The changing face of erotica : a study of erotic literature in the works of Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin and Erica Jong

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT:For especially feminist critics, erotic literature depicts an area of human experience dominated by maleprinciples. Until very recently, the rules of erotica dictated that men mostly produced and consumed it,and women played the props. Of course this implies that female subjectivity is constructed by the malegaze, and hence reified and commodified in terms of the male prerogative.To challenge and overthrow 'male-perspective' erotic language and tradition, it has been argued that weneed a woman's point of view, definition and description of sexual experience. To attack thephallocentrism of erotica, recent erotic novels have tried to create empowering scenarios for femalesexuality in which the female characters are placed in positions of equal sexual power to the male.The analyses of the erotic writing of Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin and Erica Jong in this thesis attempt todetermine whether the texts discussed succeed in incorporating diverse styles and orientations ofdepicting the sexual to construct a new language for desire.During much of his lifetime, Miller's writing was branded obscene, his voice too vulgar and his use ofautobiography too egocentric. But critics also came to see his style and voice as revolutionary, and his useof the obscene and the irreverent as literary devices to awaken the reader from a wretched sterility ofmind and body.Many attempts have been made to explain what many critics have come to see as Miller's misogynist andpatriarchal attitudes in his writing. Although Miller inventively portrayed a sense of people and of place,he seemed less successful at unravelling his attitudes toward sex and women. And so many reviewers donot see Miller playing an expansive role through his writing of the taboo by freeing us from our sexualneuroses, but find that the reader is abandoned within the limitation of a sexual mindset that is onlynamed, not transformed.The limited insight critics see in Miller's writing of the sexual has been ascribed partly to the fact that thesexual odyssey in literature has for centuries been a male prerogative in which the female's only role wasto provide material for the fictions the male would create. But as is clear from Nin's and Jong's eroticwriting, more and more female writers have taken on this journey, and have succeeded at least to somedegree in giving their characters the power and freedom to reach a fundamentally female sexualawareness and position.Great disagreement exists among critics over the literary value and importance ofNin's writing. Her workhas been rejected as pointless explorations of erotic entanglements in which writing becomes nothingmore than a solipsistic activity. On the other hand, it has been recognised as a new kind of writing of thefemale aesthetic which ignited the discourse around the issue of a genre of gender.Nin's erotica mostly displays a woman's sensibility by using a woman's language and seeing the sexualexperience from a woman's point of view. This implies that Nin treats her female sexual characters assubject-matter rather than object-matter as is generally the case in erotica from the male point of view. Although opposing viewpoints exist of Nin's contribution to the development of a female voice inliterature, Nin does seem to expand the boundaries imposed on the writing of the sexual woman byintroducing a fluidity in her depiction of gender and of sex - especially through her erotic portrayal of thelesbian relationship and her candid writing of the ultimate taboo - the sexual relationship with her father.While Miller's and Nin's lives were unavoidably entwined with their autobiographical writing, EricaJong's writing - and by implication her life - was moulded into a media product, and it has becomedifficult to approach her work except through complex layers of reputation and stereotype. AlthoughJong's Fear of Flying almost immediately topped the best-seller lists upon publication, the sheer scale ofthe novel's sales led some critics to think of her work as 'popular culture' rather than 'literature'.Jong's erotic writing has sparked similar criticisms to those lodged against Nin's, especially those whichquestion whether Jong ever attempts to defme her women characters away from a (dominant) male sexualpartner. Although Fear of Flying was supposed to be a celebration of female sexual autonomy, feministcritics were troubled by what they saw as the female protagonist's ultimate affirmation of patriarchalstandards of female conduct.But despite the varied criticism of Jong's attempt to write an alternative narrative of the female body,some reviewers do see such a new story in her main female character's physical journey in that itcoincides with the biological rhythms of her 28-day menstrual cycle. Jong is therefore seen to write intoher text much more than a body that seeks and receives sexual gratification to become a body that tells atale previously absent from American literature.Yet the winds of social, political, economic and cultural change where the sexual is concerned haveblown across Miller's, Nin's and Jong's erotic writing, so that the conflicts and challenges that occupiedtheir sexual writing now seem to strike readers as very much dated. In this regard it is important to notehow an increasingly 'me-orientated' culture and society - endlessly portrayed and exploited by the media- has forever altered the contemporary view of the sexual. And so the erotic in contemporary society hasbecome ineluctably connected to the sexual value that the commercial gaze bestows.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University