‘Plagues and Torments’: The Country Wife
[In the excerpt below, Vance discusses Wycherley's varied portrayals of fear and weakness in The Country Wife. As portrayed by Wycherley, the male's primary fear is the loss of sexual potency, while the female's is perpetual incarceration.]
Coming fresh from a reading of The Gentleman Dancing-Master, one may detect a seamless transition to The Country Wife. That is, Wycherley takes us from the courtship phase (Hippolita and Gerrard) to the married state (the Fidgets and Pinchwifes) and displays the male's greatest fear (the loss of manhood) made manifest in Pinchwife's experiences and that of the women (perpetual incarceration) both surmounted in Lady Fidget and realized in Margery Pinchwife.1 And then there is the continued attention the playwright's gives to ironic notions of male potency—now resting in the paradox of Horner's decision to move from a state of virility to one of “sterility.” By assuming the pose of an emasculated male—that ultimate state to which other males, himself included, attempt to push their brothers—Horner cleverly attempts to defuse the explosive possibility of being successfully assailed by others.2 Horner's gesture is moreover a concession to the fact that in Wycherley's world women are destined for ascendancy—that is, those women who have escaped incarceration and have been able to exercise the freedom necessary to display their power. Horner may well realize that such a state of impotence is inevitable, whether it be the immediate after-effects of a rake's spirited sexual relations or the indignities of the superannuated “Disabled Debauchee.” He simply wishes to subvert the pattern by beginning at the end, with an overt concession to the inevitable. He is perceptive enough to realize that the best way to avoid being peppered in the battle is seemingly to retire from the field as a casualty.
As Horner's only confidant, the Quack believes that he has gone out and “undone” Horner “for ever with the Women” by spreading the word of his sexual debility (I.i.5)—the irony stemming from the town's assumption that a Quack often stages “miracle cures” for maladies such as impotence:3 “Well I have been hired by young Gallants to bely 'em t'other way; but you are the first wou'd be thought a Man unfit for Women” (32-33).4 The Quack fails to perceive that instead of making him less attractive to men and less threatening to women, Horner's status as eunuch will do just the reverse—make him less threatening and thus more attractive to men (who would wish to torment one they can now wholly “trust”) but far less pleasing to women because he would have no virility to offer.5 Horner is typical of those characters in Wycherley who strive for uniqueness and separate themselves as much as they can from the average gamesplayer, while nevertheless being a slave to the game itself. Horner in essence uses the unchanging realities of human behavior and motivation, while others—particularly Pinchwife—struggle mightily against them. Although he may be applauded for pushing the ritual in a radical direction, it is ritual still.
Horner's reaction when he hears that “two Ladies and a Gentleman” are coming up is quite telling: “A Pox, some unbelieving Sisters of my former acquaintance, who I am afraid, expect their sense shou'd be satisfy'd of the falsity of the report” (50-52). The reader may immediately recall Gerrard's discomfort at the announcement of Flirt and Flounce; accordingly, an acquaintance with The Gentleman Dancing-Master encourages skepticism of Horner's status as successful rake-hero. Although his concerns are somewhat allayed as the “formal Fool” (Sir Jaspar), his wife, and sister arrive, Horner is not immune to the fear of discovery and of the curiosity and power of such women. Sir Jaspar Fidget may well stand for the playwright's more blithe manifestation of the negative male force (Pinchwife the more malicious and therefore more captivating), but even though he is preoccupied with “business,” Jaspar clearly delights in another male's humiliation and is more than willing to inflict further pain on the now sexually “helpless” figure before him, punctuating each figurative blow with the laugh of derision: “Hah, hah, hah; I'll plague him yet” (72). Jaspar is moreover stimulated by the image of the “emasculated” Horner as a Tantalus in Tartarus, reaching vainly for the fruits (Lady Fidget and perhaps Mrs. Dainty Fidget) just without his reach. Warming to new thoughts of his relative potency (publicly, at least, he is the husband of a highly sexual woman) measured against Horner's impotence, Jaspar inadvertently pimps for his own wife—the first indication that here Wycherley will focus more intently on that self-destructive impulse so often characteristic of male relationships. Jaspar is therefore no mere “gull'd gentleman,” but rather a man prompted by darker impulses, one who expresses both a sadistic joy in humiliating another male and a fear of his wife's sexual proclivities: “'Tis as much a Husbands prudence to provide innocent diversion for a Wife, as to hinder her unlawful pleasures; and he had better employ her, than let her employ her self” (117-20)—a remark suggesting that he has at least a modicum of common sense and perception.6
Horner and Sir Jaspar therefore evaluate males using the same criterion: sexual potency.7 We have long judged Horner's motivation in the play as the consummation of his lust, but his initial stimulation seems more the result of the destructive male impulse: “if I can but abuse the Husbands,” rather than its complement, “I'll soon disabuse the Wives” (I.i.137-38). Even in a remark of relative “innocence,” we find Horner creating a disturbing image of sexual substitution: “I will kiss no Mans Wife, Sir, for him, Sir” (70-71). He is aware that the grandest expression of power over other men, not over women, is in sexual conquest: as a eunuch, he tells his confidant the Quack, he may “be seen in a Ladies Chamber, in a morning as early as her Husband; kiss Virgins before their Parents [particularly the father], or Lovers” (I.i.157-59). Although the males in such instances would be oblivious to Horner's virility, he would eventually and most assuredly encourage a revelation of the truth, providing him the added pleasure of seeing the husbands, lovers, and fathers consciously beaten and their greatest fears realized.
Undoubtedly, Lady Fidget (and to a lesser extent her sister-in-law, Mrs. Dainty Fidget) may be termed a blatant hypocrite, crying “Honour” and “Reputation” while panting for sexual gratification—a fact that has led several generations of critics to call her everything from mildly offensive to completely repulsive, from an object of satire to the one character Wycherley truly hates. I would argue instead that Wycherley finds her an attractive and irresistible character, an even more memorable and “classic” version of Lady Flippant or a mature Hippolita, a woman keenly aware of the need for propriety yet undaunted in her sexual appetite, an energetic presence who is far more appealing than the sterile males in the play. The vigorous disdain she evinces for Horner once Sir Jaspar informs her that he is “in fact” a eunuch is prompted not by concerns for her “reputation,” but rather by her overt disgust now that he is sexually useless to her. Horner's famous observation—“your Women of Honour, as you call 'em, are only chary of their reputations, not their Persons, and 'tis scandal they wou'd avoid, not Men” (I.i.154-56)—seems to place the emphasis squarely on female hypocrisy and to urge our reading Horner as a satiric agent (although the directness of the satiric thrust is blunted by his addressing the remark to the Quack and not to Lady Fidget). But it is evident that he has an incomplete understanding of why avoiding scandal is important to these women. “Reputation” is another of those checks on totally unbridled expressions of pleasure—which the women understand would be detrimental to the health of the individual and to a needed sense of social order.8 Besides, we might wonder who in society views Lady Fidget as virtuous? Her husband only?
As a volatile sexual creature knowledgeable of Horner's former proficiency, Lady Fidget loathes males who cannot appreciate (physically want) her—a fact Horner accurately perceives: “You do well, Madam [to go], for I have nothing that you came for: I have brought over not so much as a Bawdy Picture, new Postures, nor the second Part of the Escole de Filles: Nor—” (86-88). Her aggressive passion demands many forms of satisfaction—from the sex act itself, to metaphoric intercourse and fondling, to representative sexuality in erotic pictures and literature.9 Surely, Lady Fidget is made uncomfortable by Horner's having brought matters so close to the dreaded truth, but she is also likely aroused by the visual delights he portrays—a form of erotic prelude to sexual activity. At heart, Horner is neither active satiric agent nor misogynist;10 instead, he is a man intrigued, despite an occasional “severe” riposte, by Lady Fidget's sexual aura, to which he feels compelled to respond.
When Lady Fidget asks Horner—after he has called her “virtue” an affectation—“wou'd you wrong my honour?” he answers, “If I cou'd,” a reply that piques her interest, as it suggests the possibility of forthcoming passionate activity.11 But Sir Jaspar's intrusion (interruption) and assurance that Horner is but a “meer Eunuch” disgusts her again, and this time most seriously: “O filthy French Beast, foh, foh; why do we stay? let's be gone; I can't endure the sight of him” (102-03). Whereas she might admit that Horner's wit is still potent, this quality does not begin to make up for what he lacks. And later, when she is with Mrs. Dainty Fidget and Mrs. Squeamish, the women's rejection of Horner is once more owing to an innate revulsion at his reported weakness: “Stand off”; “Do not approach us. … You are very obliging, Sir, because we wou'd not be troubled with you” (II.i.410-11; 437-38). And in the “China Scene,” Jaspar reflects on this point by observing that Horner's “wants make his form contemptible” to women and that Lady Fidget had observed that “a proper handsome Eunuch, was as ridiculous a thing, as a Gigantick Coward” (IV.iii.136-39). Sensing that sexual vitality is both life-sustaining and attractive, the virile man or woman loaths its opposite, a form of sexual death, fearing that such impotence might well be catching.12
Of course Horner seems the sophisticated strategist—as he envisages his ploy as a way to “be rid of all [his] old Acquaintances, the most insatiable sorts of Duns”; “And next, to the pleasure of making a New Mistriss, is that of being rid of an old One” (I.i.139-42). But other than an air of rakish irresponsibility, Horner's words reveal an uneasiness at the persistence of those insatiable women he has been unable to control and may not have been able to satisfy. Moreover, his claim that his ruse would “rid” himself of old acquaintances is ridiculed by the Fidgets' earlier visit and by the subsequent arrivals of Harcourt and Dorilant, Sparkish, and Pinchwife. Indeed, we never actually see him as a successful lover (although so much criticism assumes his frequent and successful sexual activity), dominating a relationship with an equally attractive, vibrant, or sophisticated female. He either seduces the easier mark (the country wife) or is swept up by the tide of sexuality begun by a Lady Fidget. He seeks refuge behind the notion and metaphor of gamesmanship, in which indirection is rewarded with self-praise and admiration. Although he comprehends that women have an instinctive desire for sexual expression, whether in mere word or action—“now I can be sure, she that shews an aversion to me loves the sport” (152-53)—even this perception suggests a basic hesitation, the need for a sign before he can act.
Though highly sensitive to the hidden motivations of males, and clever enough to subvert and use them for his own purposes, Horner is not free from the same impulses and fears that plague everyone else—a factor that should prevent us from evaluating his relationship with Harcourt and Dorliant as an example of a healthy fraternity.13 Rather, it is a curious relationship that says more about the male habit of “bullying” (two or three against one) than it does about the loyalty and comfort of brotherhood. Horner asks upon their arrival if the women have pitied his new condition, to which Harcourt readily answers, “What Ladies? the vizard Masques you know never pitty a Man when all's gone, though in their Service,” and Dorilant adds the following of the “Women in the boxes” whom Horner would not pity “when 'twas in [his] power” (emphasis added): “I dare swear, they won't admit you to play at Cards with them, go to Plays with 'em, or do the little duties which other Shadows of men, are wont to do for 'em” (175-83). Dorilant portrays more graphically the image of the “Shadows of men,” that perverse fraternity to which Horner is now reputed to belong: “Ay your old Boyes, old beaux Garcons, who like superannuated Stallions are suffer'd to run, feed, and whinney with the Mares as long as they live, though they can do nothing else” (187-89). Not some witty rhetorical commonplace, Dorilant's comment reveals undisguised delight at Horner's “condition” (the admired rival Lothario now seemingly out of commission) and at the image of this particular “Shadow” of a man—both men ignoring the relevance to themselves (time will eventually superannuate them as well) and, like Sir Jaspar, concentrating instead on the pleasurable comparison of their own relative strength with the impotence of such pathetic creatures.14 What is particularly frightening in this portrait is not merely the prospect of virulent time sapping youth and vitality but of the impotent male exercised, fed, and allowed some expression (by women, the vision implies) though unable to display his virility because he no longer has it—the secret of his humiliation safe from no one.
Neither Harcourt nor Dorilant feels confident that Horner could prosper in their world with anything less than an erect phallus—talk, wit, and drink are insufficient substitutes: “Perhaps,” Harcourt warns Horner, “you may prove as weak a Brother amongst'em that way, as t'other,” to which Dorilant adds that “drinking with Women” is but “a pleasure of decay'd Fornicators, and the basest way of quenching Love” (III.ii.31-35). And Harcourt's words hardly suggest one trying to ease the torment of a man in Horner's reported condition: “Sir, before you go, a little of your advice, an old maim'd General, when unfit for action is fittest for Counsel; I have other designs upon Women, than eating and drinking with them; I am in love with Sparkish's Mistriss, whom he is to marry to morrow, now how shall I get her?” (III.ii.45-49). Later, when Sir Jaspar again invites Horner to entertain Lady Fidget, Dorilant wishes that one as virile as he or Harcourt had been given the opportunity to fit Jaspar with a pair of horns—“what a good Cuckold is lost there, for want of a Man to make him one”—and Harcourt replies, again with more glee than sympathy I would argue: “Ay, to poor Horner 'tis like coming to an estate at threescore, when a Man can't be the better for't” (III.ii.549-50, 552-53).
Clearly, for every bit of shared “brotherly” advice there are several vivid reminders of Horner's impotence, the allusion to the “Disabled Debauchee” figure only exacerbating Horner's “pain.” And Horner too cannot suppress the antifraternal instinct as he informs his “friends,” “I converse with [women], as you do with rich Fools, to laugh at'em, and use'em ill” (III.ii.18-20). Here we see the men moving around each other, firing off shot after shot—the ridicule perfectly reflecting the interaction of the male sex. That Harcourt and Sparkish end this scene by vowing their fraternity (“dear Friend”) simply puts the proper ironic exclamation mark on the matter (154-64). Even when Harcourt asks Horner for advice on how he might win Alithea, he knows full well that Horner cannot help being reminded of the sexually potent world he no longer inhabits. And Horner's disappointment at the prospects of the Alithea-Sparkish match may only in part be due to his wish that Harcourt have her—“I am sorry for't … 'tis for her sake, not yours, and another mans sake that might have hop'd. … Poor Harcourt I am sorry thou hast mist her” (IV.iii.365-72)—for we should be hesitant in ascribing this reaction to the feelings of a loyal friend.15 Horner displays little loyalty or sincerity in his dealings with other males, and therefore the likelihood exists that his primary motivation in this matter is not the felicity of Harcourt but the disappointment of both Sparkish and Pinchwife (the latter having orchestrated this incomprehensible match).16
To the intelligent Horner, letting Harcourt and Dorilant in on his deceit would only invite betrayal; accordingly, his observation that although he cannot “enjoy” women any longer, he shall enjoy his friends more, for “good fellowship and friendship, are lasting, rational and manly pleasures” (I.i.191-93) is of course a deliberate mockery.17 Horner tells them that “'tis hard to be a good Fellow, a good Friend, and a Lover of Women, as 'tis to be a good Fellow, a good Friend, and a Lover of Money” (203-5). Even in the witticism, Horner suggests that in matters of sexual conquest masculine “friendship” is of secondary concern. And regarding women, the “friends” next indulge in witty simile, Dorilant adding to Harcourt's disrespectful and telling comment that “Mistresses are like Books” (“if you pore upon them too much, they doze you”) his view that “A Mistress shou'd be like a little Country retreat near the Town, not to dwell in constantly, but only for a night and away; to tast the Town the better when a Man returns” (I.i.197, 200-202). (Again, for all such boasting we never see in Wycherley any male assume successfully such a posture before the young woman.) Dorilant's image implies that women are more easily controlled outside the confines of the city, that liberating environment where they are freer to express themselves naturally—in ways with which the males have difficulty coping. The simile is moreover significant in its planting in the reader's mind the connection between the country and masculine stability and power. Dorilant's glib comparison is therefore an effective introduction to Margery Pinchwife, establishing one more reason why Horner would be attracted to her and a primary motivation for her husband's desire to keep her safely in the country.
Sparkish's visit provides further evidence of pervasive masculine antagonisms and the protective aspects of the ego: “he can no more think the Men laugh at him, than that Women jilt him, his opinion of himself is so good” (I.i.223-24). Moreover, Sparkish strives to ascend in company, as Horner tells us, with his “nauseous” attempts at wit. Hardly alone among playwrights, Wycherley implies that false-wit and fastidiousness are “effeminate” qualities, but such men as Dapperwit, Monsieur de Paris, and Sparkish see these “qualities” as something one can escape into, something that cloaks the fear of being emasculated and abused by others. But Sparkish will inevitably break from his rhetorical sanctuary and respond more aggressively in his dealings with his male competitors, although at this point the bantering with the men barely hints at the kind of deeper nastiness of which he is capable. Other than suggesting “Spark” or “Spruce Spark,” his name offers a clue that he may be a potentially dangerous commodity, a spark that may at any time ignite into something more deadly.18 Since the false wits the men revile are males, the creation of males, assailed by males, and emblematic of male weakness, they and the fops serve as signifiers of the internecine nature of masculine relationships. Even in Sparkish's comical defense of the wits, Wycherley embellishes the theme of male conflict and division: “the reason why we are so often lowder, than the Players, is, because we think we speak more wit, and so become the Poets Rivals in his audience: for to tell you the truth, we hate the silly Rogues” (III.ii.84-87). Men categorize each other, constantly breaking down the fraternity into cliques to be compared with and then found superior to. Groups band together only to attack an individual or another group—ironically making males more vulnerable to the manipulations of women: “Women, Women, that make Men do all foolish things” (93-94). Harcourt reflects further on this matter: “Most Men are contraries to that they wou'd seem; your bully you see, is a Coward with a long Sword; the little humbly fawning Physician with his Ebony cane, is he that destroys Men” (I.i.250-52). Present in both examples is a phallic prop—one to cover the inadequacy, the other to suggest that a destructive power may often lie beneath the veneer of impotence—whether it be Sparkish or Horner. And as another illustration of the larger irony, we find that the more males separate themselves from their brothers, the more they are shown to be alike, regardless of physical appearance, social grace, or public reputation.
Sparkish evinces his malicious side in constant references to Horner's emasculation and the humiliation that comes from public awareness about it: as he said to several ladies, “did you never see Mr. Horner: he lodges in Russel-street, and he's a sign of a Man, you know, since he came out of France, heh, hah, he” (287-89). The women laughed so hard, Sparkish informs Horner, that they “bepiss'd themselves”—certainly a frequent physiological reaction to excessive laughter but moreover a suggested reference, in its scatology, to their total disdain for Horner—their defilement of him. To his mind, Sparkish has scored often and severely on Horner, and the others' attempt to thrust him from the room seems less a gesture of loyalty to Horner than a reflection of anger and discomfort that their supposed inferior could so rise to the occasion. For even though Horner is quite adept at ridiculing Sparkish's manhood: “but hast thou a Mistriss, Sparkish? 'tis as hard for me to believe it,” Sparkish always repays in kind: “we were some of us beforehand with you to day at the Play: … did you not hear us laugh?” (III.ii.74-75, 78-79). As a result, the victorious Sparkish insists that they all dine together—gluttonous for another opportunity to study and disgrace Horner19—and even though his offer is rejected, he still manages to score a palpable hit: “I'll go fetch my Mistriss” (I.i.324-25), a final reminder of what he believes Horner lacks and may never have again—all the work of a far more shrewd, subtle, and diabolical creature than his overt demeanor would lead us to believe.20 Here, then, Horner stands as the baited bear, snapped at by those who torment him with constant reminders of his impotence (Sir Jasper, Harcourt, Dorilant, and Sparkish) and who—while they also turn on each other (Harcourt and Dorilant versus Sparkish and later Pinchwife)—are all in fact united by a common goal of reminding Horner of his debility, and by extension of their own now “exclusive” sexual vigor.
Having established the destructive framework of masculine relationships, Wycherley pushes out Jack Pinchwife, once a cavorter with Horner (so he says and others believe, but to what extent we cannot know) but now apparently a morose and suspicious “country gentleman.” The relative neglect or underestimation of Pinchwife in so many critical studies is nothing short of surprising, for he is a character of significance at least equal to Horner.21 To all appearances he is the stock puritanical boor, a ruffian, misogynist, insufferable fool, insensitive dolt, and jealous cuckold, who indeed gets just what he deserves. But he is moreover an important extension of Wycherley's interest in the instinctive fears and reactions of males, of those who incarcerate out of fear—an extensive fine tuning of Don Diego, now given a wife instead of a daughter, but a wife who seems as much a daughter as a wife. He certainly “pinches” his young Margery—a gesture signifying pain as well as suppression—binding her to him, hoping to nip her vitality and sexual desire. All powerful in the country he believes (we recall Dorilant's simile), Pinchwife feels himself weakening rapidly now that he is in the more emancipating environment of London.22 In his bluster and penchant for violence, Pinchwife seconds Hobbes's position that the best way one can “secure himself” is through “Anticipation”: “that is, by force, or wiles, to master the persons of all men he can, so long, till he see no other power great enough to endanger him.”23
That late seventeenth-century law, custom, and practice provided the husband with seemingly boundless power over a wife only underscores more emphatically the irony that Pinchwife fears having his marriage made known to Horner and the others. Wycherley and his characters appreciate that natural human inclinations do not change nor are instinctive fears allayed because of custom and law.24 Pinchwife accepts that he will be laughed at by members of his own sex who see the marriage state as a visible signification of lost male power, not the increase of it. And although a husband, Pinchwife's age difference with Margery (he is forty-nine; she probably at most eighteen or nineteen) and his aggressive determination to protect her suggest that his function is also that of a father defending his daughter's purity—and thus his own interests. In addition, he serves as father to his sister Alithea (who may be twenty-two to twenty-five), who certainly views him more as an intimidating parent. The darker side of the family relationship Wycherley unveiled through Gripe and Don Diego finds another expression in this play: “I must give Sparkish to morrow five thousand pound,” Pinchwife tells the others, “to lye with my Sister” (I.i.335-36)—his preoccupation evident in his choice of this tasteless phrase rather than “to wed my sister.” Is he simply helping Alithea to the altar—getting her out of his and Margery's way—by making all financial burdens disappear? Or might the presentation of money be a means by which to control his sister, a representative of her sex?
Horner of course relishes the opportunity to harass Pinchwife about his recent marriage: “the next thing that is to be heard, is thou'rt a Cuckold” (I.i.341-42). Surely, the impetus for this remark is destructive, touching as it does the heart of masculine fear.25 And Horner's subsequent observation, “But I did not expect Marriage from such a Whoremaster as you, one that knew the Town so much, and Women so well” (344-45), speaks little to Pinchwife's former proficiency as a libertine, for without question Horner's comment is heavily sarcastic, a malicious reminder to Pinchwife of what he could not be. Horner understands, as do the others, that Pinchwife never mastered whores or any other kind of woman, and Horner's articulation of Pinchwife's knowing the town and women “so well” also ridicules, because Pinchwife's erotic “knowledge” is restricted to that which stems from contemplation, observation, and fantasy, rather than from experience, as in the proverbial “Biblical sense” of “knowing” a woman—being as well a derisive reference to Pinchwife's pet expression, “I know the town.” In an attempt at retaliation, Pinchwife assures Horner that he has married “no London wife” (346)—an image personified in the undaunted and sexually demanding Lady Fidget. In arguing for similarities between country and city women, Horner further rattles the foundation of Pinchwife's security—the belief that city and country are antitheses. Distinctions, dichotomies, and contrasts are to Pinchwife like rooms without windows, in which he hopes to hide from what he dreads but cannot, owing to the clear view others have of his fears.
Still, Pinchwife makes the attempt to shut the casements by asserting that country girls are indeed easier to control, voicing the faulty assumption that the woman's power is nothing instinctual but environmental. Remove the woman from the city and she is, like Antaeus off the ground, more easily beaten: “At least we are a little surer of the breed there, know what her keeping has been, whether foyl'd or unsound” (351-52).26 Metaphor provides Pinchwife another means by which to secure power and control, as here he transforms the vibrant and threatening image of the young woman into a domestic beast, a “breed” country gentlemen have always mastered with minimal effort.27 And well knowing how a beautiful and sexually eager woman can stimulate and perplex a man, Pinchwife insists on portraying his wife as asexual or almost hermaphroditic, not simply to deter Horner but to assure himself that she could never destroy him: “No, no, she has no beauty, but her youth; no attraction, but her modesty, wholesome, homely, and huswifely, that's all” (357-58). Suggesting his participation in the ritualistic slaughter of the fellow male, Harcourt believes such an awkward wife should be brought to town “to be taught breeding”—the reference continuing Pinchwife's comparison of Margery to something bovine, but now making “breeding” an image disturbing to Pinchwife rather than comforting.
Instinctively “ganging up,” Dorilant and Harcourt attempt to turn Pinchwife's pattern of logic on its head: safe in the city, in peril in the country, where there is, as Harcourt tells him, “Open house, every Man's welcome” (374). Dorilant and Harcourt gleefully pepper him by assailing those who have “alwayes coarse, constant, swinging stomachs in the Country”; “Foul Feeders indeed” (370-72)—in this context employing the mid-century military tactic of the “caracole” (each rank riding up, firing their pistols, and then whirling away). (But one should moreover appreciate that in their attempts to bombard Pinchwife with these sexual allusions, they are also—consciously or no—blasting the “incapacitated” Horner as well.) Pinchwife reacts with predictable agitation: “good Wives, and private Souldiers shou'd be ignorant” (363-64). Ostensibly, he means to keep Margery from Horner's private “instructions,” but his real concern is that she might come to desire the freedom of sexual expression and the sorority of city women (who would offer her consolation and encouragement) and then to discover an occasion to respond more naturally to any erotic proclivities. Horner's growing interest in the country wife can be attributed in part to the attractive portrait Pinchwife paints despite himself, but actually it is Pinchwife who presents the challenge, not Margery. And we might then ask why Horner does not inform Pinchwife that he is a “eunuch.” Does he wish to have Margery in the “conventional” way, or is he aware that, unlike the other males of his acquaintence, Pinchwife would refuse to believe Horner's disclaimers? And if so, would Pinchwife's awareness be the result of a pervasive fear of being cuckolded, or in this case a healthy skepticism the other males do not apparently possess?
More than being insufferably imperious in his repeated efforts to transform Margery into the village idiot—“because she's ugly, she's the likelyer to be my own; and being ill-bred, she'l hate conversation; and since silly and innocent, will not know the difference betwixt a Man of one and twenty, and one of forty” (I.i.381-84)—Pinchwife is so obviously troubled, seeking comfort in these perverse Pygmalionesque fantasies, with his allusions and comparisons de-feminizing his wife (animal, country idiot, homely country waif) and later changing her, with a disguise, into an effeminate male. (And his terms of “endearment” for her—from “Minx” to “Baggage,” but never “Margery”—also reveal a wish to reshape her into something he may more easily control, linking him with other “creative” male characters—Don Diego, Horner, and Manly particularly.) But the truth shakes Pinchwife from such reveries, prompting an unexpected and open articulation of his fears: “what is wit in a Wife good for, but to make a Man a Cuckold?”;28 “my Wife shall make me no Cuckold, though she had your help Mr. Horner: I understand the Town, Sir” (I.i.391-400). Maliciously more than playfully, Horner sees to it that Pinchwife remains highly vulnerable to meer suggestion: “what is worse [than actually ‘clubbing’ with another man], if she cannot make her Husband a Cuckold, she'l make him jealous, and pass for one, and then 'tis all one” (395-97).29
The exact nature of Pinchwife's sexual relations with Margery is anyone's guess, even though we are sorely tempted to assume that he has been unsatisfactory in the performance of his conjugal duties, which Horner may well consider as he reminds Pinchwife of his “whoring” days. And in good “bullying” fashion Dorilant picks up the cue: “Ay, ay, a Gamester will be a Gamester, whilst his Money lasts; and a Whoremaster, whilst his vigour” (413-14).30 Should Pinchwife claim, to himself or the others, that he is no longer a whoremaster, he would in effect admit to his impotence. Now he stands as the baited bear, swatting at the curs who come to gnash at his flesh: “you may laugh at me, but you shall never lye with my Wife, I know the Town” (419-20). Yet Pinchwife does break down under the constant badgering and ceaseless disparagement and shockingly admits to his own past failures as a “whoremaster”: “A Pox on't, the Jades wou'd jilt me, I cou'd never keep a Whore to my self” (423-24). Although one tends to find this admission amusing—in its corroborating the assumption of Pinchwife's sexual debility—it more importantly depicts a tormented man revealing openly what any other male would fight desperately to keep concealed: the direct admission of sexual failure. But Horner and the others have applied the irons so masterfully that Pinchwife seems unable to control himself and out of duress voices the unthinkable.
Not satisfied with Pinchwife's embarrassing confession, Horner notes that he has indeed seen the “pretty Country-wench” (431). His accomplices (a more apt word than “friends”) aid in the identification, and Pinchwife seems emotionally flogged to the point of distraction: “Hell and damnation, I'm undone, since Horner has seen her, and they know 'twas she” (440-41). And indeed his inquisitors will allow no escape: “Nay, you shall not go.” It is difficult to see how all of this can be characterized as poetic or comic justice, for Wycherley is depicting the more uncomfortable verities about human nature and masculine interaction. Are we to believe that had Pinchwife been more moderate and decorous he would have been less vulnerable or been spared such treatment by these men? Pinchwife will soon understand that only an expression of primitive violence will serve him faithfully against the likes of Horner, Harcourt, and Dorilant, whose motives in this exchange were not to administer justice but to indulge their power and cruelty against the perceived weaker male.31 The odds being three-to-one only facilitates their efforts by making them more confident and secure from reprisal. And whereas the men earlier rejected Sparkish's (he who had aggravated them with allusions to Horner's weakness) offer to dinner, pushing him out the door, here they wish to deter Pinchwife (who makes them feel superior)—“Come you shall dine with us” (448).
With our first glimpse of the country wife, Wycherley reintroduces the voyeuristic motif featured so prominently in The Gentleman Dancing-Master, for lurking behind the door, “peeping” in on her, is the husband/father, Pinchwife. Although less formidable than Hippolita, Margery's restless energy is, like the heroine of the earlier play, impossible to suppress.32 Indeed, Margery's initial words evince her natural desire to escape the kind of sluggish and restricted world Pinchwife has fashioned for her: “Pray, Sister,” she says to Alithea, “where are the best Fields and Woods, to walk in in London?” (II.i.1-2). Her reference to movement and city delights does not obscure her insecurity, however, in that the fields and woods signify her more familiar environment, something that gives her at least some confidence in exploring the unknown. She intuitively seeks comfort and assistance from Alithea (“will you ask leave for me to go a walking?,” [24]), who knows much of the town and the freedom it may provide a married woman. In her own way, then, Pinchwife's sister may be said to “know the town” even better than her brother, and she serves a “sisterly” function by providing Margery with the names of places to visit and by warning her of Pinchwife's possessiveness: “He's afraid you shou'd love another man” (II.i.10). For instance, Alithea teaches Margery a careful bit of propriety after the country wife complains that her husband will not let her go abroad, “for fear of catching the Pox”: “Fye, the small Pox you shou'd say” (30-32). She moreover understands a woman's metamorphoses in the country into common animals: “a Country Gentlewomans leasure is the drudgery of a foot-post; and she requires as much airing as her Husbands Horses” (25-27).33 Pinchwife seeks to defy the natural dynamic by placing restraints on Margery in the liberating city, and we should judge that accordingly his cause is doomed—she will have to be dragged back to the country to be adequately controlled.
Margery Pinchwife cannot walk alone; she cannot be too far from her husband; she cannot wear what she wants. Even Pinchwife's taking her to the play (an action with clear self-destructive implications) is a form of suppression, for Margery had to sit “amongst ugly People,” not being allowed to “come near the Gentry.” But her infectious spirit will not be contained by such restrictive measures, and the city, far from corrupting, only provides her with the opportunity to act on basic inclinations. We note how excited she is by the image, as her husband tells her (again self-destructively), of those “naughty Women” at the playhouse, whom the men “tous'd and mous'd”: “but I wou'd have ventur'd [down there] for all that,” she tells Alithea (II.i.16-18). That this adventuresome, curious, sexual creature should see London first at the playhouse seems of course most appropriate, not only because the Restoration playhouse was the environment in which women were truly celebrities (as actresses or royal mistresses) but also because within its confines inhibitions were frequently shaken off. To Margery the playhouse was an even more erotic locale in which she too sought the release of her pent- and penned-up spirit: “I was a weary of the Play,34 but I lik'd hugeously [a plausible entendre] the Actors; they are the goodlyest proper'st Men” (20-21). That Margery is inclined to follow her instincts is nowhere better evident than in her response to Alithea's advice that she “must not like the Actors”: “Ay, how shou'd I help it, Sister?” (23). But the Country Wife has yet to appreciate the dangers of open expression in a world that demands indirection and frequent overtures to propriety. She is still to learn that all the world is not a stage, even though one must indeed learn to play her part.
Pinchwife reacts to his wife's initial enthusiasms as we would expect, by hurling at her a derisive “You're a Fool,” and by lecturing his sister about her influence: “What you wou'd have her as impudent as your self, as errant a Jilflirt, a gadder, a Magpy, and to say all a meer notorious Town-Woman?” (II.i.35-40). His misogynistic conclusions, the misshaping of complex feelings through generalizations and labeling, help Pinchwife stem some of his eroding masculinity, and we note his concern that Margery will become “impudent” and in other ways like a “Town-Woman,” through the efforts of his meddling and highly dangerous sister: “Hold, hold, do not teach my Wife, where the Men are to be found; I believe she's the worse for your Town documents already; I bid you keep her in ignorance as I do” (44-45, 55-57).35 It is clear that Alithea's apparent self-confidence, assertiveness, and protection of her fellow woman are influenced by her residing in London; as Margery notes, Alithea is able to “go every day fluttering about abroad” (III.i.3). Since Pinchwife cannot frighten his sister with threats and demands, he will be forced to consider other methods to keep her, as well as his wife, under control.
Becoming increasingly aware of her surroundings, Margery soon understands the reciprocal requirements of sisterhood—“Indeed be not angry with her Bud” (II.i.58)—and she is able to release both frustration and impatience by admitting that she asks about the town (and men) “a thousand times a day” (59) and by being playfully direct in reply to her husband's question “but thou lik'st none better than me?”: “Yes indeed, but I do, the Player Men are finer Folks” (70-71). But she also covers herself by lying boldly: “Dear, I hate London: our Place-house in the Country is worth a thousand of't, wou'd I were there again” (61-62)—and by deliberately forwarding a persona of the innocent and ignorant country girl.36 She cannot help revealing her exuberance, even while demonstrating a natural duplicity (survival instinct), and she has not learned that in the city that exuberance must always be publicly muted. She moreover shows herself adept at hiding behind the half-truth to both rile and confuse: “I did not care for going [to the playhouse]; but when you forbid me, you make me as't were desire it” (92-93). And Alithea picks up on the extension of the reference to sexual activity in the pronoun it: “So 'twill be in other things, I warrant” (94). Stimulated by the delicious visions of handsome actors and gallants, Margery further (though thinly) disguises her interests with a whisper of modesty: “What, a homely Country Girl? no Bud, no [actor or gallant] will like me”; “Ay, but if he [Horner] loves me, why shou'd he ruin me? answer me to that: methinks he shou'd not, I wou'd do him no harm” (104-5, 119-20). Perhaps delighting as much from the pleasurable vision as from the momentary control over her husband, Margery exploits Pinchwife's fear that she will indeed end up like those nefarious “Town Women, who only hate their Husbands, and love every Man else, love Plays, Visits, fine Coaches, fine Cloaths, Fidles, Balls, Treates, and so lead a wicked Town-life”: “Nay, if to enjoy all these things be a Town-life, London is not so bad a place, Dear” (76-80). And Pinchwife's plea is almost pitiable: “But you love none better than me?” (72). All that's left to Pinchwife here is the familiar primitive gesture at the arrival of Harcourt and Sparkish: he “Thrusts” his wife into the next room.37
The Alithea-Harcourt relationship has been the subject of much analysis to the effect that they represent a romantic or moralistic norm by which to judge the actions of Horner and the others, that they are Wycherley's most positive statement that the world is not thoroughly corrupt, and that successful marriage is indeed possible, even in a world of cuckolds and whores.38 I would argue instead that their relationship reflects none of these views but is rather one more constructed and influenced by fear and insecurity.39 Initially, Sparkish's motives in foisting Harcourt on Alithea (and vice-versa) stem from a wish to make Harcourt confront intimately what he cannot have intimately—the beautiful, not so much the virtuous, Alithea. As a result, we find ourselves uncomfortably on Pinchwife's side as he casts aspersions at Sparkish for his “generosity”: “they [other men] shall know her, as well as you your self will, I warrant you … Praising another Man to his Mistriss!” (II.i.133-34, 154). Here and throughout the play, we often find ourselves uncomfortably confronting Pinchwife, often walking briskly (or running) away from him, but then at other times standing next to him or behind him as a gesture of support. And Sparkish enjoys afflicting Pinchwife—as well as Harcourt40—by offering his “trust” and by physically preventing the Country Husband from putting an end to the highly irregular courtship Harcourt has begun: “Nay, you shall not disturb'em” (II.i.209-10). In addition, the creative and theatrical Sparkish participates vicariously in the courtly ritual, playing the role of voyeur and director (in the Don Diego mold), teeming with perverse excitement at the prospects of Harcourt's romantic interests: “I am sure you do admire her extreamly, I see't in your eyes.—He does admire you Madam”; “go, go with her into a corner,41 and trye if she has wit, talk to her any thing, she's bashful before me” (156-58, 196-97). In an attempt to flatter Alithea, yet reflective of his less-than-ideal role in the play, Harcourt admits that he feels comfortable admiring the “whole Sex”—a not-so-subtle reminder to Pinchwife that he is in danger himself from the likes of Harcourt.
Alithea's reaction to this peculiar activity is more intriguing than admirable. Initially, she “looks down” as Sparkish praises her before Harcourt (II.i.139-40). Is this a gesture (one employed by Lucy Crossbite) based on natural shyness or practiced coyness? Genuine embarrassment over being so highly praised? Or discomfort over Sparkish's blatant foolishness or over her immediate warmth for Harcourt—that is, to an awakened sexual stimulation? She naturally doubts Harcourt's motives: “you are an Enemy to Marriage, for that I hear you hate as much as business or bad Wine” (165-67). And such comments as “you look upon a Friend married, as one gone into a Monastery, that is dead to the World” (171-73) testify to her understanding of the male penchant for ridiculing a fellow male and the articulated belief—in male company, where posturing is vital—that a sincere and open commitment to a woman means sacrificing one's masculinity. Sensitive to the restrictions placed upon women by law and custom, Alithea is shrewd, intelligent, humane, assertive, and egotistical—and not above exercising what power she has over men. Her tone in this scene may be morally, though annoyingly, aloof, but it is important to note that it is not consistently so. Her emphases shift constantly, which only keeps her elusive and formidable. She playfully encourages and playfully betrays Harcourt (“your Friend here is very troublesom, and very loving” [236])—wending her way dexterously through Sparkish's vanity and Harcourt's ego. Harcourt might expect (as would we) her easy capitulation to him—seeing the alternative—but this expectation she only frustrates. She provides him openings that quickly close—though not entirely, so that he may at least determine that he has a chance. Harcourt can only strengthen himself through sarcasm: “[She has not] so much [wit] as I thought, and hoped she had” (254)—being left with only the possibility of some physical confrontation with Sparkish to vent his growing frustration. Alithea plays the benign despot to Harcourt, controlling, agitating, and pleasing, without wishing to destroy or humiliate him. Figuratively, Harcourt is on bended knee before her, absolutely no threat in this context to her femininity or liberty—a major contributing factor to her growing more fond of him.
But Alithea's seeming loyalty to Sparkish has served for many as the most vexing aspect of this play. Her “I wou'd not be unjust to him” (II.i.215) sounds simply incredulous, implying a simple-minded, masochistic, or at least insufferably moral character42—one who would sacrifice her vibrant “self” to remain faithful to a promise (one she herself had little to do with making—her brother having set up the match). Surely one is more vexed than pleased at her announcement to Harcourt here and later assertions to the effect that she will marry Sparkish because her “honour is engag'd so far to him” and that “if he be true, and what I think him to me, I must be so to him” (III.ii.498-500). But her honorable pronouncements are really a masterful bit of indirection and ambiguity and, as far as she will allow it, an encouragement for the now-suffering Harcourt to continue on his course, needing at this point only a few crumbs to fall from her table. (And, as she assumed, her gloomy qualifying does anything but deter the anxious suitor.)43
Harcourt's aggressiveness in refuting Alithea's arguments in favor of honor precipitates the end of their initial conversation; she is obviously too uncomfortable with the truth and instinctively turns from it: “Nay, now you are rude, Sir” (II.i.235)—and she speaks up for Sparkish, although clearly without enthusiasm, as Harcourt attacks him further.44 On one hand, she is both confrontational and manipulative, encouraging discord between the men, hoping, it appears, for some kind of explosive moment that will clear the air of the unsettling feelings within. And later she quickly turns from “devoted protectress” of Sparkish's reputation to his antagonist, bullying him into clarification: “How's that, do you say matrimonial love is not best?” (III.ii.289). Surely, Alithea controls the scene as might a mythic deity, leading the mortals to the point of confrontation (Sparkish draws, cowardly assuming that he will have Pinchwife's assistance) and then putting a halt to the hostilities, shifting from the voice of honesty to one of deception: “Hold, hold, indeed to tell the truth, the Gentleman said after all, that what he spoke, was but out of friendship to you” (II.i.285-86). It may be that she finds this chaotic moment a happy portent for a marriage—a dolt of a husband, easily outflanked yet encouraging of her effect on other males, and a lover such as Harcourt, one who places her in a clear position of superiority—all this while paying tribute to honor, reputation, and the other necessary components of order—in short, practicing the discourse and behavior of the liberated London wife.
Whereas “Honour” should be both admirable and desirable, especially in an environment that apparently displays little of it, in this context it is something more foreign and inimical—something more disturbing than even Lady Fidget's use of the term. But there is no requirement on our part to read Alithea's actions as angelic and as a result unbelievable; we ought instead to consider her motivations and the deep-seated emotions that prompt them. Initially, her keeping the engagement between her and Sparkish paramount in the conversation allows Harcourt to continue his flattery and overtures toward her, for she knows that while her status is indeed a barrier between them, her being engaged still (and ironically) provides the young man the kind of security he would not find if she were as free as Etherege's Harriet. That is, Harcourt's masculinity is spared the ultimate humiliation of being rejected by an available woman. She would of course understand that being “taken” increases the confidence of one such as Harcourt, who knows that she could not be physically attracted to the unappetizing Sparkish. And when she tells Sparkish “I hate him because he is your Enemey; and you ought to hate him too, for making love to me, if you love me” (III.ii.195-96), we find that she has cleverly encouraged Sparkish to admit his own (as well as Harcourt's) antifraternal sentiment and masculine weakness while at the same time flattering her pulchritude and virtue: “That he makes love to you, is a sign you are handsome; and that I am not jealous, is a sign you are virtuous, that I think is for your honour” (III.ii.203-5).
It is not difficult to envisage Alithea enjoying the posturing and head-butting (an actress has only to wear a mischievous smile)—as well as the physical tussling between Sparkish and Pinchwife—while Harcourt is courting her. Without question, she consciously stimulates such activity while at the same time keeping her hand disguised with such saccharine replies as, “But 'tis your honour too, I am concerned for” (206). This “Machiavellian” Alithea is quite antithetical to the virtuous and self-effacing character many have praised, but such an Alithea seems more representative of Wycherley's world. And her platitudes about “Love proceed[ing] from esteem,” Sparkish's love for her, and the necessity of guarding her reputation (II.i.222-31) seem highly insincere and unpalatable, especially when recalling her comments and advice to Margery earlier in the play—for she truly could not be so naive a logician to accept the conclusion she gives Harcourt: “besides he loves me, or he wou'd not marry me” (223). No doubt the audience and reader share Harcourt's conclusion, “No, if you do marry him, with your pardon, Madam, your reputation suffers in the World, and you wou'd be thought in necessity for a cloak” (232-33).
Rather than unadulterated virtue, Alithea's protestations of loyalty may reflect in part Hobbes's position on vows and oaths: that there is an egotistical glory or pride in keeping and a fear in breaking them—fear from those who might be offended.45 But more important is the possibility that she would indeed allow herself to marry Sparkish—not out of affection or duty, but out of that pervading fear that marriage to a powerful man will deny a woman freedom and destroy her spirit. She must judge Sparkish (that is, as she perceives him now) as a fool who, in his preoccupation with masculine warfare, flaunts her as a representation of his manhood, paradoxically encouraging her freedom as a way to puff his vanity. Such a husband would be easy to manipulate, thus allowing the kind of freedom she stated as desirable in her initial appearance with Margery, the kind of freedom known to a Lady Fidget, though we assume Alithea would not behave in the same lustful manner. And what would make such a motive paramount in her mind, even as she might struggle with her affections for Harcourt?46 Quite simply, the example of her brother, who has attempted to control her and to imprison her sister-in-law. She will hear, for example, Pinchwife threaten Margery with something “worse than the Plague, Jealousy” (III.i.50). The platitudes about honor and promises are her way of dealing indirectly with those fears, of transforming the complexities she feels within to something more concrete and comprehensible.47 Alithea is not simply testing Harcourt's sincerity and stamina, but also Sparkish's claim to be free from the dreaded emotion: “You astonish me, Sir, with your want of jealousie” (III.ii.228)—the point being that if Sparkish cracks and admits that he is normal in this regard, she would have just “cause” to discard him, since he would then have failed to live up to the terms of their “contract.”
Alithea's somewhat peculiar (or seemingly perverted) sense of decorum and “honor” demands that Sparkish be the one to open the door from which she may escape: “I can't fire him; he's got to resign.” As she says to Harcourt, “[Sparkish] only, not you … can give me a reason, why I shou'd not marry him” (III.ii.498-99). Because of her fears, Alithea is in a perilous position, and certainly the “finality” of her comments to Harcourt in the scene at the Exchange, “Pray, let me go, Sir, I have said, and suffer'd enough already” and “I will never see you more. … Good night, Sir, for ever” (490, 493, 560) might in part be a reaction to Harcourt's physical imposition on her person here, but her words moreover appeal for assistance (as in “I really wish I could be with you, but I don't think I can”). And like a skilled cross-examiner, Alithea uses logic, emotional appeal, and other forms of subtle and direct pressure to trick the witness (Sparkish) into impeaching himself: “I tell you then plainly”; “Do not you understand him yet?”; “Ridiculous!”; “Are you not afraid to loose me?” (III.ii.218, 238, 266, 301). And she knows how to threaten Sparkish with all the power a woman possesses: “Have a care, lest you make me stay too long—” (III.ii.317). Her problem until the end of the play is that this witness's demeanor, with a few exceptions, is implacable. Truly at one point, Alithea seems, much to her chagrin, convinced that Sparkish is exactly what he claims: “I am satisfied, 'tis impossible for him to be jealous” (IV.i.53). And Sparkish's intransigence prompts even an unadorned emotional response from Alithea: “Monstrous!” (III.ii.232)—interestingly, an epithet she shares with her brother (see III.ii.323).
