VICTORIA INSTITUTION (COLLEGE)

Candidate Name. : Asmita Saha

College Roll No. : 349
C U Registration No. : 134-1211-0123-20
University Roll No: 202134-11-0082.
Class: SEMESTER 4
Subject. Name : CC8
Paper. : 18th CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE.
Project Title: Position of women in the Restoration Age with
the reference to ‘The Way of the World’ and other plays.
YEAR: 2022
~: Acknowledgment :~
I, Asmita Saha of ENGA Semester 4 am deeply indebted to my
project supervisor, Dr. Madhumita Basu of the Department of
English for her help and guidance in this project. I am also
thankful to the TIC madam Dr. Uma Ray Srinivasan of Victoria
Institution (College) for her assistance and support.
~:Certificate :~
This is to certify that Asmita Saha of Victoria Institution
(College) has successfully completed the Project for English
Honours Semester 4 CC8 (18th CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE.)
2022. The project is titled : “Position of women in the
Restoration Age with the reference to ‘The Way of the World’
and other plays.”

Signature of Project Supervisor (Dr. Madhumita Basu)

Signature of Principal (Dr. Uma Ray Srinivasan)

Position of women in the Restoration Age with the reference
to ‘The Way of the World’ and other plays.
In the Restoration period, gender roles were very socially
defined. Some writers depicted the figure of the female as ‘a
static image of an idealized femininity – modest, chaste, pious
and passively domestic', since they wanted women to
remember their social position. This women’s social situation
was due to a constant historical oppression that ‘stemmed
from, and was replicated by, the personalized and
institutionalized domination of men over women in patriarchal
society’. The literature written during this period, especially the
drama, is ‘overwhelmingly concerned with questions of gender
identity, sexuality, and women’s oppression, to a degree and
depth not seen in a comparably popular form of entertainment
before or since’.In her book, Gender and Language in British
Literary Criticism 1660 – 1790, Laura Runge notes that
Restoration femininity was typically characterized by “being
soft, smooth, regular, pleasing, soothing, sweet-sounding,
loving, simple”.
In 1642 the theatres were closed by the authority of the
parliament which was dominated by Puritans and so no good
plays were written from 1642 till the Restoration in 1660 when
the theatres were re-opened. The drama in England after 1660,
called the Restoration drama, showed entirely new trends on
account of the long break with the past. Unlike the Elizabethan
drama which had a mass appeal, had its roots in the life of the
common people and could be legitimately called the national
drama, the Restoration drama was confined to the upper strata
of society whose taste was aristocratic, and among which the
prevailing fashions and etiquettes were foreign and
extravagant. The most popular form of drama was the Comedy
of Manners which portrayed the sophisticated life of the
dominant class of society—its gaiety, foppery, insolence and
intrigue. In tragedy, the Restoration period specialised in Heroic
Tragedy, which dealt with themes of epic magnitude. The
purpose of this tragedy was didactic—to inculcate virtues in the
shape of bravery and conjugal love. It was written in the ‘heroic
couplet’ in accordance with the heroic convention derived from
France that ‘heroic metre’ should be used in such plays.
Famous comedies from the era include William Wycherley’s
The Country Wife and The Plain Dealer, (1675), Aphra Behn’s
The Rover (1677), Dryden’s Wild Gallant (1663) and the plays of
Vanbrugh and Farquhar. Well-known Restoration tragedies
include Roger Boyle’s The Black Prince (1667) and Thomas
Otway’s Venice Preserv’d (1682).
Restoration theater brought certain innovations to the stage,
the most notable of which was the introduction of women
playing the female parts. Such parts had previously been the
province of boy-actors, and this marked the first time actresses
stepped onto the English stage. Certainly many Restoration
actresses were the mistresses of courtiers; one of the most
famous, Nell Gwyn, had a child by Charles II. The rise of women
in theatrical performance was accompanied by the
sexualization of the actress. This objectification of women
induced an evolution in the writing of plays during this time
that led female actors to be sexual props on the stage, as
opposed to equals with their male peers. As late as the early
twentieth century, theatre historian Allardyce Nicoll expresses
the conventional belief that “the male spectators looked upon
these actresses as little better than prostitutes”. Despite their
popularity, women did not enjoy the same status as men in the
theater. Their pay did not equal that of their male colleagues,
and while many male actors became playwrights, very few
women made the transition.
Aphra Behn was the first professional woman writer in England.
Her life was not confined by the boundaries normally accepted
by seventeenth-century women, whose spheres of influence
were the domestic and private. Instead, Behn’s was an
unusually independent and public life. She belonged to the
literary and theatrical society of London, where she had a wide
acquaintance and was on good terms with professional authors
such as John Dryden and Thomas Otway as well as with well-
known performers. An outspoken Tory and strong supporter of
the monarchy, Behn had some social and professional
connections with members of the English court of King Charles
II. Her first play, The Forced Marriage, was a tragicomedy, but
she soon adopted the fashion for comedy, her most successful
genre. By the time The Rover was first performed and published
in 1677, Behn had seen six of her plays produced. Yet The Rover
first appeared anonymously, with a line in the prologue
referring to the author as “he” and “him.” She wrote her first
seven plays (including The Rover) without dedications to
patrons, an unusually long period for a writer to remain
without patronage, and an indication of her status outside "the
usual system of contacts and patronage". At every stage of her
career, she was attacked for indelicacy and immorality, both
inappropriate for a woman writer. Perhaps the most famous
criticism of her is Dryden’s. After Behn’s death he wrote a letter
of advice to Elizabeth Thomas, who had sent him some of her
poems:
You, who write only for your Diversion, may pass your Hours with Pleasure in it, and without
Prejudice, always avoiding (as I know you will) the Licenses which Mrs. Behn allowed herself, of
writing loosely, and giving, (if I may have leave to say so) some Scandal to the Modesty of her
Sex. I confess, I am the last Man who ought, in Justice to arraign her, who have been myself too
much a Libertine in most of my poems.

