William Wycherley

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Against Theory? Knowledge and Action in Wycherley's Plays

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SOURCE: Hynes, Peter. “Against Theory? Knowledge and Action in Wycherley's Plays.” Modern Philology 94, no. 2 (November 1996): 163-89.

[In the following essay, Hynes describes how Wycherley's protagonists use knowledge to gain the upper hand.]

The foundation of comedy, wrote Richard Steele, lies in “happiness and success.”1 Not so much a provocation to laughter as a conventional plot structure, comic drama is a form in which protagonists make their way from exile to integration, both adapting to and mastering the social world. Validation is its stock in trade; hence Steele's attention to “success.” Given this emphasis on acceptance and inclusion, comedy might well be expected to thematize the “how-to” of social action, and one of the ways it traditionally does so is by suggesting that effective action springs from knowledge about how society works. The standard premise of the “outwitting” plot is the astuteness of the hero, the heroine, or a tricky accomplice in circumventing the opposition of a series of “blocking” characters—typically, a malign papa—in order to reap rewards both sexual and monetary.2 While Providence or luck may have something to do with the happy ending, these protagonists' success is usually more explicable in worldly terms: heroes are intellectually acute, smart interpreters of the social scene. In other words, comic protagonists may also be theorists.

There are, of course, smaller and greater indulgences in theory. I want to explore the relationship between theoretical knowledge and action in the very restricted oeuvre of William Wycherley—four plays, only two of them of much continuing interest—in order to show how, in a dramatic context where a high premium is set on skill and intelligence, it is possible to represent an extremely complex array of congruences and disjunctions between what social actors know and what they do. Wycherley, I shall argue, predictably celebrates the social success of the socially clever, but he does so in ways which subtly qualify the claims of theoretical knowledge both to reflect the world and to govern happy action. His plays demonstrate the utility—perhaps the indispensability—of theory even as they find room to show a concomitant and necessary provisionality of knowledge, whatever its sources and results. In a brief conclusion I speculate that this effect roughly confirms some ideas of contemporary neopragmatism about the relationship between theoretical self-consciousness and the concrete practice of knowing. In a well-known argument Stephen Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels have inveighed “against theory,” taking to task the foundationalist project of mastering practice from the outside. The scope and consequences of their skepticism about discursive theory may well be clarified, I think, by seeing that dramatized theory can display both how theory works and how it can fall short.3

Restoration comedy has been frequently and persuasively marketed as the “comedy of wit.”4 Its heroes have to be clever as well as ambitious, and their cleverness, more often than not, is directly relevant to their social success. In William Congreve's The Way of the World (to take the most canonical of examples) Mirabell outfoxes both old Lady Wishfort and Fainall in order to safeguard Millamant's (and his) fortune. He achieves this not because God or chance takes his side, but because he is slier than his opponents. Wycherley typifies this ethos; he, too, likes to show the victory of Wit over folly. In the early Love in a Wood, for instance, the witty Lydia successfully engineers the return of her straying lover, and Dapperwit cheats Addleplot of a fiancée. Two crafty lovers, led by the precocious Hippolita, evade an obstructive parent in The Gentleman Dancing-Master. Horner, in The Country Wife, deludes a series of bumbling husbands to gain sexual access to the wives, while his clever friend Harcourt “bubbles” Sparkish of his mistress Alithea. The Plain Dealer, although atypical in its darker tone and the parodic exaggeration of its ending, still features a subplot where Freeman can skillfully corner Mrs. Blackacre's money without actually marrying the egregious widow.

In Wycherley's plays, then, the clever are both successful and happy. His world also involves a complex assembly of different kinds of knowledge, each with its own source, its own range of reference, and its own degree of reliability. In what follows I will make a threefold distinction among these kinds: empirical knowledge, interpretive rules or maxims, and the reflexive self-scrutiny of Wit. In each case I hope to establish that the given mode both pays its way and goes in for a certain self-questioning. There are many forms of knowledge in Wycherley; they are all good in their fashion, but they are also slightly out of focus.

THE EVIDENCE OF THE SENSES

What sorts of knowledge organize and structure the world of Wycherley's plays? A good place to start, given the ambient empiricism of late seventeenth-century thought, is with knowledge furnished by the body—the solid evidence of the senses. However specious the facade constructed by hearsay and rumor, the witness of the eyes or the touch unveils social truth. This amounts to a theory of empirical verification: protagonists should be aware that direct experience guarantees the well-foundedness of knowledge.

Experience does get a very good press in Wycherley's drama. His rakes and heroes realize how essential it is to test prejudices against the concrete world, and by and large their hardheadedness translates into worldly advantage. Horner, the enterprising seducer of The Country Wife, relies on the fiction of his impotence to get near the women he covets, but he does not expect a merely verbal retraction to convince them that he is “fit” after all. His blandishments to Lady Fidget, for example, stress the immediate and rigorous proof of the senses: he assures her that he is capable of sex but adds, “I scorn you shou'd take me at my word; I desire to be try'd only, Madam.”5 Lady Fidget appreciates this readiness: “Well, that's spoken again like a Man of honour, all Men of honour desire to come to the test” (2.1.535-36). This trust in the senses applies to other characters as well. Doctor Quack, Horner's initial confidant and a neutral commentator, remains skeptical about the likely effectiveness of the impotence ploy until, secretly spying on the notorious china scene, he sees for himself how “women of honor” act in private. Only the evidence of the eye can validate Horner's previous boasts. Afterward, Quack can exclaim that “I will now believe everything he tells me” (4.3.225), implying a reestablished faith in the disembodied word. But the verbal, to renew its credibility, must first have passed the test of physical perception.

These brief examples help define the relationship between sensory knowledge and comic success. Capable protagonists know how to separate illusion from reality, appealing to the physical, the testable, as a condition for successful social action. Their astuteness may be more precisely gauged by contrast with the way their inferiors—the stock coxcombs and fops of the Restoration stage—fall foul of the empirical. Typically, Wycherley's clods are too stupid to trust their senses, with the consequence that their senses mislead them. Horner's amatory success in The Country Wife depends on getting the gulls to trust words, to accept the lie that he is impotent even in the face of the most damning proof of the contrary. Sir Jaspar Fidget, for example, is easily mollified by the brilliant but improbable improvisations of the china scene, preferring to believe what he is told rather than what he has actually beheld. As for the play's outstanding coxcomb, Sparkish, the premise of his preemptive cuckolding is that he sees everything and understands nothing. Harcourt undisguisedly courts Alithea under the fop's very nose: no matter, thinks Sparkish, it is merely “what we wits do for one another, and never take any notice of it” (2.1.258). When Harcourt pretends to be his own twin, a clergyman, in order to interfere with Sparkish's wedding, Sparkish registers clearly enough that the two men are identical but, despite everything Alithea can urge to enlighten him, insists that the priest is indeed Harcourt's brother. After all, the two are “in a Story,” are they not (4.1.116)? Again and again Sparkish lets assertion, habit, and prejudice overrule the evidence of his senses, and so he deservedly loses Alithea to his cleverer rival.

A more complex development can be found in The Plain Dealer. Vernish discovers his wife Olivia in a compromising situation with a young man. The interloper, desperate to escape, tries out an explanation which ought to deflect the husband's anger: “I am a Woman, Sir, a very unfortunate Woman” (4.2.360). This, as it happens, is true: “he” is really Fidelia, Manly's unlikely love and the unwilling go-between in the hero's vengeful entanglement with Olivia. To Fidelia's mind a few words ought to “satisfy” Vernish about her identity: “Now, Sir, I hope you are so much a Man of Honour, as to let me go, now I have satisfi'd you, Sir” (4.2.365-66). This gives rise to some unseemly punning: Vernish turns her diction back on her, rejecting her verbal account in favor of a more earthy version of proof: “When you have satisfi'd me, Madam, I will” (4.2.367). To know who Fidelia really is Vernish must undress and effectively ravish her. Feeling her breasts supplies some of the “witnesses” he needs, and he threatens worse: “Well, Madam, if I must not know who you are, 'twill suffice for me only to know certainly what you are: which you must not deny me. Come, there is a Bed within, the proper Rack for Lovers; and if you are a Woman, there you can keep no secrets, you'll tell me there all unask'd” (4.2.378-82).

