Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer: The Whorehouse of Language

Critical opinion has varied widely on the meaning of Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer (1676) to the point where one critic has written with justification that, about the play, “there is universal disagreement on every fundamental question.”¹ It is not surprising in a play that portrays a world where each character’s grasp on meaning slips away through irony, that there is so much confusion about the play’s meaning. Critics frequently—and convincingly—examine the collapse of meaning in the play, as well as in the society it portrays, as the play’s pivotal theme. Wycherley is writing at what Rose Zimbardo has called “Restoration Zero Point,”² where the old epistemology has collapsed and the new one, based on materialism and science, is just being formed, a point the satirist sees as a state of meaninglessness. Yet a greater meaning beyond a corrosive, narcissistic irony is a possibility endorsed by the play. Wycherley not only satirizes the uncertainties of the present, but he also, as a good conservative, gestures back to the traditional epistemology of the “old philosophy,”³ symbolized by Fidelia, “faith,” as the positive source of meaning. Without faith, the ironic condition of the world would only enable the characters to create meaning that is a narcissistic projection hiding Hobbes’s war of all against all. Part of what obscures this overall design is Wycherley’s technique of audience entrapment, which makes the audience identify with Freeman, the playwright’s apparent mouthpiece, and which, as a result, seemingly places the ethos of the play with the worldly-wise Londoners. In his examination of entrapment of audiences in this period, David M. Vieth gives a useful metaphor for the reaction Wycherley is aiming for in his audience: “Unlike other kinds of satire . . ., a work of entrapment refrains from implying norms or shared values that might reassure the reader by affording a sense of objective meaning or truth. In this condition of hostile indeterminacy, instead of the reader reading the work, it seems to read him. The tables are turned, he himself becomes the subject . . . . A work of entrapment is like a murder mystery in which the reader, Oedipus-like, discovers he is the criminal.”⁴ However, often members of the audience are Oedipuses who never discover they are the criminals. Likewise, many readings of this play fall prey to what the audience is supposed to fall prey to: a condescending assumption of irony that leads to interpreting Manly’s triumph only “laughingly.”⁵ This entrapment is symbolized in the play through the image of the prostitute. Like clients of prostitutes, the characters each fall victim to (or are entrapped by) the appearance of meaning that satisfies their desire for stable and usually flattering meaning only to find themselves deceived. In Freeman’s accommodating world, meaning is only a whore’s smile. This smile is a mirror from which the narcissism of the client, the vanity which says meaning is only from the self, is comfortingly reflected back at him. Rose Zimbardo detects this ironic meaninglessness, but overlooks the possible reinscription of meaning, leading her to see Manly at the play’s end as “a snarling misanthrope, an ineffectual crank” and to interpret Wycherley as writing a satire that “signals the collapse of all order.”⁶ Zimbardo takes Rochester’s “Upon Nothing” as the emblematic poem of satire at what she calls “the Restoration Point Zero”: “[Rochester’s discourse] rests on the assumption that what is ‘out there’ is not material, empirically observable ‘reality,’ but NOTHING.”⁷ She extends this observation to all Restoration satire. Wycherley would agree with Zimbardo that nothingness has a pervasive place in the heart of the culture, but his satire actually works against this attitude toward meaning. Wycherley’s play portrays a society that functions with the kind of narcissistic meaning that a whore supplies for a client—a whoredom in other words. But at the same time, through the marriage of Fidelia with Manly, it points toward a positive system of meaning that requires the courage of faith to deliver those who have it to the eternal...