Kassai Zita – Under disguise

It seems that pseudo castration as a form of disguise is a recurring motif in William Wycherley’s The Country Wife – or, at least, there are two remarkably similar cases in the play. In my last blog post, where I briefly reflected on how Margery Pinchwife’s cross-dressing can be regarded as an instance of “female…

Kassai Zita – Female Castration?

What can it possibly mean within the context of a seventeenth-century English drama? This was my very first reaction when I came across the phrase “female castration” while looking through some material on William Wycherley’s The Country Wife. Although in my first post I promised to focus on the notion of writing and deception, the…

Kassai Zita – Wife vs. Husband

  “Our wives, like their writings, [are] never safe but in our closets under lock and key,” claims Pinchwife, my favourite source of quotes when it comes to William Wycherley’s Restoration comedy, The Country Wife. The association of women and writing, which is a recurring motif in this comedy, casts light upon a serious contemporary…

Kassai Zita – Writing as Deception

Manipulation of the patriarchal order by means of a letter − this is one of the main topics I am going to investigate while I continue my research in order to extend an eight-page essay I have produced during the previous semester. This essay, which is dealing with William Wycherley’s Restoration comedy The Country Wife,…