“She writes on”: Sexual Impropriety, Stage Directions, and Letter-Writing in The Country Wife
For a play that has at the center of it a deep concern with cuckoldry, William Wycherley’s The Country Wife portrays this adultery in two significantly different manners, depending on the physical location in which these anxieties manifest. In this essay, I aim to explore, primarily, the stage directions surrounding dialogues that precede moments of sexual impropriety in The Country Wife, arguing that these stage directions show that cuckoldry is, in “public,” mocked and, in “private,” deeply feared; as a cultural anxiety in 17th century England, the fear of cuckoldry is not just the fear of the act itself, but it is also a fear of the loss of the ability to control one’s wife. The power struggles in this play—between cuckold and cuckolded, and between husbands and wives—is additionally mirrored in the stage directions. The core questions guiding this investigation are: how were moments preceding sexual impropriety navigated on stage? What might these depictions, through the mechanism of stage directions, indicate about the navigation of this deeply rooted cultural anxiety?[1] For sake of specificity, I focus my inquiry on the relationship between the Pinchwifes (and, necessarily, Horner).
It is prudent, despite my focus on stage directions, to begin with the obvious: the characters’ names. In ways reminiscent of Medieval Morality plays[2], the names of many of the characters reflect, mostly humorously, the anxiety at the center of the play: cuckoldry. The dramatis personae lists Horner, whose name is obviously a double entendre, as the first character. Horner’s name also evokes the essence of the bull: its horns—an image closely associated with cuckoldry, foreshadowing that he will, in this play, be the one cuckolding the cuckolds.[3] His name is an agent noun;[4] “Horner” becomes a threat. The name of the Pinchwifes, two of the major characters in Wycherley’s comedy, with Margery Pinchwife being the titular “country wife,” is, intentionally ironically, the action which Jack Pinchwife tries so desperately to avoid throughout the play: his wife being stolen—or “pinched”—by another man. Jack Pinchwife’s name becomes, ultimately, a self-fulfilling prophecy. This desperation manifests in increasingly violent interactions between Mr. Pinchwife and his wife, Margery, over the course of the narrative.
By focusing on the Pinchwifes, Mr. Pinchwife’s deep fears of becoming a cuckold are made starkly evident. In his second line in the play, Mr. Pinchwife expresses, in an aside, his regret that Horner is aware of Pinchwife’s recent marriage, stating that “I thought to have concealed it from [Horner] at least,” betraying an already-present, before the onset of the play, anxiety surrounding the safety of his marriage (Wycherley I.i.378). It is important to note, here, that Pinchwife had thought to conceal his marriage from Horner, moreso than his wife, indicating that he cares less for the actual woman he married than he does for the public perception of being married. Mr. Pinchwife has twenty two lines of dialogue in his first appearance, a conversation with Horner and Dorilant (about, fittingly, cuckoldry) in I.i, on stage and page; seven of these lines either are or contain asides, [5] betraying a deep reticence to converse with Horner at all, let alone about a topic he deeply fears. These asides, which include statements such as “Death, does [Horner] know I’m married too,” in response to Horner suggesting that country men are associated with being cuckolds, stating, after Horner accuses him of being a cuckold, that that word is an “insupportable name,” calling for “a pox on Horner and his [cuckold-related] simile,” and stating that “I’ll keep [Margery] from your instructions [in breeding], I warrant you;” all overwhelmingly revolve around Pinchwife’s fear of being cuckolded (I.i.378-379, 391, 400, 417). That these asides are asides show more explicitly that he is not comfortable sharing these fears with these men with who he is, supposedly, at least on friendly terms. During this conversation, Mr. Pinchwife does everything in his power to dissuade Horner from pursuing his wife, even going so far as to say that “because she’s ugly, she’s all the likelier to be my own,” and to state that she is “ill-bred,” naïve, and unintelligent (I.i.437-439). These denigrations of his wife are all statements Mr. Pinchwife is willing to speak in public, standing in contrast to the asides where he admits his fears more explicitly, suggesting that, at least in this context, the shame of marrying an “ugly,” “ill-bred,” “awkward,” and “ill-favoured” is more forgivable than not just becoming a cuckold, but also, perhaps more importantly, fearing becoming a cuckold which would, to some degree, require Mr. Pinchwife to admit publicly that he thinks himself inferior to he who would cuckold him.
