SOURCE: McDonald, Margaret Lamb. “The Witty Heroine in Restoration Comedy: 1660-1690.” In The Independent Woman in the Restoration Comedy of Manners, pp. 46-97. Salzburg, Austria: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1976.

[In the following essay, McDonald studies the development of the intelligent heroine in the comedy of manners and examines how she uses mimicry and mockery to deflate the pretentious.]

What happens to the learned lady in Restoration comedy? After 1660 the affected woman of earlier seventeenth century comedy underwent still more modifications before she finally emerged as the truly witty heroine. True it is that the aging female philosopher introduced in Jonson's immortal Lady Pol, as well as the affected young lady or pseudo-scholar represented by Fletcher's Rosalura and Lillia Bianca, remain favorites during the Restoration in the works of Dryden, Shadwell, Mrs. Aphra Behn and a number of other playwrights. But among the major playwrights we note at the same time an attempt to picture a heroine who is not to be ridiculed for her learning. It is from this new treatment of the learned lady that the witty heroine emerges.

Professor Jean Gagen in her very thorough study, The New Woman in English Drama: 1600-1750, writes that most learned women in Restoration drama continued to be used as targets of satire, either good-natured or caustic, just as they had been in Carolingian comedy. In her review of the treatment of the educated woman, Gagen concludes:

It is clear that the few pioneering voices who protested against the injustice of denying the advantages of learning to women have not greatly affected the presentation of the learned lady in drama. She continues to reflect not the most advanced views of women's intellectual capacities, but the popular love of satire on the strange, the bizarre. The possibilities for good fun at the learned lady's expense still ruled the pens of most of the dramatists who chose to include her in their plays.¹

Professor Gagen's comment, unfortunately, ignores the most exciting and most memorable heroines of Restoration comedy and draws its strength from a few rather minor characters in lesser known plays. Aside from Melantha in Dryden's Marriage a la Mode, none of the really important heroines in the major comedies fit her description.

The best of the Restoration heroines, particularly after the experiments of the sixties and early seventies, display their learning in a far more subtle, but nevertheless compelling, fashion. It is in this Restoration era that Jonson's ridiculed Plato-in-petticoats and Fletcher's affected female fop make room for a different kind of learned lady. Beginning with Dryden's Florimell (Secret Love, 1667), we find a heroine who provides the kind of intellectual challenge to men that Beatrice once did. After Florimell, the most exciting and appealing of the Restoration heroines are young women enhanced, not victimized, by their learning. The witty fair one who becomes the focus of Restoration Comedy is no longer a humour character satirized for her pretensions to learning. She is instead a clever and dynamic young woman who clearly dominates her social world. Millamant's easy grace with Suckling's verse, Harriet's adroit, allusive wit and Mrs. Sullen's deft similes all offer proof that learning heightens the aura of excitement that hovers over the new woman. No longer a strange humour that frightens or frustrates the men about her, the new woman's learning makes her an admired equal.

Not coincidentally, I think, this changing attitude toward learning in women parallels an enlarged concept of wit that colors the comedies of the latter part of the century. As the notion of wit changes in the sixties and seventies, so does the dramatization of the witty woman. No longer is she the precieuse ridicule; instead, she becomes in the most memorable comedies of the period an exciting presence who wears her learning with an easy grace.

Perhaps a brief review of the expanded meaning of the term “wit” will help us to understand the changes in the delineation of the witty heroine that followed as a concomitant of change. Literary criticism of the Restoration era offers abundant proof that no word was more often analyzed and expounded than the term “wit.” Hobbes, Charleton, Dryden, Dennis and Congreve, among others, attempted to define this elusive but all-important quality, and their refinements and amplifications of wit's dominion helped to shape the new interpretation of wit. The Restoration concept of wit was, paradoxically, much more tightly structured and at the same time much broader in its vision than was the definition of wit in the Elizabethan hey-day of Shakespeare and Jonson.

Professor Fujimura in his thoroughgoing study of the evolution of wit in the seventeenth century claims that the Restoration concept of wit epitomized an intellectual and aesthetic ideal.² This expanded notion represents a move from a flight of fancy (sheer wit) and verbal pyrotechnics to an emphasis on judgment and truth to nature. Even as late as the mid-century writings of Cowley, “wit” was almost synonymous with fancy and depended largely upon an ability to note similarities in widely disparate objects: Donne's compass and lovers, for example. After 1660, however, we note a new insistence upon an understated elegance in style, and a careful striving for the neat turn of phrase. This refinement is in large part a reaction to the excesses of the metaphysical conceit and the Senecan ebullience that permeated the literary styles of the earlier part of the century. Wit, as it was redefined in Hobbes' Leviathan (1651), made clear to a new generation of playwrights and critics that flights of fancy should be tempered by judgment: “In any discourse whatsoever, if the defect of discretion be apparent, how extravagant soever the fancy be, the whole discourse will be taken for a sign of want of wit.”³ This new conception of wit is closely associated with decorum, “the exercise of judgment in a creative activity.”⁴ Judgment to the seventeenth century meant the ability to make distinctions between seemingly similar objects; thus, it counteracts fancy.⁵ No longer did quibbles or puns that played on words rather than ideas constitute wit. And neither could Jonson's “mechanic humour,” the language of mean, coarse humour characters, be considered wit.

Dryden's favorite and most often quoted definition of wit, “a propriety of thoughts and words,”⁶ is a further refinement of Hobbes' definition of acquired wit: “something acquired by method and instruction” and grounded on the right use of speech.⁷ It is Hobbes then, as well as Dryden, who can be credited with helping to change the direction of the century's understanding of wit from rhetorical flourish to a concept that depended upon discernment, acumen and judgment controlling the free play of imagination.

Just how did this expanded concept of wit change the treatment of the heroine in the comedy of manners? Very little in the early comedies, it must be acknowledged. The witty woman whose speech reveals a polished elegance and a fine intellectual edge, the woman who can master the play of ideas, is seldom found in Restoration comedy until the late 1670's. Even then, although the ideal is recognized by some dramatists, few succeed in portraying a feminine Truewit.

To clarify this changed treatment of the learned lady that occurred after the Restoration, it might be helpful to classify several kinds of witty women in the comedies of this period. Any attempt to classify will, of course, lead to frustration because some of our Restoration heroines refuse to be fitted in these Procrustean beds. But a grouping such as this may help us to recognize why so many of the earlier heroines fail to qualify as Truewits by the century's new understanding of the term. Let us separate our comic heroines into three groups: the female fop, the mischievous outwitter and the Truewit, allowing, of course, for several important heroines who will not fit comfortably in any of these categories.

We might well begin with an assessment of the female fop, least significant of our three kinds of witty women, if we consider her infrequent appearance in Restoration comedy. Among the major playwrights only Dryden popularized the précieuse ridicule made famous in the comedies of Fletcher and Molière. Although his Melantha in Marriage a la Mode (1672) is often acknowledged as Dryden's finest comic character, she is nevertheless out of the mainstream of Restoration comic heroines. Congreve's Belinda may inherit some of Melantha's ebullience but few of the other heroines are quite as frenzied. The runaway fancy and affected mannerism which characterize the fop are more frequently observed in male characters such as Sir Fopling Flutter.

In his irresistible madcap Melantha, Dryden paints the most memorable of Restoration comedy's female fops and provides the model for the Earl of Rochester's satiric description of the affected young lady at court. In his verse letter “From Artemisa in the City to Chloe in the Country” (1675) Rochester's persona Artemisa describes her own “silly sex,” the vacuous coquettes who people London's artificial society. Many of her caustic comments parallel the inanities of Dryden's thoughtless Melantha and provide us with a cameo portrait of Dryden's heroine. In a couplet that captures the quintessential Melantha, Rochester writes: “Her private wish obeys the public voice; / 'Twixt good and bad, whimsey decides, not choice (66-67). Melantha's lack of self-awareness and her compulsive chatter are nowhere better described than in Rochester's words:

She … had a discerning wit; to her was known
Everyone's fault and merit but her own.
All the good qualities that ever blessed
A woman so distinguished from the rest,
Except discretion only, she possessed.

