Sexual Antipodes: Enlightenment Globalization and the Placing of Sex

By Pamela Cheek

Sexual Antipodes is about how Enlightenment print culture built modern national and racial identity out of images of sexual order and disorder in public life. It examines British and French popular journalism, utopian fiction and travel accounts about South Sea encounter, pamphlet literature, and pornography, as well as more traditional literary sources on the eighteenth century, such as the novel and philosophical essays and tales. The title refers to a premise in utopian and exoticist fiction about the southern portion of the globe: sexual order defines the character of the state. The book begins by examining how the idea of sexual order operated as the principle for explaining national differences in eighteenth-century contestation between Britain and France. It then traces how, following British and French encounters with Tahiti, the comparison of different national sexual orders formed the basis for two theories of race: race as essential character and race as degeneration.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Feb 28, 2003
• ISBN: 9780804780308

Book preview

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Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2003 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cheek, Pamela.

Sexual antipodes: enlightenment, globalization, and the placing of sex / Pamela Cheek.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

9780804780308

1. English literature—18th century—History and criticism. 2. Erotic literature, English—History and criticism. 3. Sex in literature. 4. French literature—18th century—History and criticism. 5. Travelers’ writings, English—History and criticism. 6. Travelers’ writings, French—History and criticism. 7. Erotic literature, French—History and criticism. 8. Literature, Comparative—English and French. 9. Literature, Comparative—French and English. 10. Globalization—History—18th century. 11. Imperialism in literature. 12. Sex customs in literature. 13. Oceania—In literature. 14. Colonies in literature. 15. Enlightenment. I. Title.

PR448.E75 C48 2003

820.9’3538—dc21

2002153929

Original printing 2003

The last figure below indicates the year of this printing:

12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03

Designed and typeset at Stanford University Press in 10/12 Bembo

For Aimee Lee Cheek and William Cheek

Table of Contents

Copyright Page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART ONE - METROPOLITAN ALLEGORIES

CHAPTER 1 - National Character, Publicity and Sex

CHAPTER 2 - Public Women in the French Body Politic

CHAPTER 3 - Public Life in Enlightenment Pornography

PART TWO - ANTIPODES

CHAPTER 4 - The Sexual Nature of South Sea Islands

CHAPTER 5 - British Encounter: Recognizing Sensibility

CHAPTER 6 - French Encounter: Crafting Transparency

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

IN MY RESEARCH along the way to completing this book, I noticed that many prefaces and acknowledgments in works on travel literature and globalization begin with an account of the author’s childhood reading. The trope suggests that scholarly books result from the accidents of early readerly identifications, which may in turn be accidents of geography, much as adult sexuality for Freud was but the product of early sexual imprints from scenes the child had randomly encountered. It involves an endearing admission, I think, that for all the clarity of thought one pretends to, book-writing can feel like a strange fixation for which there is no real cure.

For what it is worth, I grew up reading Puffin paperbacks about inquisitive British children orphaned by empire and in search of justice, which my American parents procured for me in large quantities at the Paradox Bookstore in Aix-en-Provence. Back in Southern California, our main base, the flow of Puffins jostled with French comic books, whose stock characters included the American Cowboy James West, an apparently Italian detective in a British deer-stalker named Ludovic, and the notorious Gaul Astérix. Lying on the beach in San Diego and re-reading the pink-spined Fantômette in the Desert, in which the French Nancy Drew finds herself uncovering a mystery in some unnamed part of North Africa, had the instant effect of transporting me back to the world of my French all-girls’ school. There, the illicit hankering to look for fragments of mosaic in the ruins of a Roman villa fenced off at the school’s entrance competed with the desire to win my teacher’s praise for my good behavior. My most secret ambition was to be recognized for my French essays on the beauties of the Provençal landscape. Years later, in graduate school, I read the key scene in Joseph Zobel’s novel La rue Cases-nègres (Black-Shack Alley), in which the protagonist José is accused of plagiarism at his school in Martinique because, as the son of black cane-workers, he couldn’t possibly have described a landscape in such limpid French. On José’s triumphant exoneration, my immediate reaction was one of jealousy. My personal mental landscape surely triangulates somehow between the differential pulls of British children’s literature, the France of decolonization, and the beaches of Southern California.

