Mrs Jones (Ruth Sheen) to Fanny Hill (Rebecca Knight): If she does not take Mr H as a keeper, and ends up on the streets, “It doesn’t bear thinking about” (2007 Sally Head Fanny Hill)
Dear friends and readers,
Last night I finished reading John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748/49), which has come to be commonly know as Fanny Hill; I read partly to understand the 2007 mini-series scripted by Andrew Davies, directed by James Hawes (credits as respectable as Davies), produced by Nigel Marchant. I was also curious to see what the text really is like and how it fits into the “heroine’s text” type of novel prevalent in the 18th century from novels of males in drag (La Vie de Marianne, Clarissa, La Nouvelle Heloise) to women-centered texts by women (from La Princess de Cleves to Austen’s famous six).
I find it a book which starts off very lively and meaningful in the heroine’s text pattern (as outlined by Nancy Miller), even highly original in what it dared to present to a middle class reader, and meaning to be humane, enlightened (anti- religious repressions and lies), but marred badly by a its cliched language, thought (sentimental and genteel) and finally in the second half losing all sense of plot-design and deliquescing from a delicate form of erotica into clinically detached pornography.
Its importance though is not derived simply from its content or aesthetic value: since it was prosecuted early on, and had a lingering reputation ever after (was kept in print) and was in the 20th century linked with Lady Chatterley’s Lover as unacceptable porn, it has a sociological importance other books of this type (erotic, porn) do not have (see Hal Gladfelder, “Obscenity, censorship, and the eighteenth-century novel: the case of John Cleland,” Wordsworth Circle, 35.3 (Summer 2004):134ff.)
By contrast, Davies’s rendition is a strongly plotted throughout, ironic fairy tale which concentrates on the importance of female relationships, how they are ambivalent (as two women teaming up together despite any dislike), necessary and what rare true empathies (Mrs Cole with Fanny — in Ruby in Paradise a similar pair) can do. The importance of Davies’s film is that of costume drama: that this kind of material should be included (however restrained) and that the actors who appear here can also appear in Austen films and the plot- and character parallels between an Austen film and this semi-pornographic one (we see women performing fellatio on men in positions that show they have no agency whatsoever).
What follows is a journal report of my reading experience, section by section where I compare book to recent movie as I go along.
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Esther Davies (Emily Stanfield) telling the orphan Fanny that she can survive by supporting herself in London; she need only travel there (Esther is a minor character, mentioned once or twice in Cleland’s novels; Davies turns her into a major character across the mini-series)
I began this novel this morning and it reads like a parody of novels in the mode of Richardson’s Pamela; perhaps it’s more like Marivaux’s Marianne with a specific allusion to Pamela (the use of the spelling “vartue” and a comic retelling of Pamela’s story as if it really happened). I find it more persuasive than Marianne who is immediately picked up by a protector. Fanny comes to London because after the death of her parents from small pox she receives only cold and minimal charity and a friend, Esther Davis, offers to take her to London — all the while using Fanny’s money (but minimally Esther’s vice is not expensiveness). Esther tells her where an “intelligence” office (=employment bureau is) and after crying a while, but putting her act together (as she had still several guineas and 17 shillings from the sale of all her parents’ things), she does take a lodging for the night and shows up at this haughty place.
Mrs Brown (Alison Steadman) choosing Fanny at the unemployment office — Steadman’s archeype includes Mrs Bennet)
I thoroughly believe it and am “into the book.” If I had time, I’d return to Therese Philosophe (some say by Diderot) for the flaw in FH is the narrator buys into the false values of her society and reiterates them. Not Therese, she is wittily subversive, more fun. The obviously French context of Cleland’s work reminds me of how much I like French materials in this era.
I’m having an experience similar to that I had last summer reading Sade’s novels — what is said about FH utterly distorts the reality of this novel — or overplays it. The next phase of the book is found precisely in the film adaption: Mrs Brown turns out to be a brothel keeper, Phoebe her chief aid, initiates FH into sexual experience and the two conspire to sell her to the aging brutal Mr Crofts. I’m just not finding anything shocking. I’ve read online — would anyone like to see this — the contemporary bookseller, Griffith’s defense of this book as hardly different from dozens others — and he’s right.