(164-68)⁸

The character of Melantha, often cited as a reworking of Molière's Mascarille (Les Précieuses Ridicules) is all “nimble spaniel” (lively imagination) with no tempering judgment to control it. L. A. Beaurline and Fredson Bowers in their edition of Dryden's comedies claim that Dryden's comic theory was based on Jonson's theory of Humours, which Dryden then redefined to mean “some extravagant habit … or affection particular … to some person.”⁹ In his “Defense of the Epilogue” (1672) Dryden maintained that even folly itself, well represented, is wit in a larger signification.”¹⁰ It is only in this latter restricted meaning of wit that we can accept Professor Beaurline's contention that Dryden was able to combine both humour and wit in a single figure, “thus creating a delicate balance between an audience's sympathy and laughter.”¹¹ But the notion of wit which Dryden himself most often explicated, that understanding based upon Hobbes' theory of imagination tempered by judgment, is certainly not a part of Melantha's makeup. She is at once our most laughable and loveable example of the affected young lady whose zeal for learning renders her foolish.

In his delineation of Melantha, Dryden moves from the caterwauling and earthy exchanges of his earlier heroine Isabelle to the effete language of the Frenchified fop so dear to English comedy. Melantha is one of that colorful number of Witwoulds who believe that a smattering of French will enhance her attempts to break into court circles. She is the social climber extraordinaire whose nervous energies are consumed in her daily attempts to exchange gossip with the inner circle of the Sicilian court of Polydamas and his daughter Palmyra. She admits to her cohort Doralice, “I have such a tender for the Court, that I love it ev'n from the Drawing-room to the Lobby” (III,i,198-200).¹² Later, when she sees the Princess Palmyra outside the court walls, she chortles:

O, here's her Highness! Now is my time to introduce myself, and make my court to her, in my new French phrases. Stay, let me read my catalogue—suite, figure, chagrin, naiveté and let me die for the Parenthesis of all.

(V,i,95-99)

The haughty princess, turning to her lady in waiting, says: “What is she, Artemis?” “An impertinent Lady, Madam; very ambitious of being known to your Highness,” is the arch reply.

Believing that “our damn'd Language expresses nothing,” Melantha relies on her daily list of ten new French words, “drained from the French Plays and Romances,” to fortify her conversational gift. Her little list is first practiced on her eveille Rodophil, husband of Doralice. Rodophil excites Melantha because “he sings and dances en Francois and writes the Billets doux to a miracle” (II,i,3-4). No étourdy bête like the untravel'd Sicilian islanders, he can imitate the courtly French and is a gentleman of the Grand mond.

In a tête á tête with her maid Philotis that provides one of the comic highlights of the play, Melantha practices her new list of French terms in front of a mirror, attempting to appear languissant and imagining her assignation with Rodophil. Ironically, the French words which Philotis has provided—sottises, naive, grimace, ridicule, facon—all reveal the foibles of Melantha's personality.

And of course these foibles are transparent to all who know her. To Doralice she gushes:

I'll tell you, my dear, the prince took me by the hand and press'd it al a dérobbee because the King was near, made the doux yeux to me, and, in suitte, said a thousand Gallantries, or let me die, my dear.

(II,i,220-23)

To her betrothed Palamede she is a butterfly who cannot be pinned down. When Doralice asks him, “Why do you not follow your Mistress, Sir?” he retorts, “Follow her? Why at this rate she'll be at the Indies within this half hour” (II,i,253-56). This ebullient spirit pours out in a stream of compulsive chatter which leaves Palamede bewildered and frustrated:

MELANTHA:
I suppose, Sir, that you have made the Tour of France; and having seen all that's fine there, will make a considerable reformation in the rudeness of our Court.
PALAMEDE:
I must confess, Madam, that—
MELANTHA:
And what new Minouets have you brought over with you! their Minouets are to a miracle! and our Sicilian Jigs are so dull and sad to 'em!
PALAMEDE:
For Minouets, Madam—
MELANTHA:
And what new Plays are there in vogue? and who danc'd the best in the last Grand Ballet? Come sweet Servant, you shall tell me all.
PALAMEDE:
(Aside) Tell her all? why she asks all and will hear nothing. To answer in order, Madmam, to your demands—

Dryden's talent for writing lively dialogue which reveals the vagaries of his comic characters is nowhere more successful than in the Melantha scenes in Marriage a la Mode. This fair impertinent is the most famous of the learned ladies who are good-naturedly caricatured in Restoration comedy. Mrs. Gagen's contention that “the possibilities for good fun at the learned lady's expense still ruled the pens of most of the dramatists” is certainly valid in the case of Melantha.

Colley Cibber's assessment of Dryden's heroine illuminates her limitation as a Truewit:

Melantha is as finish'd an Impertinent, as ever flutter'd in a Drawing-Room, and seems to contain the most compleat System of Female Foppery, that could possibly be crowded into the tortur'd Form of a Fine Lady. Her Language, Dress, Motion, Manners, Soul, and Body, are in a continual Hurry to be something more, than is necessary, or commendable. … She is so rapidly fond of her own Wit, that she will not give her Lover leave to praise it.¹³

Melantha is mad fancy's epitome: “the hot-mouth'd jade without a curb.”¹⁴ She lacks that equipoise of fancy and judgment which marks the truly witty woman. Her repartee with Doralice provides an example of the rhetorical flourish and excess which Dryden condemned, and her exchange with Palamede in the aborted proviso reveals her pitiful lack of the self-confidence and inner sensitivity which the truly independent heroine possesses. Melantha is loved in spite of her false learning, but this affectation blunts her sensitivity to her own true importance.¹⁵ It is Doralice (often used as Dryden's spokesman) who pinpoints Melantha's weakness:

You are an admirer of the dull French Poetry which is so thin that it is the very Leaf-gold of Wit, the very Wafers and whip'd Cream of sense, for which a man opens his mouth and gapes, to swallow nothing.

(IV,iii,165-70)

Melantha's own wit, like the dull French Poetry, is whipped cream: all froth and no substance.

Most of the independent heroines of Restoration comedy, Truewits included, are clever at outwitting their opponents. Etherege's Harriet and Congreve's Angelica, for example, although they possess the balance and discretion of the Truewit, also delight in the mischievous play of the outwitter. Our categories are, therefore, not mutually exclusive of one another. But some of these heroines, although limited in the judgment and discretion required of the Truewit, are nevertheless quick and agile in outplaying their opponents. Often these brash young women lack the sophistication and polished elegance of the Truewit and are sometimes closer to the “mechanic humours” which Dryden believed his age had outgrown.

Dryden's first comedy The Wild Gallant (1663) features a heroine Isabelle who displays the temerity and quick temper that we associate with the new comic heroine. Although her companions, the Witwoulds Burr and Failer, recognize her as the wittiest wench in town, we see that her wit is closer to the bawdry of Jonson's world of Smithfield. It soon becomes evident to us as others speak of Isabelle that her wit consists only of a canny ability to outwit others. She is shrewd and facile but lacks the urbanity and above all the polished elegance which Dryden later associated with a witty style. Often her banter is crude, and occasionally she sounds more like an ale-house wife than a sophisticated young lady. In deriding her uncle Nonesuch she says: “He puffs and blowes yonder, as if two of the Winds were fighting upwards and downwards in his belly” (I,ii,224-25).¹⁶ And she shares with her cousin Constance a penchant for flat similitudes: “We shall see him anon with his Face as red, as if it had been boyl'd in Pumpwater” (II,ii,202-03). In her back-fence cat-calls with Francis the tailor's wife, she is certainly the “ill-bred tomrig” that Shadwell deplored:

Good mistress Whatdeelack! I know your quarrels to the Ladies. Do they take up the Gallants from the Tradesman's wives? Lord, what a grievous thing it is for a she-Citizen to be forc'd to have Children by her own Husband!

