The Sodomite in Fiction and Satire, 1660-1750

In the introduction to The Sodomite in Fiction and Satire 1660-1750, McFarlane explains his intention to investigate the extent to which homosexuality in the eighteenth century extended beyond the molly houses. He rehearses for this purpose three studies that serve as the bases for his own research: Alan Bray's Homosexuality in Renaissance England (1982), Randolph Trumbach's various essays, and Rictor Norton's Mother Clap's Molly House (1992). The last of these he includes, although it is not a scholarly work, because it helps us understand the pervasiveness of homosexuality in early eighteenth century London. McFarlane then uses as his starting point a telling Pepys quotation which indicates that the seventeenth-century diarist, and by extension his contemporaries, either knew little about the mechanics of gay sex or at least pretended not to know.

One of the valuable insights that McFarlane airs early in his study is the definition of sodomy as a disrupter of social order, and this definition pervades his book. When church and state defined buggery as a fundamental dysfunction of natural instinct, the sodomist was seen as a treasonous felon intent on overthrowing authority. Thus the severity of punishment for sodomites at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century actually reflects the notion of sodomites as rebels dangerous beyond the boundaries of mere sexuality. For some time we have believed that the mollies of the late Restoration were pervasive in London for an extended period of time, but McFarlane shows that scholars have based such a conclusion on only part of a 1709 molly text by Edward Ward (The Secret History of Clubs). Actually, Ward focused on the rigor with which the mollies and their private parties were shut down by the authorities, so that by the turn of the century "the Diabolical Society were forc'd to put a period to their filthy scandalous Revels" (288, qtd. McFarlane 67).

As one might expect of the eighteenth century, when the economy of England was driving the country into greater and greater prominence, any deviation from prosperity had to have a scapegoat, and McFarlane shows in a close analysis of two texts that the scapegoat was often the sodomite, if only as a metaphor for lack of fecundity in a stagnant economy. The two anonymous texts are Sodom (1672) and Love Letters Between a Certain Late Nobleman and the Famous Mr. Wilson (1723). Although purportedly salacious, they both simply use sodomitical language to account for social and economic disorder. The eighteenth-century fascination with the sodomite, therefore, contradicted its attempt to marginalize the sodomite socially. McFarlane makes the argument convincingly, although some of his authorities seem odd, e.g. John Boswell, who actually made his name as a medieval/classical scholar, and Rictor Norton, whom McFarlane admits is more a popularizer than a scholar. While excoriating sodomy, writers were quick to appropriate it as a way to explain a faltering economy and thus, the more graphic the sodomy, the greater the pressure to eradicate the very practice that gave social commentators their strongest metaphor and scapegoat.

In a chapter devoted to Smollett, McFarlane examines two early satires of his (Advice and Reproof) in which the sodomite is attacked as less than manly and as a disrupter of the homosocial world, a view that would later typify as well the Smollett novels Roderick Random and Peregrine Prickle. McFarlane's argument that Smollett seems almost obsessive in his excoriation of sodomites is solid and supported by multiple critics. In a final chapter McFarlane focuses on two works, the little known Account of the Proceedings against Capt. Edward Rigby (1698) and the ever popular Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748) by John Cleland. What these texts bring to the discussion is graphic descriptions of the sodomitical act, a drama entirely lacking in Smolett and earlier guardians of public morals. The Rigby broadside is actually more juridical than literary, but the Fanny Hill Memoirs are eminently fictive. In an extended analysis of a sodomy scene in the latter, McFarlane determines that viewed and viewer (condemned and condemner) fuse in spite of their segregation: the aghast voyeur becomes the vehicle for reader participation.

The book may seem uneven in content, particularly since early chapters have so much to do with sodomy as a metaphor for economic disintegration and later chapters are essentially literary/critical analyses of texts, but such an impression pales in the face of the broad spectrum the volume envisions. Covering a history of sodomy from Biblical Lot up to eighteenth century raconteurs is ambitious in so slim a book (four chapters and a conclusion), and McFarlane must be praised for breadth if not for depth. A reader who wants a good introduction to sodomy in a context of economic, social, and literary eighteenth-century England can find much to praise in McFarlane's book.