Predestination Are Us

On January 6^th of 1696—1695, old style—Betty Sewall, daughter of Samuel Sewall, one of the judges in the Salem witch trials, “surprised,” as Samuel puts it in his Diary, the whole family. Samuel explains what led to that surprise:

 

It seems Betty Sewall had given some signs of dejection and sorrow; but a little after diner she burst out into an amazing cry, which caus'd all the family to cry too; Her Mother ask'd the reason; she gave none ; at last said she was afraid she should goe to Hell, her Sins were not pardon'd.

 

Betty’s “dejection” derived immediately from a sermon by John Norton that Samuel had read to the family, where the preacher used John 7.34 as his text, “Ye shall seek me, and shall not find me,” followed by John 8.21, where Jesus says, “ye shall seek me, and shall die in your sins.” Those texts “ran in her mind, and terrified her greatly,” says Samuel, especially when she then read one of Cotton Mather’s sermons where Mather asked, “Why hath Satan filled thy heart.” When her mother asked her “whether she pray'd,” Betty answered “Yes; but feared her prayers were not heard because her Sins not pardon'd.”

 

I say that the “dejection” came immediately from Norton’s sermon because that sermon, indeed a great deal of the theological underpinnings of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, itself derived from the Calvinistic idea of predestination, double predestination. The idea of double predestination is that from the beginning of time itself God had already determined, predestined, not only that some people would be saved, but also that some people—the bulk of humanity, in fact—would be damned.

 

Betty’s dejection, what nowadays you might call her nervous breakdown, stemmed from her sense that, despite all her desire, all her prayer, all her faith, god did not respond to her. She did not feel within her the justification, her acceptance into the bosom of Jesus, that would signify her predestined to salvation. Whatever she could willingly do to exercise her faith, whatever work that the spirit might perform to move her to assert her faith, a process called sanctification, there was no way that god would change his mind. Without such the inward conviction of justification, the only other option available to her was damnation. Good, faithful, innocent as she might be, god had predestined her to hell.

 

Betty Sewall’s response to double predestination is one possible outcome of Calvin’s theology. The good person, praying desperately for some sign of god’s having chosen her for salvation, will try and try and try again to perfect the sanctification that will clarify her justification and union with the divine pleroma. With no inkling of divine preference, however, dejection, depression, and despair might well follow.

 

There is an alternative path for the subjects of predestination, however. Convinced that justification will never come, that the inevitable end of one’s existence is damnation, surely it follows, for some at any rate, that the whole house of cards comes crashing down. Why work towards something that can never be accomplished? Why not simply enjoy the pleasures of the here and now, and to hell with salvation, since in any case hell certainly will engulf the ones rejected by god. And god has determined the fate of every person from before the beginning of time itself.

 

That alternative approach to double predestination motivates the actions of Dr. Faustus in Christopher Marlowe’s play. Certain of damnation, in fact so skeptical of religion itself that he does not hear Mephistopheles’s assertion of his own damned condition, Faustus signs away his soul for the pleasures of the moment. “I count religion but a childish toy, / And hold there is no sin but ignorance.” To be sure, Faustus had higher ambitions than mere pleasure. He assumes that from knowledge he can come to wealth and power. Finally he is satisfied with pleasure, the illusory presence of Helen of Troy, whose spectacular beauty “launched a thousand ships,” as he says. Certain that he is not justified before god, Faustus does away with future sanctification and opts for the instant.

 

I gave Faustus, a fictional human, as example of the way double predestination can work on those who accept that they are not and will never be among the chosen few. I did so because the fiction covers a multitude of real persons who, sure that they will never lie down beside green pastures, simply assume the right to break all bounds of law and decency. I could point to a certain president of the United States who seems to have accepted that power is the only thing that matters, for instance, and damn the torpedoes of an impossible salvation.

 

Ancient as her travails are, Betty Sewall could be considered fictional as well—certainly very different from a twenty-first century human. And yet her doubt about the prospect of justification, which produces a constant effort at sanctification, has its contemporary counterpart as well. For her as for the modern worker, if there’s no sign of paradise, or fortune for the worker, then one keeps trying; and if there’s conviction of spiritual or economic wealth, then one rests in the bosom of the Abrahams. Or Benjamins, perhaps. The failed worker’s hopelessness in poverty parallels Betty’s spiritual dejection. For Betty a continued state of dejection might lead to madness; for the worker poverty might lead to suicide.

 

Betty and Faustus. The two of them limn out modern American reality.

Heinlein Once Again

Once upon a time, pretty long ago as it happens, I contemplated writing a book on Robert Heinlein’s novels. My take on them was easy to state: the man’s perspective on almost everything in the world was vicious and rotten to the core.

 

I gave up on the project because I really didn’t fancy writing a philippic—and that’s what it would have been. It wasn’t just the outrageously condescending perspective on women that oozed from every single book, although that was sickening enough. It was also the corrosive attitude towards any established government, derived from what seemed to me the hopelessly misguided notion that the American wild west was the best time for men to be men. Kissing cousin to that point of view was Heinlein’s obvious politics of solipsism, which on a good day I could call libertarian, although it so often crossed the line into sovereign citizen idiocy—and so back to the attitude towards government.

 

But the presentation of women remained a central concern for me. Poor teen-aged Podkayne of Mars, whose only crime was her determination to be intelligent and active, gets blamed for causing the first interplanetary war. No reason, really, beyond the fact that Podkayne is a female.

 

Despite my misgivings, I decided to reread Stranger in a Strange Land. The why is kind of embarrassing, but in the interest of full disclosure I have to acknowledge that in my younger day—much much younger day, alas—I loved that book. It seemed to reflect everything that was good and proper. Suspicion of government chimed with my deep distrust of a government intent on pursuing the neo-colonial war in Vietnam. The casual disregard for conventional sexual morality struck me as just what the doctor ordered for an adolescent boy. I deeply grokked the idea that transcendence came through cultivation of the inner self, be that via Martian wisdom or, for me, via psychedelic drugs.

 

So I hoped that this book, which I had deliberately not reread when I outlined my plans for a philippic contra Heinlein, might serve as a cordial against the current Trump-induced malaise.

 

I had forgotten what an incredible windbag Jubal Harshaw is—a palimpsest for Heinlein himself. I had forgotten that the wind issuing from Jubal’s mouth traced point by point all the attitudes that I found so dismaying in his other books. I had forgotten in particular that the free sex that I had found so alluring in my adolescent years reduced itself to contempt for women, whose only redeeming quality was their willingness to be sex objects.

 

Some of that objectification is casual. For instance, when Mike, the Man from Mars, begins to understand the utility of money, “Jubal encouraged him to spend money and Mike did so, with the timid eagerness of a bride being brought to bed.” On its own such a statement doesn’t broadcast the insignificance of women, although it does hint that sexual submission, eager or not, timid or experienced, limns out the function of women.

 

But then there are passages that underscore that hint. So, one of the space voyagers who returns to Earth with Mike, is

 

pleased . . . that these women did not chatter, did not intrude into sober talk of men, but were quick with food and drink in warm hospitality. He had been shocked at Miriam’s disrespect toward her master—then recognized it: a liberty permitted cats and favorite children in the privacy of the home.

 

The women in question are Harshaw’s assistants—Anne, Dorcas, Miriam, and the new addition who comes to Harshaw’s residence with Mike, Jill—all of whom are impressive human beings, competent, self-assured, gutsy. At least they don’t chatter. But when they do, as Jill does when Mike begins to understand the human condition, they often speak as if they were Heinlein himself: “Nine times out of ten, if a girl gets raped, it’s partly her fault.”

