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The Optimism of Infidelity

This chapter argues that whereas in modern thought secularism appears the only route to challenging lifelong monogamous marriage, the early modern writers John Milton, Philip Sidney, and Mary Wroth base their endorsement of divorce and adultery on the Pauline distinction between duty and love, letter and spirit. Milton’s divorce pamphlets and Sidney’s and Wroth’s sonnet sequences presume that any given commitment may turn out to be a mistake, so intimacy is inevitably provisional. In their emphasis on interiority, these writers participate in a cultural project of privatizing love, which scholars have rightly seen as an ideological foundation of heteronormativity, capitalism, and neoliberalism. Yet by taking this privatization to its logical extreme, they provide grounds for removing intimacy from institutional regulation and reward altogether. These writings are useful to modern queer thought not just as positive models, but also because they alert us to the exclusions upon which freedom may be premised. Sidney, Wroth, and Milton are part of the longer history that precedes and conditions present queer associations of secularism with Western reason and modernity, religion with superstitious and oppressive non-Western cultures. The ideal of sexual liberation, no less than those of monogamy and marriage, has its own racialized genealogy.