Fallen Men: Representations of Male Impotence in Britain

Fallen Men: Representations of Male Impotence in Britain JUDITH C. MUELLER When Pope compares bad writers to impotent would-be lovers in his Essay on Criticism, he invokes a familiar complex of attitudes and assumptions about male impotence for his readers. In keeping with convention , he treats sexual impotence not as a morally neutral physical disability, but as an object of contempt and source of disgrace, pronouncing in a revealing comparison, that in writing, "Dulness with Obscenity must prove / As Shameful sure as Impotence in Love."1 Needless to say, in Pope's day, as now, to call a man impotent is to say much more than that his penis is incapable of erection, penetration and ejaculation.2 The label, impotent relentlessly signifies beyond the unperforming organ to the entire man—his mind, his character, his will, his very manhood. Such certainly seems to be the case during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in England. A 1674 hoax entitled, The Women's Petition against Coffee, Representing to Public Consideration the Grand Inconveniences Accruing to Their Sex from the Excessive Use ofthat Drying , Enfeebling Liquor, reflects a prevalent nostalgia for a bygone day when men were men and thus virile. The writer claims in jest what is asserted elsewhere in earnest: That the current crop of Englishmen falls far short of the gallants of "former Ages [who] were justly esteemed the Ablest Performers in Christendome."3 Whether or not Great Britain experiences a "crisis of masculinity,"4 as some have argued, the period sees an uneasy and indeter85 86 / MUELLER mÃ-nate renegotiation of gender roles, during which the male body becomes a common site for anxious deliberation about the nature, and possible decline, of manliness. Given its composition, the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century "masculine ideal" appears intrinsically disposed to crisis. As Carolyn D. Williams has shown, notions of manliness in the period embody significant contradictions. Whether masculinity is conceived in the "hard" or "soft" terms she discusses,5 however, virility remains an absolute requirement; yet this too renders the ideal precarious. Sexual potency functions as a kind of literalized symbol for other kinds of masculine power in the period. The virile penis, conventionally figured as, and standing for, the pen, the sword, the scepter, grants men privileged access to the domains of power which these objects represent; the supposed exclusivity of male intellectual, military, political (and consequent economic) power could be said to rest upon figures of speech—hardly firm ground. In exposing the instability ofthat ground, the impotent male might even appear "dangerous to government."6 Pierre Darmon's phrase, "the myth of virility," applies well to the notion of a stable and absolute phallic authority undergirding male privilege.7 The impotent male's body effectively belies the myth and seals his shame. Disruptive to cherished notions, the impotent male enjoys a marked flurry of anxious attention from the late seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries when fears of male "feminization" and the loss of "Old English Vigour '* seem to run high. He serves as frequent metaphor for other kinds of failure, bad writing the most common among them; his self-lashing or self-justifying voice rages in the imperfect enjoyment poems of the Restoration; he occupies the best and worst medical minds; he is the frequent brunt of jokes in the pamphlet wars of the late seventeenth century in which women and men debate the contested and shifting ground of gender; as fumbling husband, he spurs the sexual adventures of the libidinous heroines of bawdy verse; he titillates a voracious readership of divorce court proceedings sold to a large popular audience.9 And this list barely mentions his many manifestations in canonical literature. Drawing from such various discourses, this essay finds that, from the late seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries , in diverse contexts, the impotent male is invested with several distinct, identifiable features. AU of these features reveal aspects of the "masculine ideal" in marking perhaps the most shameful deviation from that ideal. Of course, to some degree, shame can accompany illnesses and deviations of all kinds during the period—a time of transition from spiritual to material explanations for physiological phenomena. Gideon...