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By Root 5625 0

official, John Cleland, wrote a short novel entitled The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, or Fanny Hill. In the style of the early novels of the time, the story is presented in the form of letters from a young woman, describing how she had come up to London from the country at the age of 15, hoping to make her fortune. She finds lodgings in what turns out to be a high-class brothel, where on her first night she is introduced to lesbian sex by one of the prostitutes. She is then allowed, as a voyeuse, to watch the act of sex between a man and a woman, which prompts Fanny herself to masturbate. After an embarrassing encounter with a lecherous old client too incontinent to complete his business with her, she finally loses her virginity to a handsome young man, Charles. There has been such a long build-up of anticipation to this moment that, when it finally arrives and she can fully experience the sensations it brings for the first time, it is like the high point of the story. Indeed, so taken with her is Charles, as she with him, that he sets her up in a flat as his mistress. But he then vanishes abroad, leaving her bereft and miserable, without any means of support.

Forced to make her own way in the world, she moves in with a middle-aged lawyer, although their relationship comes to end when she spies on him seducing another young country girl and takes her revenge by seducing his young protege. She then joins the staff of another high-class brothel, where she and her fellowinmates all enjoy performing with rich young clients in front of each other. When one client is persuaded to pay a particularly high price on being told she is a virgin, she is proud of how she manages to fake the loss of her virginity. Eventually she takes up with a rich elderly bachelor, who rewrites his will to leave her all his fortune and promptly dies, leaving her at the age of 19 a rich woman. Finally, staying in an inn on her way back home to show off her newfound wealth to her family, she runs into her long-lost love Charles, who falls on her with quickly gratified pleasure. We then gather they have got married, had children and are living happily ever after.

In outline this is a classic Rags to Riches story, complete with `central crisis' and archetypal happy ending. What makes it quite different from any other story we have looked at in this book is that its real purpose is to simply to provide a framework for endless physical descriptions of the sexual act. Each one portrays in detail what it is happening, with the same mechanical descriptions of the man bringing out his `magnficent machine' or `weapon', inserting it into the woman's `delicate slit', surrounded with its `soft down' of pubic hair, until in each case both parties come to a mechnically perfect mutual climax. The novel is simply a series of erotic daydreams by its author, designed to stimulate similar sexual excitement in the mind of his reader. Although described through the eyes of a woman, it is of course an entirely male fantasy. The purpose of setting it in the framework of a story in which the woman enjoys almost every minute of her sexual transactions as much as the men who are paying her, and in which she ends up rich and respectable, married to the man she loves, is to make these onanistic male daydreams seem more acceptable to the readers, in that the object and vehicle of their desires, Fanny, is portrayed as happily complicit with their own fantasies. Not only does she never really suffer as a result of making herself available to them. She so thrives on it that she can finally be seen enjoying all the outward show of an archetypal happy ending. In this sense, it is a perfect illustration of a story conceived on the sentimental, wishful-thinking level of the mind, in that a book imagined so obviously through the author's own fantasy-self, centred entirely on the ego, can nevertheless end on the image of his pasteboard heroine attaining the state of the fully-developed Self, without having to show her as possessing any of the archetypal qualities necessary to achieve