12

PAT GILL

Gender, sexuality, and marriage

The plots of Restoration drama begin, develop, and end in concerns about
gender, sexuality, and marriage. The demarcation of masculine and femin-
ine domains, the desire of one sex for the other, and the institutions charged
with legitimizing both, become the amusing foils or dire impasses that
comprise the action and envelop the characters of the plays of this era.
Other cultural concerns are neither ignored nor dismissed; rather, the
social, political, historical, and personal are imagined and played out
primarily through this narrow dramatic focus. Gender, sexuality, and
marriage emerge as comically or tragically disordered states whose permu-
tations must be worked through in order to achieve personal goals, to
consolidate families, to re-establish social order, to restore political stabi-
lity, and to secure cultural cohesion. The reliance on such constricted and
redundant dramatic tropes is rare if not unique in English theatrical history.
Although all of Restoration drama is preoccupied with gender, sexuality,
and marriage, the comedy of manners is perhaps the most exemplary.1 A
type of drama that observes with satiric amusement the deportment, wit,
and morality of contemporary society, the comedy of manners flirts with a
number of developing and unresolved social tensions. In comic fashion, the
plays broach and endeavor to resolve serious cultural concerns, such as the
definition of gender roles, the regulation of sexual behavior, the character-
istics of class, and the compatibility of marriage partners. Despite the
profligate activities of their heroes, a number of whom espouse a non-
chalantly libertine creed, these comedies are socially conservative. Engaging
in the conventional censure of hypocrisy and fear of cuckoldry in histori-
cally specific ways, comedies of manners sketch out a new model of
marriage as a witty, cultivated alliance of elegant, like-minded individuals.
The balanced unions accordingly produced nonetheless firmly uphold
established social hierarchies. The consolidations of the sparkling couples
in the last act augur the prospect of savvy, obliging spouses who rule well-
bred, refined households. The agitated insistence of social discord in the

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comic world of these plays serves as a caveat, however, hinting nervously at

the precarious nature of this celebrated future civility.
Comedies of manners serve as eloquent testimonies that the Restoration
did not restore a past way of life. Dissenting religions, increasing social
mobility, the public's growing moral rigidity, and the developing ethos of
business, all become satiric grist for the mill as the comedies define and
distribute the possession of status, power, masculinity, and women. The
alignment of stable gender roles and sexual selections, affirmed and
financed by suitable marriages, generates the busy plots of these plays. The
comedies describe these social phenomena in comically diminished and
caricatured ways, and all characters endure playful jibes at little foibles of
vanity or small follies of deportment. The hatred evoked by scheming,
salacious women and the contempt elicited by fops in these plays, however,
seem in excess to the threats they pose in the Restoration comedies. This
excess seems to belie the always successful reduction of these characters in
the dramas, suggesting perhaps that they reflect social forces not so easily
managed in Restoration life. The rake-hero is on his way out as a viable
social and dramatic figure, and all of his triumphs in these plays cannot
stop the movement of history past him.
In contrast to comedies of manners, farces and intrigue or libertine
comedies seem less concerned with gender stability, sexual control, and
traditional moral standards. The vicissitudes of gender, sexuality, and
marriage dominate the dramatic action, but the rapid pace of farces and
continuous contrivances of intrigue comedies prevent the moral explora-
tions pursued at times in comedies of manners and pathetic dramas. The
social, economic, and familial alliances afforded by marriage implicitly
ground farces and intrigue comedies, defining the stakes of the seductions,
cuckoldings, incompatible partners, forced unions, and (frequently foiled)
trysts that sustain their often frantic action. Intrigue comedies emphasize
sexual and gender misbehavior, usually poking fun at those who hope to
control or to cajole, rather than to evoke, the sexual desire of another.
These plays are generally more chaotic, farcical, and risque than manners
comedies; the heroines are more compromised, the heroes less refined and
secure, and the endings more morally ambiguous.
Thomas Southerne's rough and nasty Sir Anthony Love (1690) and
Aphra Behn's The Rover (1677) and Sir Patient Fancy (1678) serve well as
representative models of the cynical tenets and cursory sentiments of
intrigue or libertine comedy. Sir Anthony Love's rapid pace, preposterous
situations, and numerous shallow characters, its reliance on absurd con-
trivances and increasing complications, are hallmarks of this type of
comedy. The titular hero, a cross-dressing, sword-fighting woman of

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means, thwarts and promotes a number of unions, secure in her knowledge

