Richard Armitage characterizations: me + John Proctor as lover

Richard Armitage speaking in September 2014 in an interview that Digital Theatre did to promote The Crucible on film, here at about 3:57ff:

Proctor’s a very physical man, he’s got a voracious sexual appetite, and I think that that’s the core of his essence, you know, he’s a man that works the land, he works with animals, he eats his food, and he, you know, has sex with his wife, and it’s essential to his core being, and when that’s denied him as his wife was sick, instinctively he, he went somewhere else, not, that’s not to condone what he did was right, but it’s an appetite that the man has. I think in the process of the break in relationship that happened because of that action with Elizabeth, he discovers what love is, and to him, and to me as well, I think, as I have discovered Proctor’s discovery of love, it’s about forgiveness and acceptance of the flawed man, which is everything that Elizabeth gives to him in the final act of the play.

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When it comes to sexual pleasure, Puritans get an unfairly bad rap. An association between strict religious sentiments and opposition to physical pleasure is mostly an association we make about them today. They enjoyed the verdant beauty of their new surroundings and praised the explosive richness of their new fields. They came from a very bawdy century in the Anglophone world — the seventeenth — and although they certainly set their lines firmly against the religiously tolerant moments of this atmosphere within the Church of England, neither were they aliens to it in other aspects of their attitudes. They drank cider, beer, and spirits, for instance. They enjoyed their meals, which (after a initial few slim years) were richer both in calories and diversity of foodstuffs than those of their English predecessors. And — to the topic of this post — New England Puritans had plenty of sex during the century of their preeminence. They had a high birth rate in comparison to the English, if I remember correctly from college the highest premarital pregnancy rate of any early North American population, and one ground for divorce in their communities was failure to fulfill one’s marital obligations (including male impotence). They bundled enough that their most notorious preachers railed against the practice. Puritan marital partners were expected to be exclusively faithful, but sex between them was not heavily laden with notions of sin in comparison, for example, to medieval religious culture. In a culture where men worked hard and muscles were a sign of virtue and work ethic and a powerful, well-fed body also testified to wealth, a man without a shirt was not primarily a source of titillation for the spectator, as it is today. Visualizing the male body — or making it available to see — sent a different message. Even if New England Puritan women no doubt enjoyed the sight of a man without a shirt, that enjoyment would have been overlaid with other meanings in a world where the connection between sexuality and procreation was necessary rather than optional. They had their own power: they pushed the children out of their bodies, they maintained households, prepared and preserved food, spun clothing, managed finances, nursed the sick. Even as they desired, they were also objects of desire for similar reasons.

As I’ve tried to suggest in my posts so far about Richard Armitage’s performance of John Proctor’s masculinity, and in the attempt to redefine that word in this case as virility, lines drawn around sexuality were different in the past than they are today. I want to continue that to talk about Armitage as Proctor’s interactions with Anna Madeley as Elizabeth, but on the way to writing that post I keep getting a little sidetracked, into thinking about Puritan sex, and what it was like when Proctor had sex with his wife.

According to Armitage, that Proctor sleeps with his wife in the same way that he works and tends his stock and eats was an elemental piece of his vision of Proctor. I’m wondering if he wrote about this in his character biography or his notebooks or however he does that. But since I can’t see that material, I’ll just think about it a little all on my own.

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Miller’s lines here connect one the fundamental themes of Puritan attitudes about sex — the connection of prosperity, implied fertility / procreation, and pleasure, through a double entendre on “please.”

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This scene offers some clues, I think. Early modern men did not necessarily seek to coax their wives to pleasure, not least because of the contemporary cultural assumptions about female libido that predominated from the Middle Ages up til the mid-nineteenth century: that women were the more eager partners. This is not to say that the Puritans did not engage in petting or foreplay — just that practices of foreplay were less important than penetration as part of a sexual encounter in a period when marital partners hoped for offspring. Babies were the point (children, especially healthy children, symbolized all kinds of things) and to some extent relief of what was seen as a normal human level of desire in the wake of the fall into sin, rather than orgasm itself. Partners were expected to accommodate each other’s needs, and prevailing attitudes about female desire meant that women were assumed to be largely willing partners. So Elizabeth’s refusal, in the context of Puritan culture, would have been not just a sign of her lack of desire — it also signals her non-participation in their entire contract: home, hearth, children, farm, procreation, productivity, prosperity.

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John Proctor (Richard Armitage) kisses a reluctant Elizabeth Proctor (Anna Madeley) in Act Two of The Crucible, performed at the Old Vic under the direction of Yael Farber, September 2015. Cap of above.