 

A final observation about the passage on chatter, which may make it even more disturbing. The statement, really a dip into the mind of the character, comes from Dr. Mahmoud, who has no first name, apparently, although he's called "Stinky." He is the cultural anthropologist on the voyage to and from Mars, if “anthropology” is the right term for a study of Martians. Mahmoud is a lapsed but constantly repentant Muslim. The perspective on women that Heinlein attributes to him stands for a general sense of what Islam says about women.

 

Whether or not that attribution is correct presents an interesting matter to study. But the point that makes the whole thing stink to high heaven is that Mahmoud articulates precisely the perspective that Harshaw, and by implication Heinlein himself have on women. When it comes to the clear contempt of women that Mahmoud thinks is proper, however, brave and straightforward Heinlein ducks behind the cover of Islam.

 

I may finish rereading the book. I am curious about why it seemed so necessary to me back in the 1960s, indeed why it resonated so loudly with the mind set of those years. I am hoping that Mike, the Man from Mars himself, will redeem the novel.

Slang

One of the important uses of slang is to divide in-groups from out-groups. The ones inside are those who know the slang, which is entirely obscure to those in the outside. Slang also works to disguise meaning, and so it’s a regular feature of outlaws of all sorts. The proliferation of slang words for drugs and the drug trade is a case in point.

 

Here’s a passage of slang, from one of the coney-catching pamphlets published in London in the late mid-sixteenth century:

 

We will filch some duds off the ruffmans, or mill the ken for a lag of duds. So may we happen on the harmans, and cly the jerk, or to the queer-ken and scour queer cramp-rings, and so to trining on the chats.

 

A"coney" is a bunny, and to "catch" a coney is to trap it, so "coney-catching" is slang for thieving from idiots. A translation, provided by Stephen Greenblatt in his Dark Renaissance:

 

We will steal some clothes from the hedges or rob a house for a basket of clothes. But we could be set in the stocks and be whipped or taken to prison, there to be shackled with fetters, and then hanged on the gallows.

 

It’s thieves’ cant, the slang of folks too poor to get along without filching whatever came to hand—there’s a version of that need in Shakespeare’s _The Winter’s Tale_, which introduces Autolycus in 4.3 as follows:

 

The white sheet bleaching on the hedge,

With heigh! the sweet birds, O, how they sing!

Doth set my pugging tooth on edge;

For a quart of ale is a dish for a king.

 

“Pugging” is a slang word. It translates to “thieving.”

 

And translation is the name of the game for slang. It is deliberately obscure for anyone outside the in-group. To make any slang statement clear to an outsider requires the same process that makes a foreign language intelligible.

 

Besides translation, a necessary consequence of slang is that it must always, but always change, and do so pretty rapidly. As soon as the slang terms becomes transparent, especially to the forces of law and order, new terms must come into being. Heroin is dope, smack, junk, H, hero, horse, boy, skag, mud, thunder. . . .

 

But even when slang isn’t associated with something illegal, the terms change as soon as their meaning gets spread enough so that they no longer separate in- from out-group. So “groovy” becomes "fire," "dope," "boss," "rad," "sleek.” There’s an obvious cross-fertilization from drug terms in the move from being in the groove to being dope, but the more general direction is obscurity or meaning. No sleek dude wants to make the mistake of using the wrong term and making meaning clear to everyone.

 

Being now an old man, I’ve noticed that the older I get the less slang is in my common discourse. I’m not sure why that is other than the obvious fact that age and grooviness are worlds apart. But I suspect there’s a smidgeon of social reality that creeps in. The in-group/out-group dynamic disappears when, as a result of the inevitable need to make money, I have to make what had been a narrowly defined in-group as large and comprehensive as possible. I can’t convince someone to buy my product, listen to my lecture, send money to my cause if I try to do it with language that is simply too obscure to convey meaning.

 

And so the standard language comes to the rescue. It may still be dope to celebrate being inside the orbit of the cool and boss. But, as they say, follow the money to a mutually understood lingo.

Runners, Guns, and Bobbies

There’s a show on Acorn, City of Vice, that presents the establishment and early development of the first police force in London, the Bow Street Runners, sanctioned by Parliament and sponsored in 1749 by my favorite 18th century novelist, Henry Fielding, who gave up on writing in order to become a magistrate in Westminster. In one of the shows Fielding is trying to convince one of the parliamentary leaders, the Duke of Newcastle, that a police force was essential to the safety of everyone in the city. Newcastle’s first response is that a police force runs counter to the tradition of freedom among the British.

 

The same argument makes the Second Amendment an absolute basis for the tradition of freedom among the Americans. And so just as from Newcastle’s point of view, freedom from police control is worth the death, theft, and mayhem endured by citizens of London, so too, as Charlie Kirk said, the unrestrained ownership of firearms is worth the deaths of random people in the streets, schools, churches, synagogues, stadia, theaters, nightclubs, etc. etc. of the US. The Bow Street Runners ultimately receive permission to organize, however, according to the show because Fielding arranges for some of his supporters, disguised as thieves and murderers, to assault Newcastle as he is leaving his preferred whorehouse. The good duke is so frightened by his experience that, within days, he compels Parliament to fund the Runners.

 

The lesson I learned from the show is that 18th century British aristocrats have a great deal more sense than 21st century American politicians. Survey after survey shows that the citizenry of the US supports the idea of gun laws, in particular gun laws that restrict the sale and ownership of assault weapons. But despite all the deaths by gunfire that the country suffers, assaults that include attempts on the lives of the politicians themselves, the Congress of the United States refuses to constrain, if that’s what it is, the “freedom” of Americans by passing any such law.

 

Once upon a time the US did have an assault weapons ban. From 1994 to 2004 the ban resulted in a drop from 19 to 4 deaths from mass shootings by such weapons. When the ban ended the numbers rose, from the 4 in 2004 to 79 in 2019. Similar results no doubt came from the institution of the Bow Street Runners. The difference, though, is that British folk decided that it made a lot of sense to have a police force. It was not for another 80 years, in 1829, that Sir Robert Peele organized the various competing police and watch forces in London and founded the Metropolitan Police, the Bobbies. But there was no doubt that, despite Newcastle’s fear, the freedom of the British public was not infringed by the police. Oddly enough, neither was the freedom of the American public from 1994 to 2004.

"Christian" Nationalism

In the first book of Gulliver’s Travels, “A Voyage to Lilliput,” published in 1726, Jonathan Swift details the great controversy that agitated the peace and quiet of the inhabitants of that tiny land. The controverted issue is deeply important to the adherents of either side of the question. It involved the breaking of eggs. As Swift ways, “the primitive way of breaking eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger end.” Because of an accidental injury suffered by the current emperor’s grandfather as he broke his egg in that “primitive” way, that grandfather’s father, the then-emperor, issued a command for “all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs.” The imperial edict led to resistance from the “Big-enders” so powerful that “there have been six rebellions raised on that account.” Serious rebellions indeed, since in their violence “one emperor lost his life, and another his crown.” Naturally the emperor of Blefuscu, Lilliput’s inveterate enemy, took advantage of the unrest. He received the Lilliputian exiles, using them to foment more unrest in Lilliput. The result? “It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end.”

