So far, I have been tracing the conceptual intricacies of Christian faith as it theorizes race, gender, desire, and subjectivity. In this chapter, I discuss how a theological conviction of human infidelity and self-opacity challenges mainstream modern valuations of matrimony as a sanctified union deserving of the myriad legal, social, and economic benefits that come with a marriage certificate. As numerous queer scholars have pointed out, the view that conjugal sex is uniquely innocent includes the concomitant view that sex outside of marriage poses a danger both to individual health and happiness and to social order. The “hierarchical valuation of sex acts,” long ago censured by Gayle Rubin, legitimates the sexually and racially discriminatory effects of a distribution of resources based on marital status: the economically independent two-parent family was at the center of the white, neoliberal fantasy of the Clinton administration’s welfare reform and the Bush administration’s marriage program.1
Responding to the overwhelming privileges afforded those who wed, and the corollary discrimination and material loss faced by those who do not, LGBTQ activism over the past two decades has, as Michael Warner puts it, endeavored to “overcome stigma” by conforming to dominant culture rather than “chang[ing] the self-understanding of that culture.”2 Beginning in 2001, when the Netherlands became the first country to sanction same-sex marriage, this strategy of beating discrimination by legally joining those it benefited saw widespread success. In 2015, with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, the United States joined Canada, South Africa, parts of Mexico, and most of Western Europe in legalizing same-sex marriage; since then, more countries have implemented marriage equality, with Taiwan becoming the first Asian country to allow same-sex couples to marry in May 2017. This expansion of marriage rights, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Wendy Brown have observed of liberalism and legal rights more generally, is something we “cannot not want” insofar as it ends discrimination based on a couple’s gender and opens the way to claims for legal and political redress of injustice.3 In the United States, for instance, the right to marry was originally tied to the legal category of personhood and thereby denied to African American slaves.4 Yet making marriage more inclusive does little for sexual minorities and may further legitimate cultural and legal discrimination against those who willfully remain outside the “charmed circle” of conjugal coupledom now that they can legally join it.5 It is as urgent as ever to change how the dominant culture understands itself.
A central claim of this book is that one way to create such change is to look more closely at some of the foundational writings of the dominant culture: Christian theology and canonical love poetry. As I discuss in the remainder of this first section, both the majority and the dissent in Obergefell appeal to history and tradition. But this appeal obscures the ambivalence about the purpose and value of marriage expressed in two profoundly influential cultural documents, the Anglian Book of Common Prayer and the Pauline Letters. In the section that follows, I trace the challenge posed to modern sexual hierarchies by the sixteenth-century Protestant conviction that, in Luther’s words, “the sin of lust . . . flows beneath the surface” of matrimony.6 In the third section, I argue that in the Renaissance both medical discussions of orgasm and Shakespeare’s sonnets on procreation attest to the cultural influence of the view that even married, reproductive sex cannot be wholly sanctified. In the final section of this chapter, I examine how the desire for sexual innocence itself gives license to pornographic and violent fantasies in a pair of lyric sequences usually understood as translating Petrarchan poetics from a testimony of unrequited love into propaganda for Christian companionate marriage, Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion.
Because US secular norms tend to be shaped by modern Protestantism, an excavation of these biblical, theological, medical, and poetic attempts to grapple with the experience of arousal can prove as useful to queer and feminist thought as the secular and modern frameworks more usually invoked. Paul, Augustine, Luther, and Calvin have no interest in combatting stigma—they agree that it would be best not to want sex at all, and next best to enjoy it as little as possible. But, in its grim assurance of universal depravity, Pauline soteriology resonates remarkably with such queer insights as Warner’s observation that “perhaps because sex is an occasion for losing control, for merging one’s consciousness with the lower orders of animal desire and sensation, for raw confrontations of power and demand, it fills people with aversion and shame.”7 For Warner, queer ethics must be based on the recognition that sex cannot be elevated. “In those circles where queerness has been most cultivated,” Warner writes, “the ground rule is that one doesn’t pretend to be above the indignity of sex. . . . A relation to others, in these contexts, begins in an acknowledgment of all that is most abject and least reputable in oneself. . . . If sex is a kind of indignity, then we’re all in it together.”8 In its recommendation that this indignity be confined to marriage, the theological tradition I have been tracing differs from queer theory. But it also complicates the moralization of married and procreative intercourse now taken for granted by modern evangelicals, popular culture, and US law. Any serious reading of this material reminds us that the “Judeo-Christian” history from which modern marriage is usually derived is a pretty recent invention. Precisely because it accentuates what Leo Bersani deems the “ineradicable aspects” of sex that are “anticommunal, antiegalitarian, antinurturing, antiloving,” the body of writing I examine can be a vital conceptual tool for challenging the “romantic reinvention of sex,” along with the hierarchies it authorizes.9
A brief look at the arguments both for and against marriage equality in Obergefell v. Hodges indicates that queer apprehension of the coercive normativity of the redemptive reinvention of sex has proved prescient. The majority and dissent in Obergefell disagree on the proper legal definition of marriage, but they find common ground on one principle: sex has no value in itself, without the trappings of love or family. The expansion of marriage rights, in fact, grows out of the romanticization of sex in the majority opinion in Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 ruling decriminalizing sodomy. Here, Justice Anthony Kennedy overturns the Court’s previous defense of antisodomy statutes in Bowers v. Hardwick by affirming that “to say that the issue in Bowers was simply the right to engage in certain sexual conduct demeans the claim the individual put forward, just as it would demean a married couple were it to be said that marriage is simply about the right to have sexual intercourse.”10 In other words, to simply want the right to have consensual sex when, how, and with whomever one wants would indeed be demeaning. When he writes for the majority in Obergefell, Kennedy reiterates throughout this conflation of dignity, love, and committed coupledom. Reasoning that prohibiting same-sex marriage violates the Fourteenth Amendment, Kennedy argues that the liberties that cannot be denied without due process of law “extend to certain personal choices central to individual dignity and autonomy, including intimate choices that define personal identity and beliefs.”11 In an appeal to what Janet Jakobsen has shown is a structurally Protestant association of freedom with self-regulation, Kennedy proclaims that the choice to marry “is inherent in the concept of individual autonomy” because “through its enduring bond, two persons together can find other freedoms, such as expression, intimacy, and spirituality” otherwise unavailable (Obergefell 3, 10).12 Marriage “responds to the universal fear that a lonely person might call out only to find no one there,” Kennedy avers, and “embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family” (Obergefell 11, 17). Accordingly, to deny same-sex couples the right to “aspire to the transcendent purposes of marriage and seek fulfillment in its highest meaning” is to “impose stigma and injury of the kind prohibited by our basic charter” (Obergefell 14, 12).
The dissent in Obergefell was having none of this talk of love. All four of the dissenting justices—Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito—wrote opinions whose primary argument was that the definition of marriage should be decided by voters and legislators, not a “judicial Putsch” (Obergefell 34). But, as Roberts’s and Alito’s opinions make clear, a robust investment in what Lee Edelman calls “reproductive futurism” and in protecting a particular ideal of the Western, nuclear family lies beneath the indignant claim that marriage rights cannot properly be expanded by the Court.13 Roberts avers that the heterosexual norm of marriage “is no historical coincidence” but arises to meet the “vital need” of conceiving and raising children (Obergefell 21). In undermining this definition, Roberts warns, the Court threatens the very existence of the human race, which “must procreate to survive” (Obergefell 21). Doggedly ignoring the existence of both birth control and reproductive technology, Roberts writes that “sexual relations that can lead to procreation” between a couple that plans to “stay together rather than going their separate ways” is the only hope of a future (Obergefell 21). Alito similarly insists that “for millennia, marriage was inextricably linked to the one thing that only an opposite-sex couple can do: procreate” (Obergefell 43). He goes on to lament that “the tie between marriage and procreation has frayed. Today, for instance, more than 40% of all children in this country are born to unmarried women. This development undoubtedly is both a cause and a result of changes in our society’s understanding of marriage” (Obergefell 43). Same-sex marriage, by Roberts’s and Alito’s logic, will only hasten this vicious cycle whereby the more marriage is conceptually distinguished from procreation, the more procreation will happen outside of marriage.14 The specter of the promiscuous queer merges with that of the undeserving welfare queen—a figure at once queer and black in relation to white norms, as Cathy Cohen and Dorothy Roberts argue—as a threat to decent and hardworking “real” Americans.15 The conjoined religious, racial, and national identifications at play here are further accentuated by Roberts’s warning that same-sex marriage will usher in alternative kinship practices such as polygamy, which has “deep roots in some cultures around the world” (Obergefell 28).
While many who support marriage equality rightly cringe at these hysterical defenses of white family values, it is important to note that all of the Justices concur that monogamous marriage is the bedrock of “our” society and as such must be rewarded with unique dignity and promoted with tangible benefits. In Obergefell, the majority as well as the dissent is quite candid about the coercive dimension of marriage. These arguments confirm the queer critique expressed succinctly by Warner: marriage confers “selective legitimacy” that is “designed both to reward those inside it and to discipline those outside it: adulterers, prostitutes, divorcees, the promiscuous, single people, unwed parents, those below the age of consent—in short, all those who become, for the purposes of marriage law, queer.”16 Because marriage is a “building block of our national community,” Kennedy writes, it is also a union between the couple and the state: “Just as a couple vows to support each other, so does society pledge to support the couple, offering symbolic recognition and material benefits to protect and nourish the union” (Obergefell 12). The dissenting Justices agree. Roberts notes that “by bestowing a respected status and material benefits on married couples, society encourages men and women to conduct sexual relations within marriage rather than without,” and Alito adds that “states formalize and promote marriage . . . in order to encourage potentially procreative conduct to take place within a lasting unit” (Obergefell 21, 43). In all of these opinions, the uneasy fusion of coercion and choice that Elizabeth Freeman and Janet Jakobsen have seen in marriage comes to the fore.17
What Teemu Ruskola has observed of Kennedy’s majority opinion in Lawrence is equally true of the pernicious logic of the majority in Obergefell: once the legal question is the right to “intimacy” rather than “sodomy,” there is “little or no justification for protecting less-than-transcendental sex that is not part of an ongoing relationship.”18 The decriminalization of sodomy is certainly welcome news, Ruskola concedes. But its logic participates in a compulsory normativity in which “we will know whose sex is good and whose is bad” based on the legal status of the relationship in which it takes place.19 Perhaps most problematically, in Lawrence the Court promotes “‘compulsory heterosexuality’ in its new, second-generation form, Adrienne Rich updated for the millennium.”20 Likewise, what Lisa Duggan calls “the new homonormativity” aligns gay marriage rights with an embrace of neoliberal privatization by “promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and privacy,” which will “shrink gay public spheres and redefine gay equality against the ‘civil rights agenda’ and ‘liberationism.’”21 To the extent that they posit a disembodied queerness and value individual choice over social justice, proponents of the new homonormativity, like those of the old heteronormativity before it, take white men as the universal and paradigmatic political and sexual subject. They accordingly treat queer movements that address race- or gender-based discrimination as distracting at best and divisive at worst.
