The Female Philosophe in the Closet: The Cabinet and the Senses in French Erotic Novels, 1740-1800
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The Female Philosophe in the Closet: The Cabinet and the
Senses in French Erotic Novels, 1740–1800
Diane Berrett Brown
Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Volume 9, Number 2, Fall/Winter
2009, pp. 96-123 (Article)
Published by University of Pennsylvania Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jem.0.0035
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/363488
[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]The Female Philosophe
in the Closet:
The Cabinet and the Senses
in French Erotic Novels, 1740–1800
Diane Berrett Brown
Abstr act
Many eighteenth-century erotic texts recount the coming of age of a young female narra-
tor, an event that eventually motivates the capacity for philosophical reasoning. Sexual
enlightenment in these texts tends to be triggered by a voyeuristic scene in which the nar-
rator, hidden in a cabinet or behind a curtain, observes erotic activity. Using Thérèse
philosophe (1748) as a model, this essay presents voyeurism as an extension of sensa-
tionist philosophy that offers literary embodiment to the “statue man” theories of
Condillac and other French sensationists. The intricately described cabinet is shown to
be a privileged site for both seduction and observation and, ultimately, for the making of
pornography’s female philosophe.
X
L’architecture, jadis majestueuse et qui ne dérogeait pas, s’est ployée à la
licence de nos mœurs et de nos idées. Elle a prévu et satisfait toutes les
intentions de la débauche et du libertinage; les issues secrètes et les escaliers
dérobés sont au ton des romans du jour. L’architecture enfin, complice de
nos désordres, est non moins licencieuse que notre poésie érotique.
― Louis–Sébastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris (1781)1
Architecture, once majestic and unyielding, has succumbed to the
licentiousness of our lifestyle and ideas. It anticipates and fulfills all the
aims of debauchery and libertinage; secret passages and hidden stairways
the journal for early modern cultur al studies
Vol. 9, No. 2 (Fall/Winter 2009) © 2009brown X 97
are in the same vein as novels of the day. Architecture, complicit in our
disorders, is no less licentious than our erotic poetry.
L ouis-Sébastien Mercier, assessing Paris in the late eighteenth century,
indicted Parisian architecture for its complicity in societal disorders.
The architecture of the day, quipped Mercier, was as dissolute as the obscene
books sold in a thriving underground print network. In this characterization
of eighteenth-century Paris, Mercier does not criticize architects or authors,
per se, but their creations: it was buildings and books that signaled the de-
bauchery looming in the social imaginary. What architecture and erotic
books shared was the isolated, private experience each could provide.
Eighteenth-century interiors, characterized by divided, subdivided, and spe-
cialized space, complicated the demarcations between the private and the
public, creating what one might think of as three spheres: the public, the
private, and the secret. The fragmentation of the interior landscape into bou-
doirs, cabinets, alcoves, niches, and other small spaces that were then parti-
tioned by screens (cloisons) and curtains is frequently represented in French
novels of the time, from the sentimental to the erotic, as literary lovers began
to abandon the outdoor encounters of the seventeenth-century pastoral in
favor of the intimacy of the cabinet or the boudoir.2 These interior spaces of-
fered the illusion of total seclusion and the potential for unbounded plea-
sure. In a literary context, the assumption of absolute privacy allowed for the
eavesdroppers and voyeurs whose observations are a recurrent thread in
erotic and libertine literature.
Vivant Denon’s Point de lendemain (1777; “No Tomorrow”) exemplifies
the lure of interior space, the erotic sensibilities it engenders, and the literary
stakes in its exploration. The narrator’s account of his one-night tryst with
an older woman allows us to trace the migration from the public to the do-
mestic sphere and, finally, to a secret, exotically appointed cabinet. Seduction
and its spatial context become inseparable as Madame T… lures the young
narrator from the archetypical site of sociability—an opera loge, where one
sees and is seen—through a series of progressively more secluded spaces: the
interior of a carriage (where the jostling motion “forces” their first touch), a
country home, a private garden, a pavilion within the garden, and finally, the
cabinet. Anticipating the ultimate destination, the young narrator confesses
that his lust has migrated from woman to architecture: “[C]e n’était plus
madame de T… que je désirais, c’était le cabinet” (“[I]t was no longer
Madame de T… whom I desired, it was the cabinet”; 34).398 X the journal for early modern cultur al studies 9.2
This displaced desire in which a room inflames arousal illustrates only
one of the many roles of interior spaces in eighteenth-century seduction nov-
els. When the cabinet supplants the body as the object of desire, the penetra-
tion of an inner sanctum is a figure for sexual penetration. The most famous
contemporary example of this analogy is no doubt Laclos’s double entendre
in Les Liaisons dangereuses wherein Valmont insists that Cécile oil the lock
and hinges of her bedroom door so that he can enter with ease. Architectural
seduction is also the central conceit of Bastide’s La Petite maison (1758; “The
Little House”), in which the Marquis de Tremicour, Bastide’s libertine hero,
rightly presumes that if the sumptuous architectural intricacies of his “petite
maison” can seduce the young Mélite, she will, in turn, yield to the Marquis’s
sexual desires.4
It is important, however, to consider the cabinet as more than a meta-
phor for the body. The eighteenth-century cabinet is at once a site of seduc-
tion and observation, of privacy and the invasion of privacy, and of philo-
sophical and sexual experimentation. The precision with which eighteenth-
century erotic literature invokes interior design details points to a function
beyond the figurative. Alongside the sexual and anatomical minutiae that
might have served to arouse the reader, these texts sometimes included ex-
haustive architectural detail that had its own effects on readers’ sensibility.
