The Country Wife - William Wycherley, Appunti di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica The Country Wife - William Wycherley e più Appunti in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! The Country Wife (by William Wycherley) Analysis About “The Country Wife” The Country Wife is a Restoration comedy, that is, an English theatrical comedy written during the period 1660-1710, when theatrical performances resumed in London following their 18-year spell of illegality under the reign of the Puritan Commonwealth. As a genre, Restoration comedy is notable for displaying a recrudescence of bawdiness, the public expression of which had been suppressed under the Puritans, and for taking a satirical, or even cynical, view of marriage and sexuality. As will be seen, these characteristics owe much to the genre’s social and historical contexts. Restoration comedy had for its intended audience the English court and other social insiders; whereas the Elizabethan theater had played to a cross-section of English society, the theater audiences of the Restoration had a far more specific social identity, and the comedies they enjoyed reflect their attitudes and values accordingly. The aristocracy had regained its security and visibility with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, but it had lost for good much of its political and economic significance; as a result, this rather aimless class expended its energies on theatergoing and other, more dissolute antics. As if to compensate for its moral nullity, however, the Restoration aristocracy placed more emphasis than ever on social virtuosity and the punctilios of comportment; essentially, it proposed outward good breeding, rather than virtuous moral conduct, as a principle of societal coherence. This valorization of display, of perfect manners, wit, and the ability to improvise, clearly informs the action and dialogue of Restoration comedies. Moreover, the minimization of genuine moral virtue can be seen to impact the values, such as they are, that inform the plays. Among the Restoration aristocracy, sexual libertinism was fashionable and marriage scorned; consequently, as David Cook and John Swannell put it, marriage generally appears in Restoration plays “at best as a convenient means of acquiring an income, and at worst as a constant source of jealousy and frustration.” Husbands, in particular, tend to look absurd, being either compulsively jealous or obtusely complacent. In order better to understand this derogation of marriage, it will be convenient to speak of Restoration comedy, and of the values that animate it, as breaking down into two phases, namely the light comedies of the 1660s and the cynical comedies of the 1670s. The former, as B. A. Kachur points out, tended to feature an obligatory couple on the model of Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Benedick; this couple’s “mutual antagonism-cum-attraction provided the requisite does of benign sexual energy that resolved itself happily in romantic love and consensual marriage between the subversive libertine and inviolable heroine.” The plots, then, tended toward a decisive social and moral resolution, imaged in the impending licit sexual union between the leading characters: the libertine, and the moral subversion he represented, were domesticated and brought under control by his voluntary submission to the virtuous heroine. By contrast, the comedies of the 1670s were darker; as Kachur observes, they featured “a preponderance of lecherous men and married women who opted for dispassionate and illicit sex and denigrated marriage altogether.” The sexual behavior of these characters tended to effect not resolution but dissolution, and the comedies of the 1670s tended to have ambiguous conclusions, instilling insecurity rather than social affirmation. The Country Wife (1675) is, of course, of this latter type. From the 1660s to the 1670s, a shift had occurred in contemporary attitudes toward the institution of marriage. This shift was due in part to certain events during the Interregnum, i.e. the period of parliamentary and military rule under the Commonwealth of England, beginning with the execution of King Charles I in 1649 and ending with the restoration of the monarcy under Charles II in 1660. One of these events was the Civil Marriage Act of 1653, passed under the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell; this Act required a civil ceremony in order for a marriage to be legally recognized, and by shifting jurisdiction of marriage from church to state, it redefined marriage as a civil contract rather than a sacramental bond. Inevitably, this redefinition diminished the religious awe in which the institution of marriage had long been held. It also enabled a revaluation of the power dynamics obtaining between husband and wife: traditionally, the husband was sovereign in the domestic sphere and the wife was subservient to him; the model for this relation, of course, was the sovereignty of the monarch over his subjects, but as the deposition of Charles I had cast doubt upon the inevitability of the reign of monarchs over the commons, so the Civil Marriage Act made the reign of husbands over wives depend not on a religious necessity but on negotiations between the two parties concerned. Perhaps, then, women needed not be the subservient vassals of their husbands; increasingly, they were viewed as free individuals with rights and personal agency. The tyrannical or neglectful behavior of husbands therefore became grounds for criticism and satire. Moreover, the conduct of Charles II himself, in both his public and his personal capacities, provided grounds for criticism and even cynicism about both the nation and the marital state. Charles’s governance of England was culpably inept; by the 1670s, it was clear that the hopes of 1660 were to be disappointed and that the King was not to orchestrate stability in the realm or establish trust in the regime. Additionally, his personal example was deplorable: he was infamous for his extramarital affairs and for his illegitimate children, who numbered above a dozen. The King, then, was not the lynchpin of national harmony that he ought to have been; neither was he a decent husband. In the cynical comedies of the 1670s, these facts were made to analogize and comment upon each other. Kachur sums it up: “By the 1670s, marital relationships in the comedies were dominated by characters, like embittered subjects to a seemingly disloyal and detached king, whose skepticism and disenchantment over matrimony bespoke the general malaise and dissatisfaction with the current state of Britain’s restoration, and their want of fidelity, trust, and affection toward their mates, as well as their illicit sexual liaisons, signalled a covert rebellion against a bond that neither party found tenable.” Such, clearly, is the social, political, and moral atmosphere that precipitated Wycherley’s The Country Wife. Themes The Untenability of Restoration Marriage Arrangements Wycherley presents two marriages that are sadly typical of the Restoration period: Jack Pinchwife cultivates his wife’s ignorance in order to ensure her fidelity and submissiveness, and Sir Jasper Fidget neglects his young wife and seeks to keep her mind off other men by occupying her with trivial pleasures and “safe” companions. Wycherley thus takes two common assumptions about marriage—that wives should be kept in ignorance and that wives can safely be neglected—and shows them to contain contradictions that can only lead to marital breakdown. Women, no less than men, desire gratifying sexual contact; if long deprived, they will gladly avail themselves of someone like Horner, whose aphorism proves right: “a foolish rival and a jealous husband assist their rival’s designs; for they are sure to make their women hate them, which is the first step to their love for another man.” As P. F. Vernon points out, Horner is merely a “catalyzing agent,” enabling the married couples around him to fall apart on their own terms: Sir Jasper is so eager to unload his wife that he actually compels Horner and Lady Fidget to spend time together; and Pinchwife leads his own wife into adultery, because the precautions he takes against Horner merely give Margery the means to gratify the very sexual appetite that Pinchwife, the broken-down and tyrannical, stints. Hypocrisy Wycherley was repelled by hypocrisy, above all by the commonplace variety—the ordinary desire of men and women to be thought more virtuous or gifted than they are. Thus, Horner early on curses “all that force Nature and would be still what she forbids ’em; affectation is her greatest monster,” and Dorilant generalizes the critique: “Most men are the contraries to what they would seem.” Not only men but women: Lady Fidget and “the virtuous gang” come in for some of the sharpest criticism in the play, as their public personas conflict egregiously with their private activities. Indeed, the entire play is predicated on the pervasiveness of hypocrisy: Horner’s ruse, on which most of the action depends, would fail without the eagerness of wives and husbands to maintain an extreme disjunction between the true nature of women and their outward appearance. Town and Country, or Innocence and Experience Margery, the country wife of the title, represents a state of rustic innocence that contrasts strongly with the sophistication of the town. She has no natural inclination for deceit, and thus she composes what Horner calls “the first love-letter that ever was without flames, darts, fates, destinies, lying and dissembling in’t”; she takes things at face value, and thus she expresses disbelief that anyone who professes to love her would seek to “ruin” her. Some critics argue, however, that in the course of the play Margery picks up the London tricks of duplicity and