Seventeenth century novel characteristics and themes

¶ … Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, by John Cleland (commonly known as "Fanny Hill"). Specifically, it will answer the question, "is Fanny Hill an unrepentant woman or a contrite woman? It will draw parallels between another fallen woman in "The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders," by Daniel Defoe. Fanny Hill was a highly controversial and compelling novel about a prostitute, written when prostitution was certainly not an everyday topic of conversation. The book was the first to be banned in the United States. Today, it seems tame compared to our modern day versions of sex, but it still tells a compelling story of how women were forced to survive at a time in history when they had little other method of supporting themselves.

FANNY HILL

Fanny Hill" was a highly controversial and compelling novel, first published in 1749, and called the first pornographic novel by some reviewers. "The first full-length English novel explicitly and overtly engaged in arousing sexual desire in the reader is John Cleland's 'Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure' (1748-49), popularly if somewhat inaccurately known by the title of its later expurgation, 'Fanny Hill'" (Nussbaum 18). Written in 1722, "Moll Flanders" is also the story of a young woman forced to become a mistress by her circumstances. Each woman has little choice in her predicament, as there were few other options open to young women who were orphaned or left on their own. Each woman also views her predicament differently, but Fanny is ultimately unrepentant for her life style, while Moll is repentant and is used as a symbol of Puritanical reform by Defoe.

Both books are the literary products of eighteenth century England, and the two women who tell their stories in these books reflect the life and social behavior of the time in a manner the average history book cannot. While the impressions of their surroundings are colored by their own distinctly different emotional natures and the picture they describe is limited by the boundaries of their own direct experience, both women reflect in their narratives a concern for what was considered proper and virtuous conduct at that time. They also both reflect the general tendency of that period toward a belief in the basic goodness of man. Moll reforms to illustrate both her goodness and her remorse at the wrongs of her previous life. Fanny decries vice at the end of her narrative because her life is ending on a happy note, and all of her sacrifices have led her to happiness. Both of these women have committed less than virtuous deeds, but both are redeemed at the end of their novels because it is clear they are good and decent women, who did what they did in order to survive.

Although the age was one of relative prosperity and stability in which people were generally free to pursue pleasure and luxurious living, it was not without difficulties and hardships for certain classes of people, especially women on their own. It is precisely their position as women without money adrift in a world where money and sexuality were highly prized that creates and molds their life styles and their perceptions of these life styles.

Moll Flanders' circumstances are more difficult than Fanny's, and this tends to make her story more varied and wide ranging. Ultimately, her life creates a more resourceful and independent woman. Fanny's story is extremely limited next to Moll's. It is repetitive almost to the point of boredom, a situation she herself admits and does her best to rectify, as in the opening of her second letter:

imagined... that you would have been cloy'd and tired with uniformity of adventures and expressions, inseparable from a subject of this sort, whose... 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... that the words JOYS, ARDOURS, TRANSPORTS, EXTASIES... flatten and lose much of their due spirit and energy by the frequency they... recur with, in a narrative of which that PRACTICE professedly composes the whole basis (Cleland 91).

And again in her description of one of her trysts at a young gentleman's country home: "but, as the circumstances did not admit of much variation. I shall spare you the description" (Cleland 171). Her experience was perhaps limited by the ease with which she moved from one situation to another without ever being too much on her own or ever having to try something different. However, the limitation of this experience to the purely sexual sphere of life does not make her account of her life any less interesting than Moll's nor her attitudes and insights all the less irrelevant to a student of eighteenth century history. In fact, her ribald life style is quite different from Moll's, but both novels clearly relate the seamier side of the eighteenth century in England and the United States, which most accounts rarely even touch. As such, they are compelling social histories which delve into the sexuality of a century.

While both women are endowed with a frankness and candor with regard to "telling it like it is," Moll has a reluctance to go into the details of the lovemaking scenes. At one point, she modestly notes, "but then he went further with me than decency permits me to mention" (Defoe Chapter 2). Fanny never feels the need to edit her experiences, which in fact would reduce her story to practically nothing, had she shared Moll's reserve. Beyond the difference in the authors' tastes and purposes in writing, the women's divergent points-of-view on this mater could be accounted for by the preoccupation in their lives.

Moll, continuously bombarded by abrupt changes in her life that carried her both to heights above and depths below Fanny's relatively stable standard of living, as well as to the insecurities of a whole new environment in America, had ever new impressions made upon her imagination, ever new demands made upon her resourcefulness. While she obviously had her share of sexual escapades, she was not limited to this physicality, and hence her talent for observation, insight, and narration focused on a broader world and had no need to dwell on the particulars of any one situation to the exclusion of all else. Instead, she often dwells on her financial circumstances, which are often much more dire than Fanny's. One critic notes about Moll,

The disarming frankness of Moll Flanders disinfects her doings of all obscenity. At the age of forty-two she is abandoned by the man whose mistress she had become, and she proceeds as usual to take stock of her financial position. She has about £500 in cash, some plate, and a good deal of clothes and linen (Sutherland 239).

Fanny's situation was quite to the contrary. Being practically imprisoned by her circumstances in either a brothel or a kept apartment, her talent for expression was severely limited in its choice of subject matter. Thus, it was necessary for her to become preoccupied with and interested in the detailed descriptions of the sexual life of human beings in all its ramifications. Nevertheless, in relating experiences that are basically repetitive, she does not fail to give her own observations and opinions on the behavior of that time.