This attention to detail is one of the starting points of this study: if the weave
on the curtain in the boudoir does not excite the reader in the same manner
as the contours of a naked body, what function might it serve? I believe that
this architectural exactitude calls attention to the migration of inquiry from
philosophy’s theoretical realm to a fictional space that resembled the con-
temporary architecture of eighteenth-century readers. Passion itself is
staged, analyzed, and systematized in labyrinthine eighteenth-century inte-
riors, enabling erotic fiction to carve out a site of experiment where
Enlightenment theorizing on the sources of knowledge could take narrative
form. The discussion that follows will show how the closed space of the fic-
tional cabinet serves as a sensationist laboratory of sorts, fostering one of the
century’s most radical innovations: the auto-enlightenment of a young girl
through voyeuristic experiments.
The focus of this study is a subgenre of erotic literature that appeared
around mid-century: coming-of-age tales, told by a female narrator writing
to describe and comprehend her sexual curiosity. The most popular of these
was Thérèse philosophe (1748), which inspired similar narratives until the
end of the century.5 In these novels, the narrator often points to a scene ofbrown X 99
voyeurism as the origin of her sexual awakening. Voyeurism as she depicts it
is a precise, almost formulaic event, which prompts both sexual awareness
and the capacity to gain understanding. The act of witnessing some kind of
sexual encounter triggers a new sensation in the observer that the reader
might label as sexual desire, although the “naïve” narrator, who does not
yet possess sexual vocabulary or understanding as such, employs oblique la-
bels for the experience. In the naïve observer, it is not sexual arousal that
engenders insight, but the act of employing the senses—usually vision and
hearing—in the apprehension of sexual acts. In this way, eighteenth-century
pornography is, at times, a site for philosophical inquiry.
Thérèse philosophe and the body of texts like it worked out in a fictional
register quandaries typically associated with sensationist philosophy, which
saw physiological sensation as the source of human understanding. As will
be shown, sensationist experiments and pornographic texts frequently ad-
dressed similar philosophical concerns, albeit by very different means. Both
construct a fictional body to personify a sensory tabula rasa as a site of in-
quiry: a hypothetical statue in the case of sensationist philosophy and a curi-
ous young girl isolated in a cabinet in the case of pornography. Situating
Thérèse philosophe in the context of sensationist philosophy underscores the
multi-sensory aspects of sexual experience and relates the setting of the en-
counter to the feeling of the encounter. In this sense, a certain epistemology
of sexual experience comes to be embodied in the architectural space of
erotic fiction.
After first establishing the generic horizons of expectations that these
texts evoke, this study will trace the confluence of three threads woven
through the French Enlightenment: the first part explains the innovations
in eighteenth-century interior design that appear with curious detail in
erotic fiction; the second sets the philosophical scene by reviewing the hypo-
thetical statues of sensationist philosophy; the third demonstrates how
Thérèse philosophe mirrors sensationist methodology by situating female
auto-instruction in the boudoirs and cabinets that function as fictional ana-
logues to the sensationists’ cabinet de philosophe.
Erotic Novels, Erotic Subjects
From the pornographic texts circulated in France in the seventeenth century
through Sade’s La Philosophie dans le boudoir (1799; “Philosophy in the
Boudoir”) at the close of the eighteenth century, sexual education is a recur-
ring theme. While characters in French pornography perform, watch, and100 X the journal for early modern cultur al studies 9.2
describe sexual acts for the reader’s pleasure, they often do so while engaged
in a pedagogical project to rehabilitate ignorance, sexual and otherwise.
Indeed, the “plot” of the foundational early modern erotic narratives centers
on sexual instruction in a formal educational setting. Two books considered
to be among the first pornographic texts in France are set in “schools,” with
female instruction in dialogue form: L’Ecole des filles ou la Philosophie des
dames (“The School of Girls or the Philosophy of Ladies,” published anony-
mously in 1655, later attributed to Michel Millot) and Nicolas Chorier’s infa-
mous Latin text, Aloysiae Sigea (c.1660) translated into French as L’Académie
des dames (c.1680; “The Ladies’ Academy”). These quasi-educational manu-
als, which include an experienced woman teaching anatomy and vocabulary
lessons to a young girl, provide erotic entertainment, presumably for a male
reader, in the language of female pedagogy.6
While the terms of the debate have shifted over time, there remains a
lack of consensus about the corpus of early modern clandestine literature:
specifically, how to define a literary field that includes overlapping categories
including libertine literature, erotic literature, livres obscènes, mauvais livres,
and the admittedly anachronistic “pornography.”7 I will use the terms “erotic
literature” and “pornography” more or less interchangeably, but as a genre
distinct from “libertine literature.”8 Libertine fictions are often erotic, but
they also tend to center on the exploits of a glib aristocratic seducer, which is
not the case with the erotic fictions discussed here. French erotic literature,
originally structured as a teaching dialogue, expanded during the first half of
the eighteenth century to include courtesans’ dialogues and tales in exotic
settings, as seen in Diderot’s Les Bijoux indiscrets.9 At mid-century, Thérèse
philosophe introduced a new kind of erotic, philosophical novel told by a fe-
male narrator whose sexual enlightenment paralleled the acquisition of epis-
temological insight. The naïve observer of this subgenre uses sight as a means
of philosophical and physiological instruction. Unlike young male narra-
tors, whose secretive gaze tends to precede seductive conquest, female narra-
tors in erotica serve as actors in the Enlightenment interplay of sensations
and space as they seek both sexual and philosophical illumination. The
physical site of this experimentation is particularized in pornography, thus
reflecting the century’s architectural fragmentation of domestic space. What
results is not just titillating sex scenes caught by an observer from behind a
screen, but a textual site for a more grounded inquiry into vision, in particu-
lar, as a means of gaining understanding. Even if their primary purpose may
well be the cataloguing of sexual acts in order to arouse the reader,brown X 101
Enlightenment erotic texts do so by echoing contemporary scientific and ar-
chitectural advancements.