(III,ii,79-82)

All in all, we can see that Isabelle, the first of Dryden's comic heroines, is ebullient and impudent but lacks the delicacy and control of the finest Restoration comic heroines. Her wit wields a cudgel rather than a rapier. Certainly she poses no pretensions to learning, nor does she reveal any of the heightened awareness of her own predicament that marks the heroine of high comedy. Isabelle is a woman of action rather than ideas and cannot display the play of mind that marks the Truewit. In this first comic effort Dryden fails “to make regallio out of common meat.”¹⁷ His heroine is not truly witty according to Dryden's own understanding of the term. Although she is facile in outwitting others, she lacks the sophistication and judgment for verbal wit.

Another well-known comedy of the early period in Restoration comedy that exploited the outwitting woman was Thomas Shadwell's The Virtuoso (1676). Shadwell employed an indistinguishable pair of heroines, Clarinda and Miranda, who accomplish little more than to popularize the impudent duo who were often to be seen in Restoration comedy. Shadwell, always more interested in humour characters and farcical plots than he was in “genteel comedy,” used Clarinda and Miranda to outwit his humour characters, Sir Formal Trifle, the ubiquitous fop, and Sir Samuel Hearty, a sententious coxcomb.

Like Dryden's Isabelle, they plot farcical tricks to outwit Sir Formal, an obtuse knight come courting Clarinda. As a highlight of their misadventures, they decide to drop him down a trap door into a cage below stairs. Later they succeed in luring Sir Samuel, Miranda's would-be suitor, into the same trap door, chortling to one another that “it will make excellent sport.” Certainly Shadwell's preference for gross motor humor reveals no vestige of the urbane, polished elegance that identifies the witty heroine. His characters are developed through incident rather than dialogue, and the sisters are always more farcical than witty.

That Clarinda and Miranda are meant to serve as his witty heroines is evident, however, when he pairs them off with a brace of libertine rakes, Bruce and Longvil, “gentlemen of wit and sense.” In what passes as sophisticated banter among this foursome, Clarissa and Miranda betray no individuality. The romantic exchanges are uniformly stilted and trite; partners in the love duels might actually be interchangeable. The patter that follows is, I am afraid, typical of Shadwell's raillery:

MIRANDA:
Come, to divert this insipid talk of love (a theme so threadbare no man can speak new sense upon it), my maid shall sing you a new song she learned the other day. …
BRUCE:
To us there is no music like love, or harmony like the consent of lovers' hearts.
MIRANDA:
But as music is improv'd by practice, love decays by it, and therefore I scarce dare talk on it.
CLARINDA:
Let what harmony soever be between lovers at first, in a short time it turns to scurvy jangling. And therefore can you blame us if we divert so dangerous a thing away?
LONGVIL:
I confess it may come to discord, but 'tis as in music: if it be good, it makes the following concord better.
BRUCE:
If they play upon one another until they are out of tune, they must needs jangle.
CLARINDA:
'Tis most certain: when love comes once to bend, it breaks presently.
BRUCE:
But perhaps it may be set again like a broken limb and be the stronger for it.
MIRANDA:
No. When love breaks, 'tis into so many splinters; 'tis never to be set again.

(Iv,iii,1-3 and 33-54)¹⁸

Here in a scant two dozen lines Shadwell condenses all of the accoutrements of false wit: the trite similitude, the overly extended metaphor, and the interchangeable dialogue that reveals nothing of the inner character.

Obviously Shadwell lacked the light touch needed for “fine raillery.” Dryden's caricature of Shadwell in “MacFlecnoe” alludes to the trap door scene in The Virtuoso and likens Shadwell himself to his own grotesque creation: “Sir Formal, though unsought, attends thy quill.”¹⁹ Dryden delivers the coup de grace to Shadwell in this same satire: “No one thought to accuse thy toil of wit.” Kenneth Muir, in a more merciful vein, concludes that Shadwell lacked the “epigrammatic brilliance of his contemporaries.”²⁰

Sir George Etherege in one of his earlier works (She Would If She Could, 1668) uses, as does Shadwell, a sister pair to outwit his rake heroes. H. F. B. Brett-Smith in his introduction to Etherege's work holds that the comedy of manners first came into its own with the verbal battles between Ariana and Gatty on the one hand, and the philandering gallants Courtall and Freeman on the other.²¹ A later editor, Charlene Taylor, looks upon the presence of the witty heroines Ariana and Gatty as Etherege's “most significant innovation” in this early comedy of manners. Professor Taylor classifies the ingenues as witty because they are “basically honest with themselves,” and because they “declare for liberty,”²² ignoring any other criteria by which wit may be evaluated. Professor Fujimura in his evaluation of Etherege's contribution to wit comedy, goes a step further to single out Gatty as the Truewit character, distinguishing her from her sister because she 1) hates the country, 2) has a “witty attitude toward life,” 3) has a true naturalistic bias which ridicules Platonic love, and 4) admits “a frank delight in the pleasures of courtship.”²³ No one of these recent critics, however, attempts to evaluate Etherege's mindless pair by the late seventeenth century standard of wit, or even, for that matter, by the standards which Fujimura himself articulates. Fujimura, tempering his own enthusiasm, does admit that the witty sayings of the foursome seldom spring from the dramatic action, thus doing little to develop character or to distinguish one character from another. And he acknowledges rather reluctantly that the repartee in She Would If She Could often lapses into flat similitudes and lacks an original play of ideas.

Missing too is the philosophical depth that characterizes the discussions of courtship and marriage in Etherege's finest play The Man of Mode or in the serious undertone of the mock battle between Doralice and Rodophil in Marriage a la Mode.

Finally, Etherege's failure to distinguish the sisters from one another makes it difficult to focus on a heroine within the comedy. The shared inanity of Ariana and Gatty is evident in their every appearance, always side by side. The following exchange is typical:

ARIANA:
I am afraid we shall be known again.
GATTY:
Pish! The men were only acquainted with our vizards and our petticoats, and they are wore out long since. How I envy that sex! Well, we cannot plague 'em enough when we have it in our power for those privileges which custom has allowed 'em above us.
ARIANA:
The truth is, they can run and ramble, here and there, and everywhere, and we poor fools rather think the better of 'em.
GATTY:
From one playhouse to the other playhouse, and if they like neither the play nor the women, they seldom stay any longer than the combing of their periwigs, or a whisper or two with a friend. And then they can cock their caps, and out they strut again.
ARIANA:
And if we find the gallants like lawless subjects, who the more their princes grant, the more they impudently crave—
GATTY:
We'll become absolute tyrants, and deprive 'em of all the privileges we gave 'em.
ARIANA:
Upon these conditions I am contented to trail a pike under thee—march along, girl.

(I,ii,138-161)

She Would If She Could may indeed mark the true beginning of the Restoration comedy of manners, but its double heroines reveal only the faintest spark of what will later become the “chase of wit,” and the appropriate blending of thought and word which Dryden believed characterized the Truewit. In his treatment of Ariana and Gatty, Etherege clearly seems more intent upon their verbal pyrotechnics than he does upon their discerning minds. This mindless pair are clearly sisters under the skin to Clarinda and Miranda. Like Shadwell's sisters, they are clever and audacious in plotting intrigues but reveal little ability to be reflective or introspective.

Hippolyta, the saucy young heroine of Wycherley's The Gentleman Dancing Master (1672) is another of the earlier coquettes often said to be witty. Norman Holland in his assessment of The Gentleman Dancing Master considers Hippolyta “very clever” and refers to the play's romantic duo as “witty lovers.”²⁴ But I find this coquettish young malapert lacking in the intellectual depth and sensitivity to others that we associate with the Truewit. It must be conceded that her badinage with Gerard is a good deal sprightlier than the labored quid pro quo we found in She Would If She Could and The Virtuoso; and Hippolyta, we must admit, displays judgment and discernment, if not a keen intellectual edge, in all of her conversations.

