Earl of Rochester / Aphra Behn Masks

Earl of Rochester / Aphra Behn

Masks and Masculinities:

Gender and Performance in the Earl of Rochester's "Imperfect Enjoyment"

and Aphra Behn's "The Disappointment"

Literature of the English Restoration offers the example of a number of writers who wrote for a courtly audience: literary production, particularly in learned imitation of classical models, was part of the court culture of King Charles II. The fact of a shared model explains the remarkable similarities between "The Imperfect Enjoyment" by the Earl of Rochester and "The Disappointment" by Aphra Behn -- remarkable only because readers are surprised to read one poem about male sexual impotence from the late seventeenth century, let alone two examples of this genre by well-known courtly writers. In fact, Richard Quaintance presents ten more examples by lesser-known poets as he defines the literary sub-genre of the neo-Classical "imperfect enjoyment poem," written in imitation of Roman poems on the same subject, which is shared by Rochester and Behn (Quaintance 190). Since Rochester and Behn are working along such closely similar lines in terms of the artistic models that their own poems aim to imitate, it is therefore fair to ask the question: what are the main differences in their compositional technique within this tightly-defined literary sub-genre of the neo-Classical "imperfect enjoyment poem"? By examining features of each poem in turn -- including form (including this sub-genre they share), but also narrative voice and tone -- with some examination of the secondary critical literature on both Rochester and Behn, I hope to demonstrate that there are distinct differences in compositional technique which involve the difference in sex between these two writers. But my conclusion will attempt to problematize the very notion of an authorial sex difference by raising the concept of gender, and in particular the aspect of "performativity" -- I will show the way in which the narratives of dalliance with Corinna and Cloris are constructed so that the authors may demonstrate their fluency with Classical models, while acknowledging that -- within the courtly context of both Rochester's and Behn's poetry -- the identity of the poet is related to the performativity of the poetic persona and the first-person voice.

Male sexual impotence would seem at first to be an unpromising subject for poetry, especially poetry which could loosely be defined as "neo-Classical" and is based on compositional models from the Classical world of ancient Greece and Rome. Yet scholars such as Richard Quaintance and Claude Rawson have traced the history of a literary sub-genre within the neo-Classical tradition that does deal with male sexual impotence, whether through failure to achieve erection or through premature ejaculation. This literary sub-genre includes Restoration poems like Aphra Behn's "The Disappointment" and the Earl of Rochester's "Imperfect Enjoyment," and Quaintance in fact dubs the genre the neo-Classical "imperfect enjoyment poem" after Rochester's title. Quaintance situates both Rochester and Behn within French neo-Classical models (Quaintance 190), but actual Latin works were their ultimate models: Rawson notes that Ovid himself had written a poem on the subject in his third book of love elegies, Amores III.vii, and Petronius, the great courtier-satirist of Nero's Rome, had structured his Satyricon as a parody of Homer's Odyssey -- but where Odysseus is pursued by the wrath of Poseidon, God of the Sea, the protagonist of the Satyricon is pursued by Priapus, the God of the Phallus, who plagues Petronius's anti-hero with the inability to achieve erection (Rawson 9). Both Rochester and Behn demonstrate their awareness of these Roman models in various ways: Behn actually makes reference to Priapus by name in "The Disappointment," while Rochester (who had elsewhere in his collected works translated Petronius) signposts his affinity to Ovid's Amores here by using the same name for the woman in "The Imperfect Enjoyment" as Ovid used for his poetic mistress in the Amores: Corinna.

In one of the many touches which show how rhetorically finely-wrought Rochester's scenario is here, the woman in "The Imperfect Enjoyment" -- Corinna -- is not named until the final line. This causes the reader to make a sudden leap and re-evaluate the narrative that has just been put forth, in the first person. The breezy informality of the first person has led the reader to consider Rochester's narrator to be addressing the reader as though addressing a friend -- in other words, one man talking to another one, discreetly and privately, about an experience of premature ejaculation. If it were not anachronistic, we might even imagine the profane first-person direct address narration of these deeply embarrassing events to be addressed to a therapist or the like. But the shock of Corinna being named in the closing lines also registers a sort of shock, because this is precisely the same name as the mistress in Ovid's Amores, the source of Rochester's Classical model. It is possible that Rochester knew Ovid's poem in the notorious translation done by Christopher Marlowe -- whose version was entitled All Ovid's Elegies in advertisement of the fact that Marlowe did not shy away from translating poems like Amores III.vii into rhymed English iambic pentameter couplets, precisely the same form that Rochester uses here. The chief differences are the profanity -- which is not to be found in Ovid's original or in Marlowe's English version (although Petronius is closer to Rochester here) -- but also the action which takes place. Ovid's protagonist is truly impotent: he is unable to become erect for his Corinna. Rochester seems to improve upon his Classical model by having the protagonist ejaculate upon his mistress, purely in anticipation of congress, and then be unable to achieve subsequent erection.

