Eighteenth-Century Characters by E. Mcgirr

Author:E. Mcgirr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan Education UK
Published: 2007-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

La. Grace.

And yet both of them do it for the same vain Ends; to establish a false Character of being Virtuous.

(III.143–9)

The coquette and the prude maintain a sexual innocence in order to sin with impunity elsewhere. In other words, the prude’s frigidity and the coquette’s refusal to commit to any one man far or long enough to move from the ‘speculative’ to the ‘practic’ part of love are carefully calculated strategies rather than evidence of their ‘natural’ feminine modesty. They remain chaste not because they are so, but only so that they might claim greater pleasures, particularly the pleasures of gossip and the ability to control and dictate conversation. In Cibber’s plays, the coquette and the prude are looking for social power and authority, not love.

Lady Grace’s comment reminds us of the play’s corrective lesson: that female virtue is not synonymous with sexual continence. The coquette and the prude have false characters for virtue, for their habits of gossip, back-biting, and slandering are hardly virtuous. But Lady Grace is also suggesting that the coquette and the prude are not virtuous in the more traditional sense of chastity. She reminds us that both characters are defined by their sexuality and their relation to men. The coquette cannot be truly virtuous as she uses her ‘charms’ to toy with men and court their attentions, behaviour which, we are often reminded, often ends in seduction or rape. The prude’s assumption that her virginity is constantly in danger suggests that she is equally aware of her charms and their potential effect on men – the prude protests too much for her aversion to men to be believed. The punning on ‘vain’ in Lady Grace’s response highlights the other great sin of the coquette and the prude: vanity, the characteristic furthest from the good woman’s defining modesty. Their innate vanity also means that the coquette and the prude assume these characters to give them social importance they would otherwise not possess. Like the woman who adopts the hoop petticoat for fear she should ‘appear little in the Eyes of all her Acquaintance’ (T116), the liberties obtained under the character of either the coquette or the prude allow her to ‘look big.’ But because these characters are so unnatural, this effort will always be in vain: neither the coquette nor the prude ‘look big’ to Lady Grace or Manly. They even fail to appear virtuous.

Manly’s view of the coquette and the prude is even more interesting. Far from finding the coquette’s flirtations attractive, he accuses her of ‘plaguing’ the men – of assuming a place and an importance in conversation that she does not merit. Both the coquette and the prude take unlicensed freedoms in conversation, freedoms that decrease their attractiveness to men while they increase their own pleasures. Both characters keep their ‘false characters’ only so that they may attack their chosen prey – men for coquettes and other women for the prudes – with more impunity. So while Steele’s coquette and prude assume their

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