SOURCE: “Satiric Representation of Venereal Disease: The Restoration Versus the Eighteenth-Century Model,” in The Secret Malady: Venereal Disease in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France, edited by Linda E. Merians, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996, pp. 183-95.

[In the essay below, Zimbardo considers the cultural views on venereal disease as represented in the popular fiction of the Restoration Period and the eighteenth century, noting its transition from public and comical to private and immoral.]

The Restoration period in England (1660-1700) is what the philosopher Hans Blumenberg calls a “zero point,” a moment in cultural history when an epistemology is collapsing and simultaneously a new epistemology is arising: “the zero point of the dissolution of order and the point of departure of the construction of order.”¹ For the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the center of reality is the mysterious still center of the turning world: God. Each creature, like each planet, circles around that center in a ring of caritas, a cosmic harmonia. If any creature mistakes his own Self for the center, she is guilty of the sin of pride. On the other hand, for late-seventeenth-century/eighteenth-century modernism, the new epistemology in the process of construction at zero point, the locus, and the font of truth is the human Self. Moreover, from that cohesive unity emerge increasingly expanded enlargements of the human self: the nation, the empire, the world.

In the new eighteenth-century modernist coding, among the systems over which natural reason has control and for which it has responsibility is the physiological. To maintain a sound “constitution” (i.e., “the inner stock of vitality and strength, the vigor that flowed when all one's organs worked effectively together”) it was deemed “vital to order each department of life—clothing, environment, the ensemble of activities making up the day, and so on—in the light of their health implications, so that each element should be beneficial, and the whole would provide a balanced and varied economy of living. … Each individual had the power … to further healthy living—or equally to jeopardize it.”² Moreover, since “nation” is an enlargement of the self, maintenance of one's individual “constitution” is directly related to maintenance of the British Constitution. Therefore, good health habits are a duty of citizenship and, conversely, to engage in irresponsible activity that is detrimental to one's health threatens not just one's own body but the body politic as well.

In the new eighteenth-century modernist epistemology, ordered and ordering human natural reason imposes order upon the body, the nation, the world. Consequently, to maintain one's constitution, to discriminate right living from dissolute, and therefore unhealthy, living, becomes one's political as well as one's moral responsibility.

When self becomes discursively central, satire becomes mimetic, morally emendatory, and binary. No longer an instrument for exploding the postures of pride and mocking the singular self's pretensions to sovereignty, the new modern satire becomes a careful delineator of boundaries, a nice weigher of moral judgments, and a sharp instrument for discriminating “right” from “wrong”—and also “us,” the respectable, from “them”: the rake, the harlot, the criminally irresponsible “others.”

The new satire regulates and reforms its reader/viewers by its own cause-effect, linear designs, its clarity, its “reasonable” line of argumentation. Rationally ordered, it makes its reader/viewer rationally ordered. The new satire is prescriptive, and if its reader/viewer chooses not to follow the prescription, then she deserves to be sick. According to John Dryden, “They who endeavor not to correct themselves according to so exact a Model [as the new satire provides]; are just like Patients, who have open before them a Book of Admirable Receipts, for their Diseases, and please themselves with reading it, without Comprehending the Nature of the Remedies, or how to apply them to their Cure.”³ Discourse, and most particularly the discourse of satire, is a means by which the sovereign self, or natural reason, governs and regulates itself and its body.

Comparison between the representation of venereal disease in the dramatic satire of the Restoration period and the pictorial satire of the eighteenth century, when venereal disease could no longer be pictured on the morally reformed stage, can illuminate the radical epistemological transformation that occurred at Restoration “zero point.” Generally speaking, in the transition from premodern (i.e., Restoration) to modern (i.e., eighteenth-century) coding, the discourse of venereal disease went from being public and comic to being private—indeed, secret—and serious, and the representation of venereal disease went from being semiotic—a sign of our common human frailty—to being empirical evidence of the personal immorality and social/political degeneracy of the marginalized “other.” In the new discourse and coding of modernism, all health and illness involved a moral dimension. Venereal disease, of course, was particularly morally charged, an evil for which the individual subject was responsible.

