The Libertine Sublime: Love and Death in Restoration England

The Libertine Sublime: Love andzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUT Death in Restoration England JAMES GRANTHAM TURNER Tho’ round my Bed the Furies plant their Charms, I’ll break ’em, with Jocasta in my Arms: Claspt in the Folds of Love, I’ll wait my Doom; And act my Joys, tho’ Thunder shakes the Room.NMLKJIHGFEDCBA W hen Nathaniel Lee wrote these lines, in the Oedipus he co-authored with Dryden, he may not have suspected that within a few years they would be uttered again, in a dubious piece of fiction, by a villainous seducer. In Richardson’s Clarissa, of course, the libertine fraternity apply Oedipus to the dying Belton as if it were smelling salts, and Clarissa herself quotes it in her delirium after the rape.1 But I am think­ ing of an earlier and seamier fiction, Alexander Smith’s School of Venus (London, 1716), where the earl of Rochester recites these very couplets to restore his strength as he attempts to rape a young girl (1:149). In a parallel episode of the same work, Beau Fielding recites a comparable declaration of sexual bravado from “the Earl of Rochester's prophane Play of Sodom” (1:245); Smith appears to consider the obscene bur­ lesque and the heroic drama equivalent ornaments for the libertine char­ acter, since both provide magnificent assertions of erotic energy in the face of doom. My essay will try to establish a context and receptionhistory for this topos, following its shifts and recombinations at different 99 100 / TURNER levels of literature, and opening up larger questions about the status of libertinism and its rise in Restoration England. In particular it will ask how, at a specific literary-historical juncture, the cult of flamboyant sexuality encountered the discourse of sublimity. Various thinkers, from Coleridge and Kierkegaard to Georges Bataille and Julia Kristeva, have tried to understand the exhilarating power of libertinism in its most extreme manifestation, the figure of Don Juan; the episodes studied here, from English heroic drama and libertine poetry, may be seen as variants on Don Juan’s final defiance. Kristeva, for example, analyzes Don Juanism in both psychological and historical terms: she relates it to a special form of semiotic exuberance (an “ivresse des signes”) that she identifies with the Baroque, but she also finds parallels in case-histories from her own practice as a psychoanalyst, cases of casual Priapism and father-fixation, attempts to transcend the impasses of sexuality by trying “the solution called perverse, to pass from the abject to the sublime, to taste the whole gamut of troubles and delights, supreme guarantee against boredom. . . .”2 Another perceptive interpreter of “baroque” sexuality in literature, Peter Hughes, describes it as a form of heroism that replaces martial prowess, as a “constant pushing of the sexual and amorous beyond itself into the language of power,” and as an anticipation of Bataille’s principle that “Eroticism is the assertion of life even to the point of death.”3 My own approach will draw upon these important ideas, but it will modify them according to the specific mentality of the age.fedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Sexual Heroism and the Erotic Sublime Hughes is quite right to discover a heroization of sexuality in the later seventeenth century. “No Age abounded more with Heroical Poetry,” as Samuel Butler remarked, “and yet there was never any wherein fewer Heroicall Actions were performed.”4 The English Restoration was preoc­ cupied with the search for new modes of heroism, and since militant Titanism had been so fully embodied in Cromwell, it turned to the “wars within doors” of love and sex. But how could something so morally dubious be aggrandized? In a significant and potentially unstable synthe­ sis, a wholly unromantic cult of frank physicality and sexual freedom was grafted onto its apparent opposite —the heroic love-code of Romance, infinitely elaborated in the salon culture of mid-century France. Contemporary French theories of les passions de I’amour, associated with a preciosite quite different from sexual libertinism, nevertheless develop a concept of erotic greatness that prepares the way for this The Libertine Sublime /zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZY 101 fusion. For Descartes, for example, erotic love—the desire to fuse with the person or object that seems to...