Moreover, part of Alithea's “immoveable” position is shaped by her own healthy ego: “'tis Sparkish's confidence in my truth, that obliges me to be so faithful to him” (IV.i.50-51)—quite a flimsy reason, of course, for sacrificing love. Alithea is tangled in her own promises—her pride forcing her to argue a rational though ludicrous position. Like her brother, she stands baited; but her antagonists are both without (Lucy, Harcourt, and Sparkish) and within (her pride, vanity, and fears). That she is so very wrong about Sparkish's capacity for jealousy only undermines her image as the exalted paragon but at the same time buttresses her standing as a real, complex, and therefore more attractive human being. Such assertions as “I was engag'd to marry, you see, another man, whom my justice will not suffer me to deceive, or injure” (IV.i.17-18) ring as hollow as Wycherley intended them to sound. And in this instance Lucy is correct to call it “rigid honour”—for it is rigid as in “intractable,” “stiff,” and “death-like” (30). That she does not play well as an “ideal” is all the more reason to argue that she is not as totally open and sincere as her words imply. Besides, who so far in Wycherleys's plays has been?
Because she knows that a woman can maintain a good measure of freedom if she weds one with an unthreatening temperament,48 Alithea accepts that if Harcourt can prove worthy by showing that he will have no demands on her—that he is respectfully subordinate to her—she would, because she is attracted to him physically, consider marrying him. And certainly at this point, Harcourt has paid proper court to her vanity. Yet, she may also rationalize that if Sparkish remains immune from the “green-eyed” horror, he would make a practical, if not ideal, match—one that would not encroach on her freedom but rather encourage it. She tells Lucy, “I own [Sparkish] wants the wit [attractiveness] of Harcourt, which I will dispense withal, for another want he has, which is want of jealousie, which men of wit seldom want” (IV.i.43-45). And yet, despite her apparent certitude (part of her public pose), the lioness Alithea paces about waiting for Sparkish to manifest a clear sign of his jealousy so that she may then pounce and be done with him. And always there are the important qualifiers served up as delicious hints to whom she hopes is a perceptive suitor: “but if he [Sparkish] be true, and what I think him to me” (emphasis added; III.ii.499-500). She understands, as Lucy does not,49 that her freedom would be curtailed, much as Margery's has been, if she weds one as inclined as her brother toward physical gestures of dominance: “Jealousie in a Husband,” she argues in her most important speech, “Heaven defend me from it, it begets a thousand plagues to a poor Woman, the loss of her honour, her quiet, … nay, her life sometimes; and what's as bad almost, the loss of this Town, that is, she is sent into the Country, which is the last ill usage of a Husband to a Wife, I think” (IV.i.54-63).50 Alithea's words are crucial; they must not be interpreted as a simple commonplace assault on making a poor marriage—for they reflect her greatest fears and are the key to understanding her seemingly strange virtue. As does “Cuckold” with her brother, “Jealousie” terrifies and intrigues Alithea; she is fascinated by the possibility that one such as Sparkish could actually be free from its influence. Finally, even Lucy begins to understand: “O do's the wind lye there?” (64).
When Sparkish promises his friendship to the smitten Harcourt, who will be “oblig'd” to his “dear Friend” if he can be “reconcil'd” to Alithea, we find of course both men lying unashamedly—each wishing to destroy the other, each tearing even further at the already ravaged conception of “brotherhood” by dragging the phrase “dear Friend” into this duplicitous exchange. Harcourt resorts several times to a juvenile form of indirection (seeming to talk disparagingly of himself but pointing at Sparkish to make Alithea comprehend his meaning—as if she needed to be so informed), embracing Sparkish Judas-like, the quintessential emblem of a male hostility (III.ii.240-63)—giving life to Corneille's observation “J'embrasse mon rival, mais c'est pour l'étouffer.” And in his striving to control both Harcourt and Alithea, Sparkish pushes them closer and closer together in this Wycherlean perversion of a ménage à trois, secure that he will always be the agent of coitus interruptus: “Come pray, Madam, be friends with him” (319-20).
Pinchwife is once more horrified: “What, invite your Wife to kiss Men? Monstrous, are you not asham'd? I will never forgive you” (323-24). He will not forgive him as a representative of his sex, we might conclude, rather than as the intended of his sister, for Sparkish's so openly pimping for his wife-to-be (as Pinchwife sees it) only raises the Country Husband's greatest fears to the point where they cannot be held silent—forcing him to extend every gesture or hint to its full and horrible potentiality. And to Pinchwife, Sparkish metaphorically places Harcourt under Alithea's sheets, revealing his “wife's” sexual charms to the frustrated and aroused rival: “[Harcourt] is an humble, menial Friend, such as reconciles the differences of the Marriage-bed; you know Man and Wife do not alwayes agree, I design him for that use, therefore wou'd have him well with my Wife” (331-34).51 If we could have doubted Sparkish's ulterior motives, his answer to Pinchwife's contention—that he “will get a great many menial Friends, by shewing” his wife as he does now—erases any doubt: “I love to be envy'd, and wou'd not marry a Wife, that I alone cou'd love; loving alone is as dull, as eating alone; … and to tell you the truth, it may be I love to have Rivals in a Wife, they make her seem to a Man still, but as a kept Mistriss” (342-46). Sparkish's motives are sinister, prompted by his love of inflicting pain and need for ascendancy over other males: “What, then, it may be I have a pleasure in't, as I have to shew fine Clothes, at a Play-house the first day, and count money before poor Rogues” (337-39). Here he is undoubtedly the fawning physician with that dangerous cane. But Sparkish will not win at his game, because he underestimates the power, cunning, and apprehensions of Alithea—and is so preoccupied with the image of destruction that he does not feel the noose he has slipped around his own neck. In his fantasy, the now sadistic Sparkish transforms Harcourt into something no more significant than a dildo. He places Harcourt in a Priapian state, never allowed satisfaction, taking responsibility for satisfying (or perhaps not) the voraciously sexual wife (whom Sparkish could never satisfy), all to feed the pleasure of the voyeuristic, yet manipulative, husband.
And Sparkish's subsequent appearance only reinforces the danger to Alithea; he tells Pinchwife, “'tis her modesty only I believe, but let women be never so modest the first day, they'l be sure to come to themselves by night, and I shall have enough of her then” (IV.iii.356-59). Sparkish now reveals more blatantly a delusionary sense of his own masculinity (unveiled through some regressive and violent sexual activity) and therefore the kind of harsh restrictions he would hope to impose on his wife. The trusting gentleman—so “oblivious” to Harcourt's designs, so repulsed by the thought of jealousy—would pull off his mask once the laws and customs of marriage made him secure enough to introduce the true man. As for any rivals, Sparkish observes to Horner with further malicious glee, “the time will come, when a Rival will be as good sawce for a married man to a wife, as an Orange to Veale” (379-80). He moreover aims a gratuitous blow at Horner's purported condition: “what pleasure cans't thou have with women now, Harry?” (396-97)52—and one at Pinchwife's fear of cuckoldry, even in the country: “your stingy country Coxcomb keeps his wife from his friends, as he does his little Firkin of Ale, for his own drinking, and a Gentleman can't get a smack on't, but his servants, when his back is turn'd broach it as their pleasures, and dust it away, ha, ha, ha” (389-92). Commentators have spent precious little time on these remarks, but they are vital to the understanding of Sparkish's crude, menacing, and sexually maladjusted side.
Harcourt's “parson” disguise surely pushes the play into that uncomfortable depth of farce—that is, if one assumes Sparkish actually believes the chaplain is Harcourt's twin brother. But it would be in keeping with the theatrical Sparkish's love of games-playing and his perverse designs to take Harcourt, now in white heat, right to the altar, not only to watch the event that tells him Alithea will not be his but also to have an active part in his own humiliation, even if the marriage would have been a sham. And Alithea need not be seriously peeved or incredulous either. She may well be suppressing smiles or even laughter, playing along in her own way—charmed, really, by Harcourt's child-like attempt at preventing the marriage. To test again his jealousy-free protestations, Alithea confronts Sparkish directly with Harcourt's puerile plot, but of course he chooses not face the truth, advancing instead “trust and belief” to disguise his vanity and pulsing destructive tendencies. Free and capricious with her power, Alithea then turns her “anger” on Harcourt—who has in the ritual given up his identity and perhaps all past associations with mistresses who are like “books”—assuring him that this childish gimmick will not move her: “though you delay our marriage, you shall not hinder it” (IV.i.140).
And even here Wycherley reminds us that Harcourt is no “right-way” character. Lucy says that the parson “Ned” Harcourt “has the Canonical smirk, and the filthy, clammy palm of a Chaplain” (121-22)—which is part of a bawdy joke Sparkish himself had started. What may actually peak Alithea's anger is the fact that Sparkish is not showing any jealousy—the requirement of her breaking the match: “Invincible stupidity, I tell you he wou'd marry me, as your Rival, not as your Chaplain” (158-59). When she asks Harcourt at the end of the scene “What can you hope, or design by this?” Alithea knows what the reply will be (her question is not simply rhetorical), but she needs to hear the answer; she needs Harcourt to continue his courtship. By her insults and the “finality” of her protestations—“[L]et us make an end of this troublesome Love, I say”—she has pushed Harcourt to the brink both as a test of his commitment and as an indication of her own and often insufferable pride. And yet she will pull him back to safety with the slightest indication of hope—for example in the pronouncement “Though you delay our marriage, you shall not hinder it” (140); she not only poses the challenge, encouraging him to do exactly that, but also subtly allows Harcourt to read our as his and Alithea's own potential nuptials. To be openly flattered by Harcourt's persistence would only soften her powerful demeanor, for she knows that power rests in remaining aloof, even if one must eventually capitulate (again, one recalls Etherege's Harriet and Congreve's Millamant). But all must be on her terms. Harcourt can only hope to effect a “reprieve” from his doom: “at worst, if she will not take mercy on me, and let me marry her, I have at least the Lovers second pleasure, hindring my Rivals enjoyment, though but for a time” (165-68)—the antifraternal feelings remaining paramount.
One now moves from one intriguing though misjudged woman to another: Lady Fidget, who arrives (II.i.306) with her ribald cohorts, Mistress Dainty Fidget and Mistress Squeamish.53 Lady Fidget has come to escort Margery to the theater (in good “sisterly” fashion), to initiate her properly into the sorority of London wives. Pinchwife is understandably dismayed by the prospect and refuses to allow the persistent women to “see” the one he now calls his “Free-hold” (II.i.305)—a rather grim reminder of Margery's fate, the oxymoron suggesting well the tension between the “Free” Margery (her natural spirit) and the “held” Margery (her subjection to her husband and the marriage laws and customs that sustain him). Pinchwife's standing guard in front of the door—again literally “pinched” by adversaries—claiming that Margery has already gone has little effect, for the ladies keep demanding her presence.54 Sensing that his wife may come to share the undaunted personalities of these irrepressible women, Pinchwife's only recourse is to retreat in the face of insurmountable odds: “Well, there is no being too hard for Women at their own weapon, lying, therefore I'll quit the Field” (333-34).
In the women's discussing the plight of wives, who are “so neglected” by husbands who take up with “little Play-house Creatures” (342-43), we note that the traditional complaint merely provides justification for female sexual freedom. Here the women exercise their power by patronizing the males, employing (appropriating) the same kind of rhetorical and metaphoric abuse males heap on the absent female: “Fye, fye upon'em,” Mrs. Dainty Fidget giddily exclaims, “they are come to think cross breeding for themselves best, as well as for their Dogs, and Horses.” Lady Fidget completes the figurative association: “They are Dogs, and Horses for't” (357-59), the frustration only intensified by an assumption that their social position does not seem to afford them the same advantage males have in such class-blurring relationships. And what is particularly aggravating to Lady Fidget is the male propensity to cover fear and insecurity with “reports” to “the World” that they have been successful with them: “to report a Man has had a Person, when he has not had a Person, is the greatest wrong in the whole World, that can be done to a person” (364-66). Her repetitive and choppy wording suggests a kind of verbal fidgeting and frenzied amusement the women take in such comments: “Fye, fye, fye, for shame Sister, whither shall we ramble? be continent in your discourse, or I shall hate you” (377-78). Likely punctuating her remarks with a raucous laughter, Lady Fidget's references to discourse and honor offer tribute to propriety, although the women enjoy pushing matters extremely close to the chaotic state: they must bear gifts to Apollo even though their hearts are with Dionysus. Lady Fidget explains to the others that “a woman of honour looses no honour with a private Person”—to which Mrs. Dainty Fidget adds, having picked up on the sexual entendre: “So the little Fellow is grown a private Person” (386-88).
That Sir Jaspar wishes Horner to escort the ladies to the play as a form of public humiliation encourages further our seeing Lady Fidget, especially, and the other women as younger and more sexually appealing than mere farce might want them (the attractive Elizabeth Knepp assayed Lady Fidget in the original cast). Increasingly delighted by thoughts of Horner's impotence, Jaspar portrays as overtly as indirection will allow the sexual act Horner can no longer perform: “Come, come, Man; what avoid the sweet society of Woman-kind? that sweet, soft, gentle, tame, noble Creature Woman, made for Man's Companion” (II.i.452-54). And playing the Philistine to Horner's shorn Samson, Jaspar tells his wife that she should keep him as one of her “droling pack of hombre Players” because he is an “ill Gamester”; he would make a fine addition to the “two old civil Gentlemen” with “stinking breaths” who wait on her: “a Lady shou'd have a supernumerary Gentleman-Usher, as a supernumerary Coach-horse” (470-76)—establishing Horner in a fraternity of impotence. Jaspar next paints into the nightmarish portrait other strokes of humiliation: Horner will be relegated to such effeminate tasks as drinking tea, dealing cards, reading to the women, “picking Fleas” out of their dogs, and “collecting Receipts, New Songs, Women, Pages, and Footmen for'em” (485-89). But at the height of this reverie of emasculation, and as a likely reaction to it, Horner reasserts himself by beginning a metaphoric lovemaking to Lady Fidget:55
SR. Jas.
Heh, he, he, well, win or loose you shall have your liberty with her.
LAD.
As he behaves himself; and for your sake I'll give him admittance and freedom.
HOR.
All sorts of freedom, Madam?
SR. Jas.
Ay, ay, ay, all sorts of freedom thou cans't take, and so go to her, begin thy new employment; wheedle her, jest with her, and be better acquainted one with another.
HOR.
I think I know her already, therefore may venter with her, my secret for hers.—
(507-16)
Clearly, Jaspar reflects that disturbingly voyeuristic intensity shared by Don Diego and Sparkish, as well as offers a self-destructive invitation for Horner to make him a cuckold.
Lady Fidget's reaction to Horner's admission of sexual fitness borders on a missionary's euphoria at the baptism of another heathen: “to suffer your self the greatest shame that cou'd fall upon a Man, that none might fall upon us Women by your conversation; but indeed, Sir, as perfectly, perfectly, the same Man as before your going into France, Sir; as perfectly, perfectly, Sir” (528-32). Her repetition of perfectly (perfection being to Lady Fidget sexual potency)56 and of dear in the following speech (“I have so strong a faith in your honour, dear, dear, noble Sir, that I'd forfeit mine for yours at any time, dear Sir”) translates these words into sexual entendres, making evident that Horner is the object of her lust, not vice-versa; and the exuberance of her reaction gives cause to believe that for once in Wycherley the volatile sexual energy seems destined for uninterrupted release.57 Horner is indeed sensitive to a woman's fear and accordingly convinces Lady Fidget that she may remain safely behind the protective screen: “the reputation of impotency is as hardly recover'd again in the World, as that of cowardise, dear Madam” (550-52)—an observation that moreover stresses the pleasure males take in the humiliation of another, a pleasure they are not about to relinquish, regardless of the truth. And there is playful though subtle eroticism in her reply: “Nay then, as one may say, you may do your worst, dear, dear, Sir” (553-54), her affectionate words directed primarily at his sexual organ—his “honour.”58 Jaspar's self-destructive prodding is by now superfluous: “get you gone to your business together; go, go, to your business, I say, pleasure, whilst I go to my pleasure, business” (567-68). Therefore, rather than being the master of all he surveys, Horner is now about to enter the service of the domineering Lady Fidget.
The contrast between the exuberant and erotically liberated Lady Fidget of the second act and the “melancholy” and sexually incapacitated Margery Pinchwife at the beginning of the third is striking indeed. The caged bird sings, but only a “sullen” song, as it naturally seeks its freedom to fly. “I confess,” Margery tells Alithea, “I was quiet enough, till my Husband told me, what pure lives, the London Ladies live abroad, with their dancing, meetings, and junketings, and drest every day in their best gowns” (III.i.9-12). Pinchwife wrongly assumes that his wife has been awakened from a kind of idyllic slumber not so much by the town (“She has been this week in Town, and never desired, till this afternoon, to go abroad”) but by the intoxicating delights Alithea has presented to her imagination. After all, it is easier to blame Alithea (or “Mistriss Flippant, as he calls her) for his “dreadful apprehensions” than to confront the disturbing implications of Margery's increasingly assertive “Londonness”: “Come, pray Bud, let's go abroad before 'tis late; for I will go, that's flat and plain” (35, 83-84).
Interestingly, Pinchwife approaches the horrifying image with some intelligence (although indirectly in an aside to the abstract presence of Horner): “well, if thou Cuckold me, 'twill be my own fault—for Cuckolds and Bastards, are generally makers of their own fortune” (54-55)—and even more openly admits another truth: “I was my self the cause of her going [to the playhouse]” (29-30). And he comprehends, as any discerning person would, that “a Mask makes People but the more inquisitive,” for they “have made more Cuckolds, than the best faces that ever were known” (89, 94-95)—an estimation corroborated by his sister: “a Beauty mask'd, like the Sun in Eclipse, gathers together more gazers, than if shin'd out” (105-6)—a bit of wisdom she learns from a “gentle Gallant” of hers, wisdom that helps us understand better the masking of her warmth for Harcourt. But Wycherley stresses that an understanding of a problem is no firm defense against its influence, for right in the midst of all this perceptive contemplation, Pinchwife adds, “if we shou'd meet with Horner, he wou'd be sure to take acquaintance with us, must wish her joy, kiss her, talk to her, leer upon her, and the Devil and all” (91-93). Completely ignoring his better sense, Pinchwife reaches for what is most handy though most ineffectual: a physical disguise by which to deny his wife's feminine allure.59
To the Country Husband, his fellow men are “a swarm of Cuckolds, and Cuckold-makers”—the first to be despised and ridiculed, the second to be feared and avoided. Margery adds the appropriate pinch of anguish by noting that she has not “half [her] belly full of sights yet” (the metaphor being sexual as well as gastric) and points to the “power of brave signs” she observes at the Exchange: “the Bull's-head, the Rams-head, and the Stags-head, Dear”—which Pinchwife rightly determines are the “proper” signification of “every” husband (III.ii.178-83).60 But more than the allusions to horns and cuckoldry, the three animals (perhaps representing to Pinchwife his tormentors Horner, Harcourt, and Dorilant) are males who batter each other over territory and sexual privilege among the females.61 And Horner's arrival heightens the sense of interruption and anxiety. He prevents Pinchwife from leaving this pack of “lewd Rakehells” by grabbing and detaining young “Master James”—turning the screws with relish: “[W]ho is this pretty young Gentleman?”; “I never saw any thing so pretty in all my life” (III.ii.380, 383). Pinchwife's civil attempts at disentanglement fail miserably: “Come away, come away”; “How she gazes on him! the Divel; “I am upon a wrack”; “O Heavens! what do I suffer” (396, 401, 418, 451). Dorliant and Harcourt naturally “gang-up” on their adversary by complementing Horner's praise of the young lad's “sister,” who “wou'd make all that see her, in love with her” (405-6), and in sending kisses to Margery through her “brother”62—and here we see still another “male” (the metamorphosed Little Sir James) adding to Pinchwife's distress. As Horner says, “let us torment this jealous Rogue a little” (424)—the emphasis being on gratuitous affliction more than on appropriate punishment for any unwarranted jealousy. Even Horner's apparent amenity of “Well, then, if she [Margery] be gone to bed, I wish her and you a good night” (435-36) is likely a reminder of Pinchwife's failure between the sheets. Pinchwife is tied and then baited with visions of three men making love to his wife and the irony of his being guilty of the same kind of merchandising for which he ridiculed Sparkish. His image of “ten thousand ulcers” gnawing away their “lips” is as graphic as it is hyperbolic—the gnawing suggestive of venereal disease, the malady of a promiscuous wife. Can it really be that if the husband were more rational in his actions, less jealous and possessive, Horner and the others would have left him unmolested? Would Margery have warmed to him? The play suggests nothing of the kind.
Margery Pinchwife's satisfaction with her first London sexual experience, as she returns from her tryst with Horner with her hat “full of Oranges and dried fruit,” is impossible to disguise (and there was enough time, as Lucy suggests, for more than kissing and fondling: “Their business will be done presently sure, an't please your Worship, it can't be long in doing I'm sure on't” [III.ii.508-9]). A stunned Pinchwife can only stare with horror at seeing the fruit and hearing “The fine Gentleman has given me better things yet” (521).63 Having immediately surrendered to the metaphor, Pinchwife barks at Horner, “You have only squeez'd my Orange, I suppose, and given it me again” (526-27), the indirection at least helping him cope with the reality of what has likely occurred—a reference Horner puckishly embellishes: “I have only given your little Brother an Orange, Sir” (524).64 This is the first time in Wycherley that some mutually agreeable sexual activity has actually taken place. There has been a consummation of sorts, even though we do not witness it and must have some doubt as to its exact nature; as in the famous China scene, the sexual activity is funneled through a signifier. But are we to feel anxiety or relief at this consummation? Should we share Margery's satisfaction? Initially, and not on any “moral” grounds, we may answer no, for those trying to prevent the sexual union were the sisters and protectors, Alithea and Lucy, as well as the obsessed Pinchwife. He was foiled, but so were the more altruistic women, who were physically detained to allow for the sexual act to take place—both Harcourt and Dorilant resorting to crude measures to assert their will: “Thou shalt not stir thou robust Creature,” Dorilant says to Lucy, “you see I can deal with you, therefore you shou'd stay the rather, and be kind” (503-4). Yet, there is undeniably a sense of pleasure (or relief) now that Margery's natural vivacity has had its release, and perhaps this first mutual and “normal” erotic activity in Wycherley (that is, actual as well as metaphoric) helps make the play more satisfying and exhilarating than The Plain Dealer, in which coitus interruptus is more pronounced.