As I argued in chapter 2, attention to the conflicted and uneven histories of modern racial and sexual categories can remind us of their ongoing mutual constitution. Katherine Franke demonstrates that the tacit framing of same-sex marriage as an expansion of white respectability as against “dysfunctional, ‘broken’ families” reveals that “a conception of marriage as the pinnacle of mature personhood and mutual responsibility is so saturated with racial and gender stereotypes that some things do not even have to be said to convey the feeling of truth and obviousness.”22 Obergefell offers an example of how historical amnesia props up the white queer neoliberal identity politics critiqued in Duggan’s analysis of homonormativity as well as in Jasbir Puar’s analysis of homonationalism.23 Although both the majority and the dissent in Obergefell appeal to numerous touchstones of history—between them, they mention the Carthaginians, the Aztecs, the Kalahari Bushmen, and the Han Chinese; and they cite Confucius, Cicero, Edward Coke, John Locke, William Blackstone, and Alexis de Tocqueville—both sides’ opinions are based on a strikingly presentist and American perspective on marriage.
Ironically, given its Christian basis, the Obergefell opinions repress the more anxious account of marriage offered by Reformation theology. We see this ambivalence in the Book of Common Prayer, whose “Solemnization of Matrimony” remains central to Anglo-American secular marriage culture (“Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today . . .”). First published in 1549 and disseminated most influentially through the 1662 edition, this liturgy remained substantively unchanged until 1928. Comparing the 1662 and 1928 ceremonies in the Book of Common Prayer, we can appreciate that the former’s explicit anxiety about the sex that takes place within marriage is conspicuously effaced in the latter’s reluctance to mention conjugal sex at all. The nuptial state, the 1662 ceremony warns,
is not by any to be enterprized, nor taken in hand unadvisedly, lightely, or wantonly, to satisfie mens carnal lusts and appetites, like brute beasts that have no understanding: but reverently, discretely, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God, duly considering the causes for which matrimony was ordained.
First, it was ordained for the procreation of children, to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord. . . .
Secondly, it was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication, that such persons as have not the gift of continency, might marry, and keep themselves undefiled members of Christs body.
Thirdly, it was ordained for the mutual society, help and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other.24
In the version used for nearly four hundred years, wedlock may offer a remedy against sin and fornication, but it does not magically transform any conjugal sex to a chaste expression of love, as the couple at the alter is warned against marrying only to satisfy “carnal lusts and appetites.”
It is only when the ceremony is revised in 1928 that the Book of Common Prayer endows matrimony with the ability to sanitize the sex that takes place within it. This twentieth-century version explains that marriage
is not to bee enterprised, nor taken in hand unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly, but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God, duly considering the causes for which matrimony was ordained. First, It was ordained for the increase of mankind according to the will of God, and that children might be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord . . . Second, It was ordained in order that the natural instincts and affections, implanted by God, should be hallowed and directed aright; that those who are called of God to this holy estate, should continue therein in pureness of living. Thirdly, It was ordained for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of thither, both in prosperity and adversity.25
Here, the carnal lusts, brute beasts, fornication, and defilement of the 1662 service are carefully bowdlerized as “natural instincts and affections, implanted by God” to be “hallowed and directed aright” to foster “pureness of living.” The most recent revision to the Book of Common Prayer, in 1979, removes discussion of sex altogether. Here, the opening line suppresses the possibility that marriage might be contracted “wantonly,” admonishing only that it should not “be entered into unadvisedly or lightly, but reverently, deliberately, and in accordance with the purposes of which it was instituted by God.”26 The 1979 “Solemnization” also departs from the four-hundred-year tradition of naming the causes of marriage as procreation, fellowship, and avoidance of fornication—a tradition inscribed, as Roberts writes in Obergefell, in the early American definition of marriage: “In his first American dictionary, Noah Webster defined marriage as ‘the legal union of a man and woman for life,’ which served the purposes of ‘preventing the promiscuous intercourse of the sexes, . . . promoting domestic felicity, and . . . securing the maintenance and education of children’” (Obergefell 22). In fact, the modern ceremony folds sex into companionship, even to the point of making procreation optional: stressing the discourse of friendship that I discussed in chapter 2, the 1979 ceremony lists the three purposes of conjugal union as “for their mutual joy; for the help and comfort given one another in prosperity and adversity; and, when it is God’s will, for the procreation of children and their nurture.”27 In the wake of the so-called sexual revolution, the originally uneasy description of marriage as a remedy against sin and defilement (the lengthiest reason given before 1928) is whittled down to the brief, resolutely G-rated “mutual joy.”
The modern erasure of sex from the Anglican marriage ceremony exemplifies a larger principle of family values discourse that makes conjugal sex uniquely, even magically, innocent. This Disney version of marriage, frequently assumed by evangelical and queer thought alike, has little basis in the New Testament, which does not directly justify marriage on the grounds of either fellowship or procreation. Indeed, as Richard Rambuss has pointed out, “Christianity, at least in its early scriptural incarnations, is not an especially hospitable faith around which to build a heteronormative family values cultural project. In fact, the Christian scriptures are rich in figures and narratives that point the way toward, and even sacralize, other forms of kinship, other ways of spiritual belonging.”28 God’s command in Genesis to “be fruitful, and multiply” and his pronouncement that “it is not good that the man should be himself alone, I will make a help meet for him,” are not explicitly connected to marriage as contract or institution at all (KJB, Gen. 1:28, 2:18). The Old Testament indirectly questions the unique status of straight, monogamous marriage by depicting a range of divinely sanctioned forms of kinship: polygamy, incest, group marriage, and same-sex commitment (practices, we saw in chapter 2, that English Reformers emphasized to distinguish Protestantism from other religions), which bear little resemblance to the heterosexual couple for which the Supreme Court claims such a venerable and invariable history. The New Testament directly questions whether monogamous marriage has positive spiritual value at all. Jesus repeatedly urges his followers to give up everything and follow him, and Paul cites this celibate and communal lifestyle as the spiritual ideal.29
Paul begins his discussion of marriage in 1 Corinthians 7 by declaring that “it were good for a man not to touch a woman. Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his wife, and let every woman have her own husband” (GB, 1 Cor. 7:1–2).30 People are permitted to marry if, as the note to this verse in the Geneva Bible puts it, they “have not the gift of continency, and this gift is by a peculiar grace of God.” But, as Paul makes clear, no one is required to marry: the dispensation is “by permission, not by commandment” (GB, 1 Cor. 7:6). In fact, it would be better if everyone could remain single, like Paul himself: “For I would that all men were even as I myself am. But every man hath his proper gift of God, one after this manner, and another after that. Therefore I say unto the unmarried, and unto the widows, It is good for them if they abide even as I do. But if they cannot abstain, let them marry; for it is better to marry than to burn” (GB, 1 Cor. 7:7–9; emphasis in original). Marriage provides an outlet for excessive desire, preventing both the act of fornication and the distracting fantasies and yearnings that disrupt the spiritual relation with God. As the Geneva gloss explains, “It is better to marry than to burn” means “So to burn with lust, that either the will yieldeth to the temptation, or else we cannot call upon God with a quiet conscience.” Sex in 1 Corinthians is matrimony’s chief motivating force. Paul never mentions the other two reasons that the Book of Common Prayer gives for marriage (procreation and companionship) as compelling arguments to wed.
Later in 1 Corinthians, Paul emphasizes that celibacy is preferable to marriage not because of the bodily act of sex but because of the distracting affective dimension of worldly attachments:
And I would have you without care. The unmarried careth for the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord. But he that is married careth for the things of the world, how he may please his wife. There is difference also between a virgin and a wife. The unmarried woman careth for the things of the Lord, that she may be holy, both in body and in spirit, but she that is married, careth for the things of the world, how she may please her husband. (GB, 1 Cor. 7:32–34; emphasis in original)
The Geneva glosses this as: “They that are married, have their wits drawn hither and thither, and therefore if any man have the gift of continency, it is more commodious for him to live alone”; even though “they that are married may care for the things of the Lord also,” they are “divided, meaning into divers cares.” The union of marriage formally recognizes the division of both parties between flesh and spirit, this world and the next. Marriage, in the Pauline tradition, is a concession to promiscuous attachments.
To marry, in Paul’s account, is not so much an alternative to burning as an admission that one does burn, that one does not love God from the bottom of one’s heart. Not only are spouses and children a distraction from “the things of the Lord,” but from the point of view that looks forward to the second coming, there is no need to perpetuate the human species. “And I say this, brethren, because the time is short,” Paul explains, “hereafter that both they which have wives, be as though they had none. . . . And they that use this world, as though they used it not; for the fashion of the world goeth away” (GB, 1 Cor. 7:29, 31). This shortened, or constricted, time that remains between the resurrection and the apocalypse, Giorgio Agamben explains, describes the human experience of the messianic event as one of “paradoxical tension between an already and a not yet that defines the Pauline conception of salvation.”31 The Pauline subsumption of history in eschatology, chronological into messianic time, deems human action meaningful only insofar as it is directed to its own end. Believing that the extension of human life is the deferral of the full presence of the Messiah, the religious celibate shares what Edelman designates the queer’s “willingness to insist intransitively—to insist that the future stop here.”32
But what of an equally well-known Pauline discussion of marriage, the final verses of Ephesians 5 urging human spouses to emulate the union of Christ and Church? Included in the “Solemnization of Matrimony” in the Book of Common Prayer and favored by modern evangelicals, Ephesians 5 would seem to contradict the ideal of virginity in 1 Corinthians 7. It is certainly taken this way by John Calvin, who marshals it as evidence against the Catholic requirement of lifelong virginity for clergy: “Christ deigns so to honor marriage as to make it an image of his sacred union with the church. What greater eulogy could be pronounced on the dignity of marriage? How, then, dare they have the effrontery to give the name of unclean and polluted to that which furnishes a bright representation of the spiritual grace of Christ?”33 Yet, as I observed in chapter 1, numerous queer implications are imbedded in the figural logic of Ephesians 5 whereby first, a human institution preceding Christianity is taken as the model of a faith that is unrepresentable except through catachrestic accommodation, and then second, this catachresis comes proleptically to justify the holiness of the institution itself. Here, I want briefly to recall that even the most heteronormative reading of this analogy requires us to repress the sexual dimension of wedlock. Paul’s single reason for marriage in 1 Corinthians 7—to extinguish lust—is explicitly excluded in Ephesians’ warning not to read literally the analogy between marriage to a spouse and marriage to Christ. In repeating Ephesians’ elision of sex in favor of a view of marriage as delibidinized companionship or procreation, the Obergefell Justices avoid a Christian tradition in which marriage does not so much sanctify creaturely appetite as confess that it cannot be rendered fully innocent.
