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Essay on Sex In The City
Sexuality in Wycherley dramas has long received much critical notice. Gender, desire, and the characters' positions in the face of it, especially in The Country Wife, have become the central preoccupations of recent criticism while attention has also been drawn to sexual relationships as a terrain for the exercise of power. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, (1984: 226) in her perceptive reading of the play, sees in it the deployment of a symbolic system of exchange between men with women as its object.
Heterosexual relationships are significant, not in themselves, but only to the extent that they serve a male strategy of acquiring bonds with and control over other men. Sedgwick (1984: 245) offers an important perspective on the dialectics of power and gender in Wycherley, demonstrating women's passive, but nonetheless instrumental position in the construction and reproduction of male bonds of allegiance and power.
The Restoration code of sexual honor does not merely tolerate male promiscuity, but demands it. Wycherley's play registers a critical point in the transition from the system of alliance to that of sexuality. He dramatizes the tensions deriving from the discrepancy between forms of sexual control specific to alliance and emerging notions of sexuality that clearly challenge the assumptions on the basis of which such control operates.
Wycherley focuses on women's uneasy position vis-à-vis marriage as mediators for the consolidation and reproduction of alliance. For the same reason, he draws attention to their sexuality as a factor potentially subversive of patriarchal arrangements and insists on the self-determination of female desire outside such arrangements. By demonstrating women as desiring subjects who refuse to take up, or retain, their allotted positions in alliance, he moves away from a problematic of sexual legitimacy, as demarcated by the practices of alliance, to a problematic of the body and its desires.
In this context....
