Coyness and Crime in Restoration Comedy
Women's Desire, Deception, and Agency
By (author) Peggy Thompson
Publication date:
23 November 2011Length of book:
202 pagesPublisher
Bucknell University PressISBN-13: 9781611483727
Coyness and Crime in Restoration Comedy examines the extraordinary focus on coy women in late seventeenth-century English comedy. Plays by Etherege, Wycherley, Dryden, Behn, Shadwell, Congreve, Trotter, Southerne, Vanbrugh, and Pix—as well as much modern scholarship about them—taint almost all feminine modesty with intimations of duplicity and illicit desire that must be contained. Forceful responses by men, therefore, are implicitly exonerated, encouraged, and eroticized. In short, characters become “women” by performing coyness, only to be mocked and punished for it.
Peggy Thompson explores the disturbing dynamic of feminine coyness and masculine control as it interacts with reaffirmations of church and king, anxiety over new wealth, and emerging interests in liberty, novelty, and marriage in late seventeenth-century England. Despite the diversity of these contexts, the plays consistently reveal women caught in an ironic and nearly intractable convergence of objectification and culpability that allows them little innocent sexual agency. This is both the source and the legacy of coyness in Restoration comedy.
Peggy Thompson explores the disturbing dynamic of feminine coyness and masculine control as it interacts with reaffirmations of church and king, anxiety over new wealth, and emerging interests in liberty, novelty, and marriage in late seventeenth-century England. Despite the diversity of these contexts, the plays consistently reveal women caught in an ironic and nearly intractable convergence of objectification and culpability that allows them little innocent sexual agency. This is both the source and the legacy of coyness in Restoration comedy.
In allowing female actors to appear on stage, the Restoration may have marked a watershed moment in English theater history, but this did not mark a corresponding improvement in social attitudes toward women. As Thompson (Agnes Scott College) expertly documents, a wide range of late-17th-century comedies contested some as basic as a woman's right to say 'no' to persistent/unwelcome suitors. The author identifies what she terms the 'trope of insincere resistance,' a motif whereby a woman's 'no' actually means 'yes,' and female characters conceal insatiable desire behind masks of false modesty. After tracing the evolution of this pernicious trope through conduct literature of the period, Thompson charts how comic types and stock situations in drama reflected and reinforced gendered inequities in society. Chapters document that some of the era's best-loved dramatists--Wycherley, Dryden, Shadwell, Congreve, Southerne, Vanbrugh--wrote plays curtailing woman's sexual freedom and social options. Even Aphra Behn proves a traitor to her sex, depicting romantic love as mercenary self-interest, and affirming 'the prerogative of well-born men by implicitly blessing their sexual aggression in the face of women's denials.' Meticulously researched, clearly organized, methodically argued, this book strips the veils of elegance and wit from Restoration theater, exposing dismaying prurience, misogyny, and exploitation. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers.