T.C. SÜLEYMEN DEMİREL ÜNİVERSİTESİ SOSYAL BİLİMLER ENSTİTÜSÜ BATI DİLLERİ VE EDEBİYATI ANABİLİM DALI
THE ORDEAL OF FEMALE GENIUS: APHRA BEHN ACROSS CENTURIES
Yeşim Sultan AKBAY 1230224040
YÜKSEK LİSANS TEZİ
DANIŞMAN Yrd. Doç. Dr. Şule OKUROĞLU ÖZÜN
ISPARTA- 2015
YEMİN METNİ
TC SÜLEYMAN DEMİREL ÜNİVERSİTESİ Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Müdürlüğü
Yüksek Lisans tezi olarak sunduğum “THE ORDEAL OF FEMALE GENIUS: APHRA BEHN ACROSS CENTURIES” adlı çalışmanın, tezin proje safhasından sonuçlanmasına kadar ki bütün süreçlerde bilimsel ahlak ve geleneklere aykırı düşecek bir yardıma başvurulmaksızın yazıldığını ve yararlandığım eserlerin Bibliyografya’da gösterilenlerden oluştuğunu, bunlara atıf yapılarak yararlanılmış olduğunu belirtir ve onurumla beyan ederim.
Yeşim Sultan AKBAY 20.05.2015
ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The present thesis would not have been possible without the help and support of many people. First of all, I would like to thank and express my deepest appreciation to Assoc. Prof. Dr. Beture Memmedova who taught me to be patient, academic, and self- disciplined from the beginning of my thesis to the end. With her great advices and corrections the thesis was formed to its final state. Thanks to her encouragement I have had the privilege to visit particular places and people concerning my subject matter in England. A friend, a great backer and an advisor; the man who held my hand so tightly and never let go through the period deserves a great thank as well. I thank Yunus Emre Akbay, my beloved husband, who commented on, helped, read and reread my thesis with patience, who visited all the libraries, bookshops, museums and university professors with me with great pleasure. My dearest family, my two fathers and mothers, sisters, and brother, to them I owe everything I have. Without them it would not have been possible to have a clear mind. I owe endless thanks to their prayers. Professor Dame Hermione Lee, who welcomed me twice at the Oxford University and advised me a plenty of resources along with sharing her opinions on the subject deserves a great acknowledgement. I thank Assist. Prof. Dr. Şule Okuroğlu Özün, Assist. Prof. Dr. Orkun Kocabıyık, and Assist. Prof. Dr. Mehmet Uysal for their academic contributions and supports. A special thanks to Assist. Prof. Dr. Kenan Oğuzhan Oruç who gave the thesis a magical appearance with his finishing touch. My dearest and precious friends Ayşenur Zeren, Bihter İşler, Buthaina İbrahim, Hardy Mahmood, and Şeyma Özcan deserve my sincerest thanks for their moral support.
iii ABSTRACT
THE ORDEAL OF FEMALE GENIUS: APHRA BEHN ACROSS CENTURIES Yeşim Sultan AKBAY
Suleyman Demirel University, Department of Western Languages and Literature Master’s Thesis, 76 Pages, May 2015 Advisor: Assist. Prof. Dr. Şule OKUROĞLU ÖZÜN
The thesis aims to bring out the image of Aphra Behn and her ordeal within centuries, who is accepted as the first professional English woman writer in English Literature. Aphra Behn, who deservedly gained the place of the literary foremother for English women writers, is an important figure with her mystic presence and controversial lifestyle along with her unusual works challenging the male literary world. As the first professional woman writer in the history of English Literature, the image of Behn has been questioned, revised and reassessed by many biographers, critics and scholars throughout centuries. Questions and debates about Behn as a literary figure have been ongoing up until today, including her origin, her background, literary merits and spy role.
The development and transformation of the image of Behn is analysed within her mysterious and interesting life, the positive and negative views of her contemporaries, and the eighteenth, n ineteenth, and twentieth century critics, biographers and scholars, gradually helping her in gaining her already-deserved fame.
Key Words: Aphra Behn, the agony of women writers, ordeal, obscurity, struggle, fame.
iv ÖZET
Bu tezin amacı, İngiliz Edebiyat tarihinin ilk profesyonel kadın yazarı olarak kabul edilen Aphra Behn imajını incelemektir. İngiliz kadın yazarlarının öncü unvanını hak ederek kazanmış olan Aphra Behn; mistik varlığı, çelişkili hayat tarzı ve erkek egemen edebiyat dünyasına meydan okuyan sıra dışı eserlere sahip olan önemli bir edebiyatçıdır. İngiliz Edebiyat tarihinin ilk profesyonel kadın yazarı olduğundan, Behn imajı yüzyıllar içerisinde biyografi yazarları, eleştirmenler ve akademisyenler tarafından sorgulanmış, incelenmiş ve tekrar tekrar değerlendirilmiştir. Bir edebiyatçı olarak Behn’in kökeni, yaşam süreci, edebi yetileri ve ajanlık görevi hakkındaki sorular ve yapılan tartışmalar günümüze kadar varlığını sürdürmüştür.
Behn imajının gelişimi ve dönüşümü, onun mistik ve enteresan hayatı göz önüne alınarak; çağdaşları, on sekizinci, on dokuzuncu ve yirminci yüzyıl eleştirmenleri, biyografi yazarları ve edebiyatçıların pozitif ve negatif değerlendirmeleriyle, adım adım onun çoktan hak etmiş olduğu üne kavuşmasında nasıl bir rol oynadığının analiz edilmesi üzerinden incelenmiştir.
Anahtar Kelimeler: Aphra Behn, kadın yazarların çilesi, çile, belirsizlik, mücadele, ün.
v TABLE OF CONTENTS
TEZ SAVUNMA TUTANAĞI ...... I YEMİN METNİ ...... II ACKNOWLEDGEMENT ...... III ABSTRACT ...... IV ÖZET ...... V TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... VI CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION 1.1. BEING A WOMAN AND A WOMAN WRITER ...... 1 1.2. THE SUBJECT OF THE STUDY ...... 4 1.3. THE PURPOSE AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY ...... 5 1.4. THE METHODOLOGY OF THE STUDY ...... 6 1.5. THE LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY ...... 7 CHAPTER II STRUGGLE FOR AUTHORSHIP 2.1. ASTREA’S UNUSUAL AND MYSTERIOUS LIFE ...... 8 2.2. APHRA BEHN THROUGH THE EYES OF HER CONTEMPORARIES ...... 20 CHAPTER III TWO HUNDRED YEARS OF IGNORANCE 3.1. APHRA BEHN’S FAME AND REPUTATION IN THE 18TH CENTURY ... 35 3.2. APHRA BEHN THROUGH THE EYES OF VICTORIANS ...... 46 CHAPTER IV REVIVAL: WOMAN WRITER’S CONQUEST 4.1. FROM OBSCURITY TO FAME ...... 56 CONCLUSION ...... 69 WORKS CITED ...... 71 CV ...... 76
vi
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
1.1. BEING A WOMAN AND A WOMAN WRITER
Envy, malice, and all uncharitableness,—these are the fruits of a successful literary career for a woman.1
The study of women’s writing could be traced back to the eighth century BC, when in his Catalogue of Women, Hesoid listed heroines and goddesses; Plutarch listed heroic and artistic women in the work Moralia.2 As for the English Literature, it has no valid information about professional women writers up to the seventeenth century. In her seminal work A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf finds it odd not to have encountered any sixteenth century women writers’ names in the British Museum. The eighteenth century British examples included George Ballard’s (1752) Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain Who Have Been Celebrated for their Writing Skill in the Learned Languages, Arts, and Sciences and John Duncombe’s Feminiad treating women as a distinct category with a misogynist discourse. Women writers were also interested in the history of women’s writing. Mary Scott’s The Female Advocate: A Poem Occassioned by Reading Mr Duncombe’s Feminiad published in 1774 is one of
1 Angeline Goreau, Reconstructing Aphra: A Social Biography of Aphra Behn, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1980, p. 230. 2 http://www.theoi.com/Text/HesiodCatalogues.html, http://www.attalus.org/info/moralia.html, (13.04.2015).
1 the best known works in tracing a woman’s tradition in writing. Mary Hays, in 1803, published the six-volume Female Biography. In 1929, Virginia Woolf, as mentioned above, too, explores the tradition of women’s writing in her A Room of One’s Own. Additionally, anthologies and collections of women’s writing continued to be published. Yet some women writers are under the neglect of recognition due to insufficient historical data.
It remains to wonder how many literature students and professors have heard of Aphra Behn. A woman who tried to show her abilities in various fields such as poetry, drama, novel and translation in a male-dominated world of the seventeenth-century Restoration England, Behn was dismissed from the literary history for a very long time. Surprisingly, the Norton Anthology of English Literature did not include her up until its sixth edition, published in 1993 —including only her Oroonoko (1688). Her contemporaries did not make life easy for her; the following two hundred years mostly ignored her. Though accepted and recognised fully only in the twentieth century, her personal life and literary works are still under the scrutiny of the literary world.
This thesis examines Aphra Behn as the first woman writer who struggled throughout centuries in order to show her presence on the literary stage. Women writers, as in the case of Aphra Behn, had difficulties in gaining acceptance by the literary world of men-dominated doctrines. Behn, as a woman who earned her living by her pen, was one of the most important and criticised characters of such a debate. Although women writers had existed before her, they were mostly depicted as unprofessional writers due to their apologetic way of writing, however Behn wrote to live by not using the same apologetic discourse, but by being courageous enough to persevere against odds. Her idiosyncratic bald characteristic carried Behn into the first professional woman writer in the eyes of the literary historians. Partly due to her unique writing skills and partly due to the researchers’ own curiosity about her literary foremothers, Behn has been read, reread, constructed and reconstructed throughout centuries. In order to show her transformation as such, the thesis analyses Behn within a time span starting from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries till the twenty first-century, in four chapters.