In the Restoration drama venereal disease is always treated comically, as a sign of our common human frailty, a reminder that however inflated our sense of self-importance and self-sovereignty, however elevated our heroic aspirations, we are poor, weak creatures—essentially ridiculous. At one level, reference to venereal disease is purely discursive, common in ordinary discourse, and comparable to the manifold uses of the word fuck in contemporary parlance. Such references—as, for example, when one character wishes a “pox” upon another, or talks about his last “clap”—thread through the fabric of a number of social discourses. For example, when Snap, the servant of Loveless in Love's Last Shift, is given a particularly generous tip by Worthy, the play's most admirable character, he facetiously asks what services he may perform for Worthy to repay such generosity: “Bless my Eye-sight! a Guinea!—Sir, is there e'er a Whore you wou'd have kickt? any Bawd's Windows you would have broken? Shall I beat your Taylor for disappointing you? or your Surgeon, that would be paid for a Clap of two Years standing? If you have occasion you may command your humble Servant” [I.i].⁴

In the Restoration comic world the discourse of venereal disease is common public discourse; the illness itself is common and publicly acknowledged. This passage, for instance, makes clear that one among many activities in the daily experience of a young man is having the clap and being cured, or not cured, of it. Neither the sickness nor its cure is secret or serious; rather, it is as common in a man about town as dressing well, consorting with whores, dealing with bawds—all the little businesses of ordinary life. Most frequently, references to venereal disease are used as a satiric device to undermine the pretensions of hypocrites and poseurs. For instance, Horner in The Country Wife mocks Pinchwife's jealousy (a trait considered to be a form of pride in the Renaissance and early Restoration) by asking whether the reason that Pinchwife is loath to have men kiss his wife is that he was not fully cured of his last clap. Loveless, in Love's Last Shift, argues that railing against vice is the infallible sign of hypocrisy: “I have known a jolly red-nos'd Parson, at three o' the Clock in the Morning, belch out Invectives against late Hours, and hard Drinking; and a canting hypocritical Sinner protest against Fornication, when the Rogue was himself just crawling out of a Flux” [I.i].

Florio, in City Politiques, pretends to be dying of syphilis as part of a scheme to seduce the wife of the man he has helped to make mayor of Naples: “Has the worthy Citizen whom I have elected to be my cuckold attained the other dignity of Podesta of Naples yet? … For when he is chief magistrate of Naples, I shall be———of his wife, dispatch his domestic affairs, and receive all the fees of that sweet office” [I.i].⁵City Politiques is, of course, a satire on Restoration English, “true Protestant” Whigs. The Whig Citizen is coded in the play as Politician: power-hungry and money-hungry, hypocritical and pretentious—the very image of proud self-sovereignty that Restoration satiric discourse was designed to overthrow. Tory, on the other hand, is coded as Lover: for whom sexual satisfaction is more important than money and sexual appetite is more important than the drive for political status. Indeed, the Tory libertine is the Restoration's version of the clever clown of Renaissance comedy, the servant of nature and enemy of pride. Florio mourns the fact that his ruse requires him to keep company with the hypocritical “saints,” true-blue Protestants who pretend to be above human frailty:

Florio. Then I part with all the society of my witty lewd friends,
to keep company with dull lewd saints.
Pietro. Not saints, sir, but Whigs.
Florio. That's as bad—and so lose my reputation of my loyalty
and good affection to my prince. [I.i]

Imminent death from venereal disease, far from marginalizing the lover, Florio, or rendering him a despised “other,” evokes the pity and affection of his many mistresses:

Florio. And do they lament me?
Pietro. All, all, sir. The virtuous ladies sigh and cry ‘Tis pity,’
the other run distracted; the very common whores abstain from plays, and bawds
neglect their brandy bottles. [I.i]

Like death, venereal disease makes brothers and sisters of us all. Only when Florio is pretending to be a Whig, a “true Protestant” hypocrite, does he say that his venereal disease is punishment for a life of libertinism, anticipating as he does eighteenth-century modernist coding, which at its foundation, of course, was a product of triumphant, Glorious Revolution Whiggism.