The form of Rochester's "Imperfect Enjoyment" is relatively simple. The poem is written in heroic couplets -- although it might be more accurate to call them mock-heroic, for Rochester's broad (and often obscene) rhetoric veers toward the satiric. It is arguable that Rochester employs this form because infamously Christopher Marlowe had employed the form of rhymed iambic pentameter couplets to translate Ovid's earlier impotence poem, and the form is another aspect of the neo-Classicism. John O'Neill, in his essay on "Rochester's 'Imperfect Enjoyment': 'The True Veine of Satyre' in Sexual Poetry," quotes in his title Andrew Marvell's praise of Rochester and identifies the poem as satirical rather than Ovidian or erotic. But O'Neill goes on to view the poem as a seriously-intended work, written in a two-part structure with "narrative" and "commentary on the events of the narrative" (O'Neill 60). This seems to ignore the fact that the whole is one dramatic event: the second part is not so much a commentary as what Marianne Thormahlen in the chapter on "The Imperfect Enjoyment" in her book-length study Rochester: The Poems in Context terms an "expostulation," or a dramatic monologue spoken in the occasion that the first half describes (Thormahlen 84) -- although Thormahlen seems to be going a long way to avoid using the obvious term "ejaculation" here, which I suspect is part of Rochester's rhetorical point, so I would like to use the term. It is indented as though it were a new verse paragraph, which at the conclusion of a poem in couplets gives it the finality of the concluding two lines of a Shakespearean sonnet: that it is an encapsulated cry of bitter and slightly misogynistic but comically overaggerated rage, which somehow is also an appropriate emotional summation of the experience of premature emission followed by stubborn flaccidity. In other words, I think its elegance as a closing couplet lies not in its language, which is deliberately profane, but its psychological acuity, which has a dramatist's gift of graceful compression.

The chief hallmark of Rochester's poem, though, is the near violence of its expression. Rawson explains this attractively in terms of the larger context of Rochester's verse (and other poems about impotence such as "The Disabled Debauchee") by suggesting that impotence is just another kinky thing to try. As Rawson himself puts the matter: "As often as not 'impotence' is presented in Rochester as an imagined state, on a par with other erotic possibilities…The impotence is thus conceived not as a cessation of erotic energy, but as an energy in its own right, a vigour not so much diminished as gone into reverse…." (Rawson 8). This explains the excess of rhetoric, though, as when Rochester describes the moment of premature ejaculation thus:

In liquid raptures I dissolve all o'er,

Melt into sperm, and spend at every pore.

A touch from any part of her had done't:

Her hand, her foot, her very look's a cunt.

("Imperfect Enjoyment" ll.15-8)

Although some readers (like Wilcoxon) are shocked by this blunt word -- which also rhymes with "blunt" -- there is no need to assume that this word retains necessarily any negative associations in Rochester's vocabulary. To some extent the crude metonymy of "Her hand, her foot, her very look's a cunt" is a simple inversion of the sort of Petrarchan blason which once dominated courtly love-poetry. "Her hand, her foot, her very look's a rose" could be a line in the sort of inept Petrarchanism that Shakespeare had once mocked (in his sonnet on "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun," which demolishes one by one the rhetorical cliches of English Petrarchanism) -- but Rochester certainly attempts a deliberate clumsiness so that even if we did replace the c-word with a "rose," we would still have a sort of rhetorically inverted erotic poetry. Within this rhetorical inversion, I think it possible that "cunt" is a term of great praise. It follows from the rhetorical inversion that Rochester's presentation of Corinna will be a whore who can speak in the lofty terms of abstract concepts when speaking about the poet's inability to achieve erection a second time after premature ejaculation:

When, with a thousand kisses wandering o'er

My panting bosom, "Is there then no more?"

She cries. "All this to love and rapture's due;

Must we not pay a debt to pleasure, too?"

("Imperfect Enjoyment" ll. 21-4)

In other words, Corinna acknowledges the poet's "love and rapture" as an excuse for the premature ejaculation, but hopes that her "kisses wandering" may stimulate him again so that she, too, may achieve climax -- this is the "debt to pleasure" that Corinna wishes to see paid, and it would be paid in wood (so to speak). But Rochester follows this with a catalogue of the desperate and overwhelming emotions which attend his inability to achieve tumescence and finally breaks out into the poem's second half, a sort of expostulation or curse upon his penis, ending with the poem's shocking final couplet, indented as its own separate verse paragraph:

And may ten thousand abler pricks agree?

To do the wronged Corinna right for thee.

