SOURCE: Gill, Pat. “A Trick Done with Mirrors.” In Interpreting Ladies: Women, Wit, and Morality in the Restoration Comedy of Manners, edited by John Stacey, pp. 1-21. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1994.

[In the following essay, Gill explores how Restoration playwrights used satire to deal with society's moral restrictions against sexualized females.]

Disappointed and angry at the critical response to The Double Dealer (1693), William Congreve included a peevish justification of the work in his dedication. In it he warns “the Ladies” offended by the vulgarity in his satirical portraits that moral objections reflect badly on those who find fault.¹ Any lascivious depictions in this play, he archly contends, are figments of their own guilty imaginings: “I have heard some whispering, as if [the Ladies] intended to accuse this Play of Smuttiness and Bawdy: But I declare I took a particular care to avoid it, and if they find any in it, it is of their own making, for I did not design it to be so understood. But to avoid my saying anything upon a Subject which has been so admirably handled before, and for their better instruction, I earnestly recommend to their perusal the Epistle Dedicatory before the Plain Dealer.”² Since William Wycherley, the author of the above-mentioned Epistle, dedicates it to a famous London bawd, Congreve's recommendation is tongue-in-cheek—but it is not wholly facetious. Wycherley and Congreve share similar views on the representation of women in comedy and the reception of comedy by women. For both, knowledge, especially sexual knowledge, is a gendered acquisition: only men are properly in possession of it.

Rebuking the women who find his plays salacious, Wycherley asks: “But why, I say, should any at all of the truly virtuous be concerned, if those who are not so are distinguished from 'em? For by that mask of modesty which women wear promiscuously in public, they are all alike, and you can no more know a kept wench from a woman of honour by her looks than by her dress.” In a less rueful vein he cautions, “But those who act as they look ought not to be scandalised at the reprehension of others' faults, lest they tax themselves with 'em and by too delicate and quick an apprehension not only make that obscene which I meant innocent but that satire on all which was intended only on those who deserved it.”³ Both Congreve and Wycherley hope to rescue their satiric comedy from reproach by allying it with their definition of virtuous women. Virtuous women “ought not to be scandalised at the reprehension of others' faults” and ought not to possess “too delicate and quick an apprehension.” “They who are Virtuous or Discreet,” Congreve slyly insists, “cannot be offended,” for it is the vicious and affected characters that make “their Beauties more shining and observ'd: And they who are of the other kind, may nevertheless pass for such, by seeming not to be displeased, or touched with the Satire.”⁴ In contrast to her scandalous counterparts, a “woman of honour” should neither understand sexual innuendo nor recognize double meanings in the witty phrases she hears. Less honorable women who hope to pass as reputable had best pretend to the same ignorance. To follow out this rather complicated analogy: the dramatists' satire, like truly a virtuous woman, is honest and morally straightforward. The doubleness is all on the outside, all in the duplicitous mind's eye of the beholder, who is convicted of sin the moment she understands.

The playwrights' call for naive female readers of their satiric sketches seems more than a bit disingenuous. In their sardonic instruction to virtuous ladies, itself a satire on women's pretense to virtue, Wycherley and Congreve placate no critics. Like their description of women's sexual ignorance, the explanation of moral satire these playwrights advance fails because it is thoroughly equivocal. Both accounts cogently indicate the difficulty of discrediting suggestive meanings with suggestive language. Of course, satiric comedy cannot escape equivocation. In great part it depends upon suggestive language, upon the play of multiple meanings for the same terms. In Congreve's The Double Dealer, for instance, the quick-thinking Lady Froth pretends that her amorous embrace of Mr. Brisk is part of a dancing lesson, sweetly asking her intruding husband, “Shall you and I do our close dance to show Mr. Brisk?” “No, my Dear,” he demurs, his suspicions allayed, “do it with him.” “I'll do it with him, my Lord,” Lady Froth replies, “when you are out of the way.”⁵ Those who find this brief excerpt amusing have understood—and enjoyed—more than one level of discourse. A satiric joke—one that uses ridicule to expose, condemn, or deride vice or folly⁶—always hints at something more than what it says. By juxtaposing their literal import against the various other meanings words might suggest, the audience makes sense of the satire.⁷

In part, I am interested in the dramatists' moral defense of their plays or, more precisely, in the social and linguistic discomfort within and outside the plays that makes a moral defense necessary. Variously described as mean-spirited attacks, aesthetic attempts at social reform, or something in between, satiric comedies were in their own time the subject of lively debate,⁸ and succeeding centuries continue to dispute their success, skill, and significance:⁹ different critics find the same Restoration plays to be celebrations of aristocratic libertinism, witty social satires, or equivocal products of a flawed moral vision.¹⁰ Some critics simply dismiss the playwrights' repeated claims that their work is informed by a didactic moral design,¹¹ but such dismissals serve to explain neither the authors' adamant vindication of their plays on moral grounds nor the number of literary critics who continue to discover their moral intent.¹² The dramatists' sarcastic diatribe on the difficulty of locating a moral touchstone in an ideal (female) spectator, and critics' continued prescriptions for the proper reading, reveal a persistent unease about the uncertain moral position of these plays.

The playwrights' unwillingness to own up to the prurient dialogue and irreverent portrayals in their plays derives in part from their conception of women's relation to interpretation. “In short, Madam,” Wycherley writes approvingly of his supposed patroness, “you would not be one of those who ravish a poet's innocent words and make 'em guilty of their own naughtiness (as 'tis termed) in spite of his teeth; nay, nothing is secure from the power of [ladies'] imaginations, no, not their husbands, whom they cuckold with themselves by thinking of other men and so make the lawful matrimonial embraces adultery; wrong husbands and poets in thoughts and word, to keep their own reputation.”¹³ Wycherley finds female interpretation akin to cuckolding, and just as heinous a crime. Loose women have loose imaginations, and all women who interpret are suspect. Neither husbands nor poets are safe. Both Wycherley and Congreve define virtue in feminine terms, and this definition complicates and confuses their social satire. By linking promiscuous readings to promiscuous (female) behavior, the playwrights separate virtue from comprehension, a separation that helps to explain the force, focus, and failure of some of their satirical sketches.

MANNERS AND MORALS IN RESTORATION COMEDY

In comic fashion, Restoration manners comedies touch on a serious field of inquiry: the character and characteristics of desirable (English upper-class) conduct.¹⁴ Among many other things, these plays elaborate the timeworn attack on hypocrisy and fear of cuckoldry in new and historically specific ways, reasserting what Charles H. George calls the “age-old conception of society as a hierarchy of interdependent orders,” a conception that will eventually give way to that of a body politic of “independent and necessarily antagonistic classes.”¹⁵ At the cusp of this change in conception, Restoration manners comedies engage in ritual reenactments of the faltering but presumably remediable traditional social hierarchy. The future prospect of a revitalized status quo is set up in contrast with the debased, satirized status quo of the world of the plays.