I want to thank many people for their practical help and encouragement as I sought to tie together the disparate angles of this book and get it into print. A large debt is to John Bender, who, in mentoring me, has always offset his remarkable teaching in the proper way to frame questions with the incitement to take intellectual risks. Bob Folkenflik, Sepp Gumbrecht, Kathleen Howe, Ramona Naddaff, and Gerry Prince found ways of renewing my faith in the project and of helping me negotiate the vicissitudes of publishing. In addition to reading my manuscript with great care, Walter Putnam and Diana Robin supported my choice to write it. At very early stages in my thinking about culture, identity and gender, Alice Jardine, Regenia Gagnier, Sandra Naddaff and Edith Sarra helped me find my direction. At the final stage of this work, anonymous readers for Stanford University Press and Bucknell University Press offered valuable insights and corrections for which I am deeply grateful. I would like to thank all those at Stanford University Press who shepherded this book through the publication process and especially Helen Tartar for her support of the project. Needless to say, any errors in the book are entirely my own.

My thanks also go to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco for permission to use as cover art a segment of late eighteenth-century wallpaper designed by Jean Gabriel Charvet depicting the Savages of the Pacific Ocean. Given the focus early in this book on prostitution, some seam seemed to close when I learned from Patricia Cline Cohen’s The Murder of Helen Jewett that this same South Sea wallpaper with its images of arcadian abandon formed part of the sexual education of a famous New York prostitute of the 1830s.

Among my best teachers are my friends. I owe a lively education in the array of contemporary studies out there to Erin Carlston, Betsey Colwill, Vilashini Cooppan, Linda Garber, Emily Haddad, Deborah Jenson, Felicia McCarren, Lydie Moudileno and Beth Wahl. Their ability to offer up ideas, share materials and make the theoretical meaningful has only been matched by their commitment to what Enlightenment readers might have called the transformative powers of sympathy. Gina Gutierrez has given me a wonderful gift of friendship and wisdom. She, along with Peter Redfield, convinced me long ago that anthropology was superior to comparative literature and I have never fully recovered. A number of colleagues have loaned books, suggested sources and dug up impossible to locate quotations with all the good will that makes up academic life at its best.

I am grateful to the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of New Mexico for its support of the research and publication of this book. Dissertation research, which informs portions of some early chapters, was supported by the Georges F. Lurcy Foundation and the Mellon Foundation. I would also like to thank the staffs of special collections at the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Arsenal, the Kinsey Institute for Research on Sex, Gender and Reproduction, and the main libraries of Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of California at San Diego, as well as the excellent interlibrary loan staff at the University of New Mexico. James Turner kindly shared photocopies of works that were difficult to obtain. Sven-Erik Rose and Dan Cofer provided research help that was simultaneously scrupulous and good-spirited.

My largest debt is to my extraordinary family. My mother-in-law, Elizabeth Keener, and my sisters-in-law, Margaret Keener and Anne Keener, lovingly played with my small daughter and literally and figuratively fed me soup when I was trying to meet deadlines. My sister, Wendy Cheek, taught me secrets about striving and joy before she died. As soon as she learned to draw and talk, my daughter Eliza Ennis kept me inspired company by finishing books of her own. Matthew Ennis has offered me boundless care, true companionship in taking on challenges, and inventive cures for all my fixations. For their generosity in all things, including my mother’s astute reading of my manuscript and my father’s historicist questions, this book is dedicated to my parents, Aimee Lee and William Cheek,better than which, to quote an old family cookbook’s line about brownies, there are none.

Introduction

I thought I could distinguish that the globe was configured in such a way that navigation would one day be the knot that associated human kind. . . . For the same reason that [Nature] gives a gentle slope to mountains, so as to leave a free access to them and to facilitate entry into valleys, she has multiplied rivers and seas in every direction; everything announces a circulation comparable to that of the human body: she thus wants all the peoples of the world to seize the channels of union or reunion, but to do this without abrupt mixing, without invasion; thus, in extending, in linking our knowledges, we will see that they all tend towards the perfectibility of the human species, and from this point of view, art is nature.