Subdivided Space: The Cabinet
In eighteenth-century usage, the cabinet, a general designation for a room,
began to be partitioned and modified to reflect a more specialized use of in-
terior space. This spatial shift is indicated linguistically in the pairing of
name with function: the generic cabinet becomes, for example, the “cabinet
de toilette” (woman’s dressing room), the “cabinet d’étude” (study, usually
for the man of the house), both a “grand” and a “petit” cabinet, sometimes
an “arrière cabinet” (back room) or a “cabinet de peintures” (room for paint-
ings). When it appears in erotic fiction, the cabinet reflects an Enlightenment
architectural innovation that calculated potential sensory responses and
adorned rooms to elicit and confirm the intended sensation.10
The boudoir, an eighteenth-century invention, was essentially a cabinet
gendered feminine, where a woman could withdraw to her own sanctuary
and, literally, pout in private. (“Boudoir” comes from the verb “bouder”: to
pout or to sulk.11) In novels, cabinets and boudoirs tend to be depicted in jux-
taposition with the practical matters of assuring privacy, such as doors, locks,
and keys, and with verbs that signify seclusion, such as se retirer (to with-
draw) or s’enfermer (to lock oneself in or to shut oneself away).
As rooms became more intimate, architects and decorators began to
promote the link between the adornments in a room and the sentiments one
should most appropriately feel as a function of the layout and décor. Nicolas
Le Camus de Mézières devoted his guide for architects, Le Génie de
l’architecture, ou l’Analogie de cet art avec nos sensations (1780; “The Genius
of Architecture; or, The Analogy of that Art with Our Sensations”), to the
principle that architectural design must attend to and anticipate sensory re-
sponses by coordinating colors, furnishings, and styles with the predictable
sensations they inspired. The décor in a boudoir, for example, should
heighten pleasure: “Le boudoir est regardé comme le séjour de la volupté”
(“The boudoir is regarded as the abode of delight”; 116). It should therefore
be decorated in white and blue and feature strategically positioned mirrors
and candles, the effect of which will be to inspire pleasure: “Cette retraite
délicieuse ne doit occasionner que des emotions douces, porter la sérénité
dans l’ame, la volupté dans tous les sens” (“This delicious retreat should
give rise to only sweet emotions, bring serenity to the soul, pleasure to all
the senses”; 123).102 X the journal for early modern cultur al studies 9.2
In erotica, architectural details at times act in collusion with seducers as
words, gestures, and décor intersect to arouse the senses, making seduction
inevitable. Le Sopha, for example, is told from a narrative point of view that
underscores the inseparability of furnishings and seduction. In this oriental-
ist tale by Crébillon fils, the narrator is a talking sofa (in reality, it is a prince
who has been cursed to live as a sofa until he witnesses true, innocent love).
The sofa considers the sumptuous decoration of the cabinet where he finds
himself and knows that seduction is assured in such a place:
Tout y respirait la volupté; les ornemens, les meubles, l’odeur des parfums
exquis qu’on y brûlait sans cesse, tout la retraçait aux yeux, tout la portait
dans l’âme; ce cabinet enfin aurait pu passer pour le temple de la mollesse,
pour le vrai séjour des plaisirs. (333)
Everything radiated sensuality: the adornments, the furniture, the scent
of the exquisite perfume that was always burning. Everything brought
sensuality to the eye, everything transported it to the soul. This cabinet
could have been taken for the temple of voluptuousness, for the indisput-
able seat of pleasure.
Writing about the furnishings of eighteenth-century boudoirs, Peter Cryle
explains that there is little distinction between ornament and function:
“The description of a boudoir is unlikely to make any distinction between
the decorative and the functional, because the function of the décor is pre-
cisely to invite one to the erotic actions represented and inscribed there”
(Telling of the Act 29).
While the isolated, intentionally decorated cabinet often inflames desire
and allows for libertine seduction, in some literary contexts it is imbued with
more instructional aims. The emerging literary character who is the subject
of this study, the “female philosophe in the closet,” inhabits interior spaces
that allow for observation and education. Her cabinet does not elicit desire so
much as it allows the isolation required for her sensory experimentation.
These female narrators of erotic texts tend to describe architectural space as
the mechanism for experimentation. The following excerpt from Margot la
ravaudeuse, (1750; “Margot the Mender”) one of the more scabrous books of
the century, exemplifies the combination of voyeurism and architectural
precision that I see as a trope in Enlightenment pornography. As she recounts
the sexual encounter of a certain Madame Thomas with Frère Alexis, Margot
provides structural specifics of her layered spatial isolation, explaining that
she is positioned behind an almost entirely sealed screen, covering a niche,brown X 103
within a cabinet, which, we can presume, was itself locked and only accessible
through another closed room.
Je me retirai dans un trou de cabinet fermé d’une simple cloison, dont les
planches écartées d’un bon pouce les unes des autres, étaient calfeutrées
avec des bandes de papier. Au moyen d’une petite ouverture que j’y prati-
quai, il me fut aisé de les voir manœuvrer en plein. (827)
I slipped away in a niche in the cabinet that was closed by a simple screen
with panels separated from each other by a good inch, sealed together
with strips of paper. By means of a small opening that I made, it was easy
to see all of their maneuvers.
It is only after this precise logistical report that Margot goes on to provide the
sexual elements that the reader is presumably anticipating.
Mirabeau’s Le Rideau levé ou l’Éducation de Laure (1786; “The Raised
Curtain or the Education of Laure”) offers a comparable description as the
young Rose spies on her cousin, Justine. In a lengthy passage, Rose delays
the reader’s potential arousal as she first articulates the specifics of her sur-
roundings with nearly scientific precision. While these spatial banalities
may seem superfluous in a pornographic novel—and, indeed, might have
caused the gentleman reader to skip ahead to the “good parts”—they reveal
how fictional voyeurism involved the negotiation of eighteenth-century in-
terior space. Rose’s positioning within this interior is essential to her na-
scent subjectivity:
J’aperçus, au coin du lit où couchait Justine, une porte dans la ruelle, que
je parvins à ouvrir à force de la secouer, et qui conduisait dans une cham-
bre sombre toute remplie de vieux meubles, presque jusqu’au plancher. Il
n’y avait de libre qu’un passage qui conduisait à une autre porte qui don-
nait sur un escalier dérobé, duquel on descendait dans une petite cour
d’où l’on sortait dans une ruelle déserte et écartée. (85)
At the corner of the bed where Justine slept, in the space between the bed
and the wall, I noticed a door, which I managed to open by jiggling it. It
led into a dark room filled nearly to the ceiling with old furniture. The
only clear space was a passage, leading to another door that opened to a
hidden staircase, which opened into a small courtyard, from which one
reached a deserted, remote street.
