I found this while reading Madame Bovary this morning:
<giggle> He had me, up until “moist palm.” er… yeah, Flaubert. They were just shaking hands. Riiiiiiight…
“The classic books are dirty books!” said my Junior High English teacher, in an attempt to get us to read classic books with more interest. It’s true, in many cases. Lotta good stuff in Homer.
But I think you’re looking for the unintentuionally suggestive. Like when Emily Dickinson in her poem “A Dying Tiger” wrote about his “Mighty Balls”. She meant eyeballs.:
“He made a grab and caught her by the quient” (as I recall)
The Canterbury Tales
by Geoffrey Chaucer
this was required reading in High School.
Not necessarily. I think those dirty old men knew exactly what they were doing. They just played innocent.
Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock sounds perverse until you realize that “rape” originally meant to steal or carry off, and the lock in this case is a lock of hair.
well, in that case The Canterbury Tales is good (“Tee Hee!”, indeed!). And The Iliad and The Odyssey (“Aphrodite and Ares caught in Love Nest by Hephaestus!” “Red -Figure Pottry at 11!”) And The Decameron (“He then took out that dibber they use to plant men and inserted it. She withdrew, but not until that peculiar moisture had precipitated…”).
It’s not a “classic” in the same sense, but James Branch Cabell’s stories have elegantly-worded suggestion (“He took his sword, and placed it where she could not possibly see it.”)
Well, since the whole novel is about the amorous adventures of Madame Bovary, I think you have a right to expect a little moistness. Didn’t the French government ban the book when it first came out on the grounds of indecency?
Wow, how raunchy does it have to be to get BANNED in FRANCE? :eek:
Actually, I read Madame Bovary in high school and wasn’t terribly scandalized by it. I enjoyed Shakespeare’s dirty jokes much more.
Master Bates, that kid from Oliver Twist.