The Way of the World (Congreve): The Human Relationship

The Way of the World's complex plot follows the interrelationships of several couples and single people. Having married his former mistress off to his friend Fainall, the male lead character Mirabell wishes to marry the beautiful and virtuous Millamant. Meanwhile, Fainall squanders his wife's money on his mistress, Mrs Marwood. In order to gain access to Millamant, Mirabell has previously pretended to pay court to the elderly and amorous Lady Wishford, Millamant's guardian and Mrs. Fainall's mother, but his strategy is foiled by Mrs Marwood who still jealously loves Mirabell, despite her affair with Fainall. In order to ruin Mirabell's chances of obtaining Lady Wishfort's permission to marry Millamant, Mrs. Marwood has told Wishford of Mirabell’s duplicity.

        The Villains are driven by mercenary instincts, marital infidelity and selfish spite, while the play's hero and heroine are motivated by their mutual love. Mirabell possesses a moral dimension and dynamism lacking in other characters, it is he who successfully orchestrates all of the play's sub-plots. As is often the case, characters’ names reveal their natures; Fainall, Mrs Marwood and Lady Wishfort reflect a moral code associated with much earlier Restoration comedies.

         

           Act IV’s dramatization of three courtship’ scenes - one sincere and two farcical - clearly demonstrates the play’s  moral agenda concerning marriage. Here, pairs engage in dialogue preliminary to potential nuptial arrangements; contrasting language emphasizes the distance between the sincere love of Mirabell and Millamant - and their earnest desire to engage in mutually happy marriage - and the comic parodies of courtship that occur first between the ageing Lady Wishfort and Sir Rowland, and subsequently between bewildered Millamant and a drunken ‘country cousin' named Sir Wilfull Witwoud.

        Act IV's third courtship scene - the highly memorable ‘proviso scene’ in which we find Millamant and Mirabell meeting together to arrange an agreement of their marriage - is a traditional element of the English comedy of manners. The proviso scene confirm the sincerity of their motives and their wish to live a married life which was different from others. Millamant makes an unusual proviso regarding public displays of affection.

         Older versions of marriage and family life are rejected in Congreve's plays as corrupt and dishonest. Through the union of Mirabell and Millamant, Congreve embodies the new moral ideal of companionate marriage and the private domestic sphere; his reinterpretation of the traditional proviso scene accommodates the possibility of procreation into the marital realm and thereby anticipates a new kind of family.