As venereal disease is used to unmask religious and political hypocrisy in Restoration dramatic satire, so too is it used to puncture the pretensions to knowledge and command over nature of the “New Science,” another bulwark of Enlightenment epistemology. In D'Urfey's play The Fond Husband, or The Plotting Sisters (1676), Cordelia and Sir Roger go to visit Sneak, an aspiring young Cambridge student and pretender to expertise in the mysteries of the new science. They find him in a nightgown with an apothecary in attendance, and Cordelia discovers that a “sweating chair,” commonly used in the treatment of venereal disease, is part of his furniture. Sir Roger tries to pass the sweating chair off as an esoteric instrument of the new learning. “'Tis a Mathematical Engine they use at Cambridge,” he says.

However, among the most interesting figurations of venereal disease in the Restoration satiric drama is Shadwell's Crazy in The Humourists. Crazy is not a “character” in the post-Enlightenment, novelistic sense of the term; rather, he is an exaggerated, emblematic sign. The dislocation and dissonance that are figured in Crazy make him a kind of comically conceived Everyman: the very image of high heroic aspiration and low comic grotesquerie that Restoration satire conceives to be our human nature and condition. Heroic imagination drives Crazy to extremes of daring self-sacrifice for love and valor, but the effects of that daring flight are ludicrously registered on his syphilis ravaged body:

Craz. Beauty, Heav'ns brightest Image, the thing which all
the World desires and fights for, the Spur to Honour and all glorious Actions,
without which no Dominion would have been priz'd or Hero heard of.
Errant. Oh dear Mr. Crazy! … thou art a sweet man. (She claps
him on the shoulders.)
Craz. Oh death! What have you done? You have murder'd me; oh you
have struck me just upon a Callous Node, do you think I have a body of Iron.
[I.i](6)

When the bailiffs come to arrest Crazy at the suit of Pullin, the French surgeon, whom Crazy refuses to pay because his cures have been ineffective, Raymond, the man of wit in the play, comes to Crazy's rescue. Together they fight off the bailiffs:

Raym. Come on Crazy, thou behav'st thy self bravely.
Craz. O Sir, I should have fought better, but for some damn'd Pustles
upon my Arm, and some Arcochordones upon my right Shoulder; but really Mr. Raymond this is such a deliverance, that nothing
can shew my Gratitude, but to bring you to see a Person of Honour hard by.
[II.i]

The “Person of Honour” (i.e., aristocratic woman) to whom Crazy introduces Raymond is Theodosia, the heroine of the play whom Raymond will end by marrying.

Crazy's aspirations to heroic bravery, figured in Renaissance/early Restoration “love and honor” coding, are driven by his commitment to heroic love: “Dear Madam … let me but kiss this fair hand, and that will inspire me to kill twenty … Rascals in an afternoon—But where shall I have the Honour to wait upon you by and by?” [III.i]. His venereal disease is a satiric device that is used to undermine those pretensions to heroic singularity, a reminder that our common human frailty is our passport to the comic harmonia. When Crazy is about to climb over the garden wall to keep his romantic assignation, his syphilis brings him abruptly down to earth:

Craz. The Coast is clear on this side, if my Mistress be but
in the Garden, I am safe—My Dear.
Lady Lovey. Hear I am.
Craz. Now I come wer't as high as Grantham-steeple!
Death I have broke both my Shins: I am murder'd:
Oh, I see these leaps are not for men that have
fluxed thrice. [ital. mine] [IV.i]

I wish to make two points by these examples: (1) Crazy is not crazy because he has venereal disease; he is crazy because he is human. An emblem of each of us, Crazy demonstrates how crazy we are when we pretend to self-sovereignty and heroic singularity and how inevitably our common frailty brings us crashing down to make us “even” with all other “earthly things” and in tune with all our fellow creatures in the great cosmic harmonia. (2) Having venereal disease neither isolates nor marginalizes Crazy. He is happily aswim—and in active courtship—in the best society.

We have always known that marriage assumes a privileged position in the English drama from the early eighteenth century onward—that sentimental, “conscious lovers” replace witty, combative ones as objects of our approval and admiration, that rakes may from time to time “relapse” but are always brought back to good, matrimonial behavior by the absolute fidelity and devotion of their virtuous wives, and that the new masculine ideal finds definition in the husband (in every sense of the term) rather than the sexually heroic, libertine lover. In the past we attributed this change to the inexplicable birth of a new sentimental sensibility, a new warmheartedness that arose in England toward the beginning of the eighteenth century, or we have traced the genesis of the “man of feeling” to the latitudinarian doctrine of a benevolent human nature. We have not looked for the political and economic ideological underpinnings of the change to sentimental sensibility largely because, until fairly recently, we have tended to compartmentalize discourses and to read literary and philosophical discourses in isolation from other discourses. Discourses were not so compartmentalized at the end of the seventeenth century.

Henry Abelove finds an interesting correlation between the rise in economic production and the almost exactly similar increase in population during the long eighteenth century. He demonstrates the relation between “the privileging of production” and “the privileging of intercourse” in eighteenth-century culture and explains the threat that unproductive and transgressive forms of sexual behavior came to be considered in that period: “While production increases importantly it also becomes discursively and phenomenologically central in ways that it had never been before. Behaviors, customs, usages which are judged to be non-productive come under extraordinary and ever-intensifying negative pressure.”⁷ There is strong evidence to support Abelove's theory in Charles Davenant's Essay upon the Probable Methods of making a People Gainers in the Ballance of Trade (1699): “The People being the first Matter of Power and Wealth, by whose Labour and Industry a Nation must be Gainers in the Ballance, their Increase or Decrease must be carefully observ'd by any Government that designs to thrive; that is their Increase must be promoted by good Conduct and wholesome Laws, and if they have been Decreas'd by War, or any other Accident, the breach is to be made up as soon as possible, for it is a maim to the Body Politick affecting all its parts.”⁸

Sexual adventuring of any kind must be sharply curbed and penalized because any kind of libertinism, any sexual behavior unamenable to state control, threatens stable marriage, and marriage is the best mechanism for the production and maintenance of “hands” for “Mr. Bounderby”—the captains of capitalism who were first coming into ascendance in the last decade of the seventeenth and early decades of the eighteenth centuries. Defoe, prime spokesman for the trade-empire-science-nationalism nexus that was the central pillar of early modern culture, put the matter concisely: “Multitudes of People make Trade, Trade makes Wealth, Wealth builds Cities, Cities enrich the Land around them, Land enrich'd rises in Value, and Value of Land enriches the Government.”⁹ The discourse of capitalism and the discourse of marriage meet and intersect in the official language of nationalism. The atmosphere of moral reform that followed upon the Glorious Revolution, the atmosphere that bred “conscious lovers” and “men of feeling,” then, is a product of the new capitalist culture. Charles Davenant advocates “virtue”—by which he quite openly says he means heterosexual behavior strictly confined within the bounds of marriage—exclusively to the end that it promotes and ensures nationalism, class stability, and growth in the gross national product: “We shall venture to affirm that if this Nation should ever be under any great Disorder, the truest course to mend it, will be to plant in the Minds of the better sort Morality, and Shame of doing ill to their Country, and we shall presume to assert that observing the Rules and Dictates of Virtue does not only lead to Heaven and a blessed State hereafter, but is the very best way of securing to a People in general, Prosperity, Peace, Safety, Power, and happiness in this present World” [ital. mine].¹⁰

When “the Minds of the better sort,” infused with the new ideology, project their norms as the “universally applicable ideal for humanity,”¹¹ the discourse of venereal disease abruptly changes. (It also proliferates but becomes secret.) The new discourse publicly represents venereal disease as a condition suffered by those “others,” who richly deserve their suffering, since they brought it upon themselves by their own irregular behavior; privately, the disease is as widespread as ever, but cure for it must be secretly sought if the respectable are to maintain their separateness from, and superiority over, those “others.” Daniel Turner, in his exposé The Modern Quack, or The Physical Imposter Detected (1718), devotes almost half his book to those quacks who pretend to treat venereal disease. They get away with their imposture, Turner says, because their quackery is conducted under the cloak of secrecy. The victims of their imposture pay the enormous fee of “twenty five Guineas of which fifteen were paid for Secrecy, and ten for a pretended cure.”¹²

The discourse of venereal disease goes underground, so to speak, and therefore the comic language and comic figuration of venereal disease that had prevailed on the Restoration stage is no longer possible. The subject had become a “dirty” secret, shocking to the sensibilities of the virtuous, respectable men and women whom the eighteenth-century drama presumes to be its audience. Moreover, as I have demonstrated elsewhere,¹³ from the turn of the century, the conception that a drama imitates nature was replaced by the converse conception that a drama draws audiences (especially the impressionable youth) to emulate the characters it represents. The theory, best expressed in Addison's conception of associationism, postulates that young men watching libertine characters on stage will be led to imitate their behavior. Given the widespread belief that young men become what they watch, it was unthinkable that they should watch attractive young men like themselves who joke about their callous nodes and fluxes and pepper their speech with references to the clap and the pox.