of the venality of humankind. The play broadly and crudely satirizes social
mores, and it could be argued that the remarkable Sir Anthony functions in
some ways as a comic moral scourge. Like other scourges, she remains
aloof from social and sexual encounters even as she directs and performs in
them. She enables the man she loves to wed another, a quiet acknowl-
edgment that her anomalous character must always remain marginal, that
her unorthodox enactment of gender can never be recast to fit into the final
marital scheme of things. Gender misconduct, sexual improprieties, and the
business of marriage determine the plot of this fascinating play; all are
satirized and all, at least tacitly, are celebrated. The intriguing title-
character pricks skillfully with both sword and wit, exposing corruption
while enacting it, and demanding moral conclusions while calling each into
question.
Behn's plays indulge in a good deal of sexual frolic and gender playful-
ness as well, but unlike Southerne's play, unnatural women are those who
sacrifice love for money and power, not those who have strong sexual
yearnings, dress in male garb, or seem at home in masculine domains.
Behn's plays observe with stinging derision the foolish actions of fops,
lechers, and Whiggish businessmen, but it is forced marriages and mar-
riages of interest that generally propel the plots of these plays. In the
involved intrigues of these rollicking comedies, male and female protago-
nists confront and live out hard choices, often sacrificing love for financial
security. In The Town Fop (1676), for instance, economic considerations
separate and estrange young lovers, and in The Lucky Chance (1686) lusty
young women discontentedly endure unsatisfying marriages to rich and
silly old husbands. The unhappy, mismatched alliances serve as gentle
rebukes to any who would forfeit true love for financial gain. The bedroom
tricks, cuckoldings, and illicit rendezvous in Behn's plays depict a tawdry
world in which furtive pleasures and illicit amours serve as compromised
solutions to unalterable circumstances. In this harsh environment, material
needs seem always at odds with passionate desires, and the amusing sexual
arrangements that end the plays never quite obscure the sordid nature of
the compromises. There is a grittiness in Behn's plays that cannot be found
in the manners comedies of Etherege, Congreve, Wycherley, Durfey,
Farquhar, and Southerne. Even for heroes and heroines life always entails
numerous personal concessions and social capitulations.
Behn's distribution of gender attributes corresponds to that found in
manners comedies, but the disposition of punishments and rewards for
suspect female behavior differs substantially. Women who betray their
loyal lovers suffer dearly for it, but those who steal, lie, and cuckold for

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true love escape grievous reprisals. The women in Behn's raucous comedies
and farces prove sexually desirable and desiring; their virtue lies in their
faithfulness to their lover, not in their chastity. The rake-heroes who
populate these plays tend to be coarser and ruder than their brothers in the
manners comedy. The wildly popular Willmore, the title-character of The
Rover, for example, is a drunken lout willing to seize by rape what he
cannot obtain by persuasion. The witty, virtuous heroine Hellena pursues
him successfully, but at best she catches a gregarious, self-centered scoun-
drel who promises her neither love nor loyalty. Time and again Behn's plays
couple intelligent, alluring, faithful women with affable rogues who hurt
and deceive them, suggesting that this unequal and burdensome pairing is
simply the gendered way of the world.
Unlike the comedies of manners, Behn's comedies do not explore defini-
tions of proper masculinity, natural female vice, and ideal feminine virtue,
but rather inquire into problems of incompatible marriages and contending
claims of love and money. Not surprisingly, the plays neither suggest that
women who act on their desires reveal inveterate corruption nor do they
condemn out of hand women who marry for money and security rather
than love. Sexual desire grounded in love explains if not justifies the illicit
behavior of many of her male and female characters in the intrigue
comedies, and women are no more or less culpable in their strayings than
their male counterparts. The social vicissitudes of gender, such as the
economic vulnerability of women, and the frequently raucous conflicts of
desire, demand, and need often occupy center stage in Behn's plays, but
moral distinctions based on gender difference rarely find their way into the
wings.
Comedies of manners prove to be far less tolerant of fallen females.
Indeed, these characters undergo some of the most scathing satire found in
the plays. Even good-natured, morally lax women, Bellinda of The Man of
Mode (1676), for example, and Mrs Fainall of William Congreve's The
Way of the World (1700), reap the promise of dreary, strained futures at
the end of their plays. In the comedies of manners, women fall into three
general categories: sexually active hypocrites who scheme, betray, entrap,
and deceive; naive or ignorant young women who seem potentially amen-
able to seduction; and charming virgins who possess wealth and wit. Vain,
silly, and neglected women engage in self-debasing amorous escapades;
dangerous, devious women use sex as a means to power and money; and
worthy women wittily withhold. The successful heroines of these plays
circumvent the illicit lures of the rake-heroes, shrewdly reserving them-
selves for the last-act assurance of marriage and respectability. But the
closer female characters come to behaving like rakes - the more seductive

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their speech and duplicitous their actions - the more threatening they are to
the traditional realms of masculine social and discursive power. Intelligent,
sexually versed women comfortably inhabit these two masculine domains
and so transgress cultural categories, calling gender and sexual boundaries
into question in the process. Their dual natures as secretly fallen women,
equally at home in respectable and iniquitous surroundings, provoke severe
dramatic remedies. Restoration comedies of manners domesticate these
cunning ladies by unmasking them, by showing them to be merely women
and therefore vulnerable to public shame and scorn.
In my book Interpreting Ladies, I argue that these satiric moments of
unmasking are structurally analogous to hostile, obscene jokes.2 Sigmund
Freud explains that an obscene narrative operates like a power play to
confirm the (masculine) tellers as subjects in control and to fix the objects
or butts of the jest in a passive (feminine) position.3 The satire in Restora-
tion comedies functions precisely in this gendered manner - it links
masculinity with discursive and sexual prowess and femininity with
linguistic and sexual vulnerability. Those women who trespass far into
masculine cultural domains are generally forcibly returned to their
"proper" feminine spheres. Publicly exposed and humiliated, their most
private secrets revealed for all the amused onlookers to see, these women
are quite literally ob-scene by the end of the play, exiting in a huff, vowing
empty threats of revenge. Often the final pairing of the heroine and hero
rises from the ashes of the degraded remains of the publicly denounced
hypocrite, so that the culminating moments of the plays include the fall of
one woman and the rise of the next.
In the witty, fast-paced discursive romp of Restoration comic satire, the
ridicule and exposure of sexualized females reflect a concern with what has
now come to be called gender identity. That these artful women are
depicted as naturally debased reflects the dramas' failure to resolve this
concern conclusively. The tacit assessment of women found in the comedy
of manners is a resoundingly poor one. Although the heroines shine in these
plays, their exemplary and fabulous natures stand in stark contrast to those
of women with feet of clay. These latter characters, often enterprising
hypocrites determined to get what they feel to be a fair share of pleasure
and power, never earn the narratives' sympathy. They are always returned
to their proper subordinate place, and the challenge they pose to masculine
authority is decisively squelched.
The plays never harp or hammer, however, and it is only on closer
inspection that the antagonism and insistence of the satiric assaults on
defiant women seem excessive. Nonetheless, when looked at a little more
closely, these satiric assaults reveal a significant confusion, even a

