SOURCE: Velissariou, Aspasia. “Patriarchal Tactics of Control and Female Desire in Wycherley's The Gentleman Dancing-Master and The Country Wife.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 37, no. 2 (summer 1995): 115-26.

In the following essay, Velissariou discusses examples of sexual control in Wycherley's plays.

Sexuality in Wycherley's dramas has long received much critical notice. Gender, desire, and the characters' positions in the face of it, especially in The Country Wife, have become the central preoccupations of recent criticism while attention has also been drawn to sexual relationships as a terrain for the exercise of power.¹ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in her perceptive reading of the play, sees in it the deployment of a symbolic system of exchange between men with women as its object. Heterosexual relationships are significant, not in themselves, but only to the extent that they serve a male strategy of acquiring bonds with and control over other men.² Sedgwick...