Rochester and the History of Sexuality

How do we understand older models of desire? The question haunts the literary history of sexuality because it raises the problem of change, the depiction of erotic relations over time. Once we pause to look, we see that the past's ways of wanting are not our own. The language of human motivation and the practices of embodied intimacy have a different cast. Scholarship has rightly been wary of bending these antique thoughts and behaviors to fit contemporary notions of sexual identity. As elsewhere, the rule has been always to historicize. One recently prominent approach in Restoration and eighteenth-century studies has been to concentrate on the way in which modern sexuality gradually takes shape. The past is unlike the present but still holds the key to our origins. History is therapeutic: it yields our most cherished notions of ourselves. This essay suggests a different way of encountering the erotics of the past. I situate Rochester's erotic poetry within its philosophical and literary contexts and then observe how that poetry was read in later decades. Rochester provides an important example not simply because he is so explicit in depicting acts and desires, but also because sexuality is for him such a distinctive and vexing feature of the self and world. Sex troubles human willing, perception, and desire. It thus raises problems of wide significance for Restoration culture. One of them is the nature of agency in an increasingly secular world. Like many of his contemporaries, Rochester makes desire our presiding faculty, the cause behind our actions. But desire for him is a peculiar thing. Rarely do inner wants match worldly practice. Sex leads to shame, erotic love to disappointment. The trick of many of his poems is to expose how our habits of mind and bodily appetites are experienced as private even though they begin in public, in the space where people and poems circulate. Rochester's sense of the public is specific to the court and manuscript culture of the 1670s. A great deal changes when writers attempt to imagine the civil society and print culture of later years. Rochester's language does not vanish under a politer age, as has often been assumed. Rather, his language gets turned out to different ends. The semantics of desire change with the literary and political systems to which they are tied. One name for this change is the history of sexuality.

Let me begin with a typical moment in the literary culture of the Restoration. Retired to the country during the summer of 1678, Rochester writes wearily to his friend Savile at court about how he would counsel Nell Gwynn, the royal mistress, to maintain her advantage with the king: "it will disgrace my politics to differ from yours, who have wrought now some time under the best and keenest statesmen our cabinet boasts of. But to confess the truth, my advice to the lady you wot of has ever been this . . . Cherish his love wherever it inclines and be assured you can't commit greater folly than pretending to be jealous; but on the contrary, with hand, body, head, heart, and all the faculties you have, contribute to his pleasure all you can and comply with his desires throughout." ¹ By "politics" Rochester apparently means both the vocation of "statesmen" and the erotic arts of insinuation. Each is a means of personal advancement in a culture still dominated by the court. Desire follows the footsteps of ambition. Rochester's peculiar insight is to make ambition work by apathy. Complying with the desires of another turns out to be the way of getting what you want. Politics of this order saturate the self: personal matters of embodiment and consciousness take shape from desires that are not one's own. Charles and Nell Gwynn alike have their wants spelled out elsewhere, and that is because neither one's actions proceed from their passions. As we shall see, Rochester returns habitually to this disclosure, within desire, of external...