine. La Mettrie had no such problems. He believed the man-machine hypothesis could be humanistic, liberating, and a suppdrt for the uniqueness of the individual; and he says so in l Homme machine. But between us and La Mettrie rises a barrier of interchangeable parts and assembly lines. Our natural response to the word "'maclhine" or "meclhanical" is negative. Our mind's eye is clouded with images ultimately derived from Karel Capek's R.U.R. the endlessly identical marching soldiers in totalitarian Nx-ar maclhines. or the image originating in eighteenth-century georgic of the machine despoiling the garden. The maclinle is the robot, and both are inhuman; they neither feel, nor procreate, nor err, nor change. Each is the same as every other machine.³

If the word "machine" summons up ideas contrary to our general beliefs about human nature, it is even more inimical to our ideas of the erotic, either in life or literature. Bad sexuality is "mechanical" or "clinical," that is, devoid of life and feeling and emotion. Pornography is bad because it stimulates "mechanistic" responses, that is, responses without the alloy of either mind or will. Many recent theorists of the erotic argue that if, in a post-Freudian world, we recognize the role of sexuality in defining the self, we must also recognize that the erotic impulse is directly opposed to a scientific and materialistic society that stifles and destroys the self.⁴

Such responses will not do for a proper understanding of either La Mettrie or Cleland. The machines La Mettrie invokes are not the repetitive machines of industrialism, but the machines of wonder, like the duck and flute-player of Jacques Vaucanson, or the young writer and organ player of Pierre Jacquet-Droz.⁵ In order to appreciate how Fanny Hill may have emerged from a philosophical context in which the emphasis on the physiological and mechanical view of human nature was both liberating and individualizing, let us look for a moment at some of the topics discussed by La Mettrie in l' Homme machine.

La Mettrie begins his polemic by asserting that neither the Lockeans, nor the Leibnizians, nor the Cartesians have presented a compelling account of the nature of the soul. The true answers, he asserts, are to be found only in those writers who build their knowledge of man on a basis of physical fact; those who proceed from the metaphysical to the physical have caused all the trouble and confusion. The mind and the body, argues La Mettrie, are only different forms of the same substance. Their interconnections prove this. La Mettrie cites example after example of the dependence of the mental on the physical and the control that bodily events can have over the mind. He does not believe that the mental is reducible to the physical; but they are intimately interrelated and always proceed together: "Les divers Etats de l'ame sont donc toujours corrélatifs a ceux du corps" (p. 158). Despite the usually anti-psychological implications of the assertion that man is a machine, the great majority of La Mettrie's observations are directed toward psychological explanation. He argues, for example, that an understanding of normal fear and confusion or abnormal hypochondria and hysteria is impossible if one holds to the Cartesian belief in two separate substances for mind and body, but more feasible if one believes that mind is a more highly organized form of body.⁶ Even the ability to innovate in speech, which Descartes reserved for man, must in La Mettrie's hypothesis be an ability that at least in principle can be taught to apes. Language, which La Mettrie defines as the ability to manipulate symbols, is all that separates man from apes, and even that barrier is not insurmountable: "Qu'etoit l'homme, avant l'invention des Mots & la connoissance des Langues? qui avec beaucoup moins d'instinct naturel, que les autres" (p. 162).⁷

How, then, is La Mettrie using a word like "soul"? Writers since Descartes had tended to concentrate on the separate realms of extension and spirit, rather than on that which connected the realms, the soul, situated according to Descartes, in the pineal gland. For this reason, there could be a double tradition of Cartesianism, in which both atheistic and orthodox natural scientists could equally proclaim their discipleship. But La Mettrie is not interested in defining the soul as a spiritual faculty that rules the lower being, or in assigning it to a specific place in the body. Instead, he considers the soul to be the principle of organization that unites body and mind. In Historie naturelle de l'dme (1745), he had elaborated the meaning of soul along a more spiritual line. Within 1'Homme machine, in accordance with his general argument, the concept has become more physicalized. Soul frequently seems coextensive with words like "organisation," "ressort," "matrice," and "imagination." "Organisation," of course, is a general word of connection. Along with "ressort" it invokes the Cartesian image of the body as a clock, with La Mettrie's special twist to the basic metaphor: "Le corps humain est une Machine qui monte elle-meme ses ressorts; vivante image du mouvement perpetuel" (p. 154). God is not required either as watchmaker or winder:

… I'Ame n'est qu'un principe de mouvement, ou une Partie materielle sensible du Cerveau, qu'on peut, sans craindre l'erreur, regarder comme un ressort principal de toute la Machine … (p. 186).⁸

Imagination and matrice are more interesting synonyms for soul. La Mettrie frequently writes as if soul and mind were similar: "L'Ame n'est donc qu'un vain terme dont on n'a point d'idee, & dont un bon Esprit ne doit se servir que pour nommer la partie qui pense en nous" (p. 180). In what Aram Vartanian calls "the first radical rehabilitation of the imaginative faculty in his epoch," La Mettrie then associates thought with imagination. Imagination makes connections, and these connections define man's true knowledge:

Je me sers toujours du mot imaginer, parce que je crois que tout s'imagine, & que toutes les parties de l'Ame peuvent etre justement reduites a la seule imagination, que les forme toutes … (p. 165).

