Wit in Witless: Emergent Feminism in Restoration Women

Abstract

            This article will attempt to demolish two shibboleths conventionally associated with the readings of Restoration Comedy---namely, this sexually charged type of drama was oriented towards patriarchy and misogyny and that it turned some types of women into comic stereotypes. There were vital changes in the attitudes to women in the theatre from 1660 to 1700. A novel space emerged for the female playwrights like Aphra Behn, Mary Pix, Delariviere Manley and Catharine Trotter to write and see their plays being performed. The women as actors on the stage got new freedom from bourgeois assumptions about women being objects of refined feelings, delicacy, purity and passivity. Due to the increasing female presence an anonymous male writer satirized the female dramatists in a 1697 play entitled The Female Wits.    The eminent male writers were far more ambiguous towards the ladies. In The Country Wife, William Wycherley was often querulous about masculine sexual dominance, phallic aggression and female submissiveness. In George Farquhar’s plays, there is an instability between a recognition of female freedom and an adherence to patriarchal norms. In Congreve’s The Double Dealer, the three important women characters, Lady Touchwood, Lady Plyant and Lady Froth are depicted as women who propose a female ethics as an alternative to the prevalent patriarchal ethics. In Congreve’s The Way of the World, Lady Wishfort is indicated as an educated lady who has a fine collection of books in her private closet. Particularly, what should be probed at are the contexts and the circumstances the female characters were in, their problems, their struggle to attract men of position, their quest for a consolidated identity and their anger at the bondage of stereo-typification. It is interesting to note that there are anticipations in Restoration Comedy of what Luce Irigaray in An Ethics of Sexual Difference asked of “man---humanity---to glimpse something other. Something not of his world. Not built to his specifications.”