Manners comedies acknowledge in satire ranging from good-natured mockery to bitter remonstrance that the Restoration did not restore a past way of life. Trends implicit in Reformation tenets and underway since the time of Elizabeth I were now fully realized and explicit in the politics of the time; dissenting religions that had taken root accommodated the developing bourgeois ethos of the moral authorization of personal acquisition, private judgment, and subjective self-assessment,¹⁶ and prepared for the secularization of authority and power¹⁷ as well as an increasing public moral rigidity;¹⁸ competing constitutional theories and highly vocal opposition parties altered the conception of the monarchy and the authority of parliament.¹⁹ Charles II was “restored” to the throne of his murdered father, and his brilliant political governing both prevented the collapse of a government beset by considerable internal strife and erected an admirable façade of national stability, but the Restoration was nevertheless a time of political uncertainty and social upheaval.²⁰ Concerns about these social and political transformations were expressed overtly and tacitly in both court literature and popular writings. This book devotes itself to the ways in which one form of artistic endeavor, Restoration manners comedy, was engaged in the concern with the reestablishment of a stable social and moral self.

In the course of the last forty years of the seventeenth century, ideals of conduct altered in concept and focus. Observing that before this time the great majority of conduct books “were devoted mainly to representing the male of the dominant class,” Nancy Armstrong detects a marked increase at the end of the century in the number of manuals directed at women.²¹ Building on the research of Ruth Kelso, Suzanne Hull, and Richard Bell and Patricia Crawford,²² Armstrong argues that

books addressing a readership with humbler aspirations increased in popularity during the seventeenth century. Although by mid-century they outnumbered conduct books that exalted attributes of aristocratic women, the distinctly Puritan flavor of some marriage manuals and books on household governance made it quite clear that they were not endorsing the preferred cultural norms. … Although some books argued that domestic economy should be part of an ideal gentlewoman's education, they did not come into their own until the last decade of the seventeenth century. Until then, different levels of society held recognizably different ideas of what made a woman marriageable.²³

Armstrong charts alterations in the social ideal of the dutiful and desirable female to show that “as conduct books rewrote the female subject for an eighteenth-century audience, they shifted the whole strategic intention of the genre from reproducing the status quo—an aristocratic household—to produce an ever-retreating future.”²⁴ According to Armstrong's chronology, the Restoration still participated in the polemical literary reproduction of the status quo of an aristocratic household. Manners comedies' rather manic comic portrayals of social discord suggest, however, that this “status quo” was precarious already, or at least was felt to be so. Increasing social mobility and political turmoil threatened traditional definitions and social hierarchies. In the attempts by various groups either to maintain or determine the status quo—that powerful realm of the usual, the norm—the proper use of persuasive discourse became a contested issue.²⁵ The Restoration witnessed heated, determined battles waged against duplicity in language and the abuse of eloquence, battles whose contested weapons were rhetorical tropes and whose ultimate prize was interpretive authority.

Polemical strategies that had obtained for centuries were suddenly debatable. Brian Vickers proposes that the fundamental issue in these debates was “political and ideological” and not “stylistic.”²⁶ Vickers distinguishes between attempts to devise a proper English expository style and scholarly prose (with the concomitant debates over the propriety of latinate terms) and the assaults on rhetoric per se. He maintains that the latter attacks were “part of a grand campaign conducted by the twin powers of the establishment, the orthodox church and the Royal Society, against their enemies”: “the Non-conformist preachers or writers,” Protestant reformers whose teachings contradicted those of the Church of England.²⁷ Unhappily circumscribed by this debate, manners comedy found itself in a sorry predicament: the playful suggestiveness of its satire made it vulnerable to exactly the same kind of rhetorical censure as that initiated originally by those whose class interests the satire supported. Playwrights and others who defended manners comedy from charges of immorality were forced to contend with increasing controversy within the very audience that these satiric productions were supposed to entertain and, in a modest yet sustained way, to reassure.

In The History of the Royal-Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge, Thomas Sprat explains that “true Raillery should be a defence for Good and Virtuous Works, and should only intend the derision of extravagant, and the disgrace of vile and dishonourable things.”²⁸ This contention, of course, is the very one dramatists make for their plays. It is the difficulty of proving the claim that is the real bane of “true Raillery” and prevents it from being distinguished from what is presumably “false” raillery. Since moral intent, like a woman's virtue, is an internal guide, it must be inferred. And it seems that like a virtuous woman, true raillery can be mistaken for its dishonest twin. Rhetoric endangers the truth. “Eloquence ought to be banish'd out of all civil societies,” Sprat proclaims, “as a thing fatal to Peace and Good Manners” (111). Sprat resolves not to recommend this policy, however, because he fears that “the naked Innocence of vertue, would be upon all occasions expos'd to the armed Malice of the wicked” if good men renounced the “Ornaments of speaking” retained by the bad (111). In this rather startling scenario, virtue's naked innocence must be dressed by ornaments of speaking or those same ornaments will assault it. Sprat suggests that rhetoric is not merely a cloak that hides or protects truth, but a weapon that attacks it when it presents itself unadorned. In a peculiarly convoluted way, Sprat reasons that virtue is by nature naked, but—here Sprat anticipates Freud by two hundred years—since exposure always arouses hostility, then rhetoric should cloak innocence and expose vice.

Sprat warns that “all things are capable of abuse from the same Topicks by which they may be Commended” (418). It is this dual capacity of language that bothers him and, even as he acknowledges the purpose of true raillery, makes him wish to ban all eloquent discourse. Like Francis Bacon before him,²⁹ he worries that the abuse of language could subvert proper scientific investigation and reporting. In his much more radical indictment, Hobbes charges that all controversy and contradiction derive from incorrect or imprecise speech, deducing that true communication demands a far more thoughtful and far less vague use of language. For Hobbes, one of the “four correspondent abuses” of speech that plague humankind is to use words “metaphorically—that is, in other senses than they are ordained for—and thereby deceive others.”³⁰ Rhetoric suffers greatly in Hobbes's estimation; it employs affective tropes to convince people of a truth that logic alone can provide.³¹ As this brief summary of contemporary deliberations on the subject discloses, for a variety of reasons particular rhetorical tactics were under attack during the Restoration. In privileging duplicitous language in its efforts to critique modes of conduct,³² satiric comedy falls squarely in the center of the interconnecting political, religious, social, and moral lines of the debate on proper discourse and decorum.

SATIRIC EXPOSURE AND FEMALE MORALITY

Freud's theory of the generic structure of what he labels tendentious jokes, generally useful for understanding satire,³³ is especially useful in explaining the satire of Restoration manners comedy. Because of its formalist approach, Freud's comprehensive account applies without strain to most modern instances of these cultural phenomena. Freud finds that jokes “insist on maintaining play with words or nonsense. … They restrict themselves, however, to a choice of occasions in which this play or this nonsense can at the same time appear allowable … or sensible … thanks to the ambiguity of words and the multiplicity of conceptual relations. Nothing distinguishes jokes more clearly from all other psychical structures than this double-sidedness and this duplicity in speech.”³⁴ The attribute of double-sidedness poses something of a dilemma when it characterizes jokes that promote a moral point. The weapon of satiric exposure—duplicity—becomes identical to the immoral or unethical activity it exposes. It is not surprising, then, that the playwrights' reliance on duplicity to evoke moral insight or outrage complicates their claims to moral authority.

