흔히 성욕은 식욕 및 수면욕과 더불어 인간의 가장 기본적인 욕구 중 하나라고 한다. 물론 동물적 육욕과 사랑에 기반을 둔 육체적 욕구를 구분할 필요는 있지만, 성욕의 결과 발생하는 성행위는 먹고 잠자는 것만큼이나 보편적인 일상생활의 한 구성요소이다. 그렇기에 남녀 간의 사랑과 연애는 동서고금을 막론하고 수많은 예술작품의 소재 및 주제가 되어왔다. 그럼에도 불구하고 사랑과 연애 과정에 거의 필수적으로 수반되는 남녀의 성관계를 주제로 다룬 작품은 그리 많지 않다. 이런 점에서 18세기 영국의 대표적인 풍속화가 호가스(William Hogarth, 1697~1764)가 1730년대에 제작한 〈전(Before)〉과 〈후(After)〉 연작 시리즈는 대단히 흥미로운 작품이다. 〈전〉과 〈후〉라는 제목이 암시하듯 이 연작 시리즈는 젊은 남녀의 연애과정 중 성관계를 중심으로 성관계 이전과 성관계 이후의 남녀 간의 미묘한 감정과 태도의 변화를 시각적으로 표현하고 있다. 그렇다면 이 연작을 통해 우리는 18세기 전반 영국인의 성(sexuality)에 대해 무엇을 얼마나 읽어낼 수 있을까? 본고는 호가스가 제작한 연작 〈전〉과 〈후〉 시리즈를 집중적으로 분석하여 18세기 전반 영국인들의 섹스에 대한 시각과 이와 관련한 당대의 사회상을 재구성해보고자 한다. 이들 그림에 등장하는 사람들은 누구였으며, 이 그림을 주문한 사람들은 누구였을까? 그림 속에 등장하는 소품들은 어떤 의미를 어떻게 만들어내는가라는 질문을 던지고 이에 대한 해답을 찾는 과정을 통해, 본고는 호가스가 어떻게 섹스라는 지극히 일상적이고 보편적 현상 속에 내재한 욕망의 변증법을 18세기 전반 영국이라는 역사적 무대 속에서 펼쳐나가는지를 구체적으로 살펴본다.William Hogarth, one of the most prominent eighteenth-century English artists of everyday practice, is renowned for his realistic but biting portrayal of comtemporary life. Accordingly, he produced a number of pictures dealing with contemporary sexuality. Among them, his pictorial eroticism culminates in two pairs of paintings called Before and After, both of them, the indoor and the outdoor versions, were painted in 1730-1731. These two pairs of pictures and a pair of prints published in 1736 after the indoor version are undoubtedly Hogarth’s most explicit experiment in the erotic.
It is likely that the themes and the compositions in these works were influenced by contemporary French rococo erotic pieces, especially those by Jean Francois de Troy. However, there is a wide difference separating Hogarth’s erotic pictures from those of the French rococo in general. Whereas French rococo erotic scenes still retain, however lustful the subject may be, a sense of graceful touch at least superficially, Hogarth’s depiction of eroticism is to be seen not so much a pursuit of sensual gratification as a realistic satire of his contemporary everyday sexual practices.
The themes of Before and After are concerned with seduction and its aftermath. In the outdoor version, the scene is set in a deep dark green woodland. The girl is a maiden in her attire and quite young. She came to the woodland probably for a walk with her lover, a handsome young man. Pausing at a point in the deep woodland, the young man confesses his deep affection for her, swearing a word of eternal love and fidelity in his sweet gestation of a hand being pressed to his breast with the tender smile. But Hogarth brings this conventional gallant scene into a more realistic likelihood. The young man tries to persuade her into a deeper relationship by pushing his leg into her skirt. The girl at first turns down his amorous advances by lifting her hand. But she is doomed to succumb to his lust as implied by the falling apples from her apron, which no doubt alllude to the Fall of Man in the Garden of Eden, therefore, insinuating that she, like the universal mother Eve, covets forbidden knowledge, curiosity about sex in this case. In After the aftermath of copulation is shown. After the tempest of passion swept away all the rational consideration, the couple is left vulnerable and ashamed: both of them seem to droop with flushed faces laid against each other. Their clothes are in disorder, the girl’s skirt raised up high revealing her thigh vividly, and the man’s trousers pulled down showing his public hair and penis.
What, then, can be inferred from this salacious depiction regarding early eighteenth-century English notions and practices of courtship and sexuality? With this question in mind, this paper seeks to interrogate Hogarth’s Before and After series in close detail in an attempt to locate the images in diverse contemporary contexts. In the process, it is argued that Hogarth often borrowed pictorial motives and visual vocabularies from the traditional iconography of polite culture, and combine them in his own way. However, those visual meanings so created were completely transformed, they were sometimes ambivalent, sometimes subversive, and sometimes paternalistic. More significantly, those meanings were often floating, flexible, and multi-faceted. In the final analysis, it is claimed that his visual semantics resists to be articulated in a certain way, refusing to be subdued by any effort to fix the flow of discoursive meanings inherent in the images. Herein lay the fatal attraction and complexity of Hogarth’s Before and After, and of the mystery of carnal desire they depict.