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contradiction, in the plays' dramatized understandings of the social

nature of gender. The plays suggest that the Olivias, Loveits, Cockwoods,
Touchwoods, and Marwoods of their dramatic worlds behave both as
unfeminine, masculinized deviants and as typical women, untrustworthy
and promiscuous. Yet the contradiction implicit in characters who both
do and don't behave as their gender seems to demand raises the question
of what constitutes this proper place.
In general, comedies of manners introduce an amiable rake-hero, disclose
his past or present sexual intrigues, and then bring on a heroine who wins
his heart with her beauty, wit, and verve, and his hand with her breeding,
money, and honesty. Obstacles appear to this happy merger of course,
usually in the form of obdurate parents or inconvenient pre-engagements.
The clever machinations and remarkable contrivances devised by the rake-
hero to remove these obstacles comprise the principal dramatic action,
interrupted and complicated by one or two farcical subplots that either
assist or complement the rake's progress. The comedies end in the promise
of a witty marriage between the rich young beauty and the heretofore
resolutely single rake-hero, a marriage of intellectual equals whose guarded
admissions to one another seem to suggest genuine affection. Although
irreverent and pleasure-seeking, the rakish protagonist nonetheless betrays
a clear preference for the established class dictates and customary social
decorum embodied in the heroine. If he is a Hobbesian "natural man," he is
one whose nature is thoroughly refined by arch reworkings of conventional
cultural mores, and whose elegant discourse is underwritten by accepted
social codes.4
Before his implied reformation in the last act, a rake-hero lies without
remorse as he assiduously pursues his desires. An experienced gallant
whose pride rivals his passion, the rake-hero not only succeeds in winning
the lovely heiress but also often manages to settle old scores and resolve his
friends' amorous dilemmas. The conventional (double) standard that
celebrates feminine chastity applauds a masculine virtue of quite another
sort. An accomplished rake-hero makes assignations, breaks hearts, and
converses amiably with equal ease. He seduces women with dazzling self-
assurance, enticing some into bed and others to help him, wittingly or
unintentionally, with his schemes. The prototype of this beguiling character,
the witty, seductive Dorimant of Sir George Etherege's The Man of Mode,
lives an entertaining life comprised of social diversions and private, illicit
entertainments. As cruel and vain as he is charming, he glibly seduces and
abandons women who unwisely engage with him on his own terms. For
Dorimant, as for his rake successors, the discursive way of the world is
masculine and predatory. Ardent testimony of future devotion is the rake's

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customary means to an immediate, circumscribed end. "Think on your

oaths, your vows and protestations, perjured man" (2.2.224-25), an
outraged Mrs Loveit demands of Dorimant:

Dorimant: I made 'em when I was in love.

Mrs. Loveit: And therefore ought they not to bind? Oh impious!
Dorimant: What we swear at such a time may be a certain proof of present
passion, but to say truth, in love there is no security to be given for the
future. (2.2.226-31)

Dorimant's cruel explanation mortifies Loveit and seduces her best friend
Bellinda at the same time. One of the remarkable properties of rakes'
seductive discourse is its power to divide and conquer women. The
degradation of one lover serves to raise the hopes and flatter the vanity of
the next. Although Dorimant's professions of love do not differ in form or
content from one conquest to the next, they nonetheless make each
addressee believe she is special, unlike all the others who went before.
Three acts later, a sadder but wiser Bellinda ruefully asks, "Do all men
break their words thus?" "Th'extravagant words they speak in love"
Dorimant acknowledges, adding, " 'tis as unreasonable to expect we should
perform all we promise then, as do all we threaten when we are angry - "
(5.2.334-37).5 Dorimant's considerable charms distract Bellinda from the
perfectly obvious. She recognizes her consecutive relation to the cast off
Mrs Loveit only after Dorimant's diminished interest makes her position as
sexual conquest clear to her.
Rake-heroes' facile manipulation of seductive language undoes a number
of gullible women in Restoration plays. Yet heroines of these comedies
cannot simply be the opposite of the seduced women. The latter reject
advances because they are wise to the heroes' charms or oblivious to their
virility. By contrast, a heroine distinguishes herself from silly or fallen
women by her skillful admission of the rake's declaration of love and
simultaneous deflection of its damaging force. She is good at verbal thrust
and parry, but her special proficiency is in ingeniously reserving both her
personal affirmation and her person, two exercises in negative action that
her fallen sisters never master. The delightful heroine Harriet of The Man
of Mode teases and adroitly mimics the rake-hero Dorimant, acknowl-
edging through her sly imitations her deep appreciation of his seductive
power. Although animated and inventive, Harriet never deviates a hairs-
breadth from the rules of decorum or the wishes of her mother. At the close
of the play, this dutiful daughter prepares to return to the country with that
vigilant matriarch, refusing to admit her inclination for Dorimant until he
has made a public profession of his own. Unlike any woman he has met

