Aphra Behn's Courtesans and Crossdressing Women

Locus: The Seton Hall Journal of Undergraduate Research Volume 1 Article 2 October 2018 Aphra Behn’s Courtesans and Crossdressing Women: An Analysis of Gender and Power in 17th Century Literature Maria Barca Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.shu.edu/locus Recommended Citation Barca, Maria (2018) "Aphra Behn’s Courtesans and Crossdressing Women: An Analysis of Gender and Power in 17th Century Literature," Locus: The Seton Hall Journal of Undergraduate Research: Vol. 1 , Article 2. Available at: https://scholarship.shu.edu/locus/vol1/iss1/2 Barca: Aphra Behn’s Courtesans and Crossdressing Women: An Analysis of G Aphra Behn’s Courtesans and Crossdressing Women: An Analysis of Gender and Power in 17th Century Literature Maria Barca Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work and Women and Gender Studies Seton Hall University Abstract 1997, 406). Members of society are instructed to build perceptions of gender and, with these The 17th century author and playwright Aphra perceptions, are instructed to become actors of Behn used her writing talents to demonstrate her gender. This paper looks at two types of ac- knowledge of gender as a liberator and oppressor tors and how they work in tandem—the Butle- in Western European society. Behn wrote tales in rian coined “actors” of gender who act via instruc- which her female characters were imbued with her tion from societal influence, and the type of actors knowledge of the time and place Behn lived. Thus, who perform for media consumption and enter- the playwright and author created female charac- tainment. These two types of “performances”— ters in her works who, armed with Behn’s knowl- socially constructed and for entertainment and edge, intentionally subverted or emphasized their consumption—are intertwined at their very cores, gender roles to obtain social power and author- as on-stage performances will reflect exaggerated ity that they would conventionally lack in Behn’s perceptions of off-stage socially constructed gen- world. This social strategy is seen in Behn’s der roles. Media formats such as plays, movies, play The Feigned Courtesans where her charac- and television rely on the gender binary to estab- ters Marcella, Cornelia, and Laura Lucretia gain lish what body is performing what gendered ap- social mobility by feigning the role of the courte- pearance. It is by fitting into this binary system san and crossdressing as men, reinforcing and un- that allows for the media-based actors to conform dermining the gender binary in the process. This to what society sees and recognizes as familiar, paper takes an analytical approach through femi- natural, and “normal”. But accounts of gender nist, queer, and anthropological lenses to deduce subversion exist within this type of media as well. how and why Behn’s female characters in The For example, cross-dressing performances elimi- Feigned Courtesans conformed and strayed from nate the traditional gender binary and establishes their gendered world in order to obtain power in a newly formed understanding of what body is as- previously unobtainable places. sociated with what gender. In Aphra Behn’s play The Feigned Courte- 1. Introduction sans, the concept of identity, gender performance, and gender roles are prominent throughout as According to Judith Butler, “The body is only the same three female characters—Marcella, Cor- known through its gendered appearance” (Butler nelia, and Laura Lucretia—mask their true identi- Published by eRepository @ Seton Hall, 2018 1 Locus: The Seton Hall Journal of Undergraduate Research, Vol. 1, Iss. 1 [2018], Art. 2 90), Marcella, Cornelia, and Laura Lucretia can engage with the male characters of the play in ways that places them outside of their expected female sphere. In The Feigned Courtesans, the lines of identity are blurred as three women of quality alternate between their disguises as courtesans and men to achieve the same goal—establish power and protect their identities in the face of oppres- sion. In adopting these new personalities, the main female characters in Behn’s play demonstrate up- ward social mobility as they subvert their gender roles by acting as men (Nussbaum 2016) or gain bodily autonomy as they perform as the infamous and desired courtesan. These two roles allow Mar- cella, Cornelia, and Laura Lucretia to obtain social authority and protection in previously unobtainable places. 2. The Importance, and Non-Importance, of Gender Judith Butler’s theory of gender performance originally proposed nearly thirty years ago in her Figure 1. Aphra Behn, Title Page of “The Feign’d book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subver- Curtizans, or, A Nights Intrigue.” 