—Louis-Sébastien Mercier,De la géographie considérée sous le rapport politique, Chronique du mois (1792; On geography considered in its political relation, Monthly Chronicle)¹

TO CONTEMPLATE one’s place on the globe at the end of the Enlightenment was to use the idea of sex as an ambivalent and sometimes disavowed vehicle for thinking of self and society as placed within a known world. When, on studying a charted globe, the utopian writer Louis-Sébastien Mercier wrote in 1792 that everything announces a circulation comparable to that of the human body, he emphasized the movement, transformation and exchange of a world system. Nature, he concluded, wants all the peoples of the world to seize the channels of union or reunion. Mercier’s anthropo-morphized globe differed from the homeostatic body of the kingdom envisioned in 1518 by the earlier utopian Sir Thomas More. A kingdom in all parts is like a man, More explained, developing the traditional metaphor of the body politic, it is held together by natural affection. The king is the head; the people form the other parts. Every citizen the king has he considers a part of his own body (that is why he grieves at the loss of a single one). His subjects exert themselves in the king’s behalf, and they all look upon him as the head for which they provide the body.² The image of a violent or, alternatively, of an affective subordination within a bounded body politic circumscribed More’s world and the antipodes he imagined. To imagine metropole and antipodes in the age of Enlightenment, however, was to leave behind the traditional body politic for the political ideals seemingly inscribed in nature’s processes. It was to navigate between sociability and empire, to travel the slope from the marvels of diversity to the satisfactions of eugenics, to wander from the claim that natural libidinal tides determine the mixing and perfection of peoples to the prejudice that sexual order provides the very longitude and latitude of national and racial identity.

In this book, I examine how the idea of sexual order and disorder became a primary tool in British and French print culture for imagining globalization and defining modern national and racial identity. By Enlightenment globalization, I mean the Western European sense that developed over the course of the eighteenth century of living in a known world connected by navigation and print, by the mixing of peoples and knowledges.³ This sense of globalization undermined an inherited language of subordination within a bounded body politic. My project here is to examine how the idea of sex underwrote this mode of global consciousness, formally inaugurated by the British and French encounters with Tahiti in the late 1760s and 1770s during the European ocean voyages that completed basic geographic knowledge of the globe and established minimal communication between its parts. Well prior to South Sea encounter, utopian fiction about the southern portion of the globe had proposed sexual order as the representative feature of the state. The book begins by examining how print culture elevated sexual order into a principle explaining national differences in eighteenth-century contestation between Britain and France. It then traces how, following British and French encounter with Tahiti, the comparison of different national sexual orders formed the basis for two theories of race: race as essential character and race as degeneration.⁴

My first contention is that by the late Enlightenment the idea of sex had begun to play an important role in organizing an emerging Western European sense of being placed on the globe. Enlightenment globalization established the conditions for the formation of Western European identity by locating the individual’s sexuality comparatively within a range of exotic possibilities. Placing the individual’s sexuality was a process that occurred not within the frame of a single culture but in negotiations between the frames of multiple cultures. To borrow Judith Butler’s neologism, the girling of a girl or the boying of a boy was confirmed in relation to imagined versions of such identities in other cultures and even to moments in which individuals feigned or embodied foreign sexual identities.⁵ Instead of becoming a girl, for example, an individual became an English girl who was not a French girl and who was certainly not a Tahitian girl. Identity found its meaning by virtue of comparison: the composition of an individual’s sexual identity depended on the sense that the world presented other known possibilities for girling or boying.

