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Literature and Sex
ELISABETH LADENSON
Ladenson, Elisabeth
Literature and Sex
© Cambridge University Press 2016
French literature has for a very long time been known, and alternately celebrated and deplored, for its emphasis on sex. When Joyce's Ulysses was first published in unexpurgated form in 1922, to cite one notable example, many commentators expressed their reactions to the novel's objectionable aspects through allusions to French authors. For Edmund Gosse, Joyce was 'a sort of Marquis de Sade', his novel 'as obscene as Rabelais'; Shane Leslie felt that it touched 'the lower depths of Rabelaisian realism'; the demagogic editorialist James Douglas went so far as to opine that 'The obscenity of Rabelais is innocent compared with its leprous and scabrous horrors.'1 Throughout the censorship debates of the twentieth century in the Anglophone world, French literature as a general category was regularly evoked as representing the ne plus ultra of obscenity, with Rabelais, Zola, and above all Sade cited as exemplary figures of literary unacceptability.
The evocation of French literary works as vehicles of moral corruption began in the Middle Ages, with chivalric romance literature. Doubtless the first such reference is the famous episode in Canto V of Dante's Inferno (early fourteenth century) in which Francesca da Rimini recounts, from the Second Circle of Hell, her narrative of adulterous relations with her brother-in-law inspired by their reading of the thirteenth-century romance of Lancelot of the Lake. Some four centuries later, though with somewhat less dire results, the main character of Charlotte Lennox's 1752 novel The Female Quixote is led by her readings of the seventeenth-century works of Madeleine de Scudéry to believe she is living in a romance novel (since she is a young woman, her unfortunate adventures, unlike those of her eponymous Spanish forebear, chiefly involve mistaking all the men she encounters for pining suitors).2 The idea of French literature per se as a vehicle of moral corruption, however, did not become a literary commonplace until the mid nineteenth century. Victorian literature is particularly rich in allusions to the corrupting force of French novels, especially – though not exclusively – on young women.
The dangerous French novel of the Victorians
The pernicious influence of French works held sway with great force as a leitmotif...