This blog is my response to the task given to us by our Prof. Dr.Dilip Sir on the play The Rover by Aphra Behn. So read and enjoy.
The first English woman to make a living as a writer was also a spy.
On Aphra Behn, Playwright, poetess of the 17th century.
Aphra Behn was the first English woman to earn her living solely by her pen. The most prolific dramatist of her time, she was also an innovative writer of fiction and a translator of science and French romance.
The novelist Virginia Woolf wrote, “All women together ought to let flowers fall on the tomb of Aphra Behn . . . For it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.”
Minds and bodies. Behn was a lyrical and erotic poet, expressing a frank sexuality that addressed such subjects as male impotence, female orgasm, bisexuality and the indeterminacies of gender.
No woman would have such freedom again for many centuries. (And in our frank and feminist era Behn can still astonish with her mocking treatment of sexual and social subjects like amorphous desire, marriage and motherhood.) During the two more respectable or prudish centuries that followed her death in 1689, women were afraid of her toxic image and mostly unwilling to emulate her sexual frankness. In her day, Behn had the reputation of a respected professional writer and also of a “punk-poetess.” For a long time after her death, she was allowed only to be the second.
Beyond her successes on the stage and in fiction, Aphra Behn was a Royalist spy in the Netherlands and probably South America. She also served as a political propagandist for the courts of Charles II and his unpopular brother James II. Thus her life has to be deeply embedded in the tumultuous 17th century, in conflict-ridden England and Continental Europe and in the mismanaged slave colonies of the Americas. Her necessarily furtive activities, along with her prolific literary output of acknowledged and anonymous works, make her a lethal combination of obscurity, secrecy and staginess, an uneasy fit for any biographical narrative, speculative or factual. Aphra Behn is not so much a woman to be unmasked as an unending combination of masks and intrigue, and her work delivers different images and sometimes contradictory views.
Much is secure about her professional career as dramatist, but there’s a relative paucity of absolute facts about Aphra Behn’s personal life. Coupled both with the sly suggestions she throws out and with her wonderfully inventive method of weaving experience and fancy with historical fact, this circumstance suggests that speculation and intuition are at times appropriate modes for her biographers. People of the Restoration made mirror and distorted mirror images of themselves. Fooling and deceit were art forms. So identifications in her life story are tentative, and the characters in her “true” narratives and poems, relatives, friends and lovers, may be composite—or imaginary. I continue to see with varying degrees of clarity a “real” woman and a protean author of protean works.
The past 20 years of critical commentary tell me that, as an author, Aphra Behn is secure in the canon of English literature. She is taught in colleges and universities in English-speaking countries. Where Restoration drama is on the syllabus, she is there with the other great playwrights, William Wycherley and William Congreve. As author of some startling and innovative fictions, she enters as an originator or precursor of the modern English novel, along with Daniel Defoe and the trio of early women writers, Margaret Cavendish, Eliza Haywood, and Delarivier Manley. Because of its setting in Surinam, her celebrated novella Oroonoko about a princely black slave is favoured in postcolonial studies. Finally, in women’s studies courses, Behn is hailed as the first thoroughly professional woman writer, concerned with her craft, with details of publication, and with her status in the literary world.
For all this critical activity, Aphra Behn is still not as high in appreciation and recognition as I believe she deserves to be—and as I expected her to be when I began thinking about her in the heady 1970s, that decade of rediscovery when so many past women writers were allowed out of the shadows. With her craft and experimental techniques, her exciting female perspective on everything from politics to domesticity and sex, I thought her on a level with Jane Austen in literary importance. I still do. And it’s hard to imagine a more striking and adventurous life—even if a good deal of this life is and was intended to be secret!
Most of the articles and comments on Behn in the last two decades have been scholarly and subtle. They have responded to the changing fashions of the discipline of English and Cultural Studies. Second Wave Feminist criticism that brought her to greater notice in the 1960s and 1970s has given way to other “Waves” much concerned with the performative and with amorphous and polymorphous desire, while the emphasis in postcolonial studies, that other growth area within the discipline, is still overwhelmingly concerned with race and ethnicity. Aphra Behn as writer of sexually explicit poems and portrayer of England’s early colonies has much to say in both areas of study.
