The Country Wife and Social Danger
[In the essay below, Cohen examines the tension and energy inherent in the social situation presented in the play The Country Wife.]
The Country Wife is a play which is carried by the energy of constant present danger. The threat of social collapse, which a single simple exposure implies, is omnipresent. What if, we are constantly thinking, the ruse is exposed as a ruse? What consequences would ensue from such exposure? Like many another farce, the results of exposure would produce tragedy in one or many forms. Those characters who have carefully and, in one or two cases, almost deliberately, insulated themselves from the knowledge of the truth surrounding Horner and their wives, would be compelled by the full force of public humiliation to depths and degrees of self knowledge heretofore avoided. Self-knowledge would, in the more egregious cases of Pinchwife and Sir Jasper, produce a choice based on nothing so much as that fragile structure of male ethics which have determined the direction and the values of the social organism. These men, if forced to face the fact that they have been cuckolded and gulled by another man would have to choose, quite simply, between behaving like brave men or cowardly men. No other option exists. Brave men would, by tradition or precedent attack and, hopefully, kill Horner. Cowardly men would remove themselves from the scene and agents of their cuckoldry with, probably, a consequential punishment of their transgressing wives. The use of the law against Horner or their wives, tradition again dictates, would be perceived within this society as a form of cowardice. It is my object here to explore the way in which the feelings of men, the brutality of men to women, and the self-serving asseveration of masculine values in the play are the bases and the courses of male vulnerability and weakness.
Patriarchy, tyrannical though it can be towards women, is a chief cause of its own weakness; the tyrannical element of patriarchy is its own self-protective means of re-establishing itself in the face of its permanently imminent collapse. The violence and brutality that issue, apparently inevitably, from patriarchal structures are the primary, perhaps the only, means by which it can restore itself. Wycherly's The Country Wife exposes the fragility of male-induced structures of social and individual conduct and reveals the world as a strange unreal place where men plunge about in a kind of darkness; they are held together socially by mores of competitiveness, violence, suppression, and repression which derive inevitably from the profoundly isolated place that they have made for themselves. Friendship among the men in the play is entirely conditional on an acceptance of the hierarchy of sexual success. Those in the know, like Harcourt, have to accept Horner's sexual superiority to themselves if they wish to be accepted as his friends. Those not in the know, foolishly, but accordingly, make the assumption, of their own sexual superiority to him. The world of men is a world of continuous sexual contestation. This powerfully individualistic value produces a sense of profound loneliness in each of the males—more profound in some than others, of course—which can only be addressed or healed by resort to the same value. Men who seem to feel lonely cope with that feeling by reference to their sexual adequacy or inadequacy in terms of other men. The result seems inevitably to be more and increased isolation and misery. The scapegoat for male loneliness is always women. By contrast to male values of sexual competitiveness in the play, the women seem to recognize and act on feelings of community, mutuality and sympathy. They tend to support and tolerate each other, to help and conspire with each other almost by what seems to be “nature,” and also because of the socially received perception of men as their enemies. They share the plight of underprivileged despite the fact that they belong in a firmly upper middle-class stratum of society.
The dramatically complementary scenes of the play which demonstrate the dichotomy most vividly are the so-called drinking scene—in which the women agree to act drunk and speak as truthfully among themselves as if they were drunk in real earnest—and the last vivid moment of the play when Horner is left alone but surrounded by both the women he has had sex with and those he intends to seduce. Each of these scenes has a symbolic suggestiveness which powerfully sustains the idea of an essential difference between men and women. As dramatic spectacles, the scenes point to the deep incompatibility of the values of community and individuality. Each of these two scenes alludes to a transgression of sexual or gender codes. A female drinking scene is itself transgressive and subversive. Horner's plight in the last moments of the play portrays him as a man's idea of a woman—weak, foolish, used, usable, and trapped in his sexuality which he denies only at his social peril. He is of no use or value except to women as a convenient phallus.
