Johns Hopkins University Press Rice University Wives, Widows, and Writings in Restoration Comedy Author(s): Jon Lance Bacon Source: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 31, No. 3, Restoration and Eighteenth Century (Summer, 1991), pp. 427-443 Published by: Rice University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/450855 Accessed: 22-10-2015 10:51 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Johns Hopkins University Press and Rice University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.184.220.23 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 10:51:47 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SEl,31(1991) ISSN 0039-3657 Wives, Widows, and Writings in Restoration Comedy JON LANCE BACON When Harcourt likens mistresses to books in The Country Wife (1675), William Wycherley employs a common motif of Restoration comedy: the motif of woman as text. The comparison here is fairly innocuous, suggesting an experience of potential benefit to the male "reader" who wants social polish. Harcourt tells Horner, "if you pore upon them too much, they doze you, and make you unfit for Company; but if us'd discreetly, you are the fitter for conver- sation by'em" (I.i.197-99).l Later in the play, however, the motif indicates a power struggle within marriage. Pinchwife expresses his belief that "our Wifes," like the "writings" drawn up by usurers, are "never safe, but in our Closets under Lock and Key" (V.ii.77-78). Pinchwife's statement is the more typical example of the motif, in that it links the issue of legal authority-the husband's theoretical control over his wife-with the question of authorship. The association of women with writings in Restoration comedy betrays a contemporary anxiety regarding feminine self-assertion. If women are books, that is, they are books which may write themselves. The form taken by male anxiety, in terms of dramatic action, depends on the legal status of the female characters. To the extent that they lack legal power, women exert personal power as texts which demand and often defeat male exegesis.2 Those women who do possess legal power-embodied, in The Plain-Dealer (1677), by the Widow Blackacre's written documents-have no identity imposed on them, so they need not resort to such a strategy of resistance. This inverse relation between the mystification practiced by wives and the self-determination enjoyed by widows figures in many plays of the genre but most prominently in Wycherley's two major works. A century after The Plain-Dealer appeared, the woman-as-text motif remained a component of English stage comedy. The Jon Lance Bacon, a graduate student at Vanderbilt IUniversity, is completing a dissertation on Flannery O'Connor. This content downloaded from 128.184.220.23 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 10:51:47 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 428 RESTORATION WIVES AND WIDOWS malapropisms of The Rivals (1775) by Richard Brinsley Sheridan testify to the persistence of the motif; these errors in diction frequently create associations between women and language and occasionally equate women with problematic texts. Mrs. Malaprop hopes that Sir Anthony Absolute will represent her niece to his son "as an object not altogether illegible," as something to be deciphered, in other words (I.ii.341-43).3 Mrs. Malaprop's errors turn women, including herself, into objects of interpretation: "I'm quite analysed, for my part!" (IV.ii.289-90). By calling her tongue "oracular" (III.iii.86), Mrs. Malaprop recalls the obscure messages of classical deities; her own messages to Sir Lucius O'Trigger, written under a pseudonym, constitute a "mystery" (V.iii.251). Her statement that Lydia is "as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of Nile" (III.iii.238-39) connects the problem of interpretation with feminine self-assertion, considered a problem by Sir Anthony as well as Mrs. Malaprop. He calls Lydia's refusal to marry the man selected for her "the natural consequence of teaching girls to read" (I.ii.256-57). Literacy, Sir Anthony argues, puts an end to female submissiveness. Books proved to be "injury sufficient" to his late wife, and he intends that any successor of hers will be almost completely illiterate: "were I to choose another help-mate," he says, "the extent of her erudition should consist in her knowing her simple letters, without their mischievous combinations" (I.ii.276-80). With just enough knowledge to embroider her husband's initials (I.ii.282-83), such a wife would be merely an instrument for confirming her husband's identity. Sir Anthony's view resembles that of Sparkish, the fop in The Country Wife who believes "a little reading, or learning" makes a woman "troublesome" (III.ii.230-31). But Sheridan's lighthearted treatment of