Phoebe (Carli Norris) selling the innocent Fanny: Davies’s movie emphasizes the sexual initiation of Fanny by a bisexual woman, Phoebe (a proto-typical shepherdess name)
Why did the authorities get so excited? Yes there have been a couple of passages more explicit than most things I’ve read but done in language that eschews all verboten words. I cannot believe they couldn’t stand the proto-feminist point of view — for that’s there too, played up to be sure by Davies:
In the film early after arriving at the brothel Fanny is sexually attacked by Mr Croft (Philip Jackson) with the collusion of Mrs Brown and Phoebe and remains a virgin
As with Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Prevost’s Manon Lescaut (and quite a number of works of the earlier 18th century), there are no chapter divisions in this book. It is set up as two letters, one ending p 126 of my Penguin edition by Wagner, and the other ending p 224. Each was printed as a volume.
As I read on, Fanny moved on to fall in love with the beautiful good young man, Charles (as in Davies’s film) and they flee the brothel together. At this point love-making does start and I have to say that it is arousing. The style is part of the success because it’s not crude. Now I see why it must’ve shocked for it’s on the face of it marketed for a middle class reader; it’s literate and implicitly a critique of the ancien regime’s customs, laws. The book supports Darnton’s thesis as do Sade’s and Diderot’s.
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Fanny and Charles initiating one another
An autobiographical verisimilar component
I continue to read this novel with real interest in it. I’m surprised at myself for this; that is, that it continues to hold me. Now that Fanny is in love genuinely and with a kind decent man — Charles (played in the film by the handsome sweet looking Alex Robertson, a kind of Tom Jones) whose last name we have not yet been told (again very like Moll Flanders and the fictions from the early part of the century) has a real history of his own which rings true. We are told that he was an only son whose father refused to spend any money on him beyond necessities in the house; paid for hardly any education and planned to purchase him an ensign’s commission (provided he could procure it with interest and not too much money). This is the only plan the man had; he kept a mistress. He did reprimand the boy when he got in his way. Luckily there was a grandmother who took a fancy to the boy and provided him with money. It’s money from her he uses to keep his and Fanny’s lifestyle up in Mrs Jones’s house.
It strikes me this is a real story, and if not Cleland’s one he saw or one he could identify his own rejected life with. This is not the only story of this type that suddenly emerges. The depiction of Mrs Jones, the quiet landlady cum-procuress is just such another as Anthony Trollope is more discreet language describes running a “boarding house” in a less salubrious part of London in Miss Mackenzie in the second half of the 19th century. Women have ever been desperate to stay solvent, in houses, with food and clothes and in days before jobs, what could they sell if the found themselves (as they probably did with frequency) outside some family system or could not endure what punishment was wreaked on them in return for being kept.
Mr H is a glamorous idealization of himself in conventional heterosexual terms — well, every author but has his weaknesses. Hugo Speer plays the part with real panache (he was super as Sergeant George in Davies’s rendition of Bleak House and I’ve loved him ever since he was so fiercely loyal to Phil, his homeless friend).
Mr H (Hugo Speer) enjoying Fanny’s candid company, proposes to teach her from books he knows, to make a lady of her
This part of the novel has veins of reality as striking as any in an 18th century novel, memoir, or tale. And in effect Davies picks up in this when he has his Charles’s father be a miser and tyrant and bigot, thought kidnapping and pressing might be too strong for most people (who knows, in French fictions families are ever throwing disobedient adult children into the Bastille or other prisons by lettres de cachet). He also depicts Mrs Jones more in the way of a Fielding caricature but this rock-bottom solid motivation (not in Fielding) is there in the film: Davies’s Mrs Jones tells Fanny what might happen to her (in the streets) if she refuses to accept Mr H as her keeper “doeesn’t bear thinking about.”
No it doesn’t.
The one strong contrivance and intertwining together that does not occur in the book that Davies uses is Davies he has Mr Croft who Mrs Brown (played by Alison Steadman, Mrs Bennet is here revealed in her archetype as desperate procuress) would have sold Fanny to (see above) no matter how old and vicious he is, turn out to be Charles’s father. That coincidence is too pat, but then less actors needed to be paid and the recognition scene is striking. Also the hypocrisy of the old man who would rape Fanny now utterly rejects her with vile words as appropriate for her!
Fanny miscarries the pregnancy by Charles, and accepts Mr H as her lover. Although she does not love him, he is capable of awakening her sexually even more than Charles. These passages in the book are strongly arousing and at the heart of what made this book prosecuted. Here we have a heroine who while depicted a literally unchaste (from her living with Charles) is nonetheless presented as a middle class avatar, reasonable, reasoning, acting in her own best interests. To show her as experiencing sexual pleasure without love (the demand for which is still used to bind women by women themselves) was as subversive of the social order as Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover’s depiction of sexuality itself (as in its buggery). Probably too I’ve been underestimating how original this text is — it is not a mad rant like Sade’s, not hectically lurid like so many of the English tansgressive fictions (say by Haywood or Behn or Manly Delaviere or The Nun on her Smock) I’ve read.