But La Mettrie's originality does not stop here, for the most fascinating aspect of his use of imagination is its association with matrice. Previous metaphors of scientific discovery might invoke images of divine illumination or logical conclusion. La Mettrie's metaphors are most often sexual. Vartanian remarks on the fact that "… scientific and erotic curiosity seem for him to function together in a sort of alliance, each serving to strengthen and stimulate the other" (p. 32). And La Mettrie's metaphoric language is allied with his basic theme of the strong interconnection between imagination and sexuality. His metaphor for scientific insight is sexual penetration; his metaphor for the development of ideas is human generation and birth. The imagination is the womb (matrice) of ideas, and he calls the mind "cette matrice de l'esprit." Matrice as womb and matrice as matrix (of ideas) is a double meaning that La Mettrie plays upon throughout l'Homme machine. In one section, for example, he argues that organization is the first merit of man, and then must come education:

II est aussi impossible de donner une seule idée a un Homme, prive de tous les sens, que de faire un Enfant a une Femme, a laquelle la Nature auroit pousse la distraction jusqu'a oublier de faire une Vulve, comme je l'ai vu dans une, qui n'avoit ni Fente, ni Vagin, ni Matrice, & qui pour cette raison fut demariee apres dix ans de mariage (p. 167).⁹

The association La Mettrie makes between sexuality and imagination, between sexual penetration and scientific insight, calls into question the traditional role to which sexuality had been assigned by philosophers. The earlier attitude emphasized the opposition between the cognitive operations of the mind and the distracting and trivial operations of the body. In more extreme though still familiar terms, sexual motives impelled the search for forbidden knowledge, the realm of evil and the devil. The body in general and sexuality in particular worked against man's effort to achieve wisdom and transcendence.¹⁰

La Mettrie uses sexual examples as well as sexual metaphors. Sexuality is so important in his language because it is central to his philosophy. If man has achieved so much more than animals because of his larger brain, he has concomitantly lost in instinct what he has gained in organization and understanding. Man must relearn his instincts in order to live fully and most humanly. And the instincts that need the most relearning are the sexual instincts, because they are so closely allied to the force of imaginative coherence and the exuberance of both physical and mental creativity:

… c'est [I'imagination] encore qui ajoute a la tendresse d'un coeur amoureux, le piquant attrait de la volupte. Elle la fait germer dans le Cabinet du Philosophe, & du Pedant poudreux; elle forme enfin les Savans, comme les Orateurs & les Poetes (pp. 165-166).

Mais si le cerveau est a la fois bien organise & bien instruit, c'est une terre feconde parfaitement ensemencee, qui produit le centuple de ce qu'elle a requ (p. 167).

La Mettrie's emphasis on sexuality and the idea of the body as machine is for him, as for many who followed his ideas, a liberation from theories of the inferiority of body to mind and from the neo-Cartesian orthodoxy that accepted the mechanical nature of the physical world but reserved final respect and adoration for the realm of spirit and soul. The true view of man, asserts La Mettrie, emphasizes both his physical and mental nature. Each man-machine is for him unique. Once the machine hypothesis has restored to man his human nature, political or social tyranny based on man's "divine part" will vanish.

Cartesian dualism furnished a philosophical foundation for physiological research. But the postulate of the two separate substances of body and spirit allowed the same metaphysical distrust of the body that had always existed. La Mettrie's machine hypothesis allows the body a dignity to equal the mind's. Instead of man being a Hamlet crawling between heaven and earth or a Gulliver whose disgust with his "lower" self finally leads him to reject the human race, La Mettrie's man, his mind and body part of the same being, could now rise even higher. "Pourquoi faire double ce qui n'est evidemment qu'un?" Like human beings in sexual intercourse the body and mind "se reunissent toutes suivant leur nature." "L'ame et le corps s'endorment ensemble," La Mettrie writes in another place. What more appropriate transition to Fanny Hill?

Much more factual information must be discovered about Cleland's life before any question of the direct influence of 1 'Homme machine on Fanny Hill can be resolved. Cleland's activities before the publication of Fanny Hill are vague at best. He was appointed a writer for the East India Company at Bombay on 10 February 1731 and took up official service there on 19 July 1731. He rose steadily in salary and rank, becoming Secretary for Portuguese Affairs, and later Secretary to the Bombay Council in January of 1739. He left Bombay sometime about 20 September 1740 and arrived back in England shortly before 26 March 1741, when he appeared before the East India Company Board of Directors. Why he left Bombay seems more obscure, although perhaps it was due to reports of the troubles of his father, William, who was a friend of Pope and died 21 September 1741. Cleland's activities until the publication of Fanny Hill are less certain. David Foxon reports that the first advertisements for Fanny Hill he has been able to find are in the General Advertiser for 21 November 1748 (volume one) and in the London Evening Post for 14-16 February 1749 (volume two). But according to the records of the Beggar's Benison Society of Anstruther, Scotland, a work called Fanny Hill was read at a gathering in 1737.¹¹

The special relation I would argue between Fanny Hill and the views of La Mettrie (including the actual use of the phrase "man-machine") is strong proof against a fully conceived Fanny Hill in 1737.¹² At best, the earlier date, if not spurious, might mark the appearance of a primitive version of the novel's earlier parts. If I might speculate further, perhaps this early version was then laid aside until the appearance of l 'Homme machine furnished a polemical framework for Cleland's earlier and fragmentary jeu d 'esprit. The perfunctory structure of the work supports this contention. The novel is divided into two letters, both directed to a female correspondent, to whom Fanny is describing and explaining her life.¹³ In the second letter most of what might be called direct references to La Mettrie's ideas appear, although there is not an abrupt shift in attitude from the first to the second parts of the novel. The change, in fact, could be interpreted as part of Fanny's increased awareness.