Eunuchism is a curious and ambiguous state. Writing about the plight of eunuch slaves in Byzantium and Imperial China, Orlando Patterson describes the simultaneous loathing and fear in which eunuchs occasionally were held. Because eunuchs could not reproduce themselves and because they were held in such social disdain, even among other slaves, their cynical masters recognized their potential as wielders of power who were not likely to try to usurp them. Eunuchism is associated very largely with slavery and the harem. Eunuchs were used to guard the harem because it was naively held that because men were eunuchs they were incapable of giving sexual pleasure to women. Their guardianship endowed them, however, with a certain if limited authority. Eunuchs, writes Patterson, are always regarded as freaks and regarded with horror: “In typically human fashion the sense of horror does not induce pity, but rather disgust and fear.”1 These reactions arise from some fanciful and some demonstrated physical peculiarities resulting from castration. Patterson cites some so-called “authorities” on the subject who held that eunuchs “stank not only from incontinence but from excessive perspiration, [while] others claimed that they ceased to sweat from their armpits after castration. They were supposed to be intellectually superior … but morally degenerate. …”2 Lady Fidget's remarkably cruel reaction to the news of Horner's eunuchism is somewhat mitigated by dramatic irony and subsequent events and the way it reflects on her, while it follows this nearly universal pattern of callousness, disgust and horror:
O filthy French beast! foh, foh! Why do we stay?
Let's be gone. I can't endure the sight of him.
(I,1,110-1)3
It is Horner's self-imposed lot to have to endure such treatment in the interest of a higher objective. He takes on himself the universal scorn reserved for eunuchs while he is careful to let those he respects know of its unfoundedness. But it is in the closing moments of the play that we perceive Horner rather more aware of the consequences of his ploy than he seems in the beginning. It is likely that the audiences of Wycherley's source play—Terence's The Eunuch—for whom eunuchs would have been a more familiar feature of everyday life, would have found the spectacle of the artificial eunuch funny in different and more real ways.
Horner's last lines are a statement of bravado; but how they comport with his near exposure and the spectacle of his self-imposed life sentence is more ambiguous.
Vain fops, but court, and dress, and keep a pother
To pass for women's men with one another;
But he who aims by women to be prized,
First by the men, you see, must be despised.
(V,4,430-3)
To accept being despised by the men, as the drama vividly shows, is best accomplished by first despising the men—who reveal themselves with perhaps one exception to be an impressively despicable lot. Horner's position at the end, however, by its very ambiguity—is he the winner or the loser?—directs all concentration to his genitals. He is the public eunuch and the private stud. His standing is perceptible on two discrete and irreconcilable levels. He looks trapped, very much like the sex toy of a potentially endless stream of unsatisfied women. He has, however, created the trap and stepped into it with his eyes open. He has what he wanted. What is unclear is whether, now that he has it, he still wants it or believes that it was worth it. The spectacle leaves us in doubt about his happiness, though in no doubt about his success. The drinking scene introduces the dilemma.
During that scene Horner is found surrounded by women who are deeply and essentially unhappy. For this reason Horner must be seen as the very opposite of a Don Juan. The idea of a woman as a sexual trophy carries with it related ideas, chief amongst them being the notion that the greater the woman, the more happy, secure, satisfied and settled, the more universally desired she is, the greater the accomplishment of her illicit lover for seducing her. The best known such woman in English writing is, of course, Clarissa. Unlike the women Horner conquers, Clarissa is a prize because she is happy, beautiful, and virtuous. She can live without the likes of Horner who offers simple and uncomplicated sexual enjoyment as a gift. It takes little imagination to consider how Clarissa Harlowe would have reacted to the blandishments of a John Horner. Horner's plan, then, revolves around the social, political, and sexual unhappiness of women and also the sexual anxiety of men. These are, of course, the by-products of a system of gender and sexual relations and marriage which are bound to produce misery in women who seek happiness in marriage and find only disappointment—as has occurred in the cases of Lady Fidget and Margery Pinchwife, and will have occurred in other women who find themselves in the circle. The plight of womankind as described in the drinking scene and, especially, in the drinking song, is a predictably miserable and pleasureless marriage. Sadly enough, this does seem in fact to be the plight or future plight of each of the harassed women in the scene who are eternally connected to men they despise or, like the apparently unattached Mrs. Squeamish whose grandmother watches her, who seem to associate authority with tyranny.