pretense, as she tricks Pinchwife into delivering to Horner first the love-letter and then Margery herself. The question of whether these tricks indicate the corruption of Margery is an important one, for if she maintains her ignorance throughout the play, then, as B. A. Kachur puts it, “her remove to Hampshire [at the end] suggests a form of banishment from the real world which cannot accommodate 1 • “Indeed, as the world goes, I wonder there are no more jealous, since wives are so neglected.” (Act II, Scene 1, lines 342-43; p. 214) Lady Fidget, discoursing on husbands’ jealousy with the rest of the “virtuous gang,” voices a not unreasonable complaint: women who receive no attention or affection from their husbands are likely to seek it elsewhere—so if husbands feel they have cause to be jealous of their wives, they must bear some of the blame for it themselves. Coming from Lady Fidget, this complaint has an interesting resonance: on the one hand, her marriage would seem to be Exhibit A in support of this observation, as Sir Jasper’s indifference to her creates the conditions for her dalliance with Horner; on the other hand, Wycherley certainly does not go out of his way to generate sympathy for Lady Fidget, and most readers will probably feel that her behavior is hardly less selfish than her husband’s. • Sir Jasper: “What, avoid the sweet society of womankind? That sweet, soft, gentle, tame, noble creature woman, made for man’s companion—” Horner: “So is that soft, gentle, tame, and more noble creature a spaniel, and has all their tricks— can fawn, lie down, suffer beating and fawn the more; barks at your friends, when they come to see you; makes your bed hard, gives you fleas, and the mange sometimes. And all the difference is, the spaniel’s the more faithful animal, and fawns but upon one master.” (Act II, Scene 1, lines 459-67; p. 217) This exchange between Horner and Sir Jasper is a good example both of Horner’s aptitude for his chosen role of impotent misanthrope and of his ability, as a satirist, to draw out the flaws and meannesses of others. Horner’s comparison of women to dogs is vividly nasty, as is the single point on which he will allow that the two species contrast. More subtle, however, is Horner’s implicit comment on the values of Sir Jasper: in pointing out that Sir Jasper’s complimentary description could describe a spaniel as well as a human female, Horner indicates that the only virtues Sir Jasper can appreciate in women are insipid virtues, attributes that tend to make women submissive and self-effacing. If woman is indeed as Sir Jasper portrays her, then she really is “made for man’s companion”: she is so much assimilated to his wants as to be practically an extension of him, and he need not consider her as a person in her own right. Just such a neglectful, dehumanizing concept of women is of course very much apparent in Sir Jasper’s interactions with his own wife. • “I love to be envied, and would not marry a wife that I alone could love. … I love to have rivals in a wife; they make her seem to a man still but as a kept mistress.” (Act III, Scene 2, lines 342-46; p. 232) This quote encapsulates nicely the moral idiocy of Sparkish. His resistance to romantic jealousy is simply perverse: that his wife should love him is less important to him than that other men should see him as the lord and master of an attractive woman. Moreover, Sparkish’s habit of avowing such repulsive attitudes reveals him to be as stupid socially as he is morally. One of the tenets of fashionable libertinism in the Restoration was that marriage was a burden and an inferior state to unmarried promiscuity; accordingly, in seeking to model himself on the wits of his acquaintance, Sparkish openly proclaims a disdain for marriage and a preference for illicit relations. No truly witty libertine, however, would fail to leaven his misogynistic sentiments with verbal cleverness: whereas Horner or Dorilant might harbor as deplorable views of women, they would never state them so crudely. In taking the direct route to misogyny and cynicism, Sparkish misses the point and tries too hard, demonstrating that his personality has literally no redeeming features, either of the moral sort or of the intellectual. • “But what a devil is this honour? ’Tis sure a disease in the head, like the megrim, or falling- sickness, that always hurries people away to do themselves mischief. Men lose their lives by it; women what’s dearer to ’em, their love, the life of life.” (Act IV, Scene 1, lines 30-34; p. 239) Lucy speaks these lines to her mistress Alethea in an effort to talk some sense into her regarding the relative merits of Harcourt and Sparkish. Alethea’s determination to remain with Sparkish, whom she has come to regard with contempt, derives largely from her devotion to her own honor: she will not be seen to break her word to a man she has agreed to marry. Lucy points out, however, that there are more