“With drops of sperme pure white & menstruous bloud”: Sodom’s Smut and the Politics of the Prick

Scholarship on Sodom has traditionally focused on matters of attribution, prompting Harold Weber to describe the play as “a text treated by the profession as a bibliographical curiosity rather than a literary artifact” (“Carolinean Sexuality” 69).² This treatment of Sodom as a bibliographical curiosity may be symptomatic of some scholars’ unwillingness to confront the obscenity of the text itself.³ Jeremy W. Webster points out that even those who have advanced serious political readings of Sodom, including Weber and Richard Elias, have undertaken their analyses with a strategy of privileging the political over the sexual, often by sublimating sexuality into politics in a metaphorical fashion (176).⁴ Sodom’s graphic representations of sexuality have been sanitized by readings that understand them as subordinate to a coded political message. In this essay I examine one of the play’s salient features which scholars have mostly neglected: its graphic depictions of bodily fluids in the sexual interactions between characters, which I shall argue present a critique of some of the central tenets of Hobbes’s political philosophy in Leviathan. In a variation on the plot of the sexual decree exemplified by Fletcher’s play The Woman’s Prize; or, The Tamer Tamed, Bolloxinian’s declaration of buggery disrupts the status quo of heterosexual intercourse within matrimony, demonstrating that male sexual appetite poses a threat to the social and political order. The representation of sex as consumption, supported by the Aristotelian understanding of sperm and menstrual blood as concentrated forms of food, challenges Hobbes’s materialist notion of the individual subject and thereby supports an antagonistic view of sexual relations that exposes the disconnect between private appetite and the public good. Furthermore, this Aristotelian view of bodily fluids combined with a materialist understanding of the human being results in a view of sexual intercourse that involves bodies consuming one another and/or mixing with one another, such that the boundaries between bodies can no longer be clearly demarcated. Characters who pursue pleasure through sexuality therefore encounter a threat to their corporeal integrity and their subjectivity, so the free pursuit of sexual pleasure is incompatible with Hobbes’s notion of power. By destabilizing the relationship between power and pleasure, between private appetite and the public good, Sodom’s representations of sexuality undermine the principle basis for social contract theory in Hobbes’s political philosophy. The desire for pleasure (appetite), rather than motivating a rational entrance into the social contract as in Leviathan, provokes an unceasing pursuit of sexual gratification destructive of both the individual and society. The disintegration of characters’ bodies through the uncontrolled intermingling of fluids is intertwined with the disintegration of the body politic. Sodom’s representations of bodily fluids thus present a critique of Hobbes’s political philosophy by showing that appetite is destructive, rather than formative, of the social contract.

My reading of the political significance of Sodom’s sexual representations dovetails with Rachel Weil’s point that a notable feature of much of Restoration literature was how it combined representations of sexuality with its engagement with contemporary politics. According to Weil, texts such as Oldham’s Sardanapalus and the numerous obscene political satires show that “stories about royal or court sexuality were a legitimate part of political discourse, not cordoned off into a separate category” (142). Weil argues that sex was ideally suited for the representation of tyranny because it emphasized how “the location and direction of power was uncertain” (149), as evident in concerns about Charles II’s political policy being swayed by his various mistresses. Such politicized representations of sexuality are made possible by the analogy between the king’s body and the body politic (142). But this analogy could be employed to opposing political purposes: the vulnerability of the king’s body could represent the vulnerability of the nation, or its voracious sexual appetites could be construed as a threat to the public (152). Weil concludes that “[t]his equivocation about where the king’s body ended and where his kingdom, power or the bodies of his subjects began is precisely what...