| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語研究所 === 87 === Composed of two fictional letters, John Cleland's
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (commonly known as Fanny Hill) is a sexual fiction in which Fanny, the narrator, confides her history of prostitution to her addressee, Madam. Folded within this epistolary novel are Fanny's sexual secrets. This thesis aims to examine Fanny's sexual secrets from three different (philosophical, socio-historical, and textual) perspectives.
In chapter two, a certain link is made between Descartes, La Mettrie, and Fanny Hill. Descartes believes in the immaterial soul and the uniqueness of human speech, while in L'Homme machine La Mettrie sees human being as a machine made of springs in which the soul is one part of its mainspring, and he speculates on the possibility of teaching an ape to speak. Besides, La Mettrie elaborates on the notion of imagination in L'Homme machine. The materialist images of the machine and the spring also appear in the Memoirs, and, like La Mettrie, in the Memoirs Cleland shows the importance of imagination and the interplay between imagination and sexuality.
In chapter three, first, I offer an academic reconstruction of sexuality in the Enlightenment Britain and I demonstrate the Memoirs as an Enlightenment product. Then, I examine the novel's construction of the sexual ideology of sexual ab/normality. In the Memoirs, Cleland constructs marital, reproductive heterosexuality as the sexual normality, which excludes all the other sexual practices in the novel as sexually abnormal.
In chapter four I try to see the Memoirs as a successful sexually-arousing literary text. The focus is on its narrative techniques and the use of the first-person narrator. The Memoirs is filled with descriptions of sexual organs and narrations of sexual activities that keep seducing the reader, but it is also concerned with representation of other aspects of life. It is not a timeless/placeless pornotopia. In terms of the narrator, the textually female "I" offers a textual/ imaginary space where male author and reader can fulfill their sexual desires. Hence, Fanny's sexual secrets are in fact men's sexual fantasies.
Chapter five recapitulates the previous three chapters. Besides, it points out that this thesis is a process of unfolding Fanny's secrets.
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