 

For folks with some sense of history it doesn’t take a lot of thought to understand what Swift was mocking with the Big-Endian controversy. For some two hundred and fifty years before the publication of Gulliver’s Travels Europe had been awash in blood as a result of questions not too distant from those that agitated the Lilliputians. During divine services, was the bread and wine transubstantiated into the actual flesh and blood of Christ, as Catholics and the Orthodox held? Or was there only a sort of spiritual shadow of flesh and blood, a consubstantiation of the bread and wine, as Martin Luther had it? Or were the Baptists right that there was no real or imagined magic involved at all, and the ceremony was simply a memorial of what the Gospels said happened way back when?

 

Alas the failure of historical memory is a well-known disease in America, where there’s no dismissal more trenchant that to say that something is history. In any case, there seem to be a number of Americans who are all for declaring the US a “Christian nation.” What they mean by that remains something of a mystery. What variety of “Christian” do they have in mind? I suspect that they haven’t given much thought to the confessional sense of “Christian.” I suspect they mean a nation where people, especially white heterosexual people, go around reading the Ten Commandments on every street corner, behave “modestly,” and scorn anyone who doesn’t adhere to “family values.” Even at that very basic level, however, there are confessional differences that they need to consider. Which version of the Ten Commandments should sprout on those street corners? Does “modestly” mean that women should be chaste, silent, and obedient? Do “family values” assign all power to men who command it over their chaste, silent, and obedient women? Is the condition of being born again the ultimate goal? Or are works as well as faith required? And how does one judge the spiritual condition of anyone?

 

Given the sorts of differences that “Christianity” as a plain vanilla term obscures, I think it might be very important for those “Christian” nationalists to pay attention to the history of explicitly “Christian” states. Even before Martin Luther nailed his theses to the doors of the Wittenberg Castle Church in 1517 Europe suffered from religious wars. Wikipedia lists forty-seven wars waged in the name of religion, from the Hussite Wars in Bohemia to the War in the Cevennes in France. I’m not counting the War of the Spanish Succession because, religious overtones though that war had, its major focus was dynastic. So too the French Revolution, whose anticlericalism was an important but subordinate aspect of the war.

 

The poor eleven thousand Lilliputians who died in the Big-Endian controversy are a pale shadow of the hecatombs of European dead in those wars. How many people died in them? The total is hard to figure, but again Wikipedia estimates anywhere from seven to eighteen million people over the two centuries or so centuries of “Christian” fervor.

 

The so-called “Puritans”—they were really separatists, not Puritans—who travelled to the New World to establish that much-celebrated city on the hill in the Massachusetts Bay Colony did so specifically to escape the deadly persecution of another “Christian” sect, the Anglicans. Of course, as soon as those “Puritans” became established over on the west side of the Atlantic, they returned the favor, fatally persecuting Quakers, for instance, as well as Baptists. There’s nothing quite like the assurance that God loves you and hates your neighbor to fuel persecution and slaughter.

 

A third of the way into the 18^th century, and things had more or less quieted down when it came to wars motivated by religious differences. Clearly That’s not to say that toleration reigned supreme, but rather that the lines of religious division had merged with the political landscape of European nations. Denmark was Lutheran, France was Catholic. England was Anglican, Spain was Catholic. And there, in its mountain fastness, was good old Calvinist Switzerland, cheek by jowl with the various Catholic Italian states.

 

That did not mean that religious differences were tolerated within those countries. Certainly Swift knew very well that the Irish, among whom he resided, were screwed by their Protestant overlords. Indeed, English law prohibited Catholics from holding office well into the nineteenth century. To this day, English monarchs are prohibited from being or becoming Catholics. The same sorts of limitations applied in almost every nation state, varying only according to the official religion practiced in the region. It wasn’t active persecution, necessarily, but a constant infringement of people’s liberty and prerogatives much like what applied—applies, I should say, to people of color in the US.

 

I suspect that none of this is of interest to the “Christian nationalists” who plague the US at this point. Their interest is not religious but sociopolitical. They want to conquer, to reestablish the white supremacy that existed when “America was great,” back before all the progressive movements of the twentieth century took place. Perhaps a return to the ante-bellum condition of the first half of the nineteenth century would be even better.

It’s not Christianity that these folks want. It is dominion.

Performing Reality, from Hamlet to Trump

I think everyone knows, or at least everyone of a certain age who went to public school somewhere in the US (and probably the UK as well) knows that Shakespeare’s plays are full of plays within the plays. Maybe the most famous one is “The Mousetrap,” as the play staged in Hamlet is called. What perhaps is less well known is the idea that a great many of Shakespeare’s plays are centrally about performance itself.

Consider a little further the scenario that we encounter in Hamlet, for instance. Claudius is performing the role of the good, competent monarch—and in fact does a damned good job of it except for the minor point of his having murdered his own brother. Ultimately that catches up to him, so to speak, in his response to the performances that Hamlet himself puts on. Before he puts on his “antic disposition” Hamlet tries out a costume or two—his inky cloak, let’s say—and afterwards another costume, with “doublet all unbraced” and all the accoutrements of the madness he’s performing. At any rate, the antic disposition engages almost every one of Hamlet’s actions—acts?—from his treatment of Polonius to his treatment of Ophelia, poor young woman.

 

And then there are the comparatively minor performances. There’s Polonius’s advice to Reynaldo on how to catch the truth of Laertes’s behavior in Paris, to use “indirection,” which is to say to perform, so as to “find direction out.” Rosencrantz and Guildenstern fall into the same thematic frame, although their acting abilities are so poor that Hamlet susses them out within five minutes of their arrival. Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead riffs on their performative incapacity. Only Ophelia, poor young woman, and perhaps Laertes, seem not to perform. Certainly Ophelia’s actual madness is meant to contrast Hamlet’s performative madness. And although Laertes at the outset may be performing the dutiful son and brother, when he returns from Paris there is no performance in his anguish at his father’s and then his sister's death. Even that peacock, Osric, performs, although his act is so stereotypical a role that Hamlet mocks him from the moment he enters to the moment he exits the scene.

 

But Hamlet is not unique in the thematic focus on performance. Henry V is one performance after another, a concern beautifully captured in Kenneth Branagh’s film of the play, in which it becomes difficult to determine where actual behavior begins and performance stops. Performance is the heart and soul of As You Like It, of Twelfth Night, of Measure for Measure, of Timon of Athens, of The Winter’s Tale—and so on.

 

The serious, crucial corollary of the plays’ concern with performance is deciphering those moments and those characters that are authentic. My favorite conundrum in that regard involves Horatio. Is he really what he seems to be? Or is he just a better actor than Hamlet’s old buddies, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? If Horatio is indeed Hamlet’s buddy, then how does he end up being a flunky in Claudius’s court?

 

I’ve worked through these points regarding Shakespeare’s plays because our current world is so full of performance that I find it more than difficult to distinguish what is real from what is not, so that, a bit like Macbeth, my “function / Is smother'd in surmise, and nothing is / But what is not.” Take a trivial example that is currently in every Swiftie fan’s mind. Isn’t it wonderful that finally Taylor and Travis have agreed to tie the knot! And those pictures of Travis kneeling at Taylor’s feet are just so . . . so . . . so . . . practiced? I’m not doubting that the two people are really in love and are really getting married. But I am definitely doubting that the scene with the kneeling groom is an authentic moment. To my mind, it’s clearly a made-for-the-web opportunity.