Before the women's drinking scene, there is an intriguing little bit of dialogue among the men on the subject of women drinking. It contains the usual vapid generalizations that pass for wit in much Restoration comedy. The subject is women and drink and the relation of the one to the other:
HARCOURT:
Yes a man drinks often with a fool, as he tosses with a marker, only to keep his hand in ure. But doe the ladies drink?
HORNER:
Yes, sir, and I shall have the pleasure at least of laying 'em flat with a bottle, and bring as much scandal that way upon 'em as formerly t'other.
HARCOURT:
Perhaps you may prove as weak a brother amongst 'em that way as t'other.
DORILANT:
Foh! drinking with women is unnatural as scolding with'em. But 'tis a pleasure of decayed fornicators, and the basest way of quenching love.
(III,2,29-39)
It is interesting that this Harcourt who seems to participate in the anti-female badinage with a zest equal to that of any of the men has had such a good press from the critics. The dialogue is not particularly vicious, but it clearly locates women as opposite and inferior to men, rather than as their complement or equal. The construction of women as bad company and poor drinking companions alludes to something slightly insidious about women—they are the evil that stands between men and their manly pleasures, also translatable in the context as freedom.
An intriguing element of the female drinking scene is that it provides the spectacle of women behaving like men. The women imitate the only real model available to them in the context of a drinking bout, and yet, it seems, despite this need to imitate, it is in this scene that something benign surfaces almost independently of their determination to ape their male counterparts. The husbands of this play, who in the drinking scene are represented as typical, are clearly afraid of their wives, though not in the same way that the wives are afraid of their husbands. Wives fear husbands because it is part of their function to please them, though the opposite is not true. The wifely function seems clearly to endure—in the worst case—and enjoy—in the best—the use of their bodies by their husbands. According to the drinking song, husbands tend not to be the most adequate lovers, while it is the wife's duty to acknowledge, usually by a kind of tacit complicity, that her husband is an adequate lover. For a wife to express sexual dissatisfaction is for her to offer the very worst insult a wife can offer a husband. Thus, in the married world of the play, wives must be accomplished liars or risk incurring the wrath and displeasure of men who have considerable power over their simple physical mobility.
Horner has garnered three lovers by the commencement of the drinking scene, Lady Fidget, Mrs. Squeamish, and Mrs. Pinchwife, who hides in his closet while the other women are visiting him. The other female visitor is Mrs. Dainty Fidget who has not yet been initiated into the fold. The song itself is interesting; though it is as well to remember that it is a song with the predictable veracities and hyperboles of songs:
1.
Why should our damned tyrants oblige us to live
On the pittance of pleasure which only they give?
We must not rejoice
With wine and with noise.
In vain we must wake in a dull bed alone,
Whilst to our warm rival, the bottle, they're gone.
Then lay aside charms And take up these arms.
2.
'Tis wine only gives 'em their courage and wit
Because we live sober, to men we submit.
If for beauties you'd pass
Take a lick of the glass:
'Twill mend your compexions, and when they are gone
The best red we have is the red of the grape.
Then, sister, lay't on,
And damn a good shape.
(V,4,26-41)
This song and the play more generally allude to a grave political issue—the crisis of authority. In the world of The Country Wife, authority is known only as tyranny. The singer of this song and the women who concur in its message agree that they are political subjects of a male order. They are hostages to marriage which is itself a transfer from one familial subjection to another. The song, like thousands of others on the same subject, uses comic lamentation to make its subversive point. Husbands are the enemy of wives. They are tyrants, the pleasure they give is a “pittance”; they prefer wine to women; the bottle is the wife's rival. Wine which encourages men can offer comfort to women; it can make them feel attractive and it can give them the illusion of equality—“Because we live sober, to men we submit.” The potential pathos of the song is displaced by the persona of the singer, a thoroughgoing harridan. The drinking song has analogies in tavern songs throughout the world in which men lament the imprisonment of marriage. Like those, this song counsels revolt—“damn a good shape” encourages the subversion of the male value of female physical attractiveness which is one of the cornerstones of a patriarchal agenda. A “good shape”—has to do largely, though not entirely, with female conformity to the masculine notion of femininity.
