Wycherley's The Country Wife

Wycherley’s The Country Wife gives the audience a very clear-cut representation of gender roles in the late seventeenth century. It reminds the audience of the constructed nature of gender roles and it shows them a way a way to succeed in a society dominated by such roles. It is as simple as understanding the social constructions and creating new constructions within these roles. For instance, The Country Wife equates femaleness with power rather than pious passivity, especially in the characters of the married women who all vie for Horner’s attentions. Instead of representing women as fitting into the social constructs created for them, Wycherley shows their rebellion against such constructs by their assertion of control beneath the surface.

On the opposite side, one has Mr. Horner who takes advantage of his assumptions that most London women would like to have extramarital affairs to expand upon his lecherous intents. Both men underscore how many men of that time period had been conditioned by the expectations of London society. While both men had been known for their rakishness, and knew of the sexual desires of women, they both inclined to try to undermine these desires. For Pinchwife, it was a matter of keeping his wife away from other men, simply to preserve his own pride (while he may as well been one of the men making cuckolds of other men before the time when the play took place). His attempt to stifle his wife, rather than fulfill her needs himself encourage her desires for another man. [QUOTE, MAYBE FROM ALITHEA] For Horner, it was a matter of exploiting a woman’s desire to preserve her reputation while still trying to fulfill her own sexual needs. However, his verbal games become more of a desperate struggle to preserve his masculinity in the faces of multiple strong-willed women who seem to know exactly what they want, rather than a way of molding them into what he wants. Although Horner does succeed in obtaining the sexual advances he sets out to make, instead of being the