Although Dryden acknowledges that his approach is similar to

Behn’s, he criticizes her work as immodest, particularly for a
woman writer, and perhaps for a woman reader.
Actresses, like prostitutes, were defined as “public women” and
criticized for using their bodies to earn money. Like them, Behn
earned her living in the public world, and was exposed to public
criticism for behaviour which was acceptable for men. Some
critics have suggested that Behn’s sympathetic portrayals of
prostitutes may indicate that she identifies her position with
theirs, particularly in The Rover, in which the prostitute
Angellica Bianca shares her initials, AB. The fascination with
crossdressing was so deeply ingrained in pre-Restoration
theatrical practice, that it resurfaced in what is known as the
“breeches part”, an adaptation of the female-page plot device
found in many Elizabethan and Jacobean plays in which a
woman character, played by a boy actor, is disguised as a boy.
Behn frequently employs the convention; in The Rover, for
example, Hellena appears in boy’s clothes. Frances M. Kavenik
suggests that Behn employed “breeches parts” in her plays to
show that “women could share the libertine philosophy with
men and experience its liberating effects, in much the same
way as she was able to compete on relatively equal terms with
the best male playwrights of her time.”
Behn liked to show attempted ‘forced marriages’, in which
parents, uncles, brothers or guardians, often for financial
reasons, insist on a child’s marrying someone that child
strenuously dislikes; in comedy, lovers typically outwit these
attempts. She evokes English Protestant sympathy for her
continental heroines like Florinda and Hellena in The Rover or
Marcella and Cornelia in The Feign’d Curtizans (1679), who try
to avoid both forced marriage and forced confinement in
convents. An amusing, extreme case of a father hoping to raise
his family through his daughter’s marriage is that of Dr Baliardo
in Behn’s farce, The Emperor of the Moon. Obsessed with
telescopes that permit him to observe the moon and convinced
that a superior race of beings lives there, the doctor succumbs
to a plot of his daughter’s lover, who convinces him that the
Emperor of the Moon wishes to marry his daughter.
William Wycherley’s The Country Wife’s concerns, as the play’s
title suggests, is the nature and role of the wife. The marriages
in the play all appear to have been ‘arranged’ rather than to be
based on mutual admiration or even friendship. The Country
Wife, which the eighteenth century critic Thomas Davies
declared ‘a more genuine representation of the loose manner,
obscene language and dissolute practices of Charles the
Second’s reign, than … any other play whatsoever’, reflects not
just its author’s time, but his values, his social set, and his king.
Its triumphant libertine, Horner, is partly based on Rochester,
partly on Wycherley himself, while its sexually-explicit comedy
is for an audience on the same moral plane as the monarch.
With its subjects of libertinism, decadence and hypocrisy, The
Country Wife is not a critical comment on Restoration society: it
is a celebration of it.
Though the ‘country wife’ is Margery Pinchwife, the title of the
play shows its real subjects: it is about ‘wives’, or, rather,
marriage, on the one hand; and male sexual interests –
‘country’ is a double entendre – on the other. Horner is so-
called because he is primed for sexual encounters and because
he cuckolds men by sleeping with their wives. Pinchwife’s name
indicates his past history of pinching (taking) the wives of
others; his present concern that someone will now pinch (take)
his wife; and his readiness to pinch (hurt) his wife when he
suspects her fidelity. Harcourt’s name shows that he is ‘hard’ to