Since theatrical representation of venereal disease does not exist in the eighteenth century, I have chosen for comparison with the Restoration model the eighteenth-century mode of satiric representation that comes closest to dramatic representation, the narrative print satire. Like the drama, the serial print satire is a visual mode—a “show” of action—that has plot and characterization.

Among the most illuminating examples of the new, semitheatrical satiric representations of venereal disease is William Hogarth's A Harlot's Progress. “Etched and engraved from paintings, April 1732,” this narrative satire “tells the story of the fall and speedy destruction of a girl who comes from the country to London to earn a livelihood. The work is primarily didactic; Hogarth's intention was to reveal through the girl's life the follies and miseries of vice with a view to providing his audiences with a negative example for their own conduct.”¹⁴ The aim of the new eighteenth-century mode in satire was to discriminate right from wrong behavior—which, in turn, meant socially useful and productive from socially threatening and unproductive behavior. The new satire was expected to provide an “exact Model” and “Book of Admirable Receipts” for right living. If the reader/viewer chose the negative path that so exact a model delineated, then his fall into disease and death was inevitable.

In A Harlot's Progress the binary opposition between “good” and “evil” is rendered mimetically and entirely in socioeconomic terms. Hogarth's Plate I (Pl. 3) makes evident the new Enlightenment equation discussed above between individual moral action and political/social action. It presents youth with a clearly defined choice between two paths in life. The scene, a morally charged but mimetically imitated city landscape, is divided precisely in half. Centrally positioned on the dividing line are a young girl from the country, Moll Hackabout, who will become a harlot by virtue of the choice she is making, and Mother Needham, “the keeper of a notorious brothel patronized by the aristocracy” [i.e., not by the virtuous Whig merchant class].¹⁵ To the left of the dividing line, in the upper quadrant presented to the viewer, is a poor but “respectable” dwelling, what we might call “the house of decency.” A good housewife with modestly drooping head is engaged in the labor suitable to her station and gender; she is hanging out clothes on a balcony situated above Moll's plane of vision. Hers is the right, productive role for a woman. To the right is the “house of indecency,” Mother Needham's brothel. Its walls are cracked to emblematize its moral decay, and a patron (or bawd) stands in the doorway leering at his new prey. Mother Needham, who offers the young woman the fatal choice, is richly dressed. Her satin dress and lace-edged furbelow stand in contrast to the young woman's kersey, plain cambric collar, and long, white apron, and from her waist hangs a fat gold watch. Mother Needham's face, however, the nature which no rich adornment can disguise, is pitted by the lesions of venereal disease. The picture, proclaiming its mimetic fidelity in the abundance of its careful detail (i.e., this is the way things actually are in the world; this is no metaphor), is nevertheless laden with allegorical figuration that enlarges its moral dimension. For example, the horse, traditionally a symbol of high mettle, is driven by appetite to stray from his proper path and useful function. Ravenously eating hay, he knocks down—and disorders—a stack of household basins. The cracked bell and the strangled goose are emblems from the Middle Ages of fallen chastity. Even the juxtaposition of light, which brightly illuminates the house of decency, and darkness, which envelops the house of indecency, points the nature of the moral choice the young girl faces, a choice which will mold her self—both body and soul—and inevitably shape her progress.

