The Eighteenth Century: some thoughts

so, i said that i'd deliver on why the 18C is so erotically charged, and here we go. i think that i'm going to try to give some structure to this blog-post by talking first about my experiential encounters with libidinous remnants of the 18th century, and then i'll go into some of the material itself.

first off, almost everyone i know who studies the 18th century is a total lech or a perv. this is nearly true across the board - think about it, people. when you see those professors of the 18th century, don't they look sort of sweaty and dazed, like they just finished masturbating under their desks? isn't their hair a little messy, aren't their eyes a bit weepy, and what of those flushed cheeks and hastily-reassembled ties and ascots? the thing about the 18th century that you must first understand is that it combines the stuffiness of the past, and the reverence that we're taught to have for it, with the ribald nature of the here-and-now of libertinage -the sensorium, in other words. because phenomenologically and sexually, the 18C was full of literotica, erotic art, sensual architecture, smells, bells, and other sublime grime. not to rhyme for the sake of rhyming - it was the transition of dirt into musty sublimity. or so i think from reading all of this (i would imagine) semen-encrusted poetry. anyhow, so the first thing that you need to realize is that, yes, scholars of the 18th century are hornier than those of the 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th, 19th, and even, perhaps (perHAPS - not sure about this) 20th. and clearly of the 21st, when sexual pleasure seems to have dissolved into jaded cynicism and the physical malaise that follows the heady cocktail of anorexia and debauchery that we've been imbibing for the last several decades. blurgh. sex today is not what it was in the 18th century, and that's too bad, really. sex today is like a false modesty covering extreme lasciviousness covering extreme boredom - a sort of rolling around on a nuptial bed made of trashy magazines and situated in the suburbs, where we've been taught to go. there's nothing dirty about sex anymore, except the really desperate kind that still goes on among the poor, contracted, in public, on trains, et cetera. that's the other side of the coin - desperation and a desire to evade the banality of sex as a sort of croquet - but it also seems oddly devoid of pleasure, of humor. i know that i'm sort of invoking foucault here, and i'm not necessarily saying that this has anything to do with polymorphous sexualities or gender play or anything like that. i'm not saying that queerer is better and that people can never understand their desires, because i think that they can. i'm only saying that i think the pleasure has been stripped out of modern-day sex but was palpably present in the 18C, and a fraction of this pleasure can be gleaned from interpreting the textual production of that period. and it's just damn amazing stuff, so vulgar and yet so well-preserved in our modern-day an(n)als. to say that we are keeping this shit because we think it a vital part of our intellectual heritage is totally amazing! it's the equivalent of saving all of the disgusting pornographic trash that flows into the internet's fiber-optic cables on a daily basis. but most people, if you asked them, probably wouldn't even realize what this stuff is really about. just thinking about the gap between seeming and being here is making me shiver a little bit (in a good way, of course).

so: the first time that i really started to connect the 18C with extremes of eroticism, i was reading an article written by an eminent scholar, one of the top of our field. he's an old man, irrepressibly lusty, and has often intoned things about propriety while his roving eyes grazed his interlocutor's cleavage. i saw this myself, and at first i thought it strange, the juxtaposition of these two ways of being. but then i realized that propriety was precisely the source of the sexual glee.

the article was all about samuel pepys, of course - the prime lech, who masturbated in church, without touching himself, fantasizing about having sex with the queen. so awesome. he also referred to his penis in spanish, because spanish was for him the language of secret desire. also awesome. he hits on all the daughters of his friends, totally inappropriate targets, and is aware of the inappropriateness of this and the fact that he'll get nowhere with it and probably offend people in the offing. his spanish is comically terrible, but the sexual glee that erupts from every diary entry is visceral in a way that hardly ever comes across these days. (note: there are two exceptions to this that immediately come to mind: my photographer friend and susie bright. others just seem to sermonize about the politics of sex or relish their conformity to some sort of boring sexual ideal, like the blonde-headed palomino pony. and then there's porn, about which i could talk for hours, but i'm going to leave off of that dead horse for the time being.) so samuel pepys seems to be the template par excellence, the priapic statesman, the sophisticated animal whose freedom is not in his flexibility but rather in his control - he knows what he wants and often how to get it (or how to get off). in other words, sexual desire does not have to be 'deviant' to be sexy. it just has to be strong, insistent, and recurring. that is part of what the 18th century teaches us.

after i read this article, i became totally caught up in the pleasure of it - and then it faded away somewhat until i started screening films and reading up on the 18th century for a lecture that i was delivering. all at once i was reminded of this hot and heady period of novelty and experimentation, once again plunged into the whole enjoyable (but time-wasting) gauntlet. the coded language, the hyperformality, slumming, excess, deviance, looseness, nascence - the beginning of the institutionalization of sex. what a great transitional point, when categories were not yet solidified (and this is riffing directly from foucault) and the hot glass was steadily congealing, as we knew it would, but we could still mold it into certain shapes, albeit temporary and ephemeral ones. now, as we move among things that seem transparent and solid, it's hard to believe that they were once liquid and inchoate. that's the sense that foucault evokes, and i really do think that it emerges in a great deal of the literature and art of the 18th century.

then there's the ribald poetry of the earl of rochester, precursor to the marquis de sade, who wrote about giant orgies in 'rustic' language, and whose part is played by johnny depp in the movie 'the libertine.' suffice it to say that when i first saw this film, it made me collapse (or 'swoon,' as they said in the 18th century) in a hotly freudian way, and i realized that i could never show it to my students, because they'd freak out. so i ended up picking this other film that was a lot more innocent but still caused the same reaction, owing to its ribald preoccupation with the penis of this queer and sexy male actor who played women on the restoration stage. whew! even though it was a terrible movie (Claire Danes reminded me of a sniffly poodle in it, her sculpted curls whiffing about her head as she wept her way through the acknowledgment that her lover, the cheekboned Billy Crudup, was sort of gay), its weak pawings at eroticism resonated somewhat with the 'era.' oh man, the humorous decadence! comedic sex, interlaced with farcical fart-jokes and spices imported from persia. so awesome.

this isn't necessarily to say that i'd like to transport myself there - in general, i hate it when historians treat the past that way. no, i think i'd like to live now, in this somewhat sterile environment, wherein capitalism micromanages our desire and cools the overall sexual climate inversely to global warming...i do attribute some of the boringness of modern-day sex to capitalism, and here you can feel free to argue with me, since it's really just a gut instinct. but i'm sure that there are other reasons why we are less sexily sexual today. maybe people are less attractive (though also less syphilitic, i'm given to understand), and maybe it has something to do with the general absence of naked brutality from our daily vicissitudes. i think there is something about sex that is brutal, violent, scary, threatening, and in general destabilizing - and if it's not that, then it becomes a sort of spineless nuzzling, or two lumps dissolving into one. now i know that that former kind of sex might be 'bad for business' - like the business of reproducing towheaded farmchildren - but still, that's part of where the 18c gets its force.

okay, i'm sort of enervated (haha - this has truly been a balzacian exercise in masturbatory writing), but i hope i've given you at least a few hints about the sexual nature of the 18C. something more could be said about the blurring of privacy, propriety, prostitution, and OPP. also, sentiment, epistolary novels, cross-class relationships like that of Charles II and Nell Gwynne, orange-girl of the theatres. also, constant references to orgasm and libido using punnish words like 'will.' i highly recommend that you read some sexually-charged 18th-century literature today and then see the world revitalized.