This speech abounds in complexities. On one level it means simply that if he can penetrate her body Vernish will know whether or not Fidelia is a woman. Although the breasts will not suffice, an essentially similar line of tactile inquiry should furnish more trustworthy results. To find out the truth one merely has to be a determined empiricist.

On a slightly different plane, however, the threat compounds a physically conclusive action with a troubling infusion of words.6 The rack, for example, tortures the physical body not for the sake of self-evident spectacle or sense experience but in order to extort truthful speech. Vernish does think that intercourse will be both a pleasure and a proof, but he extends his requirements to include further verbal statements concerning who Fidelia is. This interference of the linguistic with the empirical is intensified by his choice of vocabulary: ‘deny’ and ‘tell,’ for example, do duty on both the physical and verbal registers. Like ‘satisfy,’ they may allude either to the assurance of words or to bodily experience. To deny is both to resist with force and to say no; to tell is to give away one's nature and to confess.

Vernish does not seem to be unduly worried by these mild interferences, but more problematic examples lead him to serious confusion. Two expressions stand out: “cry out” and “squeak.”7 Now both may refer to paralinguistic sounds of ecstasy: they accompany orgasm and are therefore physical proof that the examined creature is a woman. The utterances are not language; their connection to reality is indexical rather than conventionally symbolic. This point is reinforced for Vernish because he can see the noises themselves as a preponderant element in what is still, for him, an empirical proof. Not only Fidelia's penetrability but also her cries will show—independently of organized speech—that she is female.

The trouble is that, although they are not elements of articulated language, orgasmic noises are nonetheless semiotic phenomena. The immediately physical here is necessarily tied to an already representational form, a “sign,” and signs of any sort proffer themselves for interpretation; indeed, they force choices among different and perhaps mutually exclusive meanings. This is certainly the case with cries and squeaks, where relatively minor changes in context can transform their significance entirely. Most notably, they can be an assault victim's appeal for help rather than signs of overwhelming delight. And even then the ambiguity opened up by the alternatives of pleasure and distress is compounded by the semantic instability of female cries for help themselves. How to respond to them? Seventeenth-century theatrical convention plays the “no means yes” card frequently and without remorse, taking a woman's protest to be a face-saving acquiescence. But sometimes—as in the case of Fidelia—the negative is genuine, and encroaching males must somehow tell the difference.8The Plain Dealer dramatizes the difficult by having Vernish's attempt interrupted by his servant, who announces a visitor at the very moment when Fidelia is shouting semiarticulately for assistance (“Oh! Oh!”). Vernish damns this meddling as inept interpretation: “You saucy Rascal, how durst you come in, when you heard a Woman squeak? That should have been your Cue to shut the door” (4.2.396-97). But the servant's reaction merely responds to necessity. Whatever action he might take would be based on an interpretive decision, not on the empirically self-evident. Squeaks may well furnish a “cue,” but a cue for what? Rescue or discreet withdrawal?

Empirical proof, on this showing, is not an easy or straightforward thing. Corroboration for such a view comes from another source. Discussing Vernish's quandary with Olivia, her cousin Eliza speculates that the young man (as she assumes Fidelia to be) could quite plausibly have passed for a woman if “his” previous exertions in Olivia's bed had sexually exhausted him. “'Twas a sign your Gallant had had enough of your conversation,” she says, “since he cou'd so dextrously cheat your husband, in passing for a Woman?” (5.1.112-14). Once again the sign muddles the import of a physical fact, this time pointing to Fidelia's supposed satiety. Eliza, comfortable enough with the range of possibilities offered by this sign-rich context, implies that performance rather than anatomy determines one's sex, and while she is unspecific about what kind of further test Vernish might have carried out on the body of Fidelia, she does apparently imagine that no physical proof, no touch, can really settle a question of sexual identity.

As a final sequel to Fidelia's near-rape, Wycherley stages a conversation in which Manly tells Vernish that it was he who was with Olivia the night before. This claim sets up a furious dilemma. Who or what was really in Olivia's bedroom the previous evening, Manly or the mysterious “woman”?9 Despite his social confidence and the near-confirmatory evidence of his senses that Fidelia was a woman, Vernish remarkably allows himself to be shaken by Manly's purely verbal assertions to the contrary. On first hearing the bad news he falls back on a cliché to defend his self-respect; Manly is spreading a nasty rumor as revenge on Olivia's infidelity. But Manly persists, and Vernish is urged ever further into an interpretive context where the senses seem less and less relevant to truth, and where discursive factors—signs and meanings, maxims and rules of construction—encroach more and more. Surely the fact that Olivia “rails” against Manly suggests that she has not had sex with him. Not so, retorts Manly: “Never trust, for that matter, a Womans railing; for she is no less a dissembler in her hatred, than her love: And as her fondness of her Husband is a sign he's a Cuckold, her railing at another Man is a sign she lies with him” (5.2.272-75). The suspicious husband who sets out to trust his senses finds himself confronted with a baffling profusion of signs: the signs of Fidelia's problematic identity, the signs of Manly's narrative at table, the signs of Olivia's duplicitous response to accusations of perfidy. It does not matter whether Vernish has actually caught someone in his wife's bedroom or not; to determine the truth of his apparent discovery he still has to deal with a host of nonempirical claims to knowledge which Manly is very well prepared to manipulate.

Vernish's trouble, then, proceeds from two related causes: the force of even the most unmediated empirical proofs can be argued away, and the inseparability of the semiotic from the physical means that he will always be obliged to deal with the sign. That the female body, a physical object as well as the origin of ambivalent performances, squeaks, and cries, should be a generator of signs exposes it to the possibility of multiple meanings. There is, unfortunately, no such thing as a univocal world of pure, self-evident perceptions.

Vernish gives up in confusion, but he does know one thing: “I am distracted more with doubt, than jealousie” (5.2.342-43). This doubt, interestingly enough, provokes him to search further for definitive proof. He devises a dramatic recognition scene, pretending to leave town and returning home at the hour when Manly has told him he has a second assignation with Olivia. This way he will really see if Olivia is unfaithful. The eventual verification turns out to be double-edged: although a return to methods and principles which have already shown their uncertainty, it does confirm Olivia's cheating as well as the identity of Fidelia.10 But this proof hardly consoles Vernish; the price of knowing the truth is his social disgrace.

The play's conclusion is also interesting because the reunion of all the characters at Olivia's house is designed to serve not one but two structurally similar projects of verification: Vernish's plot to find out if Olivia is adulterous, and Manly's to publish her privately validated shame to the world. Manly, intent on proving that Olivia is a whore, has satisfied himself of her treachery by sleeping with her under the guise of Fidelia. This ought to be a definitive act, but Manly insists on repeating the encounter in front of witnesses. The elaborate public display he ultimately requires looks a little like an admission that the direct testimony of the senses will not suffice on its own. His revenge, to be complete, must move beyond empirical satisfaction to the establishment of a shared network of public meanings. These meanings, to be sure, are ratified by the persons on the scene, and therefore do not constitute a negation of empirical knowledge. Everyone's eyes must attest the truth of Olivia's crimes. But the elaboration of proof does represent a kind of qualification. Taken along with Vernish's problems, Manly's repetition of his experiments suggests the double function of empirical evidence in The Plain Dealer: it both asserts its worth and hints at the blurring to which it is always subject.