Perhaps the most striking indication of Cleland's possible assimilation of the principles of philosophic naturalism is Fanny's constant use of the word "machine" to refer to the penis. As far as the OED and Eric Partridge can enlighten us, this usage seems to begin in English with Cleland, and he may also have been a precursor of its usage in French. One could argue that Cleland is only adapting a common military usage ("apparatus, appliance, instrument," reports the OED with a 1650 first reference) to his eighteenth-century version of the Renaissance topos of the siege of love.¹⁴ But Cleland's image derives more directly from Descartes's characterization of the bete-machine, to cite the OED again, a being "without life, consciousness, or will." Cleland's usage again seems to be individual and unique, the two references cited in the OED being Robert Boyle's description of beasts (1692) and Alexander Hamilton's of soldiers (1770).¹⁵

Obviously then Cleland is implying something with his use of "machine" beyond Fanny's practice of elaborate euphemism and elegant variation. Fanny may actually be expressing a genuine wonder at the physiological reality of the human. body and the philosophic statement of this reality contained in mechanistic language.¹⁶ In incidents reminiscent of La Mettrie's examples, Fanny realizes that the body can make demands on the mind that the mind cannot resist. When Charles, her first lover (with whom she will be reunited and married at the end of the novel), begins to caress her, "My fears, however, made me mechanically close my thighs; but the very touch of his hand insinuated between them, disclosed them and opened a way for the main attack" (p. 41). Sexual relations can be the perfect human instance of Cartesian choc, the direct collision between entities that defines the causal relations of the universe. But Cleland, like La Mettrie and unlike Descartes, continually emphasizes that, at least in sexual experience, human beings have as little consciousness or will as the "bete-machine." Mr. H—, one of Fanny's later lovers, is not so personally appealing as Charles. Yet the effect of intercourse is the same:

… he soon gave nature such a powerful summons down to her favourite quarters that she could not longer refuse repairing thither; all my animal spirits then rush'd mechanically to that center of attraction, and presently, inly warmed, and stirred as I was beyond bearing, I lost all restraint … (p. 75).

In her narration, Fanny has an abundance of life and an acute sense of the world around her. She can make satiric comments about London society, briefly and effectively sketching someone she meets. But when sexual excitement begins, she seems to lose both will and self. Is Cleland therefore arguing against La-Mettrie and asserting that sexuality is a threat to mind and personality?

In descriptive terms, Cleland does recognize that sexual indulgence invites a loss of self-consciousness and self-control. The body itself, defined in the sexual moment only by its physiological makeup, responds mechanically, like a mere machine. In an important scene in the second letter, Fanny goes along with her friend Louisa, who wants to lure "Good-natured Dick" into their rooms, to see if the half-witted delivery boy had been sexually oversupplied by nature for his mental shortchanging. Fanny, as she does so frequently, will only watch. But Louisa indulges fully, and the effect is more than she anticipated:

… she went wholly out of her mind into that favourite part of her body, the whole intenseness of which was so fervously fill'd and employ'd; there she alone existed, all lost in those delirious transports, those extasies of the senses … In short, she was now as mere a machine as much wrought on, and had her emotions as little at her own command as the natural himself … (pp. 188-189).

If we take passages like this in purely descriptive terms, Cleland's view of sexuality is close to Richardson's. Both believe that the sexual instinct can be a threat to the control of the mind. For Pamela and Clarissa the loss of chastity threatens the loss of all morality and self-integrity. In this way, Cleland is much closer to Richardson than he is to Fielding, for whom sexuality is neither so momentous nor so problematic.

Cleland therefore proceeds from the same assumption about the importance of sexuality as Richardson. But his conclusions are quite different. Richardson seems to assert that sexuality is a threat from outside the "real" self. Cleland, on the other hand, uses the metaphor of military contest to express the engagement between man and woman rather than the despair of a riven self. Richardson further implies that sexuality is a looming horror from the primitive self that the needs of society and morality should have succeeded in repressing. Like La Mettrie, Cleland presents a more integrative view: instead of being a threat to the mind, the body, when its nature is properly understood, joins with the mind in the total human character. Fanny is fascinated by the physiology of sexual reactions not merely because Cleland wants to stimulate his readers but also because, in the development of her own character, she wants to know. Sexuality is a possible and much neglected way into knowledge of the self. Cleland emphasizes that it is not the only way: Fanny often loses her self-consciousness in the sexual act, but she uses the experience as part of a search for more consciousness. Louisa's transformation into a mere machine seems closely related to her previously expressed belief that her human nature may be thoroughly searched through masturbation:

Here I gave myself up to the old insipid privy shifts of my self-viewing, self-touching, self-enjoying, in fine, to all the means of self-knowledge I could devise, in search of the pleasure that fled before me, and tantalized with that unknown something that was out of my reach … (p. 125).

Louisa's exclusive preoccupation with her sexuality therefore acts as a foil to Fanny's more comprehensive view.

Perhaps a whimsical answer to the questions "Why pornography in the eighteenth century?" and "Why Fanny Hill?" might involve the relation of the materialist viewpoint to the nature of pornography itself. Cleland may see pornography as another didactic form to stand beside both satire and the novel in the first half of the eighteenth century. Pornography is in fact a surer method. The stimulus of reading a scene in Fanny Hill makes in the reader's own nature the point made in the text. The reader may be moved to reconsider the merits of stoicism, reevaluate the powers of the mind to control the body, reread his Descartes, and think again of the dividing line between man and the bite-machine. By a species of imitative form, pornography enforces and answers the hypothetical question of La Mettrie:

N'est-ce pas machinalement qu'agissent tous les Sphincters de la Vessie, du Rectum &c.? que le Coeur a une contraction plus forte que tout autre muscle? que les muscles erecteurs font dresser La Verge dans l'Homme, comme dans les Animaux qui s'en battent le ventre; & meme dans l'enfant, capable d'erection, pour peu que cette partie soit irritee? (p. 183).

