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  • Coyness and Crime in Restoration Comedy: Women's Desire, Deception, and Agency by Peggy Thompson
  • Jennifer L. Airey
Thompson, Peggy . Coyness and Crime in Restoration Comedy: Women's Desire, Deception, and Agency. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2012. 189 pp.

Peggy Thompson's Coyness and Crime in Restoration Comedy: Women's Desire, Deception, and Agency provides an original and compelling reading of women's erotic choices in Restoration comedy. Restricted on one side by cultural ideologies that forbid women to consent to sex and bounded on the other by the cultural belief in women's constant desirousness, the women of Restoration comedy, Thompson argues, find themselves "unable to say yes or mean no" (2). Trapped in this double bind, female characters behave coyly in some cases to resist sex, in others to attract lovers who will see through the façade. Onstage displays of false modesty, what Thompson calls "the trope of insincere resistance" (3), thus legitimize rape as a sanctioned way for women to express their forbidden desires and transform forced sex into a central requirement of Restoration masculinity. Meanwhile, women are compelled to prove their virtue through displays of coyness, even as they are mocked and punished for the results. Thompson's book offers both a trenchant examination of the limitations circumscribing female sexual behavior in Restoration comedy and a new way to interpret on-stage depictions of female nature, female socialization, and acts of sexual violence.

Thompson frames her thesis in her first chapter by analyzing female sexual agency in seventeenth-century conduct literature as it informs the drama of the period. The pairing here is intelligent, as it allows Thompson to draw out the contradictory requirements [End Page 80] of ideal femininity that also underlie dramatic representations of women. Since women are expected to fend off male advances, coyness becomes, paradoxically, "one of the only ways for women to exercise romantic or sexual agency" (15). In contrast, men are both predators against whom women must be constantly on guard and "valiant combatants" who know when and how to seize a woman against her stated will (15).

Thompson continues her analysis in chapter 2 with a look at William Wycherley's four plays. Throughout his career, Wycherley would treat the coy woman as "devious, threatening, and literally criminal" (21). He would also valorize sexual violence as a form of just punishment for the coy. Here Thompson constructs an illuminating parallel to Richardson's Clarissa. Although Lovelace models himself on a Wycherley-style hero in his attempt to expose Clarissa's artifice, he ultimately discovers that her resistance has been genuine. No such recognition occurs in Wycherley's plays. While Wycherley may momentarily offer sympathy for women trapped with loathsome husbands, he ultimately treats women as aggressors who must be punished for their desires.

In chapter 3, Thompson turns her focus to John Dryden's infamous The Kind Keeper (1678), a play that ridicules female desirousness to comment on contemporary politics. For Dryden, female sexual agency allegorizes dissent against King and Church, an unacceptable undermining of patriarchal political structures. In Mrs. Saintly, Dryden "taps the fear and hostility provoked by sects' authorizing wives to disobey ungodly husbands" (46), while Tricksy embodies a political radicalism "resonating with guilt—in her case, the guilt not only of a political radical but... of a lustful Eve" (42). Dryden also satirizes Shaftesbury in Limberham, but his satire is predicated on the misogynist "condemnation of women as weak, carnal, devious, uncontrolled, contaminated, and, therefore, properly dominated" (57).

Aphra Behn's comedies form the subject of Thompson's fourth chapter. Throughout her comedies, Behn exhibits a profound ambivalence towards the dynamics of female coyness. At times, she subverts the trope of insincere resistance; when her ridiculous cits misinterpret sincere resistance as false modesty, it acknowledges the existence of female erotic disinterest. In other plays, however, Behn reaffirms Royalist prerogative by emphasizing female falsity. Meanwhile, as is the case in The Rover, "modest resistance" serves as the only possible alternative to financially driven sexual transactions (81).

Thomas Shadwell, like Behn, offers a complicated and measured response to female coyness: "Shadwell's apparently sympathetic acknowledgment of the way coyness regulates women is offset by...

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