45 pages • 1 hour read
William WycherleyThe Country Wife
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1675A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Social Perception of Innocence in the City Versus in the Country
Pinchwife imagines the country as a place of innocence and the city as one of wickedness. The title is a pun on the first syllable of the word “country,” implying that his purpose of finding any wife is to use her as an object for sex. Pinchwife agrees that he only married because he “could never keep a whore to [him]self” (56). He attempts to keep Margery from experiencing the city, planning to rush her back to the country as soon as Alithea’s wedding is complete, but she does so anyway. The country represents a place where women have fewer rights, as illustrated when Margery admits that she never wanted to marry Pinchwife in the first place. Pinchwife believes there are far fewer opportunities for a woman to be exposed to temptation in the country. Pinchwife hopes that he can train and control a country wife, whereas a city wife would not accept his authority so willingly. To Pinchwife, the city is a corrupting force, and the city life has even tainted Alithea, whose claim to her virtuous reputation is legitimate.
Although the city is a corrupting force in the play, this corruption is not necessarily unfavorable. City women who are of noble breeding are much more adept at cuckolding their husbands, and Margery’s exposure to the city is what opens her eyes. At first, Margery is guileless and tells her husband unabashedly about her romantic interest in Horner. But as the play continues, she learns how to fool Pinchwife. She does not know that she can send a letter within the city, but once she learns that she can, she uses the mail to communicate without her husband’s knowledge. By the end of the play, Margery has concocted an elaborate (if ridiculous) plot that succeeds in convincing her husband to deliver her to Horner. It’s a plan that rivals Harcourt’s false twin or Horner’s fake impotence. At the end, Margery’s attitude about her marriage changes because she has seen the city and now understands its pitfalls. Access to the city’s social structure has allowed Margery to develop more of her own agency.
Illness and Disease as Consequences of Romance
In Act IV, Margery confesses, “I have got the London disease they call love. I am sick of my husband, and for my gallant” (151). The city becomes not only a force for corruption, but also a disease. Later in the act, Sparkish explains, “[C]uckolding, like the smallpox, comes with a fear, and you may keep your wife as much as you will out of danger of infection, but if her constitution incline her to’t, she’ll have it sooner or later, by the world” (153-54). The infectiousness of love makes it sound destructive, or even deadly, much like smallpox. For Pinchwife, love is a disease that makes a person weak and unscrupulous. Margery, who submitted to her marriage in the country, does not discover love and what love should mean in a marriage until she goes to the city. For those who do not have to be concerned with propriety, love is not a disease. Lucy refers to Alithea’s obsession with her honor and upholding her word as “a disease in the head” (117), as if resisting love is the illness rather than submitting to it.
While Margery’s construction of the disease of love is romantic and semi-chaste, the play also connects love to venereal disease. When Horner visits Paris—a city with an even more infamous reputation for love—he leverages that visit to claim that he caught a venereal disease that robbed him of his ability to perform sexually. After Pinchwife warns Horner not to sleep with his wife, threatening that he will become violent if Horner cuckolds him, Horner asks, “Why, wert thou not well cured of thy last clap?” (146). Horner’s flippant reply suggests that love comes with the expectation of frequent venereal diseases. As a former womanizer, Pinchwife has likely experienced the same, but has now distanced himself from that life. However, these venereal diseases, aside from the fictional one that made Horner a eunuch, are curable. While Pinchwife threatens physical violence, which could have permanent consequences, love is a disease that can be cured.
Male Relationships and Competition
Literary theorist Eve Sedgwick wrote a well-known article about the homosocial (or non-sexual) relationships between men in The Country Wife. She points out that by nature, cuckolding is an act that one man does to another. Women are objects who they use to this end. This is emphasized in the way the men treat womanizing as a game. Horner sacrifices some of his masculinity in the eyes of other men to win this game of getting away with sleeping with other men’s wives. Although Margery is attractive, Horner becomes sexually interested in her because Pinchwife is invested in keeping him away from her. His lie about impotence makes it too easy to cuckold Sir Jaspar, and he becomes bored with the women and with Jaspar’s constant presence in his house. And at the end of the play, when Horner is in danger of Pinchwife catching him, he tries to send Margery home, uninterested in her once he has succeeded in winning her away from her husband.
Sparkish seems to want the other men to cuckold him. If he has a wife who other men want, not only does he possess something of value, but they will deem him worthy of this game. He does not have much skill in attracting women, as is clear by his treatment of Alithea, and he certainly does not have the wit or guile to fool other men. Thus, Harcourt can easily fool Sparkish. Likewise, Horner’s tactic is to keep the husbands close at hand while seducing their wives, so sexual interest in Alithea would mean that Sparkish, as her husband, would be invited frequently into Horner’s house. Like most things, Sparkish misreads the men’s attraction to other men’s wives as a form of respect and envy when it is actually a sign that Horner and the other men believe that he is an easy mark. But among Horner and his two friends, Dorilant and Harcourt, womanizing is a friendly competition—one that Harcourt bows out of when he falls in love with Alithea. The women, however, have their own sense of solidarity. This is apparent when the Lady Fidget, Mrs. Fidget, and Mrs. Squeamish show up to take Margery out and refuse to concede to Pinchwife’s excuses keep her from leaving.