Despite the loss of self and mental control that Cleland describes, he, again like La Mettrie, does not consider the emphasis on the sexual side of human nature to be reductive. Both Cleland and La Mettrie seem to deny the moral and theological implications in Descartes's association of body and beast: the beast is a machine because it lacks a soul; man without a soul would be a mere beast. Instead they consider their emphasis on the body to be positive and humanizing. In order to understand human nature more fully, one must first understand the sexual and physiological side of it. In her own way Fanny is presenting a program of action to supplement the polemic of La Mettrie's first paragraphs: trust the writers who begin with the body and then move to metaphysics, not those who go the other way. Yet sexuality is only a beginning. Body without mind, in another favorite image from Fanny Hill, is like food without savor. In mind lust is transmuted into love, and, as Fanny says, love is "the Attic salt of enjoyment."

Nowhere in Fanny Hill is Cleland's commitment to both the man-machine view of human nature and to the dignity that it can restore to the individual more apparent than in the scene in which Fanny and Louisa experiment on "Good-natured Dick." Dick is "withal, pretty featur'd," although his clothes and general appearance are in "so ragged a plight, that he might have disputed points of shew with e'er a heathen philosopher of them all" (p. 184). Dick is "good-natured" and a "natural" in the sense of those words that most interested both La Mettrie and Cleland. Louisa invites him upstairs for his payment and he responds with confusion. Fanny flirts with him, and watches his cheeks begin to glow: "The emotion in short of animal pleasure glar'd distinctly in the simpleton's countenance" (p. 185). When Fanny leads him further, her language emphasizes the natural level at which she aims (and may even allude to La Mettrie's next work l'Homme plante, published at Potsdam in 1748):

My fingers too had now got within reach of the true, the genuine sensitive plant, which instead of shrinking from the touch, joys to meet it, and swells and vegetates under it … (p. 185).¹⁷

Dick's "plant" is no disappointment: "Nature, in short had done so much for him in those parts, that she perhaps held herself acquitted in doing so little for his head" (p. 186). When Louisa initiates further stages of the experiment, both the language and the themes are once again strikingly reminiscent of La Mettrie in I'Homme machine:

… she presently determined to risk a trial of parts with the idiot, who was by this time nobly inflam'd for her purpose, by all the irritations we had used to put the principles of pleasure effectually in motion, and to wind up the springs of its organ to their supreme pitch; and it stood accordingly stiff and straining, ready to burst with the blood and spirits that swelled it … to a bulk! (p. 186).

The "irritations" that Fanny speaks of are not those we commonly call irritations. They are, however, very close to the scientific definition of the principle of irritability that Vartanian asserts is "one of the most original and impressive features of 1'Homme machine" (p. 20). As Vartanian explains, La Mettrie brilliantly proposed that irritability was "a general property of living substance," even though his examples dealt only with muscular contraction. "Contractility was, in his time, the only experimentally known phase of the irritable process." But La Mettrie's frequent use of erection as an example of mechanism does not seem wasted on Cleland.

A further reflection of La Mettrie's language in this short passage is the phrase, "to wind up the springs of its organ," which implies the metaphor of the body as a clock, held together by "ressorts." The final phrase (the ellipsis is Cleland's own) is so close to some lines of La Mettrie, that I am almost willing to drop my tentativeness and assert direct influence. La Mettrie is speaking of the interplay of the muscles and the imagination when the body reacts to the image of beauty,

qui en excite un autre, lequel etoit fort assoupi, quand l'imagination l'a eveille: & comment cela, si ce n'est par le desordre & le tumulte du sang & des esprits, qui galopent avec une promptitude extraordinaire, & vont gonfler les corps caverneux? (p. 183)¹⁸

The importance of this scene is not exhausted by the possible parallels I have already mentioned. Louisa leads Dick to bed, "which he joyfully gave way to, under the incitations of instinct and palpably deliver'd up to the goad of desire" (p. 187). The two come together, and the great size of the "master-tool" of the "natural" causes Louisa to cry out in pain.

But it was too late: the storm was up and force was on her to give way to it; for now the man-machine, strongly work'd upon by the sensual passion, felt so manfully his advantages and superiority, felt withal the sting of pleasure so intolerable, that maddening with it, his joys began to assume a character of furiousness which made me tremble for the too tender Louisa (p. 187).

As she has before, Fanny thinks for a moment that the man might be too much for the woman, but Fanny also observes how the awakening of sexual feeling can be ennobling, even for one perhaps too deficient in mind to take advantage of it:

He seemed, at this juncture, greater than himself; his countenance, before so void of meaning, or expression, now grew big with the importance of the act he was upon. In short, it was not now that he was to be play'd the fool with. But, what is pleasant enough, I myself was aw'd into a sort of respect for him, by the comely terrors his motions dressed him in: his eyes shooting sparks of fire; his face glowing with ardours that gave another life to it; his teeth churning, his whole frame agitated with a raging ungovernable impetuosity: all sensibly betraying the formidable fierceness with which the genial instinct acted upon him (p. 187).¹⁹

In this passage and the descriptions that follow, Cleland adroitly keeps in solution two views of human nature that more frequently separate. Like La Mettrie, he is calling a truce between mechanism and vitalism, almost before the battle has really begun. Dick is the creature solely of his body, "instinct-ridden as he was" (p. 188), and Louisa too under the second onslaught of the "brute-machine" becomes "as mere a machine." The reference to brute-machine seemingly reinforces the reductive aspect of the sexuality. But Fanny has observed also the transfiguration of the half-wit in the grip of sexual passion; he is discovering an essential part of his human nature. There is a vitality and warmth in true sexuality that can liberate human nature, even when neither mind nor reason, soul nor spirit, is sufficient.