The truly dangerous element of the song, however, is its honesty. It exposes married life and love as shams. The social requirement that women lie to protect their husband-tyrants is implied in the song and taken farther into the scene up to the last stunning revelation of Horner's true identity. In the dialogue that follows the song the women admit to behavior that directly violates the cannons of patriarchal control. Squeamish's admission, for example, that “for want of a gallant, the butler is lovely in our eyes,” (49-50) is a flagrant acknowledgement of the existence of female sexual desire and, more important, is a statement about the artificiality of class differentiation that strikes at the heart of the system of political control which the men naively seem to believe their wives accept. The statement openly situates sexual desire as a primary force which lies behind the mask of social conformity to the male order. The threat, moreover, of a woman taking a lover from a lower class seriously questions the value of the social order to which these women are tied.
The dialogue also constructs the world of men in a far more trenchant and accurate fashion than the converse construction. Where men seem to see women as a necessary nuisance in their pursuits of pleasure, the women here reveal a perception of men that is incisive and accurate, and which is validated by the behavior of most of the men in the play:
SQUEAMISH:
Our bashfulness is only the reflection of the men's.
DAINTY:
We blush, when they are shamefaced.
(115-6)
The male bashfulness may be translated as simple feelings of sexual inadequacy, exemplified in the play by the anxiety expressed by Sir Jasper and Mr. Pinchwife in particular, but, according to this exchange, it is a common phenomenon.
As subjects, the women can only represent their feelings and beliefs as dreams, as states of consciousness and ideality which they cannot hope to realize in their lives. Thus, on the subject of love, the cynical and unlikely spokesperson for generous behavior is Squeamish, who declares, “love is better known by liberality than by jealousy.” (151) The statement wins an endorsement by none other than the hard-bitten Lady Fidget who agrees, saying, “For one may be dissembled, the other not.” (152) While it would be entirely out of place to sentimentalize these two speakers—tough birds in their own rights—there is no escaping the conclusion that the dissatisfaction of these women derives from their having to live in a world whose rules are made by their masters. The women, that is, possess the common plight of individuals in inferior and dependent positions, and it is this subjection which seems to make them sensitive to the moral and social failure of the rule of men. One of the few positive things to emerge out of the morass of cynicism and cruelty in their world is an alertness to the plight of each other. On the other hand, their reaction to Horner's alleged eunuchism reveals a kind of vicious, Hobbesian pleasure in their recognition of a plight that is more unfortunate than their own.
The revelation that caps the scene is a female version of sexual boasting; and yet, despite its imitativeness, the difference from male boasting is manifest. Men boasting about their sexual conquests refer directly or implicitly to the number of women they sleep with either concurrently or consecutively—that is, the number of women they are simultaneously able to betray—the number of times they are able to have sex within a given period, and the magnitude of their genitals. Most of these criteria of boasting apply to Horner. The women are more modest in their pretensions. Having one adequate lover at a time seems sufficient for each of them; and adequacy is defined partly by the sheer unlikeness of the lover to the husband. When My Lady Fidget claps Horner on the back in a remarkably possessive gesture which nicely reverses gender roles, she declares him her “false rogue.” (155) The possession of a lover is the great fact. What is noteworthy is that when Squeamish and Dainty lay equal claim to Horner, the women quickly agree to sharing him. Having foresworn jealousy in love, the women are each of them as good as their word. Lady Fidget speaks for the group: “Well, then, there's no remedy; sister sharers, let us not fall out, but have a care of our honour.” (169-70) I find it hard to imagine men coming to an agreement of this kind without hearing accusations of betrayal and the cry of whore ringing across the stage. (In the Hollywood movie, Boys Night Out in which four men share the services of Kim Novak—an undercover sociology student studying the sexual habits of married men—the sharing is precisely based upon the equal payments each husband makes monthly. Kim Novak skillfully keeps her virginity and the married men all fall in love with their wives again.) The moment of revelation in the play is, thus, rife with danger. The revelation of Horner's betrayal of these women raises the possibility of a social explosion. And, of course, had the women lived by the morality of hierarchy or the patriarchal structures of power and possessiveness, danger and calamity would necessarily have followed. The greatest such danger would have been the jeopardisation of secrecy and a burgeoning social disturbance.
