COMEDY

76 GENDER AND SEXUALITYconverse with wits that I don’t like, because they are youracquaintance; or to be intimate with fools, because they may beyour relations. Come to dinner when I please; dine in my dressingroom when I’m out of humour, without giving a reason. To havemy closet inviolate; to be sole empress of my tea table, which youmust never presume to approach without first asking leave. Andlastly, wherever I am, you shall always knock at the door beforeyou come in. These articles subscribed…I may by degreesdwindle into a wife.(Congreve, 1997b: 297)At first sight, these privileges look like an attempt to retainindependence within marriage, remaining the mistress of her affairs andthe gatekeeper of her own private space. Yet they also suggest anattempt to avoid the necessary familiarities of married life, and to retainthe formality of courtship. ‘What seem like provisions by Millamant forfreedom and power’, writes Pat Gill, ‘are endeavours not to extend herprerogatives but to freeze time, to remain eternally the same’ (Gill,1994:121). Thus Millamant tries to avoid the pitfalls of establishedmatrimony characterized by the surly companionship and openinfidelities of the older generation that surrounds them.The complaint that marriage is a form of servitude is certainly whathangs over the portrayal of husbands and wives in many of the populartelevision comedies of recent decades. Many prominent British sitcoms,including Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? (1973–74), BlessThis House (1973–76), George and Mildred (1976–79), or Keeping UpAppearances (1990–95), show marriage as the site of tension betweendown-to-earth men and pretentious women. A wife’s role is to thwarther husband’s attempts to act ‘naturally’, usually defined as drinking,gambling, or going to football matches, whilst encouraging middle-classaspirations and the restraint of childish impulses. The sitcom wife isoverly socialized and rigorously abstemious in answer to her husband’sperpetual appetite for sensual pleasure. She is formed by consumerism,is unreasonably materialistic, status-obsessed, and concerned with theartificialities of etiquette, whereas her husband believes himself to beunpretentious, relaxed in his identity, dismissive of any person orsituation that does not allow him to ‘be himself, such as vicars, familygatherings, Conservative politicians, and his boss. Female charactershave repeatedly been given the role of joyless authority figures in theseshows, wives who are simultaneously mothers to their infantilizedhusbands. ‘Women are forced by sitcom to be the establishment’, writes