Both Fanny and Cleland believe that in the ideal sexual relationship the mind and body have equal share. Fanny's last lover before she is reunited with Charles, her first, is a "rational pleasurist";

… he it was, who first taught me to be sensible that the pleasures of the mind were superior to those of the body; at the same time, that they were so far from obnoxious to, or incompatible with each other, that besides the sweetness in the variety and transition, the one serv'd to exalt and perfect the taste of the other to a degree that the sense alone can never arrive at. (pp. 199-200)

Fanny has viewed her own adventures retrospectively through this union of body and mind that allows each its full role. She enjoys sex for its own sake, but her most pleasurable encounters mix body with mind:

… what an immense difference did I feel between this impression of a pleasure merely animal, and struck out of the collision of the sexes by a passive bodily effect from that sweet fury, that rage of active delights which crowns the enjoyments of a mutual love-passion, where two hearts, tenderly and truly united, club to exalt the joy, and give it spirit and soul that bids defiance to that end which mere momentary desires generally terminate in, when they die of a surfeit of satisfaction (p. 75).

Such speculations are common for Fanny, "whose natural philosophy all resided in the favourite center of sense," although not for her lover, Mr. H—, "whom no distinctions of that sort seemed to disturb." The "active delights" raise the "passive bodily effect" to full realization in the same way that Fanny's meditation and explanation make sense of her sexual adventures. And, as experience alone is nothing for her without an interpretation of that experience, so it is only in love that the physical and the mental are truly combined. Fanny's love for Charles is "a passion in which soul and body were concentre'd, and left me no room for any other relish of life but love" (p. 62). Her ability to experience as well as to meditate gives a vitality and exuberance to her character that affirms the rehumanizing program behind Cleland's sexual emphasis.

Fanny Hill is therefore much more than a piece of pornography whose only intent is mercenary.²⁰ In many ways it appears to be a detailed polemic in support of some of the most advanced philosophic doctrines of its time. If one test of a major novel is the extent to which it experiments with and changes the received assumptions of novelistic form, Fanny Hill surely qualifies for consideration. Cleland recognizes the unique relationship possible in erotic literature between the reader and the work. In Fanny Hill he raises this relationship to the level of artistic consciousness by making it not only a criticism of the Richardsonian epistolary method, but also an exploration of the forces of mind and body in human character. The erotic scenes in Fanny Hill, instead of being only stimulating, are both stimulating and an essential part of "the soft laboratory of love" in which Fanny herself mingles the correlative impulses of body and mind. Our view of what Cleland has achieved has become unfortunately clouded, less by the censorship of Fanny Hill than by the way in which Cleland has become the victim of his imitators, who repeat scene, motif, and style with no understanding that, when Cleland used them, they were something more than a cabinet of stylized gestures.

Fanny's world is larger than the merely sexual, as she herself is the first to point out. The natural freedom of sexuality also implies a natural world of social relations, which is behind Fanny's jibes at upper-class London life. Cleland here again resembles Richardson in his emphasis on the egalitarian possibilities of sexuality. But, as before, Richardson and Cleland come to opposite conclusions. Egalitarian sexuality is a threat in Pamela because it threatens the class lines of society and the social order itself. Like the medieval antifeminists, Richardson considers the sexual impulse to be primarily reductive, with its origin in the devil. In Richardson's terms, however, the devil is an aristocrat, and the licentious aristocracy is forfeiting its natural right to rule by allowing a lust that cuts across the barriers of class and upsets the rules of morality. Pamela's marriage to Mr. B. breaks the class divisions in the name of morality, although with the socially subversive implication that morally all human beings are equal.

In Cleland's world of class, it is sexuality that makes all men and women equal. The naked body implies the naked heart. Fanny comments derisively on "the false, ridiculous, refinements of the great," so inferior to the natural and unalloyed joys that can be found with people of lesser rank. Here are the first articulated beginnings of the sexual and moral primitivism that is so much more elaborately developed later in the century. Mr. H—'s servant Will gives Fanny more real pleasure (physical and mental) than Mr. H—'s "loftier qualifications of birth, fortune and sense" (p. 94). La Mettrie may retain his masculine point of view even while praising the exuberant sexual nature that had previously been associated primarily with women. But Cleland through Fanny is transmuted into the first feminist. Fanny may bear a love for Charles so great that she yearns for him in what seems to be a fairly submissive way. But when she discovers him bereft of status and fortune, she likes him even better, "broken down to his naked personal merit" (p. 206).

Since sexuality in Cleland is so invariably part of the natural, one might entertain the idea that a major figure behind the growth of eighteenth-century erotic literature both in England and France is John Locke. In addition to the mechanical metaphor, the most frequent descriptive image in Fanny Hill is the paysage erotisé or, perhaps more accurately, the corps paysager. The natural world of the body is an unspoiled Eden. The girls whom Fanny admires have healthy country looks. Sexuality at Mrs. Cole's establishment is edenic and countrified. Her clients "would at any time leave a sallow, washy-painted duchess on her hands, for a ruddy, healthy, firm flesh'd country maid" (p. 110).

The authors and supporters of this secret institution would, in the height of their humours, style themselves the restorers of the golden age and its simplicity of pleasures, before their innocence became so injustly branded with the names of guilt and shame (p. 108).

