Plots and Counterplots: Sexual Politics and the Body Politic in English Literature, 1660-1730 (review)

Reviews Richard Braverman. Plots and Counterplots: Sexual Politics and the Body Politic in English Literature, 1660-1730. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. xviii + 333pp. US$59.95. ISBN 0-521-35620-2. What is the relation between the plots used by late seventeenth-century English writers and the political issues of the time? According to Richard Braverman's thesis, part of the answer is that fictional plotting of relationships between the sexes reflects the contest about the nature of monarchy and the right of succession. Beginning from an account of the controversies leading to the Civil War, Braverman sets out to show that "the quest for a settlement was played out in terms that refigured the body politic as a feminized body" (p. xii). Thus royalists respond to the Restoration with romance plots featuring the union of a lost or frustrated heir with a bride representative of the realm to which he is restored, who offers herself as in fulfilment of a debt. A persuasive account of Orrery's Henry the Fifth displays this scheme in its simplest, most optimistic form, conceived in the early years of the Restoration, before the restored glories of hereditary right and hierarchical obligation had had a chance to tarnish. Following Michael McKeon's The Origins of the English Novel, Braverman reads romance plots as expressive of an aristocratic order which turned out to be less viable by the end of the seventeenth century than initial euphoria over the Restoration of Charles p might have suggested, and he goes on to show how the form was revised in response to increasing scepticism towards traditional royalist doctrine. In particular, Braverman argues, the succession is figured as matrimonial control of a widow and her estate, a goal which may prove unobtainable, as in Hudibras, and is to be obtained, if at all, only by a modified kind of hero who is capable of negotiation and compromise, as in Etheredge's The Comical Revenge. If the body politic is a widow, she is, after the controversies of the mid-seventeenth century, both independent of the paternal control which might once have delivered her unquestioning to the hero as sign of his hereditary right, and also too experienced not to make the best terms possible for her submission. Braverman's method works particularly well for the drama of the period, making possible, for instance, a reading of Dryden's Marriage à la Mode in which the coexistence EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 7, Number 1, October 1994 80 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 7:1 and final interdependence of a romance plot and a comic plot—both featuring in their different modes the male characters' difficulties in gaining and maintaining possession of appropriate female objects of desire—becomes an expression of the need for the mutual trust and self-restraint that resolves the comic plot to come to the aid of a royal marriage and succession that the romance plot renders problematic and to an extent unresolved. As well as standard plays of the heroic tradition such as Dryden's The Conquest of Granada and Aureng-Zebe, less familiar plays such as Sedley's Anthony and Cleopatra and Bancroft's Edward the Third are brought into an argument of considerable scope, which reaches a climax in a persuasive if somewhat diffuse account of Congreve's The Way ofthe World, in which Mirabell emerges, in effect, as the man of the future, the court Whig who by tempering desire with negotiation, and by being prepared to husband rather than exploit, can alone possess Millamant and provide an heir for the Wishfort estate— and can at the same time appropriate the charm that earlier royalist plots had reserved to the rakish cavalier whose mode of life spoke of Stuart claims to unfettered autonomy. The method of the study is, in each chapter, to summarize in some detail political debates at court and in parliament over the few years in question, before offering separate readings of three or four works chosen to illustrate the political inflections of courtship and succession plots in those years. The choice of these works may prove disconcerting to readers who assume that prose fiction is a major component...