No ＂Pattern of Love＂: The Frustraterd Desire for Genuine Love in Rochester's Obscene Poems

Abstract

This paper aims to read Rochester’s obscene poems as his despair about the possibility of genuine love in which one can confirm one’s sense of existence through the union of the mind and body. This paper contends that, in Rochester’s obscene poems, love is not consummated but consumed, as the physical intercourse fails repeatedly to develop into the union of mind, thus only proves to be nothing but the letting out of bodily fluids irrelevant of one’s emotion. Then, this paper examines whether the union of mind can develop into the union of body in Rochester’s poems. This is not to be, as Rochester shows his frustration over how the persons in mental love cannot consummate their love as the male partner’s impotence sets in.Also, for Rochester, homosocial relationship cannot afford him with safe haven in which he can confirm his value of existence in the relational point of view, as the all-male companionship in his poems is always threatened by another form of exploitative human relationship, that is, buggery. In Rochester’s poems, the male has to satisfy his bodily desire, whether the exploited partner be a female or a male, which points out that the cordial all-male companionship is never self-sufficient.The failure of any meaningful human relationship, this paper argues, explains why there is abundant reference to masturbation in Rochester’s poems. As all forms of love fail to let one connect with another, these loves prove nothing but the various strata of masturbation, which confirms one’s solitary state in the Hobbesian world and which thus threatens one’s existence. This paper discusses Rochester’s “Upon Nothing” as the logical stalemate of Rochester’s cogitation on the possibility of genuine love, for the fear of non-entity is bravely tackled only to be found as insurmountable condition of human existence.