Even though Moll closes the door where Fanny opens it yet wider, they both reflect on a feeling of the period concerning "genre," or behaving and thus writing in accordance with what was considered good taste and decorum. Unfortunately, the two women, in different circumstances, must behave indecorously. Moll is reduced to thievery when she is left penniless at an age when she can no longer use her charms to catch and hold a man.

Moll Flanders, on the other hand, is always searching for some security in marriage from the poverty which seems to threaten her life. When she is left destitute at the age of forty-eight, without the charms which made her a successful Wife and mistress, a fear of necessity and poverty drives her to steal to preserve her life. As her money diminishes in the three years she lives alone after her husband's death, Moll sees before her the terrors of starvation (Novak 78).

On the other hand, Fanny's life, although much more promiscuous, takes on an air of decorum and decency even in a house of ill repute. According to Fanny, Mrs. Cole's house "breath'd an air of decency, modesty and order" (Cleland 93). She continues,

In short, this was the safest, politest, and, at the same time, the most thorough house of accommodation in town; everything being conducted so that decency made no intrenchment [sic] upon the most libertine pleasures, in the practice of which too, the choice familiars of the house had found the secret so rare and difficult, of reconciling even al the refinements of taste and delicacy with the most gross and determinate gratifications of sensuality (Cleland 94).

Interestingly, Fanny is still concerned with "decency, modesty and order" even as she enjoys more wildly sexual escapades. Not only is she unrepentant, she continues with her life style throughout the novel, as her indoctrination into Mrs. Cole's house of ill repute clearly illustrates,

The company who had stood round us in a profound silence, when all was over, help'd me to hurry on my cloaths in an instant, and complimented me on the sincere homage they could not escape observing had been done (as they term'd it) to the sovereignty of my charms, in my receiving a double payment of tribute at one juncture: but my partner, now dress'd again, signaliz'd, above all, a fondness unbated by the circumstance of recent enjoyment: the girls too kiss'd and embrac'd me, assuring me, that for that time, or indeed any other, unless I pleas'd, I was to go through no farther publick trials, and that I was now consummately initiated, and one of them (Cleland 124).

While giving in to his weaknesses and vices, man and woman manages to salvage some self-respect by his more righteous attitude toward his faults, one of honesty, humility, and penitence, never with the excuse that such behavior should really be condoned or thought virtuous. Fanny thus concludes her second letter: "If I have painted vice in all its gayest colours... It has been solely in order to make the worthier, the solemner sacrifice of it, to Virtue" (Cleland 188). This extolment of virtue appears to be Moll's purpose too when she describes her encounter with her future husband's elder brother, here. "Thus I gave of myself to ruin without the least concern, and am a fair memento to all young women whose vanity prevails over their virtue" (Defoe Chapter 2). Both women try to be as virtuous as they can be in their circumstances, but Moll succeeds in altering her life, while Fanny only succeeds in wallowing deeper in prostitution until she finds her first love and marries him. Fanny is still a highly sexual being, and her underlying feeling is that good comes to those people who are inherently good, even if they have sinned in the past.

But, independent of my flattering myself that you have a juster opinion of my sense, and sincerity, give me leave to represent to you, that such a supposition is even more injurious to Virtue, than to me: since consistently with candour and good-nature it can have no foundation but in the falsest of fears, that its pleasures cannot stand in comparison with those of Vice, but let truth dare to hold it up in its most alluring light: then mark! how spurious, how low of taste, how comparatively inferior its joys are to those which Virtue gives sanction to, and whose sentiments are not above making even a sauce for the senses, but a sauce of the highest relish! whilst vices, are the harpies, that infect, and foul the feast. The paths of Vice are sometimes strew'd with roses, but then they are for ever infamous for many a thorn; for many a canker-worm: those of Virtue are strew'd with roses purely, and those eternally unfading ones (Cleland 187).

She can lead a life of virtue because she has finished with her life of vice, but that does not mean she is remorseful about her previous life. In fact, she brings her sexuality, her love of life, and her experience to her union, making a better, more mature match than she every would had she married Charles in the beginning. She simply realizes a life of virtue is preferable to a life of vice.

Another difference in these two women is their attitude toward love, marriage, and men. Moll is the more practical, hardheaded, even cynical one. She reveals this attitude when she describes her plans for the future after the death of her first husband. "I had been tricked once by that cheat called love, but the game was over; I was resolved now to be married or nothing, and to be well married or not at all" (Defoe Chapter 4). Fanny, on the other hand, remains ever a romantic with her sentimental nature untarnished by the compromises made upon it during the years that separated her and her first lover, as she shows here:

He was soon drest in these tempory cloaths, which neither fitted him, nor became the light my passion plac'd him in, to me at least: yet as they were on him, they look'd extremely well, in virtue of that magic charm which love put into every thing that he touch'd, or had relation to him; and where indeed was that dress that a figure like his would not give grace to? For now as I ey'd him more in detail, I could not but observe the even favourable alteration which the time of his absence had produc'd in his person (Cleland 179).

She is clearly still romantically in love with her former lover, and she sees him in a sentimental and sweet light, glowing with youth, even though she is no longer young. While Defoe's reason for writing "Moll Flanders" may have been to show the evils of vice and the goodness of virtue, Cleland's main reason for writing "Fanny Hill" does not seem to be moral. In fact, it was so sexually explicit for its time, it was banned in Massachusetts, the first book to ever be banned in the United States. Cleland quite graphically shows that women were sexual beings, who not only enjoyed sex, they took part in it with gusto.