important things in the world than honor and that a sense of honor that requires the sacrifice of love and life has become pathological. As it turns out, Alethea’s sense of honor, while not as shallow as that of Lady Fidget, nevertheless has tended to place too much emphasis on what other people think of her; consequently, her moral development will consist largely of her coming to understand that there is nothing dishonorable, if “honor” means anything, about abandoning a foolish and selfish man and marrying a decent and lovable one instead. • “[Y]our bigots in honour are just like those in religion: they fear the eye of the world more than the eye of heaven, and think there is no virtue but railing at vice, and no sin but giving scandal.” (Act IV, Scene 3, lines 20-23; p. 249) In this remark to The Quack, Horner skewers the respectable ladies whose behavior amongst themselves, which he has been privileged recently to witness, diverges so sharply from their behavior before the rest of the world. The epigrammatic quality of this remark has led to its being one of the most quoted passages in the play, and indeed it captures one of the play’s great themes—hypocrisy—admirably. Perhaps more interesting than the content of the quote, however, is its context: Horner dispenses his satiric insight, one of the fruits of his ruse, not to the great world or even to his close friends, but to The Quack, a factotum whom he despises. It is a measure of the lonely course to which Horner’s sexual and satirical impulses have committed him, that his most cutting commentary has no worthy onstage audience. • “Women and Fortune are truest still to those that trust ’em.” (Act V, Scene 4, line 390; p. 280) Near the end of the play, Alethea utters a fine-sounding epigram, and most readers will feel that, due to her intelligence and her demonstrated willingness to learn and change, she has earned the right to make this resonant pronouncement. Context, however, may undercut her somewhat. The action of the play has shown that not all forms of trust are admirable: Sir Jasper, like Sparkish in an earlier phase, has displayed excessive trust arising from self-centeredness, and in both cases this negative form of trust has led to the defection of the lady in the case. Worse, the action of the play’s final scene has brought about a restoration of that form of trust which is really just cynical obliviousness: in agreeing to believe once more in Horner’s clearly bogus impotence for the sake of everyone’s reputation, the assembled company affirm the cynical belief that a transgression is not a transgression until it is acknowledged publicly. Analysis of Act I Horner is our nominal protagonist: his first speech opens the play, as if he were the author’s spokesman, and his machinations propel the plot, suggesting a further affinity with the playwright. By taking the audience into his confidence with his frequent asides, Horner makes us virtual accomplices in his trickery, which we, in turn, largely approve because it provides entertainment and the moral satisfaction of seeing corruption exposed. His hero-status must remain only nominal, however, because Horner is no less licentious and duplicitous than his victims—indeed, in depravity he may be said to outdo them all. Nor do Horner’s considerable intellect and moral insight effect any positive change in any of the characters: his wit is entirely negative, exposing and exploiting, never correcting. Still, Wycherley does not encourage audience contempt for Horner, as he does for Horner’s victims; as B. A. Kachur puts it, “[Wycherley] does expect theatregoers to applaud Horner’s wit, intelligence, and ingenuity as 1 the ultimate satirist who exposes hypocrisy and corruption.” As we see in the case of his dissecting Pinchwife’s motives for marrying, Horner is able to articulate brilliantly Wycherley’s own condemnation of Restoration society. He is admirable at least in his clear-eyed understanding of himself and others. Act I also introduces several other important male characters, including two bad husbands and one bad would-be husband. As Jack Pinchwife exits the scene, Harcourt remarks with brutal flippancy that he has gone home “[t]o beat his wife”—and indeed Pinchwife is the archetypal jealous husband, the grim watcher of a much-younger bride. His views on marriage, which Horner cleverly draws out, are as debased as they are conventional. The crude terms in which he speaks of his sister’s dowry are quite revealing: “I must give Sparkish tomorrow five thousand pound to lie with my sister.” A wife, to Pinchwife’s mind, is essentially a long-term prostitute whose sexuality requires that money should change hands. Accordingly, he looks on the new Mrs. Pinchwife as a sexual object, to whose services he has guaranteed access; she is in this sense an improvement over the mistresses who, in his life as a London rake, would take his money and then move on. For