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The movie sweetens the mixture by keeping the sex tasteful and emphasizing how Mr H is teaching Fanny important text: here they are doing Shakespeare’s great sonnet 94 (“They that have power to hurt and will do none”)
The long descriptions of Mr H making love to Fanny, arousing her against her conscious will are remarkable. They are (as far as I can tell) just about wholly original in the manner of Richardson’s Pamela. There were novels before Richardson’s of types like Pamela, there were epistolary novels, but no one put these two together for quite this story at this length with a persuasive presence. So there may have been erotica (a good term for this part book) before FH, but nothing as plain yet elegantly styled, thorough, frank, emotional in this direct way with just such a persuasive presence as this narrator. (Aretino is cold muscular stuff; Crebillon fils is indirect and prurient, much of the English stuff I’ve glanced at crude, silly, hectic).
The fiction is also again fuelled by autobiography. When to take a (foolish as she says) revenge on Mr H for his casual infidelity with her maid, she seduces a young man from the country, the long sequence is obviously a male in drag (Cleland) seducing a male. Fanny’s descriptions of the handsome body and beauty of Mr H is clearly the same sort of release for the author.
I wish I had time to read Therese Philosophe to see if it is done there or Diderot’s Bijoux Indiscrets. It cannot be a matter of influence since both were published in the same year: 1748. Therese Philosophe is (as I’ve said) superior in outlook in the sense that the discourse of Fanny contradictory will be ever so pious and moral now and again and she is quite a snob. She scorns her maid as hypocritical and coarse when Mr H goes after her. Fanny’s strictures against Mrs Jones, presented as corrupt and awful (beneath her) are absurd in this context. Davies (needless to say?) drops all this and picks up only on the more intelligent stream of comment where Fanny argues that her behavior is what she had to do under the circumstances: indeed this line from this section of the book is moved by Davies to the end of his film adaptation to be its moral lesson: “our virtues and our vices depend too much on our circumstances … (p. 98)
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In the film Mr H discovers Fanny and her country bumpkin lover: it’s not really a comic scene as Mr H becomes passionately upset, jealous, out of male pride ejects Fanny (though it’s quite all right for him to be unfaithful is the point of the movie)
I said that in Cleland’s book Fanny’s affair with the young country servant, an act of revenge on Mr H for his infidelity to her is a different kind of release for the author than his descriptions of Fanny’s physical encounters with Mr H. It is clearly a long homosexual series of passages. The alert button here is that Cleland knows it is unrealistic for Fanny to take such chances — that is, to have more than one encounter with the young man. Also Fanny is presented as not particularly promiscuous and even moralistic. Now Cleland must change her character to reckless and not so much promiscuous as self-indulgent, sybaritic. But it’s clear that Cleland wants to write these passages. Now they are as innovative (so to speak) as the heterosexual encounters, probably as erotic (though not to me). He breaks with verisimilitude and what’s more makes his book tedious (at least to me).
I mentioned that there is a certain interest and humor in reading all the different euphemisms Cleland comes up with to describe people’s body parts and what is happening. IN this section what is striking is the cool objectivity with which he’s determined to describe these body parts, really exactly. This too is new to the novel and I suggest this too led to the book being prosecuted.
It is prison literature too. It was first written as a draft a number of years (Cleland claimed) before he was put in prison, but it was while he was in prison, he perfected and extended his draft and made this publishable (well at least it adheres to aesthetic criteria of coherence and the conventions of these young-girl-from-county-enters-the-world transgressive fictions.
By contrast, in the film Davies allows only one encounter between Fanny and the servant, and that one Mr H interrupts — probably not probable but then there is not the problem of the improbability of Fanny taking so many chances and he does not have to present Fanny as promiscuous except when driven by a need to survive).
Book 1 of the novel ends not (as I thought it would) on the downfall of Fanny when Mr H catches her and her lover-country male servant in the act, but after she has secured a place at Mrs Coles’s millinery shop.
There is a real drive to keep this novel euphoric, upbeat. In the feature to the DVD of the film adaptation, the director, screenplay writer, some of the actors and production designer were all asked what they thought was the moral lesson of the novel. Did it have one? Only Samantha Morton who played Mrs Cole denied any. Most emphasized (especially Davies and the actress Rebecca Knight) that it was you, women too, do what they have to do to survive and (Davies) much moralizing is unreal. But the production designer was given the last word; he said it’s a fairy tale because it ends so happily and is continually moving into gaiety. I think that’s so. By contrast, Davies made part 1 end on Fanny losing her beloved Charles and being threatened with destitution with Mrs Jones telling her she must do something or will be ejected from her lodging place.