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before, Harriet never lets down her guard. She captures him with her
stunning self-possession, her beguiling scruples, and her witty propriety.
Dorimant: To be with you I could live there: and never send one thought to
London.
Harriet: Whate'er you say, I know all beyond High Park's a desert to you, and
that no gallantry can draw you farther.
Dorimant: That has been the utmost limit of my love - but now my passion
knows no bounds, and there's no measure to be taken of what I'll do from
anything I ever did before.
Harriet: When I hear you talk thus in Hampshire, I shall begin to think there
may be some little truth enlarged upon. (5.2.162-73)
Some critics regard the heroine as the lesser half of the hero, as a fitting
partner who shares, although always to a slighter degree, the rake-hero's
witty perceptions, skepticism, libertine attitudes, and "naturalistic" tenden-
cies, while other writers point to the heroine's many orthodox qualities and
the hero's appreciation of them. 6 The heroines in these plays may be cagey
and enticing, but they are never conclusively duplicitous or impure. They
are always technically "honest," the term punningly carrying the full
weight of its two meanings, truthful and chaste. The easy, provocative
interchanges between the heroes and these canny virgins tease but do not
seriously dispute the orthodox moral and social considerations on which
their attraction is based. Ideal embodiments of proper social form, heroines
are lively, decorous, and decent, and the heroes finds them irresistible.
Their intended marriage in the final act, however playfully conveyed,
sketches out a social order based on class affiliation, sanctioned by proper
gender roles, and maintained by regulated heterosexual desire.
Heroines of these urbane comedies combine verbal sophistication with
sexual innocence. Although a heroine deftly take parts in repartee and
appears uncannily attuned to the workings of the world in which she lives,
her dramatic position is surprisingly static. While other characters franti-
cally scheme, manipulate, and submit, she remains collected and often
inactive. Like Penelope, a Restoration heroine conducts herself and
manages others with exquisite circumspection. In some cases, her tanta-
lizing noncommittal allows others foolishly to think themselves favored by
her, and while she may allow their mistaken notions to proceed unchecked
to further her own aims, she never obligates herself in any way. Her refusal
to commit herself by word or deed often invites misinterpretation, but it
keeps her free not only from the corrupt machinations but also from the
corrupting deliberations around her. Imprudent conversation can prove as
dangerous as incautious associations to a heroine. A Restoration manners
heroine walks a fine linguistic line: she engages in provocative banter but

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never indecorous innuendo. "Criminal conversation" is a Restoration term

for adultery, and the implicit puns on conversation and honesty in manners
comedy repeatedly link verbal activities to sexual ones. 7 Indeed, one
indication of a woman's fallen, hardened nature is her dexterity in the false
rhetoric of love.
The "virtuous gang" in William Wycherley's The Country Wife (1675)
perfectly illustrate the debased nature of women whose linguistic duplicity
matches that of rakes, while Olivia in Wycherley's The Plain Dealer (16j6)
reveals with cold precision the dangerous power and influence of a woman
skilled in seductive language. These dishonest females divorce the notion of
honor from any moral reference; honor collapses into reputation, and
reputation suffers not from private iniquity but from public indiscretion. In
a marvelous syllogism, Lady Fidget of The Country Wife argues that
adultery with a private citizen is not a crime. A man who is not a
gentleman, she reasons blithely, lacks the attributes of procured status or
noble birth necessary to harm women of quality. In this self-justifying
formula, the woman's higher social status negates her illicit amour with a
common man. " 'Tis not an injury to a husband till it be an injury to our
honours," Lady Fidget explains, "so that a woman of honour loses no
honour with a private person" (2.1.456-59). 8 Rectitude and honesty have
no place in Lady Fidget's resourceful but specious interpretation of honor.
She and her virtuous gang manipulate terms to their own social advantage
and sexual pleasure, and while their spunky inventiveness might be
vindicated if not esteemed in the twentieth century, it is soundly satirized in
the seventeenth. In a clearly gender-determined dramatic convention, the
sexual bravado and amorous guile of rake-heroes become sexual rapacious-
ness and hypocrisy in women.
The stunningly businesslike Olivia of The Plain Dealer endures a far
more stringent reproof than her droll sisters above. Expertly juggling a
diverse assortment of men, she flatters them by mirroring back their every
opinion, procuring their money and jewels with seasoned ease. Learning
too late of his ill-use, the fop Novel laments that Olivia "stands in the
drawing room like the glass, ready for all comers to set their gallantry by
her, and, like the glass too, lets no man go from her unsatisfied with
himself" (4.2.112-15). 9 Revealing his susceptibility to this flattering
mirror, Manly, the eponymous hero of the play, tells a friend that Olivia's
tongue, as well as face, ne'er knew artifice; nor ever did her words or looks
contradict her heart. She is all truth and hates the lying, masking, daubing
world as I do, for which I love her and for which I think she dislikes not me.
For she has often shut out of her conversation for mine the gaudy, fluttering
parrots of the town, apes and echoes of men only, and refused their common-

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place pert chat, flattery and submissions, to be entertained with my sullen

bluntness and honest love" (i. 1.653-60).

