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"Gushing Out Blood": Defloration and menstruation in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
John Cleland’s 1740s pornographic novel, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure repeatedly depicts and eroticises the act of defloration. As such it is a revealing illustration of what Ivan Bloch termed the ‘defloration mania’ of the eighteenth century. This article maps narrative events on to contemporary medical depictions of first intercourse to show the ways that the theories and ideas presented in medical and pseudo-medical texts transferred into erotic fiction and demonstrates how in some instances the bloody defloration scenes can be read as being sex during menstruation, an act which was culturally forbidden at this time.
History
Department
- English and Drama
Published in
Journal of Medical HumanitiesVolume
39Pages
165 – 177Citation
READ, S.L., 2017. "Gushing Out Blood": Defloration and menstruation in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Journal of Medical Humanities, 39 (2), pp.165–177.Publisher
Springer Verlag / © The AuthorVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/Acceptance date
2016-12-10Publication date
2016-12-26Copyright date
2017Notes
This is an Open Access article published by Springer and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY 4.0), http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ISSN
1573-3645Publisher version
Language
- en