Modish Men and the Way of the World: The Great Restoration Comedies of Manners

Well, I probably should have done this episode earlier, since it might have been good for it to precede our other discussions of Resto comedy.  But I made a last minute decision and included a second play, which kind of threw off the old chronology.  But it's good all the same!

The Man of Mode by George Etherege: https://coldreads.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-man-of-mode.pdf

The Way of the World by William Congreve: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1292/1292-h/1292-h.htm

Transcript

Hi, there, and welcome to the Classic English Literature Podcast!  I’m glad you were able to make it.  This week, we are back at the theater for a double feature.  We’ll look at two plays that have become archetypes of the Restoration comedy of manners.  When they made these plays, they threw away the mold . . . and only some of it grew back.  I’m talking about George Etherege’s The Man of Mode from 1676 and William Congreve’s The Way of the World from 1700.  Yes, faithful listeners!  We have breached the 18th century!

Anyway, while these plays are both comedies of manners and so share many elements, the fact that they are staged some 25 years apart, and that in that time, the Bloodless (mostly) Revolution has occurred means that those elements land in rather different social and political contexts.  So, I’m not sure this week’s episode will all hang on a single, interpretive point – I think we’ll ramble across several different ideas – like the character type of the rake and the wit, the idea of marriage as a contract negotiation, and the critique of social performance – and see how they operate in each of the plays.

Oh, I see the house lights are dimming and a rather bird-like dandy has taken the stage, so the show’s about to begin.  Before he begins declaiming, let me just briefly ask that you consider clicking the “Support the Show” button to make a small donation to continue the sterling work done here at the Classic English Literature Podcast.  Anything you can manage is most gratefully appreciated. (Shh!) Oops! Sorry!

If you’ve not yet listened to our episodes on Wycherly’s The Country Wife and Dryden’s Marriage a la Mode, well, 1) shame on you.  I expect you to keep up; and  2)  those episodes treat a little more deeply about what I will briefly summarize here for the slackers.  Both the plays I’ve just mentioned, and the plays we’ll cover today, are comedies of manners.  That is, they are plays that satirically comment upon the amoral behaviors of the upper classes.  The plots are extravagant, the wit sharp, and the tone cynical.  

I’ve been choppy-changy about how to present these two plays – do I focus on each, one at a time, going through various observations?  Or do I observe variously and point out examples in both plays?  I think I’ve settled on the latter, but that does make a muddle of the quick-and-dirty plot summaries.  But no matter, really, the plots are nearly vestigial.  The real point of such plays is linguistic dexterity.

The Man of Mode – that is, the Stylish or Fashionable Man – is the last of George Etherege’s three comedies and, like Dryden’s Marriage a la Mode and Wycherly’s The Country Wife, evidences a vogue in the 1670s for the sexually frank play.  Remember, King Charles II – The Return of the Son – was a huge fan of luxury and theater.  Or, more accurately, Charles was a huge fan of actresses, and now that ladies were allowed on the stage, it would be best if they were saucier than a Christmas goose.

Congreve’s The Way of the World, too, marks the end of a career and though first performed some 40 years after the Restoration, it is seen by scholars now almost as the apotheosis of the form.  While in many ways the cousin to Etherege’s play – indeed, in some instances, we might almost say homage – Congreve writes in a much altered society.  Changing tastes had made the sexual frankness of the 1670s objectionable.  A prude named Jeremy Collier published the apocryphally named “A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, Together with the Sense of Antiquity upon this Argument” in 1698 in a moral panic – we shall have more to say about Lemon Jeremy anon – which emblematizes the more judicious times in which Congreve plied his trade.

I believe I was talking about vestigial plots.  Both plays feature witty rakes trying to secure a pretty heiress.  In The Man of Mode, a ruthless rake named Dorimant attempts to slip out of his affair with Mrs. Loveit so he can win the witty heiress Harriet, but she demands he abandon London society to prove his devotion.  There are various complicating characters: other lovers, wisecracking servants, a vacuous twit named Sir Fopling Flutter, but the upshot is that, despite his libertine ways, Dorimant wins in the end.

