|
"All women
together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it
was she who earned them the right to speak their minds." The purpose of this collaborative archive is to provide scholarly resources on the role of women during the Restoration period through the modern medium of the world wide web. The essays' themes focus on the authorship of Aphra Behn, her role as a woman playwright and the effects that these texts had on 17th century society. Aphra Behn's play, The Rover, creates a lens through which to investigate the changing roles of women. In selecting these essays, it is interesting to note that each of them is written by a female author. Reading Behn’s work continues to strike a cord within modern women writers like ourselves. Our explorations of Behn have proven that we are indebted to her for creating opportunities for future female writers. Although successful in the realm of contemporary literature, Aphra Behn’s life clearly demonstrates struggles which Restoration women faced in forging their own identities in a society dominated by patriarchal control. Even as Behn broke new ground for women in publishing her plays on a public stage, she was bound by the society she raged against both by financial dependence and social ideals. In opening her plays to the indiscriminate playhouse, Behn tied herself financially to the whims of public opinion. As Marta Straznicky explains in her essay "Restoration Women Playwrights and the Limits of Professionalism": “However much women writers were able to exploit the economy of pleasure in the public theater, the pretense that they were engaged in sexual rather than intellectual endeavors was ultimately, for them, a powerless fiction” (Pritchard Ironically in forging a career independent of patriarchal control, she incurred a new form of restraining patronage. Censorship of Behn’s plays and the resulting financial damage was an ongoing frustration for Behn; “All I ask…is the privaledge for the Masculine Part the Poet in me…to tread in those successful Paths my Predecessors have so long thriv’d in” (Straznicky 7).
The Rover demonstrates how Behn subverted the hegemony of patriarchy as she used the text of a male playwright, Thomas Killigrew and manipulated it to suggest a subtle a social commentary on the role of women. In addition, Behn, like many women during the Restoration used tools such as wit, improvisation, disguise, madness, and sexuality as means in their strive for equality in theatre. The Restoration culture which Behn confronted was one in which women held very little independence or respect. Rape was considered by many to be endemic of the culture, as men's authority over women was supreme. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the crime of rape was not prosecuted in the manner it is hoped to be so today. It was hardly considered a crime, rather it was a man expressing his sexuality and power over a woman. According to Old Bailey, a website containing actual court cases and stories about crimes in the 1600’s, rape was considered “forced sexual intercourse with a woman against her will. In order to convict a man of this offence it was necessary to prove that penetration had occurred. Due to the difficulty of proving this offence, many men accused of sexual assaults were prosecuted with a reduced charge” (Old Bailey). The heinous violence of rape was not advertised and it did not transcend social classes; rather it reinforced the differences between the privileged and the non. Feminist writer, Aphra Behn, did not agree with this representation of rape, and she is one of the first playwrights to incorporate the wrongs of this crime into her work.
In the same vein, Restoration society saw an ironic overlap in the realms of courtship and dueling, reflecting the inherent violence in male-female relations. Through the lens of The Rover, Behn allows her audience to see the representation of dueling and courting as inherently the same situation in which men struggle for possession of a woman as an object. Women are belittled to the status of a commodity, and airs of love become marketable transactions. The character of Angellica Bianca represents the ultimate illustration of a woman who is both empowered by her sex, and subject to its consequences as an object of exchange. She is a courtesan, and as such, she sells her body and sex to a man. Not only do men possess her physically, they possess her as a symbol of status and power. This raises the question of whether figures such as Angellica are empowered or undermined by their femininity. While Angellica appears to control her situation, Wilmore's rejection of her love demonstrates that she is in fact at the mercy of men's patronage. Women had to, as they do now, negotiate between the physical power of their sex and their mental capacity and intellect which men believe they do not possess. On stage they were able to use their bodily sexually and their wit in conjunction with each other to subvert the male’s power. In reality “female legibility” was a pressing concern and Behn demonstrates through Angellica the hypocrisy of condemning the poetess for subverting the female sex. Even the most contentious of women were themselves financially and socially bound to men, their hearts and their livelihoods resting on the whims of men.
Behn’s plays for a 17th century British audience portray the problematic nature of female independence. Even as Behn has become an icon for feminine equality, she was snared by a dependence on the patriarchy she opposed. Explicit sexuality, as harnessed by Behn, creates an ideal of power contrasting the reality of a dangerous vulnerability for women. This essay investigates Behn’s work The Rover and the “double bind” of female identity which ensnared the playwright as it is expressed through her characters Angellica Bianca, Florinda and Hellena.
As a result, the stage became one of the only spaces in which social experimentation could take place. In this way, it serves as a liminal arena for questioning gender roles and perhaps even a precursors to feminism. The women held very little power in reality but the stage grew as one place to subvert this reality. Women in early Restoration drama were finding ways to be seen, which inevitably extended into ways to be heard. The inclusion of women in public life, such as at the play house, opened up a whole new world to women and challenged the once all-male scene. The physical presence of women created lots of controversy and raised awareness, whether consciously or not, of a woman’s presence in the world. Women playwrights were rare during the Restoration but the few that did exist, like Aphra Behn, were able to ignite the passion of future women writers.
The following essays explore different facets of these issues. Enjoy!
Home Page | Introduction | Bibliography | Credits
|