Erotica
This image from http://etymologie-occitane.chez-alice.fr/index.html
a very serious site about language in the south of France.
I tend to think that erotic books should be read by young adults who wonder how the rest of the world makes love, and that if you are in your thirties and still curious about these things, there must be something unsound with you. But of course I am wrong: most people protect the young from erotic readings and my 75 years old neighbor takes viagra, rents porn movies and criticizes his son for being gay: it is the way of the world.
Erotic texts have always existed; think about the Kama Sutra, written in sanskrit, which is a sex education book translated in English in the 19th century. The Romans had mainly satire, then christianity came on with a long period of repression and erotic texts under cover, which leaves us with two main western periods for erotica: the 18th century and the 1950s.
Casanova(b. 1725) wrote Story of my life with a candid account of all his conquests. The man was a prick and the book lacks interest, at least for me. I largely prefer the Prince de Ligne (one of my Belgian favorites, note that his collection of writings is good reading, not erotica) who said that there is nothing as sad as making love in the dark and in silence.
The Prince used to say about Casanova that he would have been good-looking if he had not been so ugly. It may be that Casanova inspired the Don Giovanni of Mozart (Don Giovanni in this version because nobody dies in music like Siepi, but also this beautiful version***) Would you believe that I went to Maazel's concerts when he was "young"?
Other well known texts are Fanny Hill (1748) by John Cleland which is a bit crude (it comes under different titles, do not worry about it; Fanny is the most known, Memoirs...is the original title), and The Divan, by Crebillon, which is more fun: it is the story of a human transformed into a sofa until true love is met on the sofa in question.
The 19th century was, as you remember, mainly Victorian. Marriages were arranged according to social status. The wife had children, the husband was in love with a mistress. In Paris, young rich men had a "pied-a-terre", a one bedroom apartment with a small kitchen at the end of a narrow hallway where the servant could cook discretely. The architecture reflects the morality of the time. The men were considered of high moral standard and their mistresses were called prostitutes. This unequal standard still leaves traces today: how many guys do you know who think that a girl is a whore if she makes love to them? I have seen plenty. Good examples of that period are Gigi by Colette (and a good movie) and Love in the afternoon (1957) with Audrey Hepburn and Gary Cooper based on a novel of the Swiss-French Claude Anet. An early writer of porn will be the American writer in Paris Henry Miller: Tropic of Cancer was first published in 1934
The 50s explosion of erotica
Pauline Reage (= Anne Desclos) published the sadomasochist Story of O in 1954. It is the story of a woman who does anything for the man she loves, including submitting to other men.The same year, Pierre Louys published lesbian poems called Songs of Bilitis. The poems inspired Debussy. Louys was an heterosexual man interested in and good friend with Oscar Wilde and Andre Gide. Nabokov published the powerful Lolita in 1955. It is the story of a delusional pedophile "seduced" by his 12 years old daughter in-law. Finally, the Diary of Anais Nin (born in France in 1903, living a lot in the States) reveals a passionate bi-sexual nature.
Lady Chatterley's Lover*** is a novel by D. H. Lawrence first printed in 1928 but published in the United Kingdom in 1960. The novel is reputed to have explicit sex, but I do not remember any of it. Compared to what you can read nowadays in the simplest Harlequin novel, it is nothing. Lady Chatterley is married to an impotent man and finds comfort in the arms of the gardener (or game keeper): the social disparity creating more outrage than the infidelity.
This peak of erotica in the 1950s provoked a reaction and a lot of condemnations for pornography in the early 1960s. The best book on these trials was written by Charles Rembar (b. 1915): The End of Obscenity: The Trials of Lady Chatterley, Tropic of Cancer and Fanny Hill***. The ridiculous side of it is that censors picked new prints of rather old books: Fanny Hill: 1749, Chatterley 1928, Tropic 1934...
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