Houman Barekat

Bawdy, it’s not — Strange Antics: A cultural history of seduction

Clement Knox’s strangely unsalacious study reviewed

Anyone reading Clement Knox’s history of seduction for salacious entertainment is likely to be disappointed: it contains no mention of oysters or Barry White records, and only a very light sprinkling of bawdiness. Strange Antics is a serious and sober tome about libertinism and its consequences, thank you very much. Readers expecting ‘history’, in the conventional sense, will likewise be frustrated: though it dips into legal and political history, this book is principally composed of literary biography and criticism, as Knox draws on the lives of various cultural historical figures and several canonical novels to explore his theme — a format that has lately become something of a go-to for debut non-fiction authors.

In the 18th century men could sow their oats with minimal repercussions, whereas women engaging in dalliances risked social ostracism, economic ruin and pregnancy. As the letter-writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu put it: ‘Tis play to you, but tis death to us.’  It was in this context that Pamela (1740), Samuel Richardson’s novel about the seduction of a poor girl by her rakish boss, became a bestseller. Richardson said he wrote it ‘to warn the inconsiderate and thoughtless of one of the sex against the base arts and designs and specious contrivers of the other’.  Knox credits him with having kicked off the conversation: ‘Anyone who has ever understood seduction as a problem of power. . . has lingered a while in Richardson’s world.’ A similar solicitude for the plight of the ill-used poor informs Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1823): Shelley’s monster serves as a powerful metaphor for the abandoned bastard child, its plaintive plea to its creator — ‘How dare you sport thus with life?’ — doubling as a moral rebuke to reckless cads everywhere.

Concern for the welfare of women sometimes dovetailed with racial chauvinism.

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