The Country Wife – written by William Wycherley in 1675 – is a Restoration comedy based upon the life of the aristocracy. Restoration comedy is a style of drama that was made popular in the late seventeenth century. It refers to the period in England when King Charles II was returned as the head of the English empire. Life under King Charles II was seen as hedonistic: people were motivated by pleasure. These moral virtues represented the degradation of society, rampant with sexual explicitness and obscenity (“Charles II”). The definition of moral virtue can be quite ambiguous. For the purpose of this essay I will define moral virtue as such: A set of accepted traits or qualities which are accepted as "right” or “good” in society. The Characters of The Country Wife set out to wrong one another. William Wycherley comments on the degradation of moral virtue in society through the negative values held by his characters. The characters exemplify immoral and disgraceful traits including jealousy, deception, and sexuality.
The concept of jealously in The Country Wife is personified through Harcourt, the dashing and depraved friend of Horner who falls in love with Alethea. Harcourt is jealous of Sparkish who is set to marry his mistress Alethea. Harcourt expresses to Alethea that he feels in marrying Sparkish she would be dishonouring herself: “if you do marry him-with your pardon, madam- / your reputation suffers in the world” (II.i.235-236). Wycherley uses Harcourt to exemplify the effect jealously can have on a person. Harcourt declares himself a rival to his former friend Sparkish and insults him in the hopes that Alethea with change her mind. “He’s beneath an injury-a / bubble, a coward, a senseless idiot, a wretch so contemptible ...
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...uct. They do this under the belief that since Horner is seen as impotent by society, sleeping with him allows them to keep their honour: “But, poor gentleman, could you be / so generous ... to suffer yourself the greatest shame that could fall upon / a man, that none might fall upon us women by your conversation?” (II.i.536-540). During the time of King Charles II court sexuality was very prominent, and Wycherley accurately captures that idea within his play.
The portrayal of these characters in The Country Wife shows how Wycherley viewed the moral virtue of society. He uses the Restoration comedy to comment on the degradation of society. He believed people acted on self-indulgent pleasures regardless of how they might affect others. Writing as a contemporary source Wycherley accurately reflects the degradation of moral virtue of society in King Charles II court.
In the eighteenth century, the process of choosing a husband and marrying was not always beneficial to the woman. A myriad of factors prevented women from marrying a man that she herself loved. Additionally, the men that women in the eighteenth century did end up with certainly had the potential to be abusive. The attitudes of Charlotte Lennox and Anna Williams toward women’s desire for male companionship, as well as the politics of sexuality, are very different. Although both Charlotte Lennox and Anna Williams express a desire for men in their poetry, Charlotte Lennox views the implications of this desire differently than Anna Williams.
concern to men of the seventeenth century. Out of the oppressive setting of the seventeenth century
In Edmond Rostand's play Cyrano De Bergerac, originally written in the early 1600’s is still able to resonate today with younger and older audiences. The play on a surface level will get the audience to believe that inner beauty is far more important than outer beauty. Although this is the focal point, Rostland pushes the audience to analyze a character’s nobleness. A theme found deep within the play pushes the idea that lying is erroneous in any situation and goes against the moral code of honor.
The morals of the Victorian Era gained renown for their strict socials roles that existed for both men and women. However, Oscar Wilde rejected these morals as he not only wrote characters but also acted as a character who flippantly disregarded the strict moral code. In his play The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde elicits a thoughtful laughter through the constant hypocrisy and non-sequitous behaviours of Lady Bracknell. Wilde uses her to explore the hypocrisy that he detested within Victorian Society, and through Lady Bracknell’s commentary on gender roles and marital roles, Wilde illustrates his own personal contentions with Victorian morals.
Those who had remained in England during the Commonwealth had faced years of strict moral repression. Those who fled to France had acquired some of the decadence bred across the channel. In combination, these two forces created a nation of wealthy, witty, amoral hedonists. Their theatre reflected their lifestyles. Thus was born the Restoration Tragedy and the Comedy of Manners.
In Victorian times, one who came from a wealthy and respectable family was considered to be a gentleman. This is clear in numerous characters in the novel, who are immediately perceived to be gentlemen as they boast a large amount of money and dress in the finest clothes. One example, Compeyson, uses this to get a reduced sentence in court, as Magwitch says ‘one, the younger, well brought up, who will be spoke to as such’. This highlights the importance of social class in the Victorian era and it is clear to see here that the justice system is very much more favourable to the higher social ranks, deciding how they would get treated and addressed, and that the punishment is not dependent on the crime, rather the individual at trial’s background and upbringing. Dickens has shown that the Victorian concept of a gentleman is all about wealth and social ranking, not the characteristics we see in a gentleman today.
The greatness of Lady Chatterley's Lover lies in a paradox: it is simultaneously progressive and reactionary, modern and Victorian. It looks backwards towards a Victorian stylistic formality, and it seems to anticipate the social morality of the late 20th century in its frank engagement with explicit subject matter and profanity. One might say of the novel that it is formally and thematically conservative, but methodologically radical.