2 Firstly, Behn will be analysed biographically, stressing on her mysterious and doubtful origin, together with her literary image in her contemporaries’ eyes. Taking the previous chapter as a base, the third chapter will enlarge its scope by analysing Behn in two hundred years, namely the eighteenth and the nineteenth-centuries. These were centuries with predicaments and challenges for Behn, unfortunately being truly dismissive on her genius. And in the final chapter, dating from the 1900s, Aphra Behn’s revival in the canon will be focused on, for she is, now at the top of the list of early- modern writers in the UK as “highly successful.”3
3 http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2007/nov/13/aphrabehnstillaradicalexa, (17. 04. 2015).
3 1.2. THE SUBJECT OF THE STUDY
Eighty-six years have passed since the publication of A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf in which Woolf gives Aphra Behn’s name with a great appreciation and wonders at her being an obscure writer. The subject of the current study was actually prompted by this book. Only Aphra Behn out of Woolf’s list of unrecognised women writers was chosen for the research. She was the first professional English woman writer in English Literature, and her literary transformation throughout four centuries starting from the seventeenth-century till the present—an analysis from oblivion to fame. Behn has a critical and pivotal role in the history of women writers. It is her resistance to the so called “moral” literary world empowered by men that makes her one of very few women deserving to be analysed.
From a problematic and mysterious image she is transformed into a milestone who contributed to various literary genres and stylistic discourses. Her obscure and unsteady impact on the literary world, intertwined with the discussion of men and women hierarchy over literature, her up and down-career throughout centuries and the ordeal of her genius until today make the research a stimulating and constructive subject.
4 1.3. THE PURPOSE AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY
The research aims to bring Aphra Behn to the attention of today’s literary academic world by giving an account of her literary biography together with her reception and perception of the seventeenth-century contemporaries, historians, scholars, biographers, critics, and authors from her birth till today. The importance of this study is to provide an alternative view on the literary forerunners of both male and female writers. Just as Shakespeare could take Chaucer as a literary forefather, Aphra Behn definitely might be taken as a candidate for being a literary foremother to the Bronte’s, Austen, and many women descendants. As the first professional woman writer, she not only dealt with one single genre, but wrote poems, plays, novels, and translations, in all of which she used her own style. Bringing a new form to the novel, she is also considered as an important innovator by using the epistolary—long before Samuel Richardson’s well-known epistolary novels (especially Pamela) were written— form combining it with the elements of drama and conversation.
5 1.4. THE METHODOLOGY OF THE STUDY
Eclectic method including biographical, feminist and historical approaches was employed throughout the study: first, by using a biographical approach, Aphra Behn’s life story was analysed from the perspective of various biographers, historians, critics and writers. Since Aphra Behn has been the focus of feminist writers beginning with Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf to Janet Todd and Angeline Goreau, her fame as a professional writer is perceived through the perspective of numerous feminist critics belonging to all the three waves. A historical approach was inevitable in that Aphra Behn’s life and literary performance was viewed and explored within the history of her belated fame, additionally in order to see the literary milieu of the mentioned centuries a men-dominated society of England has been emphasised. The collected data has been applied in a chronological way; seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth-centuries respectively. Additionally a feminist methodology is partly indicated when necessary throughout the text.
6 1.5. THE LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY
The main limitation of our study is that we have elected only Aphra Behn out of the seventeenth century female writers due to her uniqueness in many respects. Another shortcoming might be the fact that the study does not include the analysis of her works. Although the research topic of the study is Aphra Behn as a literary female figure and the image of Aphra Behn throughout centuries, the study does not necessitate analysing her own works, but is limited to the biographical and critical works written on her. In other words, the works of Aphra Behn are consulted in relation with secondary resources to gain a factual argumentation. The study is limited to four centuries-time; seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth.
7
CHAPTER II
STRUGGLE FOR AUTHORSHIP
2.1. ASTREA’S UNUSUAL AND MYSTERIOUS LIFE
Who now of all the inspired Race, Shall take Orinda’s place? 4
Aphra Behn’s literary career as a woman writer was quite different from those of her contemporaries who mostly wrote for pleasure. Trying her hand in a variety of literary genres such as drama, novel, poetry and translation, she managed to succeed in a male-dominated society though not without cost. For a woman reckoned for her genius as Dryden, it is, unusual to look back in time and see the name mentioned only apologetically in mock and abuse ignoring both her life and works. Although she was a mere harlot for some, and although she laid her scenes in brothels and bedrooms, although her discourse is not to be recommended to the courteous, and although she opposed the conventional morality she is now much more important than a woman with no morals. It is disappointing to hear the following from the great Pope:
The Stage how loosely does Astrea tread, Who fairly puts all characters to bed.5
4 This poem was written by an anonymous ‘young lady of quality’ after the death of Aphra Behn under the title An Elegy Upon the Death of Mrs A Behn, the Incomparable Astraea: http://writersinspire.podcasts.ox.ac.uk/content/who-aphra-behn, (20.09.2014).
8 Aphra Behn was well aware of her own position as a pioneer in many styles and “her tongue and her pen grew tart under the injustice of organised attacks.”6 Using the pseudonym Astrea in her works, contingently being inspired by the Greek goddess of justice, Aphra Behn had been explicitly dismissed by many for a very long time. For some, she was “a mere harlot who danced through uncleanness”7 and all these negative and damaging criticisms took her works to obscurity for two centuries. Being the first Englishwoman to earn her living by authorship revealed an unusually interesting and mysterious perspective on her ‘doubtful’ presence and character, in time.
A friend of Dryden, Otway, Nathaniel Lee, Nahum Tate and many other Restoration wits, having written a series of plays and novels and poems, and putting a lot of effort in translations from French to English, Aphra Behn deserves to be said to have a natural genius compared to many of her contemporaries. Representing a revolutionary impact on the social life and literature of her age, she earned by her pen, and, in her struggles to overcome male prejudice and jealousy, became a pioneer in the fight for women’s liberty. Anne Finch—Countess of Winchilsea, wittily comments on Aphra Behn’s genius and birth place;
And standing there sadly he now might descry From the banks of the Stowre the desolate Wye, He lamented for Behn, o’er that place of her birth, And said among Women there was not on the earth, Her superior in fancy, in language, or witt, Yet owned that a little too loosely she write.8
5 V. Sackville-West, Aphra Behn: The Incomparable Astrea, Gerald Howe Ltd, London, 1927, p. 8. 6 Sackville-West, 1927, p. 13. 7 George Woodcock, Aphra Behn: The English Sappho, Black Rose Books, Canada, 1989, p. 7. John Dryden was an English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who was made Poet Laureate in 1668. See: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/john-dryden, (13.04.2015). Thomas Otway was an English Restoration dramatist. See: http://www.theatrehistory.com/british/otway001.html, (13.04.2015). Nathaniel Lee was an English Restoraion dramatist. See: http://global.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/334562/Nathaniel-Lee, (13.04.2015). Nahum Tate was an Irish poet, hymnist and lyricist, who was made Poet Laureate in 1692. See: http://global.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/584187/Nahum-Tate, (13.04.2015). Tallemant’s allegorical narrative Le Voyage de l’Isle d’amour and it’s sequal in 1684 and 1688 respectively. La Rochefoucauld’s maxims in 1685. Bonnecorse’s prose narrative La Montre in 1686. Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la Pluralite des mondes and Histoire des Oracles in 1688. 8 To these lines the Countess of Winchilsea added the following note in her own handwriting: “Mrs. Behn was Daughter to a Barber, who liv’d formerly in Wye, a little market Town (now much decay’d) in Kent. Though the account of her life before her Works pretends otherwise; some
9 Behn’s records of her detailed life are contradictory and have not been helpful for critics and literary scholars. Simple details like her Christian name, her parent’s surname, her father’s profession, her place of birth, and even her married name were confusing. Is the biographer “to call her Aphra, Ayfara, Aphara, Aphora, Afra, Apharra, Afara, or, more fantastically, Aphaw or even Fyhare? Is he to call her Amis or Johnson?” 9 Whether she was the daughter of a barber, as some put forth, or a gentleman, her expert knowledge of French, apparent enough in her plays, and translations did not make any change in the fact that she ‘did’ have the academic knowledge which was rare even among women of the upper classes.10 And, definitely she was a woman of great learning, for her works were influenced by classical French, Spanish, Italian and English literature.
Her well-accepted birth date of 1640 shows that she grew up in the course of the Civil War and the Interregnum. And the generally accepted facts of her life go as follows:
- In her early twenties she went to Surinam — the present Dutch Guiana, which used to be a British possession in South America — which provided her with the material for one of the most famous, popular and influential novels of the period, Oroonoko.
- After her return to England, she was sent by Charles II as a spy to Antwerp, where she was involved in the complex politics of the second Anglo-Dutch war and of the English republican exiles.
- Back in England again, she was imprisoned briefly for debt and then set about earning her living as a professional writer, as, indeed, one of the most successful dramatists of the Restoration theatre, and as poet and novelist.
Persons now alive do testify upon their Knowledge that to be her Original”, George Woodcock Aphra Behn: The English Sappho, p.13. 9 Sackville-West, 1927, p. 11. 10 George Woodcock, 1989, p. 15. The English Civil War started in 1642 when Charles I raised his royal standard in Nottingham. The split between Charles and Parliament was such that neither side was willing to back down over the principles that they held and war was inevitable as a way in which all problems could be solved. The country split into those who supported the king and those who supported Parliament – the classic ingredients for a civil war. See: http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/civil_war_england.htm , (20.09.2014). The Interregnum was the period between the execution of Charles I on 30 January 1649 and the arrival of his son Charles II in London on 29 May 1660 which marked the start of the Restoration period. See: http://www.royal.gov.uk/HistoryoftheMonarchy/KingsandQueensoftheUnitedKingdom/TheStuarts/I nterregnum.aspx, (20.09.2014).
