Jon Cleland's Memoirs Of A Women Of Pleasure

Jon Cleland’s Memoirs of a Women of Pleasure, In other times known as Fanny Hill, is a story of a country girl whom becomes wealthy by selling sex in the brothels that thrived in London in the 18th century otherwise considered “pornography.” In those days, the term pornography, in all actuality ‘writing about prostitutes”, which in essences perfectly describes the book context. The novel is very explicit and graphic by nature, with its in depth descriptions of “the truth, stark naked truth”, and full of “unreserved intimacies”, and expressly “violating the laws of decency” quoted by the author in the book. During this era, women whom were unmarried and also lacking male relatives to care for them, were very limited in choices of supporting themselves. It was not common for women to have office jobs, learn the stock market, but they did have the ability to earn an income by domestic slavery in private homes. Many worked as poorly paid seamstresses and school teachers. And the others, turned to the wonderful world of “prostitution.” In the Memoir of a Women of …show more content…
The pleasure that their vagina does or does not receive, the conditions that the work and the way they work is how Memoirs establishes this. Vaginas are a focal point of the novel, and is created in several metaphors that are present in the novel. An example, is the oh so vulgar translation of Fanny Hill’s name, from the Latin mons Veneirs. If Fanny's "natural philosophy" all resides in her "favorite center of sense," which rules her "by its powerful instinct," then the novel as a whole depends upon the allegedly instinctual workings of Fanny's and the other prostitutes' vaginas to provide its own "philosophy" of sexuality (Cleland 80). The philosophy is not concentrated on the realities of women, but the sexual experience of their