ty in the play and as a theme of Restoration comedy, particularly as she is a widow, it actually refers to her unfulfilled desire of self. Now that her husband is dead she is a widowed matriarch whose conventional role is no longer required. As Erickson (1984) argues, ôLady Wishfort, despite her role as mother superior of the female misanthropes, wishes, with overwhelming ardency of longing, for æit,Æ a longer all the more plausible, though still not to be condoned, because she is an eighteenth-century widow,ö (340).
Relations between men and women with respect to marriage were often like contractual arrangements in the Restoration era. A woman was defined not only by her sex but by her worth as a member of the aristocracy or as the eventual inheritress of a large fortune. In many Restoration comedies we see that women who are not desirable also internalize social values and norms that diminish their genuine identity. Quite often we s
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