lly pain, something to avoid. Yet Horner has ironic perspective on the situation when he reads Mrs. Pinchwife's letter: "I say for the Letter, 'tis the first love Letter that ever was without Flames, Darts, Fates, Destinies, Lying and Dissembling in't" (IV).
In LM, exploitative romantic entanglements between simple and sophisticated folk leads not to wit but to earnest bourgeois tragedy. In the character Millwood resides a concentration of beauty, cruelty, and personal (mainly sexual) power, which surpass Lillo's moral message that the wages of sexual sin is death. A beautiful courtesan with a heart of black, she understands that wit and beauty "first made me a wretch, and still continue me so" (I.iii). But Millwood has practical social wisdom to go with her lack of virtue, and knowing that a woman without virtue,
like a man without honour or honesty, is capable of any action, tho' never so vile; and yet, what pains will they not take, what arts not use, to seduce us from our innocence, and make us contemptible and wicked, even in their own opinions (I.iii).
Men having made her cruel and having tried to make her vulner able, Millwood takes revenge as a social survival strategy. Coun try boy Barnwell, in training with the merchant Thorowgood, is her target. In a carefully controlled reversal of sexual roles, she cons him into thinking her at the mercy of a cruel guardian. As consumed with shame and lust as any recently seduced virgin ever was and convincing himself he must heroically save Millwood, Barnwell steals Thorowgood's money for her.
If CW and LM share a theme, it is that enactments of power, cruelty, and beauty have consequences, few of them beneficial or speaking well of human nature. Thus the truth of a character is connected to the moral or social insight that emerges from actions predicated of these qualities. Horner knows he may tire of Mrs. Pinchwife quickly, for he is too much in and of his social set to aband...