Rochester's Libertinism and the Pleasure of Debility

In "The Maimed Debauchee"—a poem written c. 1675 and attributed to John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester—the speaker laments the onset of "days of impotence," which are caused "by pox and wine's unlucky chance."¹ Suffering from the aggregated symptoms of years of libertine overindulgence in sex and wine (namely, syphilis and cirrhosis of the liver), the debilitated libertine, who is now "deprived of force but pressed with courage still," reflects upon his former exploits (line 2). The speaker addresses himself to "new-listed soldiers," younger would-be male libertines, who might "meanly shrink" at the prospect of pursuing such pleasure (line 23). In literal and metaphorical terms, the speaker is militant about sexual pleasure, both physical and imaginative:

Nor shall the sight of honourable scars,Which my too forward valour did procure,Frighten new-listed soldiers from the wars:Past joys have more than paid what I endure.

(lines 21–22)

Although now physically impaired and "On the dull shore of lazy temperance" (line 16), the speaker does not recall his own impairment in terms of past or future treatments. The androcentric narrative fantasy conjured in this poem does not imagine improvement in terms of the treatment of the libertine's debilitated embodiment. Instead, the narrative focuses upon the pleasure that can be reached through bodily impairment. For the maimed debauchee of the poem's title, the memory of past pleasures more than compensates for his present sufferings. However, aside from the recollection of past pleasure, impairment itself is given an erotic valence in "The Maimed Debauchee," insofar as debility emerges as a crucial part of libertine praxis.

Scholars in disability studies have recently begun to theorize the politics of debility with decisive consequences for readings in the field. In The Right to Maim, Jasbir K. Puar mobilizes "the term 'debility' as a needed disruption … of the category of disability and as a triangulation of the ability/disability binary."² Puar argues that "while some bodies may not be recognized as disabled, they may well be debilitated, in part by being foreclosed access to legibility and resources as disabled."³ Although Puar focuses on twenty-first-century liberal politics, she contends that "disability is not a fixed state … but exists in relation to assemblages of capacity and debility, modulated across historical time."⁴ Debility in its current historical modulation registers as bodily injury and social exclusion engendered by economic and political forces, with entire populations debilitated and denied access to the distribution of privilege afforded through disability rights discourse. In late seventeenth-century England, debility took on a different valence within a libertine imaginary in which incapacitation was a sign of privilege, not disadvantage. Indeed, the very historicity of disability and debility are interwoven into the transmissional record of poems like "The Maimed Debauchee." Some versions are entitled "The Disabled Debauchee," and this textual variation teasingly hints at an ontological oscillation between the state of being "disabled" and that of being "maimed." While all versions of the poem present crip embodiment as erotically charged, they do not all present this eroticism as queer. As Harold Love notes, seven manuscripts omit the stanza that refers to the speaker's sex with the linkboy.⁵ States of debility, disability, and queerness are variously present or absent across the different versions of this poem. While the age of the linkboy is not stated, the speaker does refer to him engaging in sexual intercourse with Cloris. Therefore, the kind of queerness that I attribute to this passage reads the linkboy firmly as a young man and not as a "boy" (at least, insofar as we presently conceive of that category). The reading that follows also focuses upon the "Maimed" version, which includes lines 37–40, in order to attend to the specific register that maimedness invokes as a privileged kind of debility in queer libertine discourse. In historicizing Puar's reading of contemporary debility, I argue that in Restoration aristocratic male culture, debility is rendered as bodily injury endured and sustained through social and political privilege.

Debility confers access to pleasure for the elite...