A further point: Wycherley's intelligent sensualist can exploit this kind of doubleness because he knows the limitations as well as the value of empiricism. At the highest level, wits deploy both the knowledge of the senses and a critical awareness of where its boundaries lie. Both species of knowledge enhance the hero or heroine's social adaptability. Horner's test pays off when he can verify his women's sexual responsiveness by touching them, but he, Harcourt, Manly, and other canny theorists can effectively take advantage of the indeterminacy which troubles empiricism to put a different mode of inquiry into play. Sparkish, it is true, is a witling and a ready gull; but he also demonstrates that the way of the senses does not always in principle lead to knowledge. The same may be said for Vernish's desperate attempts to be a good empiricist. Their difficulties show that the senses require interpretation, and that interpretation moves one beyond the purely physical to a world where language, signs, and all their polysemous baggage must be taken into account.

RULES OF INTERPRETATION

But empirical knowledge is not the only avenue to truth in Wycherley's plays, and the theory that celebrates its value is not the only theory around. In a world where such knowledge is constantly threatened with investment by the sign, his characters also rely on a collection of interpretive rules which, however unsystematic, reduce the social context to some form of intelligibility. These rules take many shapes, from the carefully extrapolated principle to easy maxims and proverbs. For clarity's sake I will restrict myself to examples of the last kind of rule: the interpretive maxim. Explicit and compact guides to reading the world, maxims usually prove reliable enough to guarantee comic success to those who understand and apply them.11

I begin with a straightforward case. The major subplot of The Plain Dealer presents the entirely mercenary pursuit of Widow Blackacre by Freeman, Manly's lieutenant. The widow is no easy catch: her litigious humor insulates her from the temptations of love, and her widowhood assures her a financial independence which she is too cagey to sacrifice to the first impecunious young man who happens by. Freeman makes no progress until he hatches a plan to turn her foolish son Jerry against her, in hopes of creating a suitable opportunity for blackmail. The tactic works: arrested for suborning witnesses and for claiming that Jerry is a bastard, she is at Freeman's mercy and must purchase her release by awarding him a fat annuity for life.

This subplot nicely exemplifies the triumph of a not particularly scrupulous comic intelligence over a number of personal and social difficulties. But Freeman's success is doubly interesting because, unlike many heroes, he acts self-consciously, submitting his course to theoretical guidance. His difficulties excite a great deal of reflection and talk, most of it involving the trying on of a variety of aphoristic generalizations about the best way to ensnare a widow. The lieutenant especially prizes Manly's advice, and he gets plenty of it: “Thou hast taken the right way to get a Widow,” he is told, “by making her great Boy Rebel; for, when nothing will make a Widow marry, she'll do't to cross her Children” (3.1.442-44). And, on a later occasion: “He that is a Slave in the Mine, has the least propriety in the Ore: You may dig, and dig; but, if thou wou'dst have her Money, rather get to be her Trustee, then her Husband; for a true Widow will make over her Estate to any Body, and cheat her self, rather than be cheated by her Children, or a second Husband” (lines 459-64).

Manly's advice, as these examples show, leans heavily on the maxim as a means for assimilating a social and interpretive challenge to a set of theoretical propositions about “a true widow,” with occasional forays into the frankly proverbial (“He that is a Slave in the Mine”). Freeman himself knows how to grasp practice from the outside by calling upon maxims to help him; indeed, the most pithy and apposite saying of them all is his own proverb: “Steal away the Calf, and the Cow will follow you” (3.1.390). As things work out, “stealing” Jerry is precisely the way to capture the “cow.” For these two intelligent plotters, then, the correspondence of maxim and social reality paves the road to happiness and success.

Maxims work in other, less ruthlessly practical instances as well, serving understanding as much as they help characters get ahead. Unconvinced by her cousin's railing, Eliza tells Olivia that pretense serves no real purpose in The Plain Dealer's age of disguise: “In what sense am I to understand you?” she asks when faced with a particularly extreme statement of Olivia's supposed “aversion” to the world and everything in it. The answer, most reasonably, is that “I'm sure you dissemble” (2.1.88). This accusation leads to some general advice: “But methinks we ought to leave off dissembling, since 'tis grown of no use to us; for all wise observers understand us now adayes, as they do Dreams, Almanacks, and Dutch Gazets, by the contrary: And a Man no more believes a Woman, when she sayes she has an Aversion for him, than when she sayes she'll Cry out” (2.1.90-95). Wise observers, in other words, understand women by converting social appearances into their opposites in order to calculate the truth. Hence the procedure of “understanding by the contrary.”

Understanding by the contrary is a widespread and respected rule in Wycherley's world. Eliza's sentiments are closely echoed by Harcourt in The Country Wife: “Most Men,” he explains to his friends, “are the contraries to what they wou'd seem” (1.1.250). Harcourt's companions supply illustrations of the maxim: it is true that bullies are in fact cowards; doctors, assassins; clergymen, closet atheists, and so forth. The soundness of the “contraries” maxim is ratified not only by perceptive characters like Eliza and Harcourt's group but also by much of the action in the plays. During the same conversation in which Eliza enunciates the principle, Olivia's reactions demonstrate that, for her, “aversion” really does mean liking. The reversals she executes are comically exaggerated, of course: after disparaging affected hairdos Olivia turns to the mirror to inspect her “tour,” and after disclaiming any interest in male visitors she falls over herself to let Novel into the house. This fast-paced, local confirmation of Eliza's correct understanding is replayed in more leisurely fashion throughout the rest of the play. Olivia's professed aversion to sex is disproved by her lust for Fidelia, while Vernish illustrates at length Manly's subrule that “no Man can be a great Enemy, but under the name of Friend” (1.1.588-89). Such instances attest to the pervasiveness of hypocrisy in the world, and validate the maxim which shows how to interpret and unmask it.

Or so it seems, most of the time. I want, however, to develop two further points: one, an example showing the inadequacy of the contraries maxim and, two, a couple of variations which justify the rule to a large extent while at the same time probing its relevance in unexpected ways. One of the strangest features of The Country Wife is its juxtaposition of two rather different cuckold plots: the main line of action charting the success of Horner's claim to be impotent, the second dealing with his seduction of Margery Pinchwife. This second amour marks a complete contrast with the first; Margery does not know of Horner's supposed incapacity and is impelled by straightforward, untutored lust. Directness is her comic trademark from the very first scene where she blurts out her admiration of the actors at the theater to the conclusion where she must be prevented from testifying to Horner's virility. The play, to be sure, takes a wry attitude toward her country bluntness, but if her behavior serves no other purpose it does show that some characters at least are interpretable exactly as they present themselves. To trust surfaces is to read Margery aright: here the contraries rule obviously does not apply.

Such possibilities place an extra burden on would-be interpreters. Not only must they work through the details of converting appearances into their opposites in particular cases, they must also judge when this approach is relevant and when it is not. This is precisely the problem faced by Horner in The Country Wife. Starting from a state of affairs where the application of the contraries rule remains uncertain, Horner must develop a supplementary hermeneutic which both generates its own maxim and recasts the whole question of how these little theories are invented and put to use. Rakish young men, as Horner sees it, face a difficult interpretive task. For efficiency's sake they would like to know beforehand which women will be most receptive to their advances. But Restoration etiquette makes this hard to do, for two rather contradictory reasons. First, one must deal with prudes, assertive “women of honor” who are officially off-limits. Now this should be no obstacle for those who are armed with the contraries rule; presumably the women who make the greatest fuss about honor, virtue, and chastity are in fact the most lustful and therefore the most promising subjects. The Country Wife goes a long way toward justifying this presumption. In the banquet scene in act 5 Horner claims to the assembled ladies that he never dared approach them in the past because he was put off by their chaste reputations. His friends quickly disabuse him. As Lady Fidget puts it: “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” (5.4.98-103). On their own admission, the women are embodiments of contrary psychology; the trouble is that Horner has failed for some reason to apply the correct interpretive rules. Even though the contraries maxim is ready to hand for him and a perfectly appropriate tool for his circumstances, he is effectively baffled by prudery.

