"DRUDGING IN FAIR AURELIA' S WOMB": CONSTRUCTING HOMOSEXUAL ECONOMIES IN ROCHESTER'S POETRY

Abstract

Rochester's comic drinking anthem, Upon His Drinking a Bowl, concludes with this extravagant and deliberately provocative statement of libertine beliefs. Ironically appropriating a religious vocabulary, this credo insists on the primacy of appetite in a life devoted to the satisfaction of carnal desires. The poem scorns the respectable pursuits of martial honor and intellectual achievement, the former subverted by its representation through the failed invasion of Holland, the latter by the absurd astrologer of Butler's Hudibras. The libertine would be known instead by his devotion to very different values, an apparently endless alternation of drink and love, wine and cunt. As the two constituent parts of such a life, the pleasures of intoxication and sexuality are ostensibly placed in a harmonious relationship to each other. Between them they define the life of debauchery that alone possesses meaning for the libertine. Yet if both construct one life, they define nonetheless two separate activities, opposition inscribed in the very alternation of their dominance. These activities, moreover, are intimately involved in the construction of gender: men fuck women, but they drink with other men. As Wycherley's Horner suggests in The Country Wife , while attempting, successfully, to convince his friends Harcourt and Dorilant of his impotence, Women serve but to keep a man from better company; ... 'tis as hard to be a good fellow, a good friend, and a lover of women, as 'tis to be a good fellow, a good friend, and a lover of money. You cannot follow both, then choose your side. Wine gives you liberty, love takes it away.2 For this Horner, loving