Masturbation, modernity, and the Swiftian diagnosis re-examined

ABSTRACT

The opening reference to masturbation in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) provides evidence of not only an embedded cultural commentary on the masturbatory tendencies of modernity but also specific contempt for the novel as a masturbatory literary form. The same point is made elsewhere in Swift’s poetry and his parody of the erotic scene of female masturbation that continued to be a staple of amatory fiction. Yet the same body of writing reveals Swift’s recognition that he too was guilty of producing literary fuel for masturbation, as were the Ancients themselves whose works continued to invite a sexualized response from readers. As such, Swift reveals an ironic point of agreement with female authors of amatory fiction such as Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood, who represent instances of the poetry of the Ancients being put precisely to this use, providing tacit excuse for their own erotically charged writing. In his later notorious diagnosis of Swift as a chronic masturbator literary physician Thomas Beddoes is arguably responding at least in part to Swift’s own sense of entrapment within masturbatory modernity.

KEYWORDS:

• Swift
• Beddoes
• masturbation
• modernity
• print culture
• the novel

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. David Womersley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 31. This edition appears as Volume 16 in the seventeen-volume set of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift (2010–18). Christopher Fox, ‘The Myth of Narcissus in Swift’s Travels’, in Reader Entrapment in Eighteenth-century Literature, ed. Carl R. Kropf (New York: AMS Press, 1992), 92–3. Fox borrows the terms ‘accidental’ and ‘incidental’ from Frank Brady, ‘Vexations and Diversions: Three Problems in Gulliver’s Travels’, Modern Philology 75, no. 4 (1978): 350.

2 Laqueur and Michel Foucault can be credited as not only important contributors to the historical study of sexuality, but also specifically to that of masturbation. Before Foucault, historically negative attitudes towards masturbation tended to be regarded simply as another example of the general repression of sexuality in modern society, what has been called the ‘repression hypothesis’. See Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, 3 vols. (London: Penguin, 1978–85).

3 Thomas Beddoes, Hygeia, or Essays Moral and Medical, 3 vols. (Bristol: Printed by J. Mills for R. Phillips, 1802–3), 3.9.189–90. This three-volume work is divided into essays with their own title and separate page numbering. Citations for Beddoes refer to volume number, essay number, and page number.

4 Aside from Brady, Fox notes William Kinsley among those who have discussed the significance of Gulliver’s apprenticeship to ‘my good Master Bates’. William Kinsley, ‘Gentle Readings: Recent Work on Swift’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 15, no. 4 (1982): 443. Other sources containing useful considerations of ‘my good Master Bates’ include Phyllis Greenacre, Swift and Carroll: A Psychoanalytic Study of Two Lives (New York: International Universities Press, 1955); Frank T. Boyle, Swift as Nemesis: Modernity and Its Satirist (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); and Paul-Gabriel Boucé, ‘Gulliver’s Master Bates Once Again’, XVII–XVIII : Revue de la société d’études anglo-américaines des XVII^e et XVIII^e siècles 55 (2002): 85–95.

5 Womersley still evinces some caution in presuming a pun here, citing the authority of the OED and its identification of the ‘first occurrence of the verb “masturbate”’ in 1839. See footnote fourteen in Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 31.

6 Fox dates Onania to 1709–10. Laqueur speculates that Onania first appeared between 1708 and 1716, favouring 1712 as a compromise within this range. Thomas Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (New York: Zone Books, 2003), 13. Most scholars seem to accept a date within the same range, Anne Elizabeth Carson positing a publication possibly as early as 1707. Anne Elizabeth Carson, ‘“Exquisite Torture”: The Autoeroticism of Pope’s Eloisa’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 40, no. 4 (2007): 618. Laqueur notes the popular attribution of Onania ‘to a Dutch clergyman, Balthasar Bekker’, tracing the origin of this attribution to Samuel August David Tissot, a famous anti-masturbation campaigner in his own right, but he makes a convincing case of its unlikeliness and counters with his own proposed candidate: Marten (31–2).

7 Fox, ‘Myth’, 90–1.

8 Ibid., 93.

9 Ibid., 94. Boyle develops Fox’ reading, contending that Gulliver exhibits three different forms of narcissism: the ‘psycho-sexual’, which is ‘universal and fundamental, the motivating factor in all human behavior’, the ‘professional’ and the ‘specifically commercial’. Boyle, Swift, 28, 29.