The second obstacle to the rake's success derives from a similar cause but takes a very different surface form. “Women of Quality are so civil,” Horner says, “you can hardly distinguish love from good breeding, and a Man is often mistaken” (1.1.150-51). Not all women are prudes; but “civil” women are equally inaccessible to the aspiring seducer because their relaxed and friendly behavior looks so much like dissolute invitation. A process of social homogenization has leveled the distinction between politeness and lust. For the reader of the social scene such phenomena pose grave difficulties, because they render the contraries rule almost entirely useless. Consequently Horner decides to fake impotence in the belief that a woman who dislikes a eunuch must be hungry for sex. His strategy works in an interesting way: he does not persuade his targets to admit directly that they want men (Wycherley, as we have seen, reserves Margery Pinchwife for that contrastive function), but he does get around their contrarian affectation of “honor” by provoking direct, unequivocal statements of revulsion at the idea of a eunuch. There is no need to apply the contraries rule to learn that Lady Fidget or Mrs. Squeamish detests an impotent man. Horner's gambit, then, presents a fascinating confirmation of the contraries rule at the same time as it shows a way of dispensing with it. The women's day-to-day self-presentation is actually based on hypocrisy, but since those close to them are unable to discover this, a detour from “contraries” thinking is necessary.

More relevant to my specific discussion, Horner's ploy is itself epitomized in a maxim: “She that shows an aversion to me loves the sport” (1.1.152). The truth and utility of this fresh rule are demonstrated by Horner's success with Lady Fidget and her entourage. Lady Fidget, in fact, is a textbook case. On first hearing of Horner's impotence she shows an aversion, denouncing him pungently as a “filthy French Beast” and “a filthy Man” (1.1.102, 112). As things turn out she indeed loves the sport, taking advantage of Horner's eventual confidence to engage in a physically satisfying but perfectly safe intrigue. On this showing, the new aversion rule proves an effective means of social interpretation. It serves Horner and his women very well: in no instance does it backfire, and while sometimes it is immaterial to a given pursuit, such small exceptions do not cancel its general utility. By and large this rule tidily replaces the contraries maxim. It explains conduct and motive, justifies predictions about character, and prepares the way for Horner's sexual success. Although this maxim is seldom inapplicable or false, three peculiarities of its nature and the circumstances of its use seem to me worth noting. First, it is a deliberate creation, a novelty; second, it is erected on a substructure of fiction; and third, it works by enforcing a kind of exaggerated simplification on its objects.

In most cases proverbs and maxims are anonymous and available, as much a part of the preexisting social repertoire as the behavior they purport to explain and master.12 Horner needs a new and more productive rule of interpretation because the social facade has become complex and difficult to penetrate. This implies the exhaustion of all the hitherto effective rules and strategies for rakes. Interpretive maxims, like other traditional resources, no longer give leverage on their analytical object. Innovation is evidently necessary if the hero is to thrive in this entropic universe. Horner's aversion rule is designed to meet this challenge: it is a personal creation, an experimental maxim. Everyone in the play notices this. Remarkable enough in the sheer audacity of its premise, the impotence ploy is a source of constant surprise both to its dupes and to an initiate like Quack who is privy to Horner's plans from the beginning. Horner boasts of his “new, unpractis'd trick” (1.1.47), and Quack's responses stress the uniqueness of this “new design” (4.3.1). “You are the first,” he tells Horner, “wou'd be thought a Man unfit for Women” (1.1.31-33); or “Your process is so new, that we do not know but it may succeed” (1.1.161-62). New maxims may be very effective, of course. This one certainly is. The very requirement of novelty, however, draws attention to the inadequacy of previous forms. This is no good news for the power of maxims generally, and in some measure subverts the basic definition of the maxim as a public and traditional device.

My second point concerns the relation between truth and fiction established by Horner's rule. The new maxim elicits truth but is based on an untrue supposition: Horner is not really impotent. In a sense this is merely an irrelevant detail. A true eunuch would provoke outbursts of aversion and prove the validity of the maxim. But to what purpose? His acquaintance with female lust must remain empty knowledge, a profitless form. The Country Wife actually explores this possibility obliquely. Although Horner's first incursions into the world of the “virtuous gang” yield knowledge aplenty, this does seem to be miscellaneous and beside the point: the main fruit of his privileged observation is familiarity with the ladies' drinking habits. Information on this topic impresses Quack, and the revelations of the banquet scene do establish a thematic link between alcohol, lust, and truth, but on the whole the play insists on the incompatibility of wine and women—“Oil and Vinegar,” as Horner puts it (1.1.215-16). Implicit in Horner's discovery that the women drink and talk bawdy is a certain wistfulness about disinterested knowledge; one has to be disinterested to secure access to it, but one's very disinterest renders it pointless. Horner's use of the aversion rule, of course, is the very opposite of disinterested. To be fully operational, then, the maxim must be the tool of a deceiver, must be based on a lie. Discovery proceeds by invention, not just in the sense that Horner must be creative in order to break through the social crust but also in the sense that a social truth cannot be produced without the aid of rank fiction. A useful lesson, perhaps, in the logic of discovery, this process nonetheless places the function of the maxim in a suspect light.

Finally, Horner's active production of knowledge seems to diminish the people he deals with. Many rules and maxims may be applied without further meddling in the social process; they do not always require significant activity on the part of their users, nor do they alter their objects. Unlike the simple application of a rule, however, Horner's ploy (as we have seen) consists of contrived solicitation. Since truth is not just waiting to be skimmed off the surface of women of quality, some subterfuge is needed to make them betray themselves and behave as they would not do under normal circumstances. Horner's strategic intervention suggests an important thing about the generation of knowledge. To interpose an interpretive fable between reality and usable truth is to make explicit a certain simplification of that truth. Horner's maxim operates as a filter, his experimental process a molding of his subjects. Left to themselves, his repressed women would remain complex, variegated, unreadable. In the light of the aversion maxim, however, they are clear enough, but no longer complex or individual; the truth of Horner's knowledge is purchased at the cost of its range and sensitivity. In its cost the aversion rule might be seen as reinstating the false economy which led to trouble with contraries in the first place. Perhaps this is why the female community established in the banquet scene is not entirely happy or cohesive. The women make a pact to be “sister sharers” but in that good-spirited gesture lies a regret: their admission that each is Horner's mistress reduces each to an illustration of a general rule, held to the group by a uniform lust for the man they now dub “Harry Common” (5.4.170).13

My concluding example provides a very different perspective on the contraries rule. The Plain Dealer's Olivia is a wicked yet capable reader of the people around her, so her way with maxims is worth a close look. Her most important challenge is to understand Manly well enough to be able to cheat him. Her basic approach in dealing with him is a species of the contraries principle; as she explains to Fidelia, “He that distrusts most the World, trusts most to himself, and is but the more easily deceiv'd, because he thinks he can't be deceiv'd” (4.2.201-3). A perfect little maxim, the saying holds that someone who appears suspicious is in fact naive. Tactical application of this insight, however, requires many adjustments. The main point to make about Olivia is that although she suspects Manly's surface pretensions she is never so crude as to urge that he is a simple hypocrite. Her rule—that the suspicious interpreter is most easily duped—makes an interesting double construction of the contraries maxim. It is, to begin with, the foundation of her analysis of Manly's character. He does affect suspicion but he is a pushover for the friend and the lover who can play on his foibles. But part of the maxim's utility in this case is to reveal that Manly is paradoxically manipulable precisely as a subscriber to this very principle; he “distrusts,” that is, he never relies on social exteriors to judge character and motive. Olivia's control, then, would also depend on knowing the limitations of a contraries principle; she correctly infers that an interpreter who uses this means will make mistakes. One can concoct a ruse to exploit such mistakes. Her pose with regard to Manly involves adopting a fake similarity of character: “I knew he lov'd his own singular moroseness so well, as to dote upon any Copy of it; wherefore I feign'd an hatred to the World too, that he might love me in earnest” (4.2.206-8). Manly must mistake her for a kindred spirit, an embittered, distrustful railer, in order to trust her as he does.