Enlightenment print culture allowed readers to feel that they knew these other possibilities and could measure themselves against the sexual character of other cultures. Indeed, Enlightenment fictional and personal narrative represented the sexual character of the individual as an intercultural negotiation. The narrator and protagonist of Isabelle de Charrière’s novella Lettres de Mistress Henley (1784; Letters of Mrs. Henley) lives arrested between three models of girling: virtuous domesticity and maternity in the English countryside, the display of French charm, talent and taste in the world of the court, and the amoral self-assurance associated with vast, unsavory wealth secured through colonial enterprise in India. Mistress Henley’s psychological unraveling is produced by the fiction that she can rationally choose the form her adult femininity will take from among these three models, when in fact it has already been chosen for her by her specifically English girling. Gothic novels, most notably Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), translated interior psycho-sexual space onto national geographies, requiring heroines to travel through the dangerous and exciting territory of Italian, Spanish or French sexuality in order to find their way back to their (sexual) home. The practice of sending young men on a Grand Tour to complete their educations along with the corresponding genres of travel journals and travel letters regularized the notion that normative adult male sexuality depended on experiencing and then abandoning sexual relationships with foreign women. The script of male travel depicted coming to adulthood as a question of rational self-mastery and choice of character over appetites.⁶ In his Confessions (1782), Jean-Jacques Rousseau narrated his spanking by Mlle. Lambercier at the age of eight as the experience that, in retrospect, determined his tastes, desires, and passions, his self for the rest of his life.⁷ Yet sexual encounters with women in the multi-cultural frames of Catholic and Protestant Swiss cantons and of Montpellier and Lyon, as well as near encounters with men such as the frightening Moor of Turin, are what establish this sexual self as the one proper to Jean-Jacques. In the geography of his desire, they are the precondition for his constant return to, flight from and nostalgia for his relationship with his Maman, Mme. de Warens.

Exotic identifications enabled the exploration of unavailable models of sexual identity. When their desires fell outside the acceptable contours of respectable domestic writing, men and women of letters identified with foreign places and past times. Horace Walpole’s choice of Oriental and Gothic locales for his tales may have derived in part from the field for exploring alternative models of manhood that they provided. Similarly, Richard Payne Knight pursued an antiquarian interest in ancient phallic worship and, in a treatise on taste, presented ancient Greece and Tahiti as paired instances of a state of civilization in which the manners of men are polished, but yet natural . . . expressive and emphatical without ever being coarse or violent.⁸ In another example, the English diarist Hester Lynch Thrale defined her friendship with the novelist Frances Burney in relation to three sexual/cultural models. At the possible, but certainly not privileged, angle of the triangle was the English companionate friendship between Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, the well-known Ladies of Llangollen who shared a rural retreat. At the abject angle of the triangle was the French Queen Marie-Antoinette who, as Thrale recorded in Thraliana, was "at the Head of a Set of Monsters call’d by each other Sapphists, who boast her Example: and deserve to be thrown with the He Demons that haunt each other likewise, into Mount Vesuvius. And at the utopian angle of the triangle was Tahiti, the idea of which allowed Thrale to imagine her desired relationship with Fanny Burney without specifying its nature. Thrale wrote of Burney in her diary that I have at length conquered all her Scruples, & won her Confidence & her Heart; ‘tis the most valuable Conquest I ever did make, and dearly, very dearly, do I love my little Tayo, so the People at Otaheite call a Bosom Friend."⁹ In one final example, the Revolutionary journalist Camille Desmoulins patterned ideal family and social relations on a Tahitian paradise. In his last letter to his wife before his execution, he melancholically reprised the refrain that had doubtless woven through his induction into late Enlightenment culture: O my dear Lucile, I was born to write poetry, to defend the unfortunate, to make you happy, and with your mother and my father and several people after our own hearts to form a Tahiti.¹⁰ Examples such as these suggest that if in the early Enlightenment Western Europeans acknowledged that sex is a material aspect of the human body rather than a moral one and the positive social glue common to all of humanity, in the late Enlightenment they began to understand the sexual self as a virtual traveler whose authentic sexual nature emerges in relation to or is confirmed in comparison with sexual images of foreign cultures. By the end of the Enlightenment sexual identity had become contingent on the placing of the self on a known globe and inseparable from the sensibility of Enlightenment globalization.

My second contention concerns the way that eighteenth-century colonial writing about non-European cultures offered the proving ground for competing claims about national identity and national sexual character in the continuing contestation between the Enlightenment’s internal Others—Britain and France.

