Norman Holland in his book The First Modern Comedies proposed that Restoration Comedy presents a wrong way plot which is pitted against the right way plot. The right way is the right way of true love in which the characters are educated throughout the play and learn the values of true judgment.
The Wrong Way Plot: Deception and Pretense
The two main strands of The Country Wife’s plot are built on deception; deception of appearance sold as the truth. The pretenders to virtue and the pretenders to intelligence guard their reputation by seeming virtuous. All the characters in The Country Wife pretend to virtue but there is no substance. Throughout the play there is a gap between appearance and reality:
- Pinchwife is deceiving himself
- Margery is deceiving Pinchwife
- Horner prides himself in deceiving the husbands
- The Ladies of honor deceive their husbands and each other.
All the characters in the play seem unable to control their passions and emotions. They want to pretend to virtue but they are tyrannized by their passions. Harcourt affirms that “men are contrary to what they seem, they pretend to love but their ruling passion is appetite”. In The Country Wife, men pretend to wit but turn out to be fops (Sparkish, Pinchwife). Women pretend to honor and reputation, but this is usually a pretense to hide their false honor.
The Right Way Plot: The True Love Plot
The third plot of Alithea and Harcourt contrasts with the other characters of the play. Alithea gradually learns not to accept appearances. In the beginning of the play Alithea is engaged to Sparkish, a fop, whom she likes because he does not seem to be jealous. However she later learns he is not marrying her for love but for material reasons. She moves away from foppish Sparkish to true love rather than lack of jealousy.
Alithea is educated and learns to distinguish between indifference and true love. She becomes aware that Harcourt offers her true love. He believes in her virtue and manages to prove his earlier statement that he is in fact unlike Sparkish: “could no more suspect your virtue than his own constancy in his love to you”.
Holland’s reading took Wycherley’s morality into innovative seriousness and interpreted the play as representing two bad kinds of masculinity represented in Horner’s liberalism and Pinchwife’s possessiveness. In contrast Harcourt represents the golden mean, the true lover who advocates truth and constancy as the crux of true love. Constancy in love is ridiculed and undermined in The Country Wife but ultimately Harcourt spells out the meaning of true love.
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Plot Summary: The Country Wife by William Wycherley
Maureen Cutajar - Maureen is a professional IT project manager, web writer, and eBook formatter with educational background in English literature and ...