A corollary to this finding is that Olivia knows better than to interpret Manly purely in terms of the contraries principle. A real person may be expected to be inconsistent, to resist enclosure within the tidy confines of aphoristic wisdom. To fasten on “moroseness” as a leading trait, for example, or to use feigned similarity of outlook to activate Manly's latent credulity, shows just how sensitive Olivia's perceptions are. To construe Manly's ruling passion as his “spirit of contradiction” (2.1.613), a self-regarding desire to stand out from the crowd, is not the same as to see him as contrariety incarnate. Olivia's understanding is always nuanced. From her superior vantage, she can gauge how much the rule holds of a character who lives unconsciously within its boundaries, and she can exploit Manly's subjection to an over-strict binary system of interpretation. The real Manly—her Manly—is more than the gull who mistakenly believes he “knows the world and the town.” That broadly comic role had been superbly drawn in Wycherley's Pinchwife; The Plain Dealer, more somber and problematic, does not stop at the mechanical exposition of a farcically limited point of view. Manly, a finally sympathetic protagonist, escapes the grid of determination to become a complex and puzzling figure. Olivia, his best reader, follows him along the way.

There is a final twist to this dialectic of understanding. Olivia uses the contraries principle to begin dissecting Manly's personality, and then forges beyond the limitations of her initial premise to fashion a convincing account of her former lover's penchants and motives. But is Olivia's account itself complete? The larger structures of the play confirm that the hero's humor is drastically simplified by the label “distrust”; they ratify the direction taken by Olivia's subsequent thinking. She serves as a model for an approach to interpretation that sustains an increasing delicacy of register, an expanding yet ever more particular scope. Such an approach, of course, must always remain open to the possibility and the desirability of its own supersession. Olivia's own conclusions, then, ought to be transcended by hints drawn from elsewhere. And indeed they are: a point most forcibly made in that Olivia, a supremely competent reader of her victim, is not ultimately rewarded. The strength and ingenuity of Manly's vindictiveness finally defeat her, leaving a sense that her understanding of him has fallen short in crucial respects. Perhaps her most telling omissions concern positive aspects of Manly's character. Both the title of the play and much of Manly's own self-advertisement make sense of the epithet “plain-dealing”: he nobly says what he thinks, no matter what the consequences. Olivia's own method is repeated and extended by the dynamic of the play as a whole: just as she takes up a maxim, applies it, and then leaves it behind in favor of more subtle and particularized investigations, so too does The Plain Dealer both validate and supersede her own hermeneutic procedures. A useful springboard, perhaps, the contraries maxim permits social understanding to begin, but it is limiting to pretend that it can lead to fully satisfactory results on its own.14

What conclusions may be drawn from this survey of the function of maxims as instruments of interpretation and tools for comic success? First and most obviously, they work. But, as the examples of Horner's aversion rule and Olivia's reading of Manly suggest, they do not always work in a straightforward or unqualified manner. Horner's invention yields a sturdy resource, but the circumstances of its production and application highlight the difficulty of synchronizing maxim and truth as well as the impoverishment inflicted by the method on the victims of his understanding. Olivia's tactic—paradoxically, more liberating—shows how a process of mediation leads from the acceptance of the maxim to a more complete and fine-grained understanding of the social scene, a more adequate knowledge in some ways devoted by its very particularity to a stance beyond reflection or method. Not reducible in principle to a system of canons, interpretation is an infinite and infinitely varying task, always one step ahead of the theory that explains it.

THE SELF-SCRUTINY OF WIT

Empiricists, users of maxims, or free-ranging hermeneutic spirits, Wycherley's characters are always and everywhere close to theory in some form. I have shown that their practice of interpretation edges toward self-consciousness because, whatever theory they espouse, it must be deliberately applied to their immediate field of activity. The general rule, the theory that attempts to outflank practice, then imposes a certain distance between its subscribers and their circumstances. This distance is accentuated when comic heroes pause to analyze the nature of their interpretive maneuvering and the fit between theoretical intelligence and society as a whole. Such discussions tend to focus on one central term: “wit.” I will now take up some instances of such analysis and then pursue the reflexivity it entails into a particular corner: the place of dramatic criticism in opening up the function of wit to a conscious, enlarged, but not entirely unproblematic self-understanding.

Nearly everyone in Wycherley has something to say about wit. A banal example will show the pervasiveness of the topic. In Love in a Wood, Dapperwit, described in the list of characters as a “brisk, conceited, half-witted fellow of the town,” offers a complete anatomy of the intelligentsia: “There are as many degrees of Wits, as of Lawyers; as there is first your Sollicitor, then your Atturney, then your Pleading-Counsel, then your Chamber-Counsel, and then your Judge; so there is first your Court-Wit, your Coffee-Wit, your Poll-Wit or Pollitick-Wit, your Chamber-Wit or Scribble-Wit, and last of all, your Judg-Wit or Critick” (2.1.239-44). He proceeds to detailed descriptions of each class of wit, culminating in the portrait of the supreme “Judg-Wit”—a class in which Dapperwit includes himself: “Your Judg-Wit or Critick, is all these together, and yet has the wit to be none of them; he can think, speak, write, as well as the rest, but scorns (himself a Judg) to be judg'd by posterity; he rails at all the other Classes of Wits, and his wit lies in damming all but himself; he is your true Wit” (2.1.273-77).

This analysis is not, of course, to be taken seriously, but it does show that in Wycherley even a halfwit must come up with a general account of knowledge.15 Cleverer actors, not surprisingly, are deeply involved in both the practice and the theory of wit. In The Country Wife, Horner's group defines the difference between true wit and mere pretension through confrontation with Sparkish. Restoration protagonists, it goes without saying, can exercise their talents for disparagement on victims guilty of any number of different follies. Pinchwife is goaded on the sensitive point of his fear of becoming a cuckold. The case of Sparkish is especially instructive because his characteristic folly is to imagine that he is clever. To take him down, then, the rakes must engage his predominant humor, and that means thinking and talking a great deal about the real meaning of intelligence.

To Sparkish, to be a wit is the supreme ambition, “the greatest title in the World” (1.1.299). The opportunity to consort with accredited intellectuals like Horner and his friends is worth more to him than invitations to dine with peers; similarly, he thinks that his proper place at the theater is in the “Wits' Row” of the pit, not in the stuffy box with his fiancée (1.1.324). Impervious to ribbing on almost any other score, he is stung into at least tentative violence when Harcourt casts aspersions on his brain power (2.1.274). The rakes' handling of Sparkish's comic ambition takes several forms. On his first appearance Sparkish is given a chance to expose his incapacity by telling a bad joke. His quip about the new “sign” in Russell Street—Horner is “a sign of a man,” and he lives there—is feeble enough, and Horner derisively tells him so: “The Divel take me, if thine be the sign of a jest” (1.1.290). More cutting than direct contempt, perhaps, the wits register their disapproval by refusing to laugh, hurting Sparkish about as much as his inherent insensibility will allow. Presented with an egregious example of false wit, they both directly and by implication theorize about the real thing.

Sparkish's opinions about writing and plays provide a further occasion to dissect wit. In act 3 his companions induce him to express ever more fatuous views about literature, making room for them to declare and imply that they know much more about it than he does. Sparkish affects scorn for writing, but admits that he has committed verse for the very bad reason that “every body does it” to impress women (3.2.93-97). He finds fault with satirical authors because they expose fops like himself on stage, and his egotism is further revealed when he insists that he brings his own wit with him to the theater or to the reading of a book in order to avoid instruction from insignificant others. Horner and his friends make short work of these idiotic pretensions. They are not writers themselves, but their gentlemanly distance from mere professional scribbling does not prevent them from valuing poets and playwrights over the witless Sparkish. Harcourt speaks for propriety and common sense in supposing that Sparkish “had gone to Plays, to laugh at the Poets wit, not at your own” (3.2.80-81), while Dorilant shows that he understands the theory of imitation when he justifies satirical playwrights: “Blame 'em not, they must follow their Copy, the Age” (3.2.113). The Country Wife uses these and other examples of true and false wit to articulate a fairly clear hierarchy of values. Wit is better than stupidity, and an important aspect of wit is its capacity to analyze itself coherently, to generate a top-level theory about theorists. Successful performers are witty in action, but they also have a better understanding of intelligence than their social rivals do.

