Fanny Hill

Fanny opens the second letter by acknowledging how her acquaintances “would have been cloy’d and tired with uniformity of adventures and expressions” (60). She alludes to the fact that sex work is repetitive, with similar sexual situations recurring. From a narrative standpoint, this opening is a frame that justifies the following two Parts, in which variety is provided more through the addition of characters than by variety in event or action.

In Part 6, the contrasting stories of how Emily, Harriet, and Louisa lost their virginity challenge the societal narratives that portray all sex workers as the same. Cleland presents different women’s experiences to show the dangers men pose to women in adolescence, as all four women resolve to take up sex work out of necessity following their abandonment at the hands of the men who took their virginity. The disparities among the situations that led each woman to the same outcome—becoming a sex worker at Mrs. Croft’s—are particularly revealing. Harriet had had no interest in sex until she sought to save a drowning man who subsequently assaulted her. In 18th-century England, for context, a situation like Harriet’s would be considered Harriet’s fault because a woman traveling without a man’s protection would have been assumed to be either looking for sex actively or passively, while men, perceived to be inherently violent, could claim to lack control over their impulses. In contrast to Harriet, Louisa is sexually curious and takes the opportunity of meeting a young man to explore her sexuality further. Emily’s and Fanny’s stories are similar to each other, in that they began to explore their sexuality with one particular man after their families abandoned them. What they all have in common is that they are ultimately abandoned by the men who seduced and/or assaulted them. With their public reputations tarnished by the fact that they engaged in extramarital sex—whether that sex was consensual or not—their only recourse for survival is to turn to sex work. To the modern reader, the link to Women’s Economic Dependency on Men is clear. These women lack options in their lives beyond either marrying the first man with whom they have sex or entering into sex work, which, in either case, results in their dependence on men to live.

Part 7 presents less variety in sexual activity, since all four couples perform the same sex act in the same position and location, though they do so under observation from their companions. The actions and opinions of the four men who come to the brothel develop the themes of The Critique of Societal Hypocrisy Regarding Sexuality and The Tension Between Desire and Morality. Their perspectives on modesty reveal their hypocrisy, while their perspectives on monogamy and the distinction between public and private life further develop the novel’s complex depiction of the morality of desire. When Fanny first meets the men, they explain that modesty is “an impertinent mixture” which they see “as their mortal enemy, and gave it no quarter wherever they met with it” (74). Yet modesty, or the repression of sexuality, as it is meant here, is the foundation on which much of society operates. The men are all wealthy, some with aristocratic titles, and so they make this claim with the full knowledge that they are attacking modesty only in the privacy of a brothel, not in the broader view of society, where such an attack could have social consequences. Meanwhile, the women whose modesty they attack are forced, as shown in Part 6, to abandon mainstream society for sex work as a result of the “modesty” they lost because of men’s desire. This pattern highlights the crux of society’s hypocritical attitude toward sex, in which men are expected to explore and seek out sexuality, while women are expected to maintain decorum and modesty. Men compartmentalize women’s sexuality by enforcing the stigma of sexuality in “respectable” women and demanding hypersexuality from women doing sex work.

However, societal rules still impact the morality of the orgy: “[I]t was an inviolable law for every gallant to keep to his partner, for the night especially, and even till he relinquish’d possession over to the community” (82). The inclusion of monogamy within the context of the orgy continues the trend of highlighting two layers of morality, noting a crossing point between the marriage-focused monogamy of public life and the temporary monogamy of the brothel. In each case, women are seen as “possessions,” but, in the context of the brothel, each “gallant” must remain with his chosen partner out of a sense of decorum, reflecting on such instances as Mr. H’s and Fanny’s infidelities. Even within the seemingly disordered world of 18th-century sex work, in which pleasure appears as the only guiding moral force, rules from the upper layers of society still make their appearance.