This anxiety in Mr. Pinchwife is made even more explicit in his private interactions with his wife. In IV.ii, in their own bedchamber, Mr. Pinchwife dictates a letter for Mrs. Pinchwife to send to Horner in which he, in her handwriting, demands that Horner stop pursuing Mrs. Pinchwife Jack Pinchwife has Mrs. Pinchwife state that she “suffered last night [Horner’s] nauseous, loathed kisses and embraces” and that she “detests [Horner] as much as she loves her husband and her honor (IV.ii.105, IV.ii.139-140). This dictation is made with a tangible threat of violence at its core. Mr. Pinchwife, holding a penknife throughout the entire process, states that his wife must “write as I bid you, or I will write ‘Whore’ with this penknife in your face;” it must be imagined that this threat contains an embedded stage direction in which, in some manner, Mr. Pinchwife calls attention to the penknife in his hand, creating a very real tension between the couple (IV.ii.101-102). Kathleen Oliver posits that there is a deep connection between the letter Mrs. Pinchwife wrote and her physical body, arguing that this letter, as well as her future
letters function as surrogates for her body, and, because actual depictions of violence against women are rare on the Restoration stage—though threats of violence are frequently performed, actual displays of physical abuse are rare—the substitution of letters for body reveals the violence inherent in the triangular adulterous relations among Horner, Margery, and Pinchwife. (Oliver 42)
Oliver also suggests that the penknife with which Mr. Pinchwife threatens Margery takes on additional signification because “penknives were necessary implements for writing, used to cut paper, trim quills, fashion nibs, and erase mistakes by scraping the blade across the page,” meaning that by “brandishing his penknife in front of Margery’s face,” as he does multiple times in this scene, “Pinchwife produces his own pen (penknife) and paper (Margery’s face)” (Oliver 48). Through this, Mr. Pinchwife writes in multiple capacities, first on the literal level by dictating his wife’s letter to the man he (and only he) fears and second on the metaphorical level.
The more explicit of these threats occur when Margery adjusts the wording of Mr. Pinchwife’s dictation, indicating that his fear of being cuckolded manifests in overbearing control over and abuse towards his wife. Her first deviation from his script results in the first occurrence of the aforementioned threat of facial disfigurement. Margery continues to push against the insulting rhetoric Mr. Pinchwife dictates. When Mr. Pinchwife tells her to write “though I suffered last night your nauseous, loathed kisses and embraces,” Margery resists, asking “Nay, why should I say so? You know I told you he had a sweet breath,” taking advantage of her husband’s belief that she is naïve and innocent by acting clueless and incompetent while at the same time purposefully rejecting the narrative which Mr. Pinchwife tries to put into her mouth (or rather, in this case, her hand) (IV.ii.105-108). As Mr. Pinchwife “takes the paper and reads,” he notices that she has omitted several of the more insulting phrases: “‘Though,’” he reads, “‘I suffered last night your kisses and embraces’—thou impudent creature, where is ‘nauseous’ and ‘loathed’?” to which Margery responds “I can’t abide to write such filthy words;” these filthy words are in actuality, diametrically opposed to her actual experience with Horner in the previous act. Mr. Pinchwife responds to this insubordination with even more tangible threats of violence, telling her to try again and to “write as I’d have you and question it not or I will spoil thy writing with this,” which is accompanied by a stage direction stating that he “holds up the penknife,” and a threat that he “will stab out those eyes that cause my mischief” (IV.ii.118-120). The rest of the scene continues apace, with Margery first writing the letter her husband dictates but then, subtly, switching it at the last second with a letter of her own writing that explains what Mr. Pinchwife had her do, thus confirming for Horner both that Mr. Pinchwife is deeply afraid of being cuckolded and that Margery is willing to leave her husband for him. The scene ends with Mr. Pinchwife locking Margery in her room in a state of paranoia, justifying his various abuses by stating that “if [men] do not cheat women, they’ll cheat us; and fraud may be justly used with secret enemies, of which a wife is the most dangerous,” and leaving to deliver the (unknowingly incorrect) letter to the man he fears (IV.ii.213-219).