The Plain Dealer is more searching on this score. Reflection on wit, however comic the form, is a salient concern of the play, surfacing in a number of discussions about the nature and varieties of humor, intelligence, and so forth. The most concentrated of these occurs in act 5, when Novel, Plausible, Freeman, Oldfox, and Manly engage in a fairly acrimonious debate about the subject. Novel, a shallow coxcomb, defends the view that talking a lot is “a mark of Wit” and that “Railing is Satyr, you know; and Roaring, and making a noise, Humor” (5.2.208-9). His idea of an intelligent and witty action is to break windows. Against him Oldfox argues with almost equal obtuseness that “quibling” constitutes true wit, and Manly, who has been appointed “judge” of the debate by Novel, is forced to denounce both their houses in order to end the altercation. What is actually settled during this exchange? For one thing, the limitations and silliness of Novel's and Oldfox's views are roundly criticized. No, railing is not satire, breaking windows is not humor, quibbling is not wit. Manly himself is an appropriate judge, limited, perhaps, by his personal interest in distinguishing between satire and ill temper, but certainly qualified to referee a quarrel of fops. And the issues themselves have an importance beyond the spiteful edge given them by the discussants; the play as a whole grapples with the differences between irascibility and moral concern, empty chatter and genuine intelligence. While it is not easy to spell out all its implications, this exchange does seem to contribute something substantial to the understanding of understanding. Theory, on this view, is not carried on in vain.

But to grasp the full value and ambiguity of the debate, the conversation must be set in context. The arrival of the crowd of fops who launch the discussion interrupts two important pieces of business: first, Manly has been on the verge of telling Vernish the story of his night with Olivia, but is unable to complete it; and second, Vernish is sent to borrow money from Olivia, and he returns only after the debate has more or less run its course. In the first case, discussion of theory appears to be a nuisance, an interference. Manly, who has been yearning to unburden himself to Vernish, is furious: “Dam 'em! A Man can't open a Bottle, in these eating houses, but presently you have these impudent, intruding, buzzing Flies and Insects, in your Glass” (5.2.154-56). In the second instance, Vernish's departure, the debate may function as mere filler, since it is possible that Wycherley introduced and prolonged it simply to offset Vernish's necessary absence from the scene. Such a possibility is reinforced by the role of Freeman. By no means averse to discussing ideas—his disagreements with Manly about how to manage social intercourse occupy much space in act 1—Freeman is strangely silent here, his perfunctory contribution amounting to four brief statements in all. This seems to be because he is so busy with the action: at the opening of the scene he appears “backwards,” vainly trying to keep the fops out of Manly's room; he leaves with them on Vernish's return, and when he comes back he receives important instructions about the forthcoming setup at Olivia's. Such details highlight a central facet of Freeman's character: always with his eye on the main chance, he is unlikely to be drawn from his purpose by extraneous talk. All of these circumstances conduce to a common effect: they show a kind of incompatibility between action on the one hand and the discussion of knowledge on the other. The fops' colloquy is thematically crucial to the play, but the complications of its place and tone induce a certain haziness of purpose. To get on with the action, it is implied, to tell one's stories, fill one's pockets, and track down one's widows, one cannot afford to be patient with theory. In a drama that otherwise shows the comfortable fit between knowing and doing, this scene is expressively incongruous.

WIT AND METADRAMA

It will be recalled that Dapperwit's classification of the wits had ended in praise of the Judg-Wit or Critick, the highest form of intelligence available. Wycherley is not chaffing here: for him, one of the most refined and important functions of wit is to read literature, particularly plays. A consideration of drama, then, ought to be a central part of any investigation of the role of theory in this writer's world; and indeed, the theatrical experience figures prominently in some of Wycherley's most difficult thinking on this subject. Strongly metadramatic in theme and detail, his work explores criticism both as a measure of his protagonists' intellectual skill and as an occasion to deal with one of the most taxing accompaniments to theoretical knowledge—the problem of reflexive self-awareness.

A lot of playgoing does go on in these comedies. Horner first spots Margery at the theater, a “pretty Country-wench” hidden by Pinchwife in the “eighteen-penny Place” (1.1.430-31). Later Horner escorts Lady Fidget to plays as semiofficial chaperone, while his friend Harcourt pursues Alithea there. More important, response to theater serves as a touchstone, permitting a graded classification of fools and wits. Margery, taken by Pinchwife to the theater for the first time, demonstrates her naïveté by ignoring the play while rhapsodizing about the beauty of the actors (2.1.20-21). Although he is an assiduous denizen of the pit, Sparkish, as we have seen, does not quite grasp what theater is all about; his friends, on the other hand, have a finely developed sense of criticism. Jerry Blackacre will settle for a play at the bookstall if he cannot get a copy of The Seven Champions of Christendom, but his mother squelches that idea: “No, Sirrah, there are young Students of the Law enough spoil'd already, by Playes: they wou'd make you in love with your La[u]ndress, or what's worse, some Queen of the Stage, that was a La[u]ndress; and so turn Keeper before you are of age” (The Plain Dealer, 3.1.303-6). Both attitudes—the son's coarse eagerness and the mother's exaggerated fears about the corrupting effects of playgoing—are held up for evident satire.

Since country naturals and fops-about-town prove to be bad dramatic critics, wits deserve credit for understanding drama as well as they understand everything else. This, at least, is one implication of The Country Wife. Other aspects of the play's engagement with drama, however, suggest a different alignment of values. For one thing, even the wits often take a cavalier and inattentive attitude to theater. If Margery is satirized for focusing on the good looks of the actors, there is little hint of criticism directed at Horner for doing practically the same thing; he treats the theater largely as a hunting ground where he can scout beautiful women. Harcourt's time in the audience is spent “making fierce love” to Alithea, not absorbing the show (3.2.65). Sparkish's ignorance is betrayed by his glee at the attention given to Horner's impotence in the wits' row, but it is clear from Harcourt's earlier comment about how foolish Horner looked “in the Box amongst all those Women, like a drone in the hive” (3.2.10-11), that even for the true critics the main event is uninteresting compared to the sideshow of Horner's discomfiture. Busy people, it appears, have better things to do at the theater than attend to the felicities of dramatic wit. Here, as in the fops' debate in The Plain Dealer, action and theory seem to be at odds.

The Plain Dealer takes up the metadramatic question in a striking way. With an eye possibly on Molière's Critique de l'Ecole des femmes, Wycherley engineers a critical discussion of The Country Wife. The participants are Eliza, Olivia, and Plausible; at stake is the problem of female modesty. This is both a moral and an interpretive issue: modest women exemplify a virtue, but they also embody a particular approach to knowledge. The topic arises because Miss Trifle was seen at a performance of The Country Wife far enough into the play's first run to know it was a salacious piece. To Olivia, attending in spite of such knowledge is proof of immodesty. Lord Plausible counters, excusing Trifle on the grounds that she did not even pretend to be shocked by the play; that is, her true modesty is shown by the fact that she does not understand smut. Olivia, in contrast, thinks that modesty consists of actively noticing filth and then loudly denouncing it. Eliza intervenes more or less on Plausible's side, arguing that “all those grimaces of honour, and artificial modesty, disparage a Woman's real Virtue, as much as the use of white and red does the natural complexion; and you must use very, very little, if you wou'd have it thought your own” (2.1.396-99).