10 - Many of her plays and poems were written in support of the Stuart cause, to which she was attached by personal as well as political loyalty.
- She died five days after the coronation of William and Mary.
- She was buried in Westminster Abbey.11
The fictitious part of her life begins with her birth; the dichotomy of whether she was the daughter of a barber or a gentleman. But if Aphra
had been a boy, she might, like Shakespeare or Ben Jonson, have been educated to the level of the aristocracy at one of the very good public schools; but there was no way that a lower-class girl could receive the kind of education Aphra manifestly had.12 Those means were accessible only to upper-class women. Additionally, during their stay in Surinam the women of her family members were called ‘ladies’, and she, herself, was introduced to many court members, which was far-off to women of the lower-class. Another much-debated possibility is that the lowly-born-Aphra was adopted by Lord Willoughby, and that this Lord was the Lieutenant General of Surinam who took his wife, children and the adopted Aphra along with him. But to turn back to the social structure of the seventeenth century, an objection comes alongside. “Even if a child had been taken in for some reason or another, it would probably have been in some menial capacity. For her to be educated with the other children of the household would be almost inconceivable.”13 George Woodcock, in his biography of Aphra Behn, remarks that in the original History Aphra Behn’s father’s connection to “Lord Willoughby, drew him for the Continent of Surinam, from his quiet retreat at Canterbury, to run the hazardous voyage of the children; and in that number Afra, his promising Darling, our future Heroine, and admir’d Astrea”. 14 And in her novel, Oroonoko, where the unfortunate African prince hero and his wife are captured by the British and brought to Surinam as slaves, Aphra Behn merely supports the statement as;
11 Maureen Duffy, The Passionate Shepherdess: The Life of Aphra Behn: 1640-1689, Phoenix Press, London, 2000, p. 24. 12 Angeline Goreau, Reconstructing Aphra: A Social Biography of Aphra Behn, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1980, p. 11. Francis Willoughby. 5th Baron Willoughby of Parham was an English peer of the House of Lords. See: http://bcw-project.org/biography/francis-lord-willoughby-of-parham, (13.04.2015). 13 Goreau, 1980, pp. 12-13. 14 Woodcock, 1989, p. 16.
11 My stay was to be short in that Country; because my Father dy’d at Sea, and never arriv’d to possess the Honour design’d him (which was Lieutenant-General of six-and- thirty Islands, besides the continent of Surinam) nor the advantages he hop’d to reap by them; So that though we were oblig’d to continue on our Voyage, we did not intend to stay upon the Place….15 How much of the book may be taken for fact was for a long while one of the most debated issues of Aphra’s biography, but her four to five year contentious stay at Surinam was highly exotic compared to her contemporary fellows. Though she was tender in health and deep in writing her novels and verses, she had the
curiosity about natural phenomena and strange people which inspired the amateur scientists of the day, made Charles II interrupt his amours to dabble in the laboratory, and filled many contemporary poems with outlandish images drawn from scientific jargon.16 This curiosity led her to collect insects, go out for courageous expeditions, listen to the nail-biting histories and stories of the native, and go hunting for jaguar cubs. Being invited by the natives to their idiosyncratic parties, Aphra Behn and her brother had a great understanding and blissfulness in their company. The other side of Surinam, the governing and colonial, was unkind in compare to the other. Most drank heavily and used the native slaves cruelly, and by describing the men who governed Surinam, Aphra Behn wrote;
The Council consisted of such notorious villains as Newgate never transported; and possibly originally were such who understood neither the laws of God or man, and had no sort of principles to make them worthy of the name of men; but at the very Council- table would contradict the fight with one another, and swear so bloodily, that ’twas terrible to hear and see ’em.17 This cruelty, to a large extent, might have led Aphra’s family to return to England around 1663. A beautiful woman, with large brown eyes, chestnut hair, fashionably plump shoulders, and full lips; the woman who had wit, honour, good- humour, judgement, and being the mistress of all the pleasing arts of conversation, the woman of sense, the lover of pleasure returned to England with no father to rely on.18 The England of around 1660 which Aphra had left had already changed. Before, theatres were closed, and adultery was to be punished by death. Discontent was already governing; life had a forced solemnity and an unnatural and superficial asceticism
15 Woodcock, 1989, p. 16. 16 Woodcock, 1989, p. 23. 17 Goreau, 1980, pp. 47 - 48. 18 Goreau, 1980, p. 51.
12 which in no way reflected the mood of the people.19 All had changed by then, the military dictatorship had dissolved, and been replaced by the easy-going rule of the King. The revival of the theatres, with the daring innovation of female actresses, must have impressed Aphra above all. For, already in Surinam, Aphra had dabbled in play- writing. The way she had access into the theatre is not certain; it may have been through family connections or friends. But Aphra did not only set up her life with theatrical circles during these early years of her return to England, but also married. She had no father, no dowry, no income and no imminent prospect of any, so a young woman of Aphra’s gifts, resourcefulness, and independence of spirit had no alternative in London of that tie, but to marry. Even if she had chosen the freedom of shifting for herself rather than the necessarily dependent position of any of the foregoing possibilities, careers in the church, the law, the university, and the government were closed to her sex.20 In London, where there were thirteen women to every ten men, Aphra married “a shadowy figure, of whom we know little except that he was a merchant of Dutch extraction and died in 1665, possibly by the [Great P]lague.”21 Her short-winded marriage might not left pleasant memories for neither herself nor her contemporaries to mention explicitly about it, but it is very significant in so many of her plays that marriage is mentioned with a prefix ‘forced’. Lady Mary Chuldleigh’s description of marriage in her poem shows the scene of the time openly;
Wife and servant are the same, But only differ in the name … When she the word ‘obey’ has said, And man by law supreme has made, Fierce as an Eastern Prince he grows And all his innate rigour shows. Then but look, to laugh, or speak Will the nuptial contract break. Like mutes she signs alone must make, And never any freedom take, But still be governed by a nod And fear her husband as her God.22
19 Woodcock, 1989, p. 26. 20 Goreau, 1980, p. 71. The Great Plague of 1665 and 1666 killed an estimated 25% of London’s population which was caused by a bacteria usually transmitted through the bite of an infected rat flea. See: http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/plague_of_1665.htm, (13.04.2015). 21 Woodcock, 1989, p. 28. 22 Goreau, 1980, p. 70.
13 Now a widow, the rich but dead husband appears to have left Mrs. Behn almost penniless, and in reaction to this experiment, though “she could have found someone to marry, … she remained unmarried.”23 Her unfortunate journey of London, marriage, and the Great Plague, where she lost her husband, affected her character at a formidable rate. Poverty was to be her next lesson, which she had to escape by finding a way to support herself. An interesting opportunity, which, in her own words, was “unsuited to my age ands to my ex”24 presented itself; which was to spy for Charles II. Aphra Behn remarks this in her poem A Pindaric to Mr. P. who sings finely;
… by th’ Arcadian Kings Commands [Charles II] I left these Shades, to visit forein Lands; Imploy’d in public toils of State Affairs, Unusual with my Sex, or to my Years. Aphra Behn’s time did not embrace women in the King’s employment, at all. Thus, Aphra Behn, who entered King Charles’s intelligence service, was well aware of the extraordinary nature of her position as a woman acting in an official capacity, in the second Anglo-Dutch War. The procedure of being chosen as a spy remains an ambiguous matter, but she set off to the present Belgium shores.
The imperatives of her mission were these: she was first to contact “Mr. S.” and to persuade him to “become a convert” and serve his King and country. In return, she was to promise him not only a pardon from His Majesty, but a substantial reward for his services, to be forwarded punctually… She was to discover whether the Dutch had any plans for landing troops in any of the King’s dominions; when the fleet would be out; what spies the Dutch had sent into England and who their correspondents were; which of the dissidents then in Holland were the most actively involved with the Dutch; and what merchant fleets were expected either to depart or return to Holland. She was to choose names for herself and Scot to correspond under, and “to use all secrecy imaginable in the management of this business.” Her official supervisor was to be James Halsall, Cupbearer to the King.25 She arrived in Antwerp in the summer of 1666, taking with her forty pounds. Her primary duty “was to keep a watch on such renegade Englishmen as were living in Holland, and seeking, in treasonable alliance with the Dutch, to overthrow the existing English monarchy.”26 Under the name of Astrea, which was later to become famous in literature, Aphra Behn had laboured conscientiously, she had run certain risks, and was a loyal servant of the Government. Whatever personal difficulties she was experiencing