("Imperfect Enjoyment" ll.71-2)

With this Rochester formally curses his own prick, but the terms of the curse are to see "ten thousand abler pricks" -- attached, one presumes, to ten thousand abler men -- "do the wronged Corinna right" by performing the job that the poet could not, and paying the debt to pleasure. This is the element that makes readers like Wilcoxon profoundly nervous, but I think that Rawson's insight holds true here: within impotence Rochester still has the sexual energy of ten thousand men, or through impotence he can be pushed into a lurid and rococo Caligulan or Neronian fantasy of a vast orgy in which one woman is brought to climax by ten thousand different lovers with "abler pricks." The extravagance is meant to be a joke, and a funny one at that -- if Corinna had sex with one man every minute, it would still take an entire week to accomplish such a task. It is clearly satiric hyperbole -- and perhaps an expression of the vigor with which the poet feels he could satisfy his own mistress, if his body were not in apparent rebellion against his own lustful intentions.

The aesthetic shock of the closing couplet does register as a sort of shock, and for that reason it might be easy to make the leap and call the poem "shocking." This what Reba Wilcoxon, in her essay on "Pornography, Obscenity and Rochester's 'The Imperfect Enjoyment'," sets out to address, by explaining Rochester's work within the context of Classical sources: for her, the faculty of Ovidian imitation is one of several crucial factors that marks Rochester's achievement in this poem as a poetic not pornographic one. Wilcoxon's concerns about pornography seem almost quaint to us thirty-five years later (now that Andrea Dworkin is dead, and the Internet porn industry is alive and kicking) and her assessment of Rochester's poem as "blatantly shocking in sexual language and imagery" is likely to raise a chuckle in an undergraduate today (Wilcoxon 375). Likewise WIlcoxon's judgment that the protagonist of the poem "has used others as objects" which says more about the context of Wilcoxon's own bias within the context of 1970s feminism than it does about Rochester's context of Restoration court-poetry written on a French neo-Classical model (Wilcoxon 384). On the surface of it, it would seem like Rochester's narrator is calling for Corinna to be raped by ten thousand men. Yet this is where the question of satiric or mock-epic intent becomes most crucial. For a start, we must take the element of obscenity in the closing couplet as part of Rochester's theatricalized persona in this poem -- Rawson remarks on the freedom to use profane language as being an indicator of Rochester's social status as an Earl, "lordly accents" that hint that the poems' author is a courtier and close intimate of Charles the Second, who would banish him from the court for a time after reading one of Rochester's profane verse satires about his mistress (Rawson 4). So this leads to a rhetorical position where that kind of rhetorical excess is required of Rochester, to establish his bona fides as one who is free to put any sort of language into heroic couplets. Rochester became so well-known for obscene poems that Sir William Empson notes that, after his death, any obscene poem tended to be ascribed to Rochester in the same way "as proverbs are attributed to Solomon" (Empson 275). Yet there is a tradition of heroic exaggeration here, which marks the poem as mock-epic: the threat cannot be taken seriously, and within the dramatic context of the poem it registers as a theatricalized expression of impotent male rage. The feminist emphasis loses sight of this theatrical element in Rochester -- seeing the masculinities rather than the masks in his poems. Ultimately it serves as an illustration of Farley-Hills' wearied claim that "the history of Rochester criticism…illustrates almost all the ways imaginable in which the critic can be deflected from a reasonably objective view of the poetry" (Farley-Hills 1) -- from the vantage of over three decades after her article's publication, Wilcoxon seems to be no exception to Farley-Hills' generalization.

Recalling again Empson had said that any obscene poem of the Restoration whose authorship was not otherwise apparent tended to be attributed to Rochester, in the way that proverbs are vaguely attributed to Solomon, it is worth noting that this is precisely what happened to Aphra Behn's "The Disappointment" on its original publication in 1680, when it was attributed to Rochester (Rawson 8). This suggests that whatever compositional differences one may detect, the compositional similarities were sufficient to contemporary readers of both Rochester and Behn that the two could be confused (or one advertised as the other) to contemporary publishers. It is possible to overstate the importance of published editions of their work, though -- both Rochester and Behn wrote their verse for an intimate coterie of social equals of high rank. Behn did not have Rochester's aristocratic title or male gender which gave him the uniquely privileged access to Charles II that he enjoyed (until it was revoked), but Behn became a part of Charles's court by travelling in well-connected social circles and would, in fact, be recruited by the King himself to do espionage work abroad. But in terms of tone, Behn's poem is far milder than Rochester's -- although the sudden violence of Rochester's expostulation has an equivalent emotional turning-point in the concluding stanza, when suddenly the tone becomes dark and almost supernatural:

The nymph's resentments none but I

Can well imagine or condole:

But none can guess Lysander's soul,

But those who swayed his destiny.

His silent griefs swell up to storms,

And not one god his fury spares;

He cursed his birth, his fate, his stars

But more the shepherdess's charms,

Whose soft bewitching influence

Had damned him to the hell of impotence.

