A Secret History of Pandora's Box

A Secret History of Pandora's Box

Genre	Erotic fiction
Published	for T. Cooper, 1742
Media type	Book
OCLC	265032089

A Secret History of Pandora's Box is an English erotic novel published anonymously in 1742 by the London publishers Mary Cooper and her husband.^[1] Its focus on the female genitalia proceeds with reference to Greek and Roman mythology, a common trope of the time.^[2] Another common and more specific trope in much erotic fiction of the time is allegorizing "the parts of the female sex" as a cave. The trope of Pandora's box was already associated with the female body in the previous decade, in Jonathan Swift's "The Lady's Dressing Room",^[3] and A Secret History proposes that the female parts "may well have been the original Pandora's box". The connection is found in subsequent erotic fiction as well.^[2]

References

1. Harvey, Karen (2004). Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture. Cambridge UP. pp. 42–43. ISBN 9780521822350. Retrieved 26 April 2013.
2. Boucé, Paul-Gabriel (1987). "Chthonic and Pelagic Metaphorization in Eighteenth-Century English Erotica". In Robert P. Maccubin. 'Tis Nature's Fault: Unauthorized Sexuality During the Enlightenment. Cambridge UP. pp. 209–. ISBN 9780521347686. Retrieved 26 April 2013.
3. Harvey, Karen (2001). "Gender, Space and Modernity in Eighteenth-Century England: A Place Called Sex". History Workshop Journal. 51: 158–79. JSTOR 4289725.