23 Duffy, 2000, p. 72. 24 Duffy, 2000, p. 79. 25 Goreau, 1989, p. 95. 26 Sackville-West, 1927, p. 34.
14 at the time, the acquired information was immediately sent on to England. The forty pounds were of no use any longer during her stay. She wrote numerous unanswered letters to the people in charge of the mission. Not hoping to get an answer to her letters, she, helplessly, asked for a loan, to turn back to England, which was eventually provided. She was now in dept and returned poor to London, “where poverty had been rendered all the more unbearable by the effects of the Great Fire that had ravaged and wholly transformed the city during her absence.”27 Although Aphra Behn returned safely to London, she was financially hopeless. The hundred and fifty pounds she borrowed from Edward Butler, impossible to pay back within a week’s time, and the imprisonment for the debt threatened her. She knew that she would not be able to afford it; but wrote to one of the employers one last time;
If you could guess at the affliction of my soule you would I am sure pity me, ’tis to morrow that I must submitt my self to a prison the time being expired though I indeavoured all day yesterday to get a few days more: I can not because they say, they see I am dallied with all and so they say I shall be for ever: so I cannot revoke my doome I have cryd my self dead and could find my hart to break through all and get to the King and never rise ’till he weare pleased to pay this; but I am sick and weake and unfitt for it; or a prison; I shall go tomorrow. But I will send my mother to the King with a petition for I see everybody are words: and I will not perish in a prison: from whence he swears I shall not stir til the uttmost farthing be payd. and oh god; who considers my misery and charges too; this is my reward for all my great promises, and my endeavours. Sir if I have not the money to night you must send me som thing to keepe me in prison for I will not starve.28 Once more, she failed, “bewildered, incredulous, outraged, she found herself at last actually in the place to which she can never have believed that her misfortunes would lead her.”29 It is unknown about how long she remained in the sickly conditions of the prison after the Fire. What is known is that the debt was paid for her, and Aphra somehow saved herself from her painful situation. Now a free woman about to enter upon the third and most brilliant stage of her career, Aphra began “to understand that real independence required a financial base”30 as if she had foreseen the twentieth
27 Woodcock, 1989, p. 39. 28 Goreau, 1980, pp. 112-113. 29 Sackville-West, 1927, p. 43. 30 Goreau, 1980, p. 113.
15 century Virginia Woolf’s famous remark “—a woman must have money and a room of her own”.31
After she regained her freedom, she dedicated herself to writing, and though the England of the time was not a pleasure itself, she gained pleasure by writing and earning her living. Almost thirty, she had already
been a colonist’s daughter, she had been a wife, a widow, and a spy, she had known brief prosperity, she had lived through the extremes of poverty and despair, she had seen the inside of a London prison; now she was thrown upon the world of London, with her way to make and the experience of those thirty years behind. They had taught her something; they had taught her to take what she wanted.”32 To become a professional dramatist was certainly a revolutionary decision. Other women before her had become celebrated writers and even wits. In the previous decade, for example, Mrs. Katherine Phillips, “The Matchless Orinda”, had earned fame as a poetess and had even written plays. Lady Elizabeth Carew and Margaret Cavendish— Duchess of Newcastle, had published plays of average merit. But all these women were aristocratic amateurs, for whom literature was little more than an elegant game. But none of them entered the rough and tumble of professional writing of the day. Aphra Behn was the first woman to make writing her actual vocation.33
The audience Aphra Behn was writing for was “captious, rowdy, and fickle; it was difficult enough to capture their attention.”34 Playwrights, like Aphra Behn, whose income was dependent only on their works, had really been forced to write to the taste of the age which was light-hearted, reckless, extravagant, and bawdy. So Aphra Behn “gratified both herself and her audience by indulging in coarseness.”35
Aphra Behn was liked and admired by those who knew her personally. She was known for “an attractive face and a voluptuous figure” but additionally “a witty conversationalist and an amiable companion.”36 It is understood from her writings that she was the voice of the rich and the merchants and courtiers, fine ladies and the salty
31 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008, p. 4. 32 Sackville-West, 1927, p. 45. 33 Woodcock, 1989, p. 48. 34 Goreau, 1980, p. 122. 35 Sackville-West, 1927, p. 49. 36 Woodcock, 1989, p. 83.
16 women of the slums and streets. Scenes are set in the life of bankrupt young men and of prostitutes in brothels, showing her interest in the common life of the time, too. “Among all the playwrights who hold up their mirrors of the time, none represents the reality of its life more vividly or reveals its weaknesses more sympathetically than Aphra Behn.”37
Aphra Behn’s works “did” present immorality. Her plays and poems show enough knowledge of and interest in erotic and amorous subjects for us to get convinced that she had numerous love affairs. She did have lovers with whom she exchanged letters;
“Though it be very late, I cannot go to Bed, but I must tell thee I have been very Good ever since I saw thee, and have been a writing, and have seen no Face of Man, or other Body, save my own People.”38
But nonetheless her literary career outweighs the possibility that she was living an immoral life, for “neither life nor personality can be of much interest save in relation to her accomplishment.”39 Aphra Behn wrote fourteen novels, but published only six during her lifetime. Though her novels were written much earlier than the novels which were considered the first examples of the novel genre, no critic denies the innovations Aphra Behn introduced in her novels;
The value and nature of Aphra Behn’s contribution to the novel form has been the subject of much dispute among scholars. It is generally held that the first literary works in the English language that may properly be called novels were Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740). The first is so considered because of its unity of theme and its realistic recreation of the world through description, and the second because of its development of character in which inner reality is important. Aphra Behn began to write her “novels” thirty-six years before Robinson Crusoe and more than half century before Pamela; and the innovative elements that each go these later novels is known for are unquestionably present in her work.40 By using a language different from the traditional form and metaphor in her plays and poetry, she opened the way for women as professional writers. She had opened a wide trail through the prejudices of English society, and by the time she died it was impossible to deny that a woman could write as skilfully as man. Her multifaceted
37 Woodcock, 1989, p. 84. 38 Woodcock, 1989, p. 110. 39 Sackville-West, 1927, p. 72. 40 Goreau, 1980, p. 282.
17 cultural identity, gained as a result of seeing the Old and New World, communicating and spending time with different people, has affected her unique way of dealing with identity in her works.
In the career of Aphra Behn, two related aspects of her have been overlooked. “The first is her interest in natural philosophy, including her criticism of philosophers for not sharing their knowledge. The second aspect is her work as a translator, especially as a translator of scientific texts.”41 But her translations are considered to be unique in that her
creative literary practice extended not only to the writing of numerous plays and poems, but also to translations of Latin poetry, French travel writing and a book of epigrams, as well as to scientific work on botany and astronomy. It is a wonder to find such a talented female translator in the male-dominated world of classical translation and scientific knowledge. Despite the fact that the seventeenth century did not encourage the faithful translation a lot, she became a pioneer in free translation. Translation helped her to gain knowledge about religion, science and philosophy which can all be seen in her usage of different genres; “tales of adventure and romance, commentaries on social mores and misconduct, and more alimentary, ‘popular’ discussions on science.”42
The woman who wrote for the taste of her age, was both the very person of her period, and a writer foreshadowing the innovation and intellectual revolution of the future with her modern usage of styles and genres.
The pioneer of women’s emancipation, the anticipator of abolitionism, the advocate of free marriage, the precursor of Rousseau, and the inventress of much that has become permanent in the English novel as it has the best songs and plays in the English tongue, she holds a place second to none of her contemporaries as a historically important figure.43 Buried in Westminster Abbey, lying in the cloister and not among the ‘trading poets’s in poets’ corner with a written tombstone fading away with the unconscious
41 Sarah Goodfellow, “Such Masculine Strokes: Aphra Behn as a Translator of A Discovery of New Worlds”, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, 1996, Vol.28, No.2, p. 229. A Lecture given at the University College of London (UCL) by Dr Alison E. Martin (18:00-19:30, 24 October 2013), on ‘No tincture of Learning?’: Aphra Behn as (Re)Writer and Translator. See: www.ucl.ac.uk/translation-in-history/documents/Martin-Aphra-Behn-pdf, (20.05.2014) 42 Martin, ibid., p. 2. 43 Woodcock, 1989, p. 239.
18 steps of the centuries, Aphra Behn’s unusual and mysterious life have been of subject in hand across centuries. It is remarkable that the epitaph on her tombstone gives credit to her genius.
“Here lies a proof that wit can never be Defence against mortality.”
It is possible to say that though there may be biographical contradictions and though her writings were light-hearted, reckless, extravagant and bawdy, Aphra Behn remained an important woman figure of her time playing a number of roles ranging from a brave literary character and as a woman spy appointed by the King. The three turning point-stages of Behn’s life, namely her visit to Surinam and her return, paved the way to write her Oroonoko. Secondly, her short-marriage and the death of her unknown husband gained her strength in a male-dominated society, and finally her return from Antwerp as a spy and her release from debtor’s prison inspired her to earn her own living by writing to the taste of the society standing unabated to the male prejudice and jealousy.
19 2.2. APHRA BEHN THROUGH THE EYES OF HER CONTEMPORARIES
That sex, which heretofore was not allowed, To understand more than a beast, or crowd; Of which problems were made, whether or no Women had souls, but to be damned, if so; Whose highest contemplation could not pass, In mens esteem, no higher than the glass; And all the painful labours of their brain, Was only how to dress and entertain: Or, if they ventured to speak sense, the wise Made that, and speaking ox, like prodigies.44 The period between the sixteenth and the mid-eighteenth century had a different understanding of women education. Women were to be prepared for marriage; they were educated to be devout and dutiful wives. The most important thing taught to girls was religious education; academic learning was of secondary importance. Without being taught to write they were given only the education of how to read. Exceptions did exist, there were women who did write, and who did read compared with males, but it did not change the fact that there was an obvious difference in the standard of literacy between males and females. One of these exceptions was Lady Twysden of the time, and her husband Sir Roger, for example, kept diaries; and her “spelling and general expression suggest that, though she was a fluent writer, she did not read much. He, on the other hand, was obviously well educated.”45 The ones who had academic craft were only the daughters of learned men or of rich men. Thus, they were not necessarily expected to write, for they were already given the reward of being taught to read.
To make a living from writing implied access to education of a kind which we know was not available to many women, but as time passed, the increasing number of women who published writings proves the spread of education among women. Beginning from the 1640s, women writers started their literary output, never to diminish it. Therefore the seventeenth century was an extraordinary time for women writers. The history of women writers begins with two important names; Katherine Philips, the first English woman to publish a volume of poetry; Aphra Behn, who was always cited as
44 This poem was written by a female anonymous writer under the title “To the Excellent Orinda”, See: Goreau, 1980, p. 23. 45 Anne Laurence, Women in England: 1500-1760: A Social History, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1995, p. 166.
