Adultery and any sort of infidelity turns out to be a different story for men as Rosenthal stresses: "prohibition against adultery is not about property, pregnancy, misdirected male desire, or bloodlines, as one might have thought, but about the prevention of female comparison" (Rosenthal, 2008) as sharing men would be established by the size of their sexual organs.
A recurrent theme in the play from a gender perspective relates to the fact that the play is generally a patriarchal type of play in which paternal figures are predominant and the evolution of the other characters is a direct result of this way of using power. The women in this play, especially Doralice and Melantha are victimized as women had lesser rights to speak their minds or act according to their decisions. The paternalistic environment is also observed in the way Palamede and Rhodophil behave, as all four of them find themselves in arranged marriages from which they seek to escape. Also paternalistic is the way the two young ladies see men, and their subordination relation towards them. In a dialogue with Palamede, Doralice, dressed as a man, argues that a man should admire her, "cry up every word I said and screw your face into a submissive smile" (Dryden, 1981).
The interesting part of the play in what regards men-women relations in a paternalistic type of controlled world is that, towards the end the men realize that they actually do feel some sort of affection for their own wives, not only for the other one's: "Melantha: Let me die, but this solitude, and that grotto are scandalous: I'll go no further; besides, you have a sweet lady of your own / Rhodophil: "But a sweet mistress, now and then, makes my sweet lady so much more sweet" (Dryden, 1981). Perhaps in a world with lesser imposed rules, the relations between them would have even evolved to the point of strong feelings, yet as it happened, a certain spirit of rebellion and a need for breaking the rules to feel freedom led all four to have adulterous relations.
Looking at the play from the same type of paternalistic view, Dryden also sends a very important message related to the degree of which institutions, be them royalty or the institution of marriage, tend to suppress awareness of own feelings and needs. Similar to what Jason Denman argues in his "Erotic and Political Timing in Marriage a la Mode," it can be said that characters go around the same issues of time, timing and the need to accomplish their goals. The more they try...
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