British Women Playwrights and the Staging of Female Sexual Initiation: Sophia Lee's The Chapter of Accidents (1780)

British pornographic and erotic literature has frequently sought to arouse readers by surrounding its scenes with theatrical apparatuses that invite, if not sanction, community-wide watching. One of the most famous examples of eighteenth-century erotica, John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749), dramatizes cultural preoccupations with female sexual initiation rituals by featuring a moment in which five women and four men perform sexual feats for each other on a couch—which Fanny Hill calls "the scene of action"—and by having the female participants, those "polite voluptuaries," assume the blushing postures of heterosexual novices. Subsequently, in one of the novel's more comic moments, Fanny pretends to be a virgin to satisfy Mr. Norbert, a customer of the establishment at which Fanny works and who wrongly fancies himself a potent deflowerer of young women. The re-enactment of hymen loss as a strategy for erotic arousal is a familiar pattern in the British pornographic tradition—a tradition now undergoing extensive analysis thanks to the work of Peter Wagner, Lynda Hunt, Michel Feher, Ian Frederick Moulton, and Bradford K. Mudge. Less familiar, however, are studies that explore mainstream British drama's use of this pattern to comment on the sexual fantasies of late-eighteenth-century culture. Sophia Lee's first and financially lucrative play, The Chapter of Accidents, based on Diderot's Le Père de Famille and first performed at the Haymarket Theatre in 1780, demonstrates some of the ways in which late-eighteenth-century British women playwrights introduced pornographic patterns to their work in order to confront—consciously or otherwise—the topic of first-time heterosexual intercourse. Repeatedly referring to virginity, defloration, and sexual initiation for both comedic—and erotic—effect, The Chapter of Accidents establishes that the equation of childhood innocence with pre-sexual and culturally untainted experiences does not necessarily result in a de-eroticized environment; on the contrary, such an equation can fuel a preoccupation with scenarios in which the sexually uninitiated can be ritually re-introduced to defloration. Whether or not any eighteenth-century audience member would actually trust in the intact hymen as an absolute marker of sexual "purity," the idea of a performative chastity—so central to Lee's dramaturgy—clearly had the power to hold centerstage. While Katharine Rogers has suggested that portions of Sophia Lee's writing (especially her novel, The Recess) are shaped by an erotic imagination—Lee "blatantly appealed to feminine wish-fulfilling fantasy"—Rogers dismisses Lee's "exclusive concentration on refined feelings" as "shallow and tedious . . . rather than a significant representation of reality . . . [and as] reinforc[ing] perceptions about intrinsic limitations to women's work." But such limitations vanish when one considers the theatrical contexts of The Chapter of Accidents and juxtaposes these contexts with patterns in eighteenth-century British pornography. Several critics have used categories of gender and genre to point to the play's significance. Early in the twentieth century, Ernest Bernbaum ends his study of "the drama of sensibility" with The Chapter of Accidents because it represents "the final triumph of sentimental comedy over its enemies." More recently, Ellen Donkin identifies the play as one of the first to be produced during the "post-Garrick era," when "the chances of a woman going to the theatre and seeing a play by another woman, or reading about a production by a woman in the newspapers, began to improve." The prologue to The Chapter of Accidents in fact describes a theatrical environment that was more favorable to women than to "naughty men"—to whom the muses allowed "[f]ew liberties"—who behaved to them "like old maids on earth, resolv'd to vex," and who "[w]ith cruel coyness treat the other sex." Yet "naughty women" also wrote plays during the so-called Age of Sensibility, and women playwrights—naughty …