PARTISAN REVIEW
81
We are often invited into ladies' beds or permitted to peep into
their boudoirs, but never permitted to remain for the penetration of
their lovely
flesh.
And though text and illustration exploit female nudity to feed
the erotic fantasies so essential to popular fiction, such nakedness ex–
tends only to the navel. There
is
typically- usually in the course of a
lingering description of a disrobing as a prelude to seduction or rape
-considerable exposure of what such writers like
to
call
"snowy
globes," though of nothing below the waist. There
is
no more breast–
centered concern with the female form in art, with the possible ex–
ception of the Fountains of Rome and the center fold-out of
Playboy.
It should be clear that the literature of the 1840's is a specific
sub-genre of popular literature-not merely produced by men only but
intended for an exclusively male audience.
It
was, therefore, doomed
to an at least temporary eclipse, not only by the more ambitious
literature contemporary with it, the work of, say, Balzac and Dickens
-but
also
by the Pop literature which immediately succeeded it: those
genteel best sellers of the 1870's
(The Lamp-Lighter,
parodied by
Joyce in the Gertie MacDowell episode of
Ulysses
is
an example)
which represented an attempt to come to terms with the reemergence
of a bourgeois female audience-first appealed to by Richardson–
as the controllers of the literary market place.
In any case, it
is
the temporary dissolution of a politically-minded
male audience with a taste for subpornography, in favor of the
domestically oriented female audience with a taste for pure senti–
mentality which explains the loss of approval suffered by Lippard's
kind of fiction. And when that male audience reasserted iteself at the
very end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of ours, it had
grown
somehow less political, was willing at any rate to satisfy itself
with the exotic adventure story, the detective novel and the Western–
each projecting in its way a nostalgic dream of innocence rather than
fantasies of exposure and revolution and sex.
The later pop forms for men only tend, in fact, to be tales
of
men only; but in the 1840's no male best seller was without its fe–
male victims, raped or seduced, by the evil rich, rescued and redeemed
by the worthy poor--or more usually, by renegade aristocratic cham–
pions of the poor. Descriptions of the female form were as eSSential
to this genre as to the sentimental literature read by the wives, moth-