This encomium reveals not only the depth of Manly's misapprehension, but
also the criteria of a proper consort, criteria embodied in the bemused,
dedicated heroine Fidelia. Although The Plain Dealer heartily mocks
Manley's stubborn conviction and faulty judgments, it wholeheartedly
reaffirms the value of his ideals. Olivia's deceitful simulation of these ideal
traits clearly makes her a monstrous and menacing character. Recounting
her counterfeited reverence of Manley, the wily deceiver merrily reveals her
base nature, confessing conspiratorially to her two foppish devotees: "I
knew he loved his own singular moroseness so well as to dote upon a copy
of it; wherefore I feigned an hatred to the world too that he might love me
in earnest" (4.2.250-53). Like Horner of The Country Wife, Olivia uses
art and affectation masterfully; unlike that artful poseur, however, she is
brutally exposed and punished.
Manly makes out quite well at the end of The Plain Dealer. His chagrin
and disgrace are redeemed at face value as the lovely Olivia's mocking
reflection of Manly turns back on itself. In a near-literal equivalent of being
caught with her pants down, Olivia is apprehended in her private cham-
bers, rudely exposed before all as a cheat and fraud. Olivia's dismayed cry
of "What means this!" quickly gives way to her unhappy admission: "Oh,
'tis too sure, as well as my shame! which I'll go hide forever" (5.3.89-90).
Unmasked and figuratively naked before all, she banishes herself from the
jeering company. The solicitous and virtuous Fidelia is ready to fill the
vacancy, eagerly offering Manly a fresh self-image, along with her estate,
her family's status, her virtue, and her agreeable reflection of his honest
ways. As she surrenders all she owns to Manly, she tells him that she had
abandoned her affluent life and "multitudes of pretenders" in order to
pursue his love. "I left," she explains, "to follow you, sir, having in several
public places seen you and observed your actions thoroughly, with admira-
tion, when you were too much in love to take notice of mine, which yet
was but too visible" (5.3.173-82). Fidelia's adoring speech restores Manly
fully; he is resurrected through and in her eyes as his original self.
The enigmatic Angelica enacts just such a Fidelia-like redemptive man-
euver in the final act of Love for Love (1695). Before ridiculing Sir
Sampson Legend for his ludicrous pretensions to her hand, she tells his
astounded son Valentine: "Had I the World to give you, it cou'd not make
worthy of so generous and faithful a Passion: here's my Hand, my Heart
was always yours, and struggl'd very hard to make this utmost Trial of
your Virtue" (5.1.608-10).10 In one quick summation, Valentine's an-

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guished and uncertain performance as a lover and a man has been ratified
and rewarded. Angelica's coolly distant and disdainful air converts to
honeyed compliance. Rather gratuitously instructing the already chastened
Sir Sampson, Angelica tells him: "Learn to be a good Father, or you'll never
get a second Wife. I always lov'd your Son, and hated your unforgiving
Nature. I was resolv'd to try him to the utmost; I have try'd you too, and
know you both. You have not more Faults than he has Virtues; and 'tis
hardly more Pleasure to me, that I can make him and myself happy, than
that I can punish you" (5.1.622-27).
The last-act self-revelations of Fidelia and Angelica complement the
forced exposures of the fallen women. Unlike a number of heroines in the
comedies of manners, these two women actively engage in amending the
ways of their world. This unusually energetic activity is explained as self-
protective facades, ruses to stave off the moral dangers of a corrupt world.
As a cross-dressed cabin boy, Fidelia seemed quite at ease as the sardoni-
cally perceptive commentator on the sexual and moral foibles of human-
kind, an attitude and knowledge she seems to shed, however, with her
masculine dress. Angelica's nonchalant comportment as the cruel teaser of
Valentine and sarcastic taunter of her silly elders transforms into a
compelled charade as she dissolves into sweet submission in the final lines.
Although the metamorphoses take Manly and Valentine by surprise, the
narratives take care to show that these put-upon heroes are men of
substance who deserve this favorable turn of events. The timely reversals of
fortunes that unite heroes to their heroines re-establish proper gender and
sexual hierarchies and consolidate all with the pledge of marriage.
The dramatic interest in the gender protocol and sexual activities of
women reflects a more pressing dramatic concern with the gender protocol
and sexual prerogatives of men. In the comedies of manners, real rakes
don't do business, they don't become salacious old men, and they don't eat
quiche. Manly of The Plain Dealer and Mirabel of The Way of the World
equate their concern about and disapproval of their lovers' willingness to
receive fops and fools with the conviction that those casual associations
serve as unflattering reflections on the heroes themselves. Reviling the
effeminate dress and manner of Olivia's two suitors, an infuriated Manly
proclaims, "I take not your contempt of me worse than your esteem or
civility for these things here" (2.1.631-33). In response to Fainall's
question "Are you jealous as often as you see Witwoud entertained by
Millamant?" a peevish Mirabel replies, "Of her understanding I am, if not
her person" (1.1.616-64).11 Heroines perform important identificatory
services for heroes, mirroring back heroes' flattering sense of themselves
and refracting the notice of fools. As Olivia in The Plain Dealer