In William Wycherley’s The Country Wife, William Wycherley enlightens the audience to capture several different ironical statements and questionable behaviors. The play fits perfectly into Greenwald’s definition of a comedy of manners: “[Critics] assert that a comedy of manners and the people who inhabit it represent the ostentatiously idle upper-class” (“Social Heirarchy” web). Wycherley also distinguishes several oddities in his characters not typically used to describe the upper-class. For example, Mr. Pinchwife, a wealthy newlywed husband, is so afraid that he is going to become a cuckold, that he does not allow his wife to leave the house (Wycherley act two). One of Wycherley’s goals in writing The Country Wife is to point out the flaws of society (“Q & A” web). Wycherley understands that no one is perfect and that a person’s virtues can be altered if pressures and outside influences become prominent. This is precisely how Wycherley uses Mrs. Margery Pinchwife’s character. Mrs. Pinchwife, a virtuous woman, still succumbs to the immorality of the city of London. Wycherley develops characters who precisely bring out Mrs. Pinchwife’s flaws. Mrs. Pinchwife takes the risks of public shame and a damage reputation to have an affair with Mr. Horner.
Lydia, Mr WIckham and Lady Catherine de Bourg have no self awareness and are unhappy in the novel. The marriage of Lydia and Mr Wickham is one of the unhappy marriages. Mr Wickham and Lydia are both very similar and are both unaware of their faults; they are both careless with money and see no problem with asking their relatives for money. Lydia as the youngest daughter is well accustomed to having other people look after her and she is dependent on other people. Lydia’s lack of self awareness doesn’t affect her greatly; she is happy and claims that she loves Wickham. She is very fond of him but he is not fond of her and quickly loses interest, “Wickham’s affection for Lydia, was just what Elizabeth had expected to find it; not equal to Lydia’s for him.” Lady Catherine de Bourg has no self knowledge. She is full of herself and sees herself very highly; it is obvious she is lacks self knowledge. She makes discourteous comments about other people without thought to their opinions and she also enunciates comments about how she views herself. Lady Catherine de Bourg is unhappy because she is disappointed ...
... as being an ideal and virtuous women because she is dignified and views marriage as a form of prostitution, making her a character that is not sexualized. Because Eliza is embodied as being a perfect woman, she is similar to women in earlier works. The Country Wife is a more ideal representation of what women are because real women are flawed and as the play suggests, women should be allowed to be what they want to be instead of allowing others to decide for them. Despite Pygmalion’s advocacy of equality between men and women, it idolizes flawless women, which contradicts with its’ message of equality.
There have always been class divisions in England’s social groups, but it was not until the nineteenth century that they were labeled. The lower class was often uneducated and overlooked and mostly servants and prostitutes, the middle class generally had steady jobs and members of the higher classes were born to old money and did not have to work. The French Lieutenant’s Woman written by John Fowles is a complex “Victorian novel filled with enchanting mysteries and magically erotic possibilities” (Canby) in which, Fowles describes a Victorian society in 1867 that is still largely separated by class, which creates strong restrictions with respect to sex and marriage. Notably, conflict in the novel involves scandals where these restrictions are disregarded. Fowles shows that sex and marriage were still largely dictated by whether a person belonged to the lower, middle or upper class in order to highlight that there were more restrictions for higher-class men and women.
A major aspect of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is marriage, more particularly, the characters’ motives for marriage. The novel bases its story around it, and how some have different views of what marriage should be as opposed to others. Whether a couple gets married for money, physical attraction, or true love and affection for one another, all examples are carried out in this book. All of the marriages in this book including the marriage of Bennett 's, Charlotte and Mr. Collins, Lydia and Mr. Wickham, Jane and Mr. Bingley, and Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy have similar but also very different characteristics to their motives for marrying each other. This novel has a lot to say about normal views of marriage in society back in the Regency Era, as well as modern day society 's perception of marriage. Austen challenges the normal perspective many have when it comes to this topic, which is shown in each character’s decisions in this book.
Lady Henry, unfathomly dull and stupid, later files for divorce from her husband, putting her family in a scandalous situation. A smarter woman would not have risked so much to leave her only means of support. In addition, a scandal in Victorian times meant tha...
In the satiric novel, Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray exposes and examines the vanities of 19th century England. Numerous characters in the novel pursue wealth, power, and social standing, often through marriage or matrimony. Thackeray effectively uses the institution of marriage to comment on how these vanities often come at the expense of the true emotions of passion, devotion, and, of course, love.
For Emma, entering into a marriage with the very ordinary country doctor Charles Bovary marks the beginning of an unsatisfactory, restrictive, joyless domestic life. Emma and Charles exist in a world of intergenerational social stratification where a man’s background, occupation, and wealth are the determinants for his children’s place in the inflexible social hierarchy. The respective children of a “former assistant army surgeon” and working class rural farmer, Charles and Emma face the constraints of conventional middle-class morality and the expectation of a domestic life defined by mundane occupations and petty banalities (Flaubert 6). Emma Bovary’s frustration with a loveless marriage, nonexistent career opportunities, and low socioeconomic standing leads to a propensity for sentimental romanticism and the creation of an impractical, imaginative fa...