MIrabell, the refined wit at the center of Congreve’s The Way of the World, schemes to land the inheritance, by way of marriage, of the brilliant Millamant.  The main scheme is to trick Millament’s aunt, Lady Wishfort, into a fake marriage with his disguised servant. There’s a blackmail plot by the villainous Fainall and Marwood, but Mirabell foils it and, after strict negotiations, marries the heiress.

You can see the throughlines here.  These plays make good bookends for some general observations about the comedy of manners in the 17th century’s final decades.  Let’s kick off by looking at the evolution of the stock characters the wit and the rake.

The “wit” is distinguished by sharp exchanges, often involving sophisticated wordplay, puns, and double entendres, with rivals and love interests.  In Restoration high society, such linguistic prowess was a form of power, status, and desirability, allowing the wit to navigate social hierarchies and gain the upper hand. Accordingly, wits often operate in a morally ambiguous world. Their concerns are selfish: money, reputation, and seduction. However, the "true wit" is typically distinguished by a degree of honor that sets him apart from the fops and villains.

The character of the “rake” (short for “rakehell,” which is like our “hellraiser”) is often a “wit” in these plays.  The rake was typically a member of the gentry or aristocracy, possessing the wealth and status that allowed a life of indulgence and dissipation: excessive drinking, gambling, and a general addiction to pleasure and revelry.  His is a sharp intellect and a persuasive charm.  He wins women through his persistent, ardent pursuit, often deceiving them about his affections, since he demonstrates an athletic lack of restraint in sexual matters.  However, the rake is also a very self-aware character, a conscious participant in his lifestyle, often delighted by the qualities and privileges he possessed. 

These two stock characters – or, often, two dimensions of the same character – change considerably from Etherege’s earlier play to Congreve’s later.  In The Man of Mode, Dorimant is very much the unapologetic, amoral libertine of early Restoration comedy.  The play opens with Dorimant in his dressing room, reading over a dishonest letter of apology to Mrs. Loveit.  When Young Bellair, an earnest but not over-clever young man, enters to say that Sir Fopling Flutter has noticed the beautiful Mrs. Loveit, Dominant immediately seizes upon the occasion to fully discard his tiresome lover: “I wanted a fop to lay at her charge, and this is as pat as may be.”  When Bellair steps out, Dominant comments on his usefulness to him: “the women think the better of his understanding and judge more favorably of my reputation; it makes him pass upon some for a man of very good sense, and I upon others for a very civil person.”  Of course, Dorimant is not a very civil person – he is a self-absorbed rake with a very capable command of rhetoric.

And, as I said, very self-aware.  In a confrontation with Mrs. Loveit, she curses him for a “Dissembler, damned dissembler!”  To which he replies:

I am so, I confess. Good nature and good manners corrupt me. I am honest in my inclinations, and would not, were't not to avoid offence, make a lady a little in years believe I think her young, wilfully mistake art for nature, and seem as fond of a thing I am weary of as when I doted on't in earnest.

There’s a lot going on here.  First, he admits to being a dissembler, a liar.  Well, that’s quite a paradox, isn’t it?  A liar confessing that it’s his nature to lie – so is the confession thereby a lie?  So is he truthful?  It’s like saying “everything you know is wrong,” but you know that – is that wrong?  If it is wrong, then the assertion is correct, and thereby not incorrect.  If it’s correct, then it’s true, but it can't be true because . . . .  Wait . . . I’m getting tangled.  You see what I mean.

Then there’s just the garden variety ironic inversion of good nature and good manners corrupting him.  But there is an obvious opposition between “nature” – that is, something inherent or essential to a person – and “manners” – something inculcated and learned.  Nurture, to give it the usual yang to nature’s yin.  A priori versus a posteriori, for all you epistemologists out there.  Dorimant expounds upon this by asserting that his inclinations – his feelings, judgments, and preferences – are honest (he genuinely has them), but that in order to avoid offending people, he knowingly says the opposite.  Yet, he does little but offend people throughout the entire play.  There’s a sort of nihilism at work in Dorimant’s pursuit of pleasure.  Everything with him is relative, situational: if you make oaths while in love, you are not obliged to keep them if you fall out of love, for “in love there is no security to be given for the future.”

