University Press Copublishing Division / Bucknell University Press
Pages: 202
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Trim: 6½ x 9⅜
978-1-61148-372-7 • Hardback • November 2011 • $105.00 • (£81.00)
978-1-61148-551-6 • Paperback • October 2013 • $53.99 • (£42.00)
978-1-61148-373-4 • eBook • November 2011 • $51.00 • (£39.00)
Peggy Thompson has written on Restoration and eighteenth-century drama, fiction, and poetry. Her work has appeared in Studies in Philology; SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900; Restoration: Studies in Literary Culture, 1660-1700; Eighteenth-Century Fiction and elsewhere. She is the Ellen Douglass Leyburn Professor of English at Agnes Scott College.
Chapter 1 Coyness, Conduct, and She Would if She Could
Chapter 2 Feminine Illusion and Masculine Violence in Wycherley's Comedies
Chapter 3 Unruly Women and Patriarchal Control in Dryden's The Kind Keeper
Chapter 4 Coyness, Love, and Money in Behn's Comedies
Chapter 5 Liberty and Coyness in Shadwell's Comedies
Chapter 6 Novelty and Coyness in Congreve and Trotter
Chapter 7 Marriage, Virtue, and Coyness in Southerne, Vanbrugh, and Pix
In allowing female actors to appear on stage, the Restoration may have marked a watershed moment in English theater history, but this did not mark a corresponding improvement in social attitudes toward women. As Thompson (Agnes Scott College) expertly documents, a wide range of late-17th-century comedies contested some as basic as a woman's right to say 'no' to persistent/unwelcome suitors. The author identifies what she terms the 'trope of insincere resistance,' a motif whereby a woman's 'no' actually means 'yes,' and female characters conceal insatiable desire behind masks of false modesty. After tracing the evolution of this pernicious trope through conduct literature of the period, Thompson charts how comic types and stock situations in drama reflected and reinforced gendered inequities in society. Chapters document that some of the era's best-loved dramatists--Wycherley, Dryden, Shadwell, Congreve, Southerne, Vanbrugh--wrote plays curtailing woman's sexual freedom and social options. Even Aphra Behn proves a traitor to her sex, depicting romantic love as mercenary self-interest, and affirming 'the prerogative of well-born men by implicitly blessing their sexual aggression in the face of women's denials.' Meticulously researched, clearly organized, methodically argued, this book strips the veils of elegance and wit from Restoration theater, exposing dismaying prurience, misogyny, and exploitation. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers.
— Choice Reviews
Peggy Thompson offers a new understanding of female sexual agency and female sexual consent on the Restoration stage. In Coyness and Crime in Restoration Comedy: Women’s Desire, Deception, and Agency, Thompson analyses what she terms ‘the trope of insincere resistance’, the product of a culture that forces women to refuse sexual acts they actively desire. Thompson’s book is compelling, and it convincingly enumerates the many ways in which women were forced to perform resistance and then mocked or punished for their supposed virtue.
— The Year's Work In English Studies