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demonstrates cogently, the results of an awry reflection can be devastating,

at least temporarily, for the hero.
Comedies of manners defend an ideal of aristocratic, urbane English
masculinity. The menaces to this standard include not only conniving,
competent women, but also Frenchified fops, rich, libidinous old men, and
aspiring businessmen. The comedies work in very obvious ways to feminize
this socially-ominous triad of young fops, old lechers, and greedy busi-
nessmen. Rake-heroes distinguish themselves from all three. The fit compo-
site of aristocratic composure and manly virility, the hero sets his identity
against these fatuous contenders and fixes it securely in the admiration of a
worthy young heroine. It is the heroine who authenticates the hero; her
attraction to him indicates his preeminence over the fops and lechers who
mimic him and the businessmen who find making money more rewarding
than making love.
Unwittingly complicitous in their own exposure, these silly characters
court sexual ripostes that disclose their various incapacities. Their absurd
self-promotion suggests that their undoing is well-earned. Fops inadver-
tently reveal the inadequacy of their sexual performance, the fictional
status of their alleged intrigues, or the (disease-generated) flagging of their
sexual desire. In like fashion, lechers fall into comic traps that lay bare their
unseemly desires either by foiling their plans, leaving the old fools bitterly
unsatisfied, or by fulfilling them in an unwanted and humiliating manner.
In the pattern of the obscene joke, with the disclosure of inadequate
masculinity, the victims' sexual organs are metaphorically unveiled and
again, like those of women, found to be lacking or in some way smaller and
less potent than those of real men. Manners comedy emasculates all these
fools; it ridicules, exposes, and deforms, simultaneously making the clever
hero appear discerning and sexually powerful.
The incompetent, misguided follies of these substandard males comically
complement the confident, aggressive sexual and social assays of defective
females - those hypocritical and depraved ladies of fashion, lascivious
elderly matrons, and loose, litigious widows who behave in inappropriately
masculine ways. Like these women, fops, lechers, and businessmen are also
ridiculed and discredited. Lacking the winning traits of the heroes, these
characters haplessly demonstrate their unflattering kinship to those discon-
tented women, proving themselves in the process to be either inferior or
disreputable. Their own puerility obscures the spectators' recognition of
the overdetermined hostility of these comic attacks. Both the excesses of
aggressive women and the deficiencies of inadequate men represent imita-
tions of attitudes celebrated in the rake-hero's refined manhood; both are
doomed to fail; and for both the cost of humiliating failure is high. That the

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plays consistently introduce and then link the three male types - fops, old
lechers, and businessmen - aligning them with feminine traits while
contrasting them to aggressive women, attest to the strain the male trio
places on traditional definitions of masculine behavior.
In demonstrating the hero's overall superiority, The Man of Mode, for
instance, takes pains to illustrate the contrasting deficiencies of the
lecherous Old Bellair as well as those of the foolish Sir Fopling, and
Congreve's Love for Love unfolds in detail the misbegotten delusions of
potent appeal harbored by Sir Sampson Legend. Flawed versions of the
rake-heroes, fops and lechers attempt clumsy imitations of rakish seduc-
tions that almost always end in their own embarrassment. Like those bad
imitators, businessmen too are routinely unmasked and disgraced. Having
sacrificed their "natural" masculine appetites to economic enterprise,
businessmen prove themselves to be money-grubbing fools who deserve to
be cozened and cuckolded.
In Wycherley's The Country Wife, Sir Jaspar Fidget recruits the presum-
ably impotent Horner to escort Lady Fidget and her friends about the
town. Always too busy to attend to his wife himself, Sir Jaspar allows his
keen interest in business to blind him to the sexual cravings and activities of
his spouse. In the infamous china scene, as Sir Jaspar unwittingly hands
over his wife to Horner for an amorous interlude, the irrepressible Horner
pretends general annoyance with such cooperative husbands:

A pox! can't you keep your impertinent wives at home? Some men are
troubled with the husbands, but I with the wives; but I'd have you to know,
since I cannot be your journeyman by night, I will not be your drudge by day,
to squire your wife about, and be your man of straw, or scarecrow only to
pies and jays, that would be nibbling at your forbidden fruit. (4.3.)12

Horner's feigned indignation conveys a real warning. Men whose primary

concerns lie elsewhere than the tending of their most valuable possessions
will earn the consequences of this misapplied regard, either by marrying or
creating wives who dissemble and betray.
Counterpoints to businessman, fops serve as another unacceptable
masculine alternative that must be defeated by the superior intelligence and
clever rhetoric of rake-heroes by the time the play is over. As satiric
portrayals of overtly feminized masculine behavior, fops indicate a parti-
cular historical anxiety about the traditional definition of masculinity, an
anxiety concomitant with the rise of the bourgeois class and the expanding
prospect of social mobility. Restoration life seems to have provided
opportunities for a more fluid sexuality than its comedies approve of or
allow. 13 The fops who preen and parade across Restoration stages are not

