Daily Inspiration Quote by William Wycherley

Wycherley aims his blade at the era's favorite moral costume: "honor" as performance. The line is engineered to puncture the self-flattering story polite society tells about female virtue. By putting "of honor" in the mouth of a speaker who sneers, "as you call em", he signals that the category itself is suspect - not a stable moral truth but a label men apply when it suits them. The real distinction, he suggests, is not between the chaste and the fallen, but between those who can manage appearances and those who cannot.

The phrasing is clinically cruel. "Chary of their reputations, not their persons" splits virtue into two bodies: the physical self and the social self. Wycherley implies the latter is the one that matters in a world run on gossip. That pivot to "scandal" clarifies the economy: reputation is currency, and scandal is the public audit that can bankrupt a woman overnight. It's not desire that ruins her; it's visibility.

Context sharpens the indictment. Restoration comedy thrives on a post-Puritan appetite for libertinism, yet its stage is crowded with surveillance - husbands, fops, servants, and the omnipotent crowd. Women are granted agency, but only within a rigged reputational system where men enjoy transgression as sport while women must treat it as risk management. The line isn't just misogynistic swagger (though it can play that way); it's also a cynical report from inside a culture where morality has been outsourced to what people will say tomorrow.