WHAT FANNY FELT: THE PAINS OF COMPLIANCE IN "MEMOIRS OF A WOMAN OF PLEASURE"

Recalling the "powers of solid pleasure," Fanny Hill confides to her reader?Madam?her appreciation of the phallic machine: "I have, I believe, somewhere before remark'd, that the feel of that favourite piece of manhood has, in the very nature of it something inimitably pathetic."1 Fanny's word choice tells much. While Samuel Johnson would define "pathetic" as moving, affecting, his examples of the word stress the pitiful affect of the pathetic; and, as early as 1737, the word meant for Pope not just affecting, but affecting to pity, sympathy, and sadness.2 In her sympathetic recognition of the pathetic nature of sexuality, Fanny Hill proves herself to be not only a woman of pleasure, but a sentimental woman of feeling. The Memoirs have been read as an idyllic pornotopic celebration of sexuality, as a healthy celebration of feminine desire, as a serious defense of philosophical materialism, and as a phallocentric glorification of patriarchal authority.3 Most treatments agree, however, that the Memoirs tell more than they would seem to. This is partly because Fanny takes part in a sexual fantasy that Cleland both indulges in and disavows. This fantasy superficially reinforces phallic authority as it presents the adventures of a heroine so compliant and agreeable that she confesses on the first page of her memoirs that "your desires" become "indispensible orders," while she devotes herself to "the secret so rare and difficult, of reconciling even all the refinements of taste and delicacy, with the most gross and determinate gratifications of sensuality" (p. 94). By emphasizing such "rare and difficult" acts of reconciliation, Cleland turns out to be as ironic a dismantler of heroic coupling as his satiric predecessors, masters of the heroic couplet, those ironists who like to call attention in rhyme to pains they take in joining opposites together. In his