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depicted as homosexual, if by that one means sexually attracted to

members of the same sex. They are not portrayed as heterosexual either, if
by that one means sexually attracted to members of the opposite sex. They
are heterosexual threats, however. The threat lies in their ability to attract
and marry backward, silly, and pretentious women of great fortunes,
thereby depriving the rake-heroes - the representatives of appropriate
English masculinity - of opportunities for securing financial maintenance.
Although a comic business, marriage is an important social and economic
matter in Restoration plays, as it was in Restoration life, and the potential
marital success of fops both affronts and imputes established notions of
heterosexual interactions.
The unrelentingly derisive onslaught against fops in manners comedy can
be attributed to the very real peril fops pose in relation to the consolidation
of masculine characteristics. At issue is the composition of an authentic
English male, a composition determined by elegant dress, cultured de-
meanor, true wit, and libertine social philosophy, characteristics fops affect
if not fathom. When the maid Pert in The Man of Mode defends Fopling on
the grounds that he is just as handsome and as great a gallant as Dorimant,
Mrs Loveit impatiently rejects the comparison. Loveit knows full well that
Fopling is not equal to Dorimant, but she also recognizes that for some,
he's close enough. While it seems clear that the hero is far superior to these
other men, there is a nagging insistence about this apparent superiority that
belies the confident characterization. Dorimant can still be jealous of a fool
like Fopling. Although unquestionably comic inferiors, these characters
possess a menacing social potency that the plays are careful first to establish
and then to defuse. It is no accident that Dorimant insists that Loveit
publicly denounce and humiliate Sir Fopling.
Fops may not particularly care for women, but they understand them.
Like women, fops like to gossip, primp, and play cards. And significantly,
fops' ability to speak beguilingly to certain credulous young women can
rob expectant beaus of great fortunes. In Congreve's Love for Love, the
provincial Miss Prue strays rather quickly from the path of virtue, aided by
the step-by-step directions of delicate fop Tattle. "All well-bred Persons
Lie," Tattle explains to this eager trail blazer:
Besides, you are a Woman; you must never speak what you think; Your words
must contradict your thoughts; but your Actions may contradict your words.
So, when I ask you if you can Love me, you must say no, but you must Love
me too. If I tell you are Handsome, you must deny it, and say I flatter you.
But you must think yourself more Charming than I speak you, and like me for
the Beauty which I say you have as much as if I had it myself. If I ask you to
Kiss me, you must be angry, but you must not refuse me. If I ask you for

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more, you must be more angry - but more complying; and as soon as ever I
make you say you'll cry out, you must be sure to hold your Tongue.
(2.1.663-76)
In this disquisition, women are obliged at all times to conform to the code
of pretense, a code with which Tattle seems perfectly at home. If one
rigorously follows Tattle's guidelines, no amorous affirmation should be
taken at face value and no sexual check complied with.
Later, further abetting her fall into knowledge, Tattle asks Miss Prue,
"And won't you show me, pretty Miss, where your Bed-Chamber is?"
(702-03):

Miss Prue: No, indeed won't I: but I'll run there, and hide myself from you
behind the Curtains.
Tattle: I'll follow you.
Miss Prue: Ah, but I'll hold the Door with both Hands, and be angry - and
you shall push me down before you come in.
Tattle: No, I'll come in first, and push you down afterwards.
Miss Prue: Will you? Then I'll be more angry, and more complying.
Tattle: Then I'll make you cry out.
Miss Prue: Oh, but you shan't, for I'll hold my Tongue. (2.1.704-16)
Tattle's lesson inculcates in Miss Prue the one absolute of feminine
discourse: a woman can never mean "no." All the women in the play live
by this maxim and use it in more or less skillful ways to get what they
want. Miss Prue is delighted to find that she can indicate her sexual
willingness while denying it, that she is relieved of verbal compliance and,
hence, moral responsibility. Tattle reads Miss Prue perfectly; he knows
how to cajole and to illustrate, and his extravagant manner tempts and
delights her. More to the point, he seems not only to approve but to
practice precisely the same coy, immoral relations he rehearses for this
avid sexual tyro. An easy and effective tutor, Tattle acts quickly to test
Miss Prue's rote understanding of this doctrine of feminine compliance.
Tattle is both too like a successful rake and too like a hypocritical prude.
His comfortable residence in both gender categories makes him a dis-
turbing gender anomaly. Although punished at the end of the play - he is
tricked into marrying his counterpart, the scheming, aggressively licen-
tious, and poor Mrs Frail - his seductive skill is neither undone nor
contained.
In play after play in late seventeenth-century comedy, fops serve as both
comic foils and sexual threats to the rake's progress. They never succeed
against the rake, but they are not amateurs in country matters. Their
effeminate, Frenchified behavior affords them an access to women that the
rakes (and, through them, the plays themselves) disdain but nonetheless

