ABSTRACT
The two texts featured in this chapter represent for each of their genres the purest as well as the most challenging version of the pursuit of moral perfectionism. Stanley Cavell calls the film “one of the earliest, say the prehistoric phases, of the myth” of remarriage (PH, 114). Although The Country Wife offers no invitation to employ that metaphor (nonsensical, for the time in which it was written anyway), in Horner’s first speech, we are encouraged to see his ruse of impotence as a service to a “Nature” (1.1.3) that has been abandoned by the affected “pretenders to honour,” who populate the London of 1675, at least the London as portrayed in the world of the play (2.1.417).1 Consequently, the play’s central plot seems a fantasy of regression. Horner’s scheme is often critically configured as a return to a more primitive, a more innocent, state of natural freedom. Douglas Duncan and Peggy Thompson, for example, both invoke interpretations of Eden, reading Horner’s goal as an effort to get back to the state of being before Eve’s seduction by Satan transformed what had been uncomplicated love to the messy state of things (appetite, jealousy, lust, longing, etc.) we have to deal with now.2 W. Gerald Marshall, also thinking in terms of Genesis, goes even further to suggest that “by re-ordering creation and casting human beings into a purely bestial role,” Horner instigates “the insane uncreation of creation.”3 In other words, The Country Wife, like Bringing Up Baby, seems to be delving into the very heart of its genre, both texts driving back as far as they can go to the roots of the issues that preoccupy the genres in which these specific works participate, genres that recognize, as Stanley Cavell has put it, that “something evidently internal to the task of marriage causes trouble in paradise” (PH, 31).4
