The funny part is that in the end, the book--which, incidentally, would barely get a PG-13 rating today--reads as...dare I say it...feminism??
Here, let me show you what I mean:
(From The Toast)
I remember being told in high school, during a particularly dull unit on Puritan literature, that there was a time, not that far back, when fiction was still considered suspect. Reading was supposed to improve the reader somehow. It should be a true story, informing you of more about the world than you knew before; a history of some important place or figure; or at the very least, a vehicle for moral teachings.
In order to stay within the bounds of respectability, works of fiction regularly tried to fit themselves, however awkwardly, into an accepted “high” form—like the heroic epic or the chivalrous romance—or they cloaked themselves in the trappings of truth. Hence the popularity of epistolary novels, published diaries of “an actual survivor,” and novels posing as memoirs or biography; lurid scenes, illicit romances, and bad deeds unpunished couldn’t be considered as corrupting if they were, in theory, true.
L’Ecole des Filles, first published in 1655 in France, and considered by many to be the first western work of pornographic literature, may have invented one genre (porn-lit), but it still hews closely to the forms of its day. Presented as a series of true dialogues between two young women—Fanchon, a naïve 16-year old and her older cousin, Susanne, initiated in the ways of love—the author makes a deliberate effort to convince the reader that his book is, in some way, improving.
No, seriously.
...
No comments:
Post a Comment