The Novel

by Steven Moore

  There’s nothing interesting about the novel’s structure, a linear, episodic narrative beginning “I was born . . .” and ending with his marriage to the girl of his dreams, interrupted only by two inset stories fore and aft. A few subtle references to Ulysses and to Petronius suggest Smollett may have had the Odyssey partly in mind as a structural pattern as Roderick travels the world from Scotland to England to the West Indies to France to South America to England and finally back home to Scotland. The language, on the other hand, is interesting for its departures from standard English. (And as in Richardson and Sarah Fielding, the text is slashed with dashes.) Smollett gives phonetic renderings of people speaking in regional dialect and/or with heavy accents (Welsh, French), and in one case reproduces a poorly spelled love-letter from a pretentious woman living in “Vinegar-yard Droory lane” (i.e., Vine Garden Yard, Drury Lane) that anticipates the punning language of Finnegans Wake:

  Dire creatur,

  As you are the animable hopjack of my contempleshons, your aydear is constantanously skimming before my kimmerical fansie, when morfeus sheds illeusinary puppies upon the I’s of dreeming mortels; and when lustroos febus shines from his kotidian throne: Wheerpon, I shall consceif old whorie time has lost his pinners, as also cubit his harrows, until thou enjoy sweet slumbrs in the lovesick harrums of thy faithful to commend ’till death. (16)

  Smollett also drew upon his background as a ship’s doctor to introduce medical terminology into his narrative and especially nautical terms, literally during Roderick’s ocean voyages and metaphorically in the language of his sea-dog uncle. The specialized vocabulary adds to the novel’s realism, as does Smollett’s treatment of sex. Though hardly a rake, Roderick doesn’t pass up any opportunity for coitus on the rare occasions it’s available, even after he has committed to Narcissa. Traveling in France with a lascivious priest, he accepts a farm-girl’s offer of sex one night, but fantasizes he’s with Narcissa: “the idea of that lovely charmer rather increased rather than allayed the ferment of my spirits” (42). Roderick is neither the first nor last man in history to think of one woman while having sex with another, but he’s probably the first in fiction to admit doing so. Smollett is surprisingly candid about sexual matters; when Roderick is later reunited with Narcissa, she can tell he’s sexually aroused: “As my first transport abated, my passion grew turbulent and unruly. I was giddy with standing on the brink of bliss, and all my virtue and philosophy were scarce sufficient to restrain the inordinate sallies of desire.—Narcissa perceived the conflict within me, and with her usual dignity of prudence, called off my imagination from the object in view . . . (425)—that is, herself, and she smoothly changes the subject (rather than throw a fit of hysterics, like Clarissa). Nor does Smollett draw a veil over the wedding night when, as Roderick unabashedly tells us, “no longer able to restrain my impatience, I broke from the company, burst into her chamber, pushed out her confidante, locked the door, and found her―O heav’n and earth! a feast a thousand times more delicious than my most sanguine hope presaged!” (68).

  Like Richardson’s and both Fieldings’ first novels, Smollett’s first isn’t his best, though it became a best-seller: it relies too much on extraordinarily coincidental meetings, so much so that, toward the end, the reader can recognize figures from Roderick’s past before he can. One of the two interpolated stories is a self-indulgent account of a writer’s troubles getting a play produced, based on Smollett’s own experiences with his tragedy, The Regicide; betraying guilt, Smollett has the playwright admit “I ought to crave pardon for this tedious narration of trivial circumstances, which, however interesting they may be to me, must certainly be very dry and insipid to the ear of one unconcerned in the affair” (63)—yet he continuous for another four pages. The novel’s feel-good ending distributes poetic justice too neatly for an otherwise grimly realistic novel. The characters tend to be caricatures, signaled by their comic tag-names (a coffeehouse wit named Banter, a coquette named Goosetrap, a homosexual named Simper, a rogue named Slyboot, etc.), though Smollett’s often grotesque physical descriptions of them are a delight (and influenced Dickens, who mentions Roderick Random in David Copperfield). But such descriptions, the gritty renditions of life at sea and in distress, the colorful cast of characters, the sexual candor (including regarding homosexuality, though Roderick is a homophobe), the nonstop action, and the variety of incident as Roderick randomly ricochets through life like the tennis ball his mother dreamed about at his birth encourage us to overlook its maiden-voyage yaws and to react as one character does to the story of Roderick’s life: “During the recital, my friend was strongly affected, according to the various situations described: He started with surprize, glowed with indignation, gaped with curiosity, smiled with pleasure, trembled with fear, and wept with sorrow, as the vicissitudes of my life inspired these different passions” (44). We’ll deal with his better novels anon.204