 

More serious in many ways are all those fake pictures, videos, texts, written and peopled by artificial “intelligence” rather than by actual human beings. The danger those phenomena represent can’t be overestimated. I can envision a moment when a deep fake is so provocative that it provokes indeed, even to the point of causing a war to break out.

 

Even more crucial, I think, is the everyday performance that everyday people enact in every minute of their lives. Is the clip on TikTok of little Susie and little Johny disporting themselves on the beach or sharing a lovely breakfast in a fancy restaurant or passionately embracing in the shadow of the Tour Eifel a moment of real joy? Or is it joy performed for the ever-focused eye of the iPhone camera and the every-watching eyes of Susie and Johny’s online followers? And can Susie and Johny tell the difference?

 

Is there a difference? Aristotle says that one is what one does. Althusser agrees. Taking that idea to its logical conclusion, then, Susie and Johny’s performance is not merely a performance. If not an actuality, it is a reality in the making. The performative joy becomes the grounds for the eventual actual wedding. So too Hamlet, putting on his antic disposition, becomes an antic in fact. Hearing a noise behind the arras, in a moment of antic madness he kills Polonius.

 

Is authenticity itself a performance? Laertes and Hamlet, coming to the point of fisticuffs at Ophelia’s grave—an authentic moment that grows from performance? The Beatles’ solution to the question is a bit nihilistic—“nothing is real; there’s nothing to get hung about.” My worry, though, is that every performance is or becomes real. So Donald Trump performing the tough guy on TV becomes Donald Trump performing the tough guy in the Oval Office becomes Donald Trump being the tough guy who sends the Marines to pacify American cities.

 

That seems to me something definitely to be hung about.

Orientation Back Then

Seeing the incoming college newbies, both here and at PSU via online pics, I try to remember my arrival on campus back in 1970. These are the things I recall, although I will not swear to them because memory, many splendored though it is, often fails me.

 

First thing I remember is meeting my roomie, Sandy C, who seemed a nice guy, although in the long run that turned out to be not as accurate as it could have been.  And then, second thing, I couldn’t wait for the parental unit to disappear. As soon as they did I found my way to another kid, Dave C, whom I asked where I could find some pot or hash. It was kind of a dumb thing to do because I had no idea who or what Dave C was. But Dave C said his roomie, Bruce L, could satisfy my needs. So I went to Bruce L, who was equally dumb because, not knowing me from Adam, he immediately told me I could score some wonderful red Lebanese hash from him. So I did.

 

Third thing I remember is hearing that there was some sort of welcoming speech by the president, also a newbie on campus as it happened. Together with a couple of other kids we agreed that on the whole we’d rather skip that BS. So we did.

 

Fourth thing I remember is the “house” meeting in the dorm, when the RA, Tom E, gave us all sorts of interesting things to think about, especially two things. First, he told us about something called “jammies,” which were outdoor music/dance parties sponsored by the various dormitory areas on campus, and that there’d be one that very evening, down at Pollock Halls. That evening, then, a group of us went down to Pollock Halls for a nifty evening. And Tom E told us of the party that he himself was going to host, in the study lounge in the “house,” that weekend, when he would be supplying us with two or three tubs of alcoholic entertainment. I’d never had any alcohol at all, pot being my drug of choice. But that weekend I got drunk for the first and last time. Why? Well, I woke up the next morning in a bathroom stall, with puke all over me. Did I need that to happen ever again? Nah.

 

As I recall, there was absolutely nothing of the cheerfully welcoming hand-holding that seems to be the default mode nowadays. No team building. No introduction to the campus and the mysteries of how to register for classes or how to do anything at all. The only “welcome” was my fifth memory, an announcement that we would all have to endure a swimming test to demonstrate that we wouldn’t drown as we walked across campus in the rain. And that we would also have to endure a “fitness” test, which entailed running a mile around the track in Rec Hall in seven minutes or less.

 

The swimming test was not a problem for me. I’d been swimming for longer than I’d been walking, so swimming across the pool was a doddle. What they didn’t tell us was that we were required to bring our own swimsuits. I walked over to the Natatorium in my trunks, so that was no big deal either. But a lot of kids didn’t do so, and didn’t have swimsuits with them. So they had to do the test naked. The tests were sex-segregated, so there was that. But I suspect that approach to things would not fly nowadays.

 

The “fitness” test, on the other hand, I failed miserably. I’d been smoking cigarettes from age thirteen, and was up to about two or three packs a day by the time I came to campus. There was no way I would run a mile, not in seven minutes, and maybe not even in seven hours. That meant that I was condemned to take remedial phys ed. Along with the other losers, though, I had a great time since the “remediation” entailed hanging around the indoor track in Rec Hall, making believe we were really trying to improve our stamina. I’ll admit that that “class,” which was actually graded, as were all the phys ed classes we were required to take in order to graduate, and single credit though it was, brought down my GPA. Instead of a 4.0 at the end of my first year, I ended up with a 3.98. That meant that I missed out on getting the President’s Freshman Award that year—although I did get it the next year, for some reason.

 

Somewhere in there, maybe at that first jammie in Pollock Halls, I met the young woman who would be my first love. To begin with she dated my roommate, but he blew it with her, and I was fortunate to have her accept me—how that happened I cannot remember. She must have been extra kind to me since I was, and still am, a dead loss in the dating game. We lasted together for about five months, and then I also blew it.

 

But that was long after my introduction to the university and the “orientation” that, for better or worse, none of us had.

Education

I've an angle on college, for obvious reasons, having spent some 50 or so years teaching at one or another of them. And I agree completely with the idea that not everyone in the world needs to go to college. I also think it's completely true that a college degree ≠ a job or a career, although there's no doubt that some degrees that go in that direction pretty readily.

 

The point of education, IMHO, has nothing to do with a job or with an income or with some social status. I'll be etymological and point out that “education” comes from the Latin for “lead away from.” That's what an education does, as far as I'm concerned. And yes, there's no doubt that, all on my own, I could have read the same list of books that I read as an undergraduate. But the reading would have been bounded by my own self. I would not have been led from myself, but rather I would have been blithefully stuck in myself—in my family, in my experience, in my little room over the garage, not knowing that there's another room with a different view.

 

That’s why to my mind home schooling is a danger. Even with the most expansive of parental units guiding the curriculum, it tends to reinforce what’s already there. It’s not simply or only the instructor who offers a different viewpoint. It’s the other kids in the classes, in the labs, in the dorms, in the dining halls, at random on campus. The guest lecturers, the world-famous violinist, the physicist who sets out to explain string theory to the great unwashed.

 

All of that works together to form what’s offhandedly called “the college experience.” The key term there, it seems to me, is “experience.” That can’t really be duplicated in a private setting. And the more variety there is in the student body, the better the experience becomes. So-called “affirmative action,” now execrated as DEI, is good for the marginalized who get a chance to work out of their marginalization, but just as good for the privileged who get to see a world they’ve never experienced before.

 

That's not to say that the leading from self need be permanent. I've seen it many many times that a kid goes to college, takes the fast track to another universe, and then after they graduate circles back to where they came from.

 

But that return is hedged about with new perspectives and ideas that, for most of us, would not have been encountered without college. It's a little bit like real geographical travel. As Candide says when he comes across El Dorado, "This is vastly different from Westphalia and the Baron's castle. Had our friend Pangloss seen El Dorado he would no longer have said that the castle of Thunder-ten-Tronckh was the finest upon earth. It is evident that one must travel." College is El Dorado.