Like, the only constant is flux, and pursuing one’s pleasure or benefit amid that flux.  It’s an ethic – though that seems too grand a term – of consumption, of devouring.  Bellinda compares him unfavorably to other men, who are “wicked, but then they have some sense of shame. He is never well but when he triumphs—nay, glories—to a woman's face in his villainies.”  I think that a little harsh, at least by this point in the play.  He does seem to have genuine affection for Harriet, but that doesn’t mean he’s forgotten her inheritance.  All the same, Dorimant’s character, in general, is rather amoral and cynical.

Mirabell, in The Way of the World, is still the wit and the rake, but he’s been reformed.  He has had dalliances in the past, most pertinent for the plot with Mrs. Fainall, but he has genuinely fixed his heart on Millamant.  In a speech to Mr. Fainall – yes – he seems surprised at his own depth of feeling and recounts the discovery of it.  I’ll quote it at some length:

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.  I’ll tell thee, Fainall, she once used me with that insolence that in revenge I took her to pieces, sifted her, and separated her failings: I studied ’em and got ’em by rote.  The catalogue was so large that I was not without hopes, one day or other, to hate her heartily.  To which end I so used myself to think of ’em, that at length, contrary to my design and expectation, they gave me every hour less and less disturbance, till in a few days it became habitual to me to remember ’em without being displeased.  They are now grown as familiar to me as my own frailties, and in all probability in a little time longer I shall like ’em as well.

Dorimant would not give such a speech, even though he would willingly go to the country to please Harriet.  Mirabell’s first lines remind me of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 – I love her because she’s not ideal; in fact, that’s ideal!  Then he dwells upon an insult she once gave him, then pored over the flaws in her character.  Until, eventually, he found those things to be the very reason he was obsessing over her.  He sees himself in her, in terms of his own failings, his own vulnerabilities.  And, he sees a future here – “in all probability in a little time longer I shall like ’em as well.”  

Fainall, the villain of the piece, fails completely to understand, replying: “be half as well acquainted with her charms as you are with her defects, and, my life on’t, you are your own man again.”  Enjoy her beauty and sexuality – be a man, not a simp.  So, while Etherege seems to revel in Dorimant’s rascally amorality, Congreve suggests a need for the rake to be redeemed before winning a true wit like Millamant in marriage.

That’s actually not a bad segue.  Restoration comedies of manners tend to have pretty cynical views of marriage, seeing it as a contractual battle – a matter of wealth and reputation – rather than a sacramental union.  And that battle is fought with repartee and manipulation.  But Congreve elevates this negotiation in the famous “proviso” scene.

This is Act 4, scene 5 for those of you keeping score at home.  It takes place in the drawing room of an evening.  Millamant is rightfully wary of being trapped in a conventional marriage, particularly to a recently reformed “man of mode” such as Mirabell.  So, she lists the conditions under which she will agree to their union:

She shall “lie a-bed in a morning as long as I please.”  She will not permit pet names or any other “nauseous cant.”  No public displays of affection.  He asks if there’s anything else.  There is:

Trifles; as liberty to pay and receive visits to and from whom I please; to write and receive letters, without interrogatories or wry faces on your part; to wear what I please, and choose conversation with regard only to my own taste; to have no obligation upon me to converse with wits that I don’t like, because they are your acquaintance, or to be intimate with fools, because they may be your relations.  Come to dinner when I please, dine in my dressing-room when I’m out of humour, without giving a reason.  To have my closet inviolate; to be sole empress of my tea-table, which you must never presume to approach without first asking leave.  And lastly, wherever I am, you shall always knock at the door before you come in.  These articles subscribed, if I continue to endure you a little longer, I may by degrees dwindle into a wife.