female literacy and self-assertion in 1775 lacks the tension of the seventeenth-century debate over women's status-a debate which produced not only misogynistic lines of dialogue, spoken by foolish characters on stage, but also alarmist essays, written in earnest by Oxford dons. In "The Womans Right Proved False," part of a manuscript miscellany compiled sometime between 1674 and 1685, Robert Whitehall expresses fears about a continuum of personal and legal power where ambitious women are concerned. Responding to another writer's call for "a greater equality between Husbands and Wives then is allowed and practised in England,"4 Whitehall contends that the empowerment of women within marriage would lead them to arrogate political and even theological authority to themselves: That many Women are more than ready to snatch at ye Reins of Government, and surrogate a Power allowed neither by ye This content downloaded from 128.184.220.23 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 10:51:47 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions JON LANCE BACON 429 Laws of God or Nature, is so certain, that to prove it would be to suspect the Sun shines at Noon day; to whome Should an Inch be//given they would presently take more than an Ell, whose Brains being intoxicated with proud desire and ambi- tion after Rule, were they admitted to co-equal sway in a Domestick Kingdome, would presently begin to aspire at Absolute monarchy, then to challenge an equall Autority in State, to make Laws, bear Offices, vote as Members in Parliament, and afterwards presume to sit in Moses his Chair pretending they have power to TEACH as well as RULE. The result, Whitehall warns, will be "Confusion," a disruption of the natural order of things.5 His position was neither extraordinary nor unacceptable in the intellectual circles of the period, according to Margaret J.M. Ezell: his disapproval of a theoretical equality within marriage has its basis in perceived links "between arguments for greater personal freedom and those of the radical sects during the Civil War. Both are seen as anarchic forces." 6 For many of those writing in the half century after the execution of Charles I, the traditional analogy between husband/wife and sovereign/subject relations had come to suggest the possibility of rebellion in the domestic as well as the political sphere.7 James Drake's commendatory verses to An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (1696) portray its feminist author as a political revolutionary: Our Sex have long thro' Usurpation reign'd, and by their Tyranny their Rule maintain'd. Till wanton grown with Arbitrary Sway Depos'd by you They practice to obey, Proudly submitting, when such Graces meet, Beauty by Nature, and by Conquest Wit.8 Although political revolution furnishes the precedent for her challenge to male "Tyranny," the essayist herself reverses the gender roles assigned by Drake: comparing men, rather than women, to "the Rebels in our last Civil Wars," she points out "the weakness and illegallity of their Title to a Power they still exercise so arbitrarily, and are so fond of."9 The husband who governs his wife "as an absolute Lord and Master, with an Arbitrary and Tyrannical Sway," is the object of criticism in Mary Astell's Reflections upon Marriage, first published in 1700. In the preface to the third edition (1706), Astell accuses men of hypocrisy for practicing "that Arbitrary Dominion in their Families, which they abhor and exclaim against in the State." 10 This content downloaded from 128.184.220.23 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 10:51:47 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 430 RESTORATION WIVES AND WIDOWS Despite her adoption of the analogy between the two spheres, domestic and political, Astell focuses exclusively on the former. Other writers, focusing instead on the traditional distinction between "female" and "male" activity, protest the confinement of women to the domestic sphere. The reason for such confinement, argues the anonymous woman who wrote commendatory verses to the posthumous Poems (1669) of Katherine Philips, is male anxiety over female abilities: "jealous men debar / Our sex from books in peace, from arms in war . because our parts will soon demand / Tribunals for our persons, and command."'1 In The Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655), Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, objects to the fact that women "are kept like birds in cages to hop up and down in our houses" and "are never imployed either in civil nor marshall affaires."'12 Margery Pinch- wife's complaint in The Country Wife about being "a poor lonely, sullen Bird in a cage" (III.i.3-4) takes on a clearly political dimension when placed in the context of the debate over women's Status.