In this setting of the scene, Rose explains how she arranges the furnishings
and positions herself with a clear view into Justine’s bedroom:104 X the journal for early modern cultur al studies 9.2
Dans cette espèce de garde-meuble, il y avait à quelque hauteur, à l’égalité
du pied du lit, une ouverture qui avait été ménagée dans la muraille pour
y mettre une croisée qui aurait donné du jour dans cette chambre . . . Mais
l’usage qu’on faisait de cette pièce rendant cette précaution inutile, cette
ouverture était couverte par la tapisserie qui entourait la chambre de Jus-
tine. (85–86)
In this sort of furniture storage room, there was, at some height, an open-
ing that had been carefully made in the wall for a window, aligned with
the foot of the bed, which would have provided light in the room . . . The
way the room was used made it unnecessary, the opening was covered up
by the tapestry that surrounded the walls in Justine’s room.
These mundane decorating and logistical details, which add an air of realism
and architectural precision, allow the narrator to document both her meth-
odology and the physical conditions of her inquiry. Rose may lack experience
and vocabulary, but she does recognize the scene as foundational as she ar-
ticulates the novelty and the intensity of her new sensations, which show how
her body can be read as both furnishing and an instrument of perception:
“Ce que je voyais depuis une demi-heure excitait en moi un feu, une émotion
que je n’avais jamais sentie. . . J’étais dans un état que je ne concevais pas moi
-même (“What I had seen for half an hour excited a fire in me, an emotion
that I had never felt before. . . . I was in a state that I could not comprehend”;
89–90). This experience of voyeurism places her on the path to reason and
reflection. She describes a scientific method of sorts, which includes collect-
ing data then pondering her observations: “Depuis ce moment, je ne pensais,
je ne rêvais plus qu’à ce que j’avais vu; toutes leurs paroles étaient parvenues
à mes oreilles; aucune de leurs actions ne m’avait échappé; j’y réfléchissais
sans cesse” (“From that moment on I did not think or dream about anything
but what I had seen: all of their words had reached my ears, not a single one
of their actions had escaped me. I reflected on them endlessly”; 93).
After reflection and practice, Rose eventually climbs into bed with her
cousin and demonstrates her new sexual savvy, acquired through her meth-
odology of observation and reflection. The cousin, surprised by Rose’s libidi-
nal skills, explains that she had assumed that Rose was completely ignorant
because she had been raised by a devout mother. This “devout mother” sym-
bolizes one of the many targets of French pornography: the church and the
superstition it promotes that impedes rational thought. Sensory perception
and a private space for experimentation in these narratives are the tools forbrown X 105
undoing the oppressive strictures that stifle the exercise of reason. The fact
that Margot, Rose, and other young observers like them always manage to
find a hidden vantage point illustrates a paradox about space and privacy. The
very partitioning of the domestic sphere, meant to ensure absolute seclusion,
produced isolated, hidden spaces from which intruders would infiltrate the
inner sanctum, at least on the fictional stage of erotic novels. This dual nature
of the cabinet—seemingly isolated but in fact perfectly suited for observation
by a small girl hidden at its boundaries—allows its role as a kind of laboratory
for solitary experimentation. In some key ways, this experimentation echoes
Enlightenment theories of the senses, as will be shown in what follows.
Condillac’s Statue and the Cabinet de philosophe
At the heart of sensationist thought is the identification of the sensory ori-
gins of understanding. Concerned with how feelings structure and motivate
knowledge, sensationist philosophers conceived a methodology for examin-
ing the awakening of the senses. These philosophical investigations in turn
informed literary production where the theoretical world of the philosopher
migrated to the fictional realm, including erotic novels.
Sensationist theories, which counter Descartes’s insistence on the pri-
macy of innate ideas, began to appear in France in the early years of the eigh-
teenth century. Influenced by John Locke’s Essay on the Origins of Human
Understanding (translated into French in 1700),12 French sensationists sought
to locate the physical mechanisms that stimulated mental processes. They
were especially concerned with hypothetical “firsts”—such as the first per-
ceptions of a blind person given sight and other variations on Molyneux’s
question.13 A favored methodology was the conception of a hypothetical
statue that the philosopher could manipulate sense by sense. Condillac put
forward his theories on the senses in a series of works beginning with the
Essai sur les origines des connaissances humaines (1746; “Essay on the Origins
of Human Understanding”) and culminating with the Traité des sensations
(1754; “Treatise on the Sensations”) and the Traité des animaux (1755;
“Treatise on Animals”). In the Traité des sensations, Condillac writes of a
statue that comes to life as it accumulates sensory experiences, beginning
with the sense of smell.
To examine the sense of smell, which Condillac considers the least in-
formative of the senses, he places different flowers before the statue to theo-
rize the resulting mental activities of attention, differentiation, and judg-
ment between pleasure and revulsion. With experience, the statue would106 X the journal for early modern cultur al studies 9.2
cultivate the memory of different sensations, such as the different scents of a
rose and a carnation, and thus learned to compare and classify olfactory
stimuli. By repeated manipulation of scents, Condillac reaches the conclu-
sion that the statue—relying only upon the sense of smell—acquires the ca-
pacity to pay attention, remember, judge, discern, imagine, and perceive ab-
stract notions such as numbers and time. Condillac goes on to investigate the
other four senses in the same vein. On occasion, he addresses the reader to
ensure that the reader can “see” his experiment exactly as it unfolds. Therein,
however, is the rub: the statue is a fiction and the experiment nothing but
narrative, in spite of Condillac’s rhetoric, which mimics that of a scientist
taking laboratory notes of his observations. At times, Condillac positions his
reader not as a fellow philosopher observing a statue, but as the statue itself.
