Bumpkin by Day, Enchantress by Night

mask

Yesterday I talked about Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer (1773) and male shyness.  Today I discuss another Neo-Restoration comedy, Hannah Cowley’s The Belle’s Stratagem (1780), and how it addresses an equally thorny relationship problem: low self-esteem.

In the play Letetia and Doricourt are to marry, even though they haven’t seen each other since they were children.  Together their fathers have bought them an estate.  If either rejects the other, however, he or she forfeits it. 

Letitia has long fantasized about Doricourt and her fantasies are confirmed when she sees how dashing and cosmopolitan he has become.  She fears, however, that he will see her as a letdown after all the sophisticated women he’s encountered on the continent.

There is reason for her concern.  Doricourt says that it’s not enough that she is a “fine girl” with good complexion, shape, and features.  She also needs “spirit! fire! l’air enjoué! that something, that nothing, which every body feels, and which no one can describe, in the restless charmers of Italy and France.”

Because he’s an honorable man and because a large fortune is at stake, he’s prepared to go through with the marriage.  But she’s afraid that he will be indifferent to her.  If there’s no love, she says, she will refuse to be his wife. 

When her friend Mrs. Racket, setting a low bar for marriage, says that once she’s married she should have nothing to complain of, Letitia replies, “Nothing to complain of!  Heavens! shall I marry the man I adore with such an expectation as that?” And later, “The woman that has not touched the heart of a man before he leads her to the altar has scarcely a chance to charm it when possession and security turn their powerful arms against her.”

Letitia’s stratagem is two-fold.  First, she will present herself as a bumpkin (the 18th century term is maukin) and make him hate her.  As she reasons, “’tis much easier to convert a sentiment into its opposite than to transform indifference into tender passion.”

She will then get him to love her by dressing up in masquerade and courting him as an unknown woman.

I see lack of self-esteem being at the core of this play, even though (for the most part) Letitia doesn’t lack in self esteem (although she is ready to fire her hairdresser and throw away her dress when her first encounter with Doricourt goes badly).   That’s because comedies don’t necessarily show us our fears directly.  Rather, they frame them in such a way that they seem less threatening.

To give an example mentioned by my student Lindsay Myer, the film How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days seems to be about a journalist writing a story about what women can do to get rid of a guy.  In reality, however, the underlying fear addressed by the movie is being rejected because one is unworthy.  Women (and men too) sometimes obsess over what they have done wrong after their boy/girlfriend leaves them.  By showing us  a character trying to lose a guy, the film has given us a safe way of laughing at this painful anxiety.

In the same way, Letitia works to make Doricourt hate her.  She does deliberately what women fear they will do accidentally and comes across as an uneducated, ill-mannered, and sluttish yokel.  Doricourt is repulsed.

Then, in a masquerade ball, she turns on the charm so that he is ready to drop Letitia (and the fortune along with her) and marry this unknown.  It’s a wish fulfillment, of course, to think we can suddenly become a dream girl (or guy), as fascinating as all those other women who make us feel inferior.   The play’s happy ending is also wish fulfillment: Doricourt learns that the woman he is supposed to marry and the woman he dreams of are one and the same.

When Letitia asks him what he wants her to be, a down-home English wife or an exotic foreign one, he delivers a reponse that will bolster any woman’s self-esteem.  Here’s their exchange:

Letitia: You see, I can be anything; choose then my character—your taste shall fix it.  Shall I be an English wife?—or breaking from the bonds of Nature and Education, step forth to the world in all the captivating glare of foreign manners?

Doricourt: You shall be nothing but yourself—nothing can be captivating that you are not.

Of course, Letitia was trying to just be herself at their first encounter and he was looking for something else.  Hence the need for her stratagem.  Doricourt acknowledges as much: “I will not wrong your penetration by pretending that you won my heart at the first interview.”  But then he adds, “but you have won my whole soul—your person, your face, your mind, I would not exchange for those of any other woman breathing.”

His acknowledgment reminds me of the romantic comedy Hitch, where a man has a relationship coach.  Being a comedy, the relationship works out in spite of the coach, not because of him, but the point is made that some artifice was necessary if he was to get his foot in the door.  I think the same point gets made in Tootsie, where Dustin Hoffman can get close to Jessica Lang only as a woman, not as a man (where he fails miserably). 

In short, just being yourself, these comedies admit, only works in the long run.  So make some effort to appeal to his or her fantasies.  Besides, who’s to say that part of you isn’t the woman behind the mask?

But the larger point still holds: either he/she will value you for the real you or you don’t want him/her anyway.  Cowley gives us a strong female heroine who makes that quite clear.

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