In Plate II … Moll has crossed the dividing line and has become a denizen of the marginal world of the “other.” Her keeper is a “wealthy Jewish businessman.”¹⁶ Her servant is a West Indian slave. Their natures and her own are emblematized in the monkey who scurries across the foreground wearing Moll's hat. The monkey's expression parodies the Jew's. That is to say, the inhabitants of the world Moll has chosen are not quite human; they fall below the “norm” which the new culture of English modernism imposes as “the universally applicable ideal for humanity.” The most salient feature of the harlot at this stage in her progress is her disorderly movement. She is chaotic herself, and she creates around her all chaotic motion. She kicks the table over with her foot; she snaps her fingers in her keeper's face; she sends the tea china (another emblem of ruined chastity) crashing to the ground. Her dress is rich but disordered; her breast has broken the confines of her bodice. Not only is her movement purposeless but she performs no productive labor. Rather, her richly but fantastically dressed servant boy, wearing the garb of the exotic, Oriental “other,” carries the tea kettle to no purpose, since the teapot is crashing to the floor. To the far left of the picture, standing as a marker to us of how we should “read” the scene, is a masquerade mask and a mirror. These pointers tell us that all the richness we see is mere disguise. Because he is a Jew and “other,” Moll's keeper is not a real, solid English merchant but merely the masquerade appearance of one. Moll is not the vigorous young woman that her romping movement would suggest, for on her forehead and on her breast are the marks of venereal disease. Her high spirits, then, are not the outward signs of a vigorous constitution but a mere simulation of energy and health.

In Plate III …, “her marketability reduced by disease, Moll is forced to live in a slum in Drury Lane and serve the population at large.”¹⁷ Her occupation, “common whore,” has now obliterated any other identity she might have had; the bed upon which she plies her trade dominates—indeed, incorporates—the whole scene. Moll has stepped further into the darkness in her progress, for her “sign” is now a witch's hat and broom. Moreover, the instruments that she uses to disguise her deformity are now crudely obvious: the wig box on the canopy above her bed and the jar of makeup. In place of the richly framed pictures that hung on the wall in Plate II, the content of which—Jonah admonishing Nineveh and David dancing before the Ark—suggested a possibility of reform, Moll's new icons are a medallion of the Sacred Heart, a picture of Macheath, and another of Dr. Henry Sacheverell. The religious picture is, of course, a sign of irreligion, of superstition—even demonism. In the atmosphere of post-Glorious Revolution Protestantism, “Catholic” is par excellence the radically different “other.” Macheath is, of course, the highwayman libertine lover of Gay's The Beggar's Opera, and Dr. Sacheverell is a charlatan preacher of the day. Dangling a watch that she has obviously stolen from one of her johns, Moll has become fully an outlaw. The law, in the person of Sir John Gonson, a prominent leader in the Societies for the Reformation of Manners and Morals and a notorious prosecutor of defendants indicted on morals charges, has just broken in upon her with two bailiffs. Interestingly, venereal disease in this plate has assumed a figure. Moll's companion-servant, whose nose has been devoured by syphilis and who is pictured pouring drink for Moll, is, I think, a personification of venereal disease. Vice and its necessary punishment have merged into a single figure who will stand beside Moll through the rest of her progress.

In Plate IV … Moll is in Bridewell Prison beating hemp, a beadle with a rod keeping her to her pace. Her face, spotted by the lesions of venereal disease, is tired and drawn. She stands, barely able to hold her mallet, but she is richly dressed. On the right side of the picture, almost as a parodic reflection of her, are two whores. They are similarly marked by the disease, but their faces are bestial and leering; their bodies are grotesquely deformed, and their clothes are ragged and tattered. They might be said to figure the “inner” Moll, the beast beneath the finery. The moral of plate IV—for the new binary satire must point an openly declared positive antithesis to the scene of corruption it depicts—is emblazoned on the stocks from which a prostitute hangs by her hands: “Better to Work than Stand Thus.” Hogarth's satire, and, indeed, eighteenth-century satire in general, perfectly serves the function for which the macroeconomist Charles Davenant had called as early as 1699: “to plant in the Minds of the better Sort Morality and Shame of doing ill to their Country.” Sexual transgression does harm not only to the body of the transgressor but to the body politic as well.

