Fanny Hill And The Politics Of Rudeness

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This essay will look at the politics of rudeness in terms of the economy of the eighteenth century, and the commodity culture that had become prevalent at that time. At the time of the writing of Fanny Hill, Society as a whole seemed to have become very materialistic. Materialism is described as a “preoccupation with or emphasis on material objects, comforts, and considerations, with a disinterest in orrejection of spiritual, intellectual, or cultural values”. There was at the time of Fanny Hill a whole culture change, with trade with overseas countries and a new breed of writer, writing for profit rather than culture. We will see in Fanny Hill that the protagonist is a character very much set on rising in social status. At the very start of the novel, we are told of her conversation with Esther Davies and how, … “she told me, after her manner and style, "as how several maids out of the country had made themselves and all their kin for ever: that by preserving their VARTUE, some had taken so with their masters, that they had married them, and kept them coaches, and lived vastly grand and happy; and some, may-hap, came to be Duchesses; luck was all, and why not 1, as well as another?" (Fanny Hill, London, 1985, P41). At this point she seems determined to keep her virtue and profit by it; however very quickly her virtue is lost and she needs to seek material wealth through the very opposite of virtue. We will also see how she, as a woman, is used as a commodity, and that materialism not only relates to ownership of goods and increased wealth, but that the human body is also a part of the commodity culture, in particular the female body and man’s consumption of what it has to offer. Philosophers such as La Mettrie could be seen to run parallel to this idea, in that Fanny and those like her were just machines, running in a way specified by nature, and
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