The Traité des sensations opens with an “Avis important au lecteur”
(“Important Notice to the Reader”), in which the reader is told to strip him-
self of his sensory abilities:
J’avertis donc qu’il est très-important de se mettre exactement à la place
de la statue que nous allons observer. Il faut commencer d’exister avec
elle, n’avoir qu’un seul sens, quand elle n’en a qu’un; n’acquérir que les
idées qu’elle acquiert, ne contracter que les habitudes qu’elle contracte: en
un mot, il faut n’être que ce qu’elle est. (9)
I am warning that it is very important to put yourself exactly in the place
of the statue that we are going to observe. You must begin to exist with it,
to have only one sense when it only has one, to gain only the ideas it gains,
to adopt only the habits it adopts. In a word, you must be only what it is.
By asking readers to do the impossible—rid themselves of all senses and
memory of sensory experience—Condillac sets up an unassailable argument.
The readers who position themselves precisely in the statue’s place, he asserts,
will have no trouble understanding the experiment, while those who do not
will put forward endless objections. From the outset, then, Condillac situates
his readers in two different subject positions: the observer and the observed,
the scientist and his fictional creation. Anything external to the statue—other
objects, bodies, or nature itself—is manipulated and controlled by its creator.
The invisible authority of the experimenter is, according to Douthwaite, one
of Condillac’s failings: “[H]e alone stages the sensory experiences, yet one
never sees him or witnesses his interactions with the subject. His invisibility
lends an air of voyeurism to the scenario . . .” (79). It is this unseen
manipulative hand that will be eradicated in pornography’s re-creation ofbrown X 107
sensationist experimentation. In erotic novels, the potential voyeurism of the
experimenter will be eliminated as the “animated statue” becomes an
autonomous entity—both experimenter and statue at the same time.
At times, Condillac’s thought experiment does take the statue out of the
laboratory and into nature, but this natural setting is as regulated and sterile
as the philosopher’s study, a vacuous simulacrum of the natural world. The
statue will be placed in a synthetic, temperate climate, “dans un air tran-
quille, tempéré, et où elle ne sente ni augmenter, ni diminuer sa chaleur na-
turelle” (“in still, temperate air, where it will feel neither an increase nor a
diminishing of its natural warmth”; 91).
The statue’s physical features are established in some detail, except for
its gender, which remains unspecified. The heading of the first chapter of the
treatise identifies the initial understanding of a man limited to the sense of
smell (“un homme borné au sens de l’odorat”). The “man” in the heading is
immediately replaced by “statue,” a feminine noun in French. This requires
the feminine personal pronoun, “elle,” and the corresponding feminized
forms of adjectives.14 Even if we take the references to “un homme” to imply
a universalized human being, the continuous use of “she” for the statue
makes it difficult to assign the statue an incontrovertible gender. Yves Citton,
one of the few scholars to consider gender in Condillac’s work, claims that
the feminized nature of the statue is asserted throughout the treatise in
much more than feminine pronouns. If we could actually see the statue,
Citton argues, the statue’s nakedness would be covered by a leaf, but under-
neath we would no doubt discover a woman (282). John O’Neal, in his es-
sential work on the French sensationalists, refers to Condillac’s statue as the
“statue-man,” although he does consider the statue’s feminine characteris-
tics, especially curiosity (49).15
This lack of precision is telling in a study of sensations as it hints that the
treatise will remain silent on the question of the statue’s ability to perceive
and respond to sexual stimuli. The genderless statue is also asexual, as far as
one can tell. It is endowed with a sense of touch, which does not lead to sexual
sensation. The statue’s potentially sexual self is nearly awakened as it learns
to distinguish external objects by identifying its own contours. With its
hands, the statue touches every part of its body, and feeling its own touch,
says “c’est moi.” It touches itself all over, proclaiming “c’est moi . . . c’est en-
core moi.” An object is recognized as external or “other” when the hand
touches something and does not feel the corresponding tactile response that
would proclaim “it is still me.” The absence of libidinal sensation here is one108 X the journal for early modern cultur al studies 9.2
of the great silences of the treatise.
While his concerns were fundamentally quite different from those of
Condillac, the celebrated natural historian, the Comte de Buffon, made use
of hypothetical constructs akin to the statue-man in order to theorize aspects
of natural history that he could not directly observe, such as the origins of
man. In the Histoire naturelle he writes of a fictionalized “first man,” Adam,
who comes into consciousness through the acquisition of the senses.16 Unlike
Condillac, Buffon does consider sexual arousal in his investigation of the ori-
gins of sensation. In a first-person narrative, Buffon’s Adam acquires the five
senses and then encounters and touches a “first woman.” In response, he im-
mediately experiences a bodily desire that Buffon labels the “sixth sense”:
Je la sentis s’animer sous ma main, je la vis prendre de la pensée dans mes
yeux, les siens firent couler dans mes veines une nouvelle source de vie,
j’aurais voulu lui donner tout mon être; cette volonté vive acheva mon
existence, je sentis naître un sixième sens. (3: 370)
I felt her come to life at my touch, with my eyes I saw her come into
thought, her eyes caused a new source of life to flow in my veins. I wanted,
in turn, to give her all my being; this powerful desire completed my exis-
tence. I felt a sixth sense being born within me.
This sixth sense results from the deployment of touch and sight and seems to
require a different narrative form than the scientific and philosophical dis-
course that interrogated the other five senses. Buffon exchanges scientific
analysis for a fictionalized narrative that reads like a love story, in which Eve
completes Adam’s existence. Buffon’s turn to fictional discourse to address
the origins of sexual sensation signals the more radical narrative shift from
philosophy to pornography. It is my contention that the eighteenth-century
philosophical study of the five senses migrates to erotic literature, the genre
that may be best suited to accommodate an inquiry into the origins of sexual
consciousness. Certainly the production and examination of sexual sensa-
tions are an obvious component of erotic novels: the unexpected innovation
in these texts is the application of scientific methods that establishes an im-
plicit dialogue between the sensationist philosopher and the pornographer.
