By 1697, when The Provok'd
Wife was first staged, the licentious age of Charles II was past
and the throne was jointly occupied by the sober, Dutch Prince William
of Orange and his pious English wife, Mary. During their reign, which
began with the bloodless revolution of 1688, a different atmosphere
came to imbue the court. Meanwhile, the church led a reaction against
what it saw as the profanity of the age.
However, it would be foolish
to think that society as a whole changed drastically in the short time
between the usurpation of the throne and the production of Vanbrugh's
play, which clearly displayed an attitude to life that was recognised,
appreciated and no doubt shared by its audience. To be sure, the wheels
of change were slowly turning, but it would take the upper- and middle-classes
more than nine years to change the habits of a lifetime.
...During the sixteenth,
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England, there was a wide gap
between the ideal and the real process of making a marriage, the gap
being especially wide in the upper reaches of society. So far as the
propertied laity was concerned, the ideal marriage began with the selection
by the parents of the potential spouse, an agreement among both sets
of parents upon the financial arrangements, and the acceptance of this
choice by both parties, either voluntarily or under pressure...
For over half a century,
from the 1680s to the 1740s, the arranged marriage exclusively for interest,
as practised by the aristocracy...came under growing assault from the
fashionable playwrights and artists of the day...The continued, though
declining, obsession with property among the landed classes explains
why in 1701 even so ardent a champion of women's rights as Mary Astell
was claiming no more for a girl than the right of veto of a clearly
imcompatible partner...
Lawrence
Stone, from Road to Divorce: England 1530-1987 (by permission
of Oxford University Press)
...In an age before the
English had properly discovered the rumbustious sport of fox-hunting,
heiresses were hunted as though they were animals of prey...Thoughout
the seventeenth century a girl might well have been forced into a marriage
against her will, by parental pressure, or even outright violence from
a stranger, and have found herself thereby robbed of her freedom and
her money...
Antonia
Fraser, from THE WEAKER VESSEL: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century
England, (George Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd)
For those married women with
little or no property, the most obvious method of breaking a marriage
was to leave home. Not a few wives were forced to leave in order to
escape from repeated and possibly life-threatening cruelty. Most of
this cruelty was a product of poverty, brutality, and alcohol; some
of it was clearly the product of pure sadism; some of it was caused
by the psychological frustration of the husband at being trapped for
life in a household with a woman he had come to hate...
Some wives who were battered,
mistreated, or merely neglected decided to carve out a new life for
themselves and eloped with a lover, sometimes taking with them a considerable
quantity of household goods. They were the ones who tended most often
to end up in court, but they were probably also the ones with the most
promising future ahead of them...
Lawrence
Stone: ibid
It is one of the disadvantages
belonging to your sex that young women are seldom permitted to make
their own choice; their friends' care and experience are thought safer
guides to them than their own fancies, and their modesty often forbidden
them to refuse when their parents recommend, though their inward consent
may not entirely go along with it. In this case there remaineth nothing
for them to do but to endeavour to make that easy which fallenth to
their lot, and by a wise use of everything they may dislike in a husband,
turn that by degrees to be very supportable, which, if neglected, might
in time beget an aversion...
Sir
George Savile, Marquls of Halifax, from ADVICE TO A DAUGHTER
(1688)
...England in the early modern
period was neither a separating nor a divorcing society...[T]here were
a number of very powerful forces at work to keep together even the most
miserable and bitterly quarreling of couples. First there were a set
of internalized controls were reinforced by powerful external pressures,
thanks to the watchful and persistent supervision of the marriage by
parents, kin, "friends," and neighbours.
Lawrence
Stone: ibid
For your better direction
I will give a hint of the most ordinary causes of dissatisfaction between
man and wife...
The world ...is somewhat
unequal and our sex seemeth to play the tyrant in distinguishing partially
for ourselves, by making that in the utmost degree criminal in the woman
which in a man passeth under a much gentler censure. The root and the
excuse of this injustice is the preservation of families from any mixure
which may bring a blemish to them; and whilst the point of honour continues
to be so placed, it seems unavoidable to give your sex the greater share
of the penalty.
The root and the excuse
of this injustice is the preservation of families from any mixture which
may bring a blemish to them; and whilst the point of honour continues
to be so placed, it seems unavoidable to give your sex the greater share
of the penalty.
But if in this it lieth
under any disadvantage, you are more than recompensed by having the
honour of families in your keeping...this power the world hath lodged
in you can hardly fail to restrain the severity of an ill husband and
to improve the kindness and esteem of a good one. This being so, remember
that next to the danger of committing the fault yourself the greatest
is that of seeing it in your husband. Do not seem to look or hear that
way: if he is a man of sense he will reclaim himself, the folly of it
is of itself sufficient to cure him; if he is not so, he will be provoked
but not reformed. To expostulate in these cases looketh like declaring
war, and preparing reprisals, which to a thinking husband would be a
dangerous reflection. Besides...such an indecent complaint makes a wife
more ridiculous than the injury that provoketh her to it...
You must first lay it
down for a foundation in general, that there is inequality in the sexes,
and that for the better economy of the world the men, who were to be
the lawgivers, had the larger share of reason bestowed upon them; by
which means your sex is the better prepared for the compliance that
is necessary for the better performance of those duties which seem to
be most properly assigned to it. This looks a little uncourtly at the
first appearance, but upon examination it will be found that Nature
is so far from being unjust to you that she is partial on your side...You
have more strength in your looks than we have in our laws, and more
power by your tears than we have by our arguments.
Sir
George Saville, Marquls of Halifax: ibid
Lord Halifax's Advice to
a Daughter...was continually republished throughout the eighteenth century,
running to seventeen editions in English before 1791...[His counsels
are those] of resignation and despair, and yet they were widely read
and approved of in aristocratic circles until nearly the end of the
eighteenth century...
Lawrence
Stone, from THE FAMILY, SEX AND MARRIAGE IN ENGLAND
1500-1800
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd)
The view that masculine
fornication and adultery were but venial sins to be overlooked by the
wife was reinforced by the fact that before the eighteenth century,
most middle- and upper-class marriages were arranged by parents in the
interests of family economic or political strategies. Not only did neither
bride nor groom have much opportunity before the wedding to get to know
each other, but emotional attachment after marriage was considered inconvenient,
indeed almost indecent.
Natalie
Zemon Davis and Ariette Farge, from A HISTORY OF WOMEN, Vol III:
Renaissance
and Enlightenment Paradoxes (Harvard University Press)
The first [of John Locke's
Two Treatises of Government, published in 1689] attacked Robert
Filmer's Patriarcha, which had based the authority of the king
in the state on the analogy of the authority of the father in the family,
and in the process it redefined the latter as well as the former...The
practical need to remodel the political theory of state power in the
late seventeenth century thus brought with it a severe modification
of theories about patriarchal power within the family and the rights
of the individual.
The issue had already been
debated on the stage in 1697, when in Vanbrugh's play The Provoked
Wife Lady Brute applies Locke's Breakable contract theory of the
state to her own situation: "The argument's good between the King and
the people, why not between the husband and wife?"...
In 1705 Bishop Fleetwood
set out the new doctrine, which in effect undermined the traditional
absolute authority of the father and husband...Marriage was now...a
contract, with mutual rights and obligations, whose nature could be
debated endlessly...
Lawrence Stone:
ibid
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