In his interrogation of Margery, Pinchwife demands a contradiction of her stated innocence so that he may find her “false.” Considering the pattern of truth avoidance, why else does Pinchwife wish to hear again, as he has already heard almost “an hundred times over,” the tale of Horner's kissing his wife also “an hundred times” and putting “the tip of his tongue between [her] lips” (IV.ii.18, 36)?65 Pinchwife therefore fears the truth but still must prove his suspicions correct, an irony similarly present in his realization that Horner “knew her certainly,” while still being thankful for his wife's “simplicity” (27-28). In addition to the husband's “denial” is the wife's excitement in recalling her sexual experience—perhaps coloring it with every retelling, pausing and emphasizing specific words and phrases for carnal effect: “Why, he put———… the tip of his tongue” and “he's a proper, goodly strong man, 'tis hard, let me tell you, to resist him” (34-36, 46-48). True to the self-destructive impulse, Pinchwife, while trying to suppress his wife's natural sexual inquisitiveness, has given her (by demanding the “specifics”) a kind of sexual pleasure of which he is otherwise incapable. And Margery is shrewd enough to muffle at least some of the satisfaction she gets in recounting the event,66 for to tell her husband all would be to transform the sport into something frightening, since he would then resort to a regressive and hostile display to reassert his masculinity, which, as Alithea mentioned earlier when considering jealous husbands, could cost her “her life.” And Margery is moreover proficient in shifting the focus of responsibility, for when he asks, “But what you stood very still, when he kiss'd you?,” she replies, “Yes I warrant you, wou'd you have had me discover'd my self?” (29-31). Finally, she is not at all averse to reminding her husband that the cuckold-maker waits anxiously below: “he said if you were not within, he wou'd come up to her, meaning me you know, Bud, still” (25-26).
A significant feature of Wycherley's comedies is the manner in which he confronts many of his characters with unrelenting emotional stress until they demonstrate peculiar, absurd, sordid, violent, or otherwise disturbing behaviors. Here Pinchwife articulates a wish to “strangle that little Monster,” Love (sexual charm), who “gave women first their craft, their art of deluding” (52-56)—initially threatening the abstract, but soon enough the very object, Margery herself. In his assertion that women were originally “plain, open, silly and fit for slaves,” Pinchwife makes clear how easily he can leap from an intelligent assessment into one of the atavistic sanctuaries he has created for himself. He admits, for instance, that women have “more invention in love than men” because “they have more desires, more solliciting passions, more lust, and more of the Devil” (59-61)—a remark that, considering the women in Wycherley's plays, begins as accurate (“more desires, more solliciting passions”) but then bounds aggressively toward the primal and misogynistic denial of reality and human complexity.67 The second part of the characterization also provides a judicial context in which law and custom may justify his increasingly violent responses to his wife's ripening sexuality. Uncontrollable lust and sinful behavior, after all, must be identified, combated, and punished.
We may conclude that Margery's apparent bafflement (after Pinchwife orders her to compose a letter to Horner) over why one in London must write to someone else in London is in part a ruse to keep her husband off balance—but it also reminds him of where he presently is, reinforcing feelings of entrapment in a hostile environment. In the country, which denotes distance and isolation, letter writing is more necessary to communication—whereas the city suggests density, a place where there is no retreat from the madding and cuckolding crowd. Pinchwife is indeed disoriented, fearing at one moment that Margery is purposely deceiving him and assuring himself at the next that “she is innocent enough yet” (IV.ii.85). Her ongoing commentary as she begins to construct the letter and her attempts at altering what he tells her to write diminishes Pinchwife's editorial preeminence and accordingly prompts his most violent expression to this point: “Write as I bid you, or I will write Whore with this Penknife in your Face” (92-93). His floundering manhood requires a violent impetus to put it on firmer ground, and the penknife serves well enough as a menacing phallus68—the promise to write on her face suggesting how the phallic symbol threatens that which is most associated with the feminine (youth, beauty, and sexual charm). And the punctuation of his demand is even more gruesome: “Once more write as I'd have you, and question it not, or I will spoil thy writing with this, I will stab out those eyes that cause my mischief” (107-9). Confronted with such violent reinforcement, Margery's survival instinct halts temporarily the manipulation of her husband's emotions: “O Lord, I will,” although she cannot help reminding him that Horner will “ne'er believe” she could write “such a Letter” (110, 129-30).69
In essence rejecting the view that the city has corrupted her, Margery writes to Horner that she would in the country have ways enough to express herself carnally: “I'm sure if you and I were in the Countrey at cards together,—so—I cou'd not help treading on your Toe under the Table—so—or rubbing knees with you, and staring in your face, 'till you saw me” (IV.ii.158-61). Neither has Pinchwife really forced a chaste and naive Margery into a life of sexual awareness by making it all so attractive to her—in reality, he has only facilitated the prospect despite himself. And after she cleverly exchanges letters with her husband, her desperate husband (noting “I have been detained by a Sparkish Coxcomb, who pretended a visit to me; but I fear 'twas to my Wife” [172-73]), now evaluates his enemies as savage opponents who do not fight by the European rules of open confrontation: “if we do not cheat women, they'll cheat us; and fraud may be justly used with secret enemies, of which a Wife is the most dangerous; and he that has a handsome one to keep, and a Frontier Town, must provide against treachery, rather than open Force—Now I have secur'd all within, I'll deal with the Foe without with false intelligence” (198-204).
As the scene changes to the enemy's encampment, the Quack (maintaining the emphasis on male antagonisms) asks Horner, “have you not the luck of all your brother Projectors, to deceive only your self at last” (IV.iii.1-2)—in other words, “Have you not failed?” Horner's assurance that he has duped the males and been the beneficiary of the sexual appetites of their “Wives, Sisters and Daughters” (5) is a claim, we might remember, that is unsubstantiated by any clear evidence. Are we wise to believe categorically the assertions of one who takes pride in deceiving others?70 Regardless, the women he describes here are bawdy, dauntless, and intimidating in their relationships with males—in short, London women, the kind Margery would like to be, the kind Pinchwife fears the most. Horner's “success” is partly, if not mainly, due to his role as eunuch, which not only permits him safe passage but places him in the inferior position the women expect of their lovers.71 Horner's attack on female hypocrisy may serve to reinforce perceptions of his own masculinity and to reorder the hierarchy of the sexual world, placing himself, in all his “wisdom” and moral censure, above the women who have and will use him physically. And yet for all of his satiric posturing, he has absolutely no chance to dominate the famous scene about to unfold.
Regarding Lady Fidget's concern for her reputation as well as for her intimacy with Horner (“But first, my dear Sir, you must promise to have a care of my dear Honour” [IV.iii.38-39]), as Hobbes assumed, to have reputation and honor (the semblance usually being enough) is also to have power, but in this case the restraints and cautions are self-imposed, not externally forced by a husband, brother, or father—an important distinction.72 Lady Fidget knows as does Horner that such words have a useful, if not required, duality satisfying both the need for propriety and the desire for sexual expression. And Lady Fidget's employment of “Honour” (one notes the polysemic kinship to “Horner,” which permits an even easier transference of the concept to sexual activity)73 allows for the security of indirection. She faces her lover looking slightly off center, using the term as a flimsy garment that both reveals and teases in its “concealment.”74 She is therefore unaffected by Horner's criticism of her concern for “Honour”—his assertiveness in such claims as “I am a Machiavel in love Madam”75 moreover failing to impress. (And Horner's assault on hypocrisy and assertion of virility are more for the Quack's benefit, now listening behind the screen, than Lady Fidget's.) Lady Fidget's desire that Horner never share his “secret” (sexual potence) with those “censorious” acquaintances of hers implies more a delightful sexual avarice than passionate concern for reputation: “A secret is better kept, I hope, by a single person, than a multitude” (68-69). And her use of entendre is both incessant and pleasing: “Ay, but if you shou'd ever let the other women know that dear secret, it wou'd come out” (emphasis added; 55-56). Once having satisfied the demands of propriety, Lady Fidget is now free to embrace Horner openly, informing him that she will not be a passive partner in their relationship. That the sexual contacts in the play are helped along by either the male or female denying or disguising their true essence (Horner as the eunuch, Margery as Sir James, Lady Fidget as a woman of honor) only underscores Wycherley's belief that men and women must in some way conceal, distort, and decorate their erotic side as a way to control and elevate it from the Dionysian impulse it is and must always be.
Sir Jaspar's intrusion on the lovers is a kind of coitus interruptus—initially disturbing Lady Fidget (discovery diminishing power)—but she is quick to explain that she is only tickling Horner, offering something apparently diversionary but reflective nonetheless: “I love to torment the confounded Toad,” she tells her husband (76-77). (And Horner is “tormented” by being temporarily denied sexual gratification.)76 Though powerful and aggressive, Lady Fidget (like Hippolita) cannot escape her own considerable frustration—or her reliance on entendre—over Horner's so far having “done nothing,” adding “Hah, hah, hah, Faith, I can't but laugh however; why d'ye think the unmannerly toad wou'd not come down to me to the Coach, I was fain to come up to fetch him, or go without him, which I was resolved not to do; for he knows China very well, and has himself very good, but will not let me see it, lest I should beg some; but I will find it out, and have what I came for yet” (IV.iii.97-104).77 As she goes into the next room to await her “Machiavel,” Lady Fidget informs us that for a woman of power and intelligence, the locked door can occasionally liberate as well as incarcerate. Lady Fidget leads; Horner follows—the desire to satisfy her sexual desires being far more pronounced here than his. And, annoyed by Sir Jaspar's ridicule, Horner warns him—“though I cannot furnish you [a pair of horns] my self, you are sure, yet I'll find a way” (110-11)—wishing without blowing his cover to assert his manhood and more directly take part in the ritual of destruction. He cannot help predicting Sir Jaspar's fate even though he should avoid such hints that encourage more vigilance from the husband. Finally, even though Horner is smart enough to “take” the “Cue” (“China” as an out); it is Sir Jaspar who provides it: “I thought you had been at the China House?” (79-80).
Horner's linking of women to the animal world (“Oh women, more impertinent, more cunning, and more mischievous than their Monkeys” [117-18]) depicts a shameless creature so graphically associated with licentiousness that we easily sense our arrival at the peak of sexual activity in Wycherley's four plays:
HOR.
Stay here a little, I'll ferret her out to you presently, I warrant.
SIR Jas.
Wife, my Lady Fidget, Wife, he is coming into you the back way.
LA. Fid.
Let him come, and welcome, which way he will.
SIR Jas.
He'll catch you, and use you roughly, and be too strong for you.
LA. Fid.
Don't you trouble your self, let him if he can.
(IV.iii.122-30)
Even in his use of lesser animals—the mouse earlier (my interpretation of “mousled”) and “ferret” here (one that chases mice and rats)—the playwright encourages our visualizing objects going in and out of orifices. Whether we like it or not, Wycherley places both the audience and reader in a position of the classic voyeur, witnessing the sexual act performed—here through the completely transparent curtain of metaphor. We also detect the female as enthusiastic and undaunted about sex (of any kind), if not more so, than the male. Whereas Horner seems sexually potent in the references to the “back way” and “ferret,” we know that it is Lady Fidget who is “throwing [his] things about, and rifling all” he has—encroaching on his privacy and upsetting his valued possessions (the verb rifling even suggesting her usurpation of the male's prerogative). We now laugh at the irony in Jaspar's “warning” to his wife that Horner would be “too strong” for her. Horner may go smugly into the room a powerful rake hero, but he returns literally debilitated.
Upon her unexpected arrival, Mrs. Squeamish (very plausibly another fairly attractive as well as sexually stimulated woman78) reveals her particular brand of Dionysian agitation by wishing to break down the door (“liberated” London ladies seemingly having little trouble with such barriers) and vowing to “disturb 'em” when she realizes that Horner is giving sexual favors to Lady Fidget—intimating, as Lady Fidget did earlier, that women can be possessive and less sisterly when sexual gratification is concerned. For the moment foiled, Mrs. Squeamish is left to indulge in vicarious sexual release by “staring at the prettyest Pictures,” which we can trust are erotic in nature, perhaps something on the lines of Lyly's “Windsor Beauties” or some more blatantly pornographic sketches.79
Lady Fidget emerges in postcoital splendor, with the emblem of her sexual activity and triumph—the piece of china (a cylindrical vase, no doubt) in her hand: “I have been toyling and moyling, for the pretti'st piece of China, my Dear.” Horner immediately swears to her sexual prowess and concedes his more secondary role: “Nay she has been too hard for me do what I cou'd” (IV.iii.178-79). And Mrs. Squeamish has little difficulty interpreting their allusions, which animates her to the point of demanding sex from the now temporarily impotent Horner:
SQUEAM.
Oh Lord I'le have some China too, good Mr. Horner, don't think to give other people China, and me none, come in with me too.
HOR.
Upon my honour I have none left now.
SQUEAM.
Nay, nay I have known you deny your China before now, but you shan't put me off so, come—
HOR.
This Lady had the last there.
LA. Fid.
Yes indeed Madam, to my certain knowledge he has no more left.
SQUEAM.
O but it may be he may have some you could not find.
LA. Fid.
What d'y think if he had had any left, I would not have had it too, for we women of quality never think we have China enough.
(180-92)80
All of this memorable banter stresses the near volcanic need for the women to express their unbridled passions and the indispensability of indirection—whether in entendre, euphemism, allusion, metaphor, simile, or any other signifier.81 In short, the famous China Scene presents Lady Fidget as triumphant—not Horner, who cannot enjoy his experience for long without being set upon by another insatiable woman demanding his services.82 For the moment reality has become the slave to artifice: he is as helpless now as his disguise assumes, placed inside the carocele as the women in the scene—even Old Lady Squeamish—surround him, firing off expressions of derision and taunting the unarmed and weakened man to engage them in erotic battle.
Horner attempts to mollify the restless Mrs. Squeamish with the assurance that he will have a “Rol-waggon” for her “another time” (194)83—his having no choice but to promise future attentions, given his sexual debility now that Mrs. Fidget has left him so well spent. As Old Lady Squeamish observes, “Poor Mr. Horner, he has enough to doe to please you all, I see.” And whereas Horner's reply, “Ay Madam, you see how they use me” is particularly amusing in its irony and likely mode of delivery, it nonetheless testifies forcefully to the fact that indeed he is being used—and to the fact that the women are as merciless as they are powerful: “I could never find pitty,” he says to Old Lady Squeamish (she with memory but no participation), “but from such reverend Ladies as you are, the young ones will never spare a man” (203-5). Horner also tells the triumphant Lady Fidget that Mrs. Squeamish “has an innocent, literal understanding” (197-98)—something he does not believe nor should we, its being merely a futile attempt to ward off the anger of his possessive lover. (And even though the sisterhood is seemingly fractured when another man is involved, there is absolutely no gesture of any significance against the other woman—no attempt to destroy her; rather the male is the object of the woman's bitchiness.)
As if to punctuate her all-consuming nature, the younger Squeamish pulls Horner by the crevat—“Come come, Beast, [a woman again appropriating the male's favorite derogatory metaphor] and go dine with us, for we shall want a man at Hombre after dinner”; “Come Sloven, I'le lead you to be sure of you” (206-10)84—(all reminiscent of Flirt's treatment of Monsieur) and Horner, in answer to the old woman's suggestion that he kiss her granddaughter, again concedes that the aroused woman is a force beyond his control: “No Madam, that Remedy is worse than the Torment, they know I dare suffer any thing rather than do it” (213-14), meaning of course that a sweet kiss would not be enough; it would either lead to more affectionate behavior or cause the woman to laugh at the feeble effort. The image is marvelous: Lady Fidget standing to the side in wicked triumph with her “roll-wagon,” Sir Jaspar laughing heartily at Horner, Mrs. Squeamish pulling at the debilitated lover, and Old Lady Squeamish, like Don Diego, in an agitated state, insisting “Alas poor man, how she tuggs him, kiss, kiss her. … [P]rythee do” (211-16). Undoubtedly, the china scene appears to be Horner's greatest triumph—after all, he has had his cake and beaten Jaspar too, by making him (again?) a cuckold—admirable behavior in a world of libertines, hypocrisy, and aggression. But it is really the women's scene. Even considering his “manly” performance, Horner has been more used by than exploitive of the women. Only the Quack suggests that Horner's actions have been majestic: “I will now believe any thing he tells me” (225). But he is a Quack, one who purports to be what he is not, one who convinces others to believe in half-truths, falsehoods, and exaggerations.
With trepidation, Lady Fidget announces Pinchwife's arrival: “O Lord here's a man, Sir Jaspar, my Mask, my Mask, I would not be seen here for the world” (226-27), a remark that lures us into focusing on the commonplace matter of masking and hypocrisy. But the most significant words may be “O Lord here's a man,” for only Pinchwife truly represents to women what they dread most—an intimidating and perceptive man, using law, custom, and primitive expression to keep their freedoms and spirits suppressed. He has come to confront Horner, as the only male who could match Horner in battle—a man Pinchwife truly knows “so well”—ridiculing Horner's attempt at rhetorical brotherhood, “But why not, dear Jack” (241-43). Horner is unable to manipulate Pinchwife with refurbished language, attempts at flattery, protestations of loyalty or impotence, or any other form of deception. It is only Pinchwife's consuming fear and Margery's undaunted sexual desire that work successfully for Horner.
Pinchwife's delivering the wrong letter (another suggestion of the self-destructive impulse and of Horner's luck rather than skill) indicates that the rake hero can indeed be knocked off balance: “Ha, is this a trick of his or hers?” (269). But not content with what he believes is a missive terminating the relationship, for he knows too well that men like Horner are not easily discouraged, Pinchwife physically threatens his adversary, as he did Margery: “there will be danger in making me a Cuckold”; “I weare a Sword” (IV.iii.299-302). And he is not above admitting to his self-destructive tendencies, for when Horner informs him that his “freedome with [Margery] was your fault, not mine,” Pinchwife is compelled to admit to himself, “Faith so 'twas” (314-15). Hardly a mere embodiment of gullibility and peevishness, Pinchwife is the only male character who does not disguise his true feelings to the other males; there is no pretence of virtue, friendship, innocence, or impotence with him.85 Horner's reply “Thou art mad with jealousie” seems to place him in the role of satirical agent leveling justifiable criticism. Still, even this censure is undercut by the fact that Horner is lying boldly about not having seen, courted, and kissed Margery—and by the fact that Pinchwife has more than good cause to be distrustful of Horner and his wife (296-98). Accordingly, Horner's more adamant assessment, “thou art mad, Man” (304), is only partially correct, for whereas Pinchwife has the madness of obsession, he is often keenly perceptive about the motivations of those with whom he interacts (Margery, Horner, and Alithea).
Horner's sudden victory in his memorable reply to Pinchwife's “there will be danger in making me a Cuckold”: “Why, wert thou not well cur'd of thy last clap?” (299-301)—is very short-lived as Pinchwife reminds him (“I weare a Sword”) that such wit will be of little use should the Country Husband be provoked to violence. Pinchwife's threats against his wife in severe terms (“write whore” with a knife in her face) or ludicrous ones (“pinch me, or kill my Squirrel”—278-79) might be categorized as cowardly if he threatened only his wife, but his facility with hostile expression extends to anyone—including the “hero” of the play—making clear that he is dangerous. And Pinchwife does not sustain the same kinds of losses both Sir Jaspar and Sparkish receive, for Margery's earlier sexual activity was not entirely the result of his willingly pushing her toward Horner (as did the other two men); rather she was “forcibly” taken off stage. To the Quack, Horner professes delight at Margery's letter, but again we see the parasitic character benefitting from the “ingenuity” of Pinchwife's obsession. And even here his revery about the letter is interrupted by the return of Pinchwife—this time with Sparkish, another ridiculer of Horner's manhood. Horner must by now wince at the irony of his earlier comment, “I shall be rid of all my old Acquaintances” (I.i.139-40).
We next see the Country Wife in lamentation: “I am sick of my Husband, and for my Gallant” (IV.iv.2).86 Horner is to her the embodiment of freedom and open sexual expression, and accordingly, when she thinks of him her “hot fit comes” and she is “all in a Feaver” (6).87 Visions of Pinchwife, however, cause her to “tremble” and break out “in a cold sweat,” and “have inclinations to vomit” (4-5)—not so much because of his looks or bland sexuality but because he is the cause of her incarceration and fears. As if on cue, Pinchwife creeps up behind, interrupting his wife's communication to Horner and preventing her escape: “O Lord Budd, why d'ye fright me so?” (14-17). His reading the letter precludes at least for the moment her required concealment and indirect expression. Now Pinchwife has knowledge of her true thoughts and proof of her “lost” innocence as he reads “if you [love me], you will never suffer me to lye in the arms of another man, whom I loath, nauseate, and detest” (22-24), words—in addition to “sickness,” “feaver,” “disease,” “vomit,” “break out,” and “tremble”—emphasizing the infirm personal world of the Pinchwifes. One cannot help sensing the desperation in a woman convinced that she is likely doomed to a life of spiritual and sexual barrenness even amid the fruitful arbors, fertile fields, and flowing streams of the country.
Again Pinchwife calls on a primitive response as the only way to control his greatest fear. First he damns the entire sex, equating them with “sensless, indocile animals” and then drawing, not a penknife but something even more potent (as weapon and phallic symbol), a sword, to “make an end” of his wife and “all my plagues together” (37-40)—dangerously shifting his rage from the general (all women) to the particular (Margery). But Sparkish arrives to prevent this violent form of intercourse, a most felicitous manifestation of coitus interruptus, suggestive again of the males' unmitigated ability to frustrate the designs of other men: “What drawn upon your Wife? you shou'd never do that but at night in the dark when you can't hurt her” (44-45), a gleeful allusion to Pinchwife's insufficient phallic sword wielded in the marriage bed.
Pinchwife's retaliatory strike (through a gratuitous outburst against Alithea)—“[She is making] you a Cuckold, 'tis that they all doe, as soon as they can” (50-51)—with its shift back from specific to general misogyny, informs Margery that she is now out of immediate danger: “I am contented my rage shou'd take breath” (64). But Sparkish quickly ends this respite by exploiting Pinchwife's destructive and diseased preoccupations: “we men of wit have amongst us a saying, that Cuckolding like the small Pox comes with a fear, and you may keep your Wife as much as you will out of danger of infection, but if her constitution incline her to't, she'l have it sooner or later by the world” (68-72). And Pinchwife is quick to acknowledge the sagacity of such observations: “What a thing is a Cuckold, that every fool can make him ridiculous” (73-74). His fears now prominent, Pinchwife keeps his hand firmly on the one remaining symbol of his masculinity—telling his wife to continue her latest correspondence to Horner, adding, “if you are false in a title, I shall soon perceive it, and punish you with this [the sword] as you deserve” (V.i.3-5). The notion of “punishment” leads Pinchwife (as Othello before him) more deeply into the realm of judicial process—from prosecutor to judge, then to jury, and now edging dangerously close to executioner, as he seeks the final corroborating evidence to justify not only his present treatment of his wife but her ultimate fate. But this time the moment's tragic possibilities are suddenly halted, not by male interruption, but by Margery's signing the letter, “Your slighted Alithea” (12). Other than suggesting the Country Wife's awareness (shaped by both instinct and recent experience) that language lies ready to be manipulated and twisted to suit one's needs,88 Margery's forgery reinforces the power of the sorority to provide aid and protection. That is, although she is not present, “Alithea” does effect Margery's narrow escape. As Pinchwife responds, now that the horrid spectre of cuckoldry has magically vanished, “I am stunn'd, my head turns round” (18).
