The Man of Mode construes love both as a disease and a commodity. This adds an interesting dimension to previous close readings which linked together the older language of medicine into the newer language surrounding economics popping up in this time, specifically concerning the body politic and trade.
“When love grows diseased, the best thing we can do is to put it to a violent death. I cannot endure the torture of a lingering and consumptive passion” (2.2.202-4). These lines exemplify the use of medically linked language for the description of other phenomena, specifically in a negatively connotated way. It describes the dangers of a “consumptive” love that stays too long and causes more trouble than it is worth.
Throughout the play, love as a concept seems to have two competing dimensions. There is first the bad, “consumptive” love, comparing the ill-effects of love to disease, e.g., the “lovesickness” present when an individual pines romantically over another. Secondly, we have the transactional, more positively construed type of romance, which seems to exist more as a kind of material good than as an ephemeral feeling—crushes are formed freely and quickly and on little information, and these cheap emotions are spent like monopoly money. Things like affairs and crushes are deployed as strategic moves in schemes of love and appearance. Throughout the play, it is difficult to keep track of who likes who, who is courting who, and who is telling the truth.
The titular—albeit not main—character, Sir Fopling Flutter, is said to be based on the Earl of Rochester, John Wilmot. He is called a “fop,” as opposed to a “rake,” as is the main character, Dorimant. A fop is more concerned with his clothes and appearance, whereas a rake is a promiscuous gentleman. This newcomer Flutter seems to be not entirely wanted, as though the town wishes to project their own problems and insecurities onto him, since he is an easier target in his excess. Perhaps this is a nod to the often obscene and scathing commentary present in Rocester’s poetry.
A lot of sayings we have today reflect this contagious dimension to love, e.g., “love is in the air” or the aforementioned “lovesickness,” as much of our discourse around economics and capitalism contains the vestiges of medical roots. Additionally, money has always played a role in matrimony, explicitly so in the dowries common in premodern society and implicitly so today in continual ideas around gender roles and class in spousal selection. Again, we are seeing intangible ideas being described with the more tangible language of the body. Economic principles are not something that can be seen in the physical world, much like love is not a visible state of a human body.
I also looked at an article entitled “Pleasure and the Political Economy of Consumption in Restoration Comedy” to further explore these phenomena in the genre at large. The seemingly two-way street between sex and consumption the author, Hinnat, notes is quite intriguing. He explores how goods become sexualized as an object of desire and romantic relationships take on a transactional element, saying
In these and many other examples, comedy works to uncover the metaphoric and symbolic undertones of consumption, playing on the contemporary doubling of meanings in a society in which consumer goods are coming to be regarded as possessing a sexual attraction (pg. 80).
The extent to which love is based in emotion and romantic attraction versus how it can be a tool to further a person’s agenda is very present in this genre of play. Hinnat also notes that “it is also a question that is raised inescapably whenever any intrigue – courtship, seduction, love chase – comes to take on the characteristics of a commercial transaction” (pg. 81). This supports my findings relating the question of love to one of commerce and adds an interesting dimension to the nature of consumption in our project at large.