  A friend of Smollett’s named John Cleland (1710–89) pushed sexual realism even farther in Memoirs of a Woman Pleasure, aka Fanny Hill (1748–49).205 Riding the tail end of the anti-Pamela trend, Cleland revised a manuscript he had apparently begun when he was around 20 to redefine “virtue” in an unmarried woman as a matter of character (integrity, honesty, discipline) rather than the presence of a hymen, which Fanny dismisses as a “trinket,” a “little maiden-toy,” a “bauble” (23, 30, 32), thus breaking with Richardson and generations of romance novelists. And while Fanny Hill is primarily erotica written to raise cash to release Cleland from debtor’s prison, it is secondarily “an experiment,” as Patsy Fowler claims, “an attempt to explore ways in which the pornographic and/or erotic can be incorporated into novel form.”206 (Most British porn before Fanny Hill took the form of dialogues, ballads, mock epics, or allegories like Cotton’s Erotopolis.) Whereas Richardson and Fielding boasted of “a new species of writing,” Cleland offers “a new species of titillation” (152).

  The erotic element is a positive twist on an old story: at age 15, newly orphaned Frances Hill travels from Liverpool to London to become a servant and perhaps even marry her master (as Pamela did, whom Cleland alludes to via Shamela). Like Moll Hackabout in A Harlot’s Progress, Fanny is quickly scooped up by a bawd named Mrs. Brown, who preps her for a whore life’s by allowing a middle-aged lesbian named Phoebe to teach Fanny about sex by sharing her bed, showing her how to masturbate, and joining her in spying on whorehouse transactions. (There are peephole scenes throughout the novel; the reader is likewise a voyeur, right behind Fanny.) Her first male customer is a decrepit man in his sixties who barely manages to ejaculate on her clothes, but before Fanny faces her second customer she meets and runs away with a handsome young man named Charles, her first heterosexual partner. He sets her up in an apartment house managed by another bawd named Mrs. Jones, and all is well for 11 months until Charles is forced out of the country by his tyrannical father. Fanny spends the next eight months as the mistress of another man, until she is caught in the act with his huge-membered servant (whom she seduced in revenge for her master’s infidelity, not from lust). She then becomes a courtesan at a high-class bordello managed by Mrs. Cole, staffed by three other girls as young and beautiful as she is, where Fanny services a half-dozen men over the next year or so, ranging from nice young aristocrats with simple urges to those with more “arbitrary tastes,” as Mrs. Cole puts it (sado-masochism, role-playing, even a gent who simply likes to comb and play with Fanny’s auburn hair), all of which she defends: “she considered pleasure of one sort or other as the universal port of destination, and every wind that blew thither a good one, provided it blew nobody any harm” (144). Fanny makes enough money to retire at age 18, but almost immediately becomes the mistress of another man in his sixties, an admirable “rational pleasurist” who teaches her “to be sensible that the pleasures of the mind were superior to those of the body” (175). She stays with him until he dies eight months later and leaves her his fortune; shortly after, Fanny runs in to her first love Charles, l
ately returned to England, and after some vigorous makeup sex she surrenders her hand and fortune to become his bride. He forgives the sexual adventures she had while he was away, perhaps a final poke at Richardson’s Pamela: if she can forgive and marry a kidnapping rapist, then Charles can forgive and marry a whore.

  Like its protagonist, Fanny Hill has a shapely, expressive form, which is the first thing that elevates the novel from pornography to literature. The novel consists of two long letters addressed to an unnamed woman, written by Fanny much later in life, apparently after menopause, when “all the tyranny of the passions is fully over, and [when] my veins roll no longer but a cold tranquil stream” (42). That temporal distance should put us on guard: this memoir can’t be a realistic account of events that happened 30 years ago (including a few scenes at which Fanny wasn’t even present), but a soft-focus recreation, which renders questions about how realistic it is rather academic.207 It’s certainly not the “Truth! stark naked truth” Fanny promises on the first page, but Art! sexily dressed art. The older writer relies on symmetry to shape her narrative: note from the plot summary above the contrasting sickly/healthy 60-year-olds at the beginning and end, the bad/good bawds, and Charles’s position as her first and last heterosexual lover. In fact the form implies another coupling: just as an older woman first titillated Fanny, the older Fanny titillates another woman by deliberately dressing up her account of her wonder years, airbrushing away the sordidness and prettifying the highlights by way of metaphoric language (she avoids common obscenities and smutty slang), which she needlessly apologizes for near the end: “At the same time, allow me to place you here an excuse I am conscious of owing you, for having perhaps too much affected the figurative style; though surely it can pass nowhere more allowably than in a subject which is so properly the province of poetry, nay! is poetry itself, pregnant with every flower of imagination, and loving metaphors, even were not the natural expressions, for respects of fashion and sound, necessarily forbid it” (171). Fanny is also titillating herself: during her description of her reunion sex with Charles, she switches from past tense to Richardson’s “present-tense manner” as she remembers/recreates the moment he entered her: “I see! I feel! the delicious velvet tip!—he enters might and main with—oh!—my pen drops from me here in the ecstasy now present to my faithful memory!” (183). If the pen is a penis in Clarissa, in Fanny’s hands it’s a dildo.208