("Disappointment," Stanza XIV)

This stanza serves as Behn's formal close, but it also crucially -- and quite suddenly -- shifts into the first person. Any claims that Behn's sex is responsible for a more "mild" tone than Rochester clearly is incapable of seeing that -- despite her lack of Rochester's varied profanities -- there are two separate rhetorical gestures in this final stanza which mark a violent rhetorical discontinuity with the stanzas that came before. The first -- signified by the spiritual and religious words ("god," "cursed," "fate," "stars" in the sense of zodiacal fate, "charms," "bewitching," "damned," and "hell") which suddenly turn the erotic pastoral of the poem's body into a distinctly supernatural and moralistic turn. One reason Behn's poem may initially have been wrongly attributed to Rochester is that this turn seems, in some muted way, to resemble the pattern of Rochester's life as established by his posthumous fame, which hinged on his supposed deathbed religious conversion "abetted by Burnet," the attending minister who wrote up Rochester's theological deathbed ruminations as a best-selling religious tract (Rawson 8). But beyond any speculation as to whether there is any specific reference to Rochester here -- and whether Behn names Cloris after the shepherdess in a bawdy pastoral by Rochester, "Fair Cloris in a pig-sty lay" -- it is definitely beyond doubt that the poem takes a similarly dark turn to Rochester's poem, although the darkness is not summed up in a single couplet containing a single (and extravagant) thought, but instead is registered by a broader shift in tone.

Yet that is only half of Behn's strategy here. The other half is in the beginning of the stanza, which arguably marks a larger formal discontinuity with the previous stanzas than even the tonal shift in the latter half -- I refer to the sudden use of the first person singular in the narrator's voice, which has hitherto been absent from the poem. It is not merely a wild disjunction, it also seems to operate on a number of levels within context as the final "punch line" to the poem's witticisms. Behn's concluding stanza is essentially a way of summing up her pastoral vignette by saying that no further psychological investigation is required into either Cloris or Lysander -- yet she distinguishes here between the woman and the man in the situation. Of Cloris she says "none but I / can well imagine or condole" -- this would appear to operate on a number of levels, partly by its ambiguous suggestion that maybe Behn is Cloris, if "only" Behn can "well imagine" how Cloris felt after the fact. But the phrasing could also work if we imagine a smaller coterie context for the reception of this poem: in which Behn is writing a riposte to Rochester, or at the very least is writing her own entry into the stakes of the larger game of writing this kind of neo-Classical adaptive poem in a tasteful way, and either way the lines merely register a woman writing for an all-male readership. The other way of reading these stanzas is more as a metafictional gesture, calling attention to Behn's status as Chloe's creator. But either way the strong linkage of female writer to the female character in the drama of a man's premature ejaculation is made. Behn is characterizing herself here as adeptly as a playwright sketches her characters. Although Rochester may have the psychological acuity of a dramatist -- with such deep and overwrought investigation on a level that Behn explicitly declines to offer in the concluding stanza of "The Disappointment" -- but Rochester's actual contributions as a writer for the Restoration stage were relatively negligible. Behn by contrast was a highly successful stage playwright, who frequently wrote highly sexualized pieces in the contemporary prose genre known more generally as "Restoration Comedy." Derek Hughes notes how her sex affected her career: "Behn's status as the first British woman to earn her living as a creative writer might make her seem a vulnerable and marginal figure and it is easy to quote misogynist satire mocking her" (Hughes 29). So the sly implication that Cloris and Behn are one and the same implies Behn's sly knowledge that all men are susceptible to the kind of erotic immaturity demonstrated by Lysander in the poem. In point of fact, the critical consensus is remarkable in seeing Behn's "The Disappointment" as a poem that is primarily about gender and gender-differences. Lisa Zeitz and Peter Thoms argue, in their study "Power, Gender and Identity in Aphra Behn's 'The Disappointment'," that Behn's poem "is not about impotence so much as it is about power at a number of levels" and that Behn "incisively interrogates the notion of power as a definer of male identity" (Zeitz and Thoms 501). Meanwhile Jessica Munns and Susan Staves in different articles place an emphasis alike on the larger context of Behn's writings about sex, which tend to be darker than "The Disappointment." Munns sees "The Disappointment" as a poem which "treats the topics of male impotence and pastoral desire in a more light-hearted vein" compared with Behn's other representations of eroticism overall (Munns 213). Staves meanwhile offers additional examples from Behn's stage plays demonstrating Behn's darker view of male sexual libertinism overall, and concludes that the overall point is to establish (whether tragically as in Behn's other work, or comically as in "The Disappointment") a sense of serious gender difference. Staves summarizes the overall thrust of Behn's view of eroticism thus: