A Spy on Mother Midnight

In Mother Midnight, the introduction of a disguise would have signalled the book's erotic content to eighteenth-century readers, further emphasized by the subtitles of the two continuations, Adventures in Petty-Coats.^[4] Masquerades and costumes were, in general, associated with social and sexual license in eighteenth-century fiction. At public masked costume parties, the plausible deniability of anonymity allowed both men and women unusual social freedom.^[7] Dick's costume allows him to cross boundaries of both gender and class, since "Miss Polly" is not a member of the gentry. As a result, the story presents these social categories as potentially fluid.^[4]

The historian Kathleen Lubey also highlights an ambivalence about penises within the work's depiction of cross-dressing and dildos. Dick is sometimes troubled by erections which might undermine his disguise; Lubey argues that, in these moments, "Cross-dressing reveals the loose connection between man and penis, which stands erect irrespective of its owner's wishes, his peer rather than his subordinate." When he later fantasizes about becoming a dildo, Lubey argues, he admires the dildo as a "supramasculine" object: "It penetrates more frequently, outperforms men, and immerses its entirety into the bodies of women unrestrained by modesty."^[8] The scholar Julie Park interprets this fantasy as a dissolution of his status as man and heterosexual in pursuit of the secret inner world of female pleasure, and an extension of his gender transgressions in entering female spaces.^[9]

The primary theme of the book is an embrace of sexual libertinism. Unlike works such as The Libertine (1807), which ends with its titular libertine being swallowed into hell, the ending of Mother Midnight does not punish any of the characters. The sexual encounters are presented as non-violent and enjoyable for all parties, with no negative consequences.^[4] Moreover, none of Dick's sexual partners are ultimately restrained by marriage.^[6] These factors were not guaranteed in eighteenth-century pornography, and reflect this work's enthusiasm for sex.^[4]

A Spy on Mother Midnight is especially notable for extending its lighthearted and permissive attitude to the narrator's cross-dressing and flirtations with men. Other literature of the period is almost universally derogatory of "mollies" and men who cross-dress. Even in pornography, any discussion of sodomy would be followed by harsh condemnations insisting that all sodomites will be punished.^[4] Dick, however, brags about how easily his feminine features allow him to cross-dress, and intentionally stokes the lust of his male suitors at the end of the work. The narrator directly addresses the fellow libertine to whom his letters are written, drawing attention to the fact that the expected reader of his escapades is also male and creating an entirely homoerotic scenario in which a man describes his seduction of another man for the titillation of a third man.^[6] Through the all-female dialogue at the lying-in, the story also provides an extensive and detailed discussion of the relative attractiveness of various kinds of penis. Taken together, these factors present male homoeroticism as non-threatening and even fun, while remaining sufficiently subtextual that no homophobic disavowals are necessary.^[4]

In addition to its male homoerotic subtext, A Spy on Mother Midnight is also known for its female homoerotic text. All of Dick's sexual access to women relies on their belief that he, too, is a woman.^[10] The secret female-only sexual world that he enters is most prominently represented by Maria's dildo.^[9] In eighteenth-century pornography, the dildo appears as a material symbol of lesbian desire, and potentially threatening as a tool for women's sexual independence.^[11] According to the literary scholar Emma Donoghue, the narrator's act of substituting his penis for Maria's dildo enacted a recurring eighteenth-century fantasy of "outdoing and tricking lesbians whose use of a dildo threatens male power".^[10] Afterward, Dick lectures Maria that their sex was "less sinful, and indisputably more natural, than ... she heretofore had Recourse to", reinforcing a heterosexual morality.^[10]

"Mother Midnight"—part of the book's title, and the name of one of its characters—was a cant term for a sexualized midwife, often used for a stock character.^[12] Birth and midwifery were recurring themes in eighteenth-century pornography; erotic texts might sell themselves as midwifery manuals. When A Spy on Mother Midnight was published in the middle of the eighteenth century, midwifery was increasingly practiced by male midwives and physicians. A female midwife was therefore a potentially disreputable figure, notable for her sexual knowledge. In fiction, midwives were typically characterized as bawdy,^[6] and frequently as sexual procurers.^[4] The Mother Midnight in the novel, like other fictional midwives with this name, uses her position of privileged knowledge to exert power over men. She instructs young women on the standards they should expect from their husbands' sexual performance, and she assists in multiple sexual deceptions. In the story's opening birth scene, for example, Mother Midnight knows that the mother's husband is not the father of her baby, and conceals this disruption of the family line.^[13]

The midwife is also the figurehead for the lying-in, a female-only social gathering of friends and family who arrive to support a new mother before and after birth. Because the lying-in was intimate, private, and barred to men, some men viewed it as a tantalizing mystery. In molly houses, men would sometimes cross-dress to act out parodic birth and lying-in scenes, further associating the lying-in with homoeroticism.^[4]

• 18th-century erotic literature
• Venus in the Cloister
• Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure