At least since Roman times oysters were associated with sex. The most obvious reason for this association is the oyster’s resemblance to the pudendum. Raw oyster was praised as an aphrodisiac. Giacomo Casanova boasted to have eaten fifty at breakfast together with a lady of his fancy.
European painters used oyster as a symbol of fertility and sexual pleasure. Aphrodite (Venus), the Goddess of love and lust, was blown over sea on an oyster shell landing at either Cythera of Cyprus (both islands were regarded by the Greeks as territories of Venus). In “The Birth of Venus” Botticelli painted her approaching the shore on a giant oyster (clam) shell. By then, the associations with female beauty and physical love were well established.
In England “oyster” had been slang for the vulva since the sixteenth century. Contemporary drama and poetry are full of allusions to the effects of aphrodisiacs. Satirist John Marston made bawdy reference to “yawning Oysters” in 1598; Thomas Dekker wrote that he must “deriue liquor out of stale gaping Oysters” in 1608; and in George Chapman’s comedy May Day (staged in 1611) a young male prepares himself on a banquet of “oyster-pies” and other aphrodisiacs before meeting his mistress.
The subject of an oyster meal was popular among Dutch genre painters of the seventeenth century. In Jan Steen’s “Girl Offering Oysters” (1658/60) a young woman looks up coquettishly while sprinkling salt on an oyster. More oysters are being prepared in a background kitchen. This woman clearly offers more than just oysters: behind her is a bed with closed curtains. Several discarded shells scattered around her chair allude to her occupation as a prostitute.
The belief in the erotic benefit of consuming oysters never faded. It is therefore not surprising that the “oyster-girl” who sells her wares on the street became associated with sex workers. Throughout the eighteenth century bawdy songs about oyster girls (such as Dublin’s Molly Malone) were common and widely known.
It took the genius of Jonathan Swift to combine the aphrodisiac appeal of the oyster with a costermonger’s verbal ingenuity in a poem simply called “Oyster”:
Charming oysters I cry:
My masters, come buy,
So plump and so fresh,
So sweet is their flesh,
No Colchester oyster
Is sweeter and moister:
Your stomach they settle,
And rouse up your mettle:
They’ll make you a dad
Of a lass or a lad;
And madam your wife
They’ll please to the life;
Be she barren, be she old,
Be she slut, or be she scold,
Eat my oysters, and lie near her,
She’ll be fruitful, never fear her.
From Jonathan Swift, The Complete Poems, edited by Pat Rogers, (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1983).
Illustration: satirical print after Robert Dighton, Molly Milton, the Pretty Oyster Woman, 1788 (British Museum).
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