In Freudian terms, satiric comedy would be described as a hostile tendentious joke, that is, an aggressive joke with a purpose. These jokes make the “enemy small, inferior, despicable or comic, [achieving] in a roundabout way the enjoyment of overcoming him—to which the third person, who has made no efforts, bears witness by his laughter” (Jokes, 103). In Restoration manners comedy, satiric moments often revolve around the characters' sexual behavior and attitudes in ways that fuse Freud's two varieties of tendentious jokes, the hostile and the obscene, into a single type. Originally, the obscene joke is “directed toward women and may be equated with attempts at seduction. If a man in a company of men enjoys telling or listening to smut, the original situation, which owing to social prohibitions cannot be realized, is at the same time imagined. A person who laughs at smut that he hears is laughing as though he were the spectator of an act of sexual aggression” (97). “It cannot be doubted,” Freud continues, “that the desire to see what is sexual exposed is the original motive of smut” (98). Obscene jokes, then, are verbal seductions that rely on a woman's “inflexibility” to an illicit proposal: “the ideal case of a resistance of this kind on the woman's part occurs if another man is present at the same time—a third person—for in that case an immediate surrender by the woman is as good as out of the question” (99).

Let me review Freud's rather complicated account: “The woman's inflexibility is … the first condition for the development of smut. … Although to be sure,” Freud tells us, the refusal “seems merely to imply a postponement and does not indicate that further efforts will be in vain” (99). Smut, then, is the direct sexual address to a woman that is hindered in its purpose by a third party. It develops its character as an obscene joke when, “in the place of the woman, the onlooker, now the listener, becomes the person to whom the smut is addressed” (99). In a shift of triangular positions, the person who in the imagined original situation prevented the seduction—whose proximity forced the woman at least to appear morally irreproachable—now receives the obscene address in her stead but, as a listener, is expected to be neither seduced nor shocked. The woman becomes the necessarily excluded object of the joke: conceivably, women may be present at the telling, but they must not acknowledge their relation to the desired object or the joke will not work. Since the teller's aim is to produce pleasure in those present, women find themselves in a strange, almost unreal situation. Like the ideal female spectators imagined by Congreve and Wycherley, women should be entertained by dialogues and scenes in which they are portrayed as sexual objects, but they should not recognize those objects as portrayals of themselves or as sexually charged.

“Generally speaking,” Freud writes, “a tendentious joke calls for three people: in addition to the one who makes the joke, there must be a second who is taken as the object of the hostile or sexual aggression, and a third in whom the joke's aim of producing pleasure is fulfilled” (100).³⁵ Listeners to obscene jokes participate in sexual aggressivity, a “hostile trend against the second person” (100), while enjoying a laugh, a passive pleasure perhaps, but one based on an assumption of mastery, of having gotten the joke. Freud concludes, “Through the first person's smutty speech the woman is exposed before the third, who, as listener, has now been bribed by the effortless satisfaction of his own libido” (100). Freud's exposition of obscene jokes is decidedly gender-specific. He never posits a bawdy female jokester—or listener, for that matter. By definition, women qua women can be only victims and not perpetrators of obscene jokes. In Freud's framework, then, obscene jokes become reassuring testimonies of masculine privilege.

While Freud insists that men and women possess both passive and active attributes and responses, his analysis of obscene jokes reaffirms the traditional, socially accepted distribution of these traits along gender lines. The obscene narrative unfolds to reassert a passive (feminine) position, working as a power play that establishes the (masculine) tellers as subjects in control, subjects who manipulate characters in a story and prompt appreciative recognition in an audience. It is the hostile verbal undressing—in the Freudian scenario, the revelation of (the lack of) genitalia³⁶—that puts the woman back in her place as object, a place that she, in the course of the joke, momentarily manages to escape by her initial temporary refusal of the sexual invitation.³⁷

Freud's psychoanalytic explanation of the function of women in obscene jokes provides a remarkably accurate elaboration of the positions of female protagonists of manners comedy. The satiric jibe of Restoration comedy uses sexual double entendre to ridicule or expose the hypocritical and depraved character of sexually willing ladies of fashion, libidinous elderly matrons, and loose widows, in addition to the insufficiencies of young fops, old lechers, and greedy businessmen. Fops, lechers, and businessmen are subsumed within this list of “defective” females because the comedies work in very obvious ways to feminize them. Flawed versions of the rake-heroes, fops, and lechers attempt clumsy imitations of their seductions that almost always end in embarrassment.³⁸ Like those bad imitators, businessmen are routinely exposed and humiliated. Having sacrificed their “natural” masculine appetites to economic enterprise, they prove themselves to be money-grubbing fools who deserve to be cozened and cuckolded. In the witty, fast-paced discursive romp of Restoration comic satire, the ridicule and exposure of sexualized females and “lesser” males reflect both a moral concern in the plays and the failure of that concern to articulate itself coherently. By conflating sexual and social meanings, Restoration comedy simultaneously sabotages and reinscribes moral and social order, and it is only on closer inspection that the antagonism and insistence of many of the satiric assaults seems excessive.

These satiric portrayals of masculine behavior indicate a particular historical anxiety about the traditional definition of masculinity, an anxiety concomitant with the rise of the bourgeois class and the prospect of social mobility.³⁹ Restoration manners comedy defends an ideal of aristocratic, conservative, English masculinity against the heavily satirized encroachments of French foppishness and the pretensions of the aspiring merchant class. Strikingly, however, it is the female characters in manners comedy who both preserve and imperil that ideal. Orthodox patriarchal notions underlie even the radical seventeenth-century conceptions of women, and these beliefs unite with the Restoration concern about the rhetorical misapprehension of truth to produce confusing depictions of female characters, characters who cannot bear the interpretive weight of that tacit union. Despite the dramatists' claims to the contrary, female characters illustrate the precariousness of satiric meaning as well as the equivocality of moral standards.

