Paper Abstract: “The Movable Cuckold: Experimental Discourse, “Invention,” And Deferred Consummation in William Wycherley’s The Country Wife.”

Horner, the rake in Wycherley’s Restoration comedy, The Country Wife, pursues chance “inventions in love” by virtue of his feigned impotency. The character’s “innocent” physical condition allows him an intimacy with women not conventionally available to the virile rake. Horner’s proximity to women permits him to take on various identities which function as a means of safely exploring and experimenting with the conditions for and subversions of the “absent Cuckold.” The deferred physical consummation in the play mirrors, ironically, the economy of the discourse of experimental logic: that “[resolve] of the Royal Society not to prescribe to themselves, an certain Art of Experimenting within which to circumscribe their thoughts; But rather to keep themselves free, and change their course, according to the different circumstances, that occur to them in their operations; and the several alterations of the Bodies, on which they work” (Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society). Horner becomes a replacement for the sign of the absent cuckold, and as such embodies an experimental logic that seeks meaning through a deferral of consummated knowledge and movable signs. This paper examines the ‘pleasure’ of an intellectual economy that defers meaning through premature and shifting signs, delayed encounters, mutable identities, and asides, and seeks further to interrogate the sexual politics of a ‘truth’ based in delayed gratification. In many ways, Horner’s condition provides his female counterparts with a degree of subversive agency, since signs are never fixed to a closed meaning or fully consummated; yet, it is through the women characters in the play that meaning is invented—female beauty “like a mask makes people the more inquisitive and...her shape, stature, habit will be known” (III, i). The female body in The Country Wife becomes a site of both an open and subversive agency and the closed limit of experimental discourse. In this sense, the body exists as a projection of the mental anxiety and embodied frustration ‘consummate with’ invention and experiment.