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Mrs Cole (Samantha Bond), a cool businesswoman in the film (her archetype, which is also the warm compromiser, includes Mrs Weston)
In Cleland’s Book 2 we have Fanny developing a real relationship with Mrs Coles. This is what Wagner in his introduction and Nancy Miller in her essay on the novel stress; the womens’ relationship. Mrs Coles is a kindly mother figure cum businesswoman. Fanny our narrator is sceptical of Mrs C’s professed motives (which Davies cuts from the film), that Mrs Cole lost a daughter and Fanny is a substitute, but it’s their talk, a genuine self-conscious novitiate (so to speak), with the nunnery analogy being meant (remember Diderot’s La Religieuse‘s more sexualized sections) that brings the text alive again.
The millinery shop is a front for a brothel, and again we have the obvious vulnerability of women before men, their need to serve men sexually, and the presentation of Mrs Cole is relevant to this: when unlike the landlady (Mrs Jones) Mrs Coles identifies with Fanny, the story becomes a sort of parable of the necessity of female friendship in this 18th century world.
This relationship does remind one of Moll Flanders where Moll has a governess-brothel keeper and chief theft who helps her (rather like Dickens imagines a Fagin does, minus the anti-semitism). Defoe’s character is vaguer and does not present these amoral arguments at all, but the implicit realities are the same. Davies did both films and has Rebecca Knight as Fanny interrogate the audience the way Alex Kingston as Moll did. The contrast is Moll is direct, angry at us, accusing with her hard life; Fanny writes from her standpoint at the end of the book as mistress of a lovely house, and rich and married to Charles so she is looking back and happy.
Nonetheless, like many critics say, Fanny Hill, the book, falls off sharply in Part 2. Fanny is now with Mrs Cole and the narrative stops for the different prostitutes to tell their stories. Things get still and if the separate stories were well-written or original or vivid, it’d be like say Millenium Hall or a number of popular novels from the era which I recall: Fielding’s The Governess is filled with story telling of this type; one about I recall: “The Histories of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House (1760) (anonymous).
But it’s not so. It’s the same story repeatedly: girl seduced, abandoned, probably a common story doubtless but this is art not life. Johnson’s two famous Ramblers about Misella are unforgettable. The point of several stories is to display and enact sex. In this second part the rationale of showing women’s lives (each one is taken advantage of in a different way, or ejected from poverty of parents) is a transparent excuse for long erotic descriptions, each of which presents different facets of sex (one centers on masturbation for example). It is here that Cleland’s book begins to become pornographic. If not openly violent, not openly rendering the women powerless (as in Reage’s Story of O), they are that because this is how they must make a living.
The real flaw in the book is an undistinguished style. Finally good books come alive because the language is not a string of cliched phrases, flung together and that’s what’s happening here. I began to doze
Davies cuts all this, and he inserts a new character: Esther is dragged forward from Volume 1 (she was the one who Fanny came to London with) and has incurred Davies’s Fanny’s suspicion and dislike as the woman who misled when she introduced her to Mrs Brown and then deserted her. Davies’s Esther is the person who hates someone precisely because she wronged her. So they are emotional enemies and the narrative line has antagonism as part of the suspense. Later Esther will bring back Mr H to the brothel … All this is Davies’s addition.
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Mrs Cole and Esther greeting Fanny
In this section I can see why I’ve reading postings by women on listservs and blogs where they described having to read this book in a classroom and discuss it as shaming and humiliating, one of the unpleasantness and most unfair experiences they can remember in a classroom. Three girls emerge (Harriet, Emily, and Louise) as the storytellers and then in accordance with their original stories they participate in an orgy — described by Fanny which she then participates in. The rationale is they must get rid of their modesty but to a female reader this is also an ordeal in humiliation which is presented as enjoyable to the woman. There is no sense of the physical reality in Cleland: he really does write like a distanced cold clinically detached male here enjoying power over a woman who gives up all her agency.
So the text does devolute, deliquesce (though that’s not the right word for it either) into long vignettes of sexual encounters of porn. Each is justified by some slender story line, which Andrew Davies has picked up. At first Mrs Cole sells Fanny as a virgin and we see Fanny’s efforts in the hypocrisy line — this may be meant as an exposure of false manners and manipulation. Mr Norbert, in the film a sweet young man, dying, impotent, has a version in the book, not so sweet, not impotent, but someone who submits, is not dominated, and as in the film, in the book Fanny first meets him in the marketplace and brings him home and they develop a genuine relationship.