Considering Margery’s intentions and agency in this interaction, as in many other moments in this play, makes it much more complicated because, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick posits, despite Margery’s position as, ostensibly, the object of pursuit of Horner and object to protect by her husband, she is not the cause for Horner’s pursuit. Sedgwick instead suggests that Horner cuckolding Mr. Pinchwife is primarily a power struggle between the two men, noting that “Horner’s very name… makes explicit that the act of cuckolding a man, rather than enjoying a woman, is his first concern. His pursuit of Margery Pinchwife begins, not when he first admires her beauty, but when he first learns that she is Pinchwife’s jealously guarded bride" (Sedgwick 56). How, with this understanding, does her resistance against her husband, through first omitting insulting language from his letter and then switching the one he dictated with her own, read?
To answer this question, it is important to first acknowledge that this abuse occurs in a private space. The location of this spousal abuse occurring in the Pinchwifes’ bedchamber has multiple implications. First, as Jeremy Webster notes, it being set “in the bedroom reflects the fact that Pinchwife’s sexual and social desires… are based on his domination of his wife… Wycherley stages the bedroom as the site of this marital abuse, suggesting that it is not the… bed-chamber that threatens women with misogyny,” but rather Mr. Pinchwife (Webster 90). His domination over and abuse of his wife occurs in a space that is meant, ostensibly, to be a space of peace and tranquility. Webster also posits that, when understanding Horner as a “libertine” (that is, as per the OED, “a person (typically a man) who is not restrained by morality, esp. with regard to sexual relations; a person of dissolute or promiscuous habits”), “Wycherley… suggests that it is not the libertine who perpetuates violence against women but [rather] the supposed moralist who attempts to constrain women’s sexual desires” (Webster 90). Mr. Pinchwife, a supposedly reformed libertine himself, here pins the blame of Horner’s pursuit on his wife, instead of the actual perpetrator of the potential cuckolding.[6] Additionally, as Oliver notes, “Pinchwife’s insistence that his words be written down by Margery in her own handwriting demonstrates his desire to write her body as his own; her body must not “say” anything other than what he, her husband, wishes” (Oliver 47).
The stage directions in the letter-writing scene, where Mr. Pinchwife dictates to his wife a letter in which he, in her hand, maps out his disgust with Horner’s actions, focus on the physical act of writing. A repeating “she writes” follows each of Mr. Pinchwife’s lines until he leaves to “fetch wax and a candle,” when she writes her own letter (IV.ii.149). It is at this moment that Margery exerts her own will despite the violent threats from her husband because, as she ultimately asks, “what care I for my husband?” (IV.ii. 156-157). The sole stage direction as she writes her own letter alone is a reversal of the stage directions when she wrote her husband’s letter, both literally and metaphorically. Where the repeating “She writes” stage directions follow each of the lines that Mr. Pinchwife dictates, Margery’s stage direction reads first “she writes,” and second she “repeats what she hath writ” (IV.ii.167). She expresses her own thoughts before they are read aloud for the audience. She controls the narrative, despite her husband having attempted to do so a mere thirty lines previous. This new letter that she writes contains, as Oliver notes, “three deliberate and repeated refusals,” here Oliver is referring to the written/spoken refusals in Margery’s letter, not her refusals in writing her husband’s letter, “to comply with patriarchal and spousal authority,” thus inscribing on paper her displeasure with her husband’s actions; the letter also, again according to Oliver, “holds back nothing; it seeks to render the impossible,” (her love for and desire to be with Horner) “possible” in a letter “filled with love, longing, and desire” (Oliver 50).[7] The order in which this letter appears and is heard is important as it both thematically and chronologically reverses and subverts Mr. Pinchwife’s abuse.
