Fanny Hill

The last section of the novel further develops The Critique of Societal Hypocrisy Regarding Sexuality by revealing Fanny’s own hypocrisy in her moral evaluation of others’ sexual activities and preferences. Fanny considers certain sex acts like Mr. Barville’s interest in whipping as abnormal but acceptable while expressing anti-gay sentiments against sexual relations between men. Fanny refers to the sex acts between the men in the inn as a “criminal scene,” after which she is left filled with “rage and indignation” (105). Her reaction illustrates the state of gay rights and the social perception of gay men at the time, but it also points to the way Fanny and Mrs. Cole have internalized the very misogyny and prejudices that have been aimed at them: Mrs. Cole later refers to gay men as “stript of all the manly virtue of their own sex, and fill’d up with only the worst vices and follies of ours” (105). The heart of Mrs. Cole and Fanny’s issue with gay men seems to be how gay men “take […] bread” out of women’s mouths by directing their sexual energy onto each other. In Mrs. Cole’s eyes, sexual desire between two men takes an economic opportunity away from women like her. Fanny and Mrs. Cole’s blatant hypocrisy has led some critics to interpret Cleland’s presentation of gay men in the work as satirical. The irony of Fanny—who, by the standards of the 18th century, is sexually deviant and immoral—criticizing gay men for deviant and immoral acts is, such critics argue, too stark not to be intentional. The overarching themes of sexual freedom and the hypocrisy of society’s stance against sexuality imply that, though the narrator openly disapproves of gay sexuality, the morality of the novel is inclined to accept and celebrate all forms of pleasure.

Fanny and Louisa’s assault on the flower salesman with an intellectual disability also demonstrates that they are as hypocritical about consent and sexual entitlement as others in their society. All the women in Mrs. Croft’s house have experienced sexual assault and have had their lives upended by it while society looked the other way. Despite those experiences, Fanny and Louise in turn perpetrate an assault on a person who has less status and protection in society than they do. Fanny says she “had sincerely no intention to push the joke further” (107), while Louisa proceeds to sexually assault the man. They treat it as a humorous and harmless act. Fanny frequently refers to the man by demeaning and derogatory names, and the sexual assault is summed up as a strange but entertaining event, in which Louisa “had let her freak out” (109). The irony is that the men who assaulted the women of Mrs. Croft’s house treated them with similar callousness and dismissiveness. To them, the acts that forever changed the women’s lives were simply letting their “freak” out. This incident demonstrates the way that sexual exploitation of the socially vulnerable perpetuates itself in society. When there are no repercussions for harming those with less power than you, even victims can become perpetrators.

Though much of the novel highlights Women’s Economic Dependence on Men, the ending, like the beginning, subverts this theme by showing how women might support themselves in the 18th-century environment. As Fanny and Mrs. Cole part ways, Fanny explains that both she and Mrs. Cole have enough money to live independently. Though the money they earned was paid out by men, they earned their savings through labor and effort. Fanny earns an even greater fortune through her elderly companion, who honors her frugality by entrusting her with his estate. After his death, she feels “comforted by the prospect that now open’d to me, if not of happiness at least of affluence and independence” (115). At 19 years old, Fanny is no longer dependent on men for her economic sustenance. Her reunion with Charles inverts the arrangements Fanny had with men throughout the novel. Instead of a man deciding to “keep” Fanny, Fanny offers to “keep” Charles, saying: “I opened the state of my fortune to him, and with that sincerity which, from me to him, was so much a nature in me, I begg’d of him his acceptance of it, on his own terms” (122). She offers “terms” to offset the obvious switch in gender roles which would make Charles her dependent. Though Charles instead offers to marry Fanny, Fanny still provides the primary source of economic means to the relationship, thereby subverting the expectations of 18th-century gender roles.

This conclusion also resolves The Tension Between Desire and Morality by conforming to the 18th-century convention of imbuing a raunchy text with virtue by concluding with a moral lesson for the reader to take from the narrative. Fanny concludes her letter by predicting how the recipient is likely laughing “at this tail-piece of morality” (123), in which Fanny is essentially celebrating the virtue of sex and marriage with her true love, Charles, after having described almost four years of sex work in graphic detail. Cleland knew that 18th-century readers would recognize this kind of “virtuous” conclusion to an unvirtuous work from novels such as Pamela, published less than a decade before Fanny Hill, and laugh at the attempt to overwrite two letters of vice with a couple of paragraphs on virtue. Fanny’s conclusion winkingly mimics the rote moralizing that usually comes at the end of such texts, including cliched references to “roses” and “thorns”: “The paths of Vice are sometimes strew’d with roses, but then they are for ever infamous for many a thorn, for many a canker-worm,” while “those of Virtue are strew’d with roses purely, and those eternally unfading ones” (123). The unification of these paths resolves the two layers of morality that have been at odds throughout the novel, the social morals advocating chastity and marriage versus the sexual morals praising pleasure above all else. Fanny’s solution is to combine the paths by exploring her sexuality, falling in love, and marrying the man with whom she most wants to explore her sexuality further, giving a patina of conventional morality to her rebellious path.