In Plate V Moll is dying of venereal disease. Her face is stark white, and she is clothed in a loose, white, shroudlike garment. To her left two quacks violently argue the merits of their respective cures; one holds a bolus and the other a vial of mercury. Both are oblivious to the presence of the victim they have failed to cure. In the extreme right and left of the picture are signs of the inheritance Moll leaves. At the left her landlady steals from Moll's trunk the props of her trade—her high-heeled shoes, her witch's hat, and her masquerade mask. These, we presume, will be handed on to the next young girl from the country who chooses to follow the harlot's progress. To the right of Moll is a child whom we assume to be her son. He scratches his head in puzzlement about how to use a common cooking pan. His mental defectiveness is, as the telltale spot on his cheek attests, the effect of congenital syphilis passed on to him by his mother. An interesting detail in the picture, about which I disagree with Shesgreen, is a matzo nailed above the doorway. Shesgreen says that it was common in the eighteenth century to smear a matzo with honey and use it as a flycatcher. I believe, rather, that it is a sign of Moll's damnation, which is figured at the beginning of her progress by her keeper's Jewishness and now, at the end, stamps her for eternity as the “alien other.” Once Moll crossed the line between “us,” the respectable, middle-class English Protestants, and “them,” the criminal, disordered, degenerate “others,” which this satire so carefully delineates, she was doomed.

Plate VI, the last of A Harlot's Progress, pictures Moll's wake. Her coffin, the central object in the room, is ringed by a circle of underworld types, all of whom are engaged in the activities that brought Moll to this end. They include on the far left a respectably dressed priest who is groping beneath the skirt of the swoony-eyed prostitute beside him while his other hand “spills” (a visual pun) the liquor in his glass. There is a crowd of prostitutes all drinking and a bawd who has obviously inherited Moll's ring, which, tellingly, is being placed upon her finger by Moll's maid, the personification of venereal disease. In the background one of the prostitutes stands before a mirror attempting to disguise her venereal lesions with patches. At the end of the line, to the far right, is a prominently figured prostitute, who resembles Moll as she appeared at the beginning of her progress. She reaches toward the coffin as though reaching toward her fate, while her keeper draws a silken glove onto one of her hands and she uses her other hand to steal a handkerchief from his pocket.

In front of the coffin sits Moll's son, dressed in full mourning and playing with a top, which is traditionally a symbol of idleness. On the cracked wall behind him is a coat of arms blazoned with what seem to be three tops. The conclusion of A Harlot's Progress nails down the satiric antithesis, or moral, of the whole narrative satire. In the new eighteenth-century culture of modernism, idleness and the desire for pleasure and luxury without the will to pay for it in productive labor are a cardinal crime for which disease and death are the only fit punishment. As Blackmore put it in his essay against wit, “the Labours of the meanest Persons, that conduce to the Welfare and Benefit of the Publick, are more valuable, because more useful, than the Employments of those, who apply themselves only, or principally, to divert and entertain the Fancy [the imagination].”¹⁸

Notes

1. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge: MIT Press), 220.

2. Roy Porter and Dorothy Porter, In Sickness and in Health: The British Experience, 1650-1850 (London: Fourth Estate, 1988), 28, 30.

3. John Dryden, A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire: The Works of John Dryden, Poems 1693-1696, ed. A.B. Chambers and W. Frost (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1974), 75.

4. Colley Cibber, Love's Last Shift: Three Sentimental Comedies, ed. Maureen Sullivan (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1973).

5. John Crowne, City Politiques, ed. John H. Wilson (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1967).

6. Thomas Shadwell, The Humorists (1671), The Complete Works of Thomas Shadwell, ed. Montague Summers (London: Fortune Press, 1927).

7. Henry Abelove, “Some Speculations on the History of Sexual Intercourse during the ‘Long Eighteenth Century’ in England,” Genders 6 (Nov. 1989): 128.

8. Charles Davenant, An Essay upon the Probable Methods of Making a People Gainers in the Ballance of Trade (London, 1699), 24-25.

9. Daniel Defoe, Giving Alms no Charity (London, 1704).

10. Davenant, Essay, 226-27.

11. See Karlis Racevskis, “Geneological Critique: Michel Foucault,” in Contemporary Literary Theory, ed. G. Douglas Atkins and Laura Morrow (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1989), 234.

12. Daniel Turner, The Modern Quack, or The Physical Imposter Detected (London: J. Roberts, 1718), 10.

13. Rose A. Zimbardo, A Mirror to Nature: Transformations in Drama and Aesthetics, 1660-1732 (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1986).

14. Sean Shesgreen, introduction to A Harlot's Progress: Engravings by Hogarth, ed. Sean Shesgreen (New York: Dover, 1973), 18. All references to Hogarth are to this edition.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid., 19.

17. Ibid., 20.

18. Sir Richard Blackmore, “Essay on Wit,” Essays Upon Several Subjects (London, 1712), 191.