The language of mechanism and the invocation of nature are therefore total complements in Fanny Hill, although later pornographic works, in which great machines penetrate mossy grots, have undoubtedly lost this kind of understanding. In line with his attack against the Cartesian assumption that the bête-machine was without feeling and his support of La Mettrie's belief in the soul of the man-machine, Cleland seems to reflect Lockean ideas about the purity of natural impulses in the state of nature, and his egalitarian motif also may have Lockean roots. Bolingbroke argued against the Lockean state of nature because natural equality undercut the idea of a hierarchical society. Cleland's natural world of sexuality obviously has similarities to the "pornotopia" that Steven Marcus discovered in nineteenth-century pornography. But Cleland's sexuality is related to a vital social and cultural context, however ideal it may be, whereas "pornotopia" remains hermetic and self-justifying. "Pornotopia" may be defined, in fact, as the innovations of Fanny Hill forced by censorship and by familiarity into dull repetition, the unique machine now turned out by assembly-lines.

Cleland invokes the natural body and the natural landscape in a deliberately natural use of language. Fanny is conscious of language as a problem, excuses herself "for having, perhaps, too much affected the figurative style," and apologizes to her correspondent:

I imagined, indeed, that you would have been cloy'd and tired with uniformity of adventures and expressions, inseparable from a subject of this sort, whose bottom, or groundwork being, in the nature of things, eternally one and the same, whatever variety of forms and modes the situations are susceptible of, there is no escaping a repetition of near the same images, the same figures, the same expressions … (p. 105).

To remedy this cloying, Fanny calls upon the "imagination and sensibility" of her correspondent to supplement her work, in a manner very similar to Fielding's demands in Tom Jones that the reader fill in his own idea of feminine beauty when Fielding mentions Sophia Western. The inability of words to express the sexual experience either fully or adequately is most apparent when the subject is closest to nature:

No! Nothing in nature could be of a beautifuller cut; then, the dark umbrage of the downy springmoss that over-arched it bestowed, on the luxury of the landscape, a touching warmth, a tender finishing, beyond the expression of words, or even the paint of thought (p. 133).

Cleland contrasts the vitality of nature with the corrupt sophistications of society and the spurious niceties of art. Phoebe's labia, Fanny remarks, "vermilioning inwards exprest a small rubid line in sweet miniature, such as Guido 's touch of colouring could never attain to the life or delicacy of (p. 37). In the same way Charles's parts are

surely superior to those nudities furnish'd by the painters, statuaries, or any art, which are purchas'd at immense prices; whilst the sight of them in actual life is scarce sovereignly tasted by any but the few whom nature has endowed with a fire of imagination, warmly pointed by a truth of judgement to the springhead, the originals of beauty, of nature's unequall'd composition, above all imitation of art, or the reach of wealth to pay their price (p. 54).

Penises are compared to ivory columns and breasts to marble so that their actual superiority to these things of art may be clear: "… a well-formed fulness of bosom, that had such an effect on the eye as to seem flesh hardening into marble, of which it emulated the polished gloss, and far surpassed even the whitest, in the life and lustre of its colours, white veined with blue" (p. 136). Once again, a phrase of La Mettrie's in l'Homme machine seems apposite, another of La Mettrie's paeans to the imagination:

Par elle, par son pinceau flatteur, le froid squelette de la Raison prend des chairs vives & vermeilles; par elle les Sciences fleurissent, les Arts s'embellissent, les Bois parlent, les Echos soupirent, les Rochers pleurent, le Marbre respire, tout prend vie parmi les corps inanimes (p. 165).

Many of the themes that I have found in Fanny Hill sound much like those usually associated with sentimentalism: the truth of feelings and instincts, the natural as the basic part of human nature, the superiority of nature to art, the inadequacy of language, and social egalitarianism. This is no error. Fanny Hill is a storehouse of sentimental themes that achieve full expression and circulation only in the 1760s and 1770s. Cleland looks forward to Sterne, the Smollett of Humphry Clinker, and the Diderot of Le Reve de d'Alembert much more than he looks back to Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. But unlike the self-conscious sentimentality of Sterne or the less self-aware sentimentality of Henry Mackenzie, sentiment in Cleland's Fanny Hill moves comfortably in complement to sexuality. La Mettrie's integration of sexuality and imagination and Cleland's of sexuality and sentiment are beautifully articulated accounts of previously inarticulate forces in the human personality. But the balance, at least in English literature, does not seem to last very long. Part of the melancholy in Tristram Shandy and the fun in Sentimental Journey is the association of Toby's sentiment with his impotence and Yorick's sentiment with his prurience.

As true first-generation philosophers, Cleland and La Mettrie share an optimism about man's ability to deal with his sexual nature once he has recognized it. Sterne deals with the same themes of imagination, sexuality, and sentiment. But for him they have become much more problematic. Toby retreats from his own body and feelings into the artifice of history, the reconstructed Battle of Namur, while Yorick refuses to acknowledge the frequently salacious impulse beneath his sentimental sightseeing. Yorick constantly digs at the materialists. He has emotions that "could not be accounted for from any combination of matter and motion." He is positive that he has a soul despite what the materialists say. But all his philosophy, like that of the misanthropic Matthew Bramble in the first parts of Humphry Clinker, seems the projection of his inability to understand the nature of his own body and how it affects his mind and feelings. Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling (1771) carries this divorce of "feeling" from physicality even further. Sterne makes the difficult relation between emotions and bodily feeling part of his theme. But Mackenzie indicates that the highest form of feeling has no physical dimension whatsoever. The purity of the emotional relationship between Harley, his hero, and Miss Walton, is ratified by their lack of physical contact, and Harley's death occurs at just the moment when they might finally be married.²¹ Somewhere between the exuberant blend of sensation and sentiment celebrated by La Mettrie and Cleland has fallen the shadow of this eighteenth-century version of Petrarchan love. Sexuality has once again become a force that reduces human nature. In the late 1740s, l'Homme machine and Fanny Hill detailed a liberating combination of human imagination and bodily feeling that turned its face against centuries of philosophical subordination of body to mind. By the 1770s this potentially revolutionary force had become a secular religion of mere gesture, in which the only approved response of the body to a situation that involved human feeling was an interminable down-pouring of tears.