One story is so precisely like that which caused such a sexual tremor (or was supposed to have) among women viewers of the 1995 P&P that it was imitated by several more Austen films (Lost in Austen, I have found it) and is referred to still: when Colin Firth stripped to his underclothes and dived in a lake to swim. The second story told by Harriet is strikingly like this story — the great lord of the mansion returns unexpectedly on a hot day, strips nearly all his clothes off and dives in a lake while Harriet (the narrator) is in a summer house. The pavillion or summer house is an important motif in women’s erotic literature — it’s a place apart where a girl escapes surveillance. what happens is she is drawn to watch him — but then he sees her and he rushes out and rapes her. Twice. We are asked to believe that after the first onslaught she likes it.
I find it telling that a rape is in this original scene (if it is the text that gave Davies the idea) and has been erased. The original Sleeping Beauty tales are rape stories, telling that it’s been inserted into a woman’s film and then asserted to be just what women want. A joke is now mercifully made of it. Origins tell us something surely?
Colin Firth as Mr Darcy about to plunge in
Cleland’s tone is as happy and cheerful and playful as it is during long sequences in Volume I (Fanny’s falling in love with Charles, the time with Mr H) so this is indeed very ambiguous stuff and anyone who does not admit this upfront so to speak is misrepresenting what’s here. Who is Cleland in this text? who does he stand for? well the powerful male who insists on this as okay and his right and refuses to see or imagine the complicated real life response of people paid to do this sort of thing. It’s an attitude of mind that would not see rape as rape.
Not that it’s moral or judgmental — as in the early parts of volume I. Cleland has forgotten all the moral lessons he wove in early on. Just shed them. No religion in sight either.
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Mr Norbert among the women
In the middle section of Volume II (and the first one two) Cleland is really inventing stories that enable him to write long sexually graphic scenes. Mr Norbert is introduced as feeble and seducible so we can get this long presentation of Fanny as utterly hypocritical in how she fools him into thinking she’s a virgin. Step-by step. By contrast Davies divides the “types” so in the film Fanny and Mrs Cole first fool the father of a young virginal man and the emphasis is not on the sexual scene but the delusions of these males and their false pride. Fanny remains Mr Norbert’s mistress for quite a time (we are told) so gets her reward in money and support. Alas, he dies without leaving her anything (just her ill-gotten gains so to speak) and she has to lend herself out again.
In the book she takes on a Mr Balville and we get two long scenes of fetishistic sex where the idea is she is to whip him and whip her. I wondered if this was the first time in a middle class novel (prose style) this kind of scene was ever written, especially the details of the pain. We are to admire Fanny for standing to her bargain and are invited to enjoy these scenes. I didn’t; I had to skim. These are pure porn, but I suppose they have the merit of perhaps being first in the middle class novel? if we think originality a virtue, and I presume we do.
We are now going to get scenes of further permutations of sexual experience. It seems that is Cleland’s aim in Volume II: from the opening swimming rape and other scenes to these.
Davies didn’t quite skip these; he has no Mr Balville but he does has a montage of sexual orgies going on, but he presents it as distasteful after a while — the girls have to keep at it, rather like someone in a factory, and after you’ve stamped one object you really don’t want to stamp another, much less keep going for hours on end — in other words it’s brought home all this is for money. There is enjoyment when there is dancing, exhilaration: there the director of the film brought out how the well-bred dancing is a kind of simulacrum, a controlled version of these more drunken rollicking scenes. There are no such dancing scenes in Cleland’s book. But the overall feel veers between the sordid and girls’ serving men and luxurious salacious moments.
This is a more tasteful shot for the blog (everyone is near naked in many of the scenes of Davies’s movie at this point)
In the film Davies then provides a strong plot-device by bringing back Mr H, involving him with Fanny’s arch-rival, Esther Davies (who is built up as a character across the films). Mr H cannot stand to watch Fanny with other men and there is an explosion of jealousy; he tells the magistrates on Mrs Cole and the house is broke up.
Hugo Speer as the angry hurt Mr H — I find him an attractive man in this film (his role as Sergeant George in Davies’s Bleak House aligns him with other characters who protect and in their perspective help the vulnerable — he teaches Fanny in the film)
In the film we see how helpless the 18th century women are against the men. Mr H is a magistrate himself; he need only complain and the house is destroyed. The women can do nothing. (This is not what happen in Cleland’s book, mind.)
Fanny is left to the streets, and very like Waters’s & Davies’s Tipping the Velvet (book and movie) soon falls to street prostitution and being raped and even beaten.
For the conclusion and some final remarks, see the comment.
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 