Rogue Sexuality’s Afterlives, or Milton’s Charitable Divorce and the Rise of Companionate Marriage

Abstract

Abstract This chapter ties the matter of biopolitics to that of socio-sexual identity, arguing for their dual centrality in mid-seventeenth-century debates over that which might initially seem most different from it, companionate marriage. The chapter contends that rogue sexuality offers a template for marriage organized around desire rather than socioeconomic advantage, bringing the often-overlooked category of lower social status into the histories of early modern marriage and sexuality. I then turn to John Milton’s divorce tracts (1643–5) and Paradise Lost (1667, 1674), arguing that Milton’s radical theory of divorce appropriates rogue marriage in arguing for the legitimacy of temporary marriage based on affinity, but does so in order to render marital sexuality the property of the socially elite. Moreover, I argue that Milton uses rogue sexuality to manipulate readerly desire during his celebration of marital sexuality in Paradise Lost. The chapter thus shows how the different elements of rogue sexuality—identity and appropriation; reproduction and biopolitics; fantasy and metarepresentation—collide to help shape companionate marriage, one of the early modern period’s most enduring legacies, and a central node of modern biopolitical governance.