Photography

My friends and I would laugh when I was young

because those natives—Asian, African,

half-naked some, and some without a stitch—

cringed when the Geographic's magic man

trapped their souls in photographing their flesh.

 

Or so the text said, with a nod and wink

to us sophisticated ten-year-olds

who knew enough to know that photographs

were simply tarnished silver, not juju,

not sacrament, not abomination.

 

I wonder now as I watch the silver-

haired senator congressman president

preen before the lens, nudging ideas,

            adjusting the smile

Ahab and Cockwomble Trump

 I’ve been rereading _Moby Dick_, or rather reading it really for the first time because I last went through that tome back when I was a wee tyke in HS, and that sort of doesn’t count some 55 years after the fact. Anyway, I came across this passage in the chapter 41, titled “Moby Dick”:

certain it is, that with the mad secret of his unabated rage bolted up and keyed in him, Ahab had purposely sailed upon the present voyage with the one only and all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had any one of his old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was lurking in him then, how soon would their aghast and righteous souls have wrenched the ship from such a fiendish man! They were ben on profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars from the mint. He was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge.

 

The passage made me immediately think of cockwomble, raging away in his cockwombly way. And then it made me wonder what cockwomble’s White Whale might be. What is it in his history that led to the “unabated rage” that makes him “intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge”?

 

To be sure, cockwomble’s is not a “supernatural revenge.” All too natural, alas. But to pursue the parallel, it must be America itself that is the source of that “unabated rage,” since it’s America itself that cockwomble is voyaging to destroy, as Ahab the whale. Is the revenge fueled by his New York billionaire peers' refusal to take him seriously? To see him as anything more than a bloviating cockwomble, rich to be sure, but rich by naked chicanery and deceit? Is it their disdain that leads to his monomania?

 

But then, America is not just the whale. It’s also the Pequod that cockwomble navigates to destruction. And those idiotic “old acquaintances on shore,” eager to make profit on cockwomble’s mad scramble for revenge, will be destroyed along with him and the nation.

Intergenerational Elasticitiy

             I've discovered a new term, intergenerational elasticity, IGE. IGE is “a measure of how strongly a parent’s economic status is linked to their child’s economic status. . . . A higher IGE indicates a stronger link between generations, suggesting lower social mobility, while a lower IGE suggests greater social mobility.” In turn, greater social mobility suggests a “better” life, presumably in economic terms, for the offspring.

            I looked up the term because I was curious about how accurate it is to say that “every American generation has done better than its parents’ generation.” That’s the story we tell ourselves, anyway. And certainly for us lucky SOBs born into the Baby Boom, it’s absolutely the case. We certainly benefitted from the fact that, having destroyed the world economy in the course of WW II, humanity was obliged to rebuild it. The US was ideally situated to benefit from the rebuilding simply because its economic infrastructure had not been destroyed during the war. So we happy few, we band of Boomers did much much better than our parental units.

            But then I wondered if that was always the case, as the story we tell ourselves has it. I thought, for one thing, that the “greatest generation,” the one that endured the Great Depression and then fought in WW II, probably didn’t have it so good.

            So I looked. And I found a study, “In the Name of the Son (and the Daughter): Intergenerational Mobility in the United States, 1850-1930,” by Claudia Olivetti and M. Daniele Paserman, which argues that, with the exception of the Boomer generation, the story we tell ourselves is entirely mythic, sort of like the myth that all it takes to succeed economically is to keep a clean nose and watch the plain clothes—I mean, keep the nose to the grindstone.

            A key finding: “Our results indicate that the intergenerational elasticity between fathers and sons increased by 30% between 1870 and 1930, with most of the increase occurring after the turn of the century.” Earlier in the 19th century it’s quite likely that IGE had decreased, simply because the nation had been inventing itself. From the Civil War onwards, on the other hand, the reverse seems to have been the case.

            Boomers lucked out. But the luck seems to underscore the reality of how the capitalist universe we inhabit in this country wags its finger at us. Work hard, we’re told, and you’ll succeed because that’s the way the history of the country has always gone. Sure. Uh-huh. Yeppers. Belief in the myth produces a powerful incentive to keep the rich richer and everyone else bound to the grindstone and a high IGE.

            Meanwhile, say Olivetti and Paserman, in those nasty socialist countries, “Recent research reveals that today intergenerational mobility in the U.S. is lower than in most other developed countries.”

            To quote a famous dead white man, “So it goes.”

Who's the Bully?

            In 1898, the US intervened in the Cuban war of independence, and after the defeat of the Spanish Empire and the passage in the US of the Platt Amendment, which in effect gave the US veto power over Cuban legislation, supported government after government that served American interests and the interests of the upper bourgeoisie that dominated the Cuban economy at the expense of the average citizen and the poor. Sixty years later, the Cuban Revolution did away with that sequence of US-supported governments and installed the Castros and their epigones as presidents and supreme leaders. Elections? A joke. Relations with the US? Abysmal.

            In 1953, the US instigated, supported, and funded the coup that removed the elected Iranian prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh and firmly established the direct, authoritarian rule of Shah Reza Pahlavi. Twenty-six years later, in 1979, the Islamic Revolution overthrew Pahlavi, and from then till now Iran has been ruled by supreme leaders, ayatollahs, who come to their power by divine intervention, so it seems. The elected prime minister? A figurehead at best. Relations with the US? Abysmal.

            In 1984, the US became dissatisfied with the results of an election in Nicaragua that brought Daniel Ortega and his Sandinista party into the presidency. Despite a Congressional law prohibiting aid to resistance aimed at overthrowing Ortega, Ronald Reagan and his regime funded rebellion on the part of so-called Contras. In subsequent elections US-supported candidates won the presidency, until in 2006 Ortega was reelected to the presidency, where he has been in power since then.

            In 2003, the US invaded Iraq, defeated and had its president, Sadam Hussein, executed by the government that the US installed in power. After the US abandoned Iraq, a sequence of governments, each more inimical to American interests, succeeded. Elections? Sure. Relations with the US? From bad to worse.

            There are many many many many other instances of the US attacking countries, either covertly via CIA intervention or overtly via military incursion. Almost invariably all those instances have led to less-than-ideal relations between the given country and the US. To be sure, not all results have been as fraught as those I’ve suggested. But also almost invariably the reason why the results have not been so fraught has to do with what amounts to economic bullying by the US. Vietnam is a good instance, as are almost all the countries in Central and South America and the Caribbean. El Salvador is, at this point, an exception to the rule. The repeated interventions by the US in the elections and the governments of El Salvador have yielded benefit for the US in the government of Nayib Bukele. So far.

            But keep in mind that the US had peachy keen relations with Iran from 1953 to 1979. It’s the long run that is fraught.

Masculinity

            What then is this thing called “masculinity”?

            I could have started with an assertion instead of a question—the search for, not the certainty about “masculinity.”

            Between the question and the statement lies one of the major fault lines in the culture wars of the twenty-first century. A query puts the other person, the interlocutor of this imaginary dialogue, in the position of knowing and so of controlling the discourse. The questioner is therefore subordinating the self to that other, making the self a provider of service—here the question itself, which provokes the interlocutor to the assertion of a point of view. It is, in short, not a very masculine way of starting off this essay because to be masculine is always to be assertive, always to know, always to control.