Unlike other gulls, however, Pinchwife's active intelligence has no room for complacency, and he immediately questions how Alithea could have dictated the letter since Margery was “lock'd” up alone. Desperately needing to deny a pair of horns, Pinchwife comes to rationalize his wife's explanation (“O through the key hole Budd”), but only with considerable skepticism as he measures probabilities against possibilities: “This changeling89 cou'd not invent this lye, but if she cou'd, why shou'd she?” (37-38). And his subsequent resolution, “I'd rather give him my Sister than lend him my Wife, and such an alliance will prevent his pretensions to my Wife sure,—I'le make him of kinn to her, and then he won't care for her” (61-64), testifies to how his fears have pushed this normally perceptive man into bizarre scenarios and ridiculous devices in order to prevent his cuckolding—which, again, may well be a fait accompli (the “Orange and dried fruit” scene). Still, Pinchwife feels for the moment calmed—“I'd rather give him my Sister”—by the power to dispense a woman as property (V.i.61-62). This vision of his rival married to Alithea and thereby no longer interested in Margery because she would be related is of course utter nonsense and contradicts what Pinchwife has concluded about Horner—a man who would not hesitate, regardless of circumstance, to torment him further. Regardless, Pinchwife's preoccupation with intercourse is striking: “I'd rather fight with Horner for not lying with my Sister, than for lying with my Wife … for we have as much a doe to get people to lye with our Sisters, as to keep 'em from lying with our Wives” (95-103). So shackled is Pinchwife by these elaborate machinations that he is actually praising Horner as a man wealthy enough and more sexually attractive than Sparkish—becoming, despite himself, Horner's advocate.
All of this tortured maneuvering sets Pinchwife up for a variation of the bed-trick, in which the increasingly resourceful Margery (likely with some assistance from Lucy) blows out the candle, dresses in Alithea's clothing, and shifts position so that Pinchwife believes he is leading his sister to Horner's lodging. Though undeniably the stuff of farce, Pinchwife's action is still consistent for one who could dress his pretty young wife as a young “Sir James” to throw hot-blooded males off the scent. Here he is so wanting his sister to become the agent by which he may escape his fate that he willingly staggers about in the dark, in a gesture of self-destruction—actually leading his wife by the hand to her lover. His speech ebbs and flows from reason back into chaos: he paints a most felicitous image—“Wife and Sister are names which make us expect Love and duty, pleasure and comfort” (V.i.99)—but then defaces the portrait with both threats of violence and betrayal of his own sister to a man he thoroughly despises, a man, given his general distrust of other males, is properly on guard: “let's see her face presently, make her show man, art thou sure I don't know her?” (V.ii.51-52).
“What means the Fool?” Horner wonders, as he is forced to take a bite of his own deceit, evincing the discomfort of one who must now distrust, rather than orchestrate, all language and gesture (68-70). Horner is denied the luxury of uncomplicated sexual conquest; the confusion, distress, and anxiety he has sent flowing toward others has now, in its ebb, returned to him.90 And when Sir Jaspar arrives and informs Horner that his “Lady and the whole knot of the virtuous gang, as they call themselves, are resolv'd upon a frolick of coming to you to night in Masquerade” (89-91),91 Horner feels besieged by those he had earlier abused (the males) or hoped to use (the females). The women arrive more unified (as a “virtuous gang”) than do the males (Jaspar and Pinchwife “solus”). They come demanding what Horner cannot at present provide—Pinchwife, Jaspar, and the women circling about him in a kind of ritualistic promenade suggestive more of slaughter than of pleasure. In the meantime, as Horner tells the Quack, he is going “to a private feast”—Margery, who waits for him in the next room—again implying that he has simply been the beneficiary of Pinchwife's psychological problems and Margery's sexual hunger.
The play's penultimate scene (in the Piazza of Covent Garden) hardly qualifies as an instance of masculine altruism (in Pinchwife's informing Sparkish of “Alithea's” interest in Horner), for his motive is to remove Sparkish from the picture entirely—one component in the Country Husband's tortured scheme to avoid his greatest fear. Pinchwife also gains the satisfaction of having his earlier warnings to Sparkish come true: “You were for giving and taking liberty, she has taken it only Sir” (V.iii.4-5)—his parting words almost laughable considering Wycherley's negative emphasis on sight throughout his plays: “goe and believe your eyes” (18), for no character in Wycherley ever gains by such advice. Sparkish's reaction, now that his greatest fear—humiliation in front of other men—has begun to be realized, is not to seek the truth but to resort to a more vehement expression himself: “Nay I'le to her, and call her as many Crocodiles, Syrens, Harpies, and other heathenish names” (19-20), demonstrating a “normal” reaction to what he has heard. Indeed, we find him decked here in the traditional fool's raiment, his cursing simply rhetorical and harmless—Wycherley's way, perhaps, of showing the rapid deterioration of Sparkish's significance in the play: “unworthy false woman, false as a friend that lends a man mony to lose, false as dice, who undoe those that trust all they have to 'em” (34-37). And rather than explaining herself and seeking the motivation for Sparkish's outburst (a forged signature and other epistolary highjinx), Alithea is more than satisfied to allow his childish ranting to collapse the foundation of the “contract”: “So I find my Brother would break off the match, and I can consent to't, since I see this Gentleman can be made jealous” (55-56).
We know that her decision is more than mere caprice or a convenient deus ex machina—it evolves after all from Alithea's greatest fear and is therefore a culmination of a psychological process, not a revelation or awkward change of heart that serves to extricate the playwright from an intolerable denoument. But for those seeing her as a paragon, it is difficult indeed to justify her rather tepid reasoning: “How was I deceiv'd in a man!” (71)—this rhetorical flourish coming very close to self-parody of her rigid and honorable posturing. Yet even in the throes of comprehension, she fears what might have been: “O Lucy, by his rude usage and jealousie, he makes me almost afraid I am married to him, art thou sure 'twas Harcourt himself and no Parson that married us” (57-59). And consideration of a near-fatal mistake prompts her warning to the “over-wise woman of the Town, who like me would marry a fool, for fortune, liberty, or title, … then if for liberty, that he may send her into the Country under the conduct of some houswifely mother-in-law” (77-82).92 Her vision of a disastrous marriage is complete with the horror of incarceration in the country under the watchful eye of some powerful and oppressive force, one like her brother. And still she resists accepting the truth of her feelings, protecting herself and her pride with such a transparent remark as “But marry Mr. Horner, my brother does not intend it sure; if I thought he did, I would take thy advice, and Mr. Harcourt for my Husband” (75-77). Surely, Lucy could not be fooled by such a flimsy piece of indirection.
Sparkish's parting words remind us of the indifferent persona he forwarded earlier in the play: “I'le come to your wedding, and resign you with as much joy as I would a stale wench to a new Cully, nay with as much joy as I would after the first night, if I had been married to you” (66-68). But this valediction should not be equated with the magnanimous gesture of many a disappointed fop, such as Congreve's Sir Wilfull Witwoud and Cibber's Lord Foppington.93 First, such a bold admission, if it were honest, would be rare in Wycherley; second, his feelings for Alithea have been clearly subordinated to concerns for his own masculinity and wish to use her to torment other males. In essence, then, this flippant response is a cover for his deep humiliation at exposing himself and thus being known more accurately by others and accordingly rendered powerless. Rather than violence to repair the ripped ego, Sparkish employs a form of “benign” passivity, one that allows him to appear unfazed by Alithea's apparent change of heart. Yet, he does strike Alithea in a vulnerable spot by claiming that he “never had any passion” for her, “till now” (63-64)—for the insult goes to the heart of Alithea's vanity and of course reminds her of what she needs in her life—not mere “honor”—but passionate attention from a man without debilitating jealousy.
The play's final scene depicts Horner once more anxious over the approach of the formidable group of women headed by Lady Fidget: “A Pox they are come too soon—before I have sent back my new—Mistress, all I have now to do, is to lock her in, that they may not see her—” (V.iv.1-3), the nervousness evident by the flustered hitches in his speech. The desire to isolate Margery from the influence of the others clearly links him to Pinchwife—his words in fact echoing those of his adversary in earlier scenes. Wycherley seems to be hinting that Margery is indeed fated to live her life under lock and key. Because of her natural temperament, her growing proficiency in games of manipulation, and her continuing reliance on primitive expressions (in the female: sexual, not violent) without adequately obscuring them with cloaks of propriety, reputation, and honor, she represents now even to Horner a force that may never cultivate self-control, a young woman disturbing to the conception of order. In any event, the sorority remains strong in that the women do not interrupt Horner's apparent lovemaking to Margery; almost knowingly, they wait until Horner is in that “I have no more left” state—a better environment, of course, in which to frustrate and exercise power over him.
Lady Fidget, Mrs. Dainty Fidget, and Mrs. Squeamish let Horner know that they are more than willing to engage in sexual gamesplaying, especially since their “guardians,” Old Lady Squeamish and Sir Jaspar are in argument over backgammon94—although Old Lady Squeamish serves her fellow women (consciously or no) by keeping the male at bay (even if Mrs. Squeamish damns “an Old Grandmother” for interfering with a young woman's sexual expression). “Therefore,” says Mrs. Squeamish, “let us make use of our time, lest they should chance to interrupt us” (10-11). Unlike Gerrard's in the Gentleman Dancing-Master, her employment of the carpe diem convention is erotically, not monetarily, oriented. And as a prelude to more amorous activity, Lady Fidget sings a wife's and mistress's anthem, a song of female camaraderie: “Why should our damn'd Tyrants oblige us to live / On the pittance of Pleasure which they only give”—a ditty filled with irony (“damn'd Tyrants”), the obligatory gesture toward propriety (“We must not rejoyce, / With Wine and with noise”), the thinly veiled allusion to enjoyment however gotten (“On the pittance of Pleasure which they only give”; “In vaine we must wake in a dull bed alone”), and male weaknesses and female strength (“Whilst to our warm Rival the Bottle, they're gone”; “'Tis Wine only gives 'em their Courage and Wit”—“Then Sisters lay't on” [27-42]). Metaphor again provides the necessary filter, as we see the bottle in its phallic properties—the glass, with its concave shape also suggesting the female: “Lovely Brimmer,” says Mrs. Squeamish, “let me enjoy him first,” to which Lady Fidget adds, “No, I never part with a Gallant, till I've try'd him” (46-47).
This teeming Bacchanalian moment (a tableau worthy of Hogarth) releases several of the women's frustrations: “damn a Husband”; “an old keeper”; “And [the younger gallants] rather run the hazard of the vile distemper amongst [common women], than of a denial amongst us” (52-64)95—complaints that are worthy of the reader's sympathies. Their converting the drink into a “representative of a Husband”—the thing to which men run to enhance self-worth—and then their imbibing the wine suggests as well their all-consuming power.96 As their aggravation and militancy build—“drink Eunuch”; “Drink thou representative of a Husband” (51-52)—the women further disdain the male's choosing women based on class or “moral” distinctions:
DAYN.
The filthy Toads chuse Mistresses now, as they do Stuffs, for having been fancy'd and worn by others.
SQUEAM.
For being common and cheap.
LA. Fid.
Whilst women of quality, like the richest Stuffs, lye untumbled, and unask'd for … pray tell me beast, when you were a man, why you rather chose to club with a multitude in a common house, for an entertainment, than to be the only guest at a good Table.”
(65-69, 77-79)
Horner assumes a secondary place in this energetic scene, coming very close to actually functioning as a eunuch—and even his attempts at spirited insult are overwhelmed by Lady Fidget's exuberance and audacity—which is not averse to the occasional violent image:
HOR.
[P]eople always eat with the best stomach at an ordinary, when every man is snatching for the best bit.
LADY Fid.
Though he get a cut over the fingers … [W]e take freedom from a young person as a sign of good breeding, and a person may be as free as he pleases with us, as frolick, as gamesome, as wild as he will.
HOR.
Han't I heard you all declaim against wild men.
LA. Fid.
Yes, but for all that, we think wildness in a man, as desireable a quality, as in a Duck, or Rabbet; a tame man, foh.
HOR.
I know not, but your Reputations frightned me, as much as your Faces invited me.
(81-83, 90-97)
Lady Fidget's casual dismissal of Horner's censure indicates that although much of their complaining reflects genuine concerns and frustrations, still some of it, especially the inflated manner in which it is voiced, is part of the ritual they all take part in, like a daily primping of their curls, in which proper deference is paid to propriety and “honour.” And when Horner brings up the matter of “Reputation,” Lady Fidget refuses to back away or permit him the pleasure of ascendancy: “Our Reputation, Lord! Why should you not think, that we women make use of our Reputation, as you men of yours, only to deceive the world with less suspicion; our virtue is like the State-man's Religion, the Quakers Word, the Gamesters Oath, and the Great Man's Honour, but to cheat those that trust us” (98-103).
Horner sharply feels the vivacious antagonism of the moment—drink and food both serving as sexual metaphors for the women—as they surround Horner (as he, Dorilant, and Harcourt had earlier circled Pinchwife). They tell Horner they do only what men do: “Why should you not think, that we women make use of our Reputation, as you men of yours. … Our bashfulness is only the reflection of the Men's” (98-99, 111). Lady Fidget and Mrs. Squeamish thereby neutralize Horner's perceived role as satiric agent, for his blithe assumption that women such as these are the worst hypocrites, mere representations of their sex, has been thrown back in his face and in those of his sex. Horner tries to hold his own with witty retorts, but the women's logic invariably subverts his wit—resulting in Horner's barely being able to keep his nose above the raging rhetorical flood. Lady Fidget cleverly cites examples of male “hypocrisy” that have inflicted far more damage on the nation, fashionable society, and the individual than has any sexually aroused female's protestations to “honour.” Horner is denied the satisfaction he believed his condemnation would provide; he finds himself successfully countered at every move. And his major opponent here is a woman that has demanded and received his sexual favors, adding a special flavor to their debate. Lady Fidget puts a stamp on his less-than-heroic status with “Money, foh—you talk like a little fellow now, do such as we expect money?”—thus calling his bluff at not coming to them before. Horner's replies are now even more hesitant: “I was afraid of losing my little money”; “I beg your pardon, Madam, I must confess”; “With your pardon, Ladies, I know, like great men in Offices, you seem to exact flattery and attendance only from your Followers, but you have receivers about you, and such fees to pay, a man is afraid to pass your Grants; besides we must let you win at Cards, or we lose your hearts” (125-39).
This animated exchange is halted by the women's realization that each was not exclusively privy to Horner's “loyalty” and sexual favors. Instead of attacking each other, however, they instinctively band together and turn on the male. As Lady Fidget says, “Well then, there's no remedy, Sister Sharers, let us not fall out, but have a care of our Honour” (162-63). The term “Sister Sharers” informs Horner that he cannot divide and conquer these women as he can the men, nor can he ever assume an ascendancy in a relationship with any one of them. Lady Fidget asserts that for women the sisterhood is too important to allow sexual possessiveness to affect it, and she hopes that “Harry Common” (a marvelous term of derision) will “be true to three” (170)—which we may take to mean that he will be expected to satisfy all three in bed.97 Finally, Lady Fidget's restating her regard for “Honour, the Jewel of most value and use” informs us that this delightful soiree of sexual allusion and female assertiveness ends with the knot of propriety still firmly in place.98
Although he has hardly orchestrated events, Horner—as a concession to his ego—believes that he has and therefore attempts to bring all to a satisfactory conclusion. His pulling Margery out of hiding and begging her to leave so that he (as much as she) might escape the wrath of her husband meets with considerable resistance: “he'll now discover all, yet pray my Dearest be perswaded to go home, and leave the rest to my management” (194-96). His pleadings suggest a chaotic unraveling, not a “management,” of events, and her reply that she has no plans to leave at all underscores his predicament—not exactly the fate his elaborate scheme promised. His informing her that he will let her down the “back way” (196) also reflects Horner's inability even to control sexual entendre. Here that memorable phrase from the China Scene is now devoid of its figurative appeal—“back way” at present only describing Margery's best method of escape and Horner's best chance to avoid detection and a deadly confrontation with Pinchwife. Margery's reactions to these entreaties are horrifying to Horner: “What care I, d'ye think to frighten me with that? I don't intend to go to him again; you shall be my Husband now”; “every day at London here, women leave their first Husbands, and, go, and live with other men as their Wives” (204-10).
Although these rebuttals imply a delightfully innocent country girl who, infatuated with a virile libertine, dreams the fairytale ending of dissolving her marriage with the snap of her finger, such a girl is not Wycherley's Margery. Her actions are more pathetic than childlike; she is aware that in London, ladies have “left” their husbands, but she misconstrues the limits of London freedom and ignores the demands of propriety and its siblings morality and legality. Such a natural expression as she wishes here just cannot be tolerated, and it points to her unfitness for a London life. As a result, this magnificent creature's lot is a sad return to her cage. As for Horner, with both words and wit having failed him, he cannot even communicate with, let alone control, a mere country wife. His assertion to the audience is accordingly as empty as it is superfluous: “Well, a silly Mistriss, is like a weak place, soon got, soon lost, a man has scarce time for plunder; she betrays her Husband, first to her Gallant, and then her Gallant, to her Husband” (214-16).
Pinchwife's arriving with the others and asking Horner if he had indeed brought Alithea to him earlier prompts the rake's desperate attempt, after stalling with asides, to save himself and whatever is left of his crumbling empire: “Then truly, you did bring that Lady to me just now” (235). Critics have defended Horner's lie, explaining that, although he betrays Alithea, he does so to save his mistress. Or, that even though he betrays Alithea he clearly respects and appreciates virtuous women such as she.99 It appears more evident, however, that his fear of Pinchwife prompts this response—one based primarily on self-preservation. In a moment of anxiety, Horner understandably seeks breathing room in order to contemplate his next move. As for his respecting Alithea—after all, say some, he does not try to seduce her—his impression of and distance from her is more likely predicated on the simple truth that she is just too smart and formidable to be so debauched.100 And while the men fume and hesitate, the forgotten Lucy comments, “Now cou'd I speak, if I durst, and 'solve the Riddle, who am the Author of it” (244-45)—reminding us that women have power to both agitate and resolve.
As the play speeds to its end, Alithea is furious, Pinchwife impatient to marry her to Horner, and Horner still unable to effect a satisfactory resolution. Alithea then precipitates the long-anticipated move by telling Harcourt that now she fears only his “censure.” Having been prompted to make clear his willingness to be subordinate, Harcourt seizes the opportunity and assures Alithea that “'tis possible for me to love too, without being jealous”—those utterly magic words that allow her to accept him wholeheartedly, allaying her greatest fears and making Harcourt the “perfect” husband (250-51).101 Harcourt (actually Alithea) therefore solves one problem, and Horner's words to Pinchwife, “I have resign'd your Sister to him, he has my consent” (268-69) merely accompany Harcourt's solution, not initiate it. Besides, Horner's gesture has no effect on soothing the Country Husband, who quickly deposes Horner's authority: “But he has not mine Sir, … and you shall marry her presently, or,———” (270-73), as he lays his hand on his sword. And here the apparently innocuous presence of the real Parson adds one further male to surround and plague Horner at play's end.
It is left of course to Margery to catapult matters to their conclusion, first saving Horner from masculine aggression (at the hands of Pinchwife and Harcourt) and then asserting openly her own needs: “he shan't marry her, whilest I stand by, and look on, I'll not lose my second Husband so”; “don't quarrel about finding work for the Parson, he shall marry me to Mr. Horner” (274-81). With her public courage remains a commitment to the sorority, for Margery is quick with an apology to Alithea: “Pray Sister, pardon me for telling so many lyes of you” (284). Having again confronted the inescapable conclusion that his greatest fear has been realized, Pinchwife can only resort to a vestigial expression to help salvage what is left of his manhood: he “Offers to draw” on both Margery and Horner: “I will never hear woman again, but make 'em all silent, thus—” (287-88). But as we have come to expect, other males thwart his efforts: Harcourt, who physically grabs him, and Sir Jaspar, who leads the entourage of ladies into the room, flooding the scene with characters, effectively blocking Pinchwife's violent expression.
It is appropriate that Pinchwife informs Sir Jaspar that he has been abused—thus bringing the motif of internecine warfare to a fitting conclusion: “I tell you again, he has whor'd my Wife, and yours too, if he knows her, and all the women he comes near” (301-2). Pinchwife has obviously given Horner too much credit, ignoring for the moment the women's desire for being so “whor'd”; but his sharing this information with Jaspar at least provides him the satisfaction of being right all along—and it is important to remember that he is right—pulling another man into the thickening morass of cuckoldry with him.102 And while the men continue to shape their separate fictions, Lucy steps forward to aid her fellow sisters, assuring the disordered Horner that she will save him and the situation, to which the rake can only respond, “Canst thou? I'll give thee—” (317).103 That she begins speaking before he can complete his sentence suggests either (or both) that she needs no money to assist her fellow women (not so much to aid Horner) or that she, and not Horner, will be the one to determine the cost of her assistance (one might assume sexual favors later on).104 Whereas Lucy confesses to Pinchwife what appears to be the truth—“your Wife is innocent, I only culpable; for I put her upon telling you all these lyes, concerning my Mistress, in order to the breaking off the match, between Mr. Sparkish and her” (318-22)—even here the indirection is conspicuous, that is, in Lucy's leaving out the details regarding Margery's sophistication in matters of deception and Lucy's own vicarious delight in steering Alithea toward the promise of romantic gratification. Although it is Pinchwife who is kneeled to, Pinchwife who is begged of, Pinchwife who all others stand around and fear—whereas Horner has only a secondary role in this climactic moment105—Margery refuses to allow a smooth return to order and propriety, demonstrating how unfit she is for London life by failing to silence her natural and untamed spirit: “Hold, I told lyes for you, but you shall tell none for me, for I do love Mr. Horner with all my soul, and no body shall say me nay” (329-31).106 Although she pulls off her and Horner's masks, Wycherley's other characters instinctively refuse to look, and her frantic lover can only blurt out, “Peace, Dear Ideot,” a plea that moves the subversive female not a whit: “Nay, I will not peace” (333-34).107
The Quack's arrival offers Horner his one hope of survival: “you may have brought me a reprieve, or else I had died for a crime, I never committed” (341-42). Still, he cannot finish his thoughts, being unnerved by the sight of a menacing Pinchwife and an insatiable Margery, and he whispers to the Quack to convince the doubtful that he is indeed impotent. Again, Horner needs help in effecting a resolution108—requiring the assistance of one of society's most illegitimate figures. To Pinchwife's credit, although he will accept Lucy's confession as a way to escape horrid implications and to salvage his manhood, he will not condone the ridiculous assumption that Horner is sexually harmless: “An Eunuch! pray no fooling with me” (352).109 He remains throughout the one male character who is above accepting the Quack's diagnosis of Horner's condition,110 even though he is sorely tempted to do so and thus ease his distress: “Well, if this were true, but my Wife—” (380). That he finally (tacitly) accepts what Lucy and Alithea tell him proves only that he must at all costs avoid the public perception (despite what he truly believes) of his cuckoldry: “For my own sake fain I wou'd all believe / Cuckolds like Lovers shou'd themselves deceive” (410-11).111 The company's stunned reaction to the country wife's contradiction of the Quack's diagnosis—“'Tis false Sir, you shall not disparage poor Mr. Horner, for to my certain knowledge—”(369-70)—makes clear that the lonely warrior Margery Pinchwife will be unable ever to breach such impenetrable defenses with such an impotent weapon as literal truth.