“Dwindle into a wife” – quite an interesting image, the diminution of woman into wife.  In turn, Mirabell demands:

you admit no sworn confidant or intimate of your own sex; no she friend to screen her affairs under your countenance, and tempt you to make trial of a mutual secrecy . . . I prohibit all masks for the night, made of oiled skins and I know not what . . . I forbid all commerce with the gentlewomen in what-d’ye-call-it court . . . restrain yourself to native and simple tea-table drinks, as tea, chocolate, and coffee. . . These provisos admitted, in other things I may prove a tractable and complying husband.

It’s a quite funny scene, wonderfully written such that we at once understand that the characters are serious about their demands, yet their tongues are simultaneously deeply in their cheeks.  Millamant may dwindle into a wife, while Mirabell may prove a husband, the implication that a husband is more than a man.  Worth noting that Millamant demands her own liberty, her own personhood, while Mirabell is largely concerned with his reputation.  He forbids while she stipulates.

Yet neither seems to feel ill-done by.  There is a palpable sense of mutual respect, though on the surface it’s all “battle of the sexes.”  At the end, Millamant, exasperated at his conditions, shouts: “I hate your odious provisos.”  Mirabell responds, “Then we’re agreed.  Shall I kiss your hand upon the contract?”  A great line to end the scene.

There’s something very Tracy and Hepburn about this exchange.  Act 5 of The Man of Mode presents an antecedent scene of negotiation, but its tenor is quite different.  Harriet seems much more suspicious of Dorimant and all conditions for their romance feel rather probationary.  Harriet declares the reason for her chariness: “In men who have been long hardened in sin we have reason to mistrust the first signs of repentance.”  Dorimant replies: “I will renounce all the joys I have in friendship and in wine, sacrifice to you all the interest I have in other women.”  Now, I would argue that such a reply should make Harriet even more wary – I think he doth protest too much.  The exchange goes on in this manner: Harriet being practical and realistic, Dorimant effusive in his pledges.  His is the same energy and over-the-topness used in his more tawdry hook-ups, but now trying very hard to be earnest.

Perhaps the assertive, defined demands of Millamant, as opposed to Harriet’s defensive wit, indicate a shifting of women’s position.  In less than two years, Anne will replace Billy the Orange on the throne.  But if it does, it is very limited in its scope and effect.  The late 17th century was primarily an era of consolidating patriarchal control over the family and reinforcing traditional gender roles. The prevailing patriarchal ideology dictated that a woman's primary role was as a wife and mother, subservient to her husband.  Women remained legally and socially subordinate to men, though some small shifts, like the growing literacy which offered some women an avenue for intellectual expression, provided minor opportunities for expression or autonomy, especially for unmarried women (hence the “dwindling” into a wife).

pause

At this point in our overall story of English literature, there are as yet undiscovered civilizations in the heart of the deepest jungles who know that Restoration comedy satirizes the superficiality of fashionable society.  The character of the fop is the great emblem of this shallow affectation, and Etherege’s Sir Fopling Flutter is a stunning example.  Congreve splits the fop character into two minor players – Witwoud and Petulant – and instead of mocking the fop’s obsession with foreign clothes, speech, and manners, examines the larger idea of linguistic and intellectual decline among the upper orders.  Witwould and Petulant are mere stupid gossips, but in a dissipated society they pass for wits.  Congreve’s epigrammatic style – accentuating its own artificiality – may point to the means by which true wit can devolve into empty rhetorical formulae.  As Mirabell quips at the close of Act 1: “Where modesty’s ill manners, ’tis but fit / 

That impudence and malice pass for wit.”

Of course, the other great point of such plays is the idea of reputation as currency.  One’s social renown predicts and accelerates their continued social success: Dorimant’s notoriety as a lover or Mirabell’s as a social fixer.  The plays argue that “the way of the world” privileges reputation over genuine morality.  Mirabell points out: “Why do we daily commit disagreeable and dangerous actions?  To save that idol, reputation.”