20 the first woman to make her living by her pen; and many other women writers such as Anne Killigrew and Jane Barker, who started to take female pseudonyms instead of male pseudonyms and started to “have a perspective from which they write that is theirs. Instead of being the objects of male perception and expression” they started to “write from a position that they define, a distant place within the discourses.”46
Anne Finch, the Countess of Winchilsea, who also respected Aphra Behn, nevertheless “owned that a little too loosely she writ,” and unhappily acknowledged the necessary obscurity of a woman writer of her time:
Did I, my lines intend for public view How many censures would their faults persue, Some would, because such words they do affect, Cry they’re insipid, empty, uncorrect. And many, have attained, dull and untaught The name of wit, only by finding fault. True judges, might condemn their want of wit, And all might say, they’re by a woman writ. Alas! a woman that attempts the pen, Such an intruder on the rights of men, Such a presumptuous creature, is esteemed, The fault can by no vertue be redeemed. They tell us, we mistake our sex and way … Nor be despised, aiming to be admired; Conscious of wants, still with contracted wing, To some friends, and to thy sorrows sing; For groves of laurel, thou wert never meant; Be dark enough the shades, and be thou there content.47 The question of literary “identity” for a woman writer in the seventeenth century was definitely affected by the fact that a woman’s name was literally not her own. The Duchess of Newcastle writes that a woman’s
name is lost as to her particular in her marrying, for she quits her own and is named as her husband; also her family, for neither name nor estate goes to her family according to the laws and customs of this country … she hazards her life by bringing [children] into the world, and has the greatest share of trouble in bringing them up [but cannot] assure themselves of comfort or happiness by them, when they are grown to be men, for their name only lives in sons, who continue the line of succession, whereas daughters are but branches which by marriage are broken off from the root from whence they sprang, and ingrafted into the stock of another family, so that daughters are but moveable goods or furnitures that wear out; and though sometimes they carry the lands with them, for want of male-heirs, yet the name is not kept nor the line
46 Marilyn L. Williamson, Raising Their Voices: British Women Writers, 1650-1750, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1990, p. 18. 47 Goreau, 1980, p. 153.
21 continued with them, for the line, name, and life of a family ends with the male issue…48 Sir Thomas Overbury’s statement “My wife is my adopted self”49 confirms the lines above. The double meaning of a name in Aphra Behn’s century—name for virtue and name for fame—created a split in women of literary ambitions that forced some into anonymity, others into fear for publication. It is this tradition of invisibility that makes Aphra’s strong attack on those who criticised her as a woman writer. The following lines, Aphra Behn expresses her awareness of negative criticism from men.
An honest man, being troubled with a scold, Told her, if she continued so bold, That he would have a case made out of hand, To keep her tongue in, under his command.50 In addition to this gender problem, there was still another difficulty: she was inevitably seen as a threat, viewed as competing with her male contemporaries whether or not they were writers themselves. The prologue to Aphra’s The Forced Marriage makes this abundantly clear. She had initially attempted to overcome hostile reaction to a scorn of ‘feminine’ coquetry where it was claimed that her invasion of the masculine territory of wit was only to charm. But her subsequent remarks make it evident that the evasion was to no purpose. Men might compete among themselves on professional ground, sometimes even savagely, but a female wit was, by the very fact of her existence, a direct challenge to male supremacy as a whole.
Owing to Katherine Philips, the Matchless Orinda, and Aphra Behn, the incomparable Astrea, the later generations of female writers were able to take models and examples to themselves. The women who wrote in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries alluded to Orinda and Astrea at the beginning of their first works:
None characterised herself as an innovator or groundbreaker. Rather as their verses suggest, they seem obsessed with creating precursors, with legitimising female art by establishing a lineage that stretches back to the Greek poetess Sappho, through Katherine Phillips (Chaste Orinda) and Aphra Behn (Fair Astrea), to themselves.51
48 Angeline Goreau, The Whole duty of a woman: female writers in seventeenth century England, Dial Press, 1985, USA, p. 188. 49 Goreau, 1980, p. 154. 50 Goreau, 1980, p. 155. 51 Williamson, 1990, p. 19.
22 But while Behn was being vilified by misogynist satirists for her loose morals, Orinda was being praised as chaste and pure.
But O! when thou hast read this matchless Book, And from it’s excellence a Judgement took, What the fair Sex was then, thou, sure, wilt mourn To see how justly now they’re branded with our scorn. Farces and Songs obscene, remote from Wit, (Such as our Sappho to Lisander writ) Employs their time; so far th’abuse Tails; Both are expos’d, alike, to publick view, And both of ’em have Admirers too. With just abhorrence look upon these Crimes, And by thy chaste Example fix the Times; Right the wrong’d Age, redeem thy Sex from shame, ’Twas so Orinda got her deathless Name; Thou art as fair, hast the like skill in Song, And all that thou dost write will last so long.52 Women of the seventeenth century were well aware of their educational deprivation, for gender arguments were on the increase at the time: “if oxen are stronger than men, should men be subordinate to them? All other species in nature treat male and female equally. Why do not humans?” 53 So the cultural explanation for women’s lack of achievement till then was due to the small education provided for them. Though writers like Egerton and Chuldleigh understood that the degrading social presence of women was destructive for them, few were aware of the fact that it was their lack of education, not their creation that put them in such a degrading position for they were “Education’s, more then Nature’s fools.”54
The Elizabethan era was different from the Restoration, and as being still debated, women’s education was at its peak, living its own renaissance—for they were being praised and respected in intellectual spheres. The Restoration, on contrary, established an understanding that whatever opposed the male sex was inferior. The picture depicted by an anonymous woman in 1640 is not bright in terms of girls’ education:
When a father has a numerous issue of sons and daughters, the sons must be first put to the Grammar School, and after perchance sent to the University and trained up in the liberal arts and sciences, and there (if they prove not blockheads) they may in time be book-learned …. [But we daughters] are set only to the needle to prick our fingers; or
52 Williamson, 1990, p. 20. 53 Williamson, 1990, p. 29. 54 Williamson, 1990, p. 29.
23 else to the wheel to spin a fair thread for our own undoings, or perchance to some dirty and debased drudgery. If we be taught to read, they then confine us within the compass of the mother tongue, and that limit we are not suffered to pass …. If we be weak by nature, they strive to make us more weak by our nurture. And if in degree of place low, they strive by their policy to keep us more under.55 A woman of the age was exposed to conventional norms that had been decided for her. If she was of the lower class, she was either tutored at home or sent to a boarding school, or at worst taught to read by local churches. More often, no matter what sex the child was, at a very young age, sent to work to help support the family needs. Grammar Schools, where the students were taught the privilege of Latin, accepted girls very rarely, ‘only’ for a few years. As the cultural and social norms did not allow them to prove themselves in their early education, the opportunity of higher education was not allowed to them either. The founder of the famous Harrow, an independent public boy’s school, said that
girls were not to be admitted under any circumstances. Clearly no daughters ever made their way into the traditionally masculine domain of the university — there could be no question of admittance to Oxford or Cambridge.56 Looking back through time from a twenty-first century in which education is everybody’s right, it is not acceptable for today’s mindset that knowledge was a masculine privilege. In this light, accusations and criticisms Aphra Behn suffered do not surprise us, because it was a dishonour for a woman’s chastity to be known by public. No women of the time dared to educate their daughters in contrary with what was expected of them.57 Nonetheless, those norms did not change the fact that there existed women who challenged what was imposed on them.
The Restoration brought along a big change in the cultural worldview, especially in poetry and drama. A cavalier way of thinking was brought to England from exile;
They avoid the subject of religion, apart from making one or two graceful speeches. They attempt no plumbing of the depths of the soul. They treat life cavalierly, indeed, and sometimes they treat poetic convention cavalierly too. For them life is far too enjoyable for much of it to be spent sweating over verses in a study. The poems must be written in the intervals of living, and are celebratory of things that are much livelier than mere philosophy or art.58
55 Goreau, 1980, p. 24. 56 Goreau, 1980, p. 25. 57 Goreau, 1980, p. 35. 58 http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/cavintro.htm., (10.09.2014).
24 This ideology embraced sexuality very naturally, valuing it over many institutions, like religion and marriage. The cavaliers took their roles in plays as rakes, who did not value women and treated them cruelly. Some were seen as rapists, some were misogynists in the plays. A woman was expected to reject a rake in order to remain chaste; if, on the contrary, she yields, she is ruined. At this point, in her poem The Disappointment Aphra Behn expresses her female reaction to this psychology. She always used cavalier assumptions about women to defend women’s equal sexuality; celebrating female desire in all her works. So she rebels against the long held tradition by letting female characters in her play act freely according to their sexual desires, to achieve free sexual relationships, sometimes within marriage and as often outside. Religious precepts were alien to her;
Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. — Ephesians 5:2259
Aphra Behn’s followers, ‘the Female Wits’, tread in Aphra’s footsteps. The late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century inspired successors were Delariviere Manley, Catherine Trotter Cockburn, Mary Pix, Sarah Field Egerton, Eliza Haywood, and Ephelia, “whose identity is not yet clear, calls herself Behn’s heir and follows her in writing largely about female sexuality.”60 All these women believed that women were not different from men, so they could as well write. They held their views in their works by using the current discourse of the time to an audience of both men and women. Just like Aphra Behn, they dealt with the sense of property which was the enemy of desire for women. They idealised marriages or even affairs where women were not treated as properties and where they enjoyed their independence. They all complained about their lack of education seeking freedom in their fictitious world.
