Chapter 11 - Defoe and Pornography

Summary

In Defoe’s lifetime, the words pornography, pornographer, and pornographic did not yet exist. But starting in the 1650s, a new genre of sexually explicit writing began to appear in English, so that by the 1680s a ’canon’ of erotic or obscene texts that would later be termed pornographic had become a familiar part of the literary landscape. In much of his own work, Defoe presents himself as a scourge of sexual immorality and indecency: an anti-pornographer. But in two key later texts – Conjugal Lewdness; Or, Matrimonial Whoredom (1727) and his unsettling final novel, Roxana (1724) – he not only engaged with the content of pornography, i.e. sexual acts and illicit or unregulated desire, but adopted some of its key formal features, such as the seductive dialogue between women and the tension between moral suppression and immoral enticement.