The sensationist’s not-quite-human statue, entirely controlled by its
creator, is supplanted in pornography by a desiring, yet unformed girl who
begins her education in remote interior spaces. Erotic literature’s female
narrator, attempting to comprehend, systematize, and re-create sexual
sensations, may be said to embody sensationist methodology. Erotic textsbrown X 109
underscore their move from the hypothetical realm of materialist philosophy
to a space replicating interiors that would be familiar to contemporary
readers. These under-the-cloak books are, of course, fictional, but they appear
less so by evoking the blueprint of an eighteenth-century interior. The
philosopher’s statue, too, was a fiction (in spite of Condillac’s chatty invitations
to the reader to join him in his laboratory); its erotic counterpart, staged in a
context that anchors literary events to the world of the reader, suggests that it
might indeed be possible to map the trajectory from sensation to insight.
I interpret the first-person female narrators of pornography as autono-
mous embodiments of sensationist thought. That is to say, they are autono-
mous to the extent that they experiment with sensory perception without the
guiding hand of a “scientist” like Condillac. To read the pornographic novel
this way is to suggest a different erotic subject than the one evoked by O’Neal
in The Authority of Experience. In his analysis of Les Liaisons dangereuses
(Laclos, 1782) and La Philosophie dans le boudoir (Sade, 1795) O’Neal states
that later-century libertine texts feature libertines who keep their female vic-
tims in a developmental stage of pure, undifferentiated sensation (151).
Libertine texts, argues O’Neal, “depict an inverted image of the statue-man’s
characteristics of curiosity, surprise, and movement” (149). This is indeed
the case when the education of young characters is left to the wiles of liber-
tine instructors. Cécile in Les Liaisons dangereuses and Eugénie in La
Philosophie dans le boudoir remain in an inchoate state primarily character-
ized by the presence or absence of pleasure and pain because their inability to
translate sensation into rational thought subordinates them to more clever
men. My reading does not contradict O’Neal’s, but it does suggest a shift in
focus. Whereas traditional libertine novels emphasize strategies of sexual
conquest, the subgenre of first-person erotic memoirs identifies women
whose sexual pleasure resides in a system that is erotic but not libertine and,
hence, not dependent on conqueror and victim. As will be shown, the epony-
mous Thérèse philosophe is nothing like Cécile, precisely because of the
transposition she makes from sensation to reason. Indeed, the implementa-
tion of sensationist theory is one of the marks of female autonomy in
Enlightenment erotica. The statue’s gendered counterpart in erotic texts
will be shown to be an uninitiated girl who, like the statue man, isolates her
senses in the process of gaining sexual understanding. The naïve observer
employs sight and hearing to perceive sex acts and then converts libidinal
sensation into mental constructs. While Condillac’s statue inhabits the phil-
osophical space of a thought experiment, the pornographer’s “statue” carves110 X the journal for early modern cultur al studies 9.2
out a remote space with contours that allow her to isolate sensory percep-
tions. The following section illustrates how the most popular livre obscène in
eighteenth-century France, Thérèse philosophe, establishes pornography as a
textual site for the continuation of sensationist methodology.
Thérèse philosophe and the Female Autodidact
Like most eighteenth-century fictions, Thérèse philosophe is a mix of genres:
it is a sexual and intellectual memoir, a catalog of explicitly described sexual
acts, and a guide to materialist philosophy. The novel can be divided into
four sections, which define the steps involved in the making of pornography’s
female philosophe: witnessing sex for the first time; instruction from enlight-
ened mentors, Mme C… and the Abbé T… (including spying on their sexual
encounters); the excesses of sex as illustrated by the perverse history of Mme
Bois-Laurier; and finally, Thérèse’s regulating her own sexual pleasure in
partnership with the epicurean philosopher known only as “the Count.”
After a brief account of Thérèse’s early sexual precocity, playing “school”
with other children and frittering away her adolescence in a convent, Thérèse
spies on a sexual encounter between her friend, Eradice, and the lecherous
Jesuit, Father Dirrag. Based on a well-known cause célèbre, the plot initially
follows historical accounts of the 1731 trial in Provence in which a Jesuit, J.-B
Girard was accused of raping a young woman, C. Cadière.17 The event was
dramatized nearly two decades later by the introduction of Thérèse as a fic-
tional witness hidden in a closet. This scene marks the real beginning of her
sexual education. Watching from a hidden spot in a cabinet opens up two
spheres at once: first she senses the erotic possibilities that accompany sexual
sensation; then, given the context, which is the deception and rape of a young
penitent by a priest’s false religious rhetoric, Thérèse comprehends the fragil-
ity of sexual knowledge and the possibility of deception in the pursuit of
sexual pleasure. Peering through a small opening, Thérèse positions herself
to view the event staged before her. As with other narrating voyeurs, Thérèse
carefully describes the physical space of her surveillance:
Je me sauvai dans le cabinet . . . . Un trou large comme la main, qui était
dans la porte de ce cabinet, couverte d’une vieille tapisserie de Bergame,
très claire, me laissait voir librement la chambre en son entier, sans risquer
d’être aperçue. (26) . . . J’étais placée de manière à ne pas perdre la moin-
dre circonstance de cette scène; les fenêtres de la chambre où elle se passait
faisaient face à la porte du cabinet dans lequel j’étais renfermée. (32)brown X 111
I scurried into the closet . . . . A hole in the closet door, as big as my hand
and covered with an old, threadbare Bergamo tapestry, allowed me to see
the entire room easily, without risk of being caught. . . . I was positioned in
such a manner as not to miss the slightest detail of the scene: the windows
of the bedroom where this scene took place were directly across from the
door of the cabinet where I was hidden.