Recent scholarship has concerned Behn as dramatist and poet. It throws new light on her stagecraft, her shifting and often prominent position in the theatrical marketplace, as well as on her complex interactions with male colleagues and competitors such as John Dryden and Thomas Shadwell. In her theatrical dedications Behn uses flattery in ways that both amuse and dismay present critics and, in her plays, she portrays rakes and whores with the kind of ambiguity that can be disturbing—as well as funny. Behn was fascinated by rank, by the notion of nobility, its honor, and the manifold ways in which it could be dishonored. She returned to the topic over and over again in her drama, investigating the allure and vulnerabilities of personal and political authority. Critics have applauded her lively enthusiasm for sexual games and her irreverence about the masculinity that dominated the age and which she expresses so well in her plays and in her frank and risqué poems. If her treatment of sex astonishes readers less than it did a century ago, Behn can still shock when she handles subjects such as rape and the seductions of power. In many areas of gender relationships, then, her drama, fiction and poetry are still capable of destabilizing our own assumptions. So, too, can her utopian moral and political schemes, where desire and reality coalesce or clash, and where the body is left to subvert the mind.
Behn had a few female contemporaries but, unlike her, they were aristocratic and certainly not doing anything as vulgar as writing for money. These hobbyist writers would also usually warn potential readers with a notice that the following work was written by a member of the "fair sex", as though apologising in advance. Aphra Behn made no such apologies. She did not ask for permission or acceptance - and it was because she did neither that she proved to be so popular among the ordinary playgoers whose opinion so often goes unrecorded. Operating with striking success outside gender conventions, it was she who paved the way for other women to do the same. What's more, she included as much wit and bawdiness as she could muster, along with a sharp insight into both sex and politics. She was the Restoration's very own combination of Dorothy Parker and Mae West.
Many have noted how often Virginia Woolf’s powerful line is used to introduce the life and work of Aphra Behn. There can be little doubt that the novelist, playwright and poet set a radical example, not only for women and women who aspired to write, but also within seventeenth-century English society more broadly.
The facts of Behn’s early life are muddled. Born around 1640, it is quite possible that she acted as a royalist spy in her late teens in the years after the English Civil War. Following the Restoration, she began to write plays that were performed by King Charles II’s Duke’s Company. Her first play, The Forc’d Marriage (1670), represents a significant milestone in literary history, since its publication makes Behn one of the first recorded women in England to earn a living from writing. Later plays such as The Rover (1677) were popular in their moment and have continued to be so, despite certain nineteenth-century critics detracting from Behn’s talents with accusations of plagiarism and unladylike bawdiness.
Behn’s work was pioneering in many respects. Some suggest that the prose fiction Oroonoko (1688) is, in fact, the first novel in English, as Behn plays with narrative voices in telling the story of the African prince sold into slavery. Its themes were controversial: the abolition of slavery is advocated almost 150 years before Parliament passed the Abolition of Slavery Act. Behn and Oroonoko are, then, provocative choices for Georgiana to have included on her bookshelf in the 1860s.
Performed in 1677, Aphra Behn’s play, The Rover, speaks to this double standard, which limited her female peers’ sexual desires to the realm of convent, brothel, or home. Set loose in the topsy-turvy world of Carnival, her characters demonstrate the active, complicated game required of women seeking to secure personal happiness. The dangers of the chase and the play’s tidy conclusion, on the other hand, suggest at how ladies neither could nor should stray too far into the masculine roles of wooer and possessor. Late Stuart society, Behn seems to lament, offered no place to the sexually free, libertine woman.