Beginning first with the cuckoldry-related implications of the names of the characters in William Wycherley’s The Country Wife, which show before the play even begins the play’s central conceit: sexual impropriety, I have attempted here to show how various stage directions in this play show the interestingly-developed dichotomy wherein sexual impropriety is to be, in public, mocked and ridiculed, and, in private, deeply feared. Wycherley’s use of asides in Mr. Pinchwife’s first appearance in the play set up the dynamic of public mockery when he plays off various accusations to other character’s faces and, in his asides, betrays his true feelings on the topic: that becoming a cuckold is something he is deeply concerned with, as his wife is exceptionally young, beautiful, and, according to him, deeply naive. Mr. Pinchwife goes so far as to blatantly insult his own wife to Horner, her would-be pursuer, in an effort to stave off his attempts at making him a cuckold. In a private conversation, in their bed-chamber, Mr. Pinchwife dictates to his wife a letter in which he, in her hand, attempts to dissuade Horner from further pursuing his wife. When Margery refuses, Mr. Pinchwife threatens her with acts of abuse that are closely related to acts of writing, showing his willingness to inscribe on her, literally, when he threatens to carve the word “whore” on her face, his own intentions and anxieties. His fear of being cuckolded manifests itself in overbearing control over and abuse towards his wife. His wife, however, exerts her own agency when her husband leaves the room, reversing the power dynamics by penning a wholly authentic letter and switching them out at the last second and, in the process of doing so, has stage directions that reverse the pattern of her husband’s abuse, subverting his wishes and, ultimately, assisting in making him what he most fears: a cuckold.
Works Cited
“Libertine, n. and Adj.” OED Online, Oxford University Press. Oxford English Dictionary, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/107892.
Oliver, Kathleen M. “‘I Will Write Whore with This Penknife in Your Face’: Female Amatory Letters, the Body, and Violence in Wycherley’s ‘The Country Wife.’” Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700, vol. 38, no. 1, 2014, pp. 41–60.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Chapter Three. The Country Wife: Anatomies of Male Homosocial Desire.” Chapter Three. The Country Wife: Anatomies of Male Homosocial Desire, Columbia University Press, 1985, pp. 49–66. www.degruyter.com,
Webster, Jeremy. “In and Out of the Bed-Chamber: Staging Libertine Desire in Restoration Comedy.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, vol. 12, no. 2, 2012, pp. 77–96.
Wycherley, William. The Country Wife. Edited by David Cook and John Swannell, The Revels Plays, Methuen, 1975.
[1] The play-text that I will be using in this essay is the 1975 Revels Plays edition edited by David Cook and John Swannell, which uses the Q1 of 1675 as its copy-text.
[2] See the characters “Pride,” “Anger,” “Gluttony, “Envy,” etc. in The Castle of Perseverance
[3] Cf. Benedick’s lines to Don Pedro in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, 1.1.244-250
[4] A noun, typically with the suffix -or or -er, that denotes someone as one who performs the action of a verb; such as “worker” or “employer.”
[5] One aside, in I.i.417, is an editorial emendation, added after the copy-text. It is a warranted emendation: the lines would be, contextually, spoken as an aside, but the emendation should be noted nonetheless
[6] C.f. Horner’s description of Pinchwife in I.i.393-395
[7] It should also be noted that there is a naivety present both in this letter and in the interactions between Margery and Horner, as Margery wishes to be Horner’s wife, despite Horner’s adamant resistance to being married.