            Or so they say, those people who take what I’ll call the masculinist side in the culture wars. From that perspective, to grant primacy to another is to feminize oneself, on the understanding that “femininity” is passivity. A little stroll through the index of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents underscores the point of view. The reader who looks up “feminine” in the index will be directed to the lemma, “masculine and feminine.” Already “feminine” is made passive, subservient to the index power of “masculine.” Under that heading, then, the reader will be further directed to consider as well “active and passive.” Go to the page indicated for “masculine and feminine” in the index, and Freud pulls the other finger, as our British friends might say: “For psychology the contrast between the sexes fades away into one between activity and passivity, in which we far too readily identify activity with maleness and passivity with femaleness.”

            Freud doesn’t only pull the other one. He also seems to pull his punches a bit when he adds that the characteristics of activity and passivity that he has just associated with “maleness” and “femaleness” is “a view which is by no means universally confirmed in the animal kingdom.” Apparently “maleness” and “femaleness” do not trace activity and passivity “in the animal kingdom.”

            To make the punch-pulling even more definitive, Freud adds that “every human being displays both male and female instinctual impulses, needs and attributes.” Psychology and biology are simply not commensurate.

            It follows therefore that the lemmas in the index do not quite match the terms of Freud’s discussion. What he calls “maleness” and “femaleness” is ultimately the “anatomy,” as he says, the biology of male and female. But the “instinctual impulses, needs and attributes” of every human evidently do not coincide with the anatomy of the sexes. The psychology expressed in the notions of passivity/femininity and activity/masculinity does not coincide with biology/anatomy, maleness and femaleness.

            Passivity and activity are, as Freud explicitly says, a matter of psychology. Those characteristics may well incorporate questions of anatomy as one element of masculinity and femininity, but biological/anatomical sex is simply one aspect of gender, masculinity and femininity. Although the index subsumes gender into sex, the analysis of male/female and of masculine/feminine in fact radically distinguishes between the two categories. Reading Freud’s comments carefully suggests that he is uncomfortable, at least, with distinguishing sex from gender. Nonetheless, it is also the case that psychology leads to questions of gender, of masculinity and femininity, and not of sex, “maleness” and “femaleness.”

            What seems to be a pulling of punches, in other words, is Freud’s constant, uncomfortable elision of sex and gender. It’s an essential element of that troubling chapter four of Civilization and Its Discontents, in which Freud establishes the origins of male supremacy and activity—gendered categories—in the biology of sexual difference. In that chapter he concludes with what to him is an inevitably female subordination and passivity within cultural practices—the “civilization” of the books title. In biology we have sex; in cultural practice we have gender. But then Freud essentializes gender, making it essentially indistinguishable from sex.

            It turns out, then, that in the current culture wars that we endure thanks to the desire on the part of some people to make America great again, which amounts taking the country back to the social realities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the right-wing essentialists are taking a Freudian approach to sex and gender. Without exception, over and over and over again, people in the right-wing camp conflate sex and gender. The conflation is omnipresent. The reporter who asks if there are more than two genders really means to ask whether there are more than two sexes. But the question is couched in terms of gender, and the respondent answers also in terms of gender: No, of course not—there are only two genders. And then the doubling down with the observation that one has either XX, “female,” chromosomes, or XY, “male,” chromosomes. The erroneous, reductive account of genetic variability aside, as with Freud, the right wing subsumes the psychology of gender into the biology of sex.

            The conflation then takes the same direction as does the index of Civilization and Its Discontents. The male/masculine dyad is assertive, aggressive, dominant; the female/feminine dyad is passive, docile, subordinate. And to finish off the right-wing fantasy, that’s the way God planned it—Adam and Eve, you know.

            What follows from those conflations is the assumption that culturally determined behaviors and attitudes are assumed to be the inevitable result of sexual rather than psychological differences. Male assertion/aggression/dominance means that men love weapons and violence and powerful cars and relations in which acquisition rather than relation is important. Historical practices in the marriage markets of the past demonstrate the point. Marriage is a matter of alliance—“Hey ho for alliance,” as Beatrice says in Much Ado About Nothing—and not of love or affection. Love, in fact, weakens the man, who then demonstrates that weakness much as Benedick does, also in Much Ado, by shaving himself so his cheeks are as smooth as a girl’s, and perfuming himself, and washing himself, and painting himself—with all of which Benedick’s friends, Claudio and Don Pedro, mock him when he comes to seek permission to woo Beatrice.

            Before he falls in love, Benedick maintains the excellence of masculinity by observing how love has transformed Claudio himself:

I have known when there was no music with him [Claudio] but the drum and the fife; and now had herather hear the tabour and the pipe: I have known when he would have walked ten mile a-foot to see agood armour; and now will he lie ten nights awake, carving the fashion of a new doublet. He was wont to speak plain and to the purpose, like an honest man and a soldier; and now is he turned orthography; his words are a very fantastical banquet, just so many strange dishes.

Clearly love is dangerous to male assertion/aggression/dominance. The transformation is so radical that Benedick cannot conceive that he will ever be overcome with love—"love may transform me to an oyster; but I'll take my oath on it, till he have made an oyster of me, he shall never make me such a fool.”

            It’s easy to miss in all this, but the transformations that Benedick ultimately exhibits—shaven, perfumed, washed, and painted—as well as what he perceives as Claudio’s transformations are in effect the feminization of the male. In point of a male’s behavior, love transforms the men, not into oysters but into feminine men. In other words, the play demonstrates repeatedly that sex, the maleness of Benedick and Claudio, is not the same thing as the gender that the men exhibit in their behavior and attitudes—in their psychology, in short.

            The same thing works in relation to Beatrice. After the falling out of Claudio and his wife-to-be, Hero, caused by the very assertive, masculine manipulations of Don John, Beatrice expresses precisely the intersection of sex and gender:

O that I were a man for his [Don John’s] sake! or that I had any friend would be a man for my sake! Butmanhood is melted into courtesies, valour into compliment, and men are only turned into tongue, andtrim ones too: he is now as valiant as Hercules that only tells a lie and swears it. I cannot be a man with wishing, therefore I will die a woman with grieving.

In the language of our current century, “manhood” has become feminized while “womanhood” remains bound by the gendered rules of behavior.

            The feminization of men that Beatrice underscores is, perhaps, an effect of what Freud would call “civilization.” There is no doubt that the assertion/aggression/dominance of men has become increasingly less acceptable. At the same time, “feminine” behaviors have become more and more acceptable, even required for men. Benedick scorns Claudio’s love of “the tabour and the pipe,” but in the court of Louis XIV, just some fifty or sixty years after Shakespeare wrote his play, a shaven, perfumed, washed, and painted king, in his high heels, would dance to music of Lully, Couperin, Charpentier, all more refined than the tune of a tabour and a pipe.

            Men retain their social power, of course, from which stems the real basis for masculine assertion/aggression/dominance. As Mary Wollstonecraft points out in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the impetus of social training and expectations works to support the conflation of sex and gender. Even though Benedick and Claudio, Louis XIV and Cardinal Mazarin, and all the other “feminized” men of the past might be rendered weak by love, as Benedick puts it, or by the refinements of civilization, at the same time social practices recuperate masculine assertion/aggression/dominance.

            Focused on the realities of how female behavior and attitudes are gendered “feminine,” Wollstonecraft writes,

I attribute to a false system of education, gathered from the books written on this subject by men, who, considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than rational wives; and the understanding of the sex has been so bubbled by this specious homage, that the civilized women of the present century, with a few exceptions, are only anxious to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition, and by their abilities and virtues exact respect.