The last scene of the play, that in which the game is almost given away, portrays a society on the brink of disintegrating while it simultaneously supplies a strong sense of the fragility of a world held together by tenuous ideological forms. Wycherley shows here how one misspoken word is capable of rending the fabric of patriarchal dominance. The tension of the scene lies in the way the dramatist skillfully carries the characters to the brink of discovery and destruction. Tragedies of this and the previous eras should have made us alert to some of the ways in which female sexual betrayal is regarded by patriarchally determined social groups—women get killed. The refined wit and smooth verbiage of The Country Wife should not disguise the fact that the stakes are high in this play. Exposure of any of the women in the play as Horner's illicit lovers carries severe danger for any of them. This danger is probably most vividly and seriously expressed in the scenes between Pinchwife and Margery. He feels secure, apparently, in locking up his wife and, more gravely, in drawing his sword on her and threatening to cut her face with his knife—“I will stab out those eyes that cause my mischief.” (IV, 2, 113) Pinchwife's phallic violence represents a frequent response to female marital infidelity. But this is a play that refuses to recover order through a male consensus about female virtue, as so often happens in tragedy when the men unite around the body of the dead chaste woman and proclaim her matchless virtue or around the body of the unchaste and unfaithful woman and proclaim her danger to society.
This play proposes deception as a social norm. Lying is the chief power women have in this world. Their cynicism and dishonesty are inevitable concomitants of their oppressed status. Female honesty is synonymous with surrender to and complicity with men: in this world it is foolish weakness. In short, the play exposes the most basic moral norms as fraudulent means of social control. Honesty is valued by men because it reduces the need for surveillance of the women. If they can be trusted they don't have to be spied upon. Female honesty, morality or sexual fidelity, in other words, are not essential ethics in the world of the play but, rather, are practical methods of maintaining male control. The conspiracy of women in this scene, the almost literal breathing together, the whispered warnings, all these are indices of the failure of men to enforce female compliance with their world order. Women will, like men, plot and conspire. They will, in other words, imitate the example rather than the precept of the men who control the world they live in. In a sense, this fact and the accompanying practice supply a profoundly pessimistic vision at the end of the play. The world is trapped by the contradiction of moral theory and the immoral practice whose purpose is to sustain the life of that theory. In short, the existence of the theory as theory is universally regarded as more important for the maintenance of social order than the practice by which it is constantly, predictably and normally violated. There is no way out except larger lies and more collusion amongst victims—male and female—of an unrealisable ethos.
The action of the play is brought to the brink of exposure with an exchange in which the “keepers”, Sir Jaspar, Pinchwife, and Old Lady Squeamish are beginning to face the fact that they have been gulled by Horner:
PINCHWIFE:
I tell you again, he has whored my wife, and yours too, if he knows her, and all the women he comes near. 'Tis not his dissembling, his hypocrisy, can wheedle me.
SIR Jaspar:
How! does he dissemble? Is he a hypocrite? Nay then—how—wife—sister, is he an hypocrite?
OLD Lady Squeamish:
An hypocrite, a dissembler! Speak, young harlotry, speak, how?
SIR Jaspar:
Nay then—Oh, my head too!—Oh thou libidinous lady!
OLD Lady Squeamish:
Oh thou harloting harlotry! Hast thou done't then?
SIR Jaspar:
Speak, good Horner, art thou a dissembler, a rogue? Hast thou—
(V,4,312-22)
There is no mistaking the panic in these lines. Something serious is at stake. On the one hand it is the chastity of the suspected women. But more important, the panic has to do with those social values which are imperilled by that lost chastity. None of the speakers acknowledges that a moral issue is at stake. It is appropriate that to the weakest character, Sir Jaspar, should fall the task of beseeching Horner to reassure him, to lie about his real sexual power. The horror of the speakers is manifest. If their suspicions are justified then the whole social fabric unravels. A vast tissue of socially permitted lies and deceptions, all connected to one another and all connected especially to the great article of female chastity, must be exposed as lies. The pillars and props of social stability, these women who carry the responsibility for the moral firmness of Society—that exemplary institution by which social behavior is regulated—are standing on sand. Their rescue is only a way of pointing to the fact that this is where they always stand; the possibility of calamity is an omnipresent feature of their lives as long as duplicity and contradiction determine the ideological formations of social existence. An apparently impossible code of ethics, rather than drawing individuals closer to compatible social behavior, tends to drive them farther from its unrealisable demands.
