Desire, disgust and indigestibility in John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Coxcomb

Abstract

This essay analyses Cleland’s Memoirs of a Coxcomb (1754) alongside his idiosyncratic medical tracts Institutes of Health (1761) and Phisiological Reveries (1765). It explores the importance of disgust in Cleland’s representations of desiring (and desirable) bodies and the contradictory impulses produced by smell, skin and contamination, the mouth and ingestion. It argues that negative affects in Coxcomb are a symptom of embodied subjectivity. Analysing the novel’s notorious tableau of adult breastfeeding, it shows how Cleland’s mobilization of taste and distaste diagnoses the latent perversity of inter-subjective appetites.