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If Miller could have, would have, included a happy sex scene for the Proctors, and Armitage would have played it — admitting immediately all the epistemological problems I am setting up with this question —

Sex is, for Proctor, routine and expected, which doesn’t mean he doesn’t need it or enjoy it. Sex is like water when he’s thirsty, both necessary and unbelievably satisfying. He gulps it down, he requires it, it relaxes him, it gives him energy, it’s simultaneously a vent and an engine. With it he affirms his virility, his place, his ability to plan and make and do. In it he plants his prosperity. He expects his wife to accommodate him even as he assumes he is accommodating her; they engage together in the common project of the farm on all its many levels, of which their sex life is one.

During the day he comes into the house for the noon meal and when his sons are occupied elsewhere, he approaches Elizabeth with a smile, he reminds her of how many trees he has felled that day, his touch at her hip is more than a caress but not yet a rude grab, his kiss a signal of current desire and a promise for later. He touches her with the assurance that his hands are welcome. He walks out of the house with his gun and his whip, she smiles a little when she sees their sons run out after him, she clears the dinner table, thinks about which preserves, which mending, she will work on in the afternoon, she calls to her hired woman and sets her a task, she assembles bread and fresh butter and pickles and ale to take to her sickly neighbor.

In the evening, after the children are in bed, the table clear, when he has mended some bit of harness, when they have read the Scriptures and said their prayers, when the embers have burnt low — in the cooler seasons of the year, Proctor banks the fire to keep it smoldering overnight — when she has braided her hair to keep it neat in the night, the Proctors retreat to their room and blow out the candles and settle into bed, she in shift, he in night shirt. Proctor asks her some little thing about the garden and she wonders if he will help carry in the milk for her cheesemaking the next morning. He rolls toward her and the touch that that travels up her side this time is purposeful, it maneuvers her toward him and her mouth toward his. He starts with a peck, full on her lips, he feels her catch her breath, he knows she wants him, too. He pulls back a second, nuzzles his beard against her, gauges her mood. He pushes his hand into her hair, he undoes the braiding, lets go his breath and a rare endearment, the feeling of her hair sliding through his fingers, falling around her face against the sheets draws him further in. Proctor moves his hand to roll her further onto her back, he looks at her eyes in the low light from the stars and then at her mouth, his hand catches the hem of her shift and pushes it up. As his hand reaches her breasts, his kisses become more insistent, hungry, unsatisfied. He feels her breaths answering his.

Elizabeth’s under him now, his hands are warming her belly, moving restlessly across her abdomen, his desire is rising, he’s ready, he’s waiting for her to catch up with him. As he kisses and nuzzles, her hands arms come up behind his shoulders and she shifts her hips and he settles across them. She smiles at him, and reaches out to touch him. He groans, taking the touch for a stroke or two before he pushes onward. He moves his hand down mostly to take her temperature, he strokes her there a few times, maybe he moistens his palm with his tongue and touches himself, and when her hips shift a few more times in response, and he knows she’s ready, she grasps him again, this to direct his entry. He pushes in neither gently, nor roughly, but with the urgency of a need that can only be satisfied one way and the practice of something he’s done a thousand times and expects to do a thousand times more. He sees her eyes widen slightly and he chuckles, but he does not wait long before he moves. He looks once more to see her face, his mouth moves to hers again, but then his eyes close and the need to fulfill himself, to push against her, takes over. Her eyes open and she watches him, sees the frown and wince of ecstasy, she moves her hands across his back and feels his muscles contract, she smiles, her breath speeds up, she gasps. He works as hard toward this as he does every day on his land, though this work is shorter and more joyful. Soon, his eyes open briefly, his jaw drops, his breath rushes out, a strangled sound, a few more thrusts.

His head falls on her shoulder, he kisses and nuzzles at her again, she gives him her lips, she strokes the back of his hair. He pulls himself out and lies down next to her, pulls her to his side, kisses at her hair, strokes at it. She kisses the margin of his beard, uses the hem of her shift to wipe the sheen of sweat from his forehead. He is near sleep, satisfaction tracing his features, but also exhaustion. Maybe she rises and pulls herself to rights, rebraids her tangled hair, uses the chamber pot, maybe she wipes herself dry — or maybe she dozes off along with him.

Keeping in mind the crazy anachronism involved in fantasizing about the sex life of a Puritan man as written through the lens of a twentieth-century playwright and personified in the work of a twenty-first century actor, what does this fantasy mean to me? I’m not sure entirely and I don’t want to vouch for the entire historical accuracy of what I’ve written — but there’s something incredibly appealing about that picture of the simply-built man, the man who is a part of the land and has relatively uncomplicated desires that a woman can satisfy with her body, her arms, her wits, and not a lot of additional effort, as one piece of the many things she manages during the day. A more visceral kind of sex, and, perhaps, one better integrated into the landscape. The vision of a man who tries hard to please and whose pleasures, in turn, are equally simple.

~ by Servetus on February 2, 2015.