Although she is only fourteen, she possesses the maturity to serve as Wycherley's spokesman on marriage, just as Doralice served as Dryden's mouthpiece in Marriage a la Mode, produced that same year. Hippolyta's riposte to Gerard concerning jealousy in marriage (a favorite Restoration topic) is quite typical of her witty mode:

HIPPOLYTA:
Hold, Sir! let us have a good understanding betwixt on another at first, that we may be long Friends. I differ from you in the point, for a Husband's jealousie, which cunning men wou'd pass upon their Wives for Compliment is the worst can be made 'em, for indeed it is a Compliment to their Beauty, but an affront to their Honour.
GERARD:
But Madam—
HIPPOLYTA:
So that upon the whole matter I conclude, jealousie in a Gallant is humble true Love, and the height of respect, and only an undervaluing of himself to overvalue her; but in a Husband 'tis arrant sawciness, cowardice, and ill-breeding, and not be suffered.
GERARD:
I stand corrected, gracious Miss.

(V,i)²⁵

Clearly, repartee is not Wycherley's forte. His dialogue lacks the light touch needed for “fine raillery.” Hippolyta's pedantic definitions and her penchant for rhetorical distinctions impede the chase of wit that was the particular skill of Dryden's characters. We miss here the parrying of two equally matched minds and the playful attitude that mark the persiflage between Truewits. Hippolyta's long harangues—here and in several other key scenes—border on the shrewish and almost seem to echo Lady Pol's self-righteous outpourings. If Wycherley's young heroine is to be considered witty, it is because of her ability to outwit others, but not because of her fast paced play of ideas.

Hippolyta dissembles readily and is quite pragmatic in manipulating others for her own benefit. She has no intention of marrying the foppish Monsieur de Paris whom her father has chosen for her: “Fathers seldom chuse well,” she announces, “and I will no more take my Father's choice in a Husband than I would in a Gown or a Suit of Knots” (I,i). She then sets about to outwit her father and Paris, using her foolish betrothed as her dupe in a plot to sneak her true lover into her father's closely guarded home. Hippolyta lies glibly to Paris about her true feelings for Gerard, claiming that “I hate him perfectly, even as much as I love you” (I,i). Lying to achieve one's own interests is, of course, one of the identifying marks of the outwitting libertine and is regularly practiced by the beaux and belles of this cynical society.

John Crowne's Sir Courtly Nice (1685) introduces another pair of defiant young women, but his duo mark an improvement over Etherege's and Shadwell's double heroines. Crowne is able to individualize his heroines as the other two were not. Violante and Leonora can each be considered outwitting heroines who, like Hippolyta, lack the savoir faire of the Truewit. Like most of the intriguing coquettes of the earlier comedies, they work to outwit those who uphold the outmoded values of “the last age.” Violante, one of these two feminists, borrows something from Wycherley's Alithea as well as from Etherege's Harriet, and her confidante Leonora has a few fleeting moments, at least, that look forward to Congreve's great comic heroine Angelica.

But Crowne's two fair impertinents suffer in any comparison with the finest of Restoration comic heroines. If they resemble Alithea and Harriet, it is only in their least attractive qualities. Violante, for example, shares Harriet's malicious streak but shows no sign of the earlier heroine's comic self-awareness and poetic sensitivity to language. Like Harriet, she is hypocritical in her treatment of those she disdains: Surly, Sir Courtly and Aunt. When speaking to Leonora's spinster aunt, Violante defers to her as “sweet Madam,” but when the old lady's back is turned, Violante calls her “a ridiculous piece of antiquity” (I,i,282).²⁶ She craftily plots to use Surly's help in forestalling the marriage that her fiance Bellguard has arranged between his sister Leonora and the fop Sir Courtly. When Surly leaves her house, however, having been completely outwitted by Violante, she snickers to her cohort Farewell, “Now Mr. Farewell, let's go in and Laugh” (II,i,327). Her wit, such as it is, is imbued with a libertine spirit which makes her delight in her ascendancy over fools. But Violante's mockery lacks the poise and playful attitude of the Truewit.

The deft parrying of witticisms that marks the exchanges of Dryden's lovers and Etherege's Harriet and Dorimant appear stiff and awkward imitations in Violante's exchanges with Bellguard. What begins as a proviso scene deteriorates into low comedy vulgarity.

BELLGUARD:
Hold—hold—for Heaven's sake—do not use me thus!
VIOLANTE:
Then do not Rebel but practice obediently, the postures of an English Husband, before you are Listed; Poise your Hat, draw your left Leg backward, bow with your Body, and look like an Ass whilst I kiss like a—Wife—Surly kiss me.
BELLGUARD:
If he does—(Lays his Hand on his Sword.)
SURLY:
With all my Heart. If I kiss thee, let the Devil Marry thee. (He offers to kiss her, and she gives him a box o' the Ear.)
VIOLANTE:
And the Devil kiss thee, cou'dst thou think any Woman wou'd suffer thy face to come near her, but some Dairy Maid, to curdle her Milk?

(V,i,650-62)

Violante appears clever only in contrast with the obtuse humour characters of Crowne's farcical plot. Outwitting is her strength; she thinks faster than Surly and Bellguard, but her wit sparkles only in this muddled world of fools and dupes.

Leonora, the younger of the two malaperts, is even less witty than her future sister-in-law. Her forte is the snide riposte, dispirited and uninspired:

AUNT:
Do not you know how I hate impertinent Youth?
LEONORA:
(Aside) Or any sort of youth to my knowledge.

(I,i,236-37)

On occasion she, like Violante, exhibits a coarseness seldom found in the more sophisticated heroines of Restoration comedy. In a scene that is typical of Crowne's reliance on the double entendre, Leonora unveils her plan to make a fool of Sir Courtly: “Now will I manage him, humour him, pretend to admire him—to draw him into love, laugh at him and revenge myself on him for plaguing me” (IV,i,275-77). Soon her opportunity is realized when she leads Sir Courtly on by pretending that she too shares his preciosity. Unaware of her cruel tactic, he naively reveals his neurotic fear of women:

LEONORA:
Nay, I'le confess it. I am strangely curious—extravagantly curious—I nauseate a Perfume if it ever saluted any nose but my own.
COURTLY:
Oh! fortunate! my own humour.
LEONORA:
Nothing must come near me, that was ever once touch'd by another. …
COURTLY:
Oh! Madam! you ha' met with the Creature you desire; I never touch'd a Woman since I was born.
LEONORA:
This is all Gallantry, Sir Courtly. You have been told this is my humour.
COURTLY:
Is it really, Madam?
LEONORA:
Oh! above all things. I suffer nothing to come near my bed, but my Gentlewoman.
COURTLY:
Nor I, but my Gentleman. He has a delicate hand at making a Bed, he was my Page, I bred him up to it.
LEONORA:
To making Beds?
COURTLY:
Ay, Madam, and I believe he'll make a Bed with any Gentleman in England.

(V, i, 333-370)

At moments like this, Leonora seems closer to Lady Fidget, the middle-aged wanton, than she does to the elegant young heroines of Restoration comedy.

Crowne largely ignores the possibilities for witty repartee between Leonora and Farewel, the good-natured rake, to concentrate on the farcical outwitting ploys of his two impudent heroines. In doing so, he has, unfortunately, emphasized their commonality and overlooked any opportunity for subtlety. Charlotte B. Hughes, the most recent editor of Sir Courtly Nice, deplores the fact that Crowne saw fit to tamper with the tone of his source play, Moreto's No puede ser. Sir Courtly Nice is, she claims, “high comedy reduced to farce.”²⁷ Professor Hughes believes that “there could be no greater contrast to the high comedy dialogue and the dignified moral plane of Moreto's play” than we observe in Leonora's low-comic exchange with Sir Courtly: “Her brazen lies and impudent rejoinders … are more befitting the kitchen than the drawing room.”²⁸ And indeed we do experience in Crowne's comedy a return to the “mechanic humour” which Dryden thought his age had outgrown. In evaluating Violante's and especially Leonora's deficiencies, we need only harken back to Hobbes' warning: “If the defect of discretion be apparent, how extravagant soever the fancy be, the whole discourse will be taken for a sign of want of wit.” Violante and Leonora do want discretion and lack, moreover, any pretense to learning that marks the witty woman.

