The Country Wife ::: Project ETERNITY

The play is structured as a farce, driven by a succession of public near-discoveries of the truth about Horner's sexual prowess (and thus, catastrophically, of the truth about the "Town" wives), from which he extricates himself by quick thinking and luck. The most hair-raising threat of exposure comes in the last scene, through the well-meaning frankness of the young country wife Margery and the suspiciousness of her old roué husband Pinchwife. Margery is indignant at the accusations of impotence levelled at "poor dear Mr. Horner", which she knows from personal experience to be untrue, and is intent upon saying so at the traditional end-of-the-play public gathering of the entire cast. In a final trickster masterpiece, Horner averts the danger, joining forces with his more sophisticated lovers in persuading even the jealous Pinchwife to at least pretend to think Horner impotent and his own wife still innocent. This finale leaves both Horner and his lovers cheerfully free to carry on indefinitely with their intrigues.

Key scenes

Notorious scenes in the play include "the china scene", a sustained double entendre dialogue mostly heard from off stage, where Horner is purportedly discussing his china collection with several noble ladies. The husband of Lady Fidget and the grandmother of Mrs. Squeamish are listening front stage and nodding in approval, failing to pick up the double meaning which is obvious to the audience. Lady Fidget's husband knows that she is occupied in an innocent way, since she has already explained to him that Horner "knows China very well, and has himself very good, but will not let me see it, lest I should beg some; but I will find it out, and have what I came for yet." Dialogue such as this made "china" a dirty word in common conversation, Wycherley later claimed:

In another famous scene, these experienced "women of quality" meet up at Horner's lodging to carouse, throw off their public virtue, and behave exactly like male rakes, singing raucous songs and drinking defiant toasts:

Finally each of the ladies jubilantly declares that Horner himself is the very lover they have been toasting, and a mayhem of jealousy breaks out as they all realize that their friends have been receiving Horner's favours too. But they quickly realize they have no choice but to keep the outrageous secret:

The plot strand and the scenes that have most troubled critics from a moral viewpoint concern the young country wife Margery, Mrs. Pinchwife, who arrives in London to be taught by Horner how to be a "Town wife", i. e. how to have extramarital affairs and conceal them from her husband. Margery has been described by many 19th and early 20th century critics as a "breath of fresh air" in the generally unsalubriouos atmosphere of the play, innocently noticing of and enthusiastic about the virile handsomeness of town gallants, rakes, and theatre actors (a self-referential stage joke of a kind common in Wycherley's plays). A running joke is the way Pinchwife's pathological jealousy always leads him into supplying Margery with the very type of information he wishes her not to have:

Context and theme

Like most English Restoration comedies of the golden era of the 1670s, The Country Wife was written by a courtier for a courtly and aristocratic audience. An unusual pattern at this time is the way Horner's acts of cuckolding aggression are directed at his own, upper, class, at husbands of the "Town", instead of merely disrupting middle-class or "City" families in the usual way of the Restoration rake.

The courtier code proposed by Wycherley is of a great sexual game, played not between men and women, but between men by means of women. Harold Weber, among others, has argued that rakes were in constant competition, that there was a hierarchy of wits. The wittiest, most virile, and prettiest man would win, and lesser men had to guard their women. Thus Horner, as Canfield puts it, "represents not just class superiority, but that subset of class represented by the Town wits, a privileged minority that ... is the jet set identified with the Town and the Court as the loci of real power in the kingdom." The character of Pinchwife, whose age is specified as 49, is a retired, married rake, a man who, like Arnolphe in Molière's A School for Wives, has married an innocent. This was his only way of making sure of getting a woman who could not cheat on him. He wants a witless woman, a waif. As he asks, "what is wit in a Wife good for, but to make a Man a Cuckold?" He cannot win in competition with other men, and so he has gone to the country to find a woman who had never seen a rake. In that sense, it is a mark of a particular subset of class that the men compete over the same women. Indeed, it is a mark of a time of life as much as of position, for the young men attempt to seduce women and to not marry, while the older men marry and try to defend.

The aggressive attack mounted in the china scene against the class and the generation that Wycherley was patronized to defend, suggests Canfield, would only let an audience of that class laugh comfortably if Horner were punished by actual impotence in the end, which he is not. "When the play concludes with no poetical justice that makes Horner really impotent", writes Canfield, "leaving him instead potent and still on the make, the audience laughs at its own expense: the women of quality nervously because they have been misogynistically slandered; the men of quality nervously because at some level they recognize that class solidarity is just a pleasing fiction" (128).

References

External Links

Category:English Restoration plays

Category:1670s