As the curtain begins to close, Alithea warns her brother that he should avoid “too strong an imagination”—meaning of course any attempts at analyzing or plotting against his wife—and she offers a platitude as an antidote to male possessiveness: “Women and Fortune are truest still to those that trust 'em” (382, 384), which seems more her effort to solidify her own gains than the playwright's desire to conclude on any moralistic or educative note.112 These points are made for Harcourt's benefit, of course, and they establish the conditions for his marriage to Alithea. Lucy follows with another commonplace, although one that speaks well to the female ascendancy at play's end: “And any wild thing grows but the more fierce and hungry for being kept up, and more dangerous to the Keeper” (385-86). Dorilant, Sparkish, and Horner reject these visions of “London” husbands as a way to escape the image of such female potential; but Harcourt, showing that he is truly a suitable mate for Alithea, accepts the reality and acquiesces willingly to her demands. After she cues him, “There's doctrine for all Husbands Mr. Harcourt,” he speaks up properly and docilely, “I edifie Madam so much, that I am impatient till I am one” (387-88). On the other hand, with much bitterness, Pinchwife adds, “But I must be one—against my will to a Country-Wife, with a Country-murrain to me” (392-93)—his particular way of acknowledging the verity of what Alithea and Lucy have stated but at the same time signaling his determination to fight against that truth and continue to suppress his fears. And his phrase against my will accurately reflects the furtive compromise that makes the worst kind of personal existence in Wycherley's world.
Pinchwife will force himself to believe that the “wild animal” Lucy alluded to may indeed be tamed or at worst made to forfeit its natural aggressiveness and instincts after long periods of incarceration. And as if to corroborate her husband's implied promise, Margery, having accepted that acting upon her natural inclinations has failed to move, resigns herself to her fate: “And I must be a Country Wife still too I find, for I can't like a City one, be rid of my musty Husband and doe what I list” (394-96). Those who find the conclusion lighthearted or otherwise an affirmation of the joys of sexuality fail to appreciate the disappointment and depression expressed in Margery's capitulation. Lucy again tries to protect her “sister”: “what she has said to your face of her love for Mr. Horner was but the usual innocent revenge on a Husbands jealousie” (403-5). But her assessment (a protective lie) offers little comfort to one who has begun to feel the loss of her natural exuberance and hope for freedom: “Since you'l have me tell more lyes—Yes indeed Budd” (407-9)—a response marked by exhaustion and growing despair. This Persephone, now at the conclusion of her fertile period, awaits a return with her Dis to the uninviting underworld that is the country.
Horner speaks the last two couplets of the play as a dance of the cuckolds begins around him.113 His positioning in the dance has encouraged some to portray him as a phallic symbol amid the ritual,114 and his having the final word implies that he has indeed been the center of the comedy. But although he steps forward to deliver the concluding lines, he has not ruled as a comic or satiric monarch, nor has all been resolved satisfactorily—and thus rings very hollow his aside to the Quack, “[W]ell, Doctor is not this a good design that carryes a man on unsuspected, and brings him off safe” (378-79), for Horner had to be brought off safe by others whose concerns, fears, and machinations effected both his successes and his rescue. There has been neither peace nor victory here; rather all returns to status quo ante bellum—an empty and frustrating cessation of hostilities. Horner's speaking the final lines amid the dance of the cuckolds is ironically most appropriate, for he too has been cuckolded in that his manhood has been subtly undercut throughout the play by men and women (and the playwright) alike115—the irony being that his desire to reverse the pattern by going from cuckold to sexual potentate has been subverted, leaving him only where he began116—completely surrounded by all these “old Acquaintances” he had hoped to be rid of. That The Country Wife has no delightful resolution punctuates the playwright's belief that life is ambiguous, incongruous, frustrating, deceptive, and filled with fear: after all, often what emerges from chaos is only chaos.117 Finally, Jocelyn Powell may provide the most effectively succinct estimation of the play by noting that it is not a mirror of life so much as it is “a commentary on the workings of the human animal.”118 Indeed, Wycherley's brilliance in The Country Wife is more than farcical and comic; it is engagingly psychological.
Notes
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Critics have traditionally noted similarities only between The Country Wife and Love in a Wood (eg., Ranger as a preview of Horner, Christina and Valentine an early version of Alithea and Harcourt). A good critical overview is provided by Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume in Producible Interpretations: Eight English Plays, 1675-1707 (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), pp. 73-106. We need to keep in mind that perhaps only two years or so elapsed between the writing of The Gentleman Dancing-Master and The Country Wife. The implication has always been that Wycherley's first two plays were his juvenilia, written a considerable time earlier than his “mature” plays. Although criticism has come a long way from John Palmer's observation early in the century that The Country Wife is the “most perfect farce” in English drama, Robert Hume encourages our seeing it in roughly the same terms: “an immensely enjoyable play in which we take almost nothing seriously. … The gross character exaggerations are characteristic of farce, more than comedy.” Palmer, The Comedy of Manners (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1913); Hume, The Development of English Comedy in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 104.
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Bonamy Dobrée's memorable assessment of Horner as a “grim, nightmare” figure has been countered most dramatically, perhaps, by Virginia Birdsall: Horner is “a wholly positive and creative comic hero” on the side of “health, of freedom, and most controversial of all, of honesty.” Rose Zimbardo observes that Horner is “not sufficiently detached from the scene to be the satirist's persona. … [L]ess a character than an emblem,” Horner is “in himself a graphic declaration of the satiric thesis.” W. R. Chadwick also defends Horner against some of the earlier criticism: if he is a “monomaniac,” so are other heroes of sex comedies; he has “ideals”; he is a “picaresque hero” neither “admirable [n]or reprehensible.” Peter Holland comments: “The name is a symbol; it connects with other patterns of meaning and makes them relevant to the use of the word in the play. Horner is … a satyr in his cynical analysis of society, as well as his sensuality.” Anthony Kaufman argues that Horner cannot be considered a hero because of his “diseased” view of the world and his “sterility of emotion.” W. Gerald Marshall writes that Horner, “essentially … a negative creator, an anti-dramatist,” continually “sets stages upon which he invites those around him to forget about spiritual love.” Douglas Ford believes that Horner “serves as Wycherley's self-reflexive device,” a “symbol of authorial anxiety” affirming the “poet's [own] power to create.” Finally, Brian Corman asserts that Horner is “an attractive and clever character who, though no moral paragon himself, tends to apply his skills and talents only to those worse than he is.” Dobrée, Restoration Comedy, p. 94; Birdsall, Wild Civility, p. 136; Zimbardo, Wycherley's Drama, p. 90; “William Wycherley,” pp. 279, 280; Chadwick, The Four Plays of William Wycherley, pp. 117-19; Holland, The Ornament of Action: Text and Performance in Restoration Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 194; Kaufman, “Wycherley's The Country Wife and the Don Juan Character,” pp. 220-21; Marshall, Great Stage of Fools, p. 80—views that first appeared in “Wycherley's ‘Great Stage of Fools’: Madness and Theatricality in The Country Wife,” Studies in English Literature 29 (1989), 409-29; Ford, “The Country Wife: Rake Hero as Artist,” Restoration 17 (1993), 77-78; and Corman, Genre and Generic Change, p. 34.
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Quacks moreover “specialized” in “renewing maidenheads” (with alum usually). The frequent damage done to the vaginal wall caused pimps to assault the quacks, who would hasten to the Netherlands or France, from where they had come. Several years before the first performance of The Country Wife, Dutch quacks “were attacked in the famous petition of the Whores to the Prentices in 1668 after the Shrove Tuesday riots” that so upset Charles II and Lady Castlemaine. Burford, Bawdy Verse, p. 145.
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Horner's “confiding” to the Quack cannot, of course, be construed as evidence of masculine trust, for the Quack is not a participant here but rather a kind of perverse chorus, overseer, and voyeur. Besides, Horner's initial words in the play (in an aside), “A Quack is as fit for a Pimp, as a Midwife for a Bawd,” suggests the distrust and separation of the males. What is significant, however, is that by having Horner's trust, the Quack is placed in the position of authority, the familiar role for any kind of confessor, over the one who confides—and Horner willingly establishes this relationship. (The next person Horner so informs is Lady Fidget, who also maintains dominance over him in her particular way.) Foucault discusses the nature of power in the relationship between penitent and confessor in History of Sexuality, pp. 59-67. David D. Mann sees the Quack “set[ting] up the thematic oppositions of seeming and being”: “we become him: we are all quacks and frauds; merely by accepting him, we have made ourselves accomplices in the action.” My point is, though, that we should not accept him; we should be dubious of him and Horner's confiding only in him. Mann, “The Function of the Quack in The Country Wife,” Restoration 7 (1983): 19, 21.
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I cannot then support Anthony Kaufman's contention that, given the parameters of the “Don Juan” character, Horner's “disguise of impotence” requires our seeing a “latent impulse” of male homosexuality. William Freedman views the impotence as symbolic of “the Restoration society as Wycherley presents it.” Kaufman, “Wycherley's The Country Wife and the Don Juan Character,” p. 223; Freedman, “Impotence and Self-Destruction in The Country Wife,” p. 422. Freedman's essay says much about the nature of impotence and self-destruction with which I concur, but his applying these concepts to Restoration society as a whole (Horner's “injury” is “meant to comment on one prevalent insufficiency in the Restoration world: the inadequacy, in effect the impotency, of its males”) takes matters far beyond where I believe they should rest. For more on these issues see Giles Slade, “The Two Backed Beast: Eunuchus and Priapus in The Country Wife,” Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research, second series, 7, no. 1 (1992), 23-34.
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Anthony Kaufman believes that in Jaspar we see “a deliberate neglect of women as he foists off his wife unto the supposedly ‘safe’ Horner in order to absorb himself entirely in his business affairs.” I see his motives much differently. “Wycherley's The Country Wife and the Don Juan Character,” p. 226.
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Roger Thompson is quite succinct: “Masculine impotence or at least inadequacy was a seventeenth-century obsession” Unfit for Modest Ears, p. 105. And Derek Cohen adds that this “world of men is a world of continuous sexual contestation.” Cohen, “The Country Wife and Social Danger,” Restoration & Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research, second series, 10, no. 1 (1995), 2.
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Dale Underwood has examined several aspects of Restoration libertinism, noting the conflict between individual expression and the desired social order. Underwood, Etherege and the Seventeenth-Century Comedy of Manners, pp. 18-20. For further discussion of the dichotomy, see Richard Stieger, “‘Wit in a Corner’: Hypocrisy in The Country Wife.”
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Jean Hagstrum refers to “the notion that profoundly suggestive pictures can be socially or morally acceptable substitutes for forbidden feelings or wishes.” Hagstrum, “Pictures to the Heart: The Psychological Picturesque in Ann Radcliffe's The Mystery of Udolpho” in Paul J. Korshin and Robert R. Allen, eds., Greene Centennial Studies (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1984), p. 439. Horner's reference to L'Escole des filles, ou la philosophie des dames (1655) is to one of the most notorious “pornographic” works of the day; even Pepys vowed to burn it—that is, after reading it (The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 9:58). In 1675, the year of Wycherley's play, several young dons at All Souls College were found using the Oxford University presses to run off copies of Giulio Romano's engravings from Aretino's Postures—the period's famous sex manual. Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, pp. 539-40. See Roger Thompson for more on erotic literature and iconography of the time. Unfit for Modest Ears, pp. 4-5, 28.
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My argument in this chapter runs counter to Anthony Kaufman's major contention that Horner demonstrates an “abnormal hostility towards women,” whom he “compulsively exploits.” Kaufman adds that Horner's “successful but unsatisfying seductions are a gesture of hatred towards women, a desire to revenge himself on them, for the initial erotic attachment to the mother, inevitably betrayed, may lead to the hostile charge that all women are fickle.” I contend that Horner is manipulated and often dominated by them—and he evinces the natural defensive posture (born from insecurity) of a severe critic. “Fear of” seems more accurate to me than “abnormal hostility towards” women. Kaufman, “Wycherley's The Country Wife and the Don Juan Character,” pp. 220-21, 224. Kaufman's views are reiterated in “The Shadow of the Burlador: Don Juan on the Continent and in England” in A. R. Braunmuller and J. C. Bulman, eds., Comedy from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986), pp. 239-43. At the other end of the rope, Harold Weber feels that Horner “insists throughout the play on a just appreciation of women.” The Restoration Rake Hero (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), p. 54.
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As for the play's frequent use of “honour,” Rose Zimbardo concludes that the term is a “double entendre that reveals how far [Horner's and Lady Fidget's] behavior falls below the [social and] moral standard to which their words allude.” But Wycherley never gives us a sense of anyone's falling from a higher social or moral status. There are no characters representing that ethereal world of a proper and moral society. (See my later assessment of Harcourt and Alithea.) Zimbardo, “Wycherley: The Restoration's Juvenal,” p. 21. James Thompson has counted seventy-six uses of honour, correctly noting that often the reader “must perform a lexical substitution, ‘translate’ from the obviously literal meaning to some distant, different, private meaning.” Language in Wycherley's Plays, pp. 75-78, 81. We might also detect Wycherley's tempting us, with so many uses of Honour, to consider its linguistic cousins Horner and horror.
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Although we move in opposite directions, I strongly agree with Peggy Thompson, who argues that the women are “exhausting sexual creatures”—“essentially and aggressively sexual” and that Wycherley sensed that women had become “the literary embodiment of all kinds of conflicting desires and fears.” Thompson, “The Limits of Parody in The Country Wife,” Studies in Philology 89 (1992): 102-4, 113-14.
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W. R. Chadwick contends that the men are “quite clearly friends in the best sense”; and Thomas Fujimura notes that they treat Horner “amiably at all times, despite a supposed infirmity that would soon expose a lesser man to ridicule.” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick points to the “bond of cuckoldry” and argues that “Given that the object of man's existence is to cuckold men, Horner is a master. … If he gives up the friendship and admiration of other men, it is only in order to come into a more intimate and secret relation to them—a relation over which his cognitive mastery is so complete that they will not even know that such a bond exists.” Anticipating Sedgwick's interest in male “homosociality,” W. H. Matalene wrote that at times Horner “betrays his panic at the prospect of losing his London friends” and that “blinded by the physiological magic of copulation,” he “overlooks the homosocial pleasure he has taken from having his admired male companions look upon him as a great copulator.” Ronald Berman also discusses the concept of friendship (both male and female): part of Wycherley's “intention,” he concludes, “is to demonstrate” Bacon's view that without true friends “the world is but a wilderness.” Chadwick, The Four Plays of William Wycherley, p. 117; Fujimura, The Restoration Comedy of Wit, p. 140; Sedgwick, “Sexualism and the Citizen of the World: Wycherley, Sterne, and Male Homosocial Desire,” Critical Inquiry 11 (1984): 228, 231-32; Matalene, “What Happens in The Country Wife,” Studies in English Literature 22 (1982): 402-3; Berman, “The Ethic of The Country Wife,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 9 (1967): 50.
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Later, Harcourt says to Horner, “Now your Sting is gone, you look'd in the Box amongst all those Women, like a drone in the hive, all upon you; shov'd and ill-us'd by'em all, and thrust from one side to t'other” (III.ii.10-12)—a graphic metaphor likely voiced with far more satisfaction than good-natured pity. And Dorilant implies that Horner disgraces himself and his sex by submitting to such humiliation: “Yet he must be buzzing amongst'em still, like other old beetle-headed, lycorish drones; avoid'em, and hate'm as they hate you” (III.ii.13-14). For more on the issue of male friendship, see Peggy Thompson, “The Limits of Parody in The Country Wife,” pp. 106-9.
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J. Peter Verdurmen believes Horner's words are “delivered in an emotional aside, … presumably based upon a just estimation of the couple's intrinsic worth and the consequent desirability of their marriage.” Verdurmen, “Grasping for Permanence: Ideal Couples in The Country Wife and Aureng-Zebe,” Huntington Library Quarterly 42 (1979): 344.
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And how are these comments spoken? With troubled sincerity or sardonic ridicule at Sparkish's expense? Horner may also sense that Pinchwife would suspect Horner's own interest in Alithea, another “property” of Pinchwife's to spoil (and Pinchwife is concerned at Horner's disappointment in hearing of the match). Horner is furthermore perplexed that one such as Sparkish could attract such an appealing and independent woman as Alithea, for he expected Sparkish to secure only some old “stale Maid” who “has liv'd to despaire of a husband” or a young one who has failed to stimulate a “Gallant” (IV.iii.361-62).
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In addition, Lawrence Stone points to the frequent application of “friends” in the seventeenth century as meaning “no more than ‘my advisors, associates and backers.’” The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, p. 97.
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I believe Sparkish's character offers more than Robert Markley's description implies: “Sparkish is not a fop but a caricature of aristocratic presumption. He represents the failure of wit and carriage as measures of social value.” I moreover find misleading conclusions such as Alan Roper's that Sparkish “is impervious to the assault of events”: he is “so self-regarding as to be almost solipsistic, incapable of rational communication with others.” David Vieth points to the destructive aspects of the three plots headed by the “husband” figures: “the Pinchwife plot represents the country, the Fidget plot the ‘city’ or commercial district of London, and the Sparkish plot the ‘town’ or fashionable world on the fringes of Court.” However, Vieth adds that despite “superficial differences” among these worlds, the “fundamental implication is that the same ‘nature’ underlies them all.” Markley, Two-Edg'd Weapons, p. 169; Roper, “Sir Harbottle Grimstone and The Country Wife,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 10 (1977): 115; Vieth, “Wycherley's The Country Wife: An Anatomy of Masculinity,” p. 338.
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Sparkish offers three alternative places to meet: at “Chateline's,” the “Cock,” or at the “Dog and Partridg” (I.i.316-20). Other than recalling “chatelain” as meaning Lord of a manor (Sparkish would like Horner to realize that he can no longer be lord of even his own sexual desire), the person with a good ear for French might also think of “châtier” (to punish, to flog) and, more appropriately, “châtrer” (to emasculate or castrate, or in noun form, a eunuch)—all of which Sparkish would most fervently wish Horner to consider. The “Cock” certainly had a number of masculine associations, but Horner and some of the members of Wycherley's audience and reading public might have been reminded as well that in classical times the cock was often castrated, the only bird to be so mutilated. The eunuch priests of Cybele, one of the oriental cults brought to Rome, were called the Galli (the “cut offs”) because of the cock's (gallus) more debilitating and disgusting associations. See C. T. Onions, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymologies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966); N. G. L. Hammmond and H. H. Sculland, eds., The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 2nd. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970); and T. H. White, The Bestiary: A Book of Beasts, Being a Translation from a Latin Bestiary of the Twelfth Century (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1960). In addition, the Partridge's perverse sexual habits had also been long noted—the male occasionally mounting the male; the female stealing eggs of another female. And the Partridge was excellent at camouflaging its identity: “Frequent intercourse tires them out. The males fight each other for their mate, and it is believed that the conquered male submits to venery like a female” (White, The Bestiary, pp. 136-37). Although the scientifically minded mid-seventeenth century, as William J. Farrell reminds us, began to criticize and replace “the old habit of collecting anecdotes and analogies about animals, insects, and plants from the books of the past,” nevertheless, “the old dependence on the lore of the library still persist[ed].” Farrell, “The Role of Mandeville's Bee Analogy in ‘The Grumbling Hive,’” Studies in English Literature 25 (1985): 524. George Farquhar wrote that the “Nature of Comedy … bears so great a Resemblance to the Philosophical Mythology of the Ancients, that old Aesop must wear the Bays as the first and original Author.” Farquhar, “Discourse upon Comedy” in The Complete Works of George Farquhar, ed., Charles Stonehill (London: Nonsuch Press, 1930), 2:336-37.
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Sparkish may also be cognizant of Hobbes's position that the more often observed “the lesse uncertain is the Signe” (Leviathan, p. 11). Although William Freedman is certainly right to note that Sparkish's self-destructive impulse evolves from his insecurity, I would not agree that he “is dependent for satisfaction entirely on the supposed esteem of others” and that “everything he does is designed to win their praise and avoid their contempt”—for I see his satisfaction coming from destroying, not pleasing, others. Freedman, “Impotence and Self-Destruction in The Country Wife,” p. 429.
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Virginia Birdsall labels him one of the “blind fools” and “moralizing hypocrite[s].” Although W. R. Chadwick finds him more important than do most critics, noting that his role is as long as Horner's, he views him only in the most negative terms: “every facet of his character provokes disgust”; he is an “evil man” at times “close to the villain of melodrama”—even though he does provide the “darker colouring” necessary to understanding Wycherley's view of the world. Whereas he fails to develop his point, John Cunningham sees as I do that in the play “the more interesting thing is really the treatment of Pinchwife”—a “study of jealousy and possessiveness, as serious, in a way, as Othello.” Birdsall, Wild Civility, pp. 137, 147; Chadwick, The Four Plays of William Wycherley, pp. 114-16; Cunningham, Restoration Drama, pp. 86, 87.
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As Maximillian Novak writes, in another play of 1675—John Crowne's The Country Wit—the implication is “that people live in the country not because they prefer a rural existence but because they simply do not have the intelligence to cope with the ways of the city.” In Pinchwife's case, however, he lacks more the inner security rather than the intelligence to survive in London. Novak, “Margery Pinchwife's ‘London Disease’: Restoration Comedy and the Libertine Offensive of the 1670s,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 10 (1977): 13.
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Leviathan, p. 64. Freud would later write, “A man's attitude in sexual things has the force of a model to which the rest of his reactions tend to conform.” The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 10:241. Charles Hallet has explained the play in Hobbesian terms but concludes far differently than I that Wycherley is attacking “the Hobbist society from which … hypocrisy stems”—not the Leviathan or Hobbesian philosophy per se but rather the influence and application of that philosophy (mainly its concentration on self-interest). Again, I find Wycherley reflecting an agreement with much of Hobbesian thought, not attacking it or its influence. Hobbes's philosophy held the mirror to, not redirected or influenced, human behavior and thought. Hallet, “The Hobbesian Substructure of The Country Wife,” PLL 9 (1973): 380. Douglas Duncan also finds Hobbesian parody in the play. See “Mythic Parody in The Country Wife,” Essays in Criticism 31 (1981): esp. 308-12.
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Lawrence Stone offers a succinct and most sensible reminder regarding the marriage laws and customs that could suppress women: “But it would, of course, be absurd to claim that the private reality fully matched the public rhetoric.” Women had “useful potential levers of power within the home.” The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, p. 199.
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James Thompson observes that Pinchwife “fears the power of the word” and that Horner is “more quick, more ingenious, more audacious than the others” in his use of language. Language in Wycherley's Plays, pp. 83, 85. J. Peter Verdurmen suggests slight oedipal overtones in the relationship between Horner and Pinchwife—although Pinchwife is “a rather sorry father figure.” (Seeing Horner as in his mid-twenties would at least provide the proper age difference.) Verdurmen, “Grasping for Permanence: Ideal Couples in The Country Wife and Aureng-Zebe,” p. 332, n. 9. For more on the Freudian implications in the play, see Antony Kaufman's “Wycherley's The Country Wife and the Don Juan Character”; and, especially for a perspective on Horner's and the play's use of jests, Carol L. Hee, “‘The Sign of a Jest’: Freudian Jokes in Wycherley's The Country Wife,” Literature and Psychology 30 (1980): 8-17.