Among all of the outwitting heroines considered, Sedley's Bellamira (Bellamira, 1687) is certainly the most powerful and most domineering of the group. Older and far more worldly-wise than these other coquettes, Bellamira is adroit at playing one gallant against another. Sedley's heroine, unlike her Retoration peers, is a kept woman who looks upon the generous and complaisant Keepwell as her financial support. But she finds time for other liaisons, too, much to Keepwell's chagrin. Bellamira's keeper recognizes that he can hold her only by purchasing her favors with costly gifts. In discussing their “arrangement” with his friend Merryman, Keepwell speaks of Bellamira in much the same way that Dorimant referred to Belinda, or Horner to any of the “China ladies”:

I gave her but a dozen pair of Marshal Gloves, and she was in the purest Humour all day! We took the Air in the afternoon, Sup't and went to Bed together.

(I,i,30-33)²⁹

Cunningham, one of her more persistent gentlemen callers, adds evidence of Bellamira's wanton ways when he confides in Merryman: “She is a delicate Creature, and I was one of the first that Debauch'd her” (I,ii,55).

As might be expected of a witty fair one who leads such an active and varied social life, her prime form of wit is outwitting. At the outset of the action, she sends the hapless Keepwell into the country for a few days so that she might arrange an assignation with Dangerfield, a garrulous soldier. When Keepwell refuses to play her game, she threatens to retire to a monastery: “I can go into a Cloyster, since I have lost my power with you” (I,i,218-19). Keepwell realizes, of course, that he will capitulate against his better judgment and realizes, too, that he will buy his way back into her favors with “a Present of China or a French Petticoat.”

As for her verbal wit, Bellamira's language is completely naturalistic, in tune with the life she leads. She rails at Merryman in a fashion that would seem more at home in Smithfield than in Kensington where she lives:

BELLAMIRA:
Peace, thou moving Dropsie, that wadlest with Fat, worse than a Goose with Egg.
MERRYMAN:
No man that had to do with you, e'er lost his Shape; Fluxing and Sweating are great Preservatives.
KEEPWELL:
This is rudeness and not Wit.

(I,i,155-60)

On another occasion when Thisbe her confidante asks her, “What sort of Fellow is that Dangerfield?” Bellamira retorts:

A Beau Garcon of Fifty, with a Blew Chin, stiff Beard, and so forth—Loves the Old Fashion'd Greasy way of giving Treats, will dance Country Dances till he Sweat like a Running Footman; tires himself first, and then makes Love.

(I,iii,74-78)

Her advice to the innocent young Isabella regarding the wisdom of marriage again reveals her totally sensual approach to life: “A Husband is a good Bit to Close one's Stomach with when Love's Feast is over. Who wou'd begin a Meal with Cheese?” (I,iii,116-118)

We can only conclude with Keepwell that Bellamira's gusto is often closer to rudeness than to wit. But her rough humor, in spite of its animalistic tone, possesses considerably more vitality than that of Crowne's heroines. In fact, we must go all the way back to Dryden's Isabelle to find her equal. Bellamira is not capable of the “fine raillery” that punctuates the conversation of ladies and gentlemen, according to Dryden. She lacks the control of language that marks the Truewit but possesses withal a lusty humor and a capability of coping with the ways of the world.

Several of the comic heroines whom I shall include as Truewits are, of course, mischievous outwitters, too. But it is because they have achieved a kind of verbal wit which Professor Fujimura calls an intellectual and aesthetic ideal that they deserve to be considered Truewits as well. Among this more sophisticated group, quibbles, puns and the rough, “mechanic humour” of so many of the outwitters is replaced by an understated elegance and a neat turn of phrase that marks the truly witty woman. At her best, the Truewit is capable of a comic detachment which allows her to assume a playful, carefully controlled attitude toward serious matters. More than just a facile and glib command of words, her wit reveals the reign that judgment holds upon imagination. In short, she possesses what Dryden calls “a propriety of thoughts and words.”

Dryden's own contribution to the evocation of the witty woman deserves more attention than it has received. Certainly it is he, and not Etherege, who is responsible for the introduction of urbane and sophisticated dialogue. And it is Dryden whose immortal Florimell and Celadon first popularize the battle of wits between the emancipated young couple. In any study of the evolution of the comic heroine in English drama, Florimell must be mentioned as the only truly witty woman in Restoration comedy before 1675. Secret Love (1667) stands alone among the comedies of the sixties and early seventies in its portrayal of the witty fair one who will later dominate the comedy of manners. Florimell, heroine of the anti-romantic subplot, deserves to be considered the prototype of Harriet and Millamant. The most entertaining comic heroines of the future will be cast in her mold.

Abandoning the coarse “mechanic humour” which characterized Isabelle, Dryden turned in 1667 to the “fine raillery” which he would later claim was a distinguishing mark of his own age. In his “Epilogue to The Conquest of Granada, II” (1672), Dryden proclaimed:

Wit's now arriv'd to a more high degree;
Our native Language more refin'd and free
Our Ladies and our Men now speak more wit
In conversation, than those Poets [of an earlier age] writ.(30)

And certainly Florimell's wit is different from Isabelle's: no more talk of “belly” or “guts.” Dryden's new heroine is saucy, irreverent and worldly-wise, but she knows how to exercise that fine control that both Isabelle and Melantha lacked. If Isabelle were a hoyden who belonged back in Jonson's London, Florimell is a symbol of this new age which Dryden believed “more gallant than the last.” Her raillery with Celadon the rake depends more upon the elegant “turns” than upon quibbles or similitudes. More importantly, her witty exchanges clearly reveal a play of ideas rather than a play on words.

If we can accept Professor Fujimura's contention that “wit is more concerned with mockery than persuasion”³¹ then we see that Florimell is more truly witty than is Isabelle who must forcibly persuade the foolish knight Sir Timorous into marriage. Melantha is of course the object of the malicious with of others.³² She is mocked by the Princess and her court, by Doralice, and even by her betrothed Palamede. Not so with the saucy and independent Florimell who maintains an equality in her word duels with Celadon. She and Celadon compete as equals, and their mockery of one another is actually designed to mock the précieuse tradition of love.

Florimell has the comic with which enables her, in Professor Fujimura's terms, to treat people and circumstances playfully.³³ In a typical exchange with Celadon, she masks her true feelings under a cloak of indifference:

FLORIMELL:
Marriage is such a bugbear to me.
CELADON:
Some people have drawn the knot faster than they need; but we that are wiser will loosen it a little.
FLORIMELL:
'Tis true indeed, there's some difference betwixt a Girdle and a Halter.

(V,i,530-37)³⁴

This playful treatment of serious matter becomes in later comedies a staple of the railing couple's witty dialogue, and Florimell sets the pattern for future heroines.

Her independent spirit informs the entire comic action of the play. In the climactic proviso scene, for example, Celadon is about to assert his masculine authority:

CELADON:
By these Breeches—
FLORIMELL:
Which if I marry you I am resolv'd to wear; put that into our Bargain, and so adieu, Sir.

(V,i,170-72)

Later, as they discuss the liberty and privacy which each insists upon maintaining after marriage, Celadon concludes: “Why then, our onely happiness must be to have one mind, and one will, Florimell.” “One mind if thou wilt,” she retorts, “but prithee let us have two wills; for I find one will be little enough for me alone” (V,i,546-50). The question she poses in Secret Love's Epilogue captures better than anything else her independent air: “Why should not we Women act alone, or whence are men so necessary grown?”

In still another characteristic, her libertine acceptance of the rake as lover, Florimell clearly anticipates Alithea, Harriet, Millamant and Mrs. Sullen, best known among all Restoration heroines. On more than one occasion Florimell acknowledges Celadon's predatory instinct toward women, but feels capable of dealing with it, too. She tells Flavia, the queen's maid of honour:

Give me a Servant that is a high Flier at all games, that is bounteous of himself to many women; and yet whenever I pleased to throw out the lure of Matrimony, should come down with a swing and fly the better at his own quarry.