  Possessing “an ingenious way of relating matters” (27), Fanny flaunts her linguistic talents by weaving many patterns of imagery throughout her narrative, beginning with the rather obvious one of comparing her teenage self to a ship tossed on the ocean on the first page, “adrift” in the middle (86), and finally “got snug into port” upon marrying Charles. (The entire novel is awash with nautical imagery.) Less obvious, especially to modern readers, is Fanny’s use of the human-machine imagery of French philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie; in his book Machine Man (L’Homme machine, 1747), he rejected the theological notion of a sinful body yoked to an immortal soul, and instead regarded the whole person as a soft machine, fully functional only when lubricated by sexuality and the imagination. Fanny frequently calls the phallus a “machine,” and sexual response “mechanical,” but La Mettrie did not mean these terms to be dehumanizing but rehumanzing, signifying a recovery of animal instincts, a materialistic recognition of how the mind and body actually work together (per modern physiology) as opposed to the traditional mind–body dichotomy. The concept is too complicated to go into here, but critic Leo Braudy, who does go into it in an essay entitled “Fanny Hill and Materialism,” gives enough convincing evidence of Cleland’s use of La Mettrie’s book to justify his claim that, among other things, Fanny Hill “appears to be a detailed polemic in support of some of the most advanced philosophic doctrines of its time” (36).209

  The deeper the reader plunges into Fanny Hill, the greater the returns. Fanny critiques capitalist practices by contrasting the managerial styles of two of the bawds, Mrs. Jones and Mrs. Cole. The former “had no nature, nor indeed any passion but that of money,” and even sells her 17-year-old daughter to a customer. “Indifferent then by nature or constitution to every other pleasure but that of increasing the lump, . . . that of the profit created” (51–52, 66), she is contrasted to Mrs. Cole, “who contented herself with a moderate living profit” (88), doesn’t cheat her employees or her customers, and who in fact emerges as the most moral, conscientious character in the novel. Even in the skin trade, there are good and bad business practices, and Cleland not only implies that an honest bawd is morally superior to a dishonest banker, but also shows that capitalism does not have to be exploitative.

  Like the brothel customers who strip Fanny and examine her from every angle, critics have poked and prodded Fanny Hill from many lit-theory angles ever since she became legal in the 1960s, though the older perception of it as pornography continues to bar it from many literary histories of the period. It may not be great literature—the second half, like most porn novels, consists mostly of one sex scene after another (many starring Mrs. Cole’s other girls), increasing in kinkiness until Fanny witnesses a homosexual coupling, much to her disgust—but it is a smart, subversive challenge to the conventionally moralistic novels of the time and exhibits a healthy attitude toward sex that remains radical to this day. What Fowler describes as Cleland’s experiment is quite successful, but as Fanny notes on the last page, “The experiment, you will cry, is dangerous. True, in a fool; but are fools worth the least attention to?” (188). Unfortunately, fools are in charge of public morality, and they arrested Cleland and his publisher later in 1749 and outlawed Fanny Hill, which didn’t prevent it from becoming the best-selling erotic novel in Western culture.

  Another sexually explicit novel of 1749 that was reprinted in the 1960s after censorship relaxed its sphincter is the anonymous History of the Human Heart, retitled Memoirs of a Man of Pleasure in 1968 to mirror Fanny Hill’s original title. But anyone who picked up that paperback expecting something similar was probably disappointed, for The History of the Human Heart is a raffish novel of learned wit closer to Tristram Shandy than to Fanny Hill. It’s essentially a rake’s progress featuring a coxcomb named Camillo from conception to around age 20, but it has the formal features of a Scriblerus Club production. In what amounts to an extended joke justifying authorial omniscience, the novel begins with a 12-page introduction in which the Welsh narrator claims to have inherited the gift of “second sight” (the ability to view future events), which he augments later with the ability to see into the past, the dying gift of an Italian Rosicrucian he befriends. Failing as a fortune-teller, he decides to turn author, and learning from a bookseller that scandalous memoirs are popular, he spots Camillo in a coffee-house, looks into his past, and concludes “the history of him would be entertaining.”210 Anticipating modern audience-testing, he reads his first draft to his landlady, revises the parts that seem to bore her, and then shares the manuscript with a Martinus Scriblerus-type pedant, who convinces him that the bawdy story needs some “notes, moral, historical, and critical,” for “in the history of Camillo,” the author has “traced every event from its natural source in the soul, and by that means discovered the various surprising effects of the passions, habits, and affections of the human heart, in a manner quite new” (11).