Of course, the Obergefell opinions are right that marriage, defined as a public declaration of love or a means of ordering reproduction, has existed in many cultures throughout history. This includes the Western European cultures with which the Court is most concerned, and particularly that of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English Protestantism whose views so profoundly shaped the establishment of the United States as a nation and which remain, in secular form, central to American law and culture. One of the most tenacious narratives about early modern sexuality is that the Protestant Reformation ushered in a new idea of companionate marriage that displaced both the Catholic idealization of celibacy and the medieval romance of adultery.34 In this view, Catholics, following the example of Christ and his apostles, had distrusted marriage as a sign of attachment to the world, the flesh, and the devil and seen virginity as an expression of pure, uncompromised faith that set the clergy apart from the laity. By contrast, this story goes, Protestants deemed marriage the highest spiritual state for clergy and laity alike. Such readings suppose a sharp break between a Catholic idealization of celibacy and a Protestant celebration of marriage. To be sure, Protestant theologians departed from Catholic doctrine in their support for clerical marriage, and secular rulers in Protestant states justified the suppression of religious orders and seizure of monastic property by condemning these communal institutions as sites of sodomy and fornication. In Protestant states, including early America, marriage became the only legitimate adult way of life.35 But it is important to separate the historical effects of the Protestant repudiation of clerical celibacy from the conceptual model of sex and subjectivity that grounded the view that most people, including clergy, were better off married. Sixteenth-century views of companionate marriage were neither as new nor as optimistic as they are often assumed to have been. Insofar as Reform theology does not deny the indignity of conjugal sex but, true to its Augustinian roots, “renders shame productive,” it also queerer than it is usually thought to be.36
From at least the twelfth century, the Catholic Church upheld celibacy as a superior state, a view based on the writings of the early Church Fathers, who saw asceticism as the condition most conducive to a holy lifestyle. Tertullian, though himself married, deemed conjugal relations inherently sinful, arguing that insofar as marital sex involves the “commixture of the flesh,” it “consists of that which is the essence of fornication.”37 And against Jovinian’s argument that marriage was as holy an estate as virginity, Ambrose, Origen, and Jerome all insisted on the superiority of the ascetic life, with Jerome notoriously insisting that “nothing is filthier than to have sex with your wife as you might do with another woman. . . . Every too ardent lover of his own wife is an adulterer.”38 While marriage might mitigate the sin associated with sex, it nonetheless indulged sensual desires that were a reminder of humanity’s fall. As Coppélia Kahn points out, once “sexual pleasure . . . enters explicitly and legitimately into marriage, whoredom becomes an internal threat rather than an external one.”39 Even the holiest of conjugal sexual relations could not achieve the spiritual purity of lifelong virginity.
Differences in sexual behavior reinforced the distinction between a worldly, sexually active laity and a celibate clergy whose sacred status was manifested in the ability to effect the miracle of transubstantiation.40 This unique holiness justified privileges like exemption from taxation even as the prohibition of clerical marriage allowed the Church to amass wealth and property by denying priests legal heirs.41 Precisely because clerical celibacy was so instrumental to the consolidation of Church power, the Church actively encouraged lay marriage, which was officially listed as one of the seven sacraments by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. As Dyan Elliott demonstrates, beginning in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Church increasingly questioned the legitimacy of “spiritual marriage,” a legal union in which both parties consent to maintain sexual abstinence (either temporarily or permanently) in an effort to reconcile a worldly institution with celibate devotional practice. So just when the Church was more rigorously demanding clerical celibacy and rejecting priests who married or had children, it was also teaching that sexual intercourse was central to Christian marriage.42 Scholastic theologians in the twelfth through fourteenth centuries, most famously Thomas Aquinas, explored what Pierre J. Payer describes as “the legitimate choices open to people in regard to sex” and accordingly offered a positive account of sexual pleasure within the confines of marriage.43 In fourteenth- and fifteenth-century European literate culture as well as theological writing, we witness the prominence of a model of marriage that is hard to distinguish from the companionate marriage often said to have been invented by Protestants, in which husband and wife equally consent to a union based on chaste love and mutual support. Italian humanists had promoted the joys of matrimony, and in later medieval English romance, depictions of adulterous and excessive passion decreased in favor of a focus on chaste, respectable, moderate love that led to the altar.44 These cultural ideals were officially upheld by the Catholic doctrine that the single and essential requirement for a binding marriage was the mutual and voluntary consent of both parties. A priest’s blessing, like that of parents, was desirable but not required for a union to be valid in the eyes of the Church and the law.
The widely accepted narrative of the rise of companionate marriage not only suppresses the complex reality of medieval law, religion, and culture. It also ignores what influential reformers like Luther and Calvin actually wrote about marriage, as well as the views expressed in a good deal of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant writing. Certainly, during the institution of Protestantism in England there were many popular pamphlets supporting clerical marriage and singing the praises of domesticity more generally. But religious historians have noted that these works’ pervasiveness may indicate that the populace needed to be convinced that sex could be reconciled with sanctity, rather than widespread agreement about the innate value of matrimony.45 Many English Protestants, like their Catholic forbears, suspected that carnal desire, even that satisfied within marriage, was innately perverse and sinful—a qualm manifested in the refusal of some Protestants, including Elizabeth I, to accept communion from married bishops.46
Nor was this doubt about the spiritual status of sex limited to laypersons. It also appears in the writings of Luther and Calvin, a theological affinity that can be attributed in part to the shared Augustinian heritage of Catholicism and Protestantism.47 As I discussed in chapter 1, Augustine departed from previous Church Fathers in his rejection of a classical dualism in which bodily appetites could be mastered through ascetic discipline. In a formulation followed by Luther and Calvin, the works of the flesh for Augustine signified all attachments to the world, including feelings of pride, desire, and aggression that one might not act upon, or even be conscious of. In the Confessions, for instance, Augustine’s nocturnal emissions provide a reminder of the opacity and intractability of the will. Even after he has become celibate, Augustine confesses, images of lust still “attack” him in his sleep, revealing “how great a difference [there is] between myself at the time when I am asleep and myself when I return to the waking state.”48 In this gulf between self and self, will and agency, Augustine experiences the elusiveness of the continence he seeks. As Foucault notes, nocturnal emissions posed a similar problem for Cassian, for whom “carnal conjunction” had more to do with mind than body.49 Nocturnal emissions provided data on the soul, Peter Brown writes, to “inform of the movement of forces that lay beyond immediate consciousness.”50 Yet whereas Cassian believed that “the very depths of a person could shift in a collaboration of the will with the grace of God,” Augustine was certain that “deliverance never would occur in this life.”51 The disobedient will with which we are born follows us to the grave (and perhaps beyond).
This conception of innate human depravity helps shape Augustine’s view of conjugal relations. Rather than deny that there was sex in paradise, as did previous patristic writers, Augustine insisted that rational and innocent sex could have taken place, even if we cannot imagine such a thing now. Before the fall, he explains in City of God, “the marriage in paradise would not have known this opposition, this resistance, this tussle between lust and will,” since “the will would have received the obedience of all the members, including the organs of sex.”52 In Eden, “those parts of the body were not activated by the turbulent heat of passion but brought into service by deliberate use of power when the need arose” (CG 14.26). The fall introduced the poena reciproca in which, as we have seen, “the retribution for disobedience is simply disobedience itself,” and man is at perpetual “odds with himself . . . his very mind and even his lower element, his flesh, do not submit to his will” (CG 14.15). Prelapsarian genitals were as much under the will’s control as hands or feet; postlapsarian sex is inspired by arousal beyond the will’s control. Accordingly, Virginia Burras explains, Augustine defends the institution of marriage on the grounds that the conjugal bond allows for the “mutual entrustment of shame” when partners expose to one another helpless and humiliating desires.53
The Protestant defense of marriage as a divine concession to creaturely need retained the Augustinian view of postlapsarian sex as a shameful badge of the divided will. Luther and Calvin did insist on the holiness of clerical as well as lay marriage, but their reasoning was more complex and less celebratory than has often been supposed. In fact, the claim that marriage may be more conducive to holiness than virginity rests on the belief that although celibacy remained the spiritual ideal, it was possible only for the chosen few who, singled out for God’s special grace, were “eunuchs for heaven” (GB, Matt. 19:12), free from the desire for sex. For the vast majority of humanity, attempts to remain celibate result only in painful yearning, masturbation, and secret fornication; hypocritical pride before humanity is accompanied by resentment toward God. Conjugal sex, in this view, differs from fornication not because it is more rational or innocent, nor because it produces legitimate offspring. Marriage is a sign of holiness because it constitutes personal and public acknowledgment of one’s innate human depravity and consequent dependence on God’s grace, not one’s own merit, for salvation.
Given the centrality of celibacy to clerical privilege, it should be no surprise that a redefinition of the relation between sex and holiness was integral to the Protestant Reformation.54 The Protestant ideal of companionate marriage grew out of the association between celibacy, idolatry, and institutional corruption. Far from a model of otherworldly sanctity, monastic life, Protestant Reformers charged, was rife with sexual license that would make most laypersons blush. The problem with priests, monks, and nuns is not virginity itself, but avowed celibates’ refusal to admit their creaturely drives, as Calvin explains: “Our only reason for disapproving of the vow of celibacy is, because it is improperly regarded as an act of worship, and is rashly undertaken by persons who have not the power of keeping it” (Institutes 4.13.18). Disgusted that “the people continue to admire as if the monastic life alone were angelic, perfect and purified from every vice,” when in fact “you will scarcely find one in ten [monasteries] which is not rather a brothel than a sacred abode of chastity,” Calvin describes the vow of lifelong chastity as an act of “insane audacity,” an arrogant denial of human nature that is all the more galling in that celibates “aspire to the praise of humility” (Institutes 4.13. 11, 15, 3). “Priests, monks, and nuns,” Calvin writes, “forgetful of their infirmity, are confident of their fitness for celibacy. . . . How can they presume to shake off the common feelings of their nature for a whole lifetime, seeing the gift of continence is often granted for a certain time as occasion requires?” (Institutes 4.13.3). Celibates make a promise that is not theirs to keep because true chastity—like true faith—is a gift of God. Then, in their “contumacious obstinacy,” they eschew the physic of marriage, allowing the “disease of incontinence” to fester (Institutes 4.13.21).
However much they attack the hypocrisy of vowed celibates, Luther and Calvin still concede that God may give the gift of bodily and spiritual purity to a chosen few. What Dale B. Martin has remarked of Jesus’s sexuality is here a general principle of the response to virginity: “Not to experience desire at all renders someone, in our world, so abnormal as to be practically nonhuman.”55 Luther describes those who “have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of heaven” as “spiritually rich and exalted persons,” but insists that “such persons are rare, not one in a thousand, for they are a special miracle of God.”56 Calvin, similarly, acknowledges that “virginity . . . is a virtue not to be despised” and that those who have this gift should remain celibate so that “they may be less encumbered in [God’s] service” (Institutes 2.8.42, 43).57 Yet he immediately warns that “since there are many on whom this blessing is conferred only for a time, let everyone, in abstaining from marriage, do it so long as he is fit to endure celibacy. If he has not the power of subduing his passion, let him understand that the Lord has made it obligatory on him to marry,” for “even if he abstains from the outward act . . . his mind may in the meantime be inwardly inflamed with lust” (Institutes 2.8.43). Like Augustine, Calvin stresses that virginity is not just a physical state. Rather, “by continence I mean not merely that by which the body is kept pure from fornication, but that by which the mind keeps its chastity untainted. For Paul enjoins caution not only against external lasciviousness, but also burning of mind” (Institutes 4.13.17). True virgins do not need to refrain from sex because they do not want it in the first place. These elect burn only for God.
