“Staging Identity: Power, Performance, and the Libertine”
The glittering figure of the libertine during the period of the Restoration in England challenged authority in ways that defied the prevailing social, political, religious, and cultural norms. Taking their cue from the king, Charles II, the court wits flagrantly opposed any kind of moral restraint, dueling with swords and language, and defied established modes of power. In this section of Writing 20, we will use academic writing to engage questions about the implications of the libertine’s desire for power as we study the emergence of libertinism in England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Specifically, we will look at a “real life” libertine, the infamous Earl of Rochester, whose personality, wit, and poetry sparked several onstage adaptations in William Wycherley’s The Country Wife, George Etherege’s The Man of Mode, Aphra Behn’s The Rover, Congreve’s The Way of the World, and Daniel Defoe’s Roxana.
We will look at how characters in these works use language to achieve power over others, a core characteristic of the libertine identity in this period, and how they assert an autonomous self that rejects social, religious, and political restriction. In particular, we will consider how women’s participation in this movement ultimately redefined it.
To begin our discussion of power, performance, and libertinism in these works, we will research the Carolean court using the library databases and read selections from Rochester’s poetry and Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. In addition to regular responsive writing, you will write a textual analysis using primary sources on libertine power in The Country Wife, a longer essay on gender and libertine performance that incorporates secondary sources in The Rover, a critical essay that compares the Hobbesian libertines in The Man of Mode, a Restoration comedy, with those presented in The Way of the World, a comedy that reflects John Locke’s ideas on “liberty and property,” and a rewritten imaginative “ending” to Defoe’s Roxana that considers the ways in which libertines enact violence to challenge authority.
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