The beliefs informing Restoration conceptions of women and language explain why “fallen” female characters suffer some of the most scathing satire found in manners comedies. They are wanton women who make wanton use of words. The closer female characters come to behaving like rakes—the more seductive their speech and actions—the more threatening they are to traditional notions of masculine social and rhetorical power. In The Restoration Rake-Hero Harold Weber points out that “while the Revolution challenged many of the basic political assumptions of seventeenth-century England, most revolutionary leaders not only showed little interest in the rights of women, but cast their revolution in a rhetoric that assumed, in its emphasis on traditional notions of property and family, conventional conceptions of female weakness.”⁴⁰ Weber notes the contradictions in both Puritan and libertine ideologies with regard to the position and character of women. Though both provide for and at times invoke the notion of equality between the sexes, Puritanism “emphasized the subjugation of women to men” while the “libertine attitude reveals a conventional condescension towards women.” Weber goes on to say that “this same sense of contradiction characterizes … the treatment of women in plays written after the Restoration.”⁴¹

“In spite of its reputed libertinage,” Donald Bruce affirms, “there is a general contempt for promiscuous women in Restoration comedy.”⁴² Corrupt women seem especially dangerous because they are hybrids—an innocent façade concealing illicit knowledge within. This dangerous duplicity underlies the insistent depiction of virtue as a natural sexual ignorance. Deviant and scandalous, knowledgeable women comfortably inhabit masculine realms and transgress gender categories, calling boundaries into question in the process. Restoration satire tames these knowing, conniving ladies by revealing their sex, by showing them to be merely women and therefore vulnerable to public shame and scorn. The satire functions as an obscene joke, opening up the private lives of fallen women to public scrutiny. The threat of exposure, generally posed by the rake-hero, successfully prevents a worldly female adversary from carrying out her plans of independence or revenge. It puts her firmly back in her place by forcing her to rely on a man's good nature and discretion.⁴³

Restoration comedy's witty, unrelenting attack on female hypocrisy thus needs a heroine who can be as charming and clever as any experienced sophisticate but who is nonetheless innocent of dissimulation and secret amours. The heroine's role as formal and moral counterpoint to the rest of the female population serves as a locus, albeit a problematic one, for the play's tenuous moral underpinning. Ben Ross Schneider elaborates on this position as both captivator and redeemer:

To qualify for this high mission, the young lady must walk a knife-edge on either side of which lies a precipice of moral destruction. … If invitation exceeds awe she is either seduced and cast off like the rest of the easy wenches or she causes a nasty misunderstanding for which she may be condemned as a coquette. If awe exceeds invitation she will be condemned as a prude. Only by walking the narrow path between these pitfalls can she reach the elevation above common womanhood which enables her to become a beacon to lead her hero out of his wilderness of meaningless affairs.⁴⁴

Female characters perform oppositional functions in the satiric comedy of this era: the villainous ones personify the decadent hypocrisy that simultaneously endangers and is a part of the status quo, while the heroines offer the promise of renewal. Critical discussions of the plays have not examined these structural positions; recent writings have paid more attention to the roles of women, but none has addressed the thematic implications of these adversarial positions.

Often critics regard the heroine as the lesser half of the hero, as a fitting partner who shares, although always to a slighter degree, the rake-hero's witty perceptions, skepticism, libertine attitudes, and “naturalistic” tendencies—a view that overlooks both the heroine's many orthodox qualities and the hero's appreciation of them.⁴⁵ In fact, both the heroine and the rake-hero are lovers of coherent structure. They despise those who make a mockery of it, those who distort it to conceal their deviations and perversions. Libertine notions never persuade the heroine to abandon the sanctions of moral conduct. “The heroine is never permitted to cross the conventional danger-line of physical chastity,” R. C. Sharma declares, and John Harrington Smith cautions that “the reader who does not see that the [Restoration] period believed in the existence of virtue in women and distinguished carefully between it and vice … misses a most elementary aspect of the play.”⁴⁶ Heroines, by definition, are virtuous.

The hero, too, possesses a surprisingly conventional temperament.⁴⁷ Honor, self-discipline, loyalty, and respect for social forms are not restrictive curbs on behavior but traits deemed laudable in and by the rake-hero.⁴⁸ The wit, polish, and elegant discourse of Hobbes's natural man must be refined by certain moral considerations, underwritten by a reworking of conventional mores. The heroine is the perfect embodiment of proper social form, and the hero finds her irresistible. The couple's vehement dislike of hypocrisy endorses the standard that is being abused. Their intended marriage at the end of the play, however playfully imparted, nevertheless reinstates social order. The new beginning this marriage suggests may be uncluttered by rigid domestic demands but is hardly free from artificial, even idealistic, concerns.

The hero and heroine wish not to destroy social structure but to restore it to some nostalgic vision of the fairly recent past,⁴⁹ a past to which older characters make false claim. Satire almost always includes a reactionary gesture; in ridiculing and exposing the abuses of the present it suggests a time when this was not so.⁵⁰ The heroine represents both the nostalgic vision of this mythical past and the idealistic hope for the future. She points in two directions from her precarious site in the present. Like the hero, the heroine demonstrates social poise through clever dialogue and graceful carriage, but unlike him, she confirms her honesty and rectitude by the sincerity of her motives. The deft facility of expression that aids the hero in every part he performs is a necessary attribute for the heroine as social being but an anathema for her as moral exemplar: in manipulating the witty and duplicitous language of satire and sophisticated society, language that relies on a knowledge of hidden meaning, she jeopardizes her claim to sincerity and innocence.⁵¹

THE DILEMMA OF RESTORATION COMIC HEROINES

Inasmuch as it is knowledge—specifically, sexual knowledge—that a heroine cannot possess, her very entrance into the urbane world of the town endangers her exemplary status. Her purity is threatened by the very act of speaking: her witty discourse and clever strategies indicate a savviness that is at odds with the innocence and ingenuousness that characterize paragons of virtue. Of course, the heroine cannot extricate herself from the language of the world she inhabits; on the contrary, her desirability and attractiveness owe a great deal to her conversational skills. Besides, experience contaminates even that heroine who claims to find social gatherings unpleasant or threatening: as soon as she deems reprehensible certain language or behavior, she accedes to dangerous intelligence. The heroine's environment forces her to recognize and contend with inconsistency, fragmentation, and hypocrisy, and her language cannot help but slip on occasion into the parlance of insinuation and mockery. To prove her sagacity, she must indicate that she can see through the hypocrisy and turpitude she encounters. Her ability to distinguish, however, closely resembles that “too delicate and quick an apprehension” Wycherley derides in his Epistle Dedicatory. In berating depravity and satirizing foolish characters, the heroine sounds disturbingly like a woman in the know, like one of the play's hypocrites who condemns vice to hide her own. Like the Freudian obscene joke, Restoration satiric comedy depends on licentious females who merely feign modesty. The audience, however, cannot distinguish the virtuous woman from her clever imitator through her public speech; spectators must rely on other, “secret” knowledge of both the heroine's honesty and the fallen women's depravity.

Heroines live in a world that uses language to say one thing and mean something other, a world that alludes to but cannot produce transparently honest speech. The comedies' persistently unstable link between word and designated meaning serves to unsettle the heroine's status as moral alternative to female hypocrisy. The heroine, like satire, hovers between the general and the particular: she embodies the difference (and narrow boundary line) between being intelligent (a general capacity to understand) and having intelligence (a particular knowledge of the world). The heroine simply knows too much, can read too well, to give credence to her promise of a pure discursive honesty, of a consistent and informing morality. The social satire of manners comedy always includes the potential for this other, candid way of life. “However dark or bereft of decency the scene a satire presents,” Rose Zimbardo attests in A Mirror to Nature, “in order to be satire it must suggest an idea of virtue, an ideal, however remote or romantic.”⁵² In fact, a great deal is at stake in the proposal of an aristocratic moral alternative to a bourgeois and/or Puritan conception of life. It is up to the heroine to suggest that unrepresentable potential for elegant and successful married life, to maintain the indefinable distinction between the rhetoric of witty repartee and that of saucy innuendo.