Pinchwife, then, marriage is not so much a covenant as a business transaction: a wife is a kind of chattel, and once the husband has acquired her, his main interest is in maintaining her value; if she turns out to be “a whore” whom he cannot “keep … to [him]self,” then his investment will have backfired. Sir Jasper, though a less clearly odious figure than Pinchwife, has his own unpleasant qualities. His smirking at Horner’s supposed debility shows him to be careless of other people’s feelings. Worse, behind his fussily civil facade he is contemptuous and neglectful of his wife. His strategy is different from Pinchwife’s: rather than keeping her secluded from the world, he seeks to keep Lady Fidget harmlessly occupied with “an innocent diversion.” He is constantly running off, as in this scene, to attend to his all-important business, with the consequence that he has no time to spend on Lady Fidget. He resembles Pinchwife in taking no interest in his wife except to seek measures to prevent her disgracing him through adultery. Young Mr. Sparkish is a vain fop who considers himself a terribly sophisticated “wit”; in fact, his wittier acquaintances view him as a pretender and a dolt—as Horner says, “the greatest fop, dullest ass, and the worst company.” Sparkish is, in other words, a caricature of the many slow-witted poseurs of the day who tried to imitate the fashionable London libertines but who lacked the requisite intelligence and flair. Nor is Sparkish’s intellectual inferiority offset by any moral superiority. In this respect, Horner’s purported impotence acts as a touchstone, revealing Sparkish’s character through his reaction to it: whereas Harcourt and Dorilant jested about Horner’s impotence only lightly, as a means of cheering their unhappy friend, Sparkish immediately (like Sir Jasper) starts in with witless mockery “upon the report in town of thee, ha-ha- ha.” As will be seen, Sparkish’s frivolity goes hand-in-hand with a potential for unfeeling nastiness. Analysis of Act II Immediately upon her first appearance in the play, the country wife Margery shows her innocence and ingenuousness: her question, “Jealous? What’s that?” bespeaks not only her verbal inaptitude but also her unfamiliarity with the emotional categories of men and women in society. Her own inclination is, like a child, simply to trust and love that which is familiar to her: hence she says to Pinchwife, “You are mine own dear bud, and I know you; I hate a stranger.” She appears to bear toward her unlikeable husband all the customary wifely deference and affection: in this scene, her natural kindliness holds out despite the fact that he treats her brusquely at best, insults her casually upon his entrance, and subjects her to a hysterical degree of surveillance. Even at this early stage, however, the possibility of rebellion is discernible: she recognizes that “the playermen are finer folks” than the churlish man with whom she lives, and this capacity for independent judgment and for disappointment in her own lot may spell trouble in the future. The Pinchwifes’ is not the only marriage showing signs of weakness in Act II. By comparison with the two other pairings introduced in the previous Act (Pinchwife and his bride, Sparkish and his fiancée), the Fidgets’ marriage is a long-standing one. Outwardly they are a respectable couple, but their marriage is certainly loveless: Sir Jasper takes all his “pleasure” in “business” and none in his wife, though he is considerate enough (after a fashion) to provide her with a non-threatening male chaperone who will give the illusion of compensating for Sir Jasper’s neglect of her. Notwithstanding some superficial differences, then, Sir Jasper and Pinchwife have, at bottom, comparable views of women. Sir Jasper is neglectful and apathetic toward his wife, while Pinchwife is vigilant and possessive toward his—what the husbands have in common is a view of their spouses as inferior beings with whom sexual bonds are the only desirable form of intimacy. Insofar as Sir Jasper has anything at all in common with Lady Fidget, their affinity would seem to depend on their mutual love of money. If the husband is eager to go to “[his] pleasure, business,” the wife is equally bestowed by a man of sense and integrity, not when they are the result of the indifference of a frivolous man who cannot bring himself to care about her. Scene 2 demonstrates the kind of verbal and physical abuse that can be sanctioned by a system that grants husbands sovereign power over their wives. Pinchwife is innately violent: Margery is not unreasonable to fear that he will kill her pet squirrel by way of punishing her, and his natural hatred of women erupts here in brutal ways as he threatens to write “whore” on her face with his penknife. This gesture is, as B. A. Kachur notes, “a shocking and violent image of his desire to brand and disfigure her.” Unlike Sir Jasper, then, who veils his sexism with