Extreme Jealousy, a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

As I’ve been writing recently about Restoration and 18th Century couples comedies, allow me one last post on a brilliant but cold play, William Wycherley’s Country Wife (1675).  I gained new insight into it when my student Stephanie Gonzalez noted that the jealousy theme in the play is one that she is very familiar with.  She says she encountered characters from the play in her high school.

Male insecurity is the major focus of Country Wife.  A notorious rake, Horner, lives to make cuckolds of husbands—to put horns on their heads, as the expression once was.  Because he is so notorious, however, the husbands keep him at a distance, which means that he has to come up with a special strategy for approaching their wives. 

He has a doctor (Quack) brute it about that he has been rendered impotent by venereal disease.  The husbands rush to have him squire their wives about, in part so that he act as eunuch chaperone, in part to rub his impotence in his face.   Having abused the husbands, he then proceeds to “disabuse” the wives.

One extremely jealous character, Pinchwife, has not heard the news about Horner and is obsessed with keeping him away from his new country wife, the innocent Marjorie.  The logic of the play, however, is that the tighter Pinchwife tries to hold on to her, the more he sets himself up to be cuckolded.

For example, he warns her, in elaborate detail, against London’s temptations, thereby making them all the more enticing to her.  He disguises her as a man, which only allows Horner to get closer to her.  Finally, he delivers her to Horner, thinking that he is instead delivering him his sister Alithea in marriage (thereby removing Horner as a cuckolding threat).  His jealousy is extreme and out of control.

Contrasted with Pinchwife is Sparkish, the fop character who is supposed to marry Pinchwife’s sister.  Seeing Pinchwife’s jealousy as a sign that he lacks confidence in his manly prowess, Sparkish goes to the opposite extreme and all but pushes his future wife into the arms of other men.  Rather than this being a demonstration of his manliness, however, it just shows that he too is obsessed by appearance.  He is as insecure as Pinchwife and eventually loses his fiancé to a much better man.

Then there is Sir Jasper Fidget, who is so caught up in the politics of the court that he neglects his wife.  It is he who gets Horner to function as a chaperone.

The play is remarkable for its wit and intricate plot.  But perhaps because I am not particularly insecure about my manhood (I have other issues), I’ve always had difficulty relating to it.  Therefore it was fascinating for me to learn that it describes at least certain high school dating situations.

Stephanie says that she knew boys who were so afraid of losing their girlfriends that they would force them to dress down (although not as men) in order not to attract other guys.  Or who watched over their every move and worried themselves sick when they couldn’t monitor them.

She also talked about fellow students, sometimes athletes, who pretended not to care what their girlfriends did, even though in fact they cared very much. We may have not progressed as far beyond the 17^th century as we would like to think.

I love the inexorable nature of Wycherley’s play, how characters seem to be driven to make happen what they most fear.  In fact, I wonder if there’s a subconscious drive on the part of Pinchwife, Sparkish, and Fidgit to have their women betray them.  The fear of being cuckolded, of being revealed as less than a man, is so painful that it may come almost as a relief to have the worst happen.  The reality isn’t as bad as the anxiety.

Horner, in a strange way, becomes one of the moral centers of the play.  When Pinchwife, once a libertine himself, admits that he used to have difficulty controlling his whores, Horner says, “you only married to keep a whore to yourself.”  And then, “But let me tell you, women, as you say, are like soldiers, made constant and loyal by good pay rather than oaths and covenants.” 

Women want to be paid in respect and trust.  Alithea, the most positive woman in the play, makes this clear.  Sister to Pinchwife, she at first thinks that Sparkish is the man for her because he won’t monitor her every move.  She learns instead that he is no less jealous, despite appearances.

Although I appreciate the play’s insights into jealousy, I’m still not entirely sure what else the play has to teach us.  What are we to make of Horner’s weird integrity?  He is not hung up on what others think of him (I guess that’s true self assurance) and is willing to let the world laugh at him just so he can sleep with their wives.  Furthermore, he keeps the wives’ secret safe rather than meanly boasting about his conquests.  He is almost a figure of liberation in a society that is obsessed with money and reputation.

The play’s conclusion is darkly brilliant.  Marjorie, the innocent country wife, has fallen in love with Horner and is in a position to reveal to the world that he is not in fact impotent.  If she does, the society as it is constructed will self-destruct.  The men will all be shown to be cuckolds and the wives will lose their honor (a word that is bandied about in the most cynical of ways).

Therefore everyone persuades Marjorie to lie and then pretends to believe her lie.  The play achieves its “happy” ending by corrupting the one truth teller in the play.

The play was written at a very decadent time, the reign of Charles II, so maybe, in its very cynicism, the play was to serve as a wake-up call.  It can function for us as a reminder that only if we operate out of integrity and trust can our relationships provides us with a deep sense of peace.  Anything else and we twist ourselves into painful contortions.