Officers and Gentlemen

This chapter asks what imaginative representations of venereal disease say about Restoration and eighteenth-century attitudes toward gender and sexuality. It does so by considering the portrayal of venereal infections in men. It is no coincidence that many of the positive representations of the disease focus on male rather than female subjects. It has been suggested that the sexual double standard (whereby men were applauded for sexual promiscuity and women punished for it) played some role in shaping imaginative representations of the infection. However, so too did a culture that linked infection to manliness and male power. While historians working with medical texts from the early modern period have tended to conclude that the disease was seen as originating with, and spread by, women, many eighteenth-century literary and artistic works imagine venereal disease as male—as a condition predominantly experienced by men, caused by male sexual indiscretion, and passed on by philandering husbands to their faithful wives and innocent children.

Foreigners

This chapter asks what imaginative representations of venereal disease say about Restoration and eighteenth-century attitudes toward the geographically, politically, or nationally “foreign.” More specifically, it suggests that while some experts have argued for a link “between imagining disease and imagining foreignness,” venereal disease in the eighteenth-century imagination was ultimately associated less with the foreign other than with what might be called the foreign self: attributed more often to allies or rivals than to outright enemies, it provided a means of vilifying not those who remained completely outside the nation, but those who influenced or infiltrated it—those, in other words, who threatened to compromise the boundaries between foreigner and native.

The Pox and Prostitution

This chapter examines the broad range of connections between venereal disease and prostitution in eighteenth-century literature and visual art. It suggests that this period's imaginative conceptions of the relationship between female sexuality and venereal disease were both more nuanced and more complex than a blanket charge of misogyny allows. If the many sympathetic portraits of infected wives discussed in Chapter 1 constitute a challenge to the scholarly commonplace that women were blamed for the disease, then so too do the many neutral, and even positive, representations of infected prostitutes in this period. While some writers and artists clearly did vilify or ridicule diseased streetwalkers, some sympathized with them or campaigned for them; some celebrated them as examples of social mobility, sexual vigor, or physical resilience.

Conclusion

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some concluding thoughts. It argues that ultimately, venereal disease was used to explore many of the fundamental institutions on which eighteenth-century British society was based: patriarchy, consumer capitalism, nationalism, white supremacy. While it was only one of many metaphors that could be used to address these concerns, its potency and flexibility meant that it remained prominent not just in the literature and art of the Restoration and the 1700s, but also well beyond. Its persistence as a topic of literary and artistic representation likely speaks not only to the longevity of systems like patriarchy and consumerism, but also to our ongoing fascination with the human body and its complexities.

A Chapter of Noses

This chapter considers the persistent association between nasal deformity and venereal disease. It argues that this one symptom—and, more broadly, this one body part—came to assume a powerful metonymic significance, standing in for both the disease and the wider social dangers it could represent. Put simply, the deformed nose allowed the boundary between diseased and healthy to run parallel to the boundaries between classes, races, and species—boundaries that seemed to some, much like a syphilitic's nose, in imminent danger of collapse. By comparing the flattened noses of those with venereal disease to the “deformed” noses of animals and certain ethnic groups, Restoration and eighteenth-century writers and artists were able to explore broader cultural anxieties about the biological integrity of the white race and the human species.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book examines the imaginative representation of venereal disease in British literature and art produced between 1660 and 1800. In other words, it considers not how venereal disease was diagnosed, treated, or experienced in the eighteenth century, but rather how it was depicted by some of the many poets, novelists, dramatists, and artists who sought to exploit its flexibility as a metaphor. The chapters that follow track the representation of venereal disease in a wide range of eighteenth-century images and texts. In the process, it suggests that this “loathsome disease” became an important vehicle for considering—or reconsidering— some of the most important social and economic phenomena of the age: commercialization, globalization, changing gender norms, shifting class boundaries.