court, another double entendre. The play’s story, encoded in
title and names, is about women on the one hand, and male
abuse of them – and also male abuse of other men because of
them – on the other.
The women who feature in the play are often victims, though
they are also often libertine and carnal. Margery, the country
wife, is imprisoned by her violent husband, Pinchwife, who, in
one of his regular bursts of rage, threatens to etch ‘whore’ on
her forehead with his penknife. Lady Fidget, the city wife, is
trapped in a loveless marriage to Sir Jaspar Fidget, who
gleefully stokes her sexual frustration by making her keep
company with, he thinks, a ‘eunuch’ (in this instance, someone
who is impotent). Alithea, the town wife-to-be, is engaged to
Sparkish, who only cares that she is seen in public to be his
conquest.
The Way of the World is certainly the finest comedy of the
period. William Congreve (1670–1729) brought to perfection
the form which we call the comedy of manners. Its felicitous
phrasing and polished wit give it an air of sophistication
perfectly in tune with the mores depicted. In contrast to The
Country Wife, the female characters of The Way of the World
have much more depth and are more well rounded than the
naïve and kind of spastic Margery Pinchwife. Millamant is a
wonderful character that speaks her mind and has her own
opinions and seems like a strong woman, something that seems
out of the norm for this time period. Mirabell says, “I like her
with all her faults; nay, like her for her faults. Her follies are so
natural, or so artful, that they become her; and those
affectations which in another woman would be odious, serve
but to make her more agreeable.” Lady Wishfort is a great
comic study and, when roused, a fluent fount of what has been
called ‘boudoir Billingsgate’. Her manner is abrupt — a mirror
of the arbitrary, petty tyrant she is. It is clear that she shouts
when annoyed or irritated, and she is always in a state of
annoyance:
No, fool. Not the ratafia, fool. Grant me patience! I mean the Spanish paper, idiot; complexion,
darling. Paint, paint, paint! Dost thou understand that, changeling, dangling thy hands like
bobbins before thee? Why does thou not stir, puppet? Thou wooden thing upon wires!

In place of Congreve’s polish and wit, Wycherley’s plays

abound in coarseness and indecency. The delicacy with which
physical sexuality can be distanced in Congreve has no parallel
in Wycherley:
MIRABELL: Item, when you shall be breeding—
MILLAMANT: Ah! Name it not.
MIRABELL: Which may be presumed with a blessing on our endeavours.
MILLAMANT: Odious endeavours!

Congreve’s young lovers, Mirabell and Millamant, are partners

in wit and discrimination whose brittle phrases and shared
ironies suggest an inner contract deep below the level of their
banter.
Despite the fact that women were considered inferiors to men,
some writers decided to create feminine characters who
accepted to challenge the patriarchal rules that had been
imposed to them by the society of that time. Millamant in The
Way of the World is a fitting partner-antagonist to Mirabell. She
is completely sure of her feminine power, and Congreve has
given her the lines to justify her assurance. In The Rover,
Hellena and Florinda overturn parental and filial authority to
gain the men of their choice; Lucetta tricks Blunt out of his
trousers and Angellica, though bested in the contest to gain
Willmore, awards her heart as she chooses.
Works cited
1. Blamires, Harry. A_Short_History_of_English_Literature.
2. Russell, Anne. The rover, or, The banished cavaliers.
3. Staves, Susan. Behn, women, and society.
4. Wycherley, William. The Country Wife. New Mermaids.
5. Behn, Aphra. The Feign’d Courtesans. World’s Classics.
6. Congreve, William. The Way of the World. Munsey’s
Magazine. November, 1897.