The Flea

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1633

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

Premarital Sex as a Sacred Act

Despite the tectonic sexual revolutions of the mid-20th century, the moral debate at the center of Donne’s Renaissance poem is still a conundrum within contemporary cultural mores. The man and woman in the poem are not married. The speaker refers (Line 14) to the objections her parents have about their relationship. In addition, the speaker confronts the objections the Church has to sex before marriage, or what the Church condemns as fornication. By those metrics, in attempting to seduce her, the speaker is asking the woman to put her reputation, her relationship with her family, and her very soul in peril.

To put such dire weight on such a simple (and at least for the speaker pleasurable) act, the speaker argues, with his signature lawyerly wit, is to lose perspective. In this the flea certainly helps his argument. In the flea’s bites, insignificant and more annoying than dangerous, he points out, their blood has already mingled, “cloistered in [those] living walls of jet” (Line 15), the very essence of the era’s understanding of the sexual act. Look to the flea, he says, because our sexual act has already happened and the world has not been impacted at all. The speaker’s argument, whether dismissed as gross and juvenile or admired for its cleverness and intricacy, is bold for his time as well as for contemporary times. He uses the very rhetoric of the Christian church that sees sex as a sin without benefit of the sacraments and without commitment to children: He uses words such as trinity, cloister, sacrilege, temple, bloody nails, sins—all the vocabulary of the Church. By invoking such weighty terms with such theological and doctrinal weight, the lawyer mocks them by deflating their sense of their own cosmic importance and putting them into a diminished perception that is reassuring, even comic. It is sex. He argues that within this bedchamber, apart from the hypocritical, judgmental, and self-righteous outside world, sex, premarital or otherwise, can be re-defined, indulged, and, dare he hopes, even enjoyed.

The Craft of Seduction, 2.0

This poem is a narrative of seduction, the speaker using a variety of rhetorical devices to convince a reluctant woman to share her bed with him. This poem, however, is hardly the conventional play of seduction. The concept of seduction is conventionally played as a gentle give and take, a soft interplay of compliments, whispered double entendres, and sweetly halting requests, all compelling a subtle joint movement forward toward a mutually shared, if unspoken, goal.

Donne’s outlandish variation, his Seduction 2.0, upends such expectations: “The Flea” can be read as a bald and often predatory powerplay, a revelation in glaring light of the wiles of a lover, a man, calculating and smart, intent on securing what he considers the ultimate prize, in this case nothing less than a woman’s virginity. In this, the poem plays on a tradition that is fundamental to the Christian worldview—the sacrosanct “value” of a woman’s virtue—by dismissing entirely the value of that commodity.

At turns charming, witty, insistent, and charismatic, the speaker uses language itself as the strategy for his seduction. There is no physical contact, no touching, no kissing, nothing intimate save the gravitational pull of the speaker’s clever, if unsettling, argument about a bloody flea bite as a fitting metaphor for what he hopes will be their imminent lovemaking. The speaker does not dwell on his would-be lover’s charms, her physical grace, her spiritual integrity, her generous heart, all the elements of traditional seduction. Really at no point does he even compliment her. Indeed, his slyest argument is in his utter dismissal of the “value” of her virginity, really of the importance of sex itself. It means nothing, he argues cavalierly, flippantly, so we might as well enjoy it. The seduction play here then lacks a certain polish, a certain elegance, delivered as it is by a calculating player—but in abandoning the usual cliché tactics of flattery and overpromising and outright lying, the speaker defines an original (and audacious) seduction protocol, one that is more physical than spiritual, more realistic than ideal, and more pragmatic than romantic.

The Reality of Sexual Politics

It is a tempting kind of parlor game, imagining an alternate scenario for the poem. A reversed scenario, however, underscores the reality of sexual politics both in Donne’s time and in present-day society. Pretend, for instance, that the woman is talking in the poem. Imagine the game if it was the woman making this outlandish argument to a reluctant man, a man uninitiated into sex, a man interested in maintaining his virtue until the seal of marriage renders the actions socially acceptable. Imagine a woman going to the lengths to which Donne’s speaker reaches in an effort to secure the conquest of a would-be male lover. Imagine a woman resorting to sacrilegious arguments and ultimately assuring the reluctant man that the virginity he was so set on preserving matters little more than squashing an annoying bug. You are here, I am here, let’s have sex: Imagine a woman making this argument.

That this game of reversing speaker roles seems so outlandish today as much as in the Renaissance reveals the unexpected relevancy of Donne’s poem today. At the dark thematic core of what is, for all its levity and comic twists of logic and its elaborate boudoir chess game, it is a revealing look into the cold reality of gender stereotyping and sexual politics, a term not coined until the 1970s that refers to the unequal power structures involved in relationships between the sexes, in which women are conditioned to accept—even expect—a world in which men are granted institutionalized power. The woman never speaks. The woman is never described. The woman is never even acknowledged as a person but rather only as a goal, her virginity a commodity for which the speaker crudely, clumsily, and tirelessly negotiates. Power is anything but shared. In the verbal assault that is the speaker’s argument, the woman is denied a share in the power, even a role to play. The supposed conversation between two potential lovers is entirely one-sided, more an extended monologue, the man terminally fascinated by the cleverness of his own unfolding (and presumably off the cuff) argument.

As a poem about gender politics, then, the pivotal moment comes in Line 19 when the woman, despite the arguments of the speaker, asserts her own independence, the integrity of her own decision-making power, and without fanfare or explanation pinches the repulsive little bug between her fingers. Not surprisingly, the speaker, with his facile argumentative mind (and his free-floating contempt for women given his deceptive attempt in the first place), attempts to use this assertion of the woman’s power to contemptuously dismiss the very value of the virtue she protects.