Mary Pix’s "The Innocent Mistress": Welcome to the 1690s

Wildlove…Lywell…Cheatall…the same old Restoration elements, or are they?

For those of us who needed to brush up on our later 17th century history (I for one had a big gap in my memory between Charles II and all the King Georges), I found that Juliet McLaren’s article really cleared some things up. I know this is a literature and not a history class, but sometimes I need to go back to the one before I can make sense of the other.

Reading Mary Pix’s The Innocent Mistress (1697), we’ve gone forward twenty years since Aphra Behn’s The Rover (1677). Times had changed, Charlie the “Merry Monarch” was two kings ago, and “writing for the theatre was not at all what it had been during the Restoration” (McLaren 85). The Restoration comedy model (what I like to think of as the Rakes and virgins and cuckolds, oh my! model) had become “stale and repetitive in the hands of less talented imitators” (88).

Audiences began wanting “plays to reflect their familiar reality and their familiar ethical and social values” (86), what Robert Hume called “humane” comedy. After all the overt raping, wenching, and railing against educated women we’ve been reading about—culminating in The Female Wits and our dear old friend Robert Gould (the guy who said that all poetesses were punks, i.e. prostitutes)—the pendulum of moralism had started to swing back again.

It seems to me that Pix makes sense in this light. Without “directly attacking” anyone, as McLaren says, Pix “gently satirizes their misogynist and cynical plays” (90). Pix takes all the figures we are familiar with, twists them slightly, and gives them back to us to reconsider. Sir Charles, a man trapped in an unhappy marriage (for a change), is not charmed by Bellinda’s beauty or her money, but by her mind and character. And (I like how McLaren phrases this), “Instead of the seductive rake and helpless virgin or courtesan of other comedies, Mary Pix gives us the helpless rake” (93) in the character of Wildlove.

As for the women in the play, they represent a wide range of different types (indeed, at a time when a play might have 2 to 4 roles for women, Pix wrote plays with roles for 8 to 9 actresses). Most, like Bellinda, are witty, intelligent, and independent without sacrificing their virtue, while the two ridiculous women, Lady Beauclair and Peggy, serve to "set off better wives" (3.2.152), as Wildlove says.

Furthermore, the women "encourag[e] one another with their problems of the heart" throughout the play, and with the exception of Jenny Flywife, all "end up with appropriate marriage partners, and even she [as a kept woman] is not scorned but treated with a certain sympathy" (McLaren 95). Pix isn't didactic or idealistic, but she seems to present a view of marriage that does not have to be cynical, if the terms are right for both partners.

All we can do, Pix seems to say, is choose wisely and hope, like Cheatall, that there will continue to be "pantings, heavings, and raptures" (5.5.64) on the other side of matrimony.

...hmm, Mary Pix, in this portrait at least, wasn't exactly a looker...