civility, Pinchwife embodies unabashed misogyny, exposing the malevolent basis of his society’s prevalent chauvinism. Notably, however, Margery does not seem particularly frightened by these signs of Pinchwife’s violent tendencies: though she complies with his orders under threat of injury, she never cowers, and by the end of the scene she has brought off a risky plan to subvert him. Doubtless we are to understand that her unworldliness prevents her from appreciating how large a role conventional manliness plays in Pinchwife’s ego and self-presentation; she will therefore hardly be alert to the dangers of upsetting his emotional balance by undermining his masculinity. More than that, however, the contrast of Margery’s ebullience with Pinchwife’s brutality and insecurity has the effect of aligning audience and reader more firmly with the oppressed wife, who even under the pressure of tyranny shows more spirit than her “grum” old husband. As David Cook and John Swannell point out, with this scene “we are now entirely on her side in her impulsive endeavours to beguile her husband, and we experience a sense of comic release when she succeeds at the end of the scene.” Analysis of Act IV, Scenes 3-4 One of Wycherley’s most effective comic devices is the use of a speech which a fool interprets in its obvious sense but which the wittier characters and the audience interpret in its covert, real significance. Sparkish is frequently on the wrong side of these exchanges, and his tendency toward bespeaks some of his moral and psychological inadequacy. For example, when he overhears Horner speaking of someone who “is to be bubbled of his mistress,” he relishes the prospect because it never occurs to him that he himself is the target of the intended bubbling. As Katharine M. Rogers observes, “Sparkish keeps misinterpreting speeches which are perfectly evident to everybody else because he is too self-absorbed to be aware of anyone’s feelings but his own.” A related form of myopia afflicts Sir Jasper, who in Scene 3 takes “china” to mean “china,” which it assuredly does not, and who even supplies his own unwitting double entendre (“Wife, my Lady Fidget, wife, he is coming in to you the back way”). Sir Jasper has been eager to believe in Horner’s impotence because it is convenient to him, presenting a means of disposing of his wife’s social energies, and because it affords him amusement; this investment in the theory of Horner’s deficiency then allows him to construe his wife’s interactions with Horner as mere sexual shadow-boxing. In the china scene, moreover, the self-duping of Sir Jasper is compounded by an even baser form of self-interest, namely monetary greed: fine china is a valuable commodity, and Sir Jasper the upwardly mobile businessman is ardently supportive of his wife’s attempts to procure a specimen from Horner. As in the case of Sparkish, then, the failure of Sir Jasper to see (or hear) properly is as much a moral failure, deriving from his selfishness, as an epistemological one, and the sight of him cooperating in his own cuckolding is thereby poetically just. As for Horner, the china scene makes clear that he now has more lovers than he is physically capable of satisfying. It also suggests that his sexual compulsions have turned him into something of an automaton: the relentless innuendo hints that he is to these ladies no less an object than is the piece of china that Lady Fidget fondles after their encounter offstage. B. A. Kachur puts the issue in strong terms: “The greatest irony, of course, is that in his disguise as a eunuch, Horner has unwittingly feminised himself in more ways than one: not only is he suitable only for such female pastimes as theatregoing, card playing and gossiping …, he has also become a mechanical phallus, reducing himself to what is typically the feminine role of sexual object only, an anatomical part that is the sum of his entire worth.” Horner’s pose of being impotent, then, does two things: it emphasizes, of course, the purely physical nature of his desire for women; but also, as Katharine M. Rogers observes, it “symbolically suggests that—for all his virility—he is something less than a man.” Act IV concludes with a brief but important scene in which Margery, writing to Horner, gives voice to her feelings about their relationship and her marriage with Pinchwife. It appears that the unworldly Margery did not previously apprehend the severity of her emotional deprivation with Pinchwife—only with the advent of Horner has she begun to recognize that others have trapped her in a wretched existence. Thus, in Act II she avowed to Pinchwife that “You are mine own dear bud, and I know you; I hate a stranger.” Her previous 1 rustic existence had never brought her among strangers, and consequently she had grown to take comfort in the familiar. By Act IV, however, she has undergone an awakening, which she renders now in physical terms: “when I think