(III,i,298-302)

Here at last then we find the full-blown Restoration heroine. No longer need Restoration comedy achieve its satirical bent at the expense of its women, Mrs. Gagen's evidence notwithstanding. Florimell's keen-edged wit, independent spirit and calculated acceptance of the rake-hero will become the hall-marks of this exciting new kind of heroine. It is difficult to understand why Florimell is so often ignored in contemporary comments on the Restoration heroine, in view of the fact that Congreve and other later writers obviously stand in Dryden's debt for the development of a witty, independent heroine.³⁵

Placing Wycherley's most delicate heroine, Alithea, among the Truewits raises as many problems as it solves. True, Alithea is certainly no frenchified fop who lacks the judgment to control her imagination. Neither is she the outwitter of The Country Wife (1675). In fact, she stands for an unyielding idealism that would not stoop to manipulating others for her own benefit. Assuredly we can see many of the Truewit's accomplishments in Alithea, but not all.

Alithea, like Hippolyta, evidences several of the key traits we have come to associate with this independent young heroine. Claiming the privileges of an emancipated woman, Alithea insists upon taking the innocent liberty of the town. When her brother Pinchwife, a spokesman for the virtues of the past age, accuses her of being corrupted by London's freedom, she strikes back: “Why pray, who boasts of any intrigue with me? what Lampoon has made my name notorious? what ill Women frequent my Lodgings?” (II,i,45-47)³⁶ Alithea intends to breathe the heady air of London without becoming one of the notorious rambling ladies who people her brother's own hypocritical circle. To the charge that she “keeps company” with men of scandalous reputation, Alithea counters: “Would you not have me civil? answer 'em in a Box at the Plays? in the drawing room at Whitehall? in St. James Park? and Mulberry Garden?”(II,i,50-52). When the suspicious, melancholic Pinchwife calls her “an impudent, errant … Jillflirt, a gadder, a Magpy, and to say all, a meer notorious Town-woman,” she reminds him: “You are my only censurer”(II,i,79-83). Alithea is convinced that she can live in the world but not of it. She is Wycherley's proof that beauty and goodness can coexist, if not flourish, in a sordid society. Although she is keenly aware of the ways of the world, Alithea remains innocent of its entanglements. Furthermore, she is astute enough to recognize that imprisoning a woman to protect her innocence is only to invite rebellion. She warns her shortsighted brother that his wife Marjorie cannot be locked into fidelity: “Women and Fortune are truest still to those that trust 'em,” she observes (V,iv,379).

We can agree with the truculent Pinchwife that Alithea deserves to be called impudent and a gadder, but hardly a jillflirt.³⁷ Wycherley intends her to be a normative figure in his scurrilous satire on prevailing sexual mores. Her refreshing standards are set up vis a vis the hypocritical honor of the aging Lady Fidget and the candid aggressiveness of the flirtatious Marjorie. Often her idealistic visions cut through the coarse naturalism of a libertine world. When, for instance, the prurient Pinchwife says: “A Woman mask'd, like a cover'd Dish, gives a Man curiosity, and appetite, when, it may be uncover'd, 'twou'd turn his stomach,” Alithea answers him:

Indeed, your comparison is something a greasie one: but
I had a gentle Gallant, us'd to say, “A Beauty mask'd,
like the Sun in Eclipse, gathers together more gazers,
than if it shin'd out”.

(III,i,109-112)

To the extent that Alithea is obviously meant to stand for discernment and balanced judgment, she can be considered truly witty.³⁸

Her astute recognition of Harcourt's ironic wit, in the face of Sparkish's smugness, marks her as a spirit kindred to Harcourt. But in other important respects Alithea fails to respond as a truly witty woman. She fails as a Truewit for the same reason that Hippolyta does, because she is sententious and lacks the playful attitude needed for comic wit. Alithea's raillery tends to be harsh—more in the nature of harangue than fast-paced word play. This circumspect young woman, in fact, sees the railleur as insincere and is intolerant of Harcourt's early efforts at repartee. Whereas Florimell may have been too playful in her attitude toward love and marriage, Alithea is too serious. Not until Harriet is introduced in Etherege's The Man of Mode a year later, do we find a heroine with the complexity to reveal a serious undertone beneath her clever banter. Harriet can be both serious and playful; Alithea cannot.

We are perhaps most acutely aware of Alithea's stuffy self-righteousness in her first encounter with Harcourt. As Sparkish, “flower of the town fops” and selected by Pinchwife to marry Alithea, chats idly with her brother, Harcourt privately avows his sudden love for the divine Alithea. But she deflates his enthusiasm in her petty tattling to the fatuous Sparkish: “He spoke so scurrilously of you, I had no patience to hear him; besides he has been making love to me” (II,i,252-53). Harcourt's equivocal insults, aimed at Sparkish, are misinterpreted by the dupe to be self-recrimination on Harcourt's part. Alithea, who is clever enough to sense Harcourt's ironical intent, seems too stilted to share in his outwitting tactic. We can imagine what the subtle rejoinders might have been had Millamant or Mrs. Sullen played the distaff role in this triangle!

Again in the false-parson scene, when the ingenious Harcourt disguises himself as Parson Ned Harcourt, his own twin brother, in order to thwart the nuptials between Sparkish and Alithea, she misses the fun of his trickery. Rather than responding to his playful equivocation with her own brand of subtle irony, she is almost shrewish in her unctuous retort: “Once more, most impertinent Black-coat, cease your persecution, and let us have a Conclusion of this ridiculous Love” (IV,i,130-131). Poor Alithea becomes quite melodramatic at times and ruins any opportunity for the “fine raillery” that marks the intellectual intercourse of the witty couple. Wycherley, a master of dramatic irony, unfortunately chooses to give his best ironical lines to Harcourt, Horner and the canny Marjorie, leaving Alithea bereft of that redeeming grace—the delicate touch.

How then can we classify Alithea's wit? When Sparkish queries Harcourt, “Now, dear rogue, has not she wit?” Harcourt's disappointed reply is, “Not so much as I thought and hoped she had” (II,i,245-46). And we might well echo the gallant's disappointment. Wycherley, it seems to me, lost an opportunity to realize a brilliant heroine in Alithea. Admittedly Alithea shines light-years away from the sputtering efforts of Ariana/Gatty and Clarinda/Miranda. She is definitely capable of a play of ideas, and in her final acquiescence to Harcourt we recognize her potential as a Truewit. But the character as Wycherley has presented her lacks the playful detachment of a truly witty heroine.

In Wycherley's last play, The Plain Dealer (1676), the independent heroine is even less significant than she was in The Gentleman Dancing Master and The Country Wife. Eliza follows Hippolyta and Alithea in her love for the excitement of city life and her celebration of new-age values. She, too, serves as Wycherley's spokesman in castigating the affectations of hypocritical women, most notably her cousin Olivia. But Eliza has little to recommend her as a witty heroine. Wycherley, in his concentration on the sordid side of Restoration society, allows his harsh and virulent characters to overshadow the “honest man” Freeman and the fair impertinent Eliza. She is, in Kathleen Lynch's terms, “one of the reasonable people who often fade into the background”³⁹ of Wycherley's plays.

An examination of the shortcomings of Eliza's wit need not detain us here, because Eliza shares the same faults I have elucidated in my evaluation of Hippolyta and Alithea. Like Alithea, she is quick to discern affectation, and it is her controlled judgment more than any other that offers a foil to the acerbic vision of Manley the malcontent and to the dishonesty of Olivia. But the fine edge of her wit is blunted by her moral earnestness which, again like Alithea's, often becomes sententious. Eliza is best characterized by her victim, Olivia, who harps at her: “You are, I find, more censorious than the World! I must have a care of you, I see” (II,1).⁴⁰ In attempting to censure others, Eliza often becomes quite vitriolic herself. Her vituperative harangues in the end become quite tedious. Gerald Weales' perceptive comment on the artificiality of many Restoration comedies in which “archness has been substituted for vitality”⁴¹ might be narrowed in its focus to illuminate Eliza's essential weakness.