Protestant Reformers, in short, did not dispute the Pauline view of sex as a pathological compulsion derived from the fall. Instead, they made it the basis of their defense of clerical marriage: since lay marriage had always been encouraged, even elevated to a holy sacrament, it was its expansion to clergy and theological redefinition that was Protestantism’s real break with the Catholic Church. Luther maintains that the drive to copulate “is not a matter of free choice or decision but a natural and necessary thing” (Estate 148). Those who attempt to withstand an urge “more necessary than sleeping and waking, eating and drinking, and emptying the bowels and bladder” ensure that the libido will “[go] its way through fornication, adultery, and secret sins, for this is a matter of nature and not of choice” (Estate 148). Luther follows Augustine in affirming that “since the fall marriage has been adulterated with wicked lust”—it is much better to marry than to burn, but marriage still “may be likened to a hospital for incurables which prevents inmates from falling into graver sin” (Sermon 413, 414). The medicine of conjugal sex must be taken in modestly calibrated doses, Luther cautions: “A man has to control himself and not make a filthy sow’s sty of his marriage” (Sermon 415).
Calvin is even more expansive about the dangers that lurk in the nuptial bed. Even as those without the gift of continence “cure their infirmity” by engaging in conjugal sex, they must take care that the treatment not exacerbate the disease:
When spouses are made aware that their union is blessed by the Lord, they are thereby reminded that they must not give way to intemperate and unrestrained indulgence. For though honorable wedlock veils the turpitude of incontinence, it does not follow that it ought forthwith to become a stimulus [irritamentum] to it. Wherefore, let spouses consider that all things are not lawful for them. Let there be sobriety in the behavior of the husband toward the wife, and of the wife in her turn toward the husband; each so acting as not to do anything unbecoming the dignity and temperance of married life. Marriage contracted in the Lord ought to exhibit measure and modesty [modum et modestiam]—not run to the extreme of wantonness [lasciviam]. This excess Ambrose censured gravely, but not undeservedly, when he described the man who shows no modesty or comeliness [nullam erecundiae vel honestatis] in conjugal intercourse, as committing adultery with his wife. (Institutes 2.8.44)
In light of the Reformers’ acceptance of the Augustinian principle that postlapsarian humans lack the capacity to control not just body but mind, such calls for “sobriety,” “dignity,” “temperance,” “measure,” “modesty,” and “comeliness” in “conjugal intercourse” are both comic and futile. If arousal defies the conscious will, one must wonder how conjugal sex acts can avoid “anything unbecoming the dignity and temperance of married life.” What would modest and comely sex look like? Are there rules? Wouldn’t such rules themselves push the bounds of modesty in that their formulation requires thinking about what could render human sex more like what goes on in a “sow’s sty”? If there are no rules, how can a couple know at what point their perfunctory due benevolence begins to “run to the extreme of wantonness”? And even if conjugal intercourse never becomes “intemperate and unrestrained” in reality, what of fantasy? Might not the same be said of the spouse as Calvin says of the virgin: “Even if he abstains from the outward act . . . his mind may in the meantime be inwardly inflamed with lust” (Institutes 2.8.43)?
As a “hospital for incurables,” marriage is not a sign of innocence but an admission of sinful desire. Marriage is holier than celibacy because it replaces “contumacious obstinacy” with a humble, public acknowledgment that “the sin of unchastity urges and lurks within” (Institutes 4.13.21). In Luther’s and Calvin’s theology, the differentiation of good and bad sex, disease and cure, that so profoundly shapes modern law, culture, and government policy had yet to take place. As the delibidinized, companionate, procreative view of marriage we currently take for granted emerged slowly and unevenly, some of the period’s major cultural forms questioned whether it was attainable, or even appealing. Below, I examine Shakespeare’s and Spenser’s lyrics as two important examples of this ambivalence.
The focus on procreation by the dissent in Obergefell, as in white evangelical and right-wing political discourse more generally, works to desexualize marriage. In a particularly pithy formulation of this view, Edelman aligns reproduction, Christianity, and heteronormativity in describing “the envy-, contempt-, and anxiety-inducing fixation on [queers’] freedom from the necessity of translating the corrupt, unregenerate vulgate of fucking into the infinitely tonier, indeed sacramental, Latin of procreation.”58 The privileging of procreative sex, Edelman observes, requires that
all sensory experience, all pleasure of the flesh, must be borne away from this fantasy of futurity secured, eternity’s plan fulfilled. . . . Paradoxically, the child of the two-parent family thus proves that its parents don’t fuck and on its tiny shoulders it carries the burden of maintaining the fantasy of a time to come in which meaning, at last made present to itself, no longer depends on the fantasy of its attainment in time to come.59
Reproductive futurism subordinates the present act of sex (“fucking”) to its future potential (“procreation”), mimicking a triumph of spirit over flesh. This “comic book version of heterosexuality” is at once teleological and typological, with the final part, the Child, retroactively revealing love, marriage, and sex to have been directed at obeying the divine command to “be fruitful, and multiply” all along.60
The first seventeen sonnets in Shakespeare’s sequence, conventionally called the “procreation sonnets,” are perhaps the best-known cultural monument to a fantasy of delibidinized procreation that suppresses the details of the male erection and ejaculation upon which conception depends. In considering this absence of sex in the context of religious and medical representations of orgasm, as well as that of Shakespeare’s own Sonnet 129, I consider the implications for a longer history of sexual discourse of Annamarie Jagose’s argument that orgasm is not just a bodily reflex; it is “a complexly contradictory formation, potentially disruptive of many of the sedimenting critical frameworks by which we have grown accustomed to apprehending sexuality.”61 Among these, I argue, are the gendered and racial hierarchies that inform the segregation of sex from propagation that Edelman describes.
Shakespeare’s procreation sonnets are replete with images of husbandry and planting (1, 3, 13, 15, 16); thrift, traffic, moneylending, and usury (4, 6, 9, 13); distillation (5, 6); printing (11); and breeding (12). Urging the fair youth to marry and beget an heir (or ten, as Sonnet 6 suggests), the poetic speaker, Will, lays bare the economic dimension of marriage as a means of regulating sexuality and privatizing wealth.62 He says nothing about passion or companionship: reproduction in the procreation sonnets is work. These poems treat sex as an activity about “as exciting as putting up preserves,” as Richard Halpern puts it, and this is part of the sonnets’ strategic separation of a poetics of the sublime, focused on the disruptiveness of jouissance, from a poetics of the beautiful, focused on the monotony of procreation.63 These poems convey a grim Christian view of reproduction in which, as Martin summarizes, “marriage . . . was completely implicated in the dreaded cycle of sex, birth, death, and decay, followed by more sex, birth, death and decay.”64 This cycle appears in the opening poem of Shakespeare’s sequence:
From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies—
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament
And only herald to the gaudy spring
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And tender churl mak’st waste in niggarding.
Pity the world, or else this glutton be—
To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee. (1.1–14)
The “we” of line 1 assumes that the desire to reproduce beauty naturally follows from an appreciation of “fairest creatures.” Who does not want more fair creatures in the world? What kind of person would allow “beauty’s rose” to die? We get an answer in the second quatrain: “But thou.” In the procreation sonnets, as Aaron Kunin observes, the youth is not part of the “we” for whom Will speaks.65 He is at odds with this natural and theological imperative to perpetuate God’s creation. In response, Will warns (in an apocalyptic vision, as we have seen, shared by Justice Roberts), “If all were minded so, the times should cease, / And threescore year would make the world away” (11.7–8). Setting himself athwart the “we,” at odds with the consensus of “all,” the youth is designated as queer insofar as he, to borrow another of Edelman’s phrases, is “not ‘fighting for the children,’” but is stubbornly standing “outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism” to insist, like the Pauline apostle and the modern sinthomosexual, that “the future stop[s] here.”66 The procreation sonnets urge the youth to conform his desires to the commonsense assertion that, faced with the choice to “increase” or “die,” “we” will always choose the former.
As readers at least since Oscar Wilde have noticed, however, the sonnets will go on to replace the labors of reproductive sex with the pleasures of poetic generation. Initially, the sonnets treat poetry as a fallback option, arguing that “a mightier way” of defeating time and death would be to till those “many maiden gardens yet unset,” who “With virtuous wish would bear your living flowers” (16.1, 6–7). But the speaker gradually leaves off begging the youth to take action and “Make thee another self for love of me” in favor of assuring him that poetry will itself take care of the future: “As he takes from you, I engraft you new” (10.13, 15.14). The imperative to reproduce, so seemingly urgent in the early sonnets, is never mentioned again after Sonnet 17, which makes a final, if feeble, attempt to convince the youth to supplement poetry with progeny in order to defeat mortality. The “yellowed” pages of Will’s verse may one day be “scorned” as poetic hyperbole if they are not supplemented by flesh-and-blood offspring who will provide living testimony to the youth’s erstwhile beauty: “But were some child of yours alive that time, / You should live twice in it and in my rhyme” (17.9, 10, 13–14). From this point on, the sequence confidently advertises its own independent preservative power, which, as Kunin points out, requires neither the youth’s participation nor his consent: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee” (18.13–14; my emphasis).67 A turn from biological procreation, as scholars have long noticed, is also a turn away from women and toward a fantasy, at least as ancient as Plato’s Symposium, of male intellectual creation. The poet’s love replaces dutiful generation with something both more pleasurable and more dignified. The asexual reproduction of poetry preserves spiritual beauty through what Freud would call sublimation, the redirection of libidinal impulses to culturally sanctioned projects.68
This sidelining of compulsory heterosexual reproduction in favor of voluntary same-sex love and poetic creation might seem to be unproblematically queer, offering a challenge to modern heteronormative family values. But, as I discussed in chapter 2, Shakespeare’s homoerotic poetics themselves incorporate gendered and racial exclusions inimical to queer universalism. Insofar as the reproductive imperative on which “we” all agree is limited to increasing “fair creatures,” we must notice with Sharon Holland that “jettisoning the biological as the province of women in order to open up the space for queer (re)production does not facilitate the dismantling of racism’s foundational logics.”69 The fair youth of the sonnets is being scolded for what Holland summarizes as “the failure to (re)produce the Anglo-Saxon.”70 Moreover, Holland writes, “If we were to take reproduction here as part of the matrix of racialized desire, we can then see how this turn away from reproduction is racially marked, not because it reveals a loss of Anglo-Saxon sanguinity per se, but because it also produces reproduction as a function of white racial belonging rather than as a function of all racial belonging.”71 The sonnets’ biopolitical project assumes that “we” do not desire the increase of less fair creatures, through childbirth or through poetry; “we” do not mind if their genes or their memories die. Sonnet 11 is quite explicit about the sequence’s ruthless logic of selective preservation: “Let those whom nature hath not made for store, / Harsh, featureless, and rude, barrenly perish” (11.9–10).
