ABSTRACT
As suggested by the brief focus on elitism in Chapter 2 and the reference to sexual violence in Chapter 3, there are some uncomfortable facts about the two genres at the center of my study. To those already noted, this chapter will add a third: textual evidence of the underlying racial and ethnic prejudices at the heart of the respective cultures. For some critics, one or both of these genres have been in a sense spoiled by these disturbing facts, at least in terms of enjoyment, appreciation, and praise. To be sure, the plays and films have generated plenty of valuable deconstructive critique pointing out their exploitation of women, their blinkered or destructive treatment of ethnic others, and their ideological elitism. A focus on class conflict in particular has generated important analyses of work by Aphra Behn and Preston Sturges, the focus of this chapter. In his discussion of Behn’s Tory comedies of the Exclusion crisis (The Second Part of the Rover, The City Heiress, and The Roundheads), for example, Robert Markley points out the way the playwright structures political and class antagonisms through sexual ideologies that privilege the license (for both men and women) of cavalier libertinism. He notes that Behn idealizes the “freedom of exile” and exile itself as a domain of “loyalty and generosity” and perpetual courtship in contrast to the repressiveness and “moneygrubbing” of Puritan (and Whig) rule, as well as the bourgeois notion of marriage that proves particularly repressive for women’s desires.1 Sturges, too, highlights class difference only to deny it in the end (in both Sullivan’s Travels and in The Lady Eve), as Eric Schocket has argued in a particularly interesting essay on the literary and filmic strategy of investigating the problems of the poor in America through “class transvestism.” Such portrayals, he says, merely translate “class conflict into class difference and then into cultural difference,” effectually silencing “revolutionary” ideas by containing them “within a rhetoric of pluralism.”2