Even less than Alithea or Hippolyta does Eliza deserve our consideration in this catalogue of witty heroines. In attempting to give Wycherley's heroines their due, one is reminded of John Dennis' description of Jonson's female characters: “Ben seems to draw Deformity more to the Life than Beauty.”⁴² Dennis might well have echoed this observation for Wycherley. It is Wycherley's rakes and dupes and hypocrites who hold our attention, but not his witty women.

It is not until we consider Harriet in Etherege's Man of Mode, first performed the same year as The Plain Dealer, that we return to the buoyancy and cleverness that Florimell possessed in such abundance. Here at last, almost a decade after Dryden's Secret Love, we find another truly witty heroine, and this time she is placed securely in a naturalistic world of Restoration values, not in the never-never land of Dryden's tragicomedies. Harriet is easily the most outstanding of witty heroines before Congreve's Angelica and Millamant. She manages to equal the fast-paced verbal parrying that was Florimell's forte. But beyond that she displays a complexity of feeling and an astute awareness of the problematic world she inhabits, all of which marks her as our most challenging woman to date.

The challenge that Harriet presents to Etherege's modern readers is reflected in contemporary criticism. John Harrington-Smith in his study of the railing couple in Restoration comedy claims that Harriet is “a heroine superior to any as yet seen in a love-game play.”⁴³ Norman Holland adds that this superiority relies on a prescience of “that devil” Dorimant's inner needs. Unlike most wives who expect libertine husbands to forswear their errant ways after marriage, Harriet (Holland claims) persuades Dorimant to translate these naturalistic desires into marriage “and to express the private self in a social form which is decorous, natural and even redeeming.”⁴⁴ But not all critics are as flattering of Harriet's astuteness. John Wain, taking a much harsher view, concludes: “When men like Dorimant are tamed, it is generally by pert baggages like Harriet who have the necessary savagery” to do so.⁴⁵ David Krause goes even further in attempting to find the source of Harriet's ambivalent charm, and in doing so he rejects Holland's belief in Harriet's redeeming qualities. Krause asserts that she shares Dorimant's “Satanic grace,” a grace she has earned through her act of comic disobedience to her mother's outmoded values:

By playing her anti-pastoral role as the discontented Eve, Harriet has become [Dorimant's] liberated accomplice. She mocks her mother, her family, her marriage, and her native Hampshire; and by this desecration of her household golds, she commits her act of comic disobedience.⁴⁶

Generally, those critics who are pessimistic about Harriet's chances of reforming Dorimant are likewise skeptical of her good nature. Dale Underwood in his definitive study of Etherege's comedies admits that Harriet “has much of the combativeness that characterizes the hero; she is almost as fond of and quite as skilled at dissembling as he; and she is far from immune to the pleasures of conquest and power.”⁴⁷ Paul Davies, too, believes that “the imagery of war and truce is more appropriate [to Harriet] than the talk of reform and redemption.”⁴⁸

The subject of Harriet's delight in wielding power over others will be discussed in a later chapter. Let us now consider her combative wit. Not the least cause of Harriet's ambiguity is her particular flash of wit which Dorimant's friend Medley warns him is tinged with malice. Aware of the complexity of this Hampshire heiress, he tells Dorimant: She's as wild as you would wish her, and has a demureness in her looks that makes it so surprising (I,i,137-39).⁴⁹

Professor Underwood analyzes Harriet's ambivalence as one of the essential qualities of the comic hero or heroine.⁵⁰ It is this ironic awareness of her own vulnerability and her ability to ridicule herself as well as her society, which lends depth and complexity to Etherege's delineation of the comic heroine. This duality which we observe in Harriet, as well as Dorimant, allows her to be cruel to others and at the same time sensitive to their needs. Her treatment of the good-natured Young Bellair affords a case in point. She is sympathetic toward his love affair with Emilia and seems to delight in planning with him to outwit their respective parents. But when she is alone with her maid Busy, she deflates Bellair's good nature with an astringent dismissal: “Varnished over with good breeding, many a blockhead makes a tolerable show” (III,i,44-45).

Harriet's Janus-faced treatment of her friends reminds us of Moliere's Célimène. Although Harriet is not the “notorious coquette” that Célimène is, she does share that same malicious brand of wit. Her cruel vignette of Lady Dapper is very much in the tradition of Célimène's vitriolic portrayals of the habitués of Louis XIV's court:

BUSY:
Ah, the difference that is between you and my Lady Dapper! How uneasy she is if the least thing be amiss about her!
HARRIET:
She is indeed most exact. Nothing is ever wanting to make her ugliness remarkable.

(III,i,10-13)

Much has been made of the resemblance that Wycherley's women, Alithea, Olivia and Eliza, bear to Moliere's heroines, Léonore and Célimène.⁵¹ It seems to me, however, that Harriet comes closer to Célimène's rapier-edged critical faculty than do any of Wycherley's heavier-handed women.

Like Célimène's too, is Harriet's penchant for mockery. She undercut Dorimant's patrician insolence in much the same way that Célimène deflated the pompous Alceste:

DORIMANT:
The company may take notice how passionately I make advances of love and how disdainfully you receive 'em.
HARRIET:
When your love's grown strong enough to make you bear being laughed at, I'll give you leave to trouble me with it.

(IV,i,163-67)

To truly appreciate the “éclat” of Harriet's wit, we might examine the stylistic form that this wit takes. As Professor Fujimura notes, “Her witticisms are never forced, and her speech is free of labored similitudes.”⁵² This ease of expression in itself distinguishes her from Ariana and Gatty, and from most earlier Restoration heroines, for that matter. In establishing his picture of the witty heroine, Etherege relies on three important stylistic devices: parody, allusion and imagery.

Harriet's gift for mimicry is her special talent, a talent which heightens her playful treatment of serious matters. Although she and Young Bellair are well aware that the wedding arranged between them is scheduled to take place the very next morning, they still manage to laugh at the parental arrangements that would force them to be husband and wife. In a mock exchange of vows, they flaunt authority:

HARRIET:
I Harriet
BELLAIR:
And I Harry
HARRIET:
Do solemnly protest—
BELLAIR:
And vow—
HARRIET:
That I with you—
BELLAIR:
And I with you—
HARRIET & Bellair:
Will never marry.
HARRIET:
A match!

(III,i,74-81)

When the intractable Old Bellair attempts to bully Harriet into the arranged marriage, Harriet's insolent riposte hangs the old man with his own tag line:

OLD B:
Come, there is love i' the case, adod there is, or will be. What say you, young lady?
HARRIET:
All in good time, sir. You expect we should fall to and love as gamecocks fight, as soon as we are set together. Adod, y'are unreasonable!
OLD B:
Adod, sirrah, I like thy wit well.

(III,i,171-176)

And on more than one occasion, she mocks Dorimant's languishing glances and affected bows to perfection. Her talent for mimicking the pretensions and pomposities of a masquerading age make her a mirror of society's foibles.

Harriet's graceful and effortless use of allusion bear witness to her native intelligence and learning as well. In discussing her proposed match with Young Bellair, she compares herself to Cowley's haughty Merab in his Davideis, a heroic epic. Later, in a pleasant raillery with Young Harry, she alludes to Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, comparing the marriage market of Restoration London with the market at Jonson's Smithfield. But Harriet's educated wit is not always harmless. More than once she uses her learning to trap pretentious fools. When Sir Fopling, for example, flaunts his knowledge of the French literati, it is Harriet who trips him with an allusion to the Comte de Bussy, a seventeenth century author of a history of love. Fopling the Witwould assumes that she referred to Chapman's hero Bussy d'Ambois. Harriet's knowledge of history and poetry, although it is not flaunted or shouted, is unmistakably there and unequivocally a part of her charm and a source of her wit.

It is, in fact, her knowledge of poetry which helps put her on an intellectual plane with the witty Dorimant. When he greets her with a line from Waller, she answers him effortlessly with the next line, suggesting the meeting of minds these two have by now achieved:

DORIMANT:
Music so softens and disarms the mind—
HARRIET:
That not one arrow does resistance find.