The “obligatory happy ending” of The Rover reveals the unfairness of the libertine system and the demand—indeed, the unquestioned assumption—that women would fit into the socially set role of prostitute or wife. Florinda and Hellena’s attempts to challenge their brother’s arrangements are successful; the former marries her lover and the latter escapes a future as “handmaid to lazars and cripples” in the nunnery. However, their enterprising boldness in chasing men leads them into the same wifely duties of most women. Their challenge to “the repression of their autonomy and …desires” still leads to the hierarchical man-woman relationship of Puritan wedlock.
Carnival, disguise and misrule
In its setting during the Naples carnival, The Rover uses a long-standing theatrical tradition, in which a topsy-turvy world can reveal and temporarily challenge the norms of the everyday. Through the disguises in which the Spanish sisters and their cousin venture onto the streets, Florinda can arrange an elopement with her beloved Belvile, and Hellena and Valeria can find their love-matches:
HELLENA And dost thou think that ever I’le be a Nun? or at least till I’m so Old, I’m
fit for nothing else – Faith no, Sister; and that which makes me long to
know whether you love Belvile, is because I hope he has some mad
Companion or other, that will spoil my devotion; nay I’m resolv’d to
provide my self this Carnival, if there be ere a handsome proper
fellow of my humour above ground, tho I ask first.
Dressed as a gypsy – a member of a society living at the edges of Restoration culture – or as a man, a young woman can attempt to forge her own destiny. Willmore, meanwhile, tells his fellow Cavaliers that he has left the Prince (James, Duke of York) on his ship in the Bay of Naples and come ashore to ‘enjoy my self a little this Carnival’ setting the scene for his drunken assault on Florinda.
At the same time that carnival enables the unfixing of identities and destinies during a short period of misrule, this very setting – along with the skill of the actors required for the constant duelling – produces a high-energy entertainment. As the play is punctuated with song and dance and street scenes, the audience is swept along with the rebellious dreams and desires. As Twelfth Night shows perhaps most famously, however, such a suspension of rules can only ever be temporary, and the workaday world returns. In this case, the mercenary motives that underlie Willmore’s choosing of Hellena over Angellica come to the fore, and Florinda is required to forgive the men who have just tried to rape her.
With Mrs. Behn we turn a very important corner on the road. We leave behind, shut up in their parks among their folios, those solitary great ladies who wrote without audience or criticism, for their own delight alone. We come to town and rub shoulders with ordinary people of the streets. Mrs. Behn was a middle-class woman with all the plebeian virtues of humor, vitality, and courage; a woman forced by the death of her husband and some unfortunate adventures of her own to make her living by her wits. She had to work on equal terms with men. She made, by working very hard, enough to live on. . . . here begins the freedom of the mind, or rather the possibility that in the course of time the mind will be free to write what it likes. For now that Aphra Behn had done it, girls could go to their parents and say, You need not give me an allowance; I can make money by my pen. . . . Thus, toward the end of the eighteenth century a change came about which, if I were rewriting history, I should describe more fully and think of greater importance than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses. The middle-class woman began to write.
—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
2,270 Words
1. "Analysis of Aphra Behn’s The Rover." Literary Theory and Criticism, 18 Sept. 2020, literariness.org/2020/09/18/analysis-of-aphra-behns-the-rover/.
2. "Aphra Behn • Unsilencing the Library." Unsilencing the Library, 27 June 2017, www.unsilencingthelibrary.com/story-of-this-library/why-this-room-is-special/the-restored-books/aphra-behn/.
3. "Aphra Behn: Still a Radical Example." The Guardian, 21 Aug. 2019, www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2007/nov/13/aphrabehnstillaradicalexa.
4. "Aphra Behn's "The Rover": Evaluating Women's Social and Sexual Options." Inquiries Journal, www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1695/aphra-behns-the-rover-evaluating-womens-social-and-sexual-options.
5. "The First English Woman to Make a Living As a Writer Was Also a Spy." Literary Hub, 10 Apr. 2019, lithub.com/the-first-english-woman-to-make-a-living-as-a-writer-was-also-a-spy/.
6. "Twelfth Night." The British Library, www.bl.uk/works/twelfth-night.