10 Fox, ‘Myth’, 96.

11 Ibid., 99–100.

12 Ibid., 101.

13 Laqueur notably takes the identified joke about masturbation at the beginning of Gulliver’s Travels as a matter of course. Laqueur, Solitary, 13.

14 Boucé notes two classical writers with whom Swift was familiar who allude disapprovingly to masturbation: Catullus and Martial, although Laqueur devotes a substantial section of his monograph to distinguishing eighteenth-century from classical attitudes towards masturbation. Boucé himself cites ‘Gulliver’s dim eyesight’ as a signifier of masturbatory habits. Boucé, ‘Gulliver’s Master’, 89, 88.

15 Although focused on a different European context, Franz X. Eder provides another informative overview of anti-masturbation literature during the period, identifying three main categories of author: ‘members of the clergy’, who continued the church’s tradition of defining masturbation as a vice and sin; that of ‘[d]octors, who suspected that the practice amounted to a form of serious physical illness’; and that of ‘[p]edagogues, who concentrated on the educational dimension’ and ‘viewed masturbation by children and youths as a problem of upbringing’. Franz X. Eder, ‘Discourse and Sexual Desire: German Language Discourse on Masturbation in the Late Eighteenth Century’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 13, no. 4 (2004): 433–4. Evidently, Foucault identifies nineteenth-century cultural anxiety over masturbation as the beginning of the sexualization of the child.

16 There is a wealth of literature, primary and secondary, on the various mental and physical ills attributed to masturbation. In addition to the secondary sources already mentioned, Jean Stengers and Anne Van Neck’s, Masturbation: The History of a Great Terror, trans. Kathryn Hoffman (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001) provides a comprehensive survey of this particular subject.

17 Laqueur, Solitary, 210.

18 Ibid., 210.

19 Bernard Mandeville, A Modest Defence of Public Stews; or, An essay upon Whoring (London: Printed for A. Moore, 1724), 22.

20 See Laqueur, Solitary, 90–1 and 330–1.

21 My source is John Armstrong, The Oeconomy of Love: A Poetical Essay (London: Printed for T. Cooper, 1739), available at Gale Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO). Positing sex with prostitutes as a healthy alternative to masturbation was evidently not one that could be accepted by critics of commercial capitalism who, drawing on the longstanding luxury debate, equated prostitution with luxury. For more on this point, see Vivien Jones, ‘Luxury, Satire, and Prostitute Narratives’, Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods, eds. Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 178.

22 Laqueur, Solitary, 210.

23 In addition to the Berg and Eger collection, standard sources on the luxury debate in the eighteenth century include John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Christopher J. Berry. The Idea of Luxury (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and E.J. Clery, The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England: Literature, Commerce and Luxury (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

24 Laqueur, Solitary, 302.

25 Ibid., 316. For more on eighteenth-century women and reading see Jacqueline Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–1835: A Dangerous Recreation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

26 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’, Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (1991): 820. See also John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

27 J. Paul Hunter, ‘Gulliver’s Travels and the Later Writings’, Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift, ed. Christopher Fox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 224.

28 Ibid., 224, 225–6, 226.

29 As Sedgwick underscores, ‘unstable dichotomies between art and masturbation have persisted, culminating in those recurrent indictments of self-reflexive art and critical theory themselves as forms of mental masturbation’. Sedgwick, ‘Austen’, 820. Sedgwick points additionally to the way in which masturbation has continued to generate resistance to being recognized as a subject of legitimate scholarly inquiry, even when other topics related to sexuality have not, this resistance echoing the historical body of anti-masturbation literature with its ‘phobic narratives about the degeneracy of academic discourse in the humanities’ (818).

30 Brean Hammond, ‘Swift’s Reading’, Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift, ed. Christopher Fox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 85.

31 Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 168.

