The Surprising Success of Dr Armstrong: Love and Economy in the Eighteenth Century

John Armstrong’s 1736 poem The Oeconomy of Love has recently been characterized as ‘hyperbolic masculinity’, an economy of libertinism that derives from the period’s fear of effeminacy. ¹ In Conrad Brunstrom’s acute commentary Armstrong ineluctably reveals his pressing knowledge of the constructed and vulnerable nature of gendered identity. For this reason, his ‘defense of masculine health emerges essentially as a paranoid effort, and gender evades his every attempt to secure and delimit its scope’. The failure of Armstrong’s poem, in this account, is ‘part of a larger repeated failure to discipline the body’. ² Brunstrom’s Armstrong is of a piece with James Sambrook’s bluff, masculine failure, a man whose gendered inadequacies undermine his attempts to succeed as doctor and as writer. ³ The surprise, then, is that out of the evident insecurities of The Oeconomy of Love and the 1744 Art of Preserving Health later writers mould a discourse of sexuality as a path to sublimity through the destruction of fixed identities. Just that model of sexuality that Armstrong tries to repress reappears in writing of the Romantic period within a discourse which stresses continuities between gendered identities. Armstrong’s failure – if it is that – is the means to create a new economy of love.