Defining Early Modern Pornography: The Case of Venus and Adonis

Abstract

Pornography: 1.a. The description or exhibition of subjects or activity in literature, painting, film, etc., in a manner intended to stimulate rather than feelings; printed or visual material containing this. (OED)In the 2006 third edition of The Oxford Dictionary, the definition of was revised to include a distinction between the erotic and aesthetic feelings sexually representations produce in their audiences. While this distinction is not new, its recent inclusion in the definition of invites us to explore sexually early modern literature, such as Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, in a new light. In struggling to reconcile the excess of Venus and Adonis with the poem's merits, critics from the seventeenth onwards have drawn on distinctions between appreciation and titillation as a means to defend the poem as art or dismiss it as pornography. While considerable attention has been given to the effects of the poem, even as they incorporate sexuality, the poem's effects have received less consideration. Do the feelings Venus and Adonis stimulates make it a of pornography in light of the 2006 definition? Would its early modern audience have read it as pornography? What might an early modern pornographic reading process have entailed?The word did not make its first appearance until 1857, and scholars of the early modern period such as Ian Frederick Moulton, James Grantham Turner, and Julie Peakman comment on its limitations as an anachronistic descriptor of seventeenth-century literature. Moulton writes that [w]hile it is possible (but by no means certain) that the subjective feelings associates with the pornographic have always existed, the genre has not, and the term itself is a relatively new one (5). Turner coins the term pornographia in his to distance it from modern debates and to emphasize its etymological roots (xii). Turner's pornographia focuses specifically on the modern term's fusion of the Greek words for and painter in order to discuss the graphic, punitive marking of the whore in libertine England. Julie Peakman notes that although France had developed a graphic style by the seventeenth century, English pornographic work became 'an aim in itself ' (for the main purpose of excitement) only from the middle of the eighteenth century (6). The word pornographic does make infrequent appearances in early modern scholarship, often to connote the sexually or gratuitous aspects of a text or performance by modern standards, but few studies devote considerable attention to the gap between modern and premodern forms of representation. To read early modern literature as therefore requires a definition of the term that takes into account how representations of sex circulated in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, and how such representations fit into the broader social and moral schemes of the period. This essay recontextualizes the two major components of the OED's 2006 definition-the explicit representation of sexual content and the distinction between erotic and aesthetic feelings-to formulate a definition of suitable for the early modern period. In applying this definition to the case of Venus and Adonis, I hope to demonstrate that to read the poem pornographically provides insight into the place of pleasure in the sixteenth-century moral order.Although pornography remains a contentious term in early modern studies, doubts about pornography's applicability have hardly hampered the study of early modern representation, since terms like bawdy and erotic, which move more freely across historical periods, continue to shape our understanding of early modern sexuality. Bawdy and present, however, their own limitations in theorizing how societies represent sexuality. …

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