32 Louise K. Barnett, ‘Voyeurism as Entrapment in Swift’s Poetry’, in Reader Entrapment in Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Carl R. Kropf (New York: AMS Press, 1992), 50. My source for Swift’s poetry is Jonathan Swift, Poems, ed. Hugh Williams, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

33 Barnett, ‘Voyeurism’, 48, 47.

34 Solitary, 203.

35 The name ‘Abbé du Prat’, which appears on the original French edition, is by all accounts a pseudonym. One of the candidates for authorship identified by scholars is a Jean Barrin. An anonymous English translation was first published in 1683 by Henry Rhodes. The apparent translator of the Curll edition was Robert Samber, better known for his translation of Charles Perrault’s Histoires ou contes du temps passé or Les contes de ma Mère l’Oye (1695). Bradford K. Mudge provides some details of the story of Curll’s prosecution for this publication and the scholarly sources that cover the trial at length. Bradford K. Mudge, ed., When Flesh Becomes Word: An Anthology of Early Eighteenth-Century Libertine Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), xvii–xviii.

36 Eliza Haywood, Love in Excess, 2nd ed., ed. Davide Oakleaf (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2000), 107.

37 Ibid., 116.

38 Ying-chiao Lin notably cites ‘A Beautiful Young Nymph going to Bed’ within the context of a recurring commentary on the ongoing eighteenth-century syphilis epidemic, as the poet ‘mocks the syphilitic woman’s attempt to use every cosmetic aid to conceal the erosions of her disease’. Ying-chiao Lin, ‘Syphilis, Satire and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels’, NTU Studies in Language and Literature 23 (2012): 5. As Ann Cline Kelly notes, Swift himself was ironically later reported by some to have contracted syphilis. For a complete series of references to Swift and allegations of venereal disease see Ann Cline Kelly, Jonathan Swift and Popular Culture Myth, Media and the Man (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 109, 122, 136, 209.

39 Hermann J. Real divides the poem into a ‘dismemberment scene’ and ‘anxiety dream’. Against a previous ‘attempt to account for [Corinna’s] anxiety dream’ with reference to ‘the Epicurean model of the genesis of dreams’, a model which posits that ‘the human mind when dreaming is engaged by what preoccupies a man or woman during the day’, he proposes a possible more immediate source of inspiration taken from Alain-René Le Sage’s Le Diable Boiteux: or, the Devil Upon Two Sticks (1707). Hermann J. Real, ‘Corinna’s Dream, Again’, Notes and Queries 48, no. 1 (2001): 34. The earlier account to which he refers is Brean S. Hammond, ‘Corinna’s Dream’, Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 36, no. 2 (1995): 99–118.

40 As Robert Rawdon Wilson has noted, disgust is a complex emotion in itself and can be used as part of an effort to shame readers into reforming their ways, or conforming to normative standards, or submitting themselves to authority, or, completely differently, as a form of resistance to authority of various kinds. See Robert Rawdon Wilson, The Hydra’s Tale: Imagining Disgust (Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press, 2002).

41 My source for Pope’s poetry is The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963). Citations include canto and line number.

42 Joseph Addison, ‘No. 37’, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 1.154, 156. The identification of Addison’s authorship and dates are taken from Bond.

43 Cadenus and Vanessa first appeared in Swift’s Miscellanies. The Last Volume (1727), composed, as he states, in 1713, although scholars have backdated composition to 1712.

44 Laqueur acknowledges that ‘warnings about the dangers of private reading of imaginative literature had a long history’ but points out that the focus was typically on romantic couples alone reading together, as, for example, in the story of the real-life adulterous couple Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta told in Canto 5 of Dante’s Inferno, first published as part of the Comedia (1472). See Solitary, 314–5.

45 Haywood, Love, 108.

46 The suspicious usage to which women might put the letters of Eloisa and Abelard is evidently the theme of Bernard Auguste D’Agesci’s later striking painting, Femme lisant les lettres d’Héloïse et Abélard (c. 1780).

47 Carson, ‘Exquisite’, 625–6, 625. See also Marilyn Francus, ‘The Monstrous Mother: Reproductive Anxiety in Swift and Pope’, English Literary History 61, no. 4 (1994): 829–51, 832. Carson briefly touches on The Rape of the Lock as ‘a more entertaining and parodic take on the autoerotic’ than Eloisa to Abelard, affirming the possibility that Swift and Pope were both attempting to distance themselves from masturbation through parody (626).

48 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics of Transgression and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 2, 3.