of my husband, I tremble and am in a cold sweat and have inclinations to vomit but when I think of my gallant, dear Mr. Horner, my hot fit comes and I am all in a fever.” Thus, the young woman who began the play professing her loyalty to her husband now speaks explicitly of “this unfortunate match, which was never, I assure you, of my choice.” She has been put in touch with her own longing for romance and a vital human connection, and the result is that she is impulsively ready to commit herself to the first capable partner who presents himself. Analysis of Act V, Scenes 1-3 Margery has made remarkable progress in trickery and is now almost out-Hornering Horner with her outlandish ruses. Lucy, of course, is the real mastermind, but it is significant for Margery’s characterization that the girl who began the play so innocent that she needed a definition of the word “jealousy” now wonders to herself “what lie I shall tell next.” This “silly innocent,” as Horner calls her, has evidently assimilated some of the guile of the town. Importantly, however, her motive in dissembling is always the straightforward one of desire, and in her case desire is naturally attended by affection. She is unlike Horner in that she is never mercenary or exploitative; she is equally unlike Lady Fidget in that her duplicity is never of that particularly odious sort known as hypocrisy. In addition to Lucy, Margery’s own husband deserves some of the (dubious) credit for her new aptitude in deceit. In the episode of Pinchwife’s conveying Margery to Horner’s lodging, Wycherley supplies a brilliant dramatic symbol: having taught Margery how to write deceitful letters (how to “shift” in the town), the jealous husband now literally leads his wife to an assignation with her lover. The deceitfulness of the women in the play is a natural result of the neglect and cruelty of the men; as P. F. Vernon says, Margery’s progress in duplicity “demonstrates exactly how craft grows in response to tyranny,” and Pinchwife facilitates the connection precisely through the measures he takes to prevent it. However deserved Pinchwife’s cuckolding may be, nevertheless Margery’s eagerness to fly to Horner must inspire ambivalent feelings in the alert reader. As David Cook and John Swannell observe, “We are willing to feel that Margery deserves an interlude with the rakish Horner, but there is a touch of pathos in her mistaking him for the prince of her girlish dreams.” Although Horner does show some insight and appreciation when he remarks to The Quack upon the “original[ity]” of Margery’s first letter to him, he certainly does not reciprocate her apparent readiness to form a strong emotional attachment; indeed, he resembles Pinchwife in this respect, that sexual bonds, rather than emotional ones, are all he seeks from women. As Margery and Horner come together, Alethea and Sparkish fall apart. Lucy, the all-wise, gets to declare victory in Scene 3, having previously cast doubt on Alethea’s sense of Sparkish’s virtues. Lucy has indeed been largely right about Sparkish, of course, but she is actually wrong to attribute his anger to jealousy: it consists instead of rage over the injury to his vanity and indignation at Alethea’s supposedly betraying, and thereby humiliating, “a gentleman of wit and pleasure about the town.” Sparkish has now assumed the role he has so long feared, that of the foolish gentleman whom the poet caricatures in plays. The readiness with which he accepts the notion of his fiancée’s guilt is startling—he does not even pause to inquire into the accusation against her. Logically, however, he has no reason not to believe the accusation (despite the fact that Pinchwife’s evidence is purely circumstantial), for the simple reason that he has never paid enough attention to Alethea to notice her integrity and her devotion to honor. He repudiates her savagely, belying his earlier claim that, “as we [wits] have no affections, so we have no malice”: on the contrary, though Sparkish is indeed devoid of affection, he is potent in malice when his precious ego is on the line. Hence his indignation: “But who would have thought a woman”—any woman; Alethea in her particularity is irrelevant here— “could have been false to me?” Everything, then, is about “me”; even as a spurned lover, Sparkish manages to be entirely self-centered. As Cook and Swannell point out, Sparkish is deeply invested in a libertine code of display and self-assertion that, taken to an extreme, precludes all meaningful human contact. Analysis of Act V, Scene 4 and Epilogue. In what has become known as the “banquet scene,” the “virtuous gang” reveal to Horner their true moral condition: the ladies engage in some crude (and stereotypically masculine) behavior, singing drinking songs that denigrate the other sex and boasting of their sexual escapades. This episode has been faulted for heavy- handedness: for example, Katharine M. Rogers argues that the