I build here on Kim F. Hall’s argument that by attending to the racialized import of the word “fair,” we can appreciate that the delibidinized or sublimated generation that the sonnets recommend also bespeaks a nascent white supremacist ideology.72 The poetic preservation of fair creatures, no less than their physical increase, is based on racial selection that shrugs at the possibility that creatures who are not fair—not beautiful, not white—will “barrenly perish.” A celebration of “legitimate” procreation, no less in Shakespeare’s sonnets than in modern attacks on “welfare queens,” cannot fully dissever itself from eugenics. Indeed, as a reproductive technology, poetry is not entirely separate conceptually from modern forms of asexual human generation. In-utero and in-vitro fertilization, egg donation, and surrogacy all involve deciding who will donate sperm, ovum, or womb. Would-be parents receive detailed information to help in donor selection: medical history, education level, height, hair and eye color, hobbies, and—often first and foremost—racial and ethnic background. Assuming the desire for racialized selection, modern reproductive assistance makes medically explicit the erotic life of racism that Shakespeare’s poetic reproduction romanticizes and naturalizes.
Rather than treat the sonnets’ male homopoesis as a wholly laudable alternative to the ideal of reproductive futurism, we might notice that its willful division of passion from procreation itself undermines a modern view that married, reproductive sex is uniquely innocent. The problem with sexual generation—and this is a problem, I want to stress, that Shakespeare’s procreation sonnets conspicuously obscure—is that it requires orgasm, which is a particularly poignant expression of the feebleness of postlapsarian will. As Augustine recognized, lust
disturbs the whole man, when the mental emotion combines and mingles with the physical craving, resulting in a pleasure surpassing all physical delights. So intense is the pleasure that when it reaches its climax there is an almost total extinction of mental alertness; the intellectual sentries, as it were, are overwhelmed. (CG 14.16)
Nor do marriage or procreation mitigate this loss of control. For while “any friend of wisdom and holy joys who lives a married life . . . would prefer, if possible, to beget children without lust of this kind,” Augustine insists,
not even the lovers of this kind of pleasure [voluptatis] are moved either to conjugal intercourse or to the impure indulgences of vice [inmunditias faglitiorum: “filthy outrage” or “disgrace”], just when they have so willed. Sometimes the impulse is an unwanted intruder, sometimes it abandons the eager lover, and desire cools off in the body while it is at boiling heat in the mind. (CG 14.16)
The Renaissance translation of City of God is more explicit, stressing “the shame that accompanies copulation, as well in harlotry as in marriage.”73 It is because sex betrays spiritual impotence that even though conjugal and procreative intercourse is “lawful and respectable,” it nonetheless “blushes to be seen” to the extent that “a man would be less put out by a crowd of spectators watching him visiting his anger unjustly upon another man than by one person observing him when he is having lawful intercourse with his wife” (CG 14.18, 19).
Augustine’s account of Edenic affection anticipates modern idealizations of marriage: “Between man and wife there was a faithful partnership based on love and mutual respect” (CG 14.26). Imagining in-utero fertilization avant la lettre, Augustine describes prelapsarian reproduction in which male semen can enter the womb as easily as female semen—long believed to be the content of menstruation—can leave it, all without penetration:
Although we cannot prove this in experience, it therefore does not follow that we should not believe that when those parts of the body were not activated by the turbulent heat of passion but brought into service by deliberate use of power when the need arose, the male seed could have been dispatched into the womb [ita tunc potuisse utero coniugis salva integritate feminei genitalis virile semen inmitti], with no loss of the wife’s integrity, just as the menstrual flux can now be produced from the womb of a virgin without loss of maidenhead. For the seed could be injected through the same passage by which the flux is ejected. Now just as the female womb might have been opened for parturition by a natural impulse when the time was ripe, instead of by the groans of travail, so the two sexes might have been united for impregnation and conception by an act of will, instead of by a lustful craving. (CG 14.26)
Unfortunately, Augustine tells us, this immaculate conception “was not in fact experienced by those for whom it was available, because their sin happened first, and they incurred the penalty of exile from paradise before they could unite in the task of propagation as a deliberate act undisturbed by passion” (CG 14.26). The prelapsarian love theoretically possible for Adam and Eve is emphatically not within our postlapsarian capacity. As a result, Augustine admits, even his own clinical discussion of emission, menstruation, conception, and parturition is “bound to induce a feeling of shame, under present conditions,” for after the fall the very attempt to imagine virtuous sex “now suggests to the mind only the turbulent lust which we experience, not the calm act of will imagined in my speculation” (CG 14.26).
The conviction that irrational lust was the motor of generation was not limited to religious writing. In fact, this view was essential to early modern anatomical tracts and marital advice books ostensibly focused on explaining conception, pregnancy, and childbirth to a lay audience. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, works such as Thomas Vicary’s 1586 The English-Mans Treasure, Helkiah Crooke’s 1615 Mikrokosmographia, Nicolas Culpepper’s Directory for Midwives (published in two parts in 1651 and 1676), the anonymous 1684 Aristotle’s Masterpiece, and Nicholas Venette’s 1703 The Mysteries of Conjugal Love Reveal’d offered to reveal the secrets of great sex on the grounds that both male and female orgasm were necessary to procreation.74 These manuals advertised the medical credentials of their authors, perhaps because they were often hard to distinguish from pornography in their explicit rendering of male and female genitalia, erection, penetration, and ejaculation. Crooke seeks to avoid this generic confusion when he prefaces his Mikrokosmographia with a denial that his “figures are as obscoene as Aretines.”75 The fact that Crooke takes the time to distinguish this medical textbook from Pietro Aretino’s notorious I Modi (often regarded the first modern printed pornography) indicates that he is aware that his explicit descriptions have the potential to titillate readers. Indeed, his disavowal of this potential may also have served to advertise it.
In general, early modern medicine tended to eschew the Aristotelian view of women as contributing to generation only passive matter to be shaped and quickened by male form. Vicary, for instance, follows the Hippocratic and Galenic principle that conception is a collaborative effort requiring the ejaculation of both male and female seed, in which “eche of them worketh in the other, and suffereth in the other, [to] engender Embreon,” while Culpepper elaborates that “conception is an action of the womb, after fruitful seed both male and female is received, mixed and nourished, & its strength is stirred up to do its office.”76 Because female as well as male orgasm in the early modern period was deemed essential to conception, anatomical tracts and conjugal advice books were as interested in female arousal as male arousal. According to Aristotle’s Masterpiece, not only conception but also penetration requires female arousal, for the vaginal passage plays nearly as active a role in intercourse as the penis. As this popular medical text has it, “Whilst the passage is replete with Spirit and Vital Blood, it becomes more strait for embracing the Penis.”77 With the sixteenth-century “discovery” of the clitoris as an external “female penis,” anatomies also encouraged clitoral stimulation as necessary to reproductive sexuality. Culpepper, for instance, notes that “the part at the top [of the pudenda] is hard and nervous, and swells like a Yard [penis] in Venery.”78 More expansively, Venette explained that “there is a part above the Nymphae longer more or less than half a finger, called by Anatomists Clitoris, which I may justly term the Fury and Rage of Love. There Nature has plac’d the seat of Pleasure and Lust, as it has on the other hand in the Glans of Man. There it has plac’d those excessive Ticklings, and there is Leachery and Lasciviousness establish’d.”79 Venette’s comment betrays a more general ambivalence shared by many anatomies: they deemed female arousal and orgasm necessary to conception even as they expressed anxiety about its propriety and deemed clitoral hypertrophy a foreign affliction peculiar to the Indies, Turkey, and North Africa.80
Early modern anatomies share the view that conception requires mutual orgasm, and orgasm requires a loss of reason and self-possession—an equally ecstatic and shaming surrender of the self and its interests. Crooke describes sexual arousal as “a sting or rage of pleasure, as whereby we are transported for a time as it were out of our selues,” and he follows Augustine in denying that such arousal is exclusively physical, for “this part or member is not erected without the help of the imagination.”81 Extolling the connection between arousal, orgasm, and procreation, Crooke portrays loss of dignity as necessary to the perpetuation of the species:
The wonderfull prouidence of Nature hath giuen to all Creatures certayne goades and prouocations of lust, and an impotent desire of copulation for the preseruation of the seuerall kindes of Creatures. . . . This sting of pleasure was very necessary, without which man especially the one sexe in scorne and detestation of so brutish and base a work, the other for fear of payne and trouble, would have abhorred this worke of Nature.82
Nearly a century later, Venette adds that “as soon as the Fancy is touched, and the small Fibres of the Brain shaken by the Thoughts of Love, there is an internal Sweat in our Privy Parts, and the Spirits which rush thither with Precipitation.”83 Whereas handbooks detailing the mechanics of sex would seem quite distinct from Protestant admonishments to avoid excessive arousal, these manuals remained uneasy about the act of generation, recognizing its relation to fornication and sodomy—“brutish and base” work for men that, if successful, will bring women “payne and trouble.” The sacrificial schema Edelman describes is, in the early modern view, one that begins with vulgar fucking and is only retroactively recategorized as tasteful procreation.
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 indicates that the belief that orgasm necessarily overcomes reason and self-interest might help account for the procreation sonnets’ avoidance of sex. Here, the speaker regrets succumbing to what Crooke calls the “goades and prouocations of lust”:
Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action, and till action lust
Is perjured, murd’rous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had,
Past reason hated as a swallowed bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so,
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme,
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe,
Before, a joy proposed, behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows, yet none knows well
To shun the heav’n that leads men to this hell. (129.1–14)
The first sentence of the poem—stretching from lines 1 to 12—is primarily devoted to adjectives and adjectival phrases describing what lust is like before action, or consummation. The regular iambs and multisyllabic words of the first twelve lines combine with the breathless accumulation of adjectives to propel the reader quickly through the poem, mimicking what Christian doctrine and anatomical science agreed are the “goads and provocations of lust.” The effect is intensified by the formal repetitions in the long first sentence. Participial phrases translate action into descriptive quality: “Enjoyed no sooner,” “despisèd straight,” “Past reason hunted,” “Past reason hated,” “On purpose laid.” Anadiplosis, the repetition of the last word of one line as the first word of the next, structurally registers the speaker’s enclosure within the “mad”—enraged, insane—force of lust, which “make[s] the taker mad; / Mad in pursuit, and in possession so.” The repeated oscillation between past, present, and future in verb tense as well as specific temporal markers forges a sense of helpless, inevitable compulsion to repeat: “is lust . . . till action”; “Had, having, and in quest to have”; “in proof, and proved”; “Before . . . behind.” The grammar and rhetoric of lines 1–12 override line breaks and distinctions between quatrains so that we are mired in the speaker’s own experience of loss of logical thought and purposive agency. There is no sense of development or teleology, simply an outburst in which bliss and woe, self-gratification and self-loss, are indistinguishable.
The grammatical and lexical loss of control enacted by the first twelve lines is summarized in the couplet as “All this.” This belated assertion that the “hell” of postcoital shame is common knowledge casts Will’s agitation as fury at the human condition, the loss of self and agency that Bersani influentially described as the “self-shattering” of jouissance. The speaker’s inability to withstand the lure of self-dissolution is registered in the word “heav’n,” a disyllabic word that must be compressed for the line to scan. Set amidst the calm, determined monosyllables of the final iambic couplet, “heav’n” names the thwarted will to transcend the “hell” of creaturely self-division. As early modern slang for the genitals, “hell” offers an Augustinian synecdoche for our more pervasive inability to know or direct our own actions and motives.
While the self-loathing of Sonnet 129 would appear to be worlds away from the reproductive propaganda of the first seventeen sonnets, 129 may retrospectively illuminate the procreation sonnets’ clinical, sexless depiction of biological reproduction, which allows speaker, addressee, and readers to avoid thinking about what is required for the propagation these poems urge. Reading Sonnet 129, orgasm sounds like something one wouldn’t wish on an enemy, much less a “fair” beloved. But in the accounts of writers as different as Augustine and Crooke the indignity detailed in 129 is indispensable to human reproduction. Moreover, one cannot know whether a given “expense of spirit” has been a performance of procreative duty or a “waste of shame” until well after the fact. Given that sodomy was defined as a “waste” of semen on sex that fails to serve a reproductive purpose, the absence of information as to the gender of Will’s partner in 129 is telling—this could equally be the “fair” youth or the “black” mistress.84 Because after the fall the human will became divided and inscrutable, the divine command of Genesis to “be fruitful, and multiply” cannot be purposively obeyed, even by married heterosexual couples.
In other words, when it comes to procreation, obedience to divine command is rendered impossible not only by the inscrutable and divided will but also by simple biological facts. Any given instance of heterosexual intercourse is known to be procreative only retrospectively, and the precise operations of human pregnancy are as immune to agency and decision as those of digestion and planting. This is true now, when pregnancy cannot be tested until at least a couple of weeks after conception; in the early modern period the timespan between a given sex act and certain knowledge of pregnancy was several months.85 In the heat of the moment, procreation and sodomy cannot be conclusively distinguished, for postlapsarian couples can never be sure whether they are having sex in compliance with God’s prelapsarian command to multiply or their own lustful impulses. To put it another way, the mutual orgasm deemed necessary to procreation also makes the dutiful sex of Christian matrimony hard to distinguish from the “Saracen enjoyment” that, Jeffrey Cohen has shown, made jouissance a mark of racial difference.86
To reverse Edelman’s formulation, in Renaissance medical tracts the tony Latin of procreation—along with the racial and cultural hierarchies of the humanist education that Latin exemplifies—is inevitably translated into the vernacular of fucking. But what of that other justification of marriage, companionship based on spiritualized love and friendship? Is Shakespeare typical in his disgust at sexual climax? Or is it possible to imagine modest and comely copulation? For many literary critics, Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion respond to this last question with a strong “yes,” asserting the dignity and mutual respect of conjugal desire. Written to commemorate Spenser’s marriage to his second wife, Elizabeth Boyle, the Amoretti and Epithalamion were published in a single volume as companion poems in 1595. Reading this pair of lyric sequences according to theories of the “Puritan art of love” deemed to accompany the rise of companionate marriage, scholars have widely agreed that they offer a firmly Protestant alternative to Petrarchan convention.87 In this view, previous sonnet sequences anatomize the pain of desires that are at once illicit and unrequited. These earlier Petrarchan lyrics reveal the psychic cost of the division of passionate love from legitimate marriage, and they are a product, in part, of a Catholic idealization of virginity as the highest spiritual state. Spenser’s love lyrics tell a different story, this argument goes, one in which lawful desires are pursued through sincere courtship and satisfied in loving Protestant marriage.88 Their commemoration of “such loue not lyke to lusts of baser kind” and declaration that marriage is an institution in which “spotlesse pleasure builds her sacred bowre” reassures us that, yes, there is innocent sex.89
Resisting this optimistic reading, a number of critics have rightly noted the tensions inherent in Spenser’s Reformed views of human love.90 I build on this work to focus in this last section on the profound anxiety expressed by the Amoretti and Epithalamion about both the speaker’s own desires and his beloved’s responses. The poems are deeply conscious of what Warner calls the “indignity” of sex, the human vulnerability and aggression that erotic desire uniquely manifests. Together, the Amoretti and Epithalamion demonstrate that Protestant ideals of sexual innocence and married chastity may themselves encourage the failure of mutuality and recognition that foment psychic and physical violence. The Amoretti and Ephithalamion offer a Pauline portrait of marriage, with the speaker, at least, following the principle that it is better to marry than to burn (in “boyling sweat,” no less [Amoretti 30.7]). Paul, as I discussed above, quite explicitly prefers celibacy, declaring that “It were good for a man not to touch a woman” (GB, 1 Cor. 7:1). “Nevertheless,” he concedes, once married,
let the husband give unto the wife due benevolence, and likewise also the wife unto the husband. The wife hath not the power of her own body, but the husband; and likewise also the husband hath not the power of his own body, but the wife. Defraud not one another, except it be with consent for a time, that ye may give yourselves to fasting and prayer, and again come together, that Satan tempt you not for your incontinency. (GB, 1 Cor. 7:2–5; emphasis in original)
Paul’s accommodation presumes equal desire between husband and wife, each entitled to use the other’s body to quench the burning that could lead to “incontinency.” One spouse’s desire becomes the other’s debt. This scenario may help explain how a married couple has modest and comely sex: if one partner is just doing a favor or paying a debt, then copulation may achieve something like “sobriety” rather than “run to the extreme of wantonness.” Moreover, as Kahn points out, Protestant writers’ emphasis on marital chastity “lodges the problem of desire in women.”91 Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion are symptomatic of the gendered asymmetry Kahn examines, for in these poems the beloved is never burning and has no interest in claiming any benevolence that the poet might offer her. Spenser’s poetic speaker idealizes his beloved as a paradigm of chastity so absolute as to border on apathy and cruelty. (I’ll call these personae “Edmund” and “Elizabeth,” respectively, although such autobiographical designations, however traditionally assumed, are Spenser’s own fictionalizations.) Like Petrarch’s virginal Laura, Spenser’s Elizabeth “seems to scorne / base thing, and think how she to heauen may climb” (13.10). She wants out of her body, that clod of “earth” that is “loathsome and forlorne” and “hinders heauenly thoughts with drossy slime” (13.11, 12). By contrast, “My loue is lyke to yse, and I to fyre,” Edmund complains, wondering how his “exceeding heat / is not delayd by her hart frosen cold”; instead, “I burne much more in boyling sweat” (30.1, 5–6, 7). In what was by the 1590s well-established Petrarchan convention, the Amoretti depicts Edmund and Elizabeth’s courtship as an allegory of the struggle between the pure spirit (hers) and the corrupt flesh (his). The difference is that in Spenser’s story, Elizabeth “halfe trembling” allows herself to be “fyrmely tyde” “with her owne goodwill” three-quarters of the way through the Amoretti (67.11–12). The Epithalamion celebrates their nuptials, equally characterized by Edmund’s impatient passion and Elizabeth’s bashful reluctance. Rejecting a Pauline principle of mutual incontinence, in other words, Spenser makes marriage respectable at the cost of female sexual arousal. If her mind is only on heaven, Elizabeth’s consent to worldly marriage is consent to undesired sex.
For a number of critics, the preoccupation with Elizabeth’s lack of sexual appetite is the highest form of praise. She is “above tempests and passions”; as “female creator-nurturer,” she fosters a marriage in which “materiality is incorporated into spirituality, chastity is redefined”; she redeems Edmund, showing “how a woman may tame a man to love her so that his simplicity may be truly naked, his grace spotless.”92 Chivalrous praise of female purity accords with the cultural feminist claim that men’s sexual rapaciousness appears in a general will to dominance, but women are instinctively cooperative and nurturing.93 In this ubiquitous cultural narrative, men want sex (“materiality”) and women want love (“spirituality”). Already domesticated themselves, women can “tame” feral men, teaching them to enjoy backrubs and bubble baths instead of porn and promiscuous sex. A good woman can save even the most inveterate playboy from his own base instincts, gently compelling him to grow up and settle down.
Because what Henry Abelove dubs “sexual intercourse so-called” (“cross-sex genital intercourse [penis in vagina, vagina around penis, with seminal emission uninterrupted])” can be accomplished without female arousal but not without male erection, female innocence protects an ideal of marriage as somehow above the sex it legally sanctions.94 But the idealization of female chastity, whether in service of normative heterosexuality or feminist separatism, also tends to naturalize male sexual rapacity and violence. As Rubin has argued, the tendency of some second-wave feminists to treat heterosexual sex as “dangerous and violent” is “predicated on a Victorian model of distribution of libido in terms of male and female. There was the good woman who was not sexual. There is the man who is sexual. So whenever sex happens between a good woman and a man, it’s a kind of violation of her.”95 In this view, male aggression becomes normalized, creating what Carol Vance describes as “a culturally dictated chain of reasoning” through which “women become the moral custodians of male behavior. . . . Self-control and watchfulness become major and necessary female virtues.”96
It is in the conviction that female consent is not a sufficient measure of the difference between wanted and unwanted sex that the two sides of the feminist sex wars unexpectedly converge. For while they disagree on the extent to which women’s enjoyment of promiscuity, BDSM, and pornography is a sign of sexual self-determination or patriarchal false consciousness, both pro- and antisex feminists agree that within a culture that assumes male initiative and female passivity, bare “consent” is on a continuum with coercion. Following Rubin’s and Vance’s logic, we can see that for women’s “no” to be understood as inviolable, “yes” must go beyond mere, or even affirmative, consent—rather, women must be permitted to desire and initiate sex. This challenge to traditional ideas of courtship must be understood in the context of a cultural romanticization of male persistence. The need for women to play hard-to-get lest they devalue themselves by seeming too “easy” was already a cliché by the sixteenth century. Once refusal is rescripted as coyness, bare consent—or even the absence or abatement of physical resistance—counts as the difference between seduction and rape, legitimating a whole range of coercive behaviors. If women can only properly say “no” (or “wait”), then refusal is hard to distinguish from deferral. In a culture that measures a woman’s value in inverse relation to her availability, withholding sex becomes the means of achieving love and marriage. Concomitantly, the aggression uniquely lauded in the white male—not taking no for an answer—is recategorized as romance. As Catharine A. MacKinnon puts it, given the cultural valorization of (white) male pursuit, one in which even initially resistant women are assumed to be susceptible to courtship and seduction, “That consent rather than nonmutuality is the line between rape and intercourse further exposes the inequality in normal social expectations. . . . If sex is ordinarily accepted as something men do to women, the better question would be whether consent is a meaningful concept.”97 In other words, for both pro- and antisex feminists, unwanted sex will be distinguishable from wanted sex only when women can do the asking without appearing pathetic or pathological. Until then, there is all too fine a line between being swept off one’s feet and being badgered into submission.
Spenser’s Amoretti, obsessed as it is with female sexual purity, brings this problem to the fore in courting his “stubborne damzell” (29.1) and “hop[ing] her stubborne hart to bend” (51.11). Edmund wants Elizabeth’s consent but not her desire. He repeatedly distinguishes spiritual love from physical lust, insisting that he does not want Elizabeth’s “base affections” (8.6; my emphasis). He wants “such loue not lyke to lusts of baser kynd,” “chast affects,” “chast desires” (6.3, 6.12, 8.8; my emphasis). This dynamic, in which female chastity checks male appetite in service of Christian marriage, is also racialized throughout the Amoretti. Elizabeth’s attractive combination of desirability and lack of desire earns her the epitaph “proud fayre,” two qualities that reinforce one another. In the Petrarchan iconography that shapes the Amoretti, Elizabeth is “proud” in the sense of prideful because she is beautiful, and she is beautiful because she is white. But she is also “proud” in the sense that she is not subject to shameful “lusts of baser kind,” and this pride sustains her fairness as a valuable property.
Another of Spenser’s works, The Faerie Queene, offers a specific racialization of lust that sets that of the Amoretti and Ephithalamion in relief. As I have discussed elsewhere, in one episode, the maiden bride Amoret—whose name allegorizes the nuptial love celebrated in the Amoretti—enacts the danger of female desire, even within marriage.98 Having been kidnapped on her wedding day before the marriage could be consummated, Amoret actively yearns to be reunited with her husband. Her desire, however, is expressed as ravishment by her own passions: Amoret is “snatched vp” “vnawares” by the monster Lust.99 Spenser’s detailed description of this monster brings to the fore the racialization of lust that I discussed in chapter 2. “All ouergrowne with haire,” with his “neather lip” resembling “a wide deepe poke,” his “huge great nose” “empurpled all with bloud,” and his “wide long eares,” Lust is an assemblage of male and female genitalia (The Faerie Queene 4.7.5, 6). Spenser’s precise description of Lust’s obscene features derives from racial and protocolonial discourses that understand lust, and the crimen contra natura it provokes, as the specific attribute of Irish, Indigenous American, Eastern, and African peoples. Lust, a seminaked “wilde and saluage man,” is also an insatiable sodomite and cannibal who “liu’d all on rauin and on rape / Of men and beasts; and fed on fleshly gore,” and the size of his labia-like ears exceeds those “of Elephants by Indus flood” (The Faerie Queene 4.7.5, 6).100 The multiple anatomical, racial, colonial, and moral contexts that come together in the figure of Lust suggest that white femininity cannot be reconciled with sexual appetite, even within the confines of marriage. Even after she is rescued, Amoret, “sorely bruz’d,” remains “neare vnto decay” (The Faerie Queene 4.7.35) until King Arthur, the poem’s representative of divine magnanimity, treats her with drops of “pretious liquor” (The Faerie Queene 4.8.20)—the blood of Christ that, the Gospel of John tells us, “cleanseth us from all sin” (GB, 1 John 1:7). The lesson of the allegory is that even the most seemingly virginal among us may be swept away by lust, a vulnerability that no human act, including marriage, can remedy. The best we can do is face up to this shame and hope for grace.
The episode of Amoret and Lust in The Faerie Queene allows us to see that the sexual purity celebrated in the Amoretti and Epithalamion at once naturalizes male violence and racializes female innocence—no coincidence, given Spenser’s own colonial activities in Ireland.101 Yet insofar as The Faerie Queene is an allegory, Lust and Amoret represent not only a colonial encounter between virginal self and debauched other but also a battle within the divided soul. In this psychomachia, the threat figured by the racialized other is revealed to reside, ineradicably, within the deepest recesses of the self. The episode of Lust and Amoret illuminates Amoretti 58, the sequence’s strongest statement of the Augustinian conviction of innate human corruption on which Reformed arguments for clerical marriage were grounded. Here, it is the lady’s fallen condition, rather than the poet’s, that is the focus. This sonnet stands out amidst the multiple assertions of Elizabeth’s sexual purity, for it suggests that poet and mistress may be equally frail and fleshly creatures:
By her that is most assured to her selfe.
Weake is th’assurance that weake flesh reposeth
In her owne powre and scorneth others ayde:
that soonest fals when as she most supposeth
her selfe assurd, and is of nought affrayd.
All flesh is frayle, and all her strength vnstayd,
like a vaine bubble blowen up with ayre:
deuouring tyme and changeful chance haue prayd
her glories pride that none may it repayre.
Ne none so rich or wise, so strong or fayre,
but fayleth trusting on his owne assurance:
and he that standeth on the hyghest stayre
fals lowest: for on earth nought hath enduraunce.
Why then doe ye proud fayre, misdeeme so farre,
that to your selfe ye most assured arre? (58.1–14; Spenser’s emphasis)
The meaning of this sonnet depends in large part on how one reads the line that prefaces it: “By her that is most assured to her selfe.” If one reads “by her” as meaning “concerning her,” as Richard McCabe has suggested, one can paraphrase it as “concerning the woman who is most certain of and attached to herself.”102 The sonnet would be, like those that precede and follow it, in the poet’s own voice, and it would similarly combine accusations of the lady’s pride with exhortations to recognize her human vulnerability. In the larger context of the Amoretti, the deeply held Protestant belief that human fallibility makes marriage necessary sounds here like a cynical ploy of seduction at best. The reminder to Elizabeth that she, too, is only human resonates with Amoretti 10’s prayer to Cupid that “her proud hart doe thou a little shake” and “al her faults in thy black booke enroll” so “That I may laugh at her in equal sort” as she laughs at his courtship (10.9, 12, 13). The warning that pride goes before a fall (in Amoretti 58 literalized as a tumble from the “hyghest stayre”) is less an exhortation to the “mutual society, help, and comfort” endorsed by the Book of Common Prayer than a wish to even the score.
We can also, however, read “by” in its more conventional sense of signifying creative property or origin. In this case, a paraphrase of the line would be “written by the woman who is most self-assured, addressed to herself.”103 As self-address, the sonnet admits Elizabeth’s susceptibility to the fleshly desire that the poet has previously denied her, a lack of continence formally registered in the irregular meter, feminine and apocopated rhymes (reposeth/supposeth; ayde/unstayd), and headlong enjambments of the first quatrain. The pulls of carnal desire and the temptation to believe that “weake flesh reposeth / In her owne powre” are equally symptomatic of the fallen human will. And the only defense against such temptations, in Augustinian as well as Reform theology, is to recognize that one cannot consistently defend against them. Such humility allows the always-fallen creature, as Luther puts it, “to seek the help which he does not find in himself elsewhere and from someone else.”104 In relations to humanity as well as deity, it is recognition of shared vulnerability that offers the possibility of a true imitatio Christi. The indignity of lust is, in this view, central to salvation.
Through to the end of the sequence, the speaker of the Amoretti continues to reject the possibility that his marriage will include any such shame. In Amoretti 84, the poet prays for the “measure and modesty” that Calvin enjoined in conjugal relations:
Let not one sparke of filthy lustfull fyre
breake out, that may her sacred peace molest:
ne one light glance of sensuall desyre
Attempt to work her gentle mindes vnrest.
But pure affections bred in spotlesse brest,
and modest thoughts breathd from wel tempred sprites,
goe visit her in her chast bowre of rest,
accompanyde with angelick delights.
There fill your selfe with those most ioyous sights,
the which my selfe could never yet attayne:
but speake no word to her of these sad plights,
which her too constant stiffenesse doth constrayne.
Onely behold her rare perfection,
and blesse your fortunes fayre election. (84.1–14)
As in the allegorical attack of Lust on Amoret in The Faerie Queene, the poet’s own “filthy lustfull fyre” and “sensuall desyre” are dangerous not because they threaten physical assault, but because they may arouse kindred passion. If the poet “molests” Elizabeth’s “sacred peace” with indecent proposals or untoward advances, he will “work her gentle mindes unrest” by inciting either lust or horror—only the latter of which is reconcilable with an ideal of female innocence. Yet Edmund’s hope that his mistress will be an exception to the rule that “All flesh is frayle” obviates the need for marriage. Read in the context of Reform theology, the Amoretti’s prayer that Elizabeth will be immune to all traces of desire and its commotions is equally a hope that she will escape the economy of sin and solace that compels human beings to marry. If the beloved is herself given the grace easily to endure both inward and outward celibacy, then marriage and conjugal intercourse would constitute a defilement of one of God’s chosen few.
In this account, the relation between poet and lady is defined by male sensuality and female innocence, not mutual need and companionship. And if the beloved’s chastity can be reimagined as “too constant stiffenesse”—excessive rigidity and haughtiness—then courtship and marriage are characterized not by reciprocity, but by a contest between desire and frigidity. Critics have often applauded this view of courtship as a dynamic of conquest and surrender, understanding the mistress’s ultimate acceptance of the poet’s appeals in the Amoretti as a salutary relinquishment of her inappropriate pride and autonomy. In persuading Elizabeth to trade (bad, Catholic) virginity for (good, Protestant) marriage, Edmund has done her a favor.105 I would argue, to the contrary, that denial of female appetite and choice desexualizes legitimate Protestant copulation, on the one hand, and makes it sound rather like rape, on the other. The wish that Elizabeth’s “sacred peace” remain undisturbed by lust is equally a wish for sex with a woman who tolerates penetration but doesn’t want it, even as the condemnation of her “too constant stiffenesse” as unholy pride justifies unwanted advances and sexual force.
The wish for sexual control, in other words, may help orchestrate the same erotic fantasy it appears to resist. Even as he marvels that “her cold so great / is not dissolu’d through my so hot desyre” (30.2–3), Edmund reveals that this encounter between male passion and female purity can be even kinkier than the mutual burning cited by Paul as the reason for marriage. For the contest between concupiscence and chastity in the Amoretti both defers the vanilla sex Edmund claims to want and provides material for sadomasochistic fantasy. In Amoretti 24, for instance, Edmund invites Elizabeth to spank him for his naughty desires: “since ye are my scourge I will intreat, / that for my faults ye will me gently beat” (24.13–14). Elsewhere, he inverts their roles, complaining that whereas “The paynefull smith with force of feruent heat / the hardest yron soone doth mollify,” he cannot “beat” into submission “her hart more harde than yron” (32.1–2, 6). These reciprocal images of punishment (for lust, for pride) exploit the etymology of chastity, which derives from the Latin castus and retains the sense of castigation.106 (A number of Christians, most famously Origen and Abelard, took this to the extreme of self-castration, an operation whose name is derived from the same root.)107 Chastity itself may foster perversity. But in noting that Edmund’s flogging fantasies are at odds with the “sobriety,” “dignity,” “modesty,” and “comeliness” that Calvin required of “conjugal intercourse,” we must keep in mind Amber Jamilla Musser’s observation that BDSM is not inevitably disruptive of the norms of sexuality, agency, and subjectivity that it appears to transgress. Rather, sadomasochism’s “meaning is always mobile and contingent, dependent on the speaker and his or her philosophy or worldview.”108 In the case of the Amoretti, “Edmund’s” worldview is one in which the burden of keeping lust at bay falls on women, with the result that when he imagines sex games that he hopes Elizabeth won’t want to play, the interchangeability of positions operates as a thin screen for a fantasy of sexual violence.
