The Way They Read Then: Early Modern English Erotica

This essay discusses two seventeenth-century literary works that compel us to re-historicize debates over reading methods and thereby to reassess what count as feminist and queer modes of critique: George Thornley’s 1657 translation of Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe, and Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister, published in three parts between 1684 and 1687. Formally and structurally, erotic literature written for and, in Behn’s case, by women complicates modern methodological categories that pit affect against context, surface against symptom, and reparative against paranoid reading. Early modern erotica, literature that both portrays and provokes sexual arousal, offers a valuable archive for understanding histories of affect and sexuality that refuse this investment in women’s innocence, sexual as well as political. Attending to the perverse and suspicious reading demanded by pastoral and roman à clef, this essay shows how the desire for innocence—sexual, political, scholarly—can implicate us more deeply in the gendered and racial hierarchies that feminist criticism seeks to dismantle. [M.S.]