From her concealed vantage point, she witnesses a sexual ruse dressed in the
language of piety and religious ecstasy. Kneeling on a prie-dieu, her face
prostrate on the floor, the unwitting Eradice is fooled into believing that the
priest will purify her as she assumes a rather unorthodox prayer position. In
an act that is a parody of both worship and seduction, Dirrag whips her with
a switch, then takes out what he calls his “cord of Saint Francis” (31) and
penetrates Eradice, all the while employing the rhetoric of spirituality and
penitence. Thérèse experiences the contradictory sentiments of revulsion
and curiosity, accompanied by physical sensation. As she analyzes the scene
with at least partial detachment, her vocabulary vacillates between the scien-
tific and the naïve. She studies and reports Dirrag’s physiological transfor-
mations in scientific terms:
Quelle mécanique! Quel spectacle, mon cher Comte, pour une fille de mon
âge, qui n’avait aucune connaissance de ce genre de mystère! Que d’idées
différentes me passèrent dans l’esprit, sans pouvoir me fixer à aucune! (34)
What engineering! What a spectacle, my dear Count, for a girl of my age,
who had no knowledge of this kind of mystery! So many different ideas
passed through my mind, but not a single one took root!
This scene showcases two divergent views of the senses: the licentious Dirrag
preaches a distorted version of Cartesian dualism, calling for the separation
of spirit and body, while Thérèse both enacts and ponders sensationist and
materialist philosophy. Dirrag’s ploy to seduce Eradice relies upon her igno-
rance, which necessitates the repudiation of physical sensation. He explains
that spiritual ecstasy (code in Dirrag’s lexicon for sexual gratification) is at-
tained by detaching the mind from the senses: “[V]otre âme doit être déta-
chée des sens. Si ma fille ne trompe pas mes saintes espérances, elle ne voit
plus, n’entend plus, ne sent plus” (“Your mind must be detached from your
senses. In order not to betray my sacred desires, my child must no longer see,
hear, or feel”; 31). Like a sensationist philosopher, Dirrag considers the senses
a reliable mechanism for the comprehension of truth, which is why it is cru-
cial for him to preach an anti-sensationist doctrine if he wishes to mask the112 X the journal for early modern cultur al studies 9.2
truth. Eradice will be deceived as long as she sublimates her sensory percep-
tions in favor of a purely spiritual state.
[N]ous sentons, et nous n’avons d’idées du bien et du mal physique,
comme du bien et du mal moral, que par la voie des sens. Dès que nous
touchons, que nous entendons, que nous voyons, etc., un objet, des parti-
cules d’esprit se coulent dans les petites cavités des nerfs qui vont en aver-
tir l’âme. (28)
[W]e have sensations, and form ideas―of physical good and evil as well as
moral good and evil―only through the senses. As soon as we touch, hear,
or see an object, spiritual particles flow into the small nerve cavities that
alert the soul.
He instructs her to direct all the particles of her spirit away from her physical
self and toward the love of God. By doing so, no sensory receptors will re-
main and, consequently, Eradice will feel no physical pain: “[I]l n’en restera
aucune pour avertir l’âme des coups que votre chair recevra; vous ne les sen-
tirez pas” (“[N]one will remain to inform your mind of the blows that your
flesh will receive: you will not feel them”; 28). The priest, symbol of a corrupt
church, manipulates sensationist theory by teaching Eradice to elude the
flood of sensory impressions by focusing her mind intently on an abstract
idea (the love of God).18 Sensations pose a threat to Dirrag’s deception be-
cause, as Thérèse discovers, they can be repeated and evaluated. Thérèse,
whose only presence in the room was visual and auditory, nevertheless com-
prehended the truth of the incident in ways that Eradice, who had actual
bodily knowledge of the event, could not.
Curious as to the meaning of the involuntary shiver (frémissement) that
resulted from watching the scene of seduction (30), Thérèse retreats to her
room to consider what she observed and felt. In the seclusion of her room,
she engages in a cycle commonplace in Enlightenment pornography: watch-
ing or having sex stimulates a need to pause and philosophize. The philoso-
phizing in turn acts as an aphrodisiac, and thus the chain of sex, philosophy,
more sex, and more philosophy continues. Led by forces she claims not to
understand, Thérèse mulls over all that she has just observed, unsure if her
friend had experienced pleasure or pain. The scene observed from the cabi-
net and the need to comprehend the sexual frémissement she experienced,
mark the beginning of Thérèse’s reliance on analysis and reason. Unable to
reach a satisfactory explanation, she continues to ponder, especially the
memory of the changing size and properties of Dirrag’s “cord of Saintbrown X 113
Francis.” So begins her own quest to replicate the so-called religious ecstasy
she had observed. While vision alone activated her first sexual impressions,
the purely mental process of replaying previous sensory impressions pro-
duced the same feelings she had experienced in the cabinet. Mirroring the
statue-man’s acquisition of mental faculties, Thérèse deploys sight, repeti-
tion, and memory to comprehend sexual sensation and behavior. In her se-
clusion, she asserts herself as both philosopher and sensationist statue, at
once investigator and object of investigation. She alone will conduct the sen-
sationist inquiries on her body, analyze cause and effect, and, ultimately, re-
port her conclusions to others.
