Eroticism in Literature

At Issue

In psychology and religion, the individual’s experience of sex is of key importance in shaping the personality. Whether it be the loss of virginity, the acceptance of homosexuality, or the cultivation of a fetish, erotic experience creates a window that looks upon the writer’s mind and upon the writer’s culture. Eroticism in literature may unlock or loosen the bonds of guilt and shame. The erotic experience of another may allow the individual to see that he or she is not alone and that fantasies once thought to be perverse are in fact shared by many. Furthermore, the nature of fantasies, particularly if they are frowned upon by the culture, may reveal a hidden prejudice toward a group or lifestyle.

History

Historically, erotic literature has censored. Various religious groups and community watchdogs have long sought to impose their morality on others by banning books they view as damaging. In many cases the censors’ attempts at prohibition backfire, drawing attention to the book’s power and even increasing its readership. Notable examples include the attempt to block the importation of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn (1939), both of which were subject to seizure at the border of the United States. Regarding Miller’s book, the Supreme Court ruled in 1964 that obscenity was too subjective to remain a legal matter and instead placed its definition within the hands of academics. Even so, the debate over whether particular texts should be banned continues to rage.

Particularly offensive to some, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) came under fire for its treatment of pedophilia, or eroticism and children, while William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959) was banned for depicting homosexuality. The rise of gay rights and feminism in the 1960s and 1970s saw a decrease in censorship, with such writers as Allen Ginsberg and Erica Jong at the forefront of eroticism, but the 1980s created a conservative backlash which again called for the exclusion of certain texts from, for example, college and secondary school libraries.

The Canon

Among academics, the overwritten and clichéd passages of pulp fiction are not part of the literary canon. Pulp fiction, named for the cheap quality of the paper on which it is printed, is deemed to be too obvious in its intent to be classified as literature. Its aim is only to arouse readers, leaving them comfortably stationary within their own prejudices, understanding, and views. Pulp fiction does not attempt higher levels of artistry in writing, which, although it too might arouse readers, also challenges their notions of erotic experience. Indeed, perhaps the only safe generalization that can be made about erotic experience is that it is incredibly varied. Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises (1926), for example, explores male bonding and the competition among males for females. At the center of the novel is the narrator Jake Barnes, an alcoholic who is impotent spiritually and physically. Ironically, the courage he displayed in World War I brought him a wound that makes him unable to perform in the bedroom, becoming a commentary on men’s enslavement to their own pride and to the bodies of women. Miller, on the other hand, in Tropic of Capricorn, sees the crippling agent as that of Puritanism, which he indicts for its demonization of sex. In Puritanism’s place, Miller substitutes a manic celebration of the body, making it glorious in all its imperfection.

Another aspect of identity and eroticism in literature lies in the treatment of homosexuality. In Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), for example, homosexual love is seen as a threat to the male ego, challenging the athletic, macho man’s sense of himself and leading to alcoholism and suicide. Burroughs’s cult novel, Naked Lunch, however, celebrates homosexuality. The novel also examines the limits of personality as it is challenged by bondage and drug addiction. A gentler gay love is explored in Truman Capote’s classic Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), a novel of sexual initiation depicting a young woman’s journey from her hillbilly past into the heart of New York City. “A Diamond Guitar,” also by Capote, is a lyrical account of the blossoming of homosexual love in prison between an aging convict and a young man. When the young man escapes, the older man dreams of him while he strokes the diamond guitar abandoned under his bed, imagining the wide world beyond the prison walls. In Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), Rita Mae Brown depicts another sort of gay love: A young lesbian loses her innocence and confronts a world of prejudice and intolerance, discovering the pain and joy inherent in her sexuality.

Another woman explores a different aspect of female sexuality in Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973). In this novel, the woman is the man’s sexual equal, matching him in the lust for conquest and in the degree of her sexual pleasure. So long damned, the promiscuous woman, a childless adult who has escaped the tyranny of biology, is celebrated. In contrast, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) presents the male as a slave to testosterone, doomed to pursue an endless quest to satisfy his insatiable libido. The darker side of lust appears in John Irving’s The World According to Garp (1978), which depicts the average male’s horror of rape—an act of sexual violence that makes him feel that his entire sex has been tainted. In Irving’s novel, the Ellen James Society is so named in remembrance of a victim who had her tongue cut out so that she could not describe her attackers. Her sympathizers, members of the society, willingly undergo the same operation. Irving thus creates a symbol for the psychological mutilation of rape. In contrast to the horror that sex can bring, African American writer and Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison creates a lushly sensual world in Tar Baby (1981). Set in the Caribbean, much of the action takes place inside a greenhouse where the sex life of plants mirrors that of the erotic encounters between a rural man from the American South and a fashion model from New York City. The clash of their cultures within the African American community heightens the eroticism of their liaison, as each becomes more aware of the forces that shaped the other. Finally, Blue Movie (1970), by Terry Southern, is considered by many critics to be one of the best erotic novels ever written. It is rife with wit and satire, and it lampoons the pornography industry.

Implications for Identity

What emerges from a survey of erotic literature is, more than surprise at dissimiliarities of sexual practices, a sense of the vast likenesses: heartbreak, disappointment, happiness, and bliss. Erotic experience is a modern quest, whether it is a gay man cruising leather bars or a woman cruising upscale singles bars in search of a one-night stand. Judith Rossner’s Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1975), an example of cruising from a woman’s point of view, is a cautionary tale of casual sex. The novel tells of the sexual escapades of a woman who is seeking meaning in life through her erotic encounters. She is murdered at the close of the novel by a sexual predator who is aroused as much by the act of murder as he is by the act of sex. Like many late twentieth century writers, Rossner implies that the absence of spirituality, wrought by the skepticism of science, deprives human beings of God but not of their hunger for God. Unable to believe in an abstract protector and punisher, they seek solace in each other, their consummation and communion being the sexual act.

The fleeting nature of sexual bliss and the constant desire for renewal indicate, however, that erotic experience may be a tenuous salvation at best. The work of Jong and Roth partakes of a quest motif; that is, the protagonists will find fulfillment only if they can have sex with either the perfect partner, or, failing that, with a great many partners. As representatives of the search for meaning, they are afflicted by a paradox similar to the one that haunts alcoholics or drug addicts: The more they attempt to fill the void inside them, the emptier they become. Man or woman, the erotic quester finds, cannot substitute for God; lust cannot take the place of love. The literature of the erotic seeks to engage not only the mystery of physical craving wrought by glands but also the hunger for intimacy born of the complex human heart.

Bibliography

Basler, Roy. Sex, Symbolism, and Psychology in Literature. New York: Octagon Books, 1970.

Brooks, Peter. Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Gottesman, Ronald, ed. Critical Essays on Henry Miller. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1992.

Hapke, Laura. Girls Who Went Wrong: Prostitutes in American Fiction. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1989.

Hernton, Calvin C. The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers: Adventures in Sex, Literature, and Real Life. Garden City, N.J.: Anchor Press, 1990.

Millet, Kate. Sexual Politics. New York: Doubleday, 1970.

Tennant-Moore, Hannah. "The Best Literary Writing about Sex." Literary Hub, 8 Feb. 2016, lithub.com/the-best-literary-writing-about-sex/. Accessed 20 Aug. 2019.