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In his colloquy “Marriage,” Erasmus tells of a man who married an “innocent” of seventeen, who had never been outside her parents' house. The husband believed she would be more easily trained to fit his taste, but she rebelled and the frustrated spouse took her back to her mother and father. The bride's father advised the new husband to give his wife a good beating as a way to control her. The young man was reluctant, so the father threatened to perform the beating himself. The girl then went to her knees and begged forgiveness of both her father and her new husband—and thus became the perfect wife. Such a vision (including the suppositions of the old Roman patria potestas), would tend to remain fixed in the mind of a man like Pinchwife, influencing his disturbed perspective of his wife and the country. For the belief that Erasmus was describing Thomas More and his first wife, Jane Colt, see Richard Marius, Thomas More (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), pp. 39-41.
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As David Vieth concludes, “Pinchwife's speeches about women reflect fear, hostility, and a debased physical version of sex” “Wycherley's The Country Wife: An Anatomy of Masculinity,” p. 339.
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As Friedman reminds us, commentators have long recognized the similarity of Pinchwife's words here to the speeches of Arnolphe in Molière's L'École des femmes. But Friedman rightly draws a distinction between Molière's character and Pinchwife in the severity of the responses. Friedman, Plays, p. 262, n. 2. Douglas Ford feels that Pinchwife's disturbing nature is “seemingly incongruent with the light nature of the play.” But I would argue that he is perfectly reflective of what is the truer nature of the play. Ford, “The Country Wife: Rake Hero as Artist,” p. 80.
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A generation later Mrs. Fainall asks Marwood, “You would not make [a husband] a cuckold?” “No; but I'd make him believe I did, and that's as bad” (Way of the World, II.i.61-63).
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As Freud noted, “Generally speaking, a tendentious joke calls for three people [here four]: in addition to the one who makes the joke [Horner], there must be a second who is taken as the object of the hostile or sexual aggressiveness [Pinchwife], and a third [Dorilant and Harcourt] in whom the joke's aim of producing pleasure is fulfilled.” Quoted in Hee, “The Sign of a Jest: Freudian Jokes in Wycherley's The Country Wife,” p. 10.
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Hobbes wrote that “much Laughter at the defects of others, is a signe of Pusillanimity,” which he had also defined as “fear of things that are but of little hindrance” (Leviathan, pp. 26, 27). Wallace Jackson is one critic who concedes that Pinchwife is at least “a far more dangerous and knowing adversary than Sir Jasper.” Jackson, “The Country Wife: The Premises of Love and Lust,” South Atlantic Quarterly 72 (1973): 543-44.
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As W. R. Chadwick says, she is “a splendid female animal, amoral, clever, sensual, who follows her natural instincts,” adding that because she is “consistently naive and artless,” the audience must feel “compassion for her.” The Four Plays of William Wycherley, pp. 112-13. To some, most notably Thomas Fujimura, Margery Pinchwife is simply “a pleasure-loving and unaffected girl from the country … simply a pawn in this witty plot.” The Restoration Comedy of Wit, p. 143.
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As Patricia Meyer Spacks writes, women insisted that their “sheltered lives, limited opportunities, nurture the seeds of their destruction. Men, of course, are ultimately the shelterers.” Spacks, “‘Ev'ry Woman Is at Heart a Rake,’” p. 31. Wycherley's audience would have soon determined that Margery was no Ariana or Gatty (in Etherege's She Wou'd If She Cou'd), blowing into London in search of amusement.
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Although not the focus of this study, Wycherley's self-effacing humor (wonderful slights of his craft and dramatic milieu) stands for me as one of his most delightful and noteworthy qualities. As for the play's more telling allusions to the theater, Joseph Candido argues that they are there to “remind us at certain prescribed moments of the deliberately contrived nature of the spectacle before us.” Candido, “Theatricality and Satire in The Country Wife,” Essays in Literature 4 (1977): 35.
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One of those places where men may be found is “St. James's Park.” Alithea's admission “Though I take the innocent liberty of the Town” (42-43) and Margery's interest in the theater were anticipated in The Gentleman Dancing-Master: “And [I] would take all the innocent liberty of the Town to tattle to your men under a Vizard in the Play-houses, and meet 'em at night in Masquerade” (Hippolita to Mrs. Caution; I.i.296-98). Alithea's pride in having kept her freedom without any tinge of ill-repute—“who boasts of any intrigue with me? what Lampoon has made my name notorious?” (46-47)—suggests as well that she, like Lady Fidget, is highly sensitive to the necessity of a guarded reputation. And the fact that she has entertained male suitors—“wou'd you not have me civil?” (52)—should inform us that Alithea is more socially lively than her honorable and oft-admired pose suggests.
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We might keep in mind that Margery's longings and experiences in the country may have been more than virginal: when her husband informs her that a “lewd” fellow was in love with her, she responds, “Was it any Hampshire Gallant, any of our Neighbours?” (113). Such a comment would only stimulate further Pinchwife's suspicion about his wife's interests and at least momentarily take away his comforting association of the country with any power and serenity. I am therefore unwilling to accept the implication of Brian Corman's assertion that Pinchwife “corrupts Margery by mistreating her.” Genre & Generic Change, p. 31.
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Pinchwife's punctuation “In baggage, in” (127) squares well—in diction and sentiment—with Lord John Vaughn's description of a wife: “The clog of all Pleasure, the luggage of Life, her portion but small, and her C———t very wide.” Thompson, Unfit for Modest Ears, p. 120.
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Rose Zimbardo calls them “the twin virtues,” Alithea representing the “truth that opposes hypocrisy” and Harcourt a “romantic love that stands against lust.” James Thompson believes they are the only ones in the play who “strive to be what they would seem, or to be as good as their word”: at the end of the play they stand alone as examples of “decent behavior in a mass of corruption”—although he adds that the couple is “too dull and weak to support” the view that they represent “the Horatian mean, the locus of value.” David Morris sees the relationship as “essential to Wycherley's moral purpose”; at the beginning, however, Alithea (Greek for “truth”) is “literally betrothed to Folly (Sparkish).” Peggy Thompson considers Alithea an “angelic virgin,” a status that “removes her from the powerful physical forces animating the other women.” David Vieth is less willing to see them as ideal but admits that they “achieve a modest sort of proportion and wholeness in their relationship,” although the “price of wholeness” is “imperfection.” Finally, Brian Corman says that they suffer from “a mild case of what might be called Celia-Bonario syndrome, the dullness—even unattractiveness—that good characters suffer from contact with especially effective and vital rogues.” The couple seems to be “a remnant, greatly devolved, of the elevated high plot still found in Love in a Wood.” Zimbardo, Wycherley's Drama, p. 161; “William Wycherley,” p. 281; Thompson, Language in Wycherley's Plays, pp. 73, 91; “Ideology and Dramatic Form: The Case of Wycherley,” p. 170; Morris, “Language and Honor in ‘The Country Wife,’” South Atlantic Bulletin 37, no. 4 (1972): 9; Thompson, “The Comic Parody in The Country Wife, p. 104; Vieth, “Wycherley's The Country Wife: An Anatomy of Masculinity,” p. 344; Corman, Genre & Generic Change, pp. 34-35.
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Cynthia Matlack finds the “difficulty encountered by Alithea and Harcourt in their courtship” a parody of the love-honor conflict in the period's heroic plays. She is right to resist viewing Alithea's honor as ideal, but I cannot see Wycherley's consciously providing parody of the heroic genre. Matlack, “Parody and Burlesque of Heroic Ideals in Wycherley's Comedies,” p. 279. Her essay thus provides a contrast to J. Peter Verdurmen's “Grasping for Permanence: The Ideal Couple in The Country Wife and Aureng-Zebe.” Derek Hughes notes that “Epistemologically, it is hard to distinguish Harcourt's noble faith from Sir Jaspar's foolish credulity.” English Drama, p. 138.
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And Sparkish's torment of Harcourt includes the former's insistence that he is a “frank” person in a “frank age” (III.ii.327-28, 343-44)—“Frank,” of course, being Harcourt's Christian name—and thus “Sparkish” is trumping and consuming “Frank.”
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Sparkish likely realizes that to “go into a corner” is often the street prostitute's suggestion to her prospective customer—and thereby one more method of afflicting Harcourt.
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D. R. M. Wilkinson writes that Alithea's “loyalty to Sparkish is quite improbable from a lady of quality, or at least from a lady of any precipience—both by Restoration and by twentieth century standards.” Chadwick counters by pointing to the restrictions put on women by marriage laws and customs and suggesting that Alithea later hopes love might grow from the match, as Lord Halifax implied in his Advice to a Daughter, 1688: “In other words, her stand is the stand that any sensible honourable woman of her time and class would take. And this is precisely Wycherley's point, for it is the sickness of the whole marital system, a sickness that infects not only the bad but also the good, that is the main thesis of The Country Wife.” Richard Steiger is forced to conclude that if Alithea “does, as her name suggests, represent ‘truth,’ it is a severely compromised version.” Wilkinson, The Comedy of Habit: An Essay on the Use of Courtesy Literature in a Study of Restoration Comic Drama (Leiden: University Press, 1964), p. 135; Chadwick, The Four Plays of William Wycherley, p. 110; Steiger, “‘Wit in a Corner’: Hypocrisy in The Country Wife,” p. 66.
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Derek Hughes writes that “Alithea thus ultimately discredits the expectations that her name initially arouses, although her name [Gr.—“truth”] is one which peculiarly insists upon its own veracity, and she thereby demonstrates the difficulty of encompassing the totality of the self within the public world and the signs by which it coheres.” Hughes, “Naming and Entitlement in Wycherley, Etherege, and Dryden,” Comparative Literature 21 (1987): 266—restated in English Drama, p. 142.
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Again, one must consider the many possibilities for facial expression and line delivery here. Sarcastic or serious? Troubled or playful?
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Leviathan, p. 73. Charles Hallet argues that based on the true spirit of “contract,” Alithea “is perfectly correct in refusing to treat the marriage contract lightly”; she is “the one woman in the play who does not act out of self-interest.” My argument is that she, as much as anyone else, does act out of both self-interest and self-preservation. Hallet, “The Hobbesian Substructure of The Country Wife,” p. 391.
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Eventually, she will plainly admit to Lucy (and herself): “I love him” (IV.i.13).
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Robert Markley is one of the few who has seen such a motivation for Alithea's “loyalty” to Sparkish. Two-Edg'd Weapons, p. 176.
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Again, as Lawrence Stone reminds us, “In any familial relationship … the distribution of power over decision-making will, in the last resort, depend on the personal characters of the husband and the wife.” The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, p. 217.
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Chiding her mistress for preparing herself for “a stinking second-hand grave”—Sparkish's bed—Lucy proves that she has a vivacity of her own as well as a loyalty to a fellow women, which finds intolerable the thought of a lifeless match without sexual gratification. But she does not at first comprehend Alithea's deep-seated fears, which makes impossible her acceptance of her mistress's perplexing behavior and reliance on “honor.” As she says about Alithea's marrying such a fool as Sparkish, “you intend to be honest don't you? then that husbandly virtue, credulity, is thrown away upon you” (IV.i.46-48). Thomas Fujimura believes that Wycherley “is to blame, perhaps, for making Lucy wittier than her mistress, but the fault is not so much that Lucy is too witty as that Alithea is not witty enough.” But an understanding of Alithea's complex reasons for behaving as she does makes insignificant the division of wit between her and Lucy. Fujimura, The Restoration Comedy of Wit, p. 144.
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Lucy's subsequent words on the horror of the country suggest also that Wycherley's title is meant to convey more fear than amusement. For a discussion of the debate over City and Country comedies of the 1670s, see Maximillian Novak's “Margery Pinchwife's ‘London Disease.’” (Stone examines the tradition of slander, marital discord, and petty spying in the villages during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, pp. 99, 144-45.) The nature of Alithea's concerns is therefore unlike that suggested by Honour's maid Rose in Henry Neville Payne's The Morning Ramble (1673): “Well is not that better than to be troubl'd with a formal fopp of bus'ness who lodges his wife in the Country, to prescribe for the Ague, then scratches his empty Noddle [and] cryes, I protest I must post to London.” Quoted in Novak, p. 7.
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Wycherley's so often and effectively pushing us toward sexual double meaning permits our imagining Harcourt doing Sparkish's conjugal business in the “Marriage-bed.”
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His remarks here find use for the fruit metaphor Horner had earlier claimed as his own (in the scene with “Little Sir James” at the Exchange): “I have only given your Brother and Orange, Sir”—Horner says to Pinchwife (III.ii.524). It is no wonder, then, that Horner reacts with anger here: “O thou damn'd Rogue, thou hast set my teeth on edge with thy orange” (IV.iii.381-82).
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Kenneth Muir finds that “the main force of Wycherley's satire is directed against female hypocrisy” and that the hypocrisy of these women “is anything but endearing”—a point with which I cannot concur owing to what I see as Wycherley's point about the necessity for the verbal safeguards, the exuberance with which he portrays these women, and his consistent interest in the nature of indirection. Once more, where do we see the “norm” by which to judge the hypocrisy? P. F. Vernon argues that although the “satire on the affectation of Lady Fidget and her companions is a real tour de force,” the playwright does look upon them “quite sympathetically,” believing that they are “not ultimately responsible for their behavior.” Susan Staves also takes a softer, and I think more accurate, line: the women are “presented as hypocrites, but as reasonably conscious hypocrites who are aware of the difference between the universe of reputation and the universe of fact.” Finally, Richard Steiger sees no difference in the three women: they are “more or less indistinguishable from one another.” But such a conclusion fails to appreciate that Lady Fidget is far more sexual and powerful than the other two and that Mrs. Squeamish's part in the action is of more consequence than Mrs. Dainty Fidget's. Muir, The Comedy of Manners, p. 76; Vernon, William Wycherley, pp. 28-30; Staves, Players' Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), p. 161; Steiger, “‘Wit in a Corner’: Hypocrisy in The Country Wife, p. 56.
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And his attempt to flank them only enhances the pervading theme of “fear”: “Well it must out then, to tell you the truth, Ladies, which I was afraid to let you know before, least it might endanger your lives, my wife has just now the Small Pox come out upon her, do not be frighten'd; but pray, be gone Ladies, you shall not stay here in danger of your lives; pray get you gone Ladies” (322-27).
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Another manner in which Horner asserts himself is in the familiar anti-male outburst—in this case as an analogue to the “hypocritical” women who stand before him: “Why, these are pretenders to honour, as criticks to wit, only by censuring others; and as every raw peevish, out-of-humour'd, affected, dull, Tea-drinking, Arithmetical Fop sets up for a wit, by railing at men of sence, so these for honour, by railing at the Court, and Ladies of as great honour, as quality” (II.i.417-21)—a motif wonderfully punctuated by Dorilant, who tells Sir Jaspar, “Nay, if [Horner] wo'not, I am ready to wait upon the Ladies; and I think I am the fitter Man” (440-41). As his sex (and the play) almost dictates, Jaspar returns the blow: “no pray withdraw, Sir, for as I take it, the virtuous Ladies have no business with you” (445), which shows us that often in Wycherley characters offer sexual entendres despite their intentions. The characters all serve the teeming world Wycherley creates—unwillingly or no.
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This usage may also be seen as an ironic twist of Jaspar's earlier employment, “Hah, hah, hah, he hates women perfectly I find” (I.i.91).
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Derek Cohen is one of the few critics to give Lady Fidget her due: although “her morals are repellent,” she “possesses a rare intelligence which, combined with her viciousness, makes her a formidable character whose strength even Horner seems to have underestimated”; she is “honest and forthright, frankly using the power of hypocrisy to help her overcome the obstacles that society and nature have put in her way.” Cohen, “The Revengers' Comedy: A Reading of The Country Wife,” Durham University Journal 76 (1983): 33.
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In one notorious Restoration treatment, we can find
Did she not clap her Leggs about thy Back,
Her Porthole ope; Damn'd P———ck what dis't Lack?
Henceforth stand stiff, and gain thy Honour lost,
Or I'le ne're draw thee but against a Post.Thompson, Unfit for Modest Ears, p. 122 (emphasis added)
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Again a contemporary audience would have been easily cognizant of the fact that Margery is no Florimel (Dryden's Secret Love, 1667), no Hilaria (Ravenscroft's The Careless Lovers, 1673), no Betty Goodfield (the anonymous The Woman Turn'd Bully, 1675)—all women who choose to don male garb to manipulate and trick. For a discussion of the attractiveness of such gender shifting on the stage, see Pat Rogers, “The Breeches Part” in Boucé, pp. 244-58.
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Margery's allusions to sight are also conspicuous: “I like to look upon the Player-men, and wou'd see, if I cou'd, the Gallant you say loves me” and “I wou'd see first some sights”; “did the Gentleman come hither to see me indeed?”; “[S]hall we go? the Exchange will be shut, and I have a mind to see that” (III.i.60-61, 68, 75-76, 97-98)—hammering home the fear Pinchwife equates with the visual. Accordingly, he attempts to put an end to his anxiety with the simple remedy, “Sister, how shall we do, that she may not be seen?” (87).
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For more on “signs” throughout the play, see Michael Neill, “Horned Beasts and China Oranges: Reading the Signs in The Country Wife,” Eighteenth-Century Life, n.s. 12 (1988): 3-17; and Deborah C. Payne, “Reading the Signs in The Country Wife,” SEL 26 (1986): 403-19. Unlike Payne, I do not see Wycherley seemingly to “long for that world of perfect interpretation: a language beyond words, looks, and sighs; an act beyond conventional gesture” (pp. 416-17). Derek Hughes observes that as “Pinchwife's fear of being entitled a cuckold shows, names have genuine power to become the objects of fear and desire.” Margery moreover “matures by gaining control of the art of signification.” Hughes, English Drama, pp. 140-41.
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To Charles O. McDonald, the scene takes on a far different sexual connotation than other critics (myself included) are willing to give it: “Horner seems, though I could not prove this in less than some pages, thoroughly duped by Margery's disguise as a page—the humor of the scene is entirely homosexual.” McDonald, “Restoration Comedy as Drama of Satire: An Investigation into Seventeenth Century Aesthetics,” Studies in Philology 61 (1964), 543.
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Richard Steiger observes that the fruit “functions dramatically by virtue of its consistency with the play's ubiquitous imagery equating sex and food.” Steiger, “‘Wit in a Corner’: Hypocrisy in The Country Wife,” p. 69, n. 8. In addition to the employment of fruit in other plays of the period, relevant anecdotes from outside the theater would include that of the “famous libertine” Henry Killigrew, who in the 1660s confronted Frances Jennings disguised as an orange wench. Seeing her with the less attractive (and also masquerading) Mrs. Price, Killigrew, when asked by the women if he would like some oranges, replied, “Not just now but if you like to bring me this little girl tomorrow [Jennings], it shall be worth all the oranges in the shops to you.” His hand then strayed to Frances's bosom. Antonia Fraser, The Weaker Vessel, p. 412.
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Oranges may of course be seen as breasts, buttocks, or testicles. The dried fruit Margery holds offers such possibilities as prunes, apricots, or dates, the kind of dried fruit that may look suspiciously like the female sexual organ—or the state of the male sex organ after coitus—and certainly a playwright such as Wycherley encourages our looking for such things. (Later, Horner will make a more traditional equation of fruit and sex when he tells Sir Jaspar that he will not be one “that wou'd be nibling at your forbidden fruit” [IV.iii.86-87]). I believe in addition that Wycherley expected his audience to recall Peter Lyly's series of portraits titled “The Windsor Beauties” (done in the early 1660s), which as Jean Hagstrum reminds us portray sensual women with “glowingly white skin, partially exposed breasts, full and sensual lips pursed as though to invite a kiss, and languishing and flirtatious eyes. The actions in which they are engaged partially fulfill the amorous promise of their countenances, as they accept grapes from a kneeling Indian boy, hold their skirts up for a gift of fruit. …” The portrait of Lady Jane Needham (Mrs. Middleton), for example, features her looking most provocatively while holding close a collection of fruit. Hagstrum, Sex and Sensibility: Ideal and Erotic Love from Milton to Mozart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 105-6, plate 4. And Wycherley refers to Lely in The Plain-Dealer, Prologue and play. Peter McNamara sees the oranges as emblematic of Margery and the dried fruit as reflective of Pinchwife. McNamara, “The Witty Company: Wycherley's The Country Wife,” A Review of International English Literature 7 (1976): 65. Finally, Michael Neill calls attention to Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing: “Give not this rotten orange to your friend, / She's but the sign and semblance of her honour” (IV.i.30-31). Neill, “Horned Beasts and China Oranges,” p. 16, n. 16.
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Margery adds that Horner “so musl'd” her (Friedman's text). Holland's modernized edition has “mousled,” as does Fujimura's Regent's Edition of the play—both defining it as “rumpled.” (Peter Dixon's 1996 text has “muzzled.”) The OED defines “mousle” as “to pull about roughly.” Friedman adds that “muzzle” means, as Johnson's Dictionary has it, “To fondle with the mouth close. A low word” (Friedman, Plays, p. 311, n. 1). The meaning is problematic, however, in that Horner's putting the “tip of his tongue between [her] lips” does not suggest that Margery has been muzzled, pulled about, or roughed up. Another image is likely conveyed by “mousled”: that of Horner's tongue (here the substitute penis) poking about as a mouse does in and out of a hole or crack. The publication of The Wandering Whore (in several numbers, 1660-63) included this description of the whore's technique: “They kiss with their mouths open, and put their tongues in his mouth and suck it.” Thompson, Unfit for Modest Ears, p. 67.
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One detail she adds is that the “Gentlewoman of this house” came into the room—another “sister” who, despite the ambiguity of her title, assists in Margery's liberation—at the very least by not interrupting Horner's affectionate advances (IV.ii.15).
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It is Peggy Thompson's contention that The Country Wife actually “conforms to the myth of a sexual fall and its assumptions about women as sexual beings” in presenting lust as an “intimidating, overpowering force and women as carnal, devious, and demanding Eves whose sexual urges the male characters take seriously, even if the women are themselves ludicrous creatures.” “The Limits of Parody in The Country Wife,” p. 106.
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As William Freedman writes, “while Wycherley read no Freud he knew something of sexual symbolization.” Freedman, “Impotence and Self-Destruction in The Country Wife,” p. 426. G. Douglas Atkins also reminds us of Freud's impression that the writing process takes on “the significance of copulation.” Margery's writing of the letter rather than her husband may be therefore construed as another way in which Pinchwife's masculinity is menaced, even though he still dictates what she is to pen. Atkins, Reading Deconstruction, Deconstructive Reading (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983), p. 132.
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Jon Lance Bacon adds, “In a century when few women were able to sign their own names, writing had an obvious relevance to feminine identity. A woman's signature carried considerable significance in terms of political self-assertion. Several times during the Interregnum, groups of women petitioned Parliament.” More to the point, Bacon argues, “The manner of his portrayal indicates Wycherley's approval of Margery's subversiveness.” “Wives, Widows, and Writings in Restoration Comedy,” Studies in English Literature 31 (1991), 433-34. Implying again the connection to and evolution from the last play, Hippolita did not share Margery Pinchwife's ability to write.
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Robert Markley for one believes that “Horner accumulates mistresses so quickly that by the time of the China Scene he has more women than he can sexually satisfy.” Two-Edg'd Weapons, p. 165. However, we only know for sure that he has sexual experiences with four women in the play—enough, without doubt—but not enough to encourage any hyperbole.