1679, Print, Lon- sion of Identity attempts to explain the social con- don. struction of sex, gender, and the body. The social construction of gender results in a body that is ties by disguising themselves as men and courte- also socially constructed—labels given to individ- sans. Both identities adopted by these women— uals upon birth are a direct product of categoriz- the crossdresser and the courtesan—are perfor- ing people within a binary system as per the con- mances that subvert and undermine the power struction of a binary society. These labels are thus structures within the play. This social sabotage performed according to how society dictates they can occur because these identities allow for the must be performed (Butler 1990, 6). According disguised characters to move in and out of spaces to Butler, “When the constructed status of gender they normally would not inhabit, regardless of the is theorized as radically independent of sex, gen- stigma that may be attached to their masquerades. der itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the For example, the courtesan is the prostitute, en- consequence that man and masculine might just amored by men but demonized by society (Clark as easily signify a female body as a male one, and 1984, 105); and yet in Behn’s play, the role of the woman and feminine a male body as easily as a fe- courtesan is used as an empowering tool to shield male one” (Butler 1990, 10). Without these labels the identities of the main three female characters. and associations, gender and sex do not exist— Similar can be said when the same female char- but it can be argued that by embracing gender and acters cross-dress as men—by abandoning their sex, one’s analytical and storytelling ability can original roles as women of quality (Behn 2008, demonstrate what it means to subvert those cat- https://scholarship.shu.edu/locus/vol1/iss1/2 2 Barca: Aphra Behn’s Courtesans and Crossdressing Women: An Analysis of G egories as seen in Behn’s work. By emphasiz- resentations that motivate and valorize particular ing sex and gender, Behn uses the theory of gen- forms of difference” (Morris 1995, 573). The der performativity to create “non-normative” and anthropology of decomposing difference, on the subversive roles (Morris 1995, 573). While But- other hand, focuses on “the institutions of ambigu- ler’s criticism of the construction of sex and gen- ity” (Morris 1995, 574). The courtesan and cross- der may seem counterintuitive in comparison to dressing roles in The Feigned Courtesans fall into Behn’s gender-reliant work, Butler’s analysis can both categories respectively. The gendered differ- be utilized to accentuate the meaning of gender in ences set in place from the beginning of the play a media-based format in which the characters are mark the bodily gendered differences between intended to take on new gender roles or increase the characters, in the case of the hyper-feminine the way in which society perceives their gender courtesans, thus allowing them to enter spaces in performance. which these differences are thus “decomposed” Throughout The Feigned Courtesans, gen- when crossdressing occurs. The plays’ heavy re- dered behavior, expression, and vernacular are liance on what it means to be a man and a woman, used consistently to show the personalities and so- what the differences are, and how one performs cial roles of the characters. Without the very strict those differences can allow for gender variance to indication and explanation of gender in the play, occur in ways it could not if gender was not so the characters, both male and female, would not strictly enforced. exist within a world that shows hierarchy of gender, which can also be perceived as a hierarchy 3. Behn’s Crossdressing Women of power. Before the play even begins, this hierarchy is established as the characters are intro- Crossdressing performances allow for a re- duced, with the men at the top of the playbill and structuring of what is commonly understood in the women at the bottom (Behn 2008, 90). Addi- a society that relies on a gender binary to or- tionally, the subversion that the female characters ganize and categorize people into two separate in Behn’s play fall into via crossdressing would groups. For a biologically female-sexed person to not be prominent without the clear-cut formation dress and perform in a man’s role defies the so- of the gender binary within Behn’s work. Every cially constructed gender association of “female- specification of a woman wearing man’s clothes, sexed” equating “woman”, thus subverting gen- of a female character being called a “whore”, of der roles and identities in a way that reshapes men dueling over a woman, would be moot points what is traditionally known and expected. Accord- without the gendered vernacular and behavior that ing to Petri Hoppu, crossdressing men in historic accompanied each character—and it is that exact contexts were common until the mid-19th cen- gendered world that the characters of The Feigned tury as women became more involved in the the- Courtesans live in that also creates a world in ater (Hoppu 2014, 329).

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