women “confess more than is realistic; and the naked ugliness of the resulting picture is inconsistent with the gay tone of the play as a whole. It is too fantastic for a woman like Lady Fidget to admit openly, even in drink, that her public modesty is an unmistakable sign of her public lust.” In defense of Wycherley, however, one might reply that what happens in the banquet scene is merely an extreme version of the affect Horner has on people throughout the play. Horner has tended to bring out the real, base natures of those with whom he interacts: the women are cynical and licentious, the men are stupid and selfish, and Sparkish is a pretender. Only Margery, Alethea, and Harcourt are no more genuine around Horner than away from him, and that is because they are largely without guile. In Restoration plays, adulterous wives usually suffer some humiliation at the end of the play in a grand meting-out of punishment that restores the moral balance of justice and harmony. By contrast, Wycherley never discredits the adulterous Margery but instead allows her to remain sympathetic (if hardly triumphant) at the end. Nor do even Lady Fidget and her “virtuous gang” receive their just deserts: their exposure blows over, and they will doubtless continue to avail themselves of Horner’s services under the protection of the rumor in which all the company have just declared their belief. This exemption of the immoral women from punishment perhaps indicates Wycherley’s cynicism, a feeling that there is no sense apportioning blame in a society in which nearly everyone is hopelessly corrupt. Alternatively, it may indicate Wycherley’s more generous conviction that the infidelity of the women is simply a reaction to the tyranny of the men: not being ultimately responsible for their own behavior, the women do not merit punishment at the end of the play. Still, the unfaithful women do not merit the reward of happiness, either: only Harcourt and Alethea seem likely to have love and happiness after the close of the curtain, for “Love proceeds from esteem,” as Alethea observes, and deeply duplicitous people cannot merit esteem. The false accusation against Alethea, i.e. that she has betrayed Sparkish and taken up with Horner, gives Harcourt an opportunity to demonstrate that quality of honor which he must possess if he is to merit her respect and affection. His declaration, that he “will not only believe your innocence myself, but will make the world believe it,” may seem a bit comically grandiose; nevertheless, it bespeaks a degree of loyalty that no other character in the play, save perhaps Alethea herself, ever matches. With this gesture of faith, Harcourt completes his shift away from the cynicism of Horner and the other rakes, taking his stand instead with Alethea’s conviction of the value of honor and marital fidelity. For her part, Alethea shows that she has learned a lesson as well: no longer placing supreme value on her reputation in the eyes of the world, she declares to Harcourt that she values no one’s opinion but his. On the other end of the spectrum from Alethea and Harcourt’s exchange of elevated sentiments, Margery provides some of the funniest moments of the scene, with her untutored enthusiasm for her new lover (“You shall be my husband now”) and her very impolitic honesty on the subject of his virility (“You shall not disparage poor Mr. Horner; for to my certain knowledge—”). She is absurd as ever in this final scene, but the comedy is tempered by our sense of the bleakness of her prospects: Horner will not be her new husband, she will soon be returning to the country, and the hypocrites shout down her advocacy of Horner’s prowess. She is absurd, however, in a magnificent way: she is the lone voice of truth-telling in a society predicated on deception of others and ultimately, as this scene makes clear, deception of self—for as Pinchwife says in a revealing moment, “For my own sake fain I would all believe.” As for Horner himself, he is ultimately a lonely figure: when he has exposed the pretension and licentiousness endemic to London, his only (onstage) audience has been The Quack, whom he holds in contempt. As B. A. Kachur says, “Horner represents the darker side of the hardcore libertine: isolated and without close friends or confidants, sexually competitive and aggressive, undesirous of emotional attachment, and selfishly motivated.” He has committed himself to a life of lying to everyone, even Harcourt and Dorilant, with the only exceptions being his upper-class mistresses; these women are mere objects to him, the interchangeable instruments of his pleasure, and yet his relationships with them are the only honest relationships he allows himself. If Horner is not physically sterile, then he is spiritually and emotionally so, and he is telling the truth, in a way, when he says that he can never be a husband, for he is incapable of the emotions that constitute spousal love. 1