Perhaps precisely because it concludes with Elizabeth’s acceptance of a marriage proposal, the Amoretti provides critical ground for asking MacKinnon’s question in the context of a long history of companionate marriage: Has consent ever been a “meaningful concept”? For when Elizabeth, the woman that Edmund has habitually characterized as a “beast so wyld,” submits to the domestication of marriage (67.13), this is consent in the sense of acquiescence but not desire. Although Elizabeth, now “feareless,” “sought not to fly,” her passive waiting is a far cry from mutually active desire (67.10). Along with burning in his own “boyling sweat,” Edmund greedily inhales her “dainty” and “sweet” “odours” (64.3, 14), stares at “her nipples lyke yong blossomd Iessemynes” (64.12), notes that his “frayle thoughts” were “too rashly led astray” by settling “twixt her paps” (76.6, 9), and compares her body to a “goodly table of pure yvory” serving up “sweet fruit of pleasure” (77.2, 11). Such earthy sensuality is exactly what Edmund does not want Elizabeth to feel. Were she to break out in “filthy lustful fire” (inhaling Edmund’s odor, gaping at his nipples, or fantasizing about devouring his flesh), that would make her less proud, more human. But it would also make her less fair—less white, less desirable—staining her jasmine nipples and ivory flesh from within.
The Ephithalamion confirms the Amoretti’s association between female innocence, whiteness, and proper sexuality. It also suggests that female consent without desire—enduring rather than enjoying sex—is a key feature of the whiteness of vanilla sex. “Few women,” MacKinnon notes, “are in a position to refuse unwanted sexual initiatives” given their legal and economic subordination. This included, at the time MacKinnon was writing, the absence of laws defining forced sex within marriage as “rape,” a legal omission that, as I also discuss in chapter 4, sheds significant light on the sexual violence that may be sanctioned under a seemingly gender-neutral principle of “due benevolence.”109 In the Amoretti Elizabeth’s distaste for the bodily being that “hinders heauenly thoughts with drossy slime” (13.12) suggests a disinclination for sex that, as Benjamin Kahan’s work on celibacy has shown us, must be distinguished from repressed desire.110
The possibility that deflowering a reluctant bride may be tantamount to raping her in fact shapes the genre of the wedding song in the sixteenth century. Unlike its classical antecedents, the early modern epithalamion implicitly denies the mutuality of due benevolence. In Catullus’s wedding songs, and especially Poem 61, bride and groom are equally excited about the wedding night. The bride here is so “eager to be with her husband” that she will “fasten her heart with affection / as trailing ivy will fasten / around the base of a tree.”111 By contrast, in his Poetics Julius Caesar Scalinger’s description of the epithalamion repeatedly refers to the rape of the Sabines as the origin of Roman marriage, thereby stressing the continuity between marriage, rape, and imperial conquest.112 A fantasy of forceful male passion overcoming fearful female purity is, in George Puttenham’s description, central to the epithalamion tradition as such. Puttenham explains that the first part of the epithalamion was “very loude and shrill, to the intent there might be no noise be heard out of the bed chamber by the skreeking & outcry of the young damosell felling the first forces of her stiffe & rigourous young man.”113 The joke (ha ha) is that we cannot tell whether the bride is screaming in pleasure or pain, whether she desires sex or suffers it.
Spenser’s Epithalamion, by contrast, risks no such jests about Elizabeth’s agony or her arousal—far from shrieking, she keeps almost preternaturally quiet. The enjoyment that Edmund anticipates for himself depends on the bride’s continuing sexual purity and passivity, not an awakening of mutual appetite. And female chastity is cast as a white property even more insistently in the Epithalamion than it was in the Amoretti. Elizabeth is not only “clad all in white, that seems a virgin best” (150). A blue-eyed blonde, she is white nearly all over:
Her goodly eyes lyke Saphyres shinging bright,
Her forehead yuory white,
Her cheeks lyke apples which the sun hath rudded,
Her lips lyke cherryes charming men to byte,
Her breast like to a bowle of creame vncrudded,
Her paps lyke lyllies budded,
Her snowie neck lyke to a marble towre. (171–177)
Straining to express his bride’s overwhelming fairness, Edmund deploys similes of ivory, lilies, marble, and fresh, “uncrudded,” cream. The expanse of white contrasts with Elizabeth’s red cheeks and lips, a poetic convention that, Sujata Iyengar has demonstrated, yoked pale skin to chastity through the blush.114 Because a blush is less visible on dark skin, the absence of somatic evidence of shame or embarrassment was in the early modern period a trope for lack of modesty. In the Epithalamion, Elizabeth blushes throughout the wedding. Staring at the “lowly ground” as the guests gaze upon her, she will not “dare lift vp her countenance too bold / But blush to hear her prayses sung so loud” (161, 162–163). As the vows are solemnized, the poet comments, “How the red roses flush vp in her cheekes, / And the pure snow with goodly vermill stayne, / Like crimsin dyde in grayne” (226–228). He praises the “goodly modesty” of his bride’s downcast gaze “That suffers not one looke to glaunce awry, / Which may let in a little thought unsownd,” even as he asks, “Why blush ye loue to give to me your hand, / The pledge of all our band?” (235–239). The bride’s blush, of course, betrays “unsound” knowledge of the imminent consummation that in early modern England, more than any hand-fasting (the ceremonial binding of hands) or exchange of rings, supplied the final and inviolable “pledge of all our band.”
Whereas the bride blushes to complete the ceremony that will make her benevolence her husband’s due, the groom cannot wait to get the formalities over with: “Ah when will this long weary day have end,” he asks, “and lende me leave to come unto my love?” (278–279). The images of Olympian adultery and amorous abandon that shape his fantasies of the wedding night acknowledge that marriage may well liberate rather than banish his lust. Edmund imagines his new wife passively waiting in the nuptial bed, “Like vnto Maia, when as Ioue her tooke, / In Tempe, lying on the flowry gras, / Twixt sleepe and wake” (307–309). In comparing his bride to the famously bashful Pleiade, whom Jove “took” while she was half asleep, the poet here collapses marital consummation, pagan adultery, and rape. This fantasy of himself as Jove and his bride as the semiconscious Maia recalls the description of the Sun’s ravishment of the sleeping Chrysogone in The Faerie Queene, where female passivity renders sex sinless. Chrysogone, the narrator informs us, bore the offspring of this encounter “withouten paine, that she conceiu’d / Withouten pleasure”—a return to a prelapsarian state of sexual innocence that comes at the expense of female agency (The Faerie Queene 3.6.27.2–3). Edmund’s identification with Jove’s unrestrained indulgence persists in the following stanza, when he prays that this night with Elizabeth will match Jupiter’s trysts with Alcema and Night (328–331), revealing that this fantasy of sexual prerogative it is not a momentary flight of fancy but a structuring principle of the conjugal union that the Epithalamion celebrates.
As bridegroom no less than as suitor, Edmund’s images of amorous excess and entitlement conflict with his pleas for a divine “calme and quieteness,” or, as he puts it a bit later in the Epithalamion, “sacred peace” (354). Until it is “tyme to sleepe,” he hopes that
The whiles an hundred little winged loues,
Like diuers fethered doues,
Shall fly and flutter round about your bed,
And in the secret darke, that none reproues,
Their prety stealthes shal worke, and snares shal spread
To filch away sweet snatches of delight,
Conceald through couert night.
Ye sonnes of Venus, play your sports at will,
For greedy pleasure, carelesse of your toyes,
Thinks more upon her paradise of ioyes,
Then what ye do, albe it good or ill. (357–367)
The shift here from the first person “us” and “we” of previous stanzas to the second person “you” and “your” obscures both agency and subjectivity. Similarly, an allegorical sleight of hand separates the bridegroom from the activities he imagines, attributing them instead to the “little loves”—the Italian would be amoretti, reminding us that this “greedy pleasure” was the object of his courtship, the purpose of marriage, all along. In fantasy, the bridegroom eschews both traditional morality and the illusion of love and self-control. Enjoying the license to act as “good or ill” in the bedroom as he wishes, with none—including, perhaps, his bride—to “hinder” him, he indulges in what Augustine characterized as the dream of divine omnipotence.
Yet this fantasy is not without the shame that attends sexual desire, as the Epithalamion reveals in the confession that love’s “stealthes” and “snares” can “filch away sweet snatches of delight” only in “the secret dark, that none reproues.” Even the poem’s later references to the procreative potential of this union do not divest it entirely of shame or sin—nor should they, according to the Augustinian view of sexuality on which Reform theology was grounded. Edmund’s plea that Cynthia “inform” Elizabeth’s “chast wombe . . . with timely seed” (386) is prefaced by a reminder of Cynthia’s own dalliance with Endymion, who, in this account, seduced her with “a fleece of woll” (379). Likewise, the poem’s praise of Juno as she who “with awful might / The lawes of wedlock still dost patronize” (390–391) is ironic in light of the preceding stanzas’ celebration of Jove’s affairs with Maia, Alcema, and Night. Just for good measure, Edmund also appeals to the unnamed “Genius” of procreation to “Send vs the timely fruit of this same night” and to “fayre Hebe” and “Hymen free” (the gods of youth and nuptial ceremonies, respectively) to “Grant that it may be so” (398, 404, 405, 406). This multiplication of pagan deities allegorizes the recognition that forces beyond conscious control determine whether the night’s “sports” will retroactively be revealed as “good” or “ill.” In the present tense of the wedding night, “greedy pleasure” is the objective, its procreative outcome a belated alibi.
Detailing the ultimate failure of Protestant restraint, I would argue, is the point of Spenser’s poetic meditations on courtship and marriage—like all of the commandments, that against sexual excess is made to be broken so that humanity might perpetually confront its humiliating imperfection. As the feminist sex wars remind us, matters of sexuality, no less than politics, can make strange bedfellows. In this case, a shared conviction of the indignity of sex, as well as the ethical urgency of recognizing that indignity, surprisingly brings together contemporary queer and early Christian analyses of marriage. As Bersani cogently puts it, “the value of sexuality itself is to demean the seriousness of efforts to redeem it.”115 Unlike modern evangelicals, politicians, and Supreme Court Justices, early modern thinkers, from theologians to anatomists to poets, were aware of and explicit about this counterintuitive value. More attention to this early writing can helpfully disrupt modern discourses that assume the universal and transhistorical sanctity of conjugal sex—along with the legal and extra-legal exclusion and violence that such an assumption justifies.