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Of Fribblers and Fumblers: Fashioning Male Impotence in the Long Eighteenth Century

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Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture

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Abstract

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s savage response to Jonathan Swift’s voyeuristic gaze into The Lady’s Dressing Room (1732), entitled The Dean’s Provocation for Writing the Lady’s Dressing Room and published anonymously in 1734, envisages the satirist himself as the customer of a business-minded prostitute.

‘œheim, waz wirret dier?’Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The text comes from the manuscript version of the poem (Lady M. W. Montagu [1977] ‘The Reasons that Induced Dr S[wift] to write a Poem call’d the Lady’s Dressing Room’, in R. Halsband and I. Grundy [eds] Essays and Poems and Simplicity, A Comedy [Oxford: Clarendon Press], p. 275, lines 63–77).

  2. 2.

    Quoted from Angus McLaren’s seminal study (2007) Impotence: A Cultural History (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press), p. 60.

  3. 3.

    Montagu, The Reasons that Induced Dr S[wift], p. 276.

  4. 4.

    R. Thompson (1979) Unfit for Modest Ears: A Study of Pornographic, Obscene, and Bawdy Works Written or Published in England in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century (Beccles and London: William Clowes and Sons), pp. 105–6.

  5. 5.

    In the so-called ‘Scepter Lampoon’ (‘His scepter and his prick are of a length’), Rochester pretends to feel pity for Nell Gwyn’s painful attempts to satisfy the king: ‘had I but time to tell ye / The pains it costs to poor, laborious Nelly […] Ere she can raise the member she enjoys’ ([1962] The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, D. M. Vieth [ed.] [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, p. 60, line 11; p. 61, lines 28–31). It is not surprising that the satire provoked Charles II’s displeasure when Rochester handed it to him by mistake (the incident is described in the Introduction by Vieth, p. xxvii).

  6. 6.

    Thompson, Unfit for Modest Ears, p. 114; J. C. Mueller (1999) ‘Fallen Men: Representations of Male Impotence in Britain’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 28, 85–102 (pp. 85–86).

  7. 7.

    McLaren, Impotence, p. 75.

  8. 8.

    ‘impotence, n.,’ sense 2.b., Oxford English Dictionary Online, September 2015, http://www.oed.com7view/Entry/92644 (accessed 22 June 2015); see also McLaren, Impotence, p. xi.

  9. 9.

    Compare the Preface and the chapter headings of J. Marten (1985) Gonosologium Novum: Or, A New System of all the Secret Informities and Diseases, Natural, Accidental, and Venereal in Men and Women (1709), published together with the sixth edition of A Treatise of all the Degrees and Symptoms of the Venereal Disease, in Both Sexes (New York and London: Garland Publishing). Further references are to this edition and will be given in parentheses in the text. For information about midwives’ manuals and quacksters’ advertisements, and their proposed treatments of sexual dysfunctions and infertility in men and women, see J. Evans (2014) Aphrodisiacs, Fertility and Medicine in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press).

  10. 10.

    S. Johnson (1968) A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), 2 vols (Hildesheim: Georg Olms), I, s.v. ‘disease’.

  11. 11.

    Compare the various entries in B. E. (2010) A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew, in its Several Tribes (1699), reprinted under the title The First English Dictionary of Slang (1699), J. Simpson (intro.) (Oxford: Bodleian Library); and G. Williams (1994) A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, 3 vols (London et al.: Athlone Press). For further examples, see McLaren, Impotence, p. 60.

  12. 12.

    (1976) Samuel Pepys’ Penny Merriments, R. Thompson (ed.) (London: Constable), p. 260.

  13. 13.

    Compare McLaren, Impotence, p. 50 and passim.

  14. 14.

    Penny Merriments, p. 263.

  15. 15.

    See L. Stone (1992) Road to Divorce: England, 1530–1987 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press), p. 428.

  16. 16.

    Curll was depicted as a monster for publishing Cases of Impotency in issue no. 147 of the Grub-Street Journal (26 October 1732) (reprinted in McLaren, Impotence, p. 71; see also P. Baines and P. Rogers [2007] Edmund Curll, Bookseller [Oxford: Clarendon Press], p. 221).

  17. 17.

    Evidence of virility had to be displayed before at least two men over the age of 60 and of sound doctrine and pure conscience (L. Stone [1995] Uncertain Unions and Broken Lives: Marriage and Divorce in England, 1660–1857 [Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press], p. 400).

  18. 18.

    (1954) Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, W. S. Lewis (ed.), 48 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press), XVIII, p. 185; quoted in Stone, Uncertain Unions and Broken Lives, p. 399.

  19. 19.

    On Swift’s ‘self-styled impotence’ in his Market Hill poems, especially in his ‘Epistle to a Lady,’ see J. C. Mueller (1999) ‘Imperfect Enjoyment at Market Hill: Impotence, Desire, and Reform in Swift’s Poems to Lady Acheson’, ELH, 66, 51–70 (p. 52).

  20. 20.

    (1958) The Poems of Jonathan Swift, H. Williams (ed.), 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd edn), I, p. 289, line 3. Further quotations are to this edition and will be given in parentheses in the text.

  21. 21.

    (2001) The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, D.D., D. Woolley (ed.), 5 vols (Frankfurt am Main et al.: Peter Lang), II, pp. 404 and 405 n3. Louise Barnett argues that it is the young widow Swift blames most, fantasizing ‘a severe punishment’ for her, ‘degradation and venereal disease’ ([2007] Jonathan Swift in the Company of Women [Oxford: Oxford University Press], p. 143).

  22. 22.

    For further information, see G. von der Osten (1983) Hans Baldung Grien: Gemälde und Dokumente (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft), pp. 178–79.

  23. 23.

    D. Erasmus (1989) The Praise of Folly and Other Writings: A New Translation with Critical Commentary, R. M. Adams (ed. and trans.) (New York and London: W. W. Norton), p. 31.

  24. 24.

    Swift, Poems, I, p. 290, line 30; p. 295, lines 151–54.

  25. 25.

    See K. Juhas (2013) ‘Death Frightened to Death: Swift’s Transformation of the Death-and-the-Maiden Motif’, K. Juhas, H. J. Real, and S. Simon (eds), Reading Swift: Papers from the Sixth Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift (Munich: Wilhelm Fink), pp. 433–58.

  26. 26.

    J. Swift (2010) A Tale of a Tub and Other Works, M. Walsh (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 130. Further quotations are to this edition and will be given in parentheses in the text. In his marginal note on Hippocrates, Swift specifies his source as ‘Lib. De aëre locis & aquis’.

  27. 27.

    See C. M. Webster (1933) ‘Swift and Some Earlier Satirists of Puritan Enthusiasm’, PMLA, 48, 1141–53, (pp. 1143, 1145–48); H. Ertl (1977) Die Scheinheiligen Heiligen: das Bild der Puritaner im Zerrspiegel satirischer und polemischer Literatur des 17. Jahrhunderts (Bern: Peter und Herbert Lang), pp. 55–56, 72–80.

  28. 28.

    For Swift’s knowledge of Hippocrates, see D. F. Passmann and H. J. Vienken (2003) The Library and Reading of Jonathan Swift: A Bio-Bibliographical Handbook, 4 vols (Frankfurt on Main: Peter Lang), II, pp. 863–65.

  29. 29.

    For a historical survey, see E. and S. Nieschlag (2014) ‘Testosterone Deficiency: A Historical Perspective’, Asian Journal of Andrology, 16, 161–68 (pp. 161–63).

  30. 30.

    See P. Wagner (1990) Eros Revived: Erotica of the Enlightenment in England and America (London et al.: Paladin Grafton Books), p. 31.

  31. 31.

    The polemicist William Prynne (1600–69) and the propagandist John Bastwick (1593–1654) are the most prominent Puritans who had their ears cut off in the pillory (see H. J. Real [2010] ‘A Printer Brave Enough to Venture His Ears’: Defoe, Swift, and the Pillory’, Swift Studies, 25, 165–66).

  32. 32.

    See the ODNB entry on ‘Marten, John (fl. 1692–1737)’ by H. J. Cook, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/56721 (accessed 1 December 2015).

  33. 33.

    See Mueller, ‘Fallen Men: Representations of Male Impotence in Britain’, p. 87, and McLaren, Impotence, pp. 50–51.

  34. 34.

    R. Porter (1996) ‘“Laying Aside Any Private Advantage”: John Marten and Venereal Disease’, L. E. Merians (ed.) The Secret Malady: Venereal Disease in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky), pp. 51–67 (p. 59); ‘Fathers cannot be too careful in matching their Daughters to Men of untainted Reputation and Honesty, and also of promising Ability’, Marten warned in his Treatise (A Treatise of all the Degrees and Symptoms of the Venereal Disease, p. 431).

  35. 35.

    See J. Evans (2014) ‘“They are called Imperfect Men”: Male Infertility and Sexual Health in Early Modern England’, Social History of Medicine, published online 21 December (2014), 1–22 (pp. 5–6), http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/12/20/shm.hku073.full (accessed 19 November 2015).

  36. 36.

    Marten, Gonosologium Novum, p. 5; and the same author’s A Treatise of all the Degrees and Symptoms of the Venereal Disease, p. 355.

  37. 37.

    (1979) The Plays of William Wycherley, A. Friedman (ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 248 (I, i, line 6). The ‘source’ for Wycherley’s play is of course Terence’s Eunuchus.

  38. 38.

    See McLaren, Impotence, p. 81, and Baines and Rogers, Edmund Curll, Bookseller, p. 114.

  39. 39.

    For further information, see the ground-breaking essay by R. E. Quaintance (1963) ‘French Sources of the Restoration “Imperfect Enjoyment” Poem’, Philological Quarterly, 42, 190–99.

  40. 40.

    (1963) The Poems of Sir George Etherege, J. Thorpe (ed.) (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press), p. 8, line 50; ‘the Man he is active, and his Love to the Woman, if agreeable in Person and Humour, and being overcome by her Beauty, is oftentimes inordinate’ (Gonosologium Novum, p. 130).

  41. 41.

    (1992) The Works of Aphra Behn, J. M. Todd (ed.), 7 vols (London: W. Pickering), I, p. 65, lines 1, 3; see C. Barash (1990) ‘The Political Possibilities of Desire: Teaching the Erotic Poems of Aphra Behn’, C. Fox (ed.) Teaching Eighteenth-Century Poetry (New York: AMS), pp. 159–76 (p. 169).

  42. 42.

    The Works of Aphra Behn, I, p. 65, line 20; p. 68, line 118; p. 67, line 69; p. 69, line 140.

  43. 43.

    The Works of Aphra Behn, I, p. 67, line 88. According to Marten, both ‘excess of Venery’ and ‘Violent Passions of the Mind’ could cause impotence and sterility (Gonosologium Novum, pp. 34, 26).

  44. 44.

    For further details, see Quaintance, ‘French Sources of the Restoration “Imperfect Enjoyment” Poem’, pp. 198–99.

  45. 45.

    Barash, ‘The Political Possibilities of Desire: Teaching the Erotic Poems of Aphra Behn’, p. 172.

  46. 46.

    (1941) The Rochester-Savile Letters, 1671–1680, J. H. Wilson (ed.) (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press), p. 33 (III).

  47. 47.

    The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, p. 78, lines 125–26. Further references are to this edition and will appear in parentheses in the text.

  48. 48.

    Swift, Poems, I, 293, lines 121–22.

  49. 49.

    See Thompson, Unfit for Modest Ears, p. 96 and Wagner, Eros Revived, pp. 143–45.

  50. 50.

    The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, p. 79, lines 139–48.

  51. 51.

    See C. Fabricant (1974) ‘Rochester’s World of Imperfect Enjoyment’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 73, 338–50 (p. 347).

  52. 52.

    L. Braudy (1994) ‘Remembering Masculinity: Premature Ejaculation Poetry of the Seventeenth Century’, Michigan Quarterly Review, 33:1, 177–201 (p. 193).

  53. 53.

    Braudy, ‘Remembering Masculinity: Premature Ejaculation Poetry of the Seventeenth Century’, p. 197.

  54. 54.

    Fabricant, ‘Rochester’s World of Imperfect Enjoyment’, p. 348.

  55. 55.

    ‘There are two Orders of [Cuckolds]’, Samuel Butler posited, ‘the Wittol, that’s a Volunteer, and the Cuckold, that’s imprest’ ([1970] Characters, C. W. Daves [ed.] [Cleveland and London: The Press of Case Western Reserve University], p. 209).

  56. 56.

    The Plays of William Wycherley, p. 282 (II, i, lines 550–52).

  57. 57.

    See, for example, R. D. Hume (1976) The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp. 102–4.

  58. 58.

    McLaren, Impotence, p. 68.

  59. 59.

    The Plays of William Wycherley, p. 425 (II, i, lines 851–52)

  60. 60.

    Compare Wycherley’s poem entitled ‘To the Mistress, and no Mistress, who was said to be an Hermaphrodite, and who accus’d her Lover of being weary of her Company before he knew her’ ([1924] The Complete Works of William Wycherley, M. Summers [ed.], 4 vols [Soho: The Nonesuch Press], III, pp. 79–81).

