The Country Wife Plot Key Scenes Context And Theme

The Country Wife is a Restoration comedy from 1675 by William Wycherley. It was a stage success in its own time but controversial for its bawdiness even then. Between 1766 and 1924 the play was considered too outrageous to be performed at all and was replaced on the stage by David Garrick's The Country Girl, a cleaned-up version free of sexual improprieties. The original play is now regarded as a major literary as well as stage classic.

1 Plot

As is normal in Restoration comedy, The Country Wife contains several plots interwoven into a complex whole, one of them being a conventional love story in which the witty Harcourt through persistence and true love wins the hand of Alithea, who was originally engaged to the shallow fop Sparkish. Summaries of The Country Wife sometimes focus on retelling this innocent story and avoid describing the explicit main plot, which concerns the rake Horner and his successful scheme for seducing as many respectable ladies as possible. Below, however, will follow a frank discussion of the play's main plot.

Horner pays a doctor to spread a false rumour that he, Horner, has become impotent, explaining that this will convince married men that he can safely be allowed to squire their wives about town and even without scandal be left alone with them. The rumour is also expected to assist Horner's mass seduction campaign by enabling him to identify the women who, while careful of their reputation, are actually eager for extramarital sex, because those women will react to a supposedly impotent man with tell-tale horror and disgust. Thus Horner will be able to economize his campaign by concentrating it on ladies of guaranteed fake virtueVirtue ( Greek alpha;ρετ&eta Latin virtus is the habitual, well-established, readiness or diposition of man's powers directing them to some goodness of act. 1) Virtue is moral excellence of a man or a woman. The word αρε&. This diagnostic trick, which invariably works perfectly, is one of The Country Wifes many running jokes at the expense of the loud claims for reputationReputation is the general opinion of the public towards a person, a group of people, or an organization. Human societies. and virtue made by upper-class women who are rakes at heart.

The play is structured as a farceDefinition A farce is a comedy written for the stage, or a film, which aims to entertain the audience by means of unlikely and extravagant yet often possible situations, disguise and mistaken identity, verbal humour of varying degrees of sophistication, w, 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 tricksterIn the study of mythology and religion, a trickster is a god, goddess, spirit or human who breaks the rules of the gods or nature, sometimes maliciously (for example, Loki) but usually with ultimately positive effects. Often, the rule-breaking takes the f 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.

2 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:

Squeamish. Oh Lord I'le have some China too, good, Mr. Horner, don't think to give other people China, and me none, come in with me too.

Horner. Upon my honour I have none left now.

Squeamish. Nay, nay I have known you deny your China before now, but you shan't put me off so, come —

Horner. This Lady had the last there.

Lady Fidget. Yes indeed Madam, to my certain knowledge he has no more left.

Squeamish. O but it may be he may have some you could not find.

Lady Fidget. What d'y think if he had had any left, I would not have had it too, for we women of quality never think we have China enough.

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:

Squeamish. Lovely Brimmer [a drinking cup going from hand to hand], let me enjoy him first.
Lady Fidget. No, I never part with a Gallant, till I've try'd him. Dear Brimmer that mak'st our husbands short sighted.
Dainty. And our bashful gallants bold.
Squeamish. And for want of a Gallant, the Butler lovely in our eyes.

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:

Lady Fidget. Well then, there's no remedy, Sister Sharers, let us not fall out, but have a care of our Honours; though we get no Presents, no Jewels of him, we are savers of our Honour, the Jewel of most value and use, which shines yet to the world unsuspected, though it be counterfeit.
Horner. Nay, and is e'en as good, as if it were true, provided the world thinks so; for Honour, like Beauty now, only depends on the opinion of others.

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:

Pinchwife. Ay, my Dear, you must love me only, and not be like the naughty Town Women, who only hate their Husbands, and love every Man else, love Plays, Visists, fine Coaches, fine Cloaths, Fidles, Balls, Treates, and so lead a wicked Town-life.
Mrs. Pinchwife. Nay, if to enjoy all these things be a Town-life, London is not so bad a place, Dear.
Alithea. The Fool has forbid me discovering to her the pleasures of the Town, and he is now setting her a gog upon them himself.
Mrs. Pinchwife. But, Husband, do the Town-women love the Player Men too?
Pinchwife. Yes, I warrant you.
Mrs. Pinchwife. Ay, I warrant you.
Pinchwife. Why, you do not, I hope?
Mrs. Pinchwife. No, no, Bud; but why have we no Player-men in the Country?

3 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 Moliere'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).

4 References

Canfield, Douglas (1997). Tricksters and Estates: On the Ideology of Restoration Comedy. Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky.

Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve (1985). Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press.

Weber, Harold (1986). The Restoration Rake-Hero: Transformations in Sexual Understanding in Seventeenth-Century England. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Wycherley, William (1966) (ed. Gerald Weales). The Complete Plays. New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday.

5 External Links

Full E-text of the Play
English Restoration plays English literature 1670s

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3 Context and theme

4 References

5 External Links

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