Feminity In Fanny Hill

Femininity in Fanny Hill
In this work, our reading of the novel Fanny Hill or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure focuses on how the book presents femininity, embodied by its protagonist, Fanny Hill. We describe how the personality and the evolution of this character reflect feminine stereotypes and gender relations of the time.
Fanny Hill or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure is an erotic epistolarynovel written by John Cleland and published in 1748 in England. It is considered the first original English prose pornography in the form of a novel.
The story follows Fanny Hill, a naive country girl, who comes to London and under the pretences of being hired as a servant ends up in a brothel. She elopes with a handsome merchant’s son but after being abandoned is taken into keeping as a mistressof a wealthy man. She cheats on him and finding herself alone again has nowhere else to go but to another brothel where she learns to become a woman of pleasure.
We have explained the plot in the audiovisual presentation that accompanies this essay. There we have identified the main feminine stereotypes explained below, and we have also underlined some of the elements of traditional moral whichmake the novel resistant to a definitive genre classification.
Mid 18th century, the historical moment that frames the characterisation of Fanny’s femininity, is the period of the rise of capitalism and the bourgeois society. In the novel, this is reflected in the central role that money and trade have in the lives of the characters. Most of the masculine characters are related to trade andbusiness: they embark on maritime journeys to receive an inheritance (Charles), to settle debts (Polly Philip’s lover) or they are arrested for smuggling (Mr. Croft); the gentleman Fanny meets towards the end of the story became rich thanks to England commerce with India; Charles life, on the other hand, declines as his fortune decreases.
Women could not go into the same business as men, but in thenovel they are as closely dependent on money as them, or even more: since they have nothing and own nothing, their opportunities to get money are reduced to marriage, hard physical work, or prostitution. As this novel narrates the life of a woman of pleasure, it obviously focuses on the third option. We have two kind of women engaged in this economical activity: old and young ones. The greed of oldwomen sells the beauty of the young. Women become thus another object to be purchased in an uprising capitalist society dominated by men. This means that women are unavoidably subordinated to them, and for this reason, one of the main characteristics attributed to Fanny (and thus to the feminine gender) is her absolute dependence, which has different aspects.
The first of them is economical:Fanny’s lack of resources and her fear of poverty tie her to Mrs. Brow’s brothel and to her purposes. She remains there until Charles takes charge of her. When Charles disappears and Mrs. Jones threatens her with prison if she does not pay her bill, Mr. H. buys Fanny by settling of her debt. Up to this point, Fanny has always belonged to someone else and never to herself. From now on, she is stilldependent on money. And as her only way to get it is through relations with men, she becomes a member of Mr. Cole’s house. She begins to play a more active part, as she pretends to be a virgin in order to get Mr. Norbert to become his keeper. Now the economical benefit is presented as the consequence rather than the motivation of sexual subordination. The culmination of this process is her relationwith the old gentlemen that precedes Charles’ return: Fanny adopts the role of a respectable widow instead of that of a woman of pleasure. In addition, their relationship appears to be motivated by their moral affinity, and not by Fanny’s sexual or economical subordination. However, this relationship follows essentially the same pattern that the previous ones: she has given pleasure to a man, and...