“I value fame as much as if I had been born a hero,”61 remarks Aphra Behn and proves that though women were not as well educated as men they could write like men. She did not hesitate to use the bawdy cavalier discourse of her time, bold enough to defend her rights by herself needing no protection against the
59 Goreau, 1980, p. 36. 60 Williamson, 1990, p. 22. 61 Williamson, 1990, p. 139.
25 cruel critics. John Dryden, for example, did not hesitate to comment on her bawdy style; Mrs. Behn allow’d herself of writing loosely and giving some scandal to the modesty of her sex.62 Although she was constantly judged morally by her contemporaries, Behn stood for a coherent set of values, defined and defended by her anonymous biographer in 1696:
She was of a generous and open Temper, something passionate, very serviceable to her Friends in all that was in her Power; and cou’d sooner forgive in Injury, than do one. She had Wit, Honour, good Humour and Judgement. She was Mistress of all the pleasing Arts of Conversation, but us’d em not to any but those who loved Plaindealing. She was a Woman of Sense, and by Consequence a love of Pleasure, as indeed all, both Men and Women, are; but only some would be thought to be above the Conditions of Humanity, and place their chief Pleasure in a proud, vain Hypocrisie: For my part, I knew her intimately, and never saw ought unbecoming the just Modesty of our Sex, tho’ more gay and free than the Folly of the Precise will allow. She was, I’m satisfy’d, a greater Honout to our Sex than all the canting Tribe of Dissemblers, that die with the false Reputation of Saints. This I may venture to say, because I’m unknown, and the revengeful Censures of my Sex will not reach me, since they will never be able to draw the Veil, and discover the Speaker of these bold Truths. If I have done my dead Friend any manner of Justice, I am satisfy’d, having obtain’d my End: If not, the Reader must remember that there are few Astrea’s arise in our Age; and till such a One does appear, all our Endeavours in Encomiums on the last, must be vain and impotent.63 Aphra Behn stood strong by writing as the males did. Her business in her plays, “was with pleasing and audience and imitating life. If she copied well the trivia of the moment she was doing her job, a job which an uneducated woman could do quite as admirably as a learned man.”64 Though she enjoyed the bawdy style, she accepted the fact that in order to succeed, she had to write “to the taste of the age.”65 Aphra, who had written about sex with the same openness as her male contemporaries, was seen as infinitely more indecent, immoral, immodest, and unreadable only because she was a woman. There were even rumours that she had not written her own works, and the real author of the plays that appeared under her name was a man.
There is a bold woman hath offered [a play]: my cousin Aston can give you a better account of her than I can. Some verses I have seen are not ill; that is commendation enough: she will think so too, I believe, when it come upon the stage. I shall tremble for the poor woman exposed among the critics 66
62 Goreau, 1980, p. 6. 63 Williamson, 1990, p. 140. 64 Janet Todd, ““Pursue That Way of Fooling, and be Damn’d”: Editing Aphra Behn”, Studies in the Novel, 1995, Vol.27, No.3, pp. 305-306. 65 Goreau, 1980, p. 14. 66 Goreau, 1980, p. 115.
26 wrote Elizabeth Cottington, sometime around May in 1669, to her cousin in order to inform her about the latest playhouse news. At the end of the 1660s, Aphra Behn, almost thirty, sat down at her table and became the playwright of her time and the first woman to live by her pen. It is quite likely that she was in fact the ‘bold woman’ Elizabeth Cottington was referring to.
Despite the difficulties Aphra Behn had to face as a woman, many historical conditions prepared the way to ease her being a playwright. For almost twenty years, the theatres were closed and it was only in 1660 that Charles II reopened it. When this happened, it brought along many changes; one of which was most important to Aphra was the introduction of actresses to the stage. Before the Restoration, the parts of women were performed by young men. Therefore, the new audience of all kind was eager for more new plays.
Another historical development that permitted Aphra to make a career as a dramatist was the advent of the professional writers. Before the second half of the seventeenth century, most writers who did not have independent fortunes depended upon patrons or positions at court for financial support. Even Shakespeare had not lived by his pen. Of course he derived a substantial income from his plays, but they were only one part of his theatrical activities: he was also an actor, director, and manager. Like the other actors, he had a share in the company and was paid as part owner of the theatre. Ben Jonson, whose livelihood was more completely dependent on his plays, was not able to eke out a living from their production or publication alone and had to rely on patronage. When the theatres were reorganised during the Restoration, allowance was made for an author’s ‘benefit’, and the professional writer became a permanent fixture of the literary scene with Dryden’s generation. By the time Aphra Behn came to the stage in 1670, playwriting had become at least a viable, if not always reliable, means of supporting oneself. Aphra may well have eventually taken her place alongside the male playwrights no matter what her circumstances were, but the fact that she was newly out of debtor’s prison and desperate to find a new way to make her living has given her the strength to impose herself where other women had failed.
Aphra was now writing to a generation of Londoners who had never been to a play or seen a playhouse, for most of the theatres were destroyed, and many of the
27 playwrights and players from the days of James I and Charles I had died. There was an audience waiting to be restructured. The audience of the new playhouses were of two classes; “prostitutes (“vizard masks”), fops, sparks, and ordinary citizens, who sat on the straight-backed benches of the pit; and the higher nobility, who occupied the three tiers of boxes that comprised the lower, middle, and upper galleries.”67
The audience went to the theatre to see and be seen, to talk and be talked about. And those who were interested in what was happening on the stage found it hard to follow, while
the orange-wenches cried their oranges; the prostitutes of the pit plied their trade; the gentlemen and ladies carried on flirtations and discussed the latest scandals; wits and fops combed their blond periwigs, shouted insults to each other, and told bawdy jokes.68 Many satirists and playwrights criticised the indifference of the audience during a play. An anonymous play The Debauchee, which was attributed to Aphra Behn, protests the interruptions occasioned by the self-advertisement of would-be ‘rakes’:
You come bawling in with broken French, Roaring out oaths aloud, from bench to bench, And bellowing bawdy to the orange-wench, Quarrel with masques, and to be brisk and free, You’ll sell ’em bargains for a repartee, And then cry Damn’em whores, where they be.69 It was a tough task for Aphra Behn to capture the attention of her critical, changeable, and rowdy audience at the beginning of her literary career. One had to be spectacular, outrageous, or extraordinary in some way. It is no surprise that the age is characterised by burlesque and caricature. Like her contemporary playwrights, Aphra Behn had to follow the latest fashion and even the most recent slangs to attract her audience. Otherwise, a play was booed, hissed, and damned. If a play of the time was exposed to such dislike within the first three performances, attracting no audience at all for the following stages, the writer received nothing at all for his or her effort. And this was very important to Aphra Behn, for she had no independent income except her plays.
67 Goreau, 1980, p. 120. 68 Goreau, 1980, p. 121. 69 Goreau, 1980, p. 120. An absurd or comically exaggerated imitation of something, especially in a literary or dramaticwork; a parody. See: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/burlesque, (13.04.2015).
28 Therefore it was a must for her to write for the approval of the audience. When she, later in her literary life, said that she had been “forced” to write to the taste of the age, she really meant it.
People of power and prestige contributed greatly to the popularity of theatre. If Lady Castlemain, one off the King’s mistresses, for example, wanted to support a playwright, it was enough for her to announce that she was planning to attend the playhouse. So the playhouse was filled with curious audience. Again, if a court wit applauded a play, many would follow him; if they hissed, the audience did, too. Though there is no evidence that Aphra Behn was exposed to such advertisement, the conditions of her time did not save her from the bitter criticisms.
a Woman, ’cause ’tis said, The Plays she vends she never made. But that a Greys Inn Laywer does ’em, Who unto her was Friend in Bosom.70 Alexander Radcliffe made this first known criticism to Aphra Behn ’s work, denying her authorship and considering her works to have been written by the opposite sex. But in Behn’s fourteen fictions, “the narrator is never definitely male: six give no clue to gender, though she sometimes seems to be female by implication, and eight […] she is definitely female.”71 Even if it was a male, it can be taken as a praise, since her works were good enough to be attributed to men writers. Laetitia Landon confirms it by stating the following;
Envy, malice, and all uncharitableness,—these are the fruits of a successful literary career for a woman. 72
Aphra Behn’s surprising rate of dramatic production during her lifetime, her repeated success, and increasing fame were continual irritants to her literary competitors who fiercely resented what a woman had achieved. In addition, her emancipated attitude, high spirit and self-determination triggered their hostility more. When she was said to know her place, she replied with a poem;
70 Janet Todd, The Critical Fortunes of Aphra Behn, Camden House, Columbia, USA, 1998, p. 6. 71 Jacqueline Pearson, “Gender and Narrative in the Fiction of Aphra Behn”, The Review of English Studies, 1991, Vol.42, No.165, p, 41. 72 Goreau, 1980, p. 230.
29 Since you’ll have it so, I grant I am impertinent. And till this moment did not know Through all my life what ’twas I meant; Your kind opinion was the unflattering glass, In which my mind found how deformed it was. Impertinence, my sex’s shame, (Which has so long my life persued,) You with such modesty reclaim … To so divine a power what must I owe, That renders me so like the perfect—you?73 One of the bitter satires on the leading playwrights of her time included her as well, which must have caused her some pain, which was competing for the title of Poet Laureate.