Recent work informed by postcolonial and gender studies has explored the connection between the production of metropolitan gender norms and the process of imagining colonial identity. Such work participates in a project summarized by Robert Young in White Mythologies: Colonial discourse is placed in the unique position of being able to examine English culture, literature and indeed Englishness in its widest sense, from its determined position on the margins: not questing for the essence of Englishness but examining the representations it has produced for itself of its Other, against and through which it defines itself, together with the functions of such representations in a structure of power in which they are used instrumentally. ¹¹ Englishness has not been the only category produced in colonial writing to be approached in this way, but it is the category that has yielded some of the most intensive theoretical engagement, especially in terms of analysis of the articulation of gender, class and race.¹² This kind of analysis has underlined the importance of a colonial frame to the structuring of metropolitan sexual identity. In Torrid Zones, Felicity Nussbaum argues of eighteenth-century England that the invention of the ‘other’ woman of empire enabled the consolidation of the cult of domesticity in England and, at the same time, the association of the sexualized woman at home with the exotic, or ‘savage,’ non-European woman. Nussbaum links the binary invention of domestic and savage women to the harnessing of English women’s reproductive labor to meet the increasing demands of trade and colonization [that] required a large able-bodied citizenry.¹³ In Imperial Leather, Anne McClintock proposes a chiasmic model for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: as domestic space became racialized, colonial space became domesticated.¹⁴ Both Nussbaum and McClintock argue for an intercultural confirmation of sexual identity by configuring it around a metropole/colony binary. This binary structure may be most applicable to the period of high imperialism, when the hegemony of European education, publishing and consumer goods along with the formalized political and economic control over colonies produced colonial and metropolitan identities in tight relation to each other. Yet, even in analyses of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial writing, a strictly binary approach runs the risk of insisting, as Steve Clark has written in a critique of contemporary approaches to travel literature, that European texts do nothing but promote, confirm, and lament the exercise of imperial power: and that this ideology pervades their representational practices at every level.¹⁵

In contrast, this book locates the eighteenth-century idea of colonial identity between metropoles. I view colonial writing in the Enlightenment as the field in which rival British and French claims about national identity were tested rather than promoted as imperial truths. From this field, European conceptualizations of sexual character and national and racial identity emerged within a global frame. Britain and France were involved in constant rivalry and were openly at war five times in the eighteenth century. Colonies regularly shifted hands in treaties drawn on the arbitrary basis of battles won and lost, often thousands of miles away from the colonies in question and usually outside of England and France themselves. Linda Colley has argued that Britons, free of the violence and brutality of a war at home, were able to focus, many of them, on the broader, less material characteristics of the struggle with France, a struggle that played a crucial part in defining Great Britain through the very process of exposing it to persistent danger from without. The British, she writes came to define themselves as a single people not because of any political or cultural consensus at home, but rather in reaction to the Other beyond their shores.¹⁶ Implicated in the formation of Britishness, the French formed their own Frenchness in terms of their Enlightenment Other, while both metropolitan identities became committed or bound within a colonialist writing that was rapidly developing the features of a comparative social science.

The initial British and French landfalls in the South Pacific, from 1767 to 1787, spanned these conflicts and occurred during a period of intense scientific and territorial competition between the British, French and Spanish over discovery, mapping and colonization of the Pacific. Nonetheless, Tahiti (for the peoples of the Pacific Islands and even Australia and New Zealand often merged into one in the European cultural imaginary) registered not so much as a pawn in the military and economic game of empire as the conclusive experiment for antagonistic philosophies of culture and, then again, as nature’s hoax on the Enlightenment. For Europeans, the visibility and availability of sex in Tahiti exemplified contending metropolitan theses about human nature and social order, about the place of sex in the human, the social and, ultimately, the global body.