Both satiric comedy and its heroines purport to reflect and yet fail to sustain a coherent, clearly moral position. Both mirror worlds in which the act of moral recognition becomes a difficult, almost impossible task, and finally, both depend on a knowledge of duplicity they condemn. I do not claim that these complicated and confusing dramatic relations directly represent contemporary social conditions, or that they realistically reflect the actual situation of women during the Restoration and eighteenth century.⁵³ Rather, I argue, much more particularly, that the paradoxical demands made on female characters by playwrights of manners comedy slide into those made on female auditors. The dramatists' arguments in defense of their satiric treatments of female hypocrisy, duplicity, and sexual desire expose the gender gap in the moral premises of Restoration comic satire, a gap that has as much to do with putative female spectators as with female characters. The honesty and virtue that authors purport to depict depends on the contrast between the heroine and the rest of the female protagonists in the play and the acceptance of this contrast by female spectators or readers. That is, the moral integrity that the plays link so firmly to the possibility of the heroine's discursive honesty must find a referent outside itself in the moral understanding of virtuous women. And yet, at the same time, virtuous women—both within the play and in the context of its reception—are not supposed to understand a (false) word.

To put it another way, then, Restoration comic satire revolves around the female figure as the prototype of problematic signification. Even when defending the moral aims of plays to women, Wycherley and Congreve cannot resist satirizing women's responses, preemptively remarking that any women who would be thought virtuous will be incapable of responding to dialogue that virtuous women cannot comprehend. Their snide disavowals show corrupt women how successfully to hide their condition by easily managed artifice but in doing so also indicate the playwrights' contradictory attitudes toward women: women are at once the perfect reifications of, and the destabilizing factors in, moral discourse.⁵⁴ By suggesting that virtuous and immoral women cannot always be told apart, the dramatists thus undercut their argument that satiric language and salacious dialogue can be distinguished. That the dramatists, in their disgust at what they deem to be misinformed criticism, happen to satirize women on the very premise that undoes the moral claims for the heroines within their plays may simply seem an unfortunate blunder, but it is more than that. The coincidence of female (mis)interpretation and female sexual duplicity cannot be disentangled or dismissed: in Restoration comedy, the moral indeterminacy and slippage in satiric language is both a metaphor for and a metonymy of male uneasiness about female honesty and the related discomfort with the discursive components of social identity.

The plays of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve that I have chosen to discuss are plays that form the core of the canon of Restoration satiric comedy. I accept the common critical judgment that these plays are the most artful and effective examples of their genre; it is precisely the inner logic and coherence of this canon that I analyze, a logic and coherence that is gendered. That is, the narrative cohesion of the plays is not merely determined by concerns over the definition and possession of status, power, masculinity, and women, but is defined by them. The plays that I consider in the following chapters offer the most sustained interlocking elaboration of these rhetorical, social, and moral tensions, but a similar development informs the playwrights' earlier comedies, as well as the comic plays of most other Restoration dramatists.⁵⁵ I look at the formal and thematic constructions of these plays, offering an analysis of structure as well as a close reading of the behavior and claims of the characters. “Satire is sort of a glass,” Jonathan Swift observed,⁵⁶ and in the comedy of manners, satiric meaning rebounds, doubles, and reverses, compelling critics always to reflect on a trick done with mirrors. If, as I argue, certain “traditional” masculine social identities are being (re)articulated over and against new social contenders whose financial and rhetorical capacities threaten the old categories of status, then manners comedies can be seen to stage these bouts. Female characters perform double duty in these contests, serving as both dramatic punching bags and morally validating trophies.

In contrast, Aphra Behn's plays are thought to be more chaotic, farcical, and risqué, and less thematically coherent, thoughtful, and philosophically subtle than those written by the three male contemporaries mentioned above. This assessment privileges not just certain qualities but certain notions of what constitutes those qualities. Behn's comic plays most decidedly do not engage in the patriarchal mission outlined in the preceding paragraph, although some of her concerns may well be considered patriarchal. Her works allow an exploration of the ways in which female gender can be seen to inflect both the portrayals of “generic” characters and the focus of Behn's satire. Behn never produced a true comedy of manners, if by that is meant satiric comedy that directly addresses the manners, wit, marriages, and morals of the author's present-day homeland.⁵⁷ She most emphatically does not ground her satire on the morally redemptive capacity of the heroine or focus it on the sexual hypocrisy of women. Circumscription of female desire is not a goal in Behn's plays, nor is the (re)stabilization of masculine social identity. It is not definitions of masculinity, female virtue, and satiric discourse but the contending claims of love and money, the threat of Whiggish ascendancy, and the problem of incompatible marriages that interest Behn. Behn's plays provide an interesting counterpoint to the comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve. Her plots, themes, and language point to matters just as pressing as those of her male contemporaries, but not nearly as myopic—or gender-specific. One discovers, not surprisingly, that gender informs genre in ways that are both subtle and startlingly overt, the implications of which are historically and critically significant. Any reading that proposes to account for the equivocal satiric practice of Restoration comedy must therefore of necessity include a feminist critique.

Notes

1. In William Congreve (New York: Twayne, 1971), Maximillian E. Novak attests to the powerful influence on the content and reception of plays acquired by female spectators in the 1690s. Novak suggests that “a changing moral climate and its effect on women in the audience” brought about a turn away from the “libertine attitude toward love and marriage” (47).

2. Dedication to The Double Dealer, in The Comedies of William Congreve, ed. Anthony G. Henderson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

3. Epistle Dedicatory to The Plain-Dealer, in The Plays of William Wycherley, ed. Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), lines 34-42.

4. Dedication to The Double Dealer, in The Comedies of William Congreve, ed. Henderson.

5. The Double Dealer, in The Comedies of William Congreve, ed. Henderson, IV.i.412-16.

6. In using this expansive definition of satire, which easily encompasses the manners comedies of the Restoration, I know I collapse the distinctions that many critics have made concerning Restoration humor, ridicule, and satire. In particular, see Robert Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 32-62. It is very difficult to prove that the dramatists I discuss consistently adhere to those categories, even if of their own making. I am concerned with the way Restoration comedy functions as satire in its broadest sense, to expose hypocrisy and duplicity, and with the ethical or moral character, no matter how attenuated, that underlies that exposure.

7. For a well-considered investigation of satiric techniques, see Leonard Feinberg, Introduction to Satire (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1967), and Matthew Hodgart, Satire (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969). David Worcester, The Art of Satire (New York: Russell and Russell, 1940), 77-90, provides a very good description of the variations and methods of verbal irony.