…The poetess Aphra next showed her sweet face And swore by her poetry and her black ace The laurel by a double right was her own For the plays she had writ and the conquests she’s won Apollo acknowledged ’twas hard to deny her, But to deal frankly and ingeniously by her, He told her, were conquests and charms her pretence, She ought to have pleaded a dozen years hence.74 When she was attacked for her personal life and rebellious character, Aphra chose to keep silent. But when the issue was her professional capacity, she did not step back. In one of her prefaces she defends herself;
The play had no other misfortune but that of coming out for a woman’s, […] had it been owned by a man, though the most dull unthinking rascally scribbler in town, it had been a most admirable play. Nor does its loss of fame with the ladies do it much hurt, though they ought to have had good nature and justice enough to have attributed all its faults to the authors unhappiness, who is forced to write for bread and not ashamed to own it, and consequently ought to write to please (if she can) an age which has given several proofs it was by this way of writing to be obliged, though it is away too cheap for men of wit to pursue who write for glory, and a way which even I despise as much below me.75 Aphra Behn has not been one of the Restoration playwrights whom theatre managers were eager to accept. Yet when we look at her professional career and regard its implications, her involvement in the theatre was of the utmost importance. With the revival of the theatre during the 1660s, when Aphra Behn boldly shouldered her way in, the theatre was much more receptive to the idea of women writers than it might otherwise have been, and it is perhaps significant that Aphra never lacked support from
73 Goreau, 1980, p. 231. 74 Goreau, 1980, p. 233. 75 Goreau, 1980, p. 233.
30 theatre people; most of the opposition emerged among the male ‘wits’ in the audience and among the satirical pamphleteers who carried on a kind of guerrilla warfare of bad verse and worse sentiments. It is of course significant of a lasting feminisation of the theatrical world that the gate which Aphra Behn had opened did not close behind her. From her death onwards a succession of women made writing their career, including, in the generation immediately afterwards, and in this way Aphra Behn’s really innovative writing, which is fiction rather than drama, had its lasting effect.76
However, Aphra’s enemies having sexual prejudice, insistently showed that in the nature of things a woman could not be expected to write a good play;
Hiss’em and cry ’em down, ’tis all in vain, Incorrigable Scribblers can’t abstain; But impudently i’ th’ old Sin engage; Tho doom’d before, nay banish’d from the Stage. Whilst sad Experience our Eyes convinces, That damn’d their Plays which hang’d the German Princess; And we with ornament set off a Play, Like her crest fine for Execution-day…77 When some of the new-beginning wits announced their prejudices of women playwrights, Behn could not help herself of criticising one of them satirically;
Indeed that day ’twas Acted first, there comes me into the Pit, a long, lither, phlegmatick, white, ill-favour’d wretched Fop, an Officer in Masquerade newly transported with a Scarf and Feather out of France, a sorry Animal that has nought else to shield it from the uttermost contempt of all mankind, but that respect which we afford to Rats and Toads, which though we do not well allow to live, yet when considered as a part of God’s Creation, we make honourable mention of them. A thing, Reader—but no more of such a Smell; This thing, I tell ye, opening that which serves it for a mouth, out issued such a noise as this to those that sate bout it, that they were to expect a woful Play, God damn him, for it was a woman’s. Now how this came about I am not sure, but I suppose he brought it piping hot from some who had with him the reputation of a villainous Wit: for Creatures of his size of sense talk without all imagination, such scraps as they pick up from other folks.78 The ‘happy’ days of the theatre, together with its wits, was put to an end with the Popish Plot, or the Horrid Plot as contemporaries called it, of 1678—a non-existing plot planned by Titus Oates, an ill-minded man, to kill King Charles II, and replace him with his Catholic brother James. It was unfortunate for Aphra, for she was economically dependent on the playhouses and theatres. She complains in one of her epilogue; “So
76 Woodcock, 1989, p. xiv. 77 Woodcock, 1989, p. 75. 78 Woodcock, 1989, pp. 74-75.
31 hard the times are, and so thin the town, | though but one playhouse, that must too lie down; | And when we fail, what will the Poets do?” In the prologue, she unequivocally declares her own political position and lashes out at the purveyors of what she is convinced are invented plots:
The Devil take this cursed plotting age, ’T has run ruin’d all our plots upon the stage; Suspicions, new elections, jealousies, Fresh informations, new discoveries, Do so employ the busy fearful town, Our honest calling here is useless grown: Each fool turns politician now, and wears A formal face, and talks of state-affairs.79 Titus Oates was still at the height of his power when Aphra wrote her prologue. Anyone who doubted his word was immediately suspected of harbouring popish allegiance. In this light, Aphra’s statement seems very bold. Titus Oates and his party of informers had little sense of humour, and Aphra was teasingly calling attention to her point when she wrote in the prologue:
[Each fool] makes acts, decrees, and a new model draws For regulation both of Church and Laws: Tires out his empty noodle to invent What rule and methods’s best in government: But wit, as if ’twere Jesuitical, Is an abomination to ye all. To what a wretched pass will poor plays come? This must be damn’d, the plot is laid in Rome.80 Looking back through the literary history, one can see that the most vital periods are often those of political disorder. Hellas—the original name for Greece— of the 6th and 5th centuries BC, with its hundreds of warring city states and its splendid achievements in the arts and literature; the Germany of hundreds of little principalities that produced the great baroque composers of the eighteenth century; Renaissance Italy, every man’s military prey yet home of the richest of all cultures of its time; the China— packed with poets and innovative philosophers—of the disintegrating Chou Kingdom.81
In England, the equivalent was the Restoration period. The iron rule of Cromwell had come to an end with the coronation of Charles II, but so insecure was his kingships due to the betrayer parliament. And still, culturally, this was the time of
79 Goreau, 1980, p. 241. 80 Goreau, 1980, p. 242. 81 Woodcock, 1989, p. x.
32 remarkable literary and intellectual vitality. Drama revealed itself as no other time since the days of Shakespeare. And with Aphra Behn and her followers the new way of prose was used more boldly to develop the fictions pioneering before them. Deserving praise more than criticism, Aphra Behn did made an impact on her contemporaries. In spite of the jealousies and enmities she endured, she was liked and admired by those who knew her personally.
Men, like Dryden, approved her warmly, and the students who came to her rooms on their vacations from Oxford and Cambridge seem to have experienced the greatest admiration, and sang perfervid songs of praise on Astrea’s physical beauty and intellectual wit. According to many critics, writing came almost as easily to Aphra as talking. “Her muse was never subject to bringing forth with pain,” testified her friend and literary executor Charles Gildon, “for she always writ with the greatest ease in the world, and that in the midst of company, and discourse of other matters.”82 Her love of conversation was admired by many, and was seen as a natural gift; “she had a ready command of pertinent expressions,” reported William Oldys,
and was of a fancy pregnant and fluent. I am told, moreover, by one who knew her, that she had a happy vein in determining any disputes or controversies that might arise in her company; having such agreeable repartees at hand upon all occasions, and so much discretion in the timing of them, that she played them off like winning cards.83 Colonel Colepepper, in his Adversaria, says that “She was a most beautiful woman, and a more excellent poet.”84 There were some who were intense in their admiration, too. An anonymous poet dedicated “To the Lovely Witty ASTREA” a piece which began:
Oh, wonder of thy Sex! Where can we see, Beauty and Knowledge join’d except in thee? Such Pains took Nature with your Heav’nly Face, Form’d it for Love, and moulded every Grace; I doubted first and fear’d that you had been Unfinish’d left like other She’s within: I see the folly of that fear, and fin Your Face is not more beauteous than your Mind. Who’er beheld you with a Heart unmov’d, That sent not sighs, and said within he loved? I gaz’d and found, a then, unknown delight, Lofe in your looks, and Death to leave the sight. What Joys, new Worlds of Joys has he possesst, That gain’d the sought-for welcome of your Breast?85
82 Goreau, 1980, p. 116. 83 Goreau, 1980, p. 116. 84 Woodcock, 1989, p. 80.
33 Daniel Kendrick, an M.A. of Christ Church, Oxford, wrote too emotionally of Aphra, in a poem composed when she was already past forty.
Hail, Beauteous Prophetess, to whom alone, Of all your sex Heavn’s master piece is shown. For wondrous skill it argues, wondrous care, Where two such Stars in firm conjunction are, A Brain so Glorious, and a Face so fair. Two Goddesses in your composure joyn’d, Nothing but Goddess cou’d, you’re so refined, Bright Venus Body gave, Minerva Mind.
How soft and fine your manly numbers flow, Soft as your Lips, and smooth as is your Brow, Gentle as Air, bright as the Noon-day’s Sky, Clear as your Skin, and charming as your Eye. No craggy precipice the Prospect spoils, The Eye no tedious barren plain beguiles. But, like Thessalian Fields your Volumes are, Rapture and charms o’er all the soyl appear, Astrea and her verse are Tempe every where.86 One may conclude that though the Restoration was hard on women in terms of education, which was a masculine privilege, women began writing. Women’s publicity was considered to be a dishonour for them, but Aphra Behn stood adamant and wrote with the same openness as her male contemporaries. Just because she was a woman her intellect was seen as inferior, and her presence made her plays indecent, immoral, immodest and unreadable for the male critics. After all, even though some anonymous contemporaries commended her and her plays, the negative criticisms outweighed in their severity.
85 Woodcock, 1989, p. 81. 86 Woodcock, 1989, p. 81.
34
CHAPTER III
TWO HUNDRED YEARS OF IGNORANCE
3.1. APHRA BEHN’S FAME AND REPUTATION IN THE 18TH CENTURY
Aphra Behn was attacked for plagiarism and bawdiness in her plays “because of the high profile she gained as a woman dramatist writing for the public stage.”87 Even after completing many of her best works like Oroonoko, The Fair Jilt, The Luckey Chance and The Emperor of the Moon, the expected respect was not achieved. So the changing new society after the end of the Stuarts’ reign received her plays indifferently and hostilely. Critics criticised not only her works, but also blamed her for her unchastity and promiscuity. So, since her death in 1689 her works have been marginalised and dismissed, and despite the fact that next to Dryden, she may have been the most prolific writer of her day, until the mid-twentieth century Behn has been scorned for moral depravity. Her plays continued their life on the stage well into the eighteenth century. “But by that time her name had settled into the comparatively blackened obscurity it has endured” for the following two hundred years.88 Elizabeth Montague’s statement is paradoxical in that though she rightly emphasised the fact that
87 Ed. Margarete Rubik, Aphra Behn and Her Female Successors, LIT VERLAG, Berlin, 2011, p. 10. 88 Woodcock, 1989, p. 214.