The desire to replicate this first moment of sexual pleasure leads Thérèse
to the tutelage of the enlightened Mme C… and Abbé T… . With them she
undergoes a more formalized erotic and philosophical education, through
conversations about natural law, the flawed nature of Christianity, and the
primacy of pleasure. For a time, voyeurism remains one of her educational
tactics as Thérèse maintains a balance between direct instruction from oth-
ers and isolated observation and thought. Aware of an early-morning out-
door rendezvous between her two tutors, Thérèse arrives before them and
conceals herself in some underbrush. In the expanse of nature, she cannot
construct a site of observation as she could in an interior space. Away from
the confines of a cabinet, she is able to hear, but not see. “J’essayai vingt fois de
me lever, pour tâcher de trouver quelque ouverture par où je puisse décou-
vrir les objets, mais le bruit des feuilles me retint toujours” (“I tried twenty
times to get up to try to find some opening through which I could see the
objects, but the sound of the leaves held me back”; 67). In this context, she is
thus both like and unlike Condillac’s statue: she resembles him in the se-
quential isolation of senses, but is essentially unlike him because her senses
are not manipulated by an external observer. Not limited by a scientist or
philosopher to regulate her sensory experience, her only constraints are spa-
tial, as she cannot see everything from her chosen vantage point. In this in-
stance, she only has access to auditory sensation. Not satisfied with hearing
alone, she orchestrates one last scene of voyeurism indoors. As with her ob-
servation of Dirrag and Eradice, she clearly defines the spatial details of her
spying, this time in Mme C…’s bedroom:
Je n’hésitai pas de m’y couler et de me cacher dans la ruelle de son lit, où
je m’assis sur le plancher, le dos appuyé contre le mur à côté du chevet,
j’avais le rideau du lit devant moi, que je pouvais entrouvrir au besoin
pour avoir en entier le spectacle du petit lit qui était dans le coin opposé
de la chambre. (73)114 X the journal for early modern cultur al studies 9.2
I did not hesitate to slip into her room and hide in the space between the
wall and her bed, where I sat down on the floor with my back leaning
against the wall next to the head of the bed. In front of me was the bed
curtain, which I could open a crack as needed to view the entire spectacle
of the small bed that was in the opposite corner of the bedroom.
Thérèse’s voyeuristic gaze is heuristic rather than objectifying. Although it
may kindle sexual pleasure, it does not situate Mme C… and the Abbé T…
as objects, for they have already confirmed their own philosophical and
sexual subjectivity.19
This moment of visual sensation as a prelude to both sexual and philo-
sophical awakening will continue to appear in erotic novels throughout the
eighteenth century. When narrated by a young girl, her trajectory will often
begin with her peering through a loose slat in a screen or a hole in a curtain
that, as we have seen, isolates her senses. She might see but not hear, or hear
but not see. Most importantly, she is always spatially removed from actual
naked bodies, so it is not her sense of touch that initiates sexual awareness. In
this way she gains the capacity to think logically and systematically about
sexual sensation. How, the narrator must decide, can a purely ocular act lead
to a physical, sexual sensation in another part of her body? When Thérèse
observes Father Dirrag’s obvious sexual gratification, she describes her re-
sponses in sensationist terms: “Attentive à l’événement de cette scène, j’étais
remplie d’une sainte horreur, je sentais une sorte de frémissement que je ne
puis décrire” (“Attentive to this scene of events, I was filled with a holy hor-
ror. I felt a sort of shiver that I cannot describe”; 29–30). This frémissement
marks the encounter of sensibility and sexuality while it implicates Thérèse
in the experience of seduction. This correlation of the visual and the sexual is
largely absent from philosophical treatises even as they studiously test bodily
sensations as the mechanism that engenders human understanding.
Sexual sensation alone does not bring about insight. Indeed, most
scenes in erotic literature show sexual feelings leading to perversion, excess,
and debauchery rather than to enlightenment. Thérèse’s prostitute mentor,
Mme Bois-Laurier, recounts a series of tales that characterize male sexual
desire as an unnatural impulse that motivates ridiculous acts. What, then, is
the precise mechanism for the nascent female philosophe’s intellectual and
sexual development? The analytical process suggests that the origin of sexual
sensations resides simultaneously in the external world, as something ob-
served, and in the body, mediated by the senses. Whether perceived by sight,
hearing, or ultimately, touch, the female narrator reports sexual excitement,brown X 115
accompanied by mental processes such as repetition and memory. If this
process of reasoning in erotic texts is at times hasty—frequently interrupted
by more salacious adventures—it nonetheless translates simple sexual
knowledge into the ability to observe and comprehend the world beyond the
sexual sphere. When not thinking about sex, Thérèse considers topics cen-
tral to Enlightenment thought, such as civility and happiness, the authority
of the church, and the establishment of just laws and governments.
Like Thérèse, other eighteenth-century female narrators will experience
a similar scene of voyeurism as a first step to sexual enlightenment.20 One
such narrator is Mirabeau’s eponymous Laure in Le Rideau levé ou l’Éducation
de Laure, a work in which the title itself announces a link between watching
through a curtain and learning. Following the model established in Thérèse
philosophe, Laure narrates her own sexual education, which begins with voy-
eurism. Plagued with curiosity, Laure pulls aside a curtain to observe her fa-
ther with her governess, Lucette. In language nearly identical to that of
Thérèse, she watches, analyzes her sensations, and seeks understanding:
“Animée par cette vue, instruite par l’example, j’imitai . . . les mouvements
que je voyais. J’éprouvai une sensation qui m’était inconnue” (“Enlivened by
what I saw, taught by example, I imitated . . . the movements I was witnessing.
I felt an unfamiliar sensation”; 28). She goes on to overlay educational dis-
course onto this sexual scene, writing of “enlightenment” and “reflection”:
“ . . . [P]rofitant des lumières que je venais d’acquérir, et réfléchissant sur ce
que j’avais vu . . .” (“Benefiting from the enlightenment I had just acquired
and reflecting on what I had seen . . .”; 28). Laure’s voyeurism has been a cata-
lyst to analytic thought: from that time on, everything was a source of en-
lightenment and her powers of imagination were released (35).
Eighteenth-century pornography thus creates a space for the unlearning
of what it deems unnatural in favor of the natural, which is known through
the sensations. In this way, erotica creates its own sentient statues like Thérèse
and Laure whose bodies are, in Jean Mainil’s terms, at once biological and
philosophical (151). Pornography at times joins sensationist philosophy in
the skeptical examination of human understanding, rejecting information
from unreliable, unverifiable sources, in favor of observation and analysis.
Concentrated use of the sense of sight is just one step in a young girl’s
trajectory. It is eventually replaced by other modes of learning when literary
heroines abandon the cabinet, and exchange the isolated realm of pure sen-
sation to enter a circle of sociability where they find enlightened guides, fe-
male friends, and, soon enough, lovers of their own. The cabinet, however,You can also read