Notes

¹ The difficult problem of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century origins of pornography, as distinguished from bawdy or erotic literature in general, has been broached by David Foxon in Libertine Literature in England, 1660-1745 (New Hyde Park, New York, 1965). Foxon's book also includes a detailed account of the publication and prosecution of Fanny Hill.

² Aram Vartanian, La Mettrie's l'Homme machine: A Study in the Origins of an Idea (Princeton, 1960), pp. 6-8, 137-138. My debt to Vartanian's thorough and subtle work will be apparent in the following pages. Further references to it will be included in the text.

³ In Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (New York, 1960), Raymond Williams comments frequently on the changing meaning of words as an index to the quality of change between eras. See especially "A Note on 'Organic'," pp. 281-282, in which Williams dates the distinction between "organic" and "mechanical" from Burke and Coleridge.

⁴ Susan Sontag in "The Pornographic Imagination," Partisan Review, 2 (1967), 195-196, follows French theorists in tracing the connection between machinery and pornographic eroticism to Sade:

Sade's ideas—of the person as a "thing" or an "object," of the body as a machine and of the orgy as an inventory of the hopefully indefinite possibilities of several machines in collaboration with each other—seems mainly designed to make possible an endless, non-culminating kind of ultimately affectless activity.

Georges Bataille, whom Miss Sontag frequently cites, images the contrast in the picture of a naked girl on a bicycle: "le spectacle irritant, theoriquement sale, d'un corps nu et chausse sur la machine" Histoire de l 'oeil (Paris, 1967), p. 37.

⁵ For photographs of these "automata" and a history of machines that concentrates more on wonder than on uniformity, see K. G. Pontus Hulten, The Machine as seen at the End of the Mechanical Age (New York, 1968), pp. 20-21.

⁶ It is intriguing that a century usually characterized by its desire to reduce mystery to intelligibility could contain among its greatest empiricists men so interested in the diseases of mind and the vagaries of imagination. One example of this fascination may be the growing importance of doctors in the English novel, not as satiric butts for their use of jargon (as in Fielding), but as abettors of a pervasive hypochondria (as in Sterne and Smollett). Within a more clinical context Michel Foucault in Madness and Civilization (New York, 1965) argues that madness in the eighteenth century served to identify the outsider (and by implication the "normal" society) in much the same way that leprosy had done in the Middle Ages. For his discussion of hysteria and hypochondria, two subjects frequently referred to by La Mettrie, see chapters IV and V, "Aspects of Madness" and "Doctors and Patients." See also Minds and Machines, ed. Alan Ross Anderson (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1964).

⁷ Another parallel between the materialist and the pornographic perspectives is their common preoccupation with the problem of language. La Mettrie's views are discussed by Keith Gunderson in "Descartes, La Mettrie, Language, and Machines," Philosophy, 39 (1964), 193-222. See also Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics, A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought (New York, 1966). Cleland was also interested in the origins of language, first publishing a pamphlet entitled The Way to Things by Words, and to Words by Things (1766) and in 1768, Specimen of an Etimological Vocabulary, or, Essay By Means of the Analitic Method, to Retrieve the Antient Celtic.

⁸ Compare the language used by Louis Racine, one of the last defenders of Cartesian animal automatism, in a poem written prior to 1719: "Je ne puis rapporter cet etonnant savoir/Qu'a de secrets ressorts que le sang fait mouvoir." Cited by Leonora Cohen Rosenfield, From Beast-Machine to Man-Machine (New York, 1940), p. 58.

⁹ It is difficult for the English or American reader to appreciate this aspect of La Mettrie's thought, since the only available translation of La Mettrie into English since 1750 (according to Vartanian's bibliography) has been that of Gertrude C. Bussey, published by Open Court and reprinted several times since 1912. The Preface remarks that the translation is based on Miss Bussey's Wellesley dissertation, corrected by M. W. Calkins with the help of M. Carret and George Santayana. But there is no way for the reader to find out, except by comparing the French and English texts, that a total of almost five pages—in words, phrases, and entire paragraphs—have been omitted from the English translation, their departure marked only by dots. I should say "bowdlerized" rather than "omitted," for the passages removed almost without exception refer to matters sexual. I have compared the Open Court edition with Miss Bussey's original, and her "correctors" have been even more scrupulous than she was, omitting passages that seem to contain sexual reference, although one or two actually do not. (Miss Bussey is at least consistent and also ellipsizes the corresponding French passages.) Stylistically, the Open Court translation also leaves much to be desired. Matrice for example, is almost invariably rendered as matrix, even when womb is the primary meaning.

¹⁰ Although La Mettrie's argument serves to enhance the stature of sexuality in general, his own prejudices are still male-oriented. In the great controversy between the ovists and the spermatists over the origins of generation, La Mettrie leans to the spermatist position: "II me paroit que c'est le Male qui fait tout, dans une femme qui dort, comme dans la plus lubrique" (p. 194). One intriguing indication of the way in which later pornography becomes fixated in eighteenth-century beliefs about physiology is the prevalence of the idea that both men and women ejaculate with orgasm. This belief, sanctioned by Hippocrates and Galen, was also supported by Descartes, who based his theory of generation on a "melange des deux liqueurs." Maupertuis had revived the idea in Venus Physique (1745) and Buffon later held similar beliefs. La Mettrie takes a measured view: "II est si rare que les deux semences se recontrent dans le Congres, que je serois tente de croire que la semence de la femme est inutile a la generation" (p. 194). See the discussion by Vartanian, footnotes 114 and 119, pp. 247-249.

