‘How we perceive the past, what we see in it and what we ignore, depends on our current perspective’, writes Faramerz Dabhoiwala at the end of his hotly-anticipated The Origins of Sex. Well, quite. In seeking words to describe Dabhoiwala’s history of sex, though, none could be more appropriate. The book resounds with sundry modern truths, so much so, in fact, that when Dr. Dabhoiwala finally poses the question, ‘How far, then, have we come?’ The answer, ‘Not very, sir, since 1800’, springs to mind.
In tandem with the explosion of popular publications, mass circulation of literature, and most importantly the emergence in force of the factual biography from around 1800, Dabhoiwala suggests, it became increasingly permissible, indeed, desirable, for individuals’ intimate details to be publicised, mulled over, and discussed.
Sex had never really been a private affair. The first section of his book documents some of the many legal trials brought to bear over illicit relations in the previous centuries. But now, following generations of casting scorn — and much worse- upon prostitutes, in particular, there sprang up in England a fascination with what they might have to say, what they might look like. Sex entered the mainstream, supposedly this time for the better.
But publication of this kind wasn’t exactly unprecedented. The diaries of John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys, from which Dabhoiwala draws, had provided similar insight into all manner of sexual intrigue. The degree to which popular literature and art could be, not purely celebratory, but at once denigrating, or at least perceived with an acknowledged self–superiority even after 1800, goes largely unquestioned. John Evelyn, to take a modern parallel, lives on at Oxford University in the form of an anonymous student gossip column on the sexual misdemeanours of others.
In the most microcosmic sense, which is often the sense offered in this book, mass-publication of the sexually explicit doesn’t always endear one to its contents. Which is why even self-confessional works published by women, such as Frances, Lady Vane’s 1751 Memoirs of a Lady of Quality cannot be as liberating as Dabhoiwala makes out. For what became of the memoirs? They were absorbed into Tobias Smollett’s novel, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, the tales of an Oxford-educated male bon viveur, attractive primarily to a male readership. There’s a difference between what can be practiced in private, and be there liberating, and what can be made public and continue to be such. It’s a modern as much as an historical problem, and one that lives on for women.
The Origins of Sex is a dense, but intriguing guide through the centuries leading up to 1800 in England, embracing laws pertaining to marriage, procurement, asylum and deportation of prostitutes, the character of sex in literature, and male versus female views about lust and its inevitable consequences. While Dabhoiwala’s emphasis is on development by 1800, it is rather the continuity, or at least the peaks and troughs of repeated one step forward, two steps back, that emerges as the more interesting pattern of his account, from 1600 to the modern day.
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