In short, the curriculum of female education forces a gendered femininity on the women who otherwise would be as capable of “masculine” behavior and attitudes as the men.

            Wollstonecraft goes on to argue that some men “who are, like them [i. e. women], sent into the world before their minds have been stored with knowledge or fortified by principles,” end up, like women, “practic[ing] the minor virtues with punctilious politeness.” The men Wollstonecraft has in mind, paradoxically from a twenty-first century perspective, are soldiers, who

from continually mixing with society . . . gain, what is termed a knowledge of the world; and this acquaintance with manners and customs has frequently been confounded with a knowledge of the human heart.”

Wollstonecraft is describing the peculiar education of an aristocratic soldiery in late 18^th and 19^th century Britain. The younger sons of aristocrats, absent any hope of inheriting title and property, bought their way into the officer class and, with no training, no preparation, and no education to speak of, spent most of their time in the sitting rooms and ballrooms of high society, mixing with women, finding themselves “civilized” by their encounter with women. The result, then, is the feminization of the officer class that Wollstonecraft underscores. Wollstonecraft’s point is that social practice produces the psychology associated with femininity even though the sex/biology is male. Social practices in education work to construct gendered behavior.

            Oddly, right wingers recognize the point that Wollstonecraft makes. They regularly mock feminine males and masculine women. That has been the case for a long long long time. One example, published in 1620: Hic Mulier: or, The Man-Woman. I’m attaching an image of the title page, both to get the full title in here as well as to highlight the frontispiece that substitutes for a colophon, showing a woman about to be shorn of all her hair and so made to look like the an in the portrait held by the woman on the right.

The title plays on the “false Latine” that combines the masculine demonstrative article hic, “this,” with the feminine pronoun, mulier, “woman.” The point is to demonstrate that

since the daies of Adam women were never so Masculine [as they now are]; Masculine in their genders and whole generations, from the Mother, to the youngest daughter; Masculine in Number, from one to multitudes; Masculine in Case [i .e clothing], even from the head to the foot; Masculine in Moode, from bold speech, to impudent action; and Masculine in Tense: for (without redresse) they were, are, and will be still most Masculine, most mankinde, and most monstrous.

The text goes on to mock women who take on  masculine gender behavior and identities. As always with texts like this the implication is that the man who wrote it feels that his own masculine authority is undermined by such women, and that he is addressing an audience of men who feel similarly threatened. Think the bro-sphere of our modern world.

            At the same time, the writer explicitly acknowledges that sex and gender are two different things. The woman is sexed female, as Jeannette Winterson might say in Sexing the Cherry, but their “case,” their clothing, their behavior, their attitudes—all of those are couched in terms of masculine identity.

            I’ll point out in passing that Moll Cutpurse, the hero of The Roaring Girl, one of Thomas Middleton’s and Thomas Dekker’s city comedies, is masculine in exactly the same way as the pamphlet describes the “man-woman” that it mocks. But Moll is not mocked. She is a good human being, a woman who prefers to enact masculine attitudes and behaviors. And here she is, from the title page of the 1611 edition.

Not all men, it seems, felt as threatened by such women as is the pamphleteer.

            At any rate, what our current right wingers don’t understand is that their mockery in effect acknowledges that sex and gender are two different things. In the end, then, the right wingers undermine their own reductive conflation of sex and gender.

            And so I come back to the initial question: what is masculinity? From what I gather in Freud, Shakespeare, Wollstonecraft, Hic Mulier, and Middleton and Dekker, it is exactly parallel to femininity—a set of attitudes and behaviors imposed and policed by social discourses from which psychological identities derive.

            What attitudes and behaviors fall in which category changes as discourses and practices change. Once upon a time childbirth was a quintessentially feminine activity, undertaken by women obviously, but overseen by midwives, aunties, gossips—all the women who might be of use. And then childbirth became a masculine activity, not because men gave birth but because male doctors arrogated the practice to themselves and made it a matter of domination and control. And now childbirth is swinging back—not so much to a feminine activity but to an ungendered one, over which women more than men have influence. So too so many other practices. Attending to the tabour and pipe is feminine until the king begins to do so, and then it's masculine—and eventually also ungendered. Cooking is feminine so long as it involves hearth and home, but when it intersects commerce and status it becomes a masculine endeavor undertaking by male chefs—until now, when in the orbit of commerce and status cooking too is a neutral activity.

            So gender is infinitely malleable, and perhaps the binary of masculine and feminine is slowly dissolving under the influence of new discourses and new practices. In that context, of course male and female sex represent a discourse associated with gender. But not to make a mystery of things, sex and gender are not the same thing, not by a long shot.

Esteem: Love in Wycherley's The Country Wife

William Wycherley’s The Country Wife is one of those Restoration comedies that you either hate or love. I fall in the latter category, which may reflect more on my sense of humor than on my strict adherence to expressions of so-called virtue. I acknowledge that the play presents humans as fairly vicious animals, more interested in acquiring money and power and in the gratification of their sexual desires than in almost anything else—except, perhaps, for due attention to the social standing that, in the play and in the world that it depicts, is called “honour.” But then that’s the job of a satirist, to strip away the masks that hide the reality of existence. In Hamlet’s more expansive way of putting it, the task of art is “to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” Satire’s mirror always reflects scorn.

I also acknowledge that Restoration comedy is often a stew of misogyny. There are obvious exceptions, of course, as in the plays of Aphra Behn where women’s agency is foregrounded. I think, however, that the best Restoration comedies are not so much misogynistic as they are misanthropic.

 

The Country Wife is clearly scornful, gently so perhaps, of ignorant women such as Margery Pinchwife, the “country wife” of the title. Unlike the subtler, more penetrating comedies of Shakespeare, among others, the play suggests but does not analyze the reasons for Margery’s ignorance. The satire does not directly address, but rather simply presents the gendered inequities of the seventeenth century. More ruthlessly, the play focuses squarely on sexual viciousness. The coterie of sexually starved women—Lady Fidget and Mrs. Dainty Fidget, Mrs. Squeamish—who people the play will do anything they can to get a good fuck so long as it doesn’t entail loss of “honour.”

 

That is why they so admire Mr. Horner. They abhor Horner when they think he has become entirely impotent, but they adore him when they discover that the report of his impotence is his ruse to convince husbands to leave their wives in his company. As Lady Fidget says when Horner reveals the truth to her,

But, poor Gentleman, cou'd you be so generous? so truly a Man of honour, as for the sakes of us Women of honour, to cause your self to be reported no Man? No Man! and to suffer your self the greatest shame that cou'd fall upon a Man, that none might fall upon us Women by your conversation; but indeed, Sir, as perfectly, perfectly, the same Man as before your going into France, Sir; as perfectly, perfectly, Sir?

In France the cure for the clap—loads and loads of mercury—would have made Horner “no Man” indeed, and the good Lady Fidget is in awe that he provulgates that falsehood so that he can enjoy women’s “conversation” without destroying the ladies’ “honour.”

 

But Wycherly does not limit the satire to women. The men are in for as much scorn as they are. The women have good cause to be dissatisfied with the bargains they made in marrying their mates.