  61. 61.

    See H. Feldmann (1980) Die Gedichte William Wycherleys, doctoral dissertation (Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster), pp. 2–4. For the complicated publication history of the Miscellany Poems, see H. P. Vincent (1937) ‘Wycherley’s Miscellany Poems’, Philological Quarterley, 16, 145–48.

  62. 62.

    C. J. Garbett (1978) William Wycherley as Poet: A Study of His Miscellany Poems, doctoral dissertation (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan), p. 35; Summers, ‘Introduction’, The Complete Works of William Wycherley, I, 3–64 (p. 58).

  63. 63.

    For this and what follows on Wycherley and Pope, I am indebted to Feldmann, Die Gedichte William Wycherleys, pp. 111–70.

  64. 64.

    See Feldmann, Die Gedichte William Wycherleys, pp. 12–13.

  65. 65.

    ‘What happens to a worn-out convention when epigrammatic point replaces narrative interest is illustrated in five poems on sexual impotence by William Wycherley’ (Quaintance, ‘French Sources of the Restoration “Imperfect Enjoyment” Poem’, p. 191n.1).

  66. 66.

    Richard Gwinett to Elizabeth Thomas, Bath, 15 September 1709 (R. Gwinnett [1732] The Honourable Lovers: Or, the Second and Last Volume of Pylades and Corinna [London], p. 15; quoted in Feldmann, Die Gedichte William Wycherleys, p. 2).

  67. 67.

    The Complete Works of William Wycherley, III, p. 36, lines 23–24. All quotations are from this edition and will be given in parentheses in the text.

  68. 68.

    At the end of his dissertation, Coy Garbett makes a confessional statement: ‘I wince when I think of the number of times in this study I have scored Wycherley for being repetitious or for riding a poetic image to the dust’ (William Wycherley as Poet, p. 178).

  69. 69.

    On the ‘Discovery of the Sexes’, see T. Laqueur (1990) Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press), pp. 149–92. With the phrase ‘a rising threshold of shame’, David M. Turner sums up a basic thesis of The Civilizing Process (1939) by Norbert Elias ([2005] ‘Adulterous Kisses and the Meanings of Familiarity in Early Modern Britain’, in K. Harvey [ed.], The Kiss in History [Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press], pp. 80–97 [pp. 80–81]).

  70. 70.

    L. Sterne (1997) The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, M. and J. New (eds) (London: Penguin), p. 175.

  71. 71.

    M. P. Tilley (1950) A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: A Collection of the Proverbs Found in English Literature and the Dictionaries of the Period (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), p. 341 (I 75). See also Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, II, pp. 1007–9. The phrase also occurs in one of Edmund Curll’s bestselling divorce court publications. Although, in 1613, Frances Howard, Countess of Essex, eventually lost her suit against her husband, there was ample room for speculation—for example, by the Lord Chamberlain, who believed ‘That it was Truth, that the Earl had no Ink in his Pen’ (G. Abbot [1737] Cases of Impotency and Divorce, as Debated in England in that Remarkable Tryal 1613 Between Robert Earl of Essex, and the Lady Frances Howard, Who, After Eight Years of Marriage, Commenc’d a Suit Against Him for Impotency, 3 vols [London: E. Curll], I, p. 3).

  72. 72.

    Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, p. 449. This thesis may also be found in my study (2008) ‘I’le to My Self, and to My Muse Be True’: Strategies of Self-Authorization in Eighteenth-Century Women’s Poetry (Frankfurt on Main, et al.: Peter Lang), pp. 31–32.

  73. 73.

    Prominent examples occur in Shakespeare’s sonnets nos 63 and 81; for Rushdie, see (1991) Midnight’s Children (Harmondsworth, Middlesex and New York: Penguin Books), p. 39.

  74. 74.

    I should like to thank Kerstin Rüther and Professor Hermann J. Real, as well as my father, George Juhas, for their invaluable expertise and support. Last but not least, I owe my deepest gratitude to my husband, Dr Michael Bähr, to whom I do not dedicate this essay.

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  1. Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster, Germany

    Kirsten Juhas

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  1. Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences, Northumbria University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK

    Allan Ingram

  2. Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences, Northumbria University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK

    Leigh Wetherall Dickson

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Juhas, K. (2016). Of Fribblers and Fumblers: Fashioning Male Impotence in the Long Eighteenth Century. In: Ingram, A., Wetherall Dickson, L. (eds) Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59718-2_6

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