Wives, Widows, and Writings in Restoration Comedy

Abstract

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, 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 conversation 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 Wifes, like the 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