English Drama - General & Miscellaneous - Literary Criticism, Society & Culture in Literature, English Fiction & Prose Literature - 16th-17th Century - Literary Criticism, English Drama - Restoration & 18th Century - Literary Criticism, Philosophy & Liter
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Overview
Interpreting Ladies explores the defense by the Restoration comedy of manners of an ideal of aristocratic, conservative, English masculinity against the heavily satirized encroachments of French foppishness and the pretensions of the aspiring merchant class. Using Freud's theory of obscene wit, in which obscene jokes become reassuring testimonies of male privilege, as well as more recent theoretical descriptions of the discursive processes of meaning and desire, Gill considers the position of both the female protagonists and the female spectators in Restoration satire. She sketches the historical events and issues that create the link between morality and rhetoric and that serve to connect each to class and status. Gill posits that the moral indeterminacy and slippage in satiric language is closely linked to male uneasiness about female honesty, and the dramatists' arguments in defense of their satiric treatments of female hypocrisy, duplicity, and sexual desire expose the gap in the moral premise of Restoration comic satire. It is a gap, Gill contends, that has everything to do with women - with female characters and putative female spectators - and it is why she states that "any reading that proposes to account for the equivocal satiric practice of Restoration comedy must therefore of necessity include a feminist critique."Editorials
Booknews
Provides an exploration of the roles and functions of female characters and elaborates a theory of the relationship of women to Restoration notions of wit and morality. Attentive to the specific historical concerns that inform certain dramatic portrayals, Gill focuses on the plays of George Etherege, William Congreve, and William Wycherley, and then offers a contrasting reading of Aphra Behn. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)Book Details
Published
January 31, 1995
Publisher
Athens : University of Georgia Press, c1994.
Pages
216
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780820316642