49 Medico-moral anti-masturbation literature posits curiously opposite consequences of masturbation related to sexual life more broadly, warning that it would cause sexual dysfunction and sterility on the one hand and promiscuity and even nymphomania on the other. We find the former emphasis in Onania and Tissot’s L’Onanisme, subtitled ‘Dissertation physique sur less maladies produites par la masturbation’, first published in French in 1760, expanded from a Latin treatise that appeared the year before. The thesis regarding masturbation and nymphomania is central to J.D.T. Bienville’s La Nymphomanie, ou Traité de la fureur utérine (1771).

50 Delarivier Manley, The New Atalantis, ed. Rosalind Ballaster (New York: New York University Press, 1992).

51 Ibid., 34, 35.

52 Ibid., 37.

53 Ibid., 37.

54 Ibid., 37.

55 William B. Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford: California University Press, 1998), 108.

56 Bradford K. Mudge, The Whore’s Story: Women, Pornography, and the British Novel, 1684–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 147.

57 Ibid., 80.

58 Beddoes, Hygeia, 1.4.71.

59 Ibid., 4.9.190, 186.

60 Ibid., 4.9.190.

61 Boucé, ‘Gulliver’s Master’, 94. Boucé mentions two other scholarly considerations of Beddoes’ diagnosis: Hugh Ormsby-Lennon, ‘Swift’s Spirit Reconjured: Das Dong-an-sich’, Swift Studies 3 (1988): 72–7 and Roy Porter, ‘Forbidden Pleasures: Enlightenment Literature on Sexual Advice’, in Solitary Pleasures: The Historical, Literary, and Artistic Discourses of Autoeroticism, eds. Paula Bennett and Vernon A. Rosario (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1995), 87–9.

62 Boyle, Swift, 26. As Boyle points out, the difficulty has been exacerbated by the influence of psychoanalytic criticism, as we all ‘tend to read as psychanalysts, moving back through a narrative of abnormal behavior to a diagnosis, narcissism’ (26).

63 See Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance, 2 vols. (Colchester: Printed for W. Keymer, 1785), 2. 53 and Barbauld’s prefatory essay to The British Novelists (1810) in Anna Letitia Barbauld, Selected Poetry and Prose, eds. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2002), 377.

64 Beddoes, Hygeia, 4.9. 167.

65 Ibid., 1.4.45. Swift remains a particularly interesting historical case study for the number of rumours that swirled around his sexuality, including incest and homosexuality in addition to masturbation. For a comprehensive discussion of the various rumours regarding Swift’s transgressive sexual life see Kelly, Jonathan Swift, 105–26. Indirectly, Swift suggests another bridge between the sexual identity of masturbator that was eventually displaced and that of the homosexual, at the very least still in formation throughout the eighteenth century. For more on homosexuality in the eighteenth century a frequently cited source is Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution Vol. 1: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

66 Mary Fairclough, ‘Dr. Thomas Beddoes and the Politics of Imagination’, Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies 37, no. 1 (2013): 90.

67 Ibid., 91– 2.

68 Beddoes, Hygeia, 2.9, 187, 188. The original passage appears in ‘The Life of the Rev. Dr. Jonathan Swift’ that Thomas Sheridan wrote for the first volume of his seventeen-volume collected edition of The Works of the Rev. Dr. Jonathan Swift (London: Printed for J.F. and C. Rivington, L. Davis, J. Dodsley, T. Longman, B. Law, J. Johnson, T. Cadell, J. Nichols, G. Robinson and Co., R. Baldwin, J. Sewell, T. Egerton, W. Bent, W. Otridge, and B.C. Collins, 1784), 3.

69 John Edmond Stock, Memoirs of Thomas Beddoes, with an Analysis of his Writings (London: Printed for John Murray, 1811), 406.

70 Beddoes, Hygeia, 1.4.59.

71 Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 260–1.

72 Boyle, Swift, 30–1.

73 Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 267–8.

74 Further reading on nineteenth-century intersections between literature, medicine, and masturbation includes Diane Mason, The Secret Vice: Masturbation in Victorian Fiction and Medical Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).

75 Lesley A. Hall, review of Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation, by Thomas Laqueur, Medical History 48, no. 2 (April 2004): 274.