Abstract
The ‘violent scene of happiness’ is the result of a repeated indulgence in extreme passion, the dangers of such limitless sexual activity exemplified by the hero’s demise. Here, the heroine, Tonzenie, accidentally kills her footman through sexual over-exertion, assisted by Janneton, her maid, who has dosed him with aphrodisiacs by lacing his food.2 More significantly, Tonzenie has exhausted him, literally, to death. Such erotica not only contained warnings to men not to overdo their sexual exertions, but to beware of women who demanded them. Excess evacuation of sperm is seen not only to weaken a man, but even proves fatal.
This violent scene of happiness every night repeated, soon cost the poor fellow his life: for his blood was so inflamed with provocative doses Janneton used to administer to him, and his body so harassed and exhausted by Tonzenie’s insatiable demands, that he fell sick of a raging fever, and was carried off in a few days to her inexpressible sorrow.
Anon, A New Atalantis for the Year One Thousand Seven Hundred and Fifty-Eight1
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Notes
Anon, A New Atalantis for the Year One Thousand Seven Hundred and Fifty-Eight (2nd edn., London, M. Thrush, 1758), p. 67.
Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex. Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1992); Caroline Bynum, ‘The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages’, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 3 (1986), pp. 399–439.
James Thorpe (ed.), Rochester’s Poems on Several Occasions (Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1950); Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned. Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London, Routledge, 1995), p. 245.
Norbert Elias, The Civilising Process. Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1982).
Patricia Crawford, ‘Attitudes to Menstruation in Seventeenth-Century England’, Past and Present No. 91 (1981), pp. 47–73.
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1971), p. 649.
Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy I. iii. 2 (4) [1.414–19], quoted in N. H. Keeble (ed.), The Cultural Identity of Seventeenth Century Women (London, Routledge, 1994), pp. 35–7.
Roy Porter and Dorothy Porter, In Sickness and in Health (London, Fourth Estate, 1988), pp. 51, 83.
J. Donnison, Midwives and Medical Men (London, Heinemann, 1977); Helen Rodnite Lemay, ‘Anthonius Guainerius and Medieval Gynaecology’, in Julius Kirschner and Suzanne Wemple (eds.), Women of the Medieval World (London, Blackwell, 1885), pp. 317–34; Roy Porter (ed.), Lay Patients and Practitioners. Lay Perceptions of Medicine in Pre-Industrial Society (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985).
John Cleland, Memoirs ofa Woman of Pleasure (London, George Fenton, 1749), Vol. II, p. 120.
Keith Thomas, ‘The Double Standard’, Journal of History of Ideas, No. 20 (1959), pp. 195–216.
Jones, Women in the Eighteenth Century, p. 46.
Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1990). Also see Felicity Nussbaum, ‘The Empire of Love. The Veil and the Blush of Romance’, in Felicity Nussbaum (ed.), Torrid Zones. Maternity, Sexuality and Empire in Eighteenth Century Narratives (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 114–34.
Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote (reprint: London, Pandora, 1986), pp. 8, 34, 42, 161.
Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792; reprint London, Penguin, 1988), p. 174.
Richard Polwhele, The Unsex’d Females (London, Cadell & Davies, 1798), p. 13.
Anon, The Whore’s Rhetorick (London, George Shell, 1683), p. 121.
Rosa Matilda, Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer (London, D. N. Shury, 1805), p. 185.
F. J. Barker-Benfield, The Horrors of the Half-Known Life (New York, HarperColophon, 1976).
Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer. Eighteenth Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 16, 21.
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© 2003 Julie Peakman
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Peakman, J. (2003). Bodily Fluids. In: Mighty Lewd Books. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230512573_4
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