8. As early as 1668, in his dispute with Dryden and other playwrights of the time, Thomas Shadwell promoted the belief in the necessity of moral instruction. Expressing concern about the portrayal of proper examples in plays, he repeatedly denounced the immorality of wit comedy. See the Prologue to The Sullen Lovers, 1:11; the Prologue to The Squire of Alsatia, 4:204; and “To the Reader,” The Royal Shepherdess, 1:100, all in The Complete Works of Thomas Shadwell, ed. Montague Summers (London: Fortune Press, 1927). The most famous of the contemporary denunciations is of course Jeremy Collier's A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (London, 1698). This pamphlet inspired prompt, anonymous dissent, such as A Letter to A. H. Esq.; Concerning the Stage (London, 1698) and A Vindication of the Stage … in Answer to Mr. Collier's Late Book (London, 1698), as well as responses from the authors under attack, notably John Vanbrugh's A Short Vindication of the Relapse and the Provok'd Wife, from Immorality and Profaneness (London, 1698) and William Congreve's Amendments of Mr. Collier's False and Imperfect Citations etc. from the Old Batchelor, Double Dealer, Love for Love, Mourning Bride (London, 1698). Congreve's defense provoked an anonymous reformer to publish a critique four days later entitled Animadversions on Mr. Congreve's Late Answer to Mr. Collier in a Dialogue between Mr. Smith and Mr. Johnson (London, 1698). The controversy continued, albeit less furious and fast-paced, throughout the next quarter-century. See Sister Rose Antony, S.C., The Jeremy Collier Stage Controversy, 1698-1726 (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1937) for a fine record of the dispute.

9. Norman Holland (The First Modern Comedies: The Significance of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959]) and Ursula Jantz (Targets of Satire in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve [Salzburg: Universität Salzburg, 1978]) supply thoroughgoing summaries of this dispute. More recently, Robert Hume in Development of English Drama and later in The Rakish Stage: Studies in English Drama, 1600-1800 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983) gives balanced, pithy, and exhaustive accounts of the critical attitudes toward Restoration drama.

10. In the twentieth century, Allardyce Nicoll (A History of Restoration Drama 1660-1700 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923]), Bonamy Dobrée (Restoration Comedy [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924]), and J. W. Krutch (Comedy and Conscience After the Restoration [New York: Columbia University Press, 1949]) posit the view that these plays offer accurate renditions or commendations of aristocratic life. Most recently, Jantz (Targets of Satire), Rose Zimbardo (A Mirror to Nature: Transformations in Drama and Aesthetics, 1660-1732 [Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986]), and Leon Guilhamet (Satire and the Transformation of Genre [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987]) underscore the satiric content of the plays. Harriet Hawkins (Likenesses and Truth in Elizabethan and Restoration Drama [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972]), Hume (Development of English Drama and The Rakish Stage), and Robert Markley (Two-Edg'd Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988]) propose that satiric moral vision is flawed or lacking.

11. There are many readings that disregard the dramatists' claims of moral intent or find them to be merely perfunctory excuses. Other arguments define satire in terms that keep the plays from critical consideration. Matthew Hodgart, for instance, does not think manners comedies true satire because they accept “the rules of the social game; satire does not: it is a protest against the rules as well as the players, and it is much more profoundly subversive than comedy can afford to be” (Satire, 189). Northrop Frye (Anatomy of Criticism [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957]) would distinguish between the “comic irony” of Restoration manners plays and the “militant irony” of true satire. Alvin B. Kernan (The Cankered Muse [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959]) would find the plays under discussion incompatible with the plot of satire, a static mode that does not allow “the miraculous transformations of comedy or the cruel dialectic of tragedy” (34); and similarly, Sheldon Sachs (Fiction and the Shape of Belief: A Study of Henry Fielding with Glances at Swift, Johnson, and Richardson [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964]) would disqualify these comedies because he distinguishes satire sharply from action. Although these distinctions are helpful attempts to clarify, they fail to provide a critical space for discussing the light but acerbic comedy of the Restoration.

12. In Critics, Values, and Restoration Comedy (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), a book-length study of the critical presuppositions that inform assessments of Restoration drama, John T. Harwood finds that four of the five critical approaches “pertain directly to the moral effect of imaginative literature, in this case, Restoration comedy, on the reader” (ix).

13. Epistle Dedicatory to The Plain-Dealer, in The Plays of William Wycherley, ed. P. Holland, lines 99-104 and 111-16.

14. By the rather loose term manners comedy I mean those satiric, witty comedies written and produced between 1660 and 1700 that include clever, eloquent, fashionable characters who reflect on or criticize contemporary social behavior and standards in a more or less humorous way.

15. Charles H. George, “The Making of the English Bourgeoisie,” Science and Society 35, no. 4 (Winter 1971): 385-414.

16. Particularly comprehensive explorations of the political, philosophical, and ideological consequences of emergent capitalism, Puritan thought, and the aftermath of the Civil War can be found in Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953); C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (London: Oxford University Press, 1962); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Christopher Hill, Some Intellectual Consequences of the English Revolution (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980); and Robert P. Kraynak, History and Modernity in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).

17. For precise, well-documented investigations that employ a contextual approach in their discussion of literary works, see Michael McKeon, Politics and Poetry in Restoration England: The Case of Dryden's Annus Mirabilis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), and The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); Barbara K. Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); Annabel Paterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984); Susan Staves, Players' Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979); Steven Zwicker, Politics and Language in Dryden's Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); and Graham Parry, The Seventeenth Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1603-1700 (London: Longman, 1989).

18. Dudley W. R. Bahlman (The Moral Revolution of 1688 [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957]) alleges a decisive reformation. But Hume, (The Rakish Stage), Laura Brown (English Dramatic Form, 1660-1700 [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981]), McKeon (Origins of the English Novel), and Zwicker (Politics and Language) sketch a much slower and less well defined transition.

19. Some of the contemporary writings that indicate the problems and divisions in this period are Edmund Hickeringill, The History of Whiggism (London, 1682); Gilbert Burnet, History of My Own Time (London, 1725-34); John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (London, 1690); The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); and John Trenchard, The Art of Governing Parties (London, 1701).

20. For descriptions and slightly varying assessments of the political conditions of this time, see R. S. Besher, The Making of the Restoration Settlement (London: Adams and Charles Black, 1957); J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675-1725 (London: Macmillan, 1967); D. R. Lacey, Dissent and Parliamentary Politics in England, 1661-1689: A Study in the Perpetuation and Tempering of Parliamentarianism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1969); B. W. Hill, The Growth of Parliamentary Parties, 1689-1742 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1976); and J. P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party, 1689-1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

21. Nancy Armstrong, “The Rise of the Domestic Woman,” in The Ideology of Conduct: Essays in Literature and the History of Sexuality, ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (New York: Methuen, 1987), 96-141, 98. For an in-depth analysis of the influence and consequences of conduct literature, see Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), especially the second chapter, from which the above essay is adapted.

22. Ruth Kelso, The Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (1956; reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978); Suzanne W. Hull, Chaste, Silent, and Obedient: English Books for Women, 1475-1640 (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1982); Richard Bell and Patricia Crawford, “Women's Published Writings, 1600-1700,” in Women in English Society, 1500-1800, ed. Mary Prior (New York: Methuen, 1985), 211-81. Another relevant book is Angeline Goreau, The Whole Duty of a Woman: Female Writers in Seventeenth-Century England (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1985).