¹¹ The DNB account of Cleland's foreign activities seems retrospectively colored by the notoriety of Fanny Hill. The statement that he was consul in Smyrna seems primarily based on a long footnote in John Nichols' Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century (6 vols., London, 1812) that calls Smyrna the place "where, perhaps, he first imbibed those loose principles which, in a subsequent publication, too infamous to be particularized, tarnished his reputation as an author" (II, 458). A search of the relevant Public Record Office documents shows no reference to Cleland at Smyrna in 1734, the date cited by the DNB. His honorable and successful career in Bombay was documented at the India Office Library, where I was helped very much by all the staff, especially Mr. Ian A. Baxter. The fact that Cleland was in India from 1731 to 1740 makes the so-called earlier performance of Fanny Hill at the Beggar's Benison even more suspect. The Beggar's Benison is described by Louis Clark Jones in The Clubs of the Georgian Rakes (New York, 1942), p. 230. G. Legman refers to the possible performance in The Horn Book: Studies in Erotic Folklore and Bibliography (New Hyde Park, N.Y., 1964), pp. 76-77, 250. It is supposed that the work was read by a relative of Cleland's named Robert Cleland, a charter member of the Beggar's Benison. The notes themselves were published privately in 1892, although the years 1733-1738 are represented by a resume based on fuller notes that were destroyed. The exact reference is to 30 November 1737; "Fanny Hill was read." Another possibility, of course, is that the work in question has been lost, and Cleland has whimsically named his own work after it.

¹² What seems to be an early allusion to Pamela also makes the 1737 date difficult to support:

… she told me, after her manner and style, "as how several maids out of the country had made themselves and all their kin for ever: that by preserving their VIRTUE, some had taken so with their masters, that they had married them, and kept them coaches, and lived vastly grand and happy; and some, may-hap, came to be Duchesses; luck was all, and why not 1, as well as another?"; with other almanacs to this purpose. Fanny Hill (New York, 1963), pp. 5-6.

¹³ Cleland's concept of the epistolary method can certainly bear comparison to Richardson's. In place of Richardson's effort to preserve immediacy and present the epistolary form as a virtually transparent medium for experience and emotion, Cleland explores its confessional and meditative possibilities.

¹⁴ One immediately calls to mind the changes worked on this image by Corporal Trim and Uncle Toby, who, Tristram remarks, wanted to see his bowling-green battlefield with a desire like that of a lover for his mistress (Tristram Shandy, II, v).

¹⁵ For an account of bête-machine references in English literature that does not, however, include Cleland, see Wallace Shugg, "The Cartesian Beast-Machine in English Literature (1663-1750)," JHI, 29 (1968), 279-292.

¹⁶ Cleland, of course, may be trying to express a subjective element in Fanny's perceptions by these exaggerations. Pamela's dislike for snakes and fear of the bull (that turns out to be a cow) may come to mind. Compare also the account in La Mettrie's philosophical pastoral l'Art de jouir (1751) of the "berger" and the "bergere" examining each other's parts for the first time, and the young girl's upset at her first sight of an erection. I 'Homme machine suivi l 'Art de jouir, intro. Maurice Solovine (Paris, 1921), p. 155.

¹⁷ Who knows whether Shelley was aware of this earlier "sensitive plant"? In any case, Cleland seems to be the primary reference for anyone who wishes to trace an eroticized nature from Spenser and Milton to the Romantics. The natural and the sexual unite in Fanny Hill in a way that Thomson and other eighteenth-century poets of nature never explore so thoroughly. Similarly, conceptions of an idyllic and edenic sexuality appear in Cleland to presage Keats.

¹⁸ There are other elements in Fanny Hill of what might be called a "scientific" language. Here is a particularly notable example: "Chiming then to me, with exquisite consent, his oily balsamic injection, mixing deliciously with the sluices in flow from me, sheath'd and blunted all the stings of pleasure, it flung us into an ecstacy that extended us fainting, breathless, entranced" (p. 97). "Chiming" may refer to "harmonizing like two bells." A more suggestive possibility in this context may be that Cleland is referring to "chyme" or "chyle," the milky, fluid mass in which food moves from the stomach to the intestine:

Le corps n'est qu'une horloge, dont le nouveau chyle est l'horloger. Le premier soin de la Nature, quand il entre dans le sang, c'est d'y exciter une sorte de fievre, que les Chymistes qui ne revent que fourneaux, ont dû prendre pour une fermentation (p. 186).

¹⁹ Compare the effect on Harriet:

In the mean time, we could plainly mark the prodigious effect the progressions of this delightful energy wrought in this delicious girl, gradually heightening her beauty as they heightened her pleasure. Her countenance and whole frame grew more animated; the faint blush of her cheeks, gaining ground on the white, deepened into a florid vivid vermilion glow, her naturally brilliant eyes now sparkled with ten-fold lustre; her languor was vanish'd, and she appeared, quick spirited, and alive all over (p. 134).

²⁰ Cleland actually received only £20 for Fanny Hill (Foxon, Libertine Literature, p. viii).

²¹ This motif has already been presaged in Memoirs of an Oxford Scholar (1756), ascribed without warrant to Cleland in a recent paperback edition. (This ascription may have occurred because the copy used by the publisher was that in the Beinecke Library at Yale, a copy that has "Cleland's Oxford Scholar" on the spine. I have seen two other copies, neither marked in this way.) In the Oxford Scholar the narrator alternates between erotic adventures and periods of extreme sentiment in which he laments his inability to marry the girl of his dreams, Chloe, because of family and financial reasons. At the end of the novel, when the obstacles have been cleared away in appropriate romance fashion, he and Chloe indulge sexually, whereupon, in about two pages, she dies. The epigraph is from Pope's Eloisa to Abelard.