How to Read Literature Like a Professor: Chapter 17 Summary & Analysis

Scenes that explicitly feature sex are notoriously difficult to write, which is another reason why authors often choose to avoid them. When a work of literature does involve an explicit sex scene, this event almost certainly contains layers of meaning beyond sex (if a sex scene only means sex, then this is likely pornography). Although authors have not been able to write explicitly about sex without getting censored for very long (only a few decades, in fact—and such writing would still, in many contexts, warrant a book being banned), ways of describing sex have quickly become clichéd.

There is a famous sex scene in John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), in which the narrator describes the sexual act as lasting “precisely ninety seconds” from start to finish. Foster argues that in specifying this length of time, Fowles is neither ridiculing the male character’s virility nor suggesting that all Victorians had extremely quick sex. Rather, in the context of the novel, the woman in the scene represents the temptations of a freer, more modern life, unbound from restrictions of Victorian society. It is these layers of meaning that make the man panic and become unable to perform.

Two controversial books from the mid-20th century, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1958) and Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange (1962), center around sexual perversity—“evil” sex. Foster argues that A Clockwork Orange is far more concerned with violence than with sex; Lolita, although much more focused on the theme of forbidden sexuality, similarly contains few explicit descriptions of sex. There are examples of writers, such as Angela Carter, who depict more detailed and visceral accounts of sex acts in their books. However, sex in Carter’s work is always symbolically meaningful, complex, and “wildly disruptive.” While it is not always clear what sex scenes mean, it is almost guaranteed that they signify meaning beyond the sex itself.