Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature.

Warren Chernaik has balanced this study of Restoration literary libertinism between the genders, giving extended attention to both John Wilmot and Aphra Behn, a mad couple well matched, if scarcely suffering from critical inattention as individuals. Despite the brimstone whiff of gender studies in its fide, this is a book generally innocent of contemporary theory. Too polite for the boarding-house reach of a cultural materialist, Chernaik turns to the reliable thinkers of the Restoration "intellectual milieu" to structure his readings. Hobbes and Lucretius, impatiently simplified by the rakes, are seen as providing the flawed hedonism that betrays Rochester to "radical ontological insecurity." The spirit of Lucien Goldmann's Pascal presides (over Gilbert Burnet's shoulder) at the poet's notorious deathbed conversion. Behn, despite her own demurrals, is credited with an equally respectable set of intellectual influences; Chernaik deals well with her imitation of Tasso's "Golden Age" and the commendatory poem she writes for Creech's De Natura Rerum. In challenging conjugal tyranny, the Tory Behn joins anti-domestic feminists such as Chudleigh and Astell (and Congreve's Mirabell and Valentine) in turning from Hobbist absolutism to Locke's liberal contract theory.

Chernaik is an excellent reader of poetry, and does revealing New Critical excavation of ambivalence in verse such as Rochester's "Absent from thee" and Behn's "To the Fair Clarinda." In fact, what may be most original about the book is the profitable and delicate attention it pays to lyrics often overshadowed by Rochester's philosophical satires and Behn's aggressive fiction and drama. But at times the author's thesis blunts his sensitivity to poetic and philosophical doubt. Rochester's Satyr against Mankind is found to be "self-evidently the work of a religious poet" (98); a temperate Epicurean dismissal of divine reward and punishment, in the conversations with Burner, is taken as "a confession of unworthiness, a conviction, born of despair, that one is . . . cut off irremediably from God's grace" (100). Such interpretive hectoring could take a lesson from the relative tact and humility of Burnet's Some Passages of the Life and Death.

By characterizing Rochester as the God-tormented rake, Chernaik endangers serious consideration of a philosophical position in which bleak materialist conclusions are often mitigated by Lucretian ethics, and obscene mockery of rational aspirations is not inconsistent with the claim that "My Reason is my Friend." The death-bed melodrama may seem to a reader less an "inevitable conclusion" of Wilmot's ideas than - as excursus on Don Giovanni suggests - a piece of the libertine myth itself.

Aphra Behn escapes playing a similarly reductive role in the book's scheme, even though she responds more than once to a Giovanni by assuming the complementary voice of an Elvira, the conventional "abandoned woman" about whom Lawrence Lipking has written. Chernaik acutely points out how Behn, for instance, intentionally uses the tears of an Ovidian heroine to dampen the panegyric of her "Pindaric Poem" on the unwelcome accession of William III. But this witty revisionism is typical of the poet, who seems to have been too worldly (and too commercially adaptive) to be caught in a single shift. Where Chernaik's Rochester enacts the narrow masculine plot of tragic detumescence, his Behn remains (femininely?) polytropic and diffuse, testing literary subversions and accommodations from androgyny and cross-dressing to trick-for-trick predation in her efforts to cope with the male libertine ideal. And by gracefully accepting its inability to pin down Behn, Chernaik's study enjoys a final slight disordering of its neoclassic equilibrium.

DAVID BADY Lehman College, City University of New York