Merryland
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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An early novel, A New Description of Merryland. Containing a Topographical, Geographical and Natural History of that Country (1740), "a fruitful and delicious country," by Thomas Stretzer, depicted the female body as a landscape that men explore, till, and plow. For example, he writes: "Her valleys are like Eden, her hills like Lebanon, she is a paradise of pleasure and a garden of delight." Sometimes, the metaphor of female form = landscape changes, but the objectification of the female body remains intact; only the image is changed, as when, for example, in another passage, the novel's narrator, Roger Pheuquewell, describes the uterus ("Utrs," as the author simply contracts vowels without graphical indication) as resembling "one of our common pint bottles, with the neck downwards." It is remarkable, he says, for expanding infinitely, the more it is filled, and contracting when there is no crop to hold. Similarly, in Charles Cotton's Erotopolis: The Present State of Bettyland (1684), the female body is an island farmed by men.
The book was published by Edmund Curll and is dedicated to George Cheyne, who, at that time, would not be known for vegetarianism, but, rather, alleged deism. Merryland combines the traditional language of Song of Songs, the microcosm of classical education, and, most pointedly, the tropes of Book II of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. In Book II, Gulliver reports that he was used in ways that a gentleman should not endure by the giant girls who undress in his presence. The erotic possibilities were dismissed in Swift's account, but Curll, who was an enemy of Swift's, would have quickly seen the pornographic possibilities, especially as he had already produced a "Key" to Gulliver and had attempted to siphon off Swift's sales. Curll's practice was to hire impoverished authors for commissioned works on pornography, and his stable of hired authors was substantial.
Modern editions
- Stretzer, Thomas. "Robin Hood House," ed. (1932). Merryland. New York: Kessinger Publishing, 2003.
- Merryland. In v.3 of Eighteenth-Century British Erotica, edited by Alexander Pettit and Patrick Spedding. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2002.
See also