Let me provide two earlier parallels to the eighteenth-century dynamic I am describing. During the French Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century, French Catholic and Calvinist factions developed competing representations of the Brazilian Tupinamba. On the one hand, Catholics represented the Tupinamba as savages whose souls might be saved, unlike the Calvinists who were damned. On the other, Calvinists likened ingestion of the host at communion to Tupi cannibalism and compared the Tupi shaman to a Popish charlatan who imposed on the people with idolatrous relics.¹⁷ For his part, Montaigne developed an independent humanist identity by celebrating the truthfulness and transparency of the Tupinamba and contrasting them with the hypocrisy he saw at the heart of the European conflict. ¹⁸ The Tupinamba functioned as counters in the assertion of a political identity built around religion: they served to dramatize stereotypes of Calvinist and Catholic being and belief. In another parallel, in the early eighteenth century, the critique of the Spanish conquest and transformations of purportedly Spanish representations of South American peoples became all but obligatory in Enlightenment writing. Contestation over representation of peoples subjected to the Spanish conquest served as the cornerstone in indictments of superstitious and religious thinking; primitivist re-workings of these representations offered the means of claiming enlightenment. In both of these extra-national, intra-European examples (Calvinism versus Catholicism, the Enlightenment versus its image of Spanish Catholicism), the comparative term was religion. The Enlightenment’s condemnation of the Spanish Conquista represents a reaction to an initial phase of European globalization imagined as an extension of Christianity across the globe. Here, I investigate not religion but the central role played by sex as a crucial comparative term in eighteenth-century metropolitan contestation over public identity within the field of colonial representation.

Sexual Antipodes thus develops two central contentions: first, identity in modernity is contingent on the placing of sexuality; second, in the eighteenth century, colonial representations were the field in which competing metropoles expressed binding notions of sexual identity. I consider the organization of identity around the placing of sex that occurred during a second phase of globalization by exploring its roots in Enlightenment contestatory metropolitan politics. I view the placing of sex as a British and French means of beginning to imagine belonging to a world in communication. This second phase of globalization involved the extension of Anglo-European political, economic and cultural dominance in a world in which the constraints of geography no longer seemed insuperable.¹⁹ My concern is not to chart immediate practices of colonial domination, however, but to examine how one imaginative strategy, the placing of sex, evacuated the antipodes from the globe, replacing the critical world upside-down inherited from Thomas More with colonial space.

I develop my two central contentions through a consideration of an Enlightenment triangle trade in sexual self-conceptualization. The argument develops along the following lines. The first part of the book explores how the idea of sexual order functioned as a crucial term in rival eighteenth-century English and French negotiations of a public identity and national character independent from the monarchical state. Chapter one, National Character, Publicity and Sex, describes the portraits of Britain and France that had become dominant in Enlightenment print culture by mid-century. Britain’s distinction lay in its successful cultivation of liberty, associated with the rational political and public institutions supporting the state after 1688. France’s distinction lay in its cultivation of civility, associated with women’s empire over French language and sociability. Anglophiles and Francophiles registered their admiration for their neighboring country’s signal distinction throughout the century, but particularly in its early decades. In the second half of the century, these images of European Others helped crystallize reactive explanations of national character and enabled emergence of a new form of publicity. By mid-century as well, philosophical and popular literature had transformed sex into a representative feature of humanity and had figured sexual desire as the pleasurable, if treacherous, glue holding societies together. In the second half of the century, sexual order, as an empirical quality representative of the character of the nation, increasingly displaced the sexual symbolism underwriting the monarch’s embodiment of the body politic. As an early to mid-century leitmotif in Enlightenment print culture, the Oriental harem provided a sexualized caricature of the decadence of royal body politics.

Chapter two, Public Women in the French Body Politic, approaches the mid-century contestatory portraits of British and French sexual character through an examination of representations in the popular press of quintessentially public French women: actresses and prostitutes. The public woman became a vehicle for the transferral of the sexual politics attached to monarchical authority onto the public, just as the domestic woman offered a means for reimagining British public identity. French public life ultimately emerged before the eyes of an Enlightenment reading public as ineradicably sexualized in all of its institutions, a perception springing from the participation of women in French politics and culture as well as from the monarchy’s uneven embodiment of public authority. French political failure and cultural achievement were equally dependent, in this view, on the work of sexual desire as a social motor. In contrast, Enlightenment writers and readers increasingly came to view British public life after the Restoration as successfully un-sexed, or rid of the troubling intrusions of bodily desire that could compromise rational public discussion and transparent communication.

