1. More talk about inferences 2. Conceptual connections3. Reading the play as a comedy

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Margery Pinchwife& her “inclinations to vomit”

• Working from our previous inference—

• The play’s comparison of sex to physical appetite is reductive in a specifically gendered way: women are usually the food.

• ---what can we say about Margery Pinchwife’s “London disease” speech at the beginning of Act IV, sc. iv?

• Discussion.

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Thinking with Hobbes What problem is Hobbes trying to address? Conceptual connections

The Leviathan, 1651 (date alert!)

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Title page of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651). Abraham Bosse. Printed by Andrew Crooke, London. http://www.wwnorton.com/nael/nto/17thC/politics/hobbesfrm.htm

READING THE TITLE PAGE OF LEVIATHAN“Leviathan” = sea monster, any huge sea animal (e.g., whale), or anything of immense size and power (Random House Dict.)

The body rising over the landscape and composed of many bodies is the “body politic.” All individuals contract with each other to surrender their power to the sovereign and are thus incorporated in his sovereign power.

The sovereign exercises power over both church (see the pastoral staff or crosier) and state (see the sword). See also the left and right panels that extend the scenes and symbols of state and church.

The “body politic” constrains motion. Why? What would happen to the image if there were political rebellion?

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Nature has made all “men” equal. Lev. Ch. XIII

So what’s the problem with equality?

• CHAPTER XI• So that in the first

place, I put for a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death. [A man] cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more.

• CHAPTER XIII• Nature hath made

men . . . Equall.

• CHAPTER XIII (cont.)

• [M]en have no pleasure, (but on the contrary a great deal of griefe) in keeping company, where there is no power able to over-awe them all.

• [I]t may be perceived what manner of life there would be, where there were no common Power to feare; by the manner of life, which men that have formerly lived under a peacefull government, use to degenerate into, in a civill Warre.

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The problem of equality

• Equality produces the condition for intense competition.

• Without some check on equality, “men” live in a state of war, a war of everyone against every other one.

• The contract through which individuals surrender their rights to everything relieves them from the unendurable equality of the state of nature.

• What is the “state of nature”?• In such condition there is no place for industry, because the

fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short (Ch. 13). 6

Interpreting The Country Wife through a Hobbesian lens

• Wycherley creates a device that allows Horner state-of-nature sexual privileges.

• Fundamental competitiveness is defined sexually. What’s at stake?

• But, unlike The Leviathan, the play works against any absolute solution. Wit undermines authority - and desire cannot be repressed.

• In the end, self-preservation requires a contract.7

A reductive treatment of psychology coincides with Hobbes’s analysis but also belongs more generally to a comic satiric

tradition.

• Desire is a physical appetite - it is natural and cannot easily be restrained.

• Restraint increases desire.

• The virtue required of women by social codes is affectation.

• Marriage is a financial arrangement, an entrapment, etc.

• Jealous men will be cuckolded.

• Inattentive men (devoted to business) will be cuckolded.

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Disguises

• How many disguises occur in the play? What is the status of deception? Is it wrong? Is it smart? Is it necessary?

• Which disguises work? Which ones don’t? What can we say about the play by noticing which ones work and which ones don’t?

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Contract

• How can you describe the contract at the end of the play? Who are the parties to the contract? What do they contract to do? And what guarantees that the parties will not violate the contract?

• Is the contract a source of conceptual connection?

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Comedy and the Marriage Ending

If comedies conventionally end in marriage (they do), what can you say about the ending of The Country Wife?

What are the implications of a marriage ending? What kind of solution is marriage?

How do you balance the marriage of Harcourt and Alithea with the statements about marriage at the end of the play? How would the play have been different if the Harcourt/Alithea plot had been the main one, with the Horner/Pinchwife/Margery/virtuous gang a subplot?

What do you think about Lucy? If we identify characters who are the playwright’s stand-ins, Horner is one--his strategy at the outset is the strategy through which the action of the play takes place. But at the end, the play, power is taken out of Horner’s hands. Lucy begins to manage the plot. And she’s the one who arranges the contract of denial or appearance at the end. What can you say about the play by analyzing the role of Lucy?

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If you were writing a paper called “What’s the Problem?”. . .

• What thesis could you imagine?

• Let’s work together on this question.

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