23. Armstrong, “Domestic Woman,” 98.

24. Ibid., 135. Lawrence Stone (The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 [1977; reprint, Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1979]) and Margaret George (Women in the First Capitalist Society: Experiences in Seventeenth-Century England [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988]) offer complementary portrayals of the social changes Armstrong describes.

25. James Thompson devotes the first two chapters of Language in Wycherley's Plays: Seventeenth-Century Language Theory and Drama (University: University of Alabama Press, 1984), 6-36, to an overview and analysis of Restoration concepts of discourse. Markley, in Two-Edg'd Weapons, provides the most comprehensive study of the ideological transformations of dramatic style in Restoration comedy. His explorations of “the ways in which stylistic structures describe, respond to, and suppress the trauma of historical change” (29) are compelling and provocative. Although we share similar views on the nature of Restoration dramatic language and on the historical conditions that shape it, we arrive at very different conclusions about the plays we discuss.

26. Brian Vickers, “The Royal Society and English Prose Style: A Reassessment,” in Rhetoric and the Pursuit of Truth: Language Change in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, by Brian Vickers and Nancy S. Struever (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1985), 1-76. In these contentions the author is at odds with the three most influential writers on the subject, all of whom have differing opinions but fall under the aegis of a stylistic critical approach: Morris Croll, Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm, ed. J. Max Patrick and Robert D. Evans, with John M. Wallace and R. J. Schoeck (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966); Richard Foster Jones, The Seventeenth Century: Studies in the History of English Thought and Literature from Bacon to Pope (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1951) and The Triumph of the English Language: A Survey of Opinions Concerning the Vernacular from the Introduction of Printing to the Restoration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1953); and George Williamson, The Senecan Amble: A Study in Prose Form from Bacon to Collier (London: Faber and Faber, 1951).

27. A selection of contemporary works that give a good idea of the terms, issues, and underlying motives of the fray: Meric Casaubon, A Treatise Concerning Enthusiasme (London, 1655); Joseph Glanville, The Vanity of Dogmatizing (London, 1661); Samuel Parker, A Free and Impartial Censure of the Platonick Philosophie (Oxford, 1666); John Evelyn, Publick Employment and Active Life … Prefer'd to Solitude (London, 1667); John Wilkins, An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (London, 1668); Robert Ferguson, The Interest of Reason in Religion (London, 1675); and James Arderne, Directions Concerning the Manner and Stile of Sermons (London, 1671).

28. Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge, ed. Jackson I. Cope and Harold Whitmore Jones (St. Louis: Washington University, 1958), 419. This text is a facsimile reproduction of the 1667 edition, and page numbers correspond to that edition.

29. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (London, 1625).

30. Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan, vol. 3 of The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, 11 vols., ed. Sir William Molesworth (London: John Bohn, 1839-45), chap. 4, sec. 20. Hobbes further elaborates this theory of language in De Cive, vol. 2, and The Whole Art of Rhetoric, vol. 7.

31. Ample discussions of Hobbes's thoughts on language can be found in studies by J. W. N. Watkins, Hobbes' System of Ideas: A Study in the Political Significance of Philosophical Theories (London: Hutchinson, 1965), 138-56; Frederick Whelan, “Language and Its Abuses in Hobbes's Political Philosophy,” American Political Science Review 75 (1981): 59-74; and Kraynak, History and Modernity, 74-94. For a well-considered and invaluable analyses of the ideological premises of the claim to objective language, see Joel Reed, “Restoration and Repression: The Language Projects of the Royal Society,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 19 (1989): 399-412; and Robert Markley, “Objectivity as Ideology: Boyle, Newton, and the Languages of Science,” Genre 16 (Winter 1983): 355-72.

32. Although both his methodological premise and his objective—to describe a dialogics of style—differ from mine, Markley, in Two-Edg'd Weapons, shares a similar view of the ideological stakes in manners comedies. For a reading of the era's assessment of wit and rhetoric that varies significantly from both mine and Markley's, see Richard W. F. Kroll, The Material Word: Literate Culture in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).

33. For other applications of Freud's theory to the workings of satire, see Feinberg, Introduction to Satire, 176; Hodgart, Satire, 110; Worcester, The Art of Satire, 33; and Robert C. Elliott, The Power of Satire: Ritual, Magic, Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 263-64.

34. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1960), 172.

35. Richard Morton (“Introduction: Satire and Reform,” in Satire in the Eighteenth Century, ed. J. D. Browning [New York: Garland, 1983], 1-8) gives a strikingly similar definition of the operation of satire: “Satire, whether in literature or fine arts, seems to have a double audience; the person or persons attacked and the spectators to the jubilant assault. The person attacked may be named as an individual or generally classified, but the satiric aim is to injure him for the delight of the spectators” (2). Morton makes satire the operant third term here. Although he addresses satire and satiric aim, the satirist is notably absent from this discussion; it is the satire, not the satirist, that attacks.

36. As is well known, Freud describes female genitalia either as stunted copies of the male apparatus (the little girl possesses a “small and inconspicuous organ” that compares unfavorably to the little boy's “strikingly visible … superior counterpart” of “large proportions”), or as lacking entirely (the little girl “has seen it and knows that she is without it and wants to have it”). See Sigmund Freud, “Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes,” in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 187-88. For a superb Freudian explication of the woman's role as unwitting participant in and alienated observer of a dirty joke, see Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, and Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1991), 28-31 and 39-43.

37. Freud's surprisingly unselfconscious account of the function of obscene jokes demands an analysis that is not within the scope of this book. In his exegesis the sight of female genitalia confers a sense of triumphant accomplishment. Generally in Freud's discussions such exposure testifies to the “fact” of castration, knowledge of which is always double-edged. The female condition as castrated simultaneously verifies the dominant male position and possession and threatens both by demonstrating their potential loss. The horror of the discovery of female “lack” can bring about denial through the fetishization of another bodily part (see Sigmund Freud, “Medusa's Head” and “Fetishism,” in Sexuality and Love, ed. Rieff), or it could cause a sustained voyeuristic impulse, an attempt to control others through a subjugating look. On voyeuristic activity, particularly scopophilia, see Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1975). For a further account see Freud, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” in General Psychological Theory, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Macmillan, 1963). I believe that the aim of the obscene joke is far more than “to see what is sexual revealed.” I propose that this type of joke is both a means of denial and control through verbal voyeurism and a method of punishment for a perceived lack by the objectification of those who are found lacking.

38. For a fine description of the fops' function as comical counterfeiters of rake-heroes, see R. C. Sharma, Themes and Conventions in the Comedy of Manners (New Delhi: Asia Publishing House, 1965), 116-18.

39. Instructive accounts of the social and cultural shifts and reshapings taking place during this period are provided by Mervyn James, Family, Lineage, and Civil Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974); Stone, Family, Sex, and Marriage; Alan McFarlane, The Origins of English Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1560-1680 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1982); Cicely Howell, Land, Family, and Inheritance in Transition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

40. Harold Weber, The Restoration Rake-Hero: Transformations in Sexual Understanding in Seventeenth-Century England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 150.

