4 - The anatomy of masculine desire in Love's Labor's Lost

Summary

As we have seen in each of my discussions thus far, sexual desire is a paradoxical if not contradictory drive: it impels the masculine subject toward conquest and possession, but at the same time, it threatens to dissolve the very subjectivity that desires in the first place. There are many ways to identify and to explain this paradox as a constituent element in masculinity. Desiring and being are inseparable because desire locates the individual in a series of relations to others and to other things – it apprehends and negotiates the world. But from this it follows that consummation, although “devoutly to be wished,” is nonetheless the mark of not-being: for Hamlet the solution to his restless desiring (although not specifically sexual) is death. Or, following the logic of Duke Orsino's early speech in Twelfth Night, men hunt with their desire, but they are also hunted by it. We have seen this paradox expressed in physiological terms by Burton in his portrayal of the melancholic as consumed by his own excessive concupiscence; his masculine reason is overthrown by his feminine, desiring fluidity. Or, if Bacon's new scientific enterprise is to subdue a feminine nature, he nonetheless constructs nature as never completely knowable, protective of its secrets, thus leaving the scientist continuously in pursuit. And in Tarquin's version of this narrative, he is impelled by his desire to conquer what is most elusive (Lucrece's chastity) at the same time as he knows it will destroy him. In this dialectic of presence and absence – desiring to have and being afraid to have – masculinity is endemically at odds with itself – always already its own worst enemy.