I say “more or less” because Eliza's commentary throughout this exchange raises extremely complex problems: part of the reason for aligning her views with Plausible's, I think, is precisely to dramatize the distinctions between his rough version of an argument and her own refined one. Not that existing criticism of the scene is especially sensitive to its ambiguity; most readers regard Eliza as clearly winning the debate, and there are good reasons for thinking so.16 Eliza's credentials are convincing: she is morally upright but also a woman of the world, and she is, after all, arguing with the play's consummate hypocrite. Olivia, everyone knows, does not really object to sexy talk; in fact, she is lustful, even prurient, and surely on that score an unreliable critic of The Country Wife. These considerations are compounded by the unlikelihood that a dramatist would set out to disparage his own work, so that Eliza's concluding puffery seems to be the last word on the subject: “All this will not put me out of conceit with China, nor the Play, which is Acted today, or another of the same beastly Author's, as you call him, which I'll go see” (2.1.446-48).

Wycherley, however, does not leave the matter there. In the most remarkable turn in the debate Olivia, who to the detriment of her modesty picks up every innuendo and double meaning, proves a much better reader of The Country Wife than Eliza. Of course the name of Horner harbors a “clandestine obscenity” (2.1.412); of course Horner's randy punning with Lady Fidget “has quite taken away the reputation of poor China itself, and sully'd the most innocent and pretty Furniture of a Ladies Chamber” (2.1.435-36). To anyone who has read or seen the antecedent play, Olivia's perceptions will strike home while Eliza's defense of the comedy's moral integrity must look partial and strained.

Why should Wycherley be giving the best lines here to his villain? To understand this we need to look closely at Eliza's speech concerning “artificial modesty.” At issue, I believe, is a distinction between nature and art which creates complications because Wycherley wants finally to endorse a self-conscious version of artifice which more or less successfully hides its traces and converts itself back into nature. Trifle's imputed innocence may serve here as a limit case. To Plausible at least, she unreflectively preserves her modesty because she simply does not see what is wrong with The Country Wife. In other words, this is a purely natural innocence. Eliza is in a much more ticklish position. The very fact that the debate about double meaning and smut is taking place means that she cannot go home again, cannot unknowingly inhabit an interpretive sphere where certain meanings just do not arise. But Eliza is quite resolute in her refusal to detect the erotic connotations of the china scene. This ought to locate her in a higher state of innocence, but both the logical exigencies of her situation and the details of the speech in which she explains her view indicate that such an achievement is impossible. Why, for instance, does Eliza complicate her reference to makeup by avoiding the obvious alternative between “red and white” and a naturally unadorned complexion? Instead, she talks of “a little, a very little” paint, with the implication that some artifice may be desirable. Even here the artifice is justified as a rendition of nature (“your own”) which, rather than subsisting on its own terms, pays its way by imposing on society (“if you would have it thought”).

Whatever its larger worth, Eliza's analogy fits her stance as an interpreter of drama very well. Somewhere between Miss Trifle's beatific blindness and the scurrilous knowledge of Olivia lies a tempered innocence which should encompass ignorance, awareness, and a conscious self-suppression. Eliza's goal is to achieve a satisfactorily limited understanding of The Country Wife. On the moral plane, she makes do with what is theoretically and practically inadequate in exchange for a ratification of her modesty. This, however, is not moral worth construed in anti-intellectual terms as a retreat from the interpretive task as such; it precisely demonstrates her moral worth as an interpreter, a theorist. One can, she urges, be in the fullest sense a “good” interpreter while setting fairly drastic limitations on one's range. On the theoretical level, modesty is interesting because it requires strenuous epistemological gymnastics of its practitioners. Here one must trust one's perceptions as a kind of natural knowing even as one consciously schools them; one must embrace an impossible reflexivity, both knowing and denying that what one knows is hedged and incomplete. In a word, the effect of Eliza's argument about understanding plays is to make a virtue of missing the point.

Missing the point of drama, we may conclude, is subject to complex evaluation in Wycherley. In principle he defends the pertinence and worth of plays, associating their proper appreciation with social intelligence, with true and responsible wit. But, as always, he hedges his bets. On the crudest level, his wits do not uniformly let a concern for dramatic criticism get in the way of their ruthless attention to comic success. These two activities may be mutually exclusive rather than complementary. The metadramatic discussion in The Plain Dealer puts a dazzling spin on this implication. While gently furthering the sentimental point that it is better to be good than to be bright, the discussion also subverts that point and, in doing so, highlights a fraught relation between the self-consciously knowing subject and the object of knowledge which is, I think, relevant to understanding some of the problems of contemporary theory.

POSTSCRIPT

It would be false to my argument to conclude that Wycherley's plays project a skeptical hermeneutic (or, better, a skepticism about hermeneutics?) that dispenses with even the most authoritative and reliable rules for interpreting oneself and one's surroundings. His world, rather, is a stable enough place where established prejudices and procedures justify themselves both intrinsically and in the way they further the triumphs of the comic wits. Nonetheless, each field of knowledge put in play throughout Wycherley's work has its interesting ragged edge, a zone of doubt which hints at its failure to be absolutely valid, absolutely true. The evidence of the senses does offer the possibility of a last touch if not a last word, but it loses precision when language and interpretation begin to sully its pure effect. Maxims and similar rules of social interpretation work well, allowing astute practitioners to fulfill their ambitions and to make succinct sense of the world around them, but these maxims and rules are not always unmediated or undistorted reflections of the real. Finally, thinking about theory yields powerful insight into the shapes and social functions of intelligence, but it must also come to grips with the most difficult kind of self-awareness—the consciousness of its own provisionality.

It is here that Wycherley's affinities with neopragmatism should become apparent. In Richard Rorty's critiques of foundationalism as well as in other strands of poststructuralist thought, a philosophical awareness of the limits of knowledge is comfortably joined to a continued satisfaction with intellectual business as usual. By “business as usual” I mean a continued trust in current knowledge. Despite the absence of any transcendental grounding, our knowledge imposes itself reliably on us both because it is ours and because, in the subtle acceptance accorded the word by pragmatist thinkers, it “works.” This, as I hope to have shown, is one of the lessons of Wycherley's plays. We could, indeed, take his outlook as a particularly raw version of the idea that truth is confirmed not by its correspondence to the real but by its social utility. What for Rorty is the careful, even anodyne, proposition that “a given vocabulary works better than another for a given purpose” becomes in Wycherley the near-certainty that if you manipulate the contraries rule well enough you will get the girl, the money, and a chance to humiliate your enemies.17

Being aware of the limits of knowledge is another matter. Sensitive to the awkwardness of rejecting absolutist epistemology while remaining entangled in its ground rules and vocabulary—since assertions such as “There is no transcendental truth” are bound to sound transcendental themselves—pragmatist writers frequently express a wish that the bad old problematics could simply be set aside, freeing us to do other, more interesting things. Hence the groan that “theorists should stop trying” or the suggestion that “conversation” should replace system building as a cultural and philosophical goal. Intellectuals should ignore the past and just do it.18

Unfortunately, this liberation is not readily achieved. A residual interference from epistemology means that problems will continue to be posed in the creaky, inadequate terms of knowledge, method, and truth. Self-consciousness about these subjects, supposedly a forgettable relic of the past, is currently a genuine imperative. This is why Rorty's “edifying” philosophers are given two jobs: as creators they invent “abnormal discourse,” refreshing the culture and keeping conversation alive; but as “therapeutic” thinkers they must also perpetually deconstruct the claims of grand theory, working parodically and parasitically to ensure that normal science, normal talk, never gets the upper hand.19 Theory appears here as somehow impervious to exorcism; at the very least, one must say that it is still alive.

The effects that I have been trying to describe in Wycherley's drama take account of both versions of knowledge. The plays show how different types of knowledge achieve truth by “working,” by leading theorists to happiness and success. They also show, by dramatizing minor slippages in each field, that the rules are mutable, that knowledge is not fully grounded. And finally, they show that the conjunction of these two versions produces the dilemma of methodological self-consciousness, where reflexive agents must both inhabit the limitations of their knowledge and criticize them from an impossible, yet apparently conceivable outside.