 

There is Mr. Pinchwife, who marries ignorant little Margery according to his principle, that “he's a Fool that marrys, but he's a greater that does not marry a Fool; what is wit in a Wife good for, but to make a Man a Cuckold?” Under that principle lies the truth, which Horner worms out of him when he asks why, if he is so worried about becoming a cuckold, he doesn’t simply keep a mistress. “A Pox on't, the Jades wou'd jilt me, I cou'd never keep a Whore to my self.” Horner draws the proper conclusion, that “you only marry'd to keep a Whore to your self.” Why the whores would jilt him is left unexamined, but the implication is that when it comes to sexual performance he is at least a bit insufficient.

 

Pinchwife’s sexual self-doubt acts as the catalyst for much of the comedic plot of the play. He does not believe in Horner’s self-proclaimed impotence, and so that part of the plot hangs on Horner’s maneuvers to deceive the husband, Pinchwife, as he tries to get the wife, Margery, in bed—or at least in compromising positions. In short, Mr. Pinchwife is so thoroughly sexually inferior that he is the major image of scorn in the play.

 

And there is Sir Jasper Fidget, a city knight, as they said back then, a newly rich urban merchant of some sort whose goal in life is to keep making as much money as he can. Eager to get business, he is happily willing to believe in Horner’s impotence so he can leave his wife and daughter alone with Horner while he hies off to Whitehall to ingratiate himself with king and courtiers and so manage his financial affairs. Another locus for scorn, then, is the venality of the men.

 

And there is Sparkish. In his case, the mirror of satire presents two images of scorn. Venality is one element of the scorn. Sparkish is meant to marry Alithea, the wonderfully heroic hero of the play, not because he loves her but rather because he will be getting five thousand pounds in dowry from Pinchwife, Alithea’s brother, to do so. One aspect of Alithea’s heroism is that, although she is not ignorant and naïve as Margery is, nonetheless she trusts in the good will of others. When Mr. Harcourt, the male “hero” of a play where there are no male heroes, tries to woo Alithea away from Sparkish, the action at the heart of the romantic plot of the play, she rejects him because, she says, Sparkish “loves me, or he wou'd not marry me.” To be fair to Sparkish, he seems to have equal faith in Alithea’s truth and virtue. Alithea thinks so, at any rate, and asserts that “'tis Sparkish's confidence in my truth, that obliges me to be so faithful to him.”

 

As it turns out, it’s not so much Sparkish’s confidence as it is his foolishness that makes him so accommodating to Alithea. Indeed, the other element of scorn in the image of Sparkish is his profound folly. As Dorilant, another man about town, says, “to pass for a wit in Town, [Sparkish] shewes himself a fool every night to us.” A wit-wannabe, Sparkish demonstrates how easily men descend into idiocy. Sparkish is not ignorant, as is Margery, but he is so full of himself as the icon of the latest fashion and the purveyor of the latest gossip, that he is easily, and repeatedly, mocked, scorned, fleeced. Ultimately, when Harcourt’s machinations convince Sparkish that Alithea has betrayed him, Sparkish shows that he can be jealous: “Cou'd you find out no easie Country Fool to abuse?” he asks Alithea, “none but me, a Gentleman of wit and pleasure about the Town”?

 

At the heart of Sparkish’s relation to Alithea is the untenable position that Alithea finds herself in. Yes, Sparkish seems to trust Alithea, who in truth is a virtuous young woman. But on the other hand, Sparkish also takes as gospel truth the default general notion about women that animates the sexual games of the play. As he says to Pinchwife, “Cuckolding like the small Pox comes with a fear, and you may keep your Wife as much as you will out of danger of infection, but if her constitution incline her to't, she'l have it sooner or later by the world.” In short, all women are or will be harlots. Harcourt paints Alithea as just another woman, and therefore Sparkish comes to see her as cuckold-maker in waiting. Recognizing that Sparkish is no different from the run of the mill “gentleman” who can never trust a wife, then, Alithea is happy to change her mind. Pinchwife is as happy to have Alithea marry Harcourt as Sparkish—indeed, Harcourt is socially and financially a better catch than is Sparkish. And so, says Alithea, “I find my Brother would break off the match [with Sparkish], and I can consent to't, since I see this Gentleman can be made jealous.”

 

The sexual malaise of the society that the play reflects is nowhere clearer or sharper than it is in Horer, a “true” wit. Horny as his name indicates, he deploys his wit to fulfill all his sexual desires. Witness the wonderfully funny scene where Sir Jasper Fidget warns his wife, who has locked herself into Horner’s chamber, that Horner is about to penetrate Lady Fidget “the back way.” Ostensibly the good lady is selecting the best “china” that Horner owns. But behind the closed door, as the lady says, “Let him come, and welcome, which way he will.” There is no doubt that Horner comes indeed, so that when eventually he and Lady Fidget exit his chamber, she holds up “the pretti'st piece of China” that she has taken from him. Seeing the prize, Mrs. Squeamish says, “Oh Lord I'le have some China too, good Mr. Horner, don't think to give other people China, and me none, come in with me too.” The depleted Horner demurs, however: “Upon my honour I have none left now.”

 

The question the character of Horner raises is whether the expenditure of energy in the pursuit of a fuck is worth the effort. Horner himself defines the kind of women that his claim of impotence is designed to prey on: “Why, these are pretenders to honour, as criticks to wit, only by censuring others.” Women like the Fidgets or the Squeamishes are female versions of men like Sparkish and Pinchwife. All of them, men as much as women, are simply proper objects of satirical scorn. If that is the case, then Horner is a much debased as is Lady Fidget.

 

Alithea is the counter to so much debauchery. Until Sparkish proves himself to be just another accuser of women, she is steadfast in her loyalty to him. It’s obvious that Harcourt attracts her. He is, after all, exactly what Pinchwife understands him to be: “His [Harcourt’s] estate is equal to Sparkish's, and his extraction as much better than his, as his parts are.” Alithea does not even think of Pinchwife’s first consideration, Harcourt’s estate. But she does recognize that Harcourt is infinitely superior to Sparkish in wit and grace.

 

Although it is not absolutely clear in the play, it seems as well that Harcourt is not so thoroughly misogynistic as are the other male characters. He certainly admires Alithea, not just for her beauty but also for her wit and for her virtue. At the first meeting of Alithea and Harcourt affirms the truth that the play presents, that “Marriage is rather a sign of interest, then love; and he that marries a fortune, covets a Mistress, not loves her.”

 

At no point in the play does Harcourt expressly accept Alithea’s watchword, that “Love proceeds from esteem.” But his behavior from the first meeting limns out the fact that he does indeed esteem Alithea.

 

The climax of the comic plot involves Margery putting on Alithea’s clothes and, in that disguise, going off to an assignation with Horner. In the mish mash of identities that ensues, Alithea’s “honour” comes under suspicion. Alithea is distraught because, newly engaged to Harcourt, she assumes that he will reject her much as Sparkish has: “O unfortunate Woman! a combination against my Honour, which most concerns me now, because you share in my disgrace, Sir, and it is your censure which I must now suffer, that troubles me, not theirs.” Alithea’s concern for Harcourt’s reputation, and her fear that he will no longer esteem her, are evident. But Harcourt is a man of a different stripe. “Madam, then have no trouble,” he replies, “you shall now see 'tis possible for me to love too, without being jealous, I will not only believe your innocence my self, but make all the world believe it.”

 

Harcourt does not use “esteem,” the word that underlies Alithea’s ideal grounds for the flourishing of love. But it’s clear enough that Harcourt so esteems Alithea that he cannot even begin to believe that she has in fact lost her “honour.” When the two marry it will, without a doubt, be a matter of mutual esteem that underlies the union.