Wycherley's The Country Wife and the Don Juan Character

Abstract

WVILLIAM WYCHERLEY'S The Country Wife [1675] has received voluminous, yet curiously mixed, assessment. Literary critics have agreed on the play's extraordinary dramatic power, but have been puzzled as to its final meaning. How best to understand this wildly hilarious, but quite ambiguous-even in some respects rather sinister-drama? And especially, how to understand the play's central figure, the enigmatic seducer, Harry Horner? Since strictly literary inquiry has been more suggestive than conclusive, perhaps it is valid to trust in our own direct and immediate response to the play, and surely our most vivid experience of The Country Wife is the powerful sense of Horner's sexual hostility and aggression toward women. It is important, then, to an understanding of Wycherley's achievement to explore this central motif in his dramatic design. Behind Horner, as behind all of the seducers of Restoration comedy, lies the myth of Don Juan. This myth is transcultural and takes many forms; Don Juan has been portrayed as vulgar seducer, as a seeker after a full, ideal love, as the embodiment of masculinity, or, indeed, even as a latent homosexual.' But it is generally acknowledged that the first full literary crystallization of the Don Juan myth is found in Tirso de Molina's Burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra, published in 1630. Scholars differ on the immediate source of El Burlador; the play may have derived from the auto sacramental: one-act religious plays which flourished from