(V,ii, (89-90)

Perhaps the most sophisticated evidence of Harriet's wit is to be found in her repartee with Dorimant. Their lengthy exchange on fidelity in love is couched in a religious and gaming imagery that affords our finest example thus far of what Dryden calls “fine raillery”:

DORIMANT:
You were talking of play, madam. Pray, what may be your stint?
HARRIET:
A little harmless discourse in public walks or at most an appointment in a box, barefaced, at the playhouse. You are for masks and private meetings, where women engage for all they are worth, I hear.
DORIMANT:
I have been used to deep play, but I can make one at small game when I like my gamester well.
HARRIET:
And be so unconcerned you'll ha' no pleasure in't.
DORIMANT:
Where there is a considerable sum to be won, the hope of drawing people in makes every trifle considerable.
HARRIET:
The sordidness of men's natures, I know, makes 'em willing to flatter and comply with the rich, though they are sure never to be the better for 'em.
DORIMANT:
'Tis in their power to do us good, and we despair not but at some time or other they may be willing.
HARRIET:
To men who have fared in this town like you, 'twould be a great mortification to live on hope. Could you keep a Lent for a mistress?
DORIMANT:
In expectation of a happy Easter; and though time be very precious, I think forty days well lost to gain your favor.

(III,iii,62-82)

In Harriet's deft touch with language, that appropriate blending of thought and word which characterizes true wit, we come close to the ideal of the comedy of manners. Harriet is the conscious wit capable of thinking simultaneously on two planes.⁵³ Her use of imagery is at once imaginative and controlled. Her railing at others, harsh and condescending though it may be, avoids the belabored harangues of Wycherley's heroines. Although Harriet may be malicious, she is never sententious.

Looking back on the bevy of heroines from Dryden's Isabelle (The Wild Gallant, 1663) to Sedley's Bellamira (1687), we realize that few playwrights succeed in creating a truly witty heroine. The ideal is seldom achieved, but the ideal is by this time clearly defined. Playwrights of the next two decades will come closer in their delineation of the Truewit. Florimell and Harriet are the most significant forbears of the heroines at the turn of the century, but Alithea, Melantha, Leonora and even Isabelle and Bellamira each form a part of the mosaic that will become a portrait of the witty heroine in late Restoration comedy.

Notes

1. Jean Gagen, The New Woman in English Drama: 1600-1750 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953), p. 53. Professor Gagen's overview of the treatment of women in English drama includes an extensive list of plays that deal with the lady scientist, lady writer and lady philosopher, as well as the female fop.

2. Thomas H. Fujimura, The Restoration Comedy of Wit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), p. 15ff.

3. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. MacPherson (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1968), I,8, p. 137.

4. Fujimura, p. 20.

5. See W. K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History, pp. 29ff. for a fuller discussion of seventeenth century refinements of this term.

6. John Dryden, “An Apology for Heroic Poetry,” Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, ed. George Watson, 2 vols. (London: Everyman's Library, 1962), I, 98-99.

7. Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 134-35.

8. John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. D. M. Vieth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), p. 106.

9. Watson, I, 73.

10. Watson, I, 178.

11. L. A. Beaurline and Fredson Bowers, “Introduction,” John Dryden: Four Comedies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 11.

12. Dryden: Four Comedies

13. Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, ed. B. R. S. Fone (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), p. 96.

14. Watson II, 248.

15. Professor Beaurline (John Dryden: Four Comedies, p. 10) believes that Melantha is conscious of her folly and is aware that others ridicule her.

16. John Dryden, The Wild Gallant, The Plays of John Dryden, eds. John H. Smith and Douglas MacMillan (1962), VIII, in The Works of John Dryden, Gen. Ed. H. T. Swedenborg, Jr. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956- ).

17. Watson, I, 60.

18. Thomas Shadwell, The Virtuoso, eds. M. H. Nicholson and D. S. Rodes, Regent's Restoration Drama Series (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966).

19. M. H. Abrams, ed., The Norton Anthology of Literature, revised ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1966), I, 1388.

20. Kenneth Muir, The Comedy of Manners (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1970), p. 55.

21. H. F. B. Brett-Smith, The Dramatic Works of Sir George Etherege, 2 vols. (Oxford: The University Press, 1927), I, lxxviii.

22. Charlene Taylor, ed., She Would If She Could by Sir George Etherege, Regents Restoration Drama Series (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971), p. xxv.

23. Fujimura, Restoration Comedy of Wit, p. 101ff.

24. Norman N. Holland, The First Modern Comedies: The Significance of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), p. 68.

25. William Wycherley, The Complete Works of William Wycherley, ed. Montague Summers, 4 vols. (London: Nonesuch Press, 1924, I; rpt. New York: Russell and Russell, Inc., 1964).

26. Charlotte Bradford Hughes, ed., John Crowne's Sir Courtly Nice: A Critical Edition (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1966).

27. Hughes, p. 54.

28. Hughes, p. 39.

29. Sir Charles Sedley, The Poetical and Dramatic Works of Sir Charles Sedley, ed. Vivien de Sola Pinto, 2 vols. (London: Constable & Company, Ltd., 1928), II.

30. Watson I, 167.

31. Fujimura, Restoration Comedy of Wit, p. 71.

32. For a differing interpretation of Melantha's wit see Beaurline, p. 18.

33. Fujimura, Restoration Comedy of Wit, p. 71.

34. Beaurline and Bowers, Dryden: Four Comedies.

35. Norman Holland (The First Modern Comedies) and Fujimura, for example, ignore Secret Love; Lynch concentrates on parallels with D'Urfee's L'Astree, and even Bruce King in his Dryden's Major Plays (New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1966) has nothing to say about Secret Love.

36. William Wycherley, The Country Wife, ed. T. H. Fujimura, Regent's Restoration Drama Series (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965).

37. The Oxford English Dictionary, 12 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), IV, defines “jillflirt” as “a young woman or girl of wanton or giddy character.”

38. Gerald Weales argues conversely that Alithea, far from being astute and discerning, is actually dull because she clings so tenaciously to her intended, the fatuous Sparkish. Weales adds, “Her sententious speech at the end of the play, ‘Come, Brother, your wife is yet innocent …’ indicates that she is either as corrupt as Dorilant and the Quack in covering for Horner, or as stupid as she has often seemed to be.” The Complete Plays of William Wycherley, ed. Gerald Weales (Garden City: Anchor Books, Inc., 1966), p. xix.

39. Kathleen Lynch, The Social Mode of Restoration Comedy (New York: Macmillan and Company, 1926), p. 173.

40. Wycherley, The Complete Plays of William Wycherley.

41. Weales, The Complete Plays of William Wycherley, p. xi.

42. John Dennis, “A Letter from Dennis to Congreve dated June, 1695,” William Congreve: Letters and Documents, ed. John C. Hodges (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Wold, Inc., 1964).

43. John Harrington-Smith, The Gay Couple in Restoration Comedy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), p. 89.

44. Holland, The First Modern Comedies, pp. 94-95.

45. John Wain, “Restoration Comedy and Its Modern Critics,” Preliminary Essays (London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1957), p. 17.

46. David Krause, “The Defaced Angel: A Concept of Satanic Grace in Etherege's The Man of Mode,” Drama Survey, 7 (1969), 101.

47. Dale Underwood, Etherege and the Seventeenth Century Comedy of Manners (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), p. 80.

48. Paul Davies, “The State of Nature and the State of War: A Reconsideration of The Man of Mode,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 39 (October, 1969), 55.

49. W. B. Carnochan, ed., The Man of Mode, Regent's Restoration Drama Series (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966).

50. Etherege, p. 107.

51. See, for example, Kathleen Lynch's The Social Mode of Restoration Comedy, p. 168; and Kenneth Muir's The Comedy of Manners, p. 80.

52. Fujimura, The Restoration Comedy of Wit, p. 112.

53. Fujimura, p. 31, includes this skill in his definition of the Truewit.