Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Oxford World's Classics)

Rating:
Summary: Suprisingly graphic
Review: I had to read this book for class. When the teacher said that it could be offensive, I shrugged it off. How offensive could an 18th cent. piece of literature be, right. This book is porn. Not the soft stuff, but hard core. There is a story and the novel is presented well. I think it paints a good depiction of the hardships of a woman at the time, yet is completely inaccurate on the life of a prostitute. ...

Rating:
Summary: Suprisingly graphic
Review: I had to read this book for class. When the teacher said that it could be offensive, I shrugged it off. How offensive could an 18th cent. piece of literature be, right. This book is porn. Not the soft stuff, but hard core. There is a story and the novel is presented well. I think it paints a good depiction of the hardships of a woman at the time, yet is completely inaccurate on the life of a prostitute. ...

Rating:
Summary: Lascivious! Unbelievable! An Erotic Literary Classic
Review: I once reviewed Matthew Lewis' 1796 novel "The Monk" and said that it should be rated "R". Well, having just had the experience (and it is an experience) of reading John Cleland's 1748-9 novel, "Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure," everything else just seems like children's literature. Cleland's "Memoirs" was simultaneously reviled and a best seller, declared obscene and yet continued to be published illegally througout the 18th century. In the aftermath of the public frenzy for and against Samuel Richardson's ultra-famous novels "Pamela" and "Clarissa" and Henry Fielding's equally famous responses, "Shamela," "Joseph Andrews," and "Tom Jones," Cleland's novel strikes out into wholly uncharted moral and aesthetic territory.

Similarly to Defoe's "Moll Flanders," Cleland's novel begins with its heroine, Fanny Hill, an innocent, uneducated country girl, thrown at a very early age into the cruel world of London and forced into a life of prostitution. As an innocent virgin, the madam whose house she live in is saving Fanny for a noble customer whom they expect daily, but learns about sexual commerce by watching other prostitutes in the house. Eloping with a beautiful, wealthy young man named Charles before she engages in any sexual activity, the novel concerns Fanny's sexual awakenings and her life with and without her first love, Charles. The way that the novel refigures fidelity in the relationship between Fanny and Charles is astounding.

Cleland's master-stroke, if you will, linguistically, is to write a whole-heartedly pornographic novel and couch everything in such a rich variety of metaphors. Graphic scenarios can be found on almost every page, but there is a marked and remarkable absence of graphic language. Structurally, Cleland's plotting of Fanny Hill's escapades is exquisitely balanced and even-handed. Morally and aesthetically, "Memoirs" comes straight out of the strain of 18th century moral philosophy associated by turns, with Shaftesbury and David Hume. From Shaftesbury, Cleland takes the idea that aesthetics and morality should be judged on an equal form in works of art. From Hume, he takes the radical stance that vices and luxuries are not inherently evil, and even acceptable when not carried to extremes. Cleland makes judicious use of these structural and philosophical elements in creating one of the strongest and most liberated heroines in English literature.

Among other points of interest in the novel, there is the prevalence and even propriety of expressions of feminine desire, agency, power, and control over self and circumstances. Aside from her first entrance into London and her various periods as a kept-mistress, Fanny Hill is educated by the prostitute Phoebe, and the procuress Mrs. Cole to be an independent, self-regulating subject. Related to this is the rather revolutionary notion inferred that sexual education predicates all other sources of knowledge, and is at heart, the basis and foundation of human interaction, at least in the semi-utopic world of the novel.

There are so many fascinating things about Cleland's "Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure," it would take forever to puzzle through them all. All the same, I've only been able myself to think critically about the novel at some distance of remove from reading it. Reading this novel was an interesting, but frustrating, and at times impossible task. It's not a difficult novel to read in terms of prose, but for a 188 page novel, it tends to overwhelm everything else while you're reading it. Like I said, reading "Memoirs" is an experience - I often had to look at the cover to recall that this is no simple work of pornography, but an acknowledged work of classic literature. By all accounts, a captivating novel. It gets five stars just because it is so amazing and outlandish. Aside from the Marquis de Sade, who belongs properly to the excesses of the Romantic Era, I had no idea that there was anything even remotely like this in the 18th century. To quote that immortal philospher, Stephon Marbury, Cleland's novel is "all nude...but tastefully done."

Rating:
Summary: a classic
Review: this is one of the classics of victorian erotica and definitelyworth reading. it depicts a womans path to prostitution with none ofthe attached moral lectures and is a good buy.