Practice Essays: Country Bumpkins
Identify some generic characteristics of upper and lower class “country bumpkin” figres in at least three Restoration and 18c plays or novels. Discuss the relation between these characters and the works’ ideological messages about class.
Since the period in question covers almost 150 years and hundreds of plays and novels, any kind of outline that I make will be sketchy at best, but what I would like to argue is that a relative disinterest in the advantages of country life during the Restoration era gradually gives way to a much more complex portrait of country life and country people as you move through the eighteenth century. Restoration theatre centered around the court of Charles the II, which was by all accounts a fast-paced environment in which wit and fashion were valued above all other qualities. Almost by its very definition the country does not emphasize these qualities, and as a result the country is treated with more or less straightforward contempt in Restoration theatre. However, as country-centric genres like pastorals and Georgics became popular in the early eighteenth century, authors became more interested in probing the advantages of country life, even if many of the Restoration-era prejudices against it remained.
One could select any number of Restoration plays to illustrate this disparagement of the country, but I’d like to talk about William Wycherly’s The Country Wife since it at least leaves open the question that people might be better off outside of the capitol’s fashionable society. This play is based around the character Horner, whose mission in life is to cuckold as many of the men of London as he possibly can. He has been so successful in his mission that husbands no longer allow their wives to converse with Horner, so he spreads a rumor that he is impotent in order to gain more intimate access to women, a plan which succeeds very well. One of his friends, Pinchwife, has a very well-developed fear of being cuckolded by Mr. Horner, and when he marries an innocent young country girl named Marjorie he resolves not to let her taste the pleasures of the town so that she will not be corrupted into valuing the wit and fashion that lead women to submit to Horner’s advances. However, when Marjorie attends a play she becomes enamored of the town, and begs her husband to let her continue to appear in public. Pinchwife agrees, but only if she disguises herself as a boy. Horner sees through the disguise and pays his advances to Marjorie despite her being dressed as a man, realizing Pinchwife’s greatest fear. Horner also effectively initiates Marjorie into fashionable society, transforming her naive country character into that of a witty young woman who can make a scene in court. While Pinchwife is clearly mocked for thinking that he can shield a young woman from the pleasures of the town (which seem to draw women like magnets from the country), Wycherly’s attitude toward Marjorie’s transformation is comparatively unclear. While the loss of her characteristic country naivete gets a positive spin, one can’t help but question the other effects of her transformation, such as the affair with Horner that seems inevitable by the play’s conclusion. The reader must make up his or her own mind about whether Marjorie’s transformation is a good thing for her moral character, but Wycherly assumes the appeal of the town over the country will be self-evident for his readers and viewers.
By the time you get to the middle of the eighteenth century, however, attitudes toward the country are hardly so cut and try. Throughout the first half of the century the country has been praised in poems such as Pope’s Windsor Forest and the other Georgics of the period, and the city has been mocked and satirized in mock-Georgics like Swift’s “Description of a City Shower” and Gay’s “Trivia.” However, many writers are suspicious of this idea that morality and refinement are more easily cultivated in the country, and one of the most prominent of these authors is Henry Fielding, who paints a dismal portrait of the country squire with Squire Western in his novel Tom Jones.
Ostensibly the country is a place where the slow pace of life gives one the time to catch up on reading and other refinements, but Squire Western has no interest in these activities. His primary (and one might argue, his sole) interest is in hunting, an activity that has little refinement in it, at least as Squire Western practices it (there have been attempts to legitimize the activities of hunting, such as Dryden’s “To My Honoured Kinsman, John Driden of Chesterton,” in which Dryden praises his cousin Driden for hunting the foxes that would otherwise steal his tenants’ chickens). Squire Western is rude, crass and has a zeal for money that one might be more inclined to expect from a merchant residing in London. One bright spot in his character is his obvious love for his daughter Sophia, but his expression of this love is colored by his lack of refinement, sine he seems more concerned with his daughter’s monitary well-being than any other aspect of her future happiness. With Squire Western characters, generic country qualities such as ignorance of fashion and base humor get a more or less entirely negative spin.
While Fielding gives us a straightforwardly farcical portrait of country life in Tom Jones, the character Tony Lumpkin in Goldsmith’s play She Stoops to Conquer gives a slightly more fleshed-out portrait of country living. Like Squire Western, Tony Lumpkin has a low sense of humor, and one of his trademark practical jokes generates the play’s main plot, in which a young suitor from London mistakes Lumpkin’s house for an inn and his step-father Mr. Hardcastle (father of the woman he has come to court, Kate) for an innkeeper. While Tony’s “country wit” is the object of a great deal of ridicule in the play (as are some of the other charcters’ lack of social refinement, such as Hardcastle’s penchant for telling stories about the Duke of Marlborough, whose fame had subsided some several decades prior), we must remember that it is Tony’s actions that allow the play’s unconventional courtship plot to take place. In addition, while he lacks the refinement of John Driden of Chesterton or Pope’s Man of Ross, he has a great deal of fun, and his lively spirit is infectious; in other words, while Tony Lumpkin might be something of a doofus, he is a doofus that you wouldn’t mind spending a drunken evening with.
Thus, we can see a relatively uncomplicated dichotomy of “country bad / city good” in the literature of the Restoration, but as the city becomes less associated with refinement and more associated with commerce and crime over the first part of the eighteenth century, a more complex view of country life emerges, influenced both by the idealization of country life in Georgics and pastorals and by the denigration of country life in the literature of Charles II’s court.
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