This essay argues that John Cleland's pornographic novel, Fanny Hill , conceals coercion by employing the language of materialism to suggest that all sex, commercial or not, produces pleasure. While the ostensible benevolence of human instinct allows the novel to sidestep questions of injury and rape, they persist until Fanny's marriage, which delivers her to conjugal felicity. Fanny Hill presents an extreme version of the marriage plot, showing that marriage's claim to retroactively pardon harm allows it to sanction violent means. Cleland's novel implicates Pamela by demonstrating that they share a basic structure: materialist pornography, like the marriage plot, transforms injury into the impossibility thereof, forcefully restricting first-person narrative in the process.
This short piece reads two of Phillis Wheatley’s elegies to children to reflect on how they represent the dead as speaking rather than silent. It considers how the deceased’s speech invokes different categories of the child, overlaying political and theological ideas about children’s vulnerability and potential power.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.