Journal Article

Fair Readers of Pornography: Narrative Intervention & Parodic-Didactic Style in Captain Charles Deveraux’s Venus in India

Saxon, Jessica

2017

Overview

[ 2 ] Devereaux uses narrative interventions to address a promiscuous audience (an audience of men and women—but also here a term that plays on various characters’ sexual promiscuity), and he pays sustained and specific attention to his female narratees (and by extension to a female narrative audience(2)). Vignettes in volume one recount Devereaux and Louie’s passionate marriage; Devereaux’s disappointment with the lack of pornographic detail in Theophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin; Lizzie’s memories of losing her virginity; Searles’s predilection for sodomy and Searles’s wife’s new career as a high-priced prostitute as her means of punishing her husband for sodomizing her; and Searles’s attempted rape of Lizzie and subsequent beating by the enlisted men. Presenting himself as a man both deeply in love with his wife and deeply interested in sex (he repeatedly refers to sex as a form of worship, hence the novel’s title), Devereaux leads his narratees and narrative audience into wilder and wilder sexual situations, building on their acceptance of one sex act as “normal” in order to have them accept more sex acts as “normal.” [...]Phelan argues that the narratological narratee and the rhetorical narrative audience (in a slightly revised form) are complementary theories; “Let Prince’s definition of narratee stand: the audience addressed by the narrator (the enunciatee).

• Publisher: Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies
• Subject: Audiences / Devereaux, Charles / Females / Fiction / Intervention / Narratives / Novels / Pornography & obscenity / Rape / Victorian period / Voyeurism / Women