Not to give the last word here to the moderns, we may return to Pinchwife's excruciating accommodation at the end of The Country Wife. Confronting the probability that he has been cuckolded, he makes an effort to believe that Horner is impotent. The compliance is reluctant but sincere: “For my own sake fain I wou'd all believe. / Cuckolds like Lovers should themselves deceive” (5.4.410-11). Like Eliza at the play, that is, cuckolds and lovers perform the impossible: they believe in what they simultaneously know to be a fiction. At once inhabiting a world of bad faith and carrying on a reflective critique of that faith, they exemplify a dilemma whose comic embodiment in the seventeenth-century repertoire of rakes and cuckolds does not cancel its relevance to the contemporary critic and theorist.

Notes

  1. Richard Steele, preface to The Conscious Lovers, in The Plays of Richard Steele, ed. Shirley Strum Kenny (Oxford, 1971), p. 299.

  2. Compare Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N.J., 1957), pp. 163-86.

  3. Stephen Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, “Against Theory,” Critical Inquiry 8 (1982): 723-42.

  4. A notion effectively launched in Thomas Fujimura, The Restoration Comedy of Wit (Princeton, N.J., 1952). See also Jocelyn Powell, Restoration Theatre Production (London, 1984): “At the Restoration, comedy of manners is really quite as much comedy of ideas” (p. 35). Although her terms of reference and vocabulary are very different from Fujimura's and Powell's, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's recent discussion of the rake's “cognitive control of the symbolic system that presides over sexual exchange” still presents The Country Wife as a contest between those who possess knowledge and those who do not. See her Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985), p. 51.

  5. William Wycherley, The Country Wife, in The Plays of William Wycherley, ed. Arthur Friedman (Oxford, 1979), act 2, scene 1, lines 533-34. All references to Wycherley use this edition and cite the text according to act, scene, and line.

  6. The importance of language and especially of “signs” in Wycherley has been underlined in a number of recent studies. See, e.g., Deborah C. Payne, “Reading the Signs in The Country Wife,Studies in English Literature 26 (1986): 403-19; Michael Neill, “Horned Beasts and China Oranges: Reading the Signs in The Country Wife,Eighteenth-Century Life 12 (1988): 3-17; and James Thompson, Language in Wycherley's Plays (University, Ala., 1984).

  7. “Cry out” is used several times in the play; “squeak,” once. In The Gentleman Dancing-Master Hippolita jokingly refers to the possibility that she might “cry out” if Gerrard should try to carry her off (2.1.186-91). The vocabulary is given an even more frankly comic turn in the sexual education of Congreve's Miss Prue: Tattle explains to her how she should threaten to cry out when he makes advances, but should in fact say nothing; however, when matters reach a climax he promises that “Then I'll make you cry out” (Love for Love, 2.1.667). A celebrated instance of a woman's passage under erotic stress from articulate speech to noise as well as of the conventional association of danger and pleasure is Aubrey's anecdote about Sir Walter Raleigh (Aubrey's Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick [London, 1949], pp. 255-56). Friedman notes a comparable use of “squeak” in Sir Robert Howard's The Surprisal (p. 482).

  8. Vanbrugh's The Relapse offers a particularly compressed example of the possibilities. At the end of 4.3, Loveless carries Berinthia off to bed after she has declared, “I will not go.” As she is being forcibly removed she calls out for help, “very softly,” according to the stage directions: “Help, help, I'm ravished, ruined, undone! O Lord, I shall never be able to bear it.” Authentic resistance is displayed by Amanda when Worthy—an attractive suitor on most counts—makes a similar attempt: cajoling, forcing, pulling, and holding onto her skirts prove futile, so Worthy renounces his lewd ambition. A noble soliloquy, in which Worthy marvels that “the coarser appetite of nature's gone” (5.5.175), cements this decision. In its range of implications the play serves well as a summary of period attitudes to seduction and/or rape.

  9. One of the curious details of Wycherley criticism is the controversy surrounding this very point. The debate has been rehearsed and clarified in Percy G. Adams, “What Happened in Olivia's Bedroom? Or Ambiguity in The Plain Dealer,” in Essays in Honor of Esmond Linworth Marilla, ed. Thomas Austin Kirby and William John Olive (Baton Rouge, La., 1970), pp. 174-87. The latest word on the problem comes from Robert F. Bode, “A Rape and No Rape: Olivia's Bedroom Revisited,” Restoration 12 (1988): 80-86. Bode argues that the interpretive difficulty arises not so much from the ambiguity of Wycherley's text as from critics' hasty reliance on some rather sloppy predecessors.

  10. Readers confused about the difference between men and women will be happy to know that the conclusive revelation about Fidelia comes when, in the course of the scuffle which ends act 5, her peruke falls off and her natural hair spills out.

  11. Robert D. Hume has remarked on the frequency of Wycherley's use of proverbs in “William Wycherley: Text, Life, Interpretation,” Modern Philology 78 (1981): 404. See also Archer Taylor, “Proverbs in the Plays of William Wycherley,” Southern Folklore Quarterly 21 (1957): 213-17; and the annotations to Friedman's edition of the plays.

  12. An effective confirmation of this point may be found in Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, where Lovelace's uncle, Lord M, is presented as a great lover of proverbs. These he characterizes as “the wisdom of whole nations and ages collected into a small compass” ([London, 1962], 2:322) but his reliance upon them as universal guides for interpretation is satirized as an inability to think freshly or independently about anything.

  13. Discussion of the banquet scene oscillates between the view that here the women really create a space of freedom and the gloomier opinion that the continued need for secrecy vitiates whatever advantages might derive from erotic sisterhood. For the former view, see Derek Cohen, “The Revenger's Comedy: A Reading of The Country Wife,Durham University Journal 45 (1983): 31-36; and Harold Weber, “Horner and His ‘Women of Honour’: The Dinner Party in The Country Wife,Modern Language Quarterly 43 (1982): 107-20. Opposing opinions are expressed by Rose Zimbardo, Wycherley's Drama: A Link in the Development of English Satire (New Haven, Conn., 1965), p. 160; W. R. Chadwick, The Four Plays of William Wycherley (The Hague, 1975), p. 102; and Katharine Rogers, William Wycherley (Boston, 1972), p. 62.

  14. Plain Dealer criticism represents a kind of extended rewriting of this process. A central preoccupation has always been Manly's character: is he a rough barbarian, deserving our contempt, or an unsullied hero caught up in a corrupt environment? A useful summary and reading are provided in Ian Donaldson, The World Upside Down: Comedy from Jonson to Fielding (Oxford, 1970), pp. 99-118.

  15. W. T. Craik has argued that at this point Dapperwit steps grossly out of character, becoming sensible and perceptive for once. See his “Some Aspects of Satire in Wycherley's Plays,” English Studies 41 (1964): 171.

  16. For Thompson, Eliza is “an exemplum of right thinking” (p. 92), and Olivia's interpretation of The Country Wife represents “anarchy,” a distortion of the play's “innocent words” ([n. 6 above], p. 109). Derek Hughes complains of the “private and eccentric meanings” Olivia infers from the play (“The Plain Dealer: A Reappraisal,” Modern Language Quarterly 43 [1982]: 330). Norman Holland (The First Modern Comedies [Cambridge, Mass., 1959]) does not pronounce emphatically for one or the other side, but his covert sympathies evidently lie with Eliza: Olivia, for him, is speaking “hypocritically” (p. 100). The fullest and best discussion of the debate is found in Peter Holland, The Ornament of Action: Text and Performance in Restoration Comedy (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 193 ff.

  17. Richard Rorty, “Method, Social Science, Social Hope,” in Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972-1980 (Minneapolis, 1982), p. 193.

  18. Knapp and Michaels (n. 3 above), p. 742. See also Stanley Fish, “Consequences,” Critical Inquiry 11 (1985): 433-58.

  19. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, N.J., 1979), pp. 360-77. The difficulties of remaining edifying—or of deciding whether a given philosopher belongs in one or the other camp—are suggested in Rorty's “Is Derrida a Transcendental Philosopher?” in his Essays on Heidegger and Others, Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 119-28.

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The Country Wife: Metaphor Manifest

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