41. Ibid.

42. Donald Bruce, Topics of Restoration Comedy (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1974), 144.

43. There are, of course, some exceptions to this general account. The most notable is the title character in Thomas Southerne's Sir Anthony Love, a libertine woman in rake's clothing who successfully maneuvers everyone to gain her own ends. Revealing the hypocrisy of others along the way, she makes use of the rotten elements in the social structure to maintain her own decadence. Though certainly a protagonist, Sir Anthony is far from a heroine. Her life, like Horner's in Wycherley's The Country Wife, is spent uncovering faults, her pleasure gained by manipulating others. Essentially static, these characters expose but cannot reform others or themselves. They are caricatures of depravity and lust for power, and the success of their strategies seems not the reward for determined human endeavor but a caustic comment on the way of the world.

44. Ben Ross Schneider, The Ethos of Restoration Comedy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 170. Schneider eloquently describes this difficult position of the heroine but does not examine it as a formal aspect of the play.

45. Thomas Fujimura (The Restoration Comedy of Wit [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952]) first introduced the Hobbesian notions of naturalism, skepticism, and wit into the discussion of Restoration drama. In his brief treatments of female characters, he emphasizes the heroines' witty, playful, and malicious moments but ignores their graver concerns and traditional mores. Margaret Lamb McDonald (The Independent Woman in the Restoration Comedy of Manners [Salzburg: Universität Salzburg, 1976]) contends that “the Hobbesian attitudes of self-interest and will-to-power are not only reflected in the heroine, but, more importantly, help form the very basis of her independent spirit” (163). Yet the female characters who adequately correspond to her Hobbesian notion of natural (libertine) behavior are neither heroines nor Truewits. Virginia Ogden Birdsall (Wild Civility: The English Comic Spirit on the Restoration Stage [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971]) thinks several Restoration heroines products of the Hobbesian mold. But her evidence is rather slim. She accentuates any instances of the heroine's impudence or rancor but disregards all indications of her moral concern, kind disposition, and virtuous behavior.

46. Sharma, Themes and Conventions, 75-76, and John Harrington Smith, The Gay Couple in Restoration Comedy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), 76.

47. Hume (The Rakish Stage, 138-75) explores this topic in far greater detail and supplies much more nuanced readings of a number of the heroes of Restoration comedies.

48. For a comprehensive catalogue of the rakehell's laudable motives and attributes, see Schneider, The Ethos of Restoration Comedy.

49. Steven van der Weele's exhaustive study, The Critical Reputation of Restoration Comedy in Modern Times Up to 1950 (Salzburg: Universität Salzburg, 1978), 389-412, succinctly summarizes the contradictory and problematic nature of Fujimura's major premises.

50. Earl Miner (“In Satire's Falling City,” in The Satirist's Art, ed. H. J. Jensen and M. R. Zirken [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972], 3-27) describes the potential utopia's relation to the satire as symbiotic: “It is not true that Utopias are simply satires in reverse or satires failed Utopias, but by setting out extreme versions of each other, they depend on each other's existence to keep them in being” (16). Michael Seidel, (“Satire and Metaphoric Collapse: The Bottom of the Sublime,” in Satire in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Browning, 116-23) believes that satire has a critical distance on the nostalgia for a past ideal state, a nostalgia it deploys as a trap for its gullible readers.

51. It is perhaps for this reason that Sharma (Themes and Conventions), among others, finds it necessary to reclaim the heroine's conversation from any allegations of double meaning.

52. Zimbardo, A Mirror to Nature, 105.

53. For descriptions and examinations of the predicament of women in the seventeenth century, see Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1919); Jean Gagen, The New Woman: Her Emergence in English Drama, 1600-1730 (New York: Twayne, 1954); Doris Stenton, The English Woman in History (London: Allen and Unwin, 1957); Myra Reynolds, The Learned Lady in England, 1650-1760 (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1964); David J. Latt, “Praising Virtuous Ladies: The Literary Image and the Historical Reality of Women in Seventeenth-Century England,” in What Manner of Woman: Essays on English and American Life and Literature, ed. Marlene Springer (New York: New York University Press, 1977), 39-64; Antonia Fraser, The Weaker Vessel (New York: Random House, 1984); Prior, Women in English Society; Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski, Fetter'd or Free? English Women Novelists, 1670-1815 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986); and M. George, Women in the First Capitalist Society.

54. The appearance of actresses on the stage may have much to do with the dramatists' contradictory declarations about women. Certainly, the histrionic portrayal of virtue by women of questionable character calls attention to the problematic nature of representation. That the love life and love interests of actresses were well known and often alluded to in the plays could in part account for the difficulty playwrights and audience alike had in separating moral illustration from satiric send-up. For an illuminating examination of the changing social climate that permitted the introduction of actresses in the Restoration, see Katharine Eisaman Maus, “‘Playhouse Flesh and Blood’: Sexual Ideology and the Restoration Actress,” ELH 46 (1979): 595-617. In considering the role actresses played on and off stage in determining the genre, topics, and reception of plays, Maus demonstrates the ways in which the audience's fascination with the actresses' private lives informed and confirmed general notions of female sexuality. Weber (The Restoration Rake-Hero, 150-52) offers a similar reading of how the “sexual change” brought about by the addition of women to the Restoration stage “could both elevate and degrade women at the same time” (151).

55. The earlier plays of the dramatists under discussion are Wycherley's Love in a Wood and The Gentleman Dancing Master and Congreve's The Old Batchelour. In other writers see, for instance, James Howard's The English Monsieur and All Mistaken; Dryden's Marriage a-la-Mode and Mr. Limberham; Charles Sedley's The Mulberry-Garden and Bellamira; Thomas Shadwell's The Sullen Lovers, Epsom-Wells, The Virtuoso, and A True Widow; Thomas Betterton's The Amorous Widow; Edward Revet's The Town-Shifts; Edward Ravenscroft's The Careless Lovers and The London Cuckolds; Thomas Durfey's A Fond Husband and Love for Money; Thomas Otway's Friendship in Fashion, The Souldiers Fortune, and The Atheist; John Crowne's Sir Courtly Nice; Thomas Southerne's Sir Antony Love and The Wives Excuse; Thomas Shadwell's Bury Fair and The Amorous Bigotte; John Vanbrugh's The Provok'd Wife; Thomas Dilke's The Lover's Luck and The City Lady; and Colley Cibber's Woman's Wit. All these plays illustrate the issues mentioned above, but I have not by any means exhausted the list of relevant plays.

56. Jonathan Swift, Preface to The Battle of the Books, ed. Adolph Guthkelch (London: Chatto and Windus, 1908).

57. Hume (Development of English Drama, 335-39) disputes the usefulness of the category of comedy of manners, pointing out that the criteria for inclusion are vague and arbitrary. He argues that except for time and place, Behn's The Rover meets the general qualifications of manners comedies far better than, say, Etherege's The Man of Mode.