spends many years in prison, while Miranda, as we have seen, comes to a comfortable end.
Behn's reversal of genders, though it lends comedy and exposes stereotypes, does little to revise the system of sexual force that amatory -56- fictions continue to uphold, a system that most often worked, in fiction as in practice, to enhance male prerogatives and reinforce women's comparative powerlessness. Undoubtedly, in Miranda's upside-down rape of the priest, Behn is laughing at the expense of the patriarchal love-as-rape scenarios that permeated her culture's art and social relations, scenarios that invariably represented men as lustful brutes and women as sexual prey. But Behn also makes ridiculous her sexually powerful woman-a rapist without a penis who must finally attribute to her intended victim the violent act she threatens, achieving victory only by reassuming the typical posture of cringing female. Of course, Miranda's deliberate assumption of the role of sexual victim is itself a paradoxically powerful move, a strategy that beats patriarchy, as it were, at its own game; and certainly the mere representation of a powerful woman exercising sexual desire is extraordinarily subversive (enough so, perhaps, to contribute to the continued exclusion of The Fair Jilt from the canons of eighteenth-century literature). But along with the potentially empowering aspects of amatory fiction's scenes of female lust, there are also disturbing assumptions at work. Amatory fiction's women actively desire, often initiate, and thoroughly enjoy heterosexual sex; but they consistently define and act out their desire according to the force-oriented ethic of the Augustan rake. Within such a framework, representations of female sexuality fail to exemplify a positively or uniquely female form of sexual desire, though they do succeed in creating a space for such representation. Even the most transgressive scenes, then, function in contradictory ways, at once revolutionary and conventional: they show women exercising sexual desire, and at the same time bolster phallocentric patterns of sexual dominance.
The co-optation of female sexuality by established sex-as-force systems points to the pervasive masculinist orientation at work in these texts written by and for women, an orientation also signaled by the repeated use of misogynist truisms. ''Tis the Humour of our Sex,' Behn announces in a female voice, 'to deny most eagerly those Grants to Lovers, for which most tenderly we sigh.'
So contradictory are we to our selves, as if the Deity had made us with a seeming Reluctancy to his own Designs; placing as much Discords in our Minds, as there is Harmony in our Faces. We are a sort of aiery Clouds, whose Lightning flash out one way, and the Thunder another. Our Words and Thoughts can ne'er agree. -57-
Likewise, Manley's female narrator pauses to counsel the Duke when he is wondering whether to «possess» Charlot right away or 'permit her time to know and set a value upon what she granted.' 'One ought never,' the narrator remarks, 'allow 'em [women] time to Think, their vivacity being prodigious, and their forsight exceeding short, and limited; the first hurry of their Passions, if they are but vigorously follow'd, is what is generally most favourable to Lovers.' Not that giving Charlot a chance to think would much jeopardize the Duke's chances. After all, as we learn later in Atalantis, 'when once a young Maid pretends to put her self upon the same Foot with a Lover at Argument, she is sure to be cast.' And when in Love in Excess a man sees his girlfriend flirting with another man, Haywood genders his jealous feelings to the detriment of women: 'Envy, and a sort of Womanish Spleen transported him,' she informs us. Behn even goes so far as to unite her disparagement of her own sex with denigration of the genre she works in. 'Women enjoy'd,' she remarks in
This is not to say that the many representations of women's desire offered in these texts have no subversive power. On the contrary, no appraisal of the sexual force of amatory fiction can afford to leave out its tremendous potential for subversion. Merely by assuming a position as subject (both the central subject of the narrative and the possessor of active sexual subjectivity), even if that position is ironized, amatory fiction's desiring women threaten traditional male prerogatives based on female subjugation and objectification, and provide space for readers to imagine something new. It is important to remember that the facet of eighteenth-century prose fiction that is considered most revolutionary by critics as different as McKeon and Armstrong-its habit of making ordinary women of central importance-originated not in Richardson (as is often taught), but in amatory fiction. Furthermore, the bald statement of misogynist truisms, disturbing as it is, sometimes has a comic ring. Occasionally such stuff is presented in italics (as in the quotation from Manley above); despite the notoriously unsystematic way some -58- Augustan writers and printers used italic type, it is possible that in some cases this may suggest more self- consciousness and control than critics generally grant these writers-perhaps even a sense of humor. But caution is also required. Insofar as these texts do not themselves succeed in representing a uniquely female sexual desire, their representations of women as desiring subjects may be less an expression of new, boldly female sensibilities than a repackaging for women of the usual maleoriented social and intimate arrangements.
In this sense, Augustan amatory fictions are the direct ancestors of modern supermarket romances with their lurid, fetishistic covers, their sexually demanding men and innocent, desirable, passive women, and their insistence that sexual violence, correctly interpreted, reveals or engenders love. Indeed, without mitigating the immense cultural and historical distance between Augustan England and the contemporary United States, we can trace a distinct line of inheritance from Augustan amatory fiction to today's semipornographic mass-market romances. Recent work on the ideological functions of modern pulp reading, especially the work of Janice Radway, illuminates by implication the cultural work of Augustan England's amatory fictions and demonstrates the continuing power of the past in the present.
A latter-day variant of amatory fiction, Harlequin romances are written especially for female consumption, offering sex and love in arousing, but usually not graphic, packages. They inspire obsessive reading, and are considered by readers and critics alike to be low, throwaway forms of writing, requiring of their audience little sophistication or application. Readers of Harlequin-type romances read in order to replicate predictable sensations and reaffirm cherished assumptions. So these romances seldom challenge dominant ideologies; they work instead to shore up traditional social positions (woman as the object of sexual desire, man as its subject) and expectations (heterosexual monogamy; female devotion to children). Although readers often use these texts as a means of escape and sometimes even of resistance, their participation draws them ever more tightly into the ideological web of male privilege and female subordination. Readers read obsessively because the books manage to promise a space for female protest and desire while never quite providing it; they whet, but never satisfy, both the reader's sexual appetite and her appetite for socially transgressive autonomy. Amatory fictions work the same way; as Richetti observes, — 59- they tend more often to 'flatter and exploit' than to 'challenge or redefine' readers' assumptions.
Like the Harlequins and other forms of romance, amatory fictions tend to repeat a limited number of characteristic topoi (obsessively recurrent formulas, assumptions, or ideas). Among the most frequently encountered of these is the idea that love is an irresistible force: lovers are its victims, and escape is impossible. 'Almighty Love,' intones a fallen woman in Haywood's
Are there such violent Desires that Reason cannot suppress? Is Love such an irresistable Tyrant? Will he trample upon all Obstacles? Are the most sacred ties of no obligation in his Sense? O no! for if it were but true Love, 'twould seek the good of the Person belov'd.
Also frequently invoked in amatory tales is the notion that men are inherently changeable (either insincere to begin with or honestly incapable of keeping their many vows of faithfulness), while women are naturally more trusting and trustworthy. 'Without dispute,' Behn declares, 'Women are by Nature more Constant and Just, than Men, and did not their first Lovers teach them the trick of Change, they would be Doves, that would never quit their Mate.' Men adore women until women succumb sexually; then men begin to cool off, just as women really fall in love. 'The same unaccountable thing that cools the Swain,' Manley remarks toward the end of the first volume of Atalantis, 'more warms the Nymph: Enjoyment (the death of Love in all Mankind) gives Birth to new Fondness, and doating Extasies in the Women; they begin later, withheld by Modesty, and by a very ill tim'd Oeconomy, take up
