Documenting Sexual Difference

Vanessa Warne

Todd C. Parker. Sexing the Text: The Rhetoric of Sexual Difference in British Literature, 1700-1750. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. 218 pages. Notes, bibliography, index. $54.40 (cloth); $17.95 (paper).

In Sexing the Text, Todd Parker examines the representation and formulation of sexual difference in early eighteenth-century British culture. Parker’s discussion of the nature and operations of sexual difference in this period takes as its focus the discursive naturalization of heterosexuality both in and by literature. Specifically, Parker traces the development between 1700 and 1750 of a new rhetoric of natural heterosexuality. This rhetoric, which is founded on the notion of sexual difference, operates against older and more diverse conceptions of sexuality. Parker argues that texts produced in this fifty-year period "reinforce the sociocultural authority of heterosexuality, in large part by constraining rhetorically the formal and ideological potential of the sexed body" (177). He characterizes this process as one which is contested but which is largely complete by the midpoint of the century. According to Parker, the development of this particular system of sexual difference has had significant consequences for the modern age. He explains: "For eighteenth-century Britain, male sexuality, instead of signaling a masculine identity sensitive to its class and immediate environment, becomes increasingly the privileged site of an emerging heterosexual hierarchy defining ‘male’ as that which corresponds to ‘female’ as a limit. This limiting effect . . . establishes the modern period as such, since it is only by instating a self-limiting logic of heterosexual duality that the political conventions of modern subjectivity become possible" (1).

In pursuit of this thesis, Parker undertakes a literary-critical analysis of a small but diverse group of early-eighteenth-century texts. His selection of texts is based on his assessment of them as "exemplary moments in the literary history of sexual difference" (3). They include poems by canonical figures such as Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope as well as such lesser-known works as an anonymous anti-masturbation tract entitled Onania (c.1708). Parker prefaces his detailed analysis of these texts with an introduction that documents and analyzes historical developments in the meaning and legal status of sodomy. He traces a "transition from comprehensible forms of male sodomy to the ‘perverse’ and alienating practices that bear the burden of so much of today’s sexual anxiety" (9). Parker’s reading also ties shifting conceptions of sodomy to related shifts in ideas about masculinity and male subjectivity.

Like much of the volume, the introduction draws heavily on Thomas Laqueur’s highly acclaimed discussion of the history of sexuality in Making Sex (1995). Laqueur’s influence is, for example, apparent in Parker’s decision to focus on moments of conflict or instability within the larger movement towards the hegemony of natural heterosexuality. Parker repeatedly emphasizes the competitive nature of interactions between contradictory but coexisting encodings of normative sexuality in the eighteenth century. This approach is perhaps best exemplified by his reading of Onania; or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution in the first chapter. In it, Parker presents a persuasive analysis of the text’s expression of anxieties about homosexual activities. Parker argues, for instance, that masturbation is attacked by the anonymous author of the tract on the basis that it is a sexual practice that undermines the claims of sexual difference and consequently threatens the perceived naturalness of heterosexuality.

In his second and third chapters, Parker extends his thesis to a discussion of poems by Swift and Pope. His treatment of Swift’s poetry takes as its focus connections between political satire and Swift’s use of images and allusions to sodomy. Parker maintains that the identification of public figures such as William Wood with homosexual desires and practices enabled Swift to target and vilify his own political and ideological opponents. Put simply, by exploiting growing anxieties about sodomy, Swift was able to contain political threats. According to Parker, this same activity "also creates a complex poetic network where gender identity, perverse sexuality and masculine politics so intertwine that male sexual identity in Swift’s poetry becomes a dangerously unstable source of political power" (52). The argument and the support that Parker provides for it are very persuasive. It is also worth noting that by highlighting the role that references to marginalized forms of sexuality play in Swift’s work, Parker broadens existing criticism’s overly narrow focus on the scatological dimensions of Swift’s representation of the body.

Moving on to Pope, Parker undertakes a close analysis of two poems, "To Cobham" (1734) and "To a Lady" (1735). Parker argues that the relation of these texts to the rhetoric of sexual difference has not been adequately addressed by recent treatments of the poems’ generic characteristics. The reading he presents focuses on Pope’s representation of sexual difference, a difference expressed in Pope’s work as "male character and female characterlessness" (116). Parker’s focus throughout the chapter is on the problematically unstable nature of Pope’s construction of sexual difference. As Parker puts it, "Pope’s two epistles on character are most concerned with ratifying reliable difference between male and female that his works cannot, finally, sustain" (89). According to Parker, the inability of these texts to sustain sexual difference is both revealed and concealed by the formal characteristics of Pope’s character-sketch poetry.

In his fourth and fifth chapters, Parker moves away from poetry in order to discuss a selection of novels by Eliza Fowler Haywood and John Cleland. Parker’s discussion of Haywood’s 1727 romance novel, Philidore and Placientia, is particularly strong. In his analysis of this fascinating but seldom-studied novel, Parker addresses the interplay of notions of sexual difference with the troubling and destabilizing inclusion of a eunuch figure in the cast of characters. As Parker argues, the eunuch’s castrated state "reveals the contingent nature of gender identifications" (28). This chapter also provides Parker with a forum for a nuanced discussion of the changing relation of class status to sexual identity in this period. In his discussion of Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749) and Memoirs of a Coxcomb (1751), Parker focuses on representations of the sexed body and on the related demonization of homosexual desire. Emphasis is once again placed on ways in which literary texts participate in the attempted naturalization of an often unstable system of sexual difference. He argues, for instance, that "Cleland attempts to use genital reference to produce apparently natural male and female referents as a strategy for the stabilization of the very identities his novel is supposed merely to describe" (141). The close readings presented in support of this argument are thorough and insightful.

The primary strengths of Sexing the Text do not, however, lie with Parker’s close readings. They lie instead with Parker’s ability to negotiate deftly between literary texts, existing criticism, and a range of both theoretical and historical sources. In the course of the book, literature, criticism, theory, and history are consistently brought together in insightful ways. With the exception of some minor inconsistencies in the depth and quality of his analysis, the book is well argued and well written. The only clear cause of complaint might be the limited number of texts that Parker discusses. He works with a varied selection of texts but the size of the selection is disappointingly small. Generally speaking, however, Sexing the Text brings the insights of queer theory to a body of literature that is helpfully illuminated by their application. It makes a valuable contribution to the literary-critical study of the history of sexuality.