The rescuer in this case is Alithea's maid, Lucy, an interesting figure in her own right. What it is that prompts Lucy to help the women maintain their lie is not as simple as it looks. Sheer habit teaches us to pass over the question: Lucy seems to belong to that tradition of clever servants who possess the key to social survival. But her action of saving the bacon of the subversive group of women and Horner raises some important issues. Lucy is a female servant to Alithea, the one woman who is not directly involved in the conspiracy to undermine the patriarchal tyrants of the action. All that she has obviously in common with the women she rescues is the fact that she is a woman. They are her social superiors, they give her her job; that job is to take orders from them and to serve them deferentially. Her social interests are far from the rarefied drawing rooms of society. What is happening amongst the plotters has no potential or actual consequences for her—her position is not threatened. And yet Lucy sees fit to intrude on the scene and supply an escape from the crisis. Her intervention can be explained as the simple product of affection for Alithea and Mrs. Pinchwife, or even as a quite reasonable detestation of the violent brute, Pinchwife.
But there is also, surely, a less personal political dimension to the actions of Lucy in these last moments. She identifies with the illicit and subversive interests of the women of the drama in sabotaging the oppressive system of male control. It is, in a way that is somewhat remote from the play, this very system that accounts for and determines Lucy's own locus on the social scale. Like the other women of the play, she is necessarily submissive to domination. And yet, anomalously perhaps, in identifying with the women by saving them from the wrath of their husbands and preventing social disaster and tragedy, Lucy—and all the witty servants like her in drama—are in fact helping to sustain the very system that oppresses them. Patriarchy survives the play: the lies that it depends on, the structure of lying by which it is maintained, prop it up. Its managers, the men who control its direction, are exposed as both self-deludingly stupid as well as utterly determined to maintain their power. The Lucys of this world, the Jeeveses and other witty trickster servants of comedy who are endowed with ultimate power to preserve and protect their masters, must always be read ambiguously. Their protector role involves them in a politics of collaboration with the very system that oppresses them—that keeps them servants, in other words—despite their obvious and innate intellectual superiority to those masters. They do not seem to desire the kind of social change that would reward the likes of them and place them in control of the moral and intellectual nincompoops to whom they are obliged to defer. Instead, they help to sustain the inequity of their own positions. In so accepting and perpetuating their own inferior status, characters like Lucy are made to conform to an essentially conservative construction of a world where merit and ability are subordinated to birth and acquired social position. Such servants, almost more than any other characters, appear to accept the patriarchal politics of differentiation. They are not discontented with their lots, but rather do what is in their power to preserve the system of class. Trickster servants, in other words, are comedy's most reliable agents of social conservatism.
The most visible symbol of the fragile lies that sustain the structures of domination and difference is Horner himself. The artificial eunuch is an agent of subversion. By publicizing himself as a eunuch Horner has identified himself, presumably forever, as the detritus of patriarchy. He is relegated to the position of a woman. In his first encounters with the husbands and keepers of women in the play Horner is treated like a woman—a useless social ornament with a grotesque sexual deformity. His triumph is to have used the ambiguity of patriarchy against itself. If the bullying men of this world insist on regarding women as essentially flawed in ways that threaten their rule, then Horner's strategy of identifying himself as one of them is a dramatic and spectacular recognition of that ambiguity. And it is Horner's recognition that itself supplies a glimpse into the open cavern of the future that lies beyond the play. When the play ends Horner is both trapped by his disguise and liberated by it from the constraints of sexual conformity. Only at the greatest peril can he ever reveal his trick; he has only just begun on a series of seductions that will increase until he is finally exhausted and humiliated. But each seduction implies another husband to contend with, another danger, another secret. Horner's power lies his alertness and his ruthlessness: he knows that the institution of marriage is normally a failure and a sham, that it produces animosity and mistrust; and he is ruthless about mining that mistrust for personal gain.
Notes
-
Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 31.
-
Ibid.
-
My quotations are from the New Mermaids edition of The Country Wife, edited by James Ogden (A & C Black: London, 1991).
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