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To Virginia Birdsall, Horner stands as a kind of “phallic symbol incarnate,” a view seconded by Kenneth Muir: Horner “is more a phallic symbol than a man.” Birdsall, Wild Civility, p. 156; Muir, The Comedy of Manners, p. 72. Much seventeenth-century bawdy verse features the relationship of a woman to her dildo—that object which frustrates males in its ability to satisfy the woman more ably but to the woman poses no threat, nor places any restriction on her sovereignty. See, again, Rochester's Signior Dildo (1673), Butler's “Dildoides” in Hudibras (1672), and much earlier Thomas Nashe's “Dildo Ballad” (ante 1601). For another perspective, consult Harold Weber, The Restoration Rake Hero: “Like Rochester, the rake is too complex and enigmatic a figure to be reduced to a sexual machine” (p. 3).
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Patricia Meyer Spacks writes that “Seldom indeed, even in fiction, was a woman allowed to enjoy sexual satisfaction without concern for her dignity, honor, or innocence.” Foucault has moreover commented on the “advent of the great prohibitions” in the seventeenth century: “the imperatives of decency.” Virginia Birdsall's criticism of Lady Fidget and her friends—they “are scarcely even willing to admit to having natural inclinations”—therefore misses an important point. Nor can I agree with Harold Weber's conclusion that Lady Fidget's “affected disdain for pleasure and her incongruous attempts to reconcile her lust with her ‘dear, dear Honour’ reveal an individual ashamed of, and afraid to admit, her natural passions.” Given Wycherley's world, Lady Fidget's approach hardly suggests one ashamed of her natural passions. One need only recall her earlier conversation with Horner and her subsequent one (in the fifth act) with Mrs. Squeamish and Mrs. Dainty Fidget. Spacks, “‘Ev'ry Woman Is at Heart a Rake,’” p. 35; Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 115; Birdsall, Wild Civility, p. 144. Weber, “Horner and His ‘Women of Honour’: The Dinner Party in The Country Wife,” Modern Language Quarterly 43 (1982): 112. For a further view on the fear of public disclosure, see Katherine Zapantis Keller, “Re-reading and Re-playing: An Approach to Restoration Comedy,” Restoration 6 (1982): 64-71. Keller believes that “everyone” in The Country Wife is a “satirist” attempting to destroy the facades of others, while keeping their own in place.
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To Robert Markley, “The ironic coupling ‘Horner/honour’ offers paradoxical standards of pretence and honesty, each term defining itself by the satiric corruption of the other.” Two-Edg'd Weapons, p. 159.
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One further use of Honour needs mentioning. In later seventeenth-century card playing, Honour (or more chiefly Honours) was a term in whist to denote the four trump cards—those powerful weapons that frequently gave women victory on the playing field. (See Horner's remarks about letting women win at cards [V.iv.138-39].) Here then may be another variation of the code word Lady Fidget expects Horner to understand—Honour standing not only for propriety and sex but also for female ascendancy.
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For more on the Machiavellian aspects of the play, see Gorman Beauchamp, “The Amorous Machiavellism of The Country Wife,” Comparative Drama 11 (1977-78): 316-30. “Sex is in The Country Wife,” Beauchamp writes, “what power is in The Prince: the energizing force, the motive for action” (p. 318).
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Peter McNamara points out that “symbolically the toad is the inverse of the frog, which images fecundity; hence ‘Toad’ refers jocularly or demeaningly, depending on a lady's current estimate or underestimation, to Horner's sexuality.” McNamara, “The Witty Company: Wycherley's The Country Wife,” p. 70.
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Although china is less effective than fruit as a sexual signifier, it does offer interesting interpretive possibilities. As Friedman points out, china houses were often “used as places of assignation,” and others have seen china as refined and decorated earth; “a vehicle for obscenity”; something that “completely hides its earthy origin”; a vessel for food, suggesting sex as mere appetite; a “fitting emblem for honor itself—since honor, like china, is at once precious, attractive, and frail; in short, a “euphemism for everything from Horner's sex organ to the sex act itself.” I would add that china is also a commodity that is frequently exhibited, then sold, protected, often dropped and broken and then replaced, something coveted yet fragile—as is sex and one's reputation or actual proficiency in it—something common but claimed to be rare—something that all can possess in name, but few in quality. And, as Aubrey Williams has written, in the period there was a “growing passion for fine China among women.” Friedman, p. 318, n. 1; Rogers, William Wycherley, p. 59; Chadwick, The Four Plays of William Wycherley, p. 99; Holland, The First Modern Comedies, p. 77; David Morris, “Language and Honor in ‘The Country Wife,’” p. 7; Carol Hee, “The Sign of a Jest: Freudian Jokes in Wycherley's The Country Wife,” p. 13; Williams, “The ‘Fall’ of China and The Rape of the Lock,” Philological Quarterly 41 (1962): 415.
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As for her calling Horner “this Woman-hater, this Toad, this ugly, greasie, dirty sloven”—Richard Steiger points out that the “speech is a tip to the audience that [Mrs. Squeamish] knows the truth about Horner, for, as Horner has said earlier, ‘she that shews an aversion to me loves the sport.’” Steiger, “‘Wit in a Corner’: Hypocrisy in The Country Wife,” p. 69, n. 6.
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She expresses her appreciation of art to her grandmother Old Lady Squeamish, who is hardly the typical senex figure; she is more related to Wycherley's own Mrs. Caution. The older woman takes delight in conjuring an image of Horner as a “Snake without his teeth”—an allusion having the component of both castration and impotence.
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Katharine Rogers believes that this scene and much of the play emphasizes Wycherley's attack on the “selfishness which pervaded sexual relationships in his society.” But I cannot find here or elsewhere Wycherley's looking severely on the sexual activity of his age—the exuberance of the moment making most difficult such moralistic or satirical conclusions. Harold Weber contends that the “success” of the China Scene proceeds mainly “from the joy which Horner takes in revealing the hypocrisy of Lady Fidget and the stupidity of her husband.” I can agree with the latter half of his statement, but to whom is Lady Fidget exposed? Not to her husband certainly. The audience? To Roy Porter, “These naturalistic and hedonistic assumptions—that Nature had made men [and Wycherley's women] to follow pleasure, that sex was pleasurable, and that it was natural to follow one's sexual urges—underpinned much Enlightenment thought about sexuality.” Rogers, William Wycherley, p. 59; Weber, “The Rake Hero in Wycherley and Congreve,” Philological Quarterly 61 (1982): 146; and The Restoration Rake Hero, p. 53; Porter, “Mixed Feelings” in Boucé, p. 4.
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C. D. Cecil finds the “whole point” of the China Scene “is to display the skill with which a brilliant rake and a few obliging ‘right’ women can conduct un discours licentieux without disconcerting one another or discovering themselves to a suspicious intruder.” Foucault has written that “Sexuality is not the most intractable element in power relations, but rather one of those endowed with the greatest instrumentality: useful for the greatest number of maneuvers.” Cecil, “Delicate and Indelicate Puns in Restoration Comedy,” Modern Language Review 61 (1966): 576; Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 103.
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Rochester's “The Imperfect Enjoyment,” which David Vieth dates to the 1672-1673 period, speaks well to the issue. “Is there then no more?” his lover cries. The male's attempts at reviving his potency fail him—the once proud thunderbolt now dwindled to a “dead cinder.” Vieth, Poems, p. 38.
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Yes, a “roll-wagon” is a also cart, as Thomas Fujimura notes in his 1965 edition of the play—but by now we shouldn't be squeamish about glossing it as a “cylindrical vase”—the shape being the point of Horner's reference, of course.
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That Horner has had sex with Lady Squeamish may be inferred from Old Lady Squeamish's remark that he had “admir'd” her granddaughter's picture “so last night” (215-16).
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His telling Horner that Margery is an “innocent creature” with no “dissembling in her” is of course deliberately deceptive, but it is a gesture of self-preservation—not an element in a scheme or game (328-29).
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Antonia Fraser considers the period's interesting parallel between notions of sickness and notions of sexual pleasure: “Jane Sharp, the midwife [whose book was published in 1671], writing for popular consumption, agreed with Lord Monmouth that the ‘Green Sickness’ which occurred in unmarried girls would be cured by the physical delights of marriage.” What Lord Monmouth had written was a joyous endorsement of sexual pleasure: to the newly-married Philadelphia Cary he suggests that she tell her ill sister “that such an ingredient as you have had of late would do her more good than any physick she can take. But she is too good and too handsome to lack it long if she have a mind to it; and therefore she may thank herself if she continue to be ill.’” Weaker Vessel, p. 51.
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She has “the London disease they call Love.” As Maximillain Novak observes, “I cannot find a passage in the play that suggests there is anything wrong with sensuality.” “Margery Pinchwife's ‘London Disease’: Restoration Comedy and the Libertine Offensive of the 1670s,” p. 19. I would only add that neither do I find the playwright consciously advocating openly unrestricted or at least freer sexual license.
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James Thompson argues, however, that ultimately Wycherley is concerned with a “certitude of language” and with incorruptible “standards for right speech.” In Wycherley's plays, “Correct and honest speech is rewarded with trust, while incorrect and dishonest speech is punished with distrust.” Language in Wycherley's Plays, pp. 4, 114. For more on the play's language, see Barrie Hawkins, “The Country Wife: Metaphor Manifest,” Restoration & Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research, second series, 11, no. 1 (1996): 40-63.
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We expect Pinchwife to use “changeling” in the sense of one who is capricious or simple-minded, but its more formal meaning of one who is secretly exchanged for another also fits: the “country” Margery has been replaced—through the secret machinations of Alithea, Horner, and Margery herself—by the more frightening “city” Margery—she who threatens Pinchwife's masculinity. See his earlier allusion to her as a “changeling” (IV.ii.44).
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Before Pinchwife arrives with “Alithea,” Horner asserts to the Quack that “keeping a Cuckold company after you have had his Wife, is as tiresome as the company of a Country Squire to a witty fellow of the Town, when he has got all his Money” (V.ii.10-12), which suggests Horner's frequent, at least according to him, sexual adventures lately—and earlier, he wants the Quack to assume. And yet this picture does not square with the facts of the play. Horner does not keep Sir Jaspar or Pinchwife company (although the men come upon him without invitation). And we know of no males he must endure who are connected to Mrs. Squeamish or Mrs. Dainty Fidget. We may conclude, then, that Horner's depiction is a fictive construct—a vision intended for the Quack's benefit—at least to be distrusted if not disbelieved entirely.
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That the ladies call themselves the “virtuous gang” is more than a sanctimonious reference to their publick “virtue” or “honour.” We have seen Lady Fidget's ability to use honour as a code word for sex, and virtue is probably another esoteric reference to sexual proclivity at the expense of the dull-witted Jaspar.
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This “mother-in-law” is most assuredly one female who is not part of the sisterhood. But there really is no such character in Wycherley. Mrs. Caution comes closest to filling the role, but as discussed, her character and motivations are complex enough to discourage our labeling her too simplistically.
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Sir Wilfull says to Lady Wishfort, “I have no mind to marry. My cousin's a fine lady, and the gentleman loves her and she loves him, and they deserve one another”; and Lord Foppington observes to Lady Betty Modish, “Madam, to convince you that I am in an universal peace with mankind, since you own I have so far contributed to your happiness, give me leave to have the honor of completing it by joining your hand [to Morelove] where you have already offered up your inclination.” Congreve, The Way of the World (V.i.635-38); Cibber, The Careless Husband (V.vii.250-55).
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Harold Weber writes that “this dinner party, in presenting an image of genuine community which the play's larger society moves to frustrate, displays the conception of human nature which the play assumes and the values it celebrates. … Within the context of the play, the honesty of the banquet's participants is a virtue, not a vice, and their frank acknowledgement of the sexual aspects of human nature marks a valuable departure from the negations of those characters who would deny the importance of their own desires and needs.” Much of what Weber says here seems to me on the mark; I have trouble only with his assertion that “The dinner party, then, functions as a scene of revelation, creating an atmosphere in which the women no longer feel the necessity to lie to each other” (114). I believe they understand each other very well from the beginning, each comprehending the need for indirection and metaphoric speech. Derek Cohen finds that the scene provides significant commentary on the “threat of social collapse” and the “fragility of male-induced structures.” Weber, “Horner and His ‘Women of Honour’: The Dinner Party in The Country Wife” (repeated in The Restoration Rake Hero, pp. 56-66), pp. 108, 110; Cohen, “The Country Wife and Social Danger,”p. 2.
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The sexual possessiveness again makes a small crack in the fortress of female sisterhood (“common women”), but there is no one woman they have in mind, no one who is attacked directly.
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A similar reference is suggested in one of Rochester's “Songs” from the mid 1670s, where the man complains to his lady,
While I, my passion to pursue,
Am whole nights taking in
The lusty juice of grapes, take you
The lusty juice of men.Vieth, Poems, p. 84. Regarding Wycherley's scene, Rose Zimbardo finds a Juvenalian parallel (in his Sixth Satire) in the Maenads “conducting their orgiastic rite” in the rite of Bona Dea (Wycherley's Drama, pp. 152, 160).
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I cannot agree then with Michael Neill's assertion that “for a moment all four characters stand exposed and vulnerable to scorn: the ladies as victims of one another's duplicity and Horner's guile.” Nor would I second Peggy Thompson's position that the women here “continue to exhibit the grossest sort of self-delusion.” Neill, “Horned Beasts and China Oranges,” p. 13; Thompson, “The Limits of Parody in The Country Wife,” p. 102. As Derek Cohen comments, “Nowhere in the play does [Horner] seem more like the object he ultimately becomes, the very plaything of a gang of female gallants. … The scene throws into doubt the entire question of the extent to which Horner manipulates the world about him.” “The Revengers' Comedy: A Reading of The Country Wife,” pp. 31, 32. I think, however, that Horner's omnipotence was thrown in doubt much earlier in the play—indeed, in its very first scene.
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Judith Milhous and Robert Hume comment that critics have “devoted singularly little thought to how the women in the audience are supposed to respond” to the play and that a Horner “contemptuous of his conquests would hardly appeal to the female part of the audience; if he seems genuinely to please and satisfy his women, then perhaps the identification would be with their interests.” I think it more to the pleasure of Restoration women to see Lady Fidget and her friends much as I see them here. Milhous and Hume, Producible Interpretations, p. 81, n. 15.
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An insistence on seeing Alithea as “ideal” wrongly encourages anger over Horner's “betrayal” of her. Second, Margery has barely earned the designation “Mistress” (at least as modern readers construe the term) based on the “Orange and dried fruit” encounter and her being stuffed in Horner's “closet.” And then, does Horner in any serious way love Margery Pinchwife? Earlier, he observed to the Quack that Margery was nothing but “a silly innocent”—not the supreme challenge he seemed to prefer (V.ii.22-24).
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Some contend, to use Charles Hallet's words, that Alithea's “reputation is ruined” when Horner admits that she was brought to him and that “all the characters believe that Alithea has become Horner's mistress”—an assumption further held by Pat Gill: “While Harcourt's good name and offer of marriage deliver Alithea from shame, they do not acquit her from any charges.” But the misunderstanding lasts only some forty lines before Margery arrives in Alithea's clothes to correct the false impression—hardly enough time to ruin a reputation—especially one as imposing as Alithea's. Hallet, “The Hobbesian Substructure of The Country Wife,” pp. 393-94; Gill, Interpreting Ladies: Women, Wit, and Morality in the Restoration Comedy of Manners (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), p. 69.
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Harcourt says to Horner that he must be concerned for Alithea's “Honour”—to which Horner answers, “And I must be concern'd for a Ladies Honour too”:
HAR
This Lady has her Honour, and I will protect it.
HOR.
My Lady has not her Honour, but has given it me to keep, and I will preserve it.
HAR.
I understand you not.
HOR.
I wou'd not have you.
(254-61)
Other than the further fragmentation of the brotherhood, this exchange suggests Horner's continuing Lady Fidget's use of “Honour” in the sexual sense and Harcourt's obtuseness, now that he has been “purified” by Alithea's accepting him, in not, openly at any rate, acknowledging its meaning.
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Here we discover another intriguing connection between the adversaries. In the play's first scene, Horner ridiculed Jaspar's tag word Sir with “I will kiss no Man's Wife, Sir, for him, Sir; I have taken my eternal leave, Sir, of the Sex already, Sir” (I.i.70-71)—echoed now by Pinchwife's (again to Sir Jaspar) “Why my Wife has communicated Sir, as your Wife may have done too Sir, if she knows him Sir” (V.iv.294-95).
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In this wild moment, an agitated Old Lady Squeamish comes up to her granddaughter: “An Hypocrite, a dissembler, speak young Harlotry, speak how?” And yet her next “assault” on Mrs. Squeamish allows for her dropping of the conventional senex pose and revealing an awareness of her granddaughter's natural promptings. The key to this interpretation is to read the first part of the line in a senex pose—then pause briefly—to deliver the second part in an exuberant interrogative, reflective of a young girl's questioning her older sister upon her return from a romantic assignation: “O thou Harloting Harlotry, [pause] hast thou done't then?” Such a reading reinforces in another way the play's delightful sorority.
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Derek Cohen has likewise identified Lucy's power at this moment but supposes “for argument's sake, that Lucy is old and ugly”—which would make Horner's “enslavement” complete, a character “far more fettered than freed by sexual liberty.” But there is no need to suppose Lucy as “old and ugly.” Being younger and sexually attractive would suggest even more emphatically the power of her sex to rule Horner. “The Revengers' Comedy: A Reading of The Country Wife,” p. 35. And more recently Cohen has argued that she “identifies with the illicit and subversive interests of the women of the drama in sabotaging the oppressive system of male control.” “The Country Wife and Social Danger,” p. 13. J. Douglas Canfield believes that she “remains a parasite on the political economy of the hegemonic system but exercises independent agency, serving not only her mistress but the Town Wits who reward her services.” Tricksters & Estates, p. 191.
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Yet Pinchwife has no relief from the realization of his humiliation—as Sparkish reminds him: “I was only deceiv'd by you, brother that shou'd have been, now man of conduct, who is a frank person now, to bring your Wife to her Lover—ha—” (324-26).
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Aspasia Velissariou rightly asserts that the sexuality of Margery and the other women is “a factor potentially subversive of patriarchal arrangements” and that the play “insists on the self-determination of female desires outside such arrangements.” She moreover notes that the play demonstrates the impossibility of a “‘liberated’ sexuality.” “Patriarchal Tactics of Control and Female Desire in Wycherley's The Gentleman Dancing-Master and The Country Wife,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 37 (1995): 116, 125.
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Horner's reaction makes it difficult to see the validity of J. Peter Verdurmen's claim that Horner “remains in the broad sense true to Margery, the mistress for whom he cares most.” “Grasping for Permanence: Ideal Couples in The Country Wife and Aureng-Zebe,” p. 345.
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And as H. W. Matalene reminds us, from this point on the other characters have nothing to say to Horner. Matalene, “What Happens in The Country Wife,” p. 409.
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Helen M. Burke writes that “the resolution of normalcy—the comic resolution—then, demands the expulsion of this barbaric element [the women's overt sexual desire], the permanent exorcism of the consciousness that disturbs and disrupts. In the designation of Horner at the end of the play as the sole evil in the system, we see the process by which such a restoration can be carried out. Horner functions as the pharmakos, or ritual scapegoat, the man who is cast out of the city to save it. Like the pharmakos, Horner is expelled from the social system, his alienation being his public designation as eunuch. … But as Derrida has argued … the expulsion of the scapegoat also endlessly makes apparent the very difference it seeks to hide.” Burke, “Wycherley's ‘Tendentious Joke’: The Discourse of Alterity in The Country Wife,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 29 (1988), 238.
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W. R. Chadwick finds as a minor flaw the unlikelihood that Pinchwife “would not have heard of Horner's impotence before Act V.” But owing to his perception and fears he may well have simply rejected the validity of the rumor. Chadwick, The Four Plays of William Wycherley, p. 104, n. 16.
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These words are bitterly ironic in that he mouths the trite couplet as a way to concede his defeat without dwelling on the significance to his masculinity. I do not agree with A. N. Kaul that “From now on Pinchwife will be as well-adjusted and routinely jealous a husband as Sir Jasper Fidget”—for to take a pair of horns back to the country would be unthinkable in part because the country had long viewed the male's reputation as a cuckold as “a slur both on his virility and his capacity to rule his own household.” He would be defamed and denied public office—often, with his wife, suffering the indignation of a “skimmington” (public shame and punishment). Kaul, The Action of English Comedy, p. 127; Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, pp. 503-4.
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Her remark “Come Brother your wife is yet innocent you see” (381) prompts one of her few detractors, Gerald Weales, to claim that “she is either as corrupt as Dorilant and the Quack, in covering for Horner, or as stupid as she has often seemed to be.” The Complete Works of William Wycherley, p. xix. Her words, though, reflect neither corruption nor stupidity but rather that “sisterly” overture for Margery's sake. Nor would I agree with J. Peter Verdurmen's argument that here Alithea's “abrupt reversal” of character “can be understood only as an emotional reaction to the heavy pressure she has undergone.” Verdurmen, “Grasping for Permanence: Ideal Couples in The Country Wife and Aureng-Zebe,” p. 342.
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A dance consisting of Sir Jaspar, Pinchwife, and Sparkish? Horner's remark to the Quack—“Where are your Maskers” (401) conjures a separate troupe advancing on stage. To John Bowman the dance “seems to be a survival of the jigs and undoubtedly was an obscene and mocking short-hand for the play's action.” John Harwood views it as an “icon of disorder, of loyalties forsaken and vows neglected.” I would agree about the disorder, but where have we seen loyalties forsaken and vows broken to the extent that we are to feel regret (Alithea and Sparkish)? Bowman, “Dance, Chant and Mask in the Plays of Wycherley,” p. 183; Harwood, Critics, Values, and Restoration Comedy, p. 111.
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As “phallic symbol incarnate,” writes Virginia Birdsall, Horner “represents, in all his impudence, the life force triumphant.” On the other hand, John Harwood believes that Horner finds a hell in a “confinement to his own solitary being and the petty illusions by which he defines himself and of which he is master.” Finally, I agree with the heart of Peggy Thompson's argument that the “dance and epilogue also resonate with the threatening power of female sexuality that Horner as hostile and inadequate lover cannot control.” Birdsall, Wild Civility, p. 156; Harwood, Critics, Values, and Restoration Comedy, p. 111; Thompson, “The Limits of Parody in The Country Wife,” p. 113.
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David Vieth does not go this far but does believe that Horner's “strikingly successful ruse limits the nature of his masculine activities so drastically that in a sense he becomes the eunuch he pretends to be” Vieth, “Wycherley's The Country Wife: An Anatomy of Masculinity,” p. 346. We may find interesting if not significant the fact that Charles Hart (Horner) spoke the Prologue and Elizabeth Knepp (Lady Fidget) the Epilogue—emphasizing a shift in power and ascendancy at play's end. (The Epilogue chides the males for their inability to satisfy their women.)
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I disagree, then, with Julie Stone Peters' assertion that here we see “the brilliant flash of Horner's final victory.” Peters, “‘Things Govern'd by Words’: Late Seventeenth-Century Comedy and the Reformers,” English Studies 68 (1987): 148.
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The dance “Cuckolds all in a row”—explained in John Playford's The English Dancing Master (1650)—may be said to describe the play's movements, frenzied yet going nowhere, especially in the attempts of the male to put aside the woman, and the woman's redoubtable efforts to gain ground: “Men put the [contrary women] back by both hands, fall even on the [contrary's] side men cast off to the right hand, your [women] following, come to the same place again. put them back again, fall on your owne side, men cast off to the left hand, and come to your places, the [women] following” (p. 67).
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Powell, Restoration Theatre Production, p. 144.
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