To assess the reach of this French/British contrast in eighteenth-century print culture, chapter three, Public Life in Enlightenment Pornography, turns to the evidence provided by pornography. British pornographic woman-as-land allegories depend in their central conceit on the notion that British public life, epitomized by rational British scientific language, is de-libidinized. Late eighteenth-century British pornography provides evidence of a consuming reaction against a figurative, ornamental or feminine language, which it perceives as politically dangerous and relegates to the private realm. In British pornography, the capacity to joke around with the public language of science becomes a means of establishing homosocial bonds and of extending the claims of the nationalist cult of landscape to globe and empire. In French pornography, considered here in a series of plans for creating ideal public brothels, the use of a thoroughly hybridized language binding juridical and sexual terms together reveals a vision of a public life that is ineradicably sexualized. The overriding concern of French pornography with rationalizing institutions culminates not in relegating sex to a private realm but in making it a universal instrument of public administration.

The second part of the book, considers how the encounter with Tahiti and its visible sex tested the British and French models of a delibidinized or sexualized public life. Encounter reconfigured contestatory anxiety about civility and institutions into a privileging of transparent sensibility and bio-cultural regeneration. Reactions to encounter unfolded around the use of sex to establish a society’s boundaries developed in earlier world upside-down representations of South Sea societies. Chapter four,The Sexual Nature of South Sea Islands, focuses on pre-contact imaginative fiction about the South Seas, in which sexual order guarantees the rationality of antipodal political institutions and the truthfulness or transparency of antipodal language and civility. Pre-contact fiction proposed two means of verifying the homogeneity of utopian colonies: the recognition of shared humanity by means of mutual sexual desire and the production of shared identity through eugenics. After contact, Tahiti walked onto the global stage in Old British drag, as a primitive isle of liberty and free love complete with natural republicanism and a queen. Later, Tahiti appeared in the deshabillé of French court society, with a ruthless sexual oligarchy playing the role of decadent Versailles nobles to the tune of nose flutes under the breadfruit trees. This second image lent itself powerfully to intra-European anxiety about demographic crisis and state power; the spectres of depopulation and over-population mediated interpretations of the island’s character.

Chapter five, British Encounter: Recognizing Sensibility, begins with the task in official travel narratives of representing the visible sex of Tahiti. This constituted a rhetorical problem not in France, where those reporting on the French voyage unhesitatingly dubbed the island a New Cythera, but within a British public culture configured self-consciously around the image of its own de-libidinization. The British response was to separate the travel account and scientific report from pornography by using the techniques for assigning sexual sensibility to individuals that had been developed in the polite novel. In the travel account, novelistic sensibility transferred moral responsibility for sexuality onto indigenous people and preserved the sexual quarantine around public language. Building specifically from the quandaries—both rhetorical and demographic—posed by the British encounter with Tahiti, Thomas Malthus acknowledged the explanatory power of sex as a diagnostic tool in the analysis of cultural difference. In revising his first Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) to account for the apparent sexual freedom but demographic balance of Tahiti, Malthus repeated the strategies of the travel accounts he relied on. The paradigm-shifting revised essay made the moral responsibility for sexual behavior adhere to individual bodies whose proper membership in one society or another could be detected in the manifest character of their sensibility. Thus, as in the novel, an indigenous person might prove to be a British subject, in essence, when her true sexual sensibility was finally recognized. The British solution to the problem posed by the visible sex of Tahiti was to subsume sex into rational colonial public description and into a private racial identity based on the recognition of sexual sensibility.

Chapter six, French Encounter: Crafting Transparency, considers the utopian fictions about species regeneration spawned in France by encounter. The French response was to imagine a colonial identity built around the public administration of bodily desire and the sexual crafting of transparent racial identity. The late eighteenth-century South Sea utopias conceived by Diderot, Restif de la Bretonne and Sade transformed sex into the ultimate tool for creation and public administration of the rational libertarian state. In their three political fantasies, state eugenics made perfecting the individual body and creating a homogeneous social body possible through its miscegenous mixing of French intelligence into transparent and uncorrupted antipodal bodies. In end of the century print culture, sex in the British racial model was a descriptive term for identity; it explained what was already there. Sex