Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Valerie Traub

Brome’s stage play The Antipodes, a comedy first performed in 1638, a theme of sexual distress is introduced by a reference to two women lying in bed together. Martha Joyless, a countrywoman suffering from a virgin’s melancholy straight out of Robert Burton,¹ is dismayed that her marriage of three years has never been consummated; she reports to her new London acquaintance, Barbara, of her equally melancholic husband, Peregrine: “He nere put child, nor any thing towards it yet / To me to making.”² At the same time, she expresses ignorance about the actual means of conceiving children: “For were I now to dye, I cannot guesse / What a man do’s in child-getting” (1.3.319–20). Joyless and clueless as she is, however, she is not altogether without sexual experiences, as becomes clear when she relates to Barbara this memory:

      I remember

      A wanton mayd once lay with me, and kiss’d

      And clip’t, and clapt me strangely, and then wish’d

      That I had beene a man to have got her with childe.

      What must I then ha’ done, or (good now tell me)

      What has your husband done to you?

      (1.3.320–25)

      In an aside, Barbara directs the audience’s perceptions: “Was ever / Such a poore peece of innocence, three yeeres married?” (1.3.326–27). She then asks Martha directly: “Does not your husband use to lye with you?” Martha’s earnest answer further displays her ignorance:

      Yes, he do’s use to lye with me, but he do’s not

      Lye with me to use me as he should, I feare;

      Nor doe I know to teach him, will you tell me,

      Ile lye with you and practise, if you please.

      Pray take me for a night or two, or take

      My husband and instruct him, But one night.

      Our countrey folkes will say, you London wives

      Doe not lye every night with your owne husbands.³

      (1.3.328–36)

      Despite Martha’s unwitting, if nonetheless thoroughly conventional, jab at the promiscuity of city wives, the dramatic focus throughout her request for erotic instruction is her astonishing “innocence.” So eager for knowledge that she would place both herself and her husband in Barbara’s bed, Martha’s rural simplicity is posed against Barbara’s urban sophistication. Clearly, Martha is the butt of this sexual joke.⁴ Yet, her lack of understanding of the mechanics of procreation is nonetheless accommodating of her fond recollection of a “wanton mayd” who kissed, clipped, and clapped her. Modern editors gloss “clip’t and clapt” as “embraced and fondled passionately,” as well as “embraced and patted”—with the added suggestion that “clapt” “may imply something more firmly administered”; and one editor suggests that “‘slap’ is a recent equivalent”—still so used, I am told, in contemporary Ireland.⁵ Apparently, this unnamed maid’s behavior took the form of passionate, even forceful caresses that were not incompatible with her own desire to be penetrated and impregnated. Like Barbara’s urbane sophistication, this maid’s erotic desires and actions contrast comically to Martha’s erotic ignorance and dependence on the knowledge of others.

      The play’s thematization of Martha Joyless’s sexual dilemma invites us to consider anew the historical production of sexual knowledge: the conditions of collecting, creating, and disseminating information about sexuality, in the past as well as in the present. Although the intent of Brome’s play is to satirize Martha’s “innocence” and to pity her marital lot,⁶ I want to resist its satiric pull long enough to consider the implications of the fact that she does articulate knowledge about sex, although not the kind her culture readily acknowledges. Of what does Martha’s knowledge and ignorance consist?⁷ On the one hand, she is inexperienced in the mechanics of sex with men—so much so that although she is, by her own admission,

      past a child

      My selfe to thinke [children] are found in parsley beds,

      Strawberry banks or Rosemary bushes,

      she nonetheless confesses to “have sought and search’d such places / Because I would faine have had one” (1.3.306–8). On the other hand, she is experienced, however briefly, in the erotic caresses of a woman; but other than realizing that this is not the way to procreate, she possesses little understanding of what such contact signifies. Indeed, given her incomprehension, one hesitates to call it knowledge at all.

      Martha’s asymmetrical position of knowing and not knowing (or more precisely, of having experienced a form of “sex” eccentric to the dominant discourse that is then overwritten as simplicity) introduces sexual knowledge as a problem of pedagogy: Martha seeks tutelage from Barbara because she has not been properly taught by her husband. At the same time, in its lack of accommodation to both dominant discourses of reproductive sexuality and to the counterdiscourses generated by queer scholarship, Martha’s situation forces us to confront, as an epistemological problem, the function of sexual knowledge as an analytical category within historiography. One only has to inquire whether the conceptual categories thus far made available by the history of sexuality help to elucidate Martha’s erotic situation to see the difficulty, given the present state of our knowledge, of doing her analytical justice. As prior chapters have detailed, within the history of sexuality, debate has focused largely on whether same-sex sexualities in eras prior to the nineteenth century are best understood as connoting sexual identities or sexual acts. Yet, neither the logic of sexual identities (that is, the self-perception or social ascription of being a “lesbian,” “heterosexual,” or even a “sapphist”) nor the idiom of sexual acts (in which all nonreproductive contact is simply a form of carnal sin) adequately comprehends or describes the complex meanings of Martha’s experience.

      Nor are the analytical categories that have illuminated the relationship of modern homosexuality to knowledge of particular help here: this is not the “open secret” analyzed by D. A. Miller, nor is it precisely the “privilege of unknowing” anatomized by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick—not only because the epistemology of the closet requires homosexuals, that is, sexual identities, in order to enact its discipline, but because Martha is so very open about what is not a secret.⁸ Nor is it sufficient to fall back on the tired trope of inconceivability that has dominated understanding of lesbianism in the past; erotic acts between women are part of what is at stake, albeit comically, in Martha and Barbara’s exchange, or the joke would lose its effectiveness. We are in undefined territory here, where the relations of knowledge to subjects, and both to eroticism, have yet to be charted.⁹

      Indeed, to what extent is it possible to apprehend Martha’s subjective desire at all? The passage from The Antipodes inscribes nothing of her possible pleasure and is equally silent about her possible displeasure. Only Martha’s ambiguous descriptors of the “wanton” maid and her “strange” behavior offer any clue—and both of these could signify approval, disapproval, or neither.¹⁰ Other than her wish to learn what her husband must do to conceive a child, Martha gives us little access to her desire or interiority. Indeed, her indifference as to whether Barbara bed down with her or her husband underscores that nothing essential about the state of Martha’s erotic subjectivity is revealed in her remembrance.¹¹

      Even when we broaden the analytical optic beyond the question of Martha’s subjectivity to survey the wider implications of her recollection, its significance remains obscure. Indeed, the status of her erotic remembrance is a prime example of the principle that eroticism need not signify or convey particular meanings. Is Martha’s experience with her unnamed bedmate a transgressive act? Is her narrative a tale of misconduct? To the contrary: no repugnance on the part of other characters is generated by her story of clipping and clapping, nor is any stigma attached to it. Barbara’s pity is explicitly directed toward the sorry state of Martha’s marriage:

      Poore heart, I gesse her griefe, and pitty her.

      To keepe a Maiden-head three yeares after Marriage,

      Under