Which leads me to my final thoughts on Restoration comedy.  The satiric point seems to lie in the gap between reputation and reality, between what appears to be and what authentically is.  The epilogue to The Man of Mode (by one Mr. Dryden) includes the following couplet: “Something of man must be exposed to view, / That, gallants, they may resemble you.”  OK, so a little tweak of the nose to the fops in the audience.  It’s the complement to one in the prologue (by one Sir Car Scroope): “Since each is fond of his own ugly face, / Why should you, when we hold it, break the glass?”  OK, so the satire here holds the mirror up to culture (to borrow from Hamlet).  A line in the prologue to The Way of the World ironically indicates satire’s purpose for reform: “For so reformed a town who dares correct?”

OK, let me take a short spur trail here.  I mentioned at the top of the show a bloke called Jeremy Collier who wrote a screed against the immorality of the stage in 1698.  It’s not too much to suggest, I think, that Collier had some grudging effect on Congreve’s development of social comedy.  He makes the perennial complaints that the terminally unhip make about any form of entertainment: too much swearing, too much sex, not enough imagination, blah, blah, blah: “Such licentious discourse tends to no point but to stain the imagination, to awaken folly, and to weaken the defenses of virtue.”  Right, a bit scoldy, but we in the 21st century have heard all this before about novels, movies, tv, rock music, rap music, and video games.  Plus ca change.  But take a listen to this passage from “A Short View of the Immorality”:

Call you this Diversion? Can Profaness be such an irresistable Delight? Does the Crime of the Performance make the Spirit of the Satisfaction, and is the Scorn of Christianity the Entertainment of Christians? Is it such a Pleasure to hear the Scriptures burlesqu'd? Is Ribaldry so very obliging, and Atheism so Charming a Quality? Are we indeed willing to quit the Privilege of our Nature; to surrender our Charter of Immortality, and throw up the Pretences to another Life? It may be so! But then we should do well to remember that Nothing is not in our Power.

Mostly same old same old – little more frothy about the mouth, perhaps.  But there’s a phrase in there that intrigues me: he asks if we are willing to quit “the privilege of our nature.”  So let me go back to that split between appearances and reality I was talking about a second ago.  If one is going to condemn, a la Plato, the appearance as a perversion or an obscuring of reality, one must posit that such a reality exists beyond the image, right.  The image is false because there is a reality whose truth I can measure it by.  And the plays speak to this idea all the time.  Here’s a couple of lines from Etherege:

Love gilds us over and makes us show fine things to one another for a time, but soon the gold wears off, and then again the native brass appears.

 Varnished over with good breeding many a blockhead makes a tolerable show. 

Forms and ceremonies, the only things that uphold quality and greatness, are now shamefully laid aside and neglected. 

And a great one from Congreve.  This is Pert, Lady Wishfort’s maid, commenting on her lady’s fading appearance: “I warrant you, madam: a little art once made your picture like you, and now a little of the same art must make you like your picture.  Your picture must sit for you, madam.”

Anyway, all this just makes me wonder – and I totally get that this is kind of a “stoner philosophy” kind of question.  But, what makes us think there is a reality behind the appearance? I mean, if we’re going to mock some people as fake, we must reckon that there’s a “real” version of them that they’re being false to.  And I’m just not sure that’s true.  What is reputation and appearance is, in fact, all we are?  That certainly seems to be the case in all these plays we’ve been reading lately.  The only thing that makes anything happen in them is how one person regards the social place and value of another person.  I get the sense that, if we took the world of these plays seriously, our identity or our selfness, is not something inherent and virginal and unsullied by society.  It is constructed by society itself.  We are what we think other people think we are. 

We are what we think other people think we are. 

Hold on to that idea for a while.  In another 60 or 70 years, we’ll look at Scottish philosopher David Hume and his ideas about stable identity.  But for now, I think it’s time to sign off.  Thanks very much for listening.  If you enjoyed the show, please give it a 5 star rating on your streaming platform.  Please like, follow, and subscribe.  Tell a friend about how much you enjoy the show and, of course, if you can spare a couple of spondulicks, click the "support the show” button – I’d be very grateful.

I think that we should get out of the theatre for a bit and get some fresh air.  What about a nice sea voyage?  Africa, Brazil, Trinidad!  Get some air into them lungs!