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seem jealous of and worried about. The heroes' utter conviction in their
own superior understandings neither eclipses nor appeases their apprehen-
sions of women's negligent tolerance of these affected blockheads. The
extraordinary capacity of fops to disconcert testifies to a deep-seated
unease that is never completely assuaged by the acquisition of the heroine
or by embarrassing the coxcomb, an unease that derives from fundamental
questions about proper masculine conduct, natural (that is, normative)
sexual relations, and established social dogma.
Although I have concentrated on comedies in discussing gender, sexuality
and marriage, heroic and pathetic dramas are equally attentive to these
issues.14 Shifting gender definitions, complicated or deviant sexual entan-
glements, and unhappy or unsuitable marriages function dramatically as
causes, means, and results in these plays. They become metaphors for, as
well as the consequence of, political turmoil, social unrest, and moral
confusion. In the overwrought dramas of Thomas Otway and Nathaniel
Lee especially, male siblings and patriarchs struggle among themselves for
the sexual possession of women who are, or are comparable to, sisters and
daughters. Sexual obsessions undermine potent leadership and explode
familial boundaries. Male rivalries that always end in bloodshed pit
brothers, fathers, and friends in battles that cause social and state upheaval.
Marriage serves to inflame rather than quench illicit desires. Passionate
testimonies of trust and fondness collapse into ecstatic avowals of enmity,
generating unspoken and unresolved erotic tensions. The flip side of the
polished, carefully tempered, and wittily circumscribed clarifications of
gender, sexuality, and marriage in manners comedies, pathetic dramas
relate what happens when clarification ceases, when gender roles shift or
breakdown, and when sexual desire runs amok.
In Restoration drama, questions of gender, sexuality, and marriage
generate the narrative action; issues of gender, sexuality, and marriage
inform the subtext; and solutions proposed in terms of gender, sexuality,
and marriage comprise the outcomes. The plays dramatize contests over
the control and meaning of these terms and categories, a contest all the
more significant because of circumstances beyond the control of the
dramatic action: the historical interplay between a refined social realm and
a newly developing bourgeois sphere informed in part by sentimental
apprehensions and private moral convictions. As the brittle, irreverent, and
promiscuous comedies give way to dramas exploring the effects of con-
science and moral convictions, the relation of gender, sexuality, and
marriage is reconfigured and the categories are revised.15 The banter and
appeal of a witty, well-meaning beauty seem more the stuff of tragedy than
comedy as the eighteenth century begins, leading not to marriage but

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disgrace and death, as in Nicholas Rowe's The Tragedy of Jane Shore

(1714). The dissolute conduct of a staunch libertine begets equally
debauched behavior in his wife, as a morally upright, clever younger
brother wins the hand of a somewhat silly but amiable young woman,
revealing in the process the true qualities necessary to be a tender husband
in Richard Steele's play of that name. Sophisticated, amusing intercourse
and liberal exchanges among men and women who value style and status
make an encore appearance in John Gay's splendid satiric comedy, The
Beggar's Opera (1728), where highwaymen and prisoners, prostitutes and
jailer's daughters, ape their betters in language and appearance, thoroughly
mocking and degrading the hackneyed, clearly unacceptable principles they
espouse. As the Restoration comes to an end, the rake-hero becomes the
foil of kinder, gentler males who succeed by moral persuasion, and the
sharp, seductive heroine succumbs to repentant or innocent distress, or
hardens into depravity.

NOTES
1 The accuracy or validity of the category "comedy of manners" has been disputed
by some, but I find Arthur H. Scouten's definitional distinction still quite useful.
See Scouten's "Notes toward a History of Restoration Comedy," PQ, 45.1
(January 1966), 62-70. For a forceful argument against this grouping of the
comedies, see Robert Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late
Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 32-62.
2 Interpreting Ladies: Women, Wit, and Morality in the Restoration Comedy of
Manners (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994). This book provides
further elaborations of the ways in which particular comedies use satire to
expose, humiliate, and privilege characters.
3 Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans, and ed.
James Strachey (New York: Norton: i960), pp. 140-58.
4 Thomas Fujimura in The Restoration Comedy of Wit (Princeton University
Press, 1952) first introduced the Hobbesian notions of naturalism, skepticism,
and wit into the discussion of Restoration drama, arguing that the keenly witty,
libertine rake-hero embodied Hobbesian principles of human behavior.
5 This and all subsequent references to the text are taken from The Man of Mode,
in The Plays of Sir George Etherege, ed. Michael Cordner (Cambridge
University Press, 1982).
6 For differing accounts of the characteristics of the heroine, see R. C. Sharma,
Themes and Conventions in the Comedy of Manners (New Delhi: Asia
Publishing House, 1965); Virginia Ogden Birdsall, Wild Civility: the English
Comic Spirit on the Restoration Stage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1971); Donald Bruce, Topics of Restoration Comedy (New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1974); and Harold Weber, The Restoration Rake-Hero: Transformations
in Sexual Understanding in Seventeenth-Century England (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1986).

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7 For a brief delineation of the sexual connotations of the terms "honesty" and
"conversation," see the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press,

8 William Wycherley, The Country Wife, The Plays of William Wycherley, ed.
Peter Holland (Cambridge University Press, 1981).
9 This and all subsequent references to the text are taken from The Plain Dealer,
The Plays of William Wycherley.
10 This and all subsequent references to the text are taken from Love for Love,
The Comedies of William Congreve, ed. Anthony G. Henderson (Cambridge
University Press, 1982).
11 The Way of the World, The Comedies of William Congreve.
12 The Country Wife, The Plays of William Wycherley.
13 Kristina Straub, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual
Ideology (Princeton University Press, 1992) analyzes how public perceptions of
the immorality of actors and actresses influenced gender expectations in the
eighteenth century.
14 See chapter 11, above.
15 See Straub, Sexual Suspects.

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