35 women of wit paid dear for their talent, she nevertheless accuses her of failing in chastity:
Wit in women is apt to have bad consequences; like a sword without a scabbard, it wounds the wearer and provokes assailants. I am sorry to say the generality of women who have excelled in with have failed in chastity….89 When Thomas Southerne, an Irish dramatist, turned her short novel Oroonoko— The Royal Slave into a famous stage play in 1696, she gained some recognition again. There was also a rush to publish Behn’s outstanding unpublished works, including a large number of short stories. Charles Gildon, Thomas Brown and Samuel Briscoe helped Behn to regain her fame “at first with the respectable likeness of a generous cavalier lady and then increasingly, as times became stricter concerning the presentation of women, with a naughtier, more titillating and disreputable image.”90 Thomas Brown, for example, attacked her writing as lewd. In 1757, The London Chronicle also attacked the loose morality of The Rover.91
The new stage of the eighteenth-century got rid of obscenity in plays and “valued goodness of heart rather than wit.”92 They had a tendency to demonise the Restoration as a period of licentiousness, which led to Behn’s plays to slowly disappear, though The Rover was considered to be very famous during the century. At the same time, her poems deserving more respect, took their place in the anthologies of women as a warning about her horrible life and the obscenity of most of her writing. Even Oroonoko was censored and changed more than once, even though it could now be considered as “a natural philosophy text and the narrator a natural philosopher.”93
Due to her disreputableness during the eighteenth-century, it became very difficult for her female successors to see her as a role model. Hannah Parkhouse Cowley, a playwright of the late eighteenth-century, for example, adapted the plot of Behn’s The Luckey Chance in her School for Greybeards to the more ethical tastes of
89 Goreau, 1980, p. 143. 90 Ed. Janet Todd, Aphra Behn: Contemporary Critical Essays, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1999, p. 2. 91 Ed. Heidi Hutner, Rereading Aphra Behn: History, Theory, and Criticism, University Press of Virginia, USA, 1993, p. 2. 92 Ed. Rubik, 2011, p. 11. 93 Anne Bratach, “Following the Intrigue: Aphra Behn, Genre, and Restoration Science”, The Journal of NArrative Technigue, 1996, Vol.26, No.3, p. 210.
36 the age. She abstained from giving an open reference, by speaking only of “an obsolete Comedy; the work of a poet of the drama, once highly celebrated.”94
In 1754, in a distasteful eulogy of women’s abilities, The Feminiad by John Duncombe—an English clergyman and writer—praises Catherine Trotter Cockburn, one of Aphra Behn’s followers—possibly forgetting about her being one of the Female Wits of Behn and additionally considering her marriage to a minister. After all John Duncombe labels Behn and her followers as enemies to virtue:
The modest muse a veil of pity throws O’er Vice’s friends and Virtue’s female foes Abashed she views the bold unblushing mien Of modern Manley, Centlivre, and Behn.95 Quite contrary to Duncombe, in 1759 Theophilus Cibber—one of her rare eighteenth-century defenders—criticises the merciless attackers in his Lives of the Poets;
It is unpleasing to have the merits of any of the Fair Sex lessened. Mrs. Behn suffered enough at the hands of supercilious prudes, who had the barbarity to construe her sprightliness into lewdness; and because she had wit and beauty, she must be likewise charged with prostitution and irreligion.96 Additionally, William Oldys—an eighteenth-century English antiquarian and bibliographer—who knew many of Behn’s friends, informs us that
she might justly be called the ENGLISH SAPPHO, equalling her either for description, or perhaps experience, in the flames of love, and excelling in her personal temptation to it; being a graceful, comely woman, with brown hair, and a piercing eye.97 Oldys also declared that
she had a capacity above most of her sex who have obliged the public. She had a great command of pertinent expressions, and was of a fancy pregnant and fluent: whence it is that she wrote with a facility, spirit and warmth, especially in amorous subjects, superior to every other Poetess of the Age, and many of the Poets too...98 Susanna Centlivre, for example, who was “the most successful woman playwright between Behn in the seventeenth century and Hannah Cowley in the late
94 Folger Collective on Early Women Critics (Scholarly Group), Women Critics 1660-1820: An Anthology, Indiana University Press, USA, 1995, p. 201. 95 Williamson, 1990, p. 21. 96 Woodcock, 1989, p. 8. 97 Woodcock, 1989, p. 80. 98 Todd, 1998, p. 35.
37 eighteenth century,”99 became known as the second woman of the English stage after Aphra Behn. She used Aphra Behn’s penname of Astrea, claiming her admission for the “genius of Mrs. Aphra Behn (the earlier Astrea).”100
Aphra Behn was defended by her anonymous biographer in 1696 despite all the moral judges who attacked her:
She was of a generous and open Temper, something passionate, very serviceable to her Friends in all that was in her Power; and cou'd sooner forgive an Injury, than do one. […] If I have done my dead Friend any manner of Justice, I am satisfy’d, having obtain’d my End: If not, the Reader must remember that there are few Astrea’s arise in our Age; and till such a One does appear, all our Endeavours in Encomiums on the last, must be vain and impotent.101 Being an inspirer to a company of successors of the late-seventeenth and eighteenth-century such as Ephelia, Sarah Fyge Field Egerton, Delariviere Manley, Catherine Trotter Cockburn, Mary Pix, Mary Hearne, and Susanna Centlivre, one does agree with her anonymous biographer that such heroines are extremely rare.
In 1702 Jacob Tonson—Aphra Behn’s old publisher— wrote a vignette Plays Written by the late Mrs. BEHN, with an anonymous preface, where she is described as the “incomparable Mrs. A. Behn, a person whose Character is so universally known, and whose Performances have met with such a General Applause, that ’tis needless to bespeak the Reader’s Favour on her Behalf.”102 These critical praises faded as the century progressed and had a clear vision of the Restoration period.
Besides Charles Gildon—a friend of Aphra Behn in her last years who published her unpublished works— John Oldmixon, the editor of The Muses Mercury of 1707- 1708 also made use of Behn’s literary legacy. The latter advertised Behn as an immoral figure rather than a prominent woman writer. He published Behn’s conventional pastoral ditty I led my Silvia to a Grove with some corrections for the sake of decency:
99 Susan Staves, A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660-1789, Cambridge University Press, UK, 2006, p. 155. 100 http://www.theatrehistory.com/british/centlivre001.html, (17.09.2014). 101 Williamson, 1990, p. 140. 102 Todd, 1998, p. 27.
38 As Amorous as these Verses may be thought, they have been reduc’d to bring them within the Rules of Decency, which all Writers ought to observe, so instead of a Diversion they will become a Nuisance.103 Thomas Brown who had been trying to make a living by his wits in the London theatre life in Behn’s time, was treated kindly by Behn as she included some of his poems in her 1685 Miscellany. But in 1702 Brown included his old friend in his work called Letter from the Dead to the Living, in which he draws an image of Behn and the actress Anne Bracegirdle exchanging insults. Bracegirdle’s imaginary answer portrays Behn with a young men company:
You were the young Poets Venus; to you they paid their Devotion as a Goddess, and their first Adventure, when they adjourn’d from the University to the Town, was to solicit your Favours; and this advantage you enjoy’d above the rest of your Sex, that if a young Student was but once infected with a Rhiming Itch, you by a butter’d Bun could make him an establish’d Poet at any time.104 Brown’s ‘acknowledgement’ to Behn was made by presenting Aphra Behn as a “poets’ whore, a woman who sleeps with Dryden or a Whitefriars ballad-monger if he will praise her. She preys on young male poets both for sex and for rhymes.”105 In 1738, The Gentleman’s Magazine published “The Apotheosis of Milton,” and the anonymous writer who fell asleep in Westminster Abbey, dreamt of an assembly for the admission of Milton into the company buried in Poet’s Corner. When Behn attempted to join them she was rejected, for no woman had the right to sit among the privileged men. The Restoration mocked Aphra Behn as a woman writer, and thus made a short appearance in the “Apotheosis”:
Observe that Lady dressed in the loose Robe de Chambre with her Neck and Breasts bare; how much Fire in her Eye! What a passionate Expression in her Motions! And how much Assurance in her Features! Observe what an Indignant Look she bestows on the President, who is telling her, that none of her Sex has any Right to Seat there. How she throws her eyes about, to see if she can find out any one of the Assembly who inclines to take her Part. No! not one stirs; they who are enclined in her favour are overawed, and the rest shake their Heads; and now she flings out of the Assembly. That extraordinary Woman is Afra Behn….106 Women writers of the eighteenth-century were expected to write piously and decently in order to be welcomed by the literary stage. In 1740, in the misogynist work
103 http://www.forgottenbooks.com/readbook_text/The_Works_of_Aphra_Behn_v6_1000569590/429, (18.10.2014). 104 Todd, 1998, p. 29. 105 Janet M. Todd, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn, Rutgers University Press, New Jersey, 1996, p. 314. 106 Christopher Flint, Family Fictions: Narrative and Domestic Relations in Britain, 1688-1798, Stanford University Press, California, 1998, p. 325.
39 Man Superior to Woman, the writer imagined a Female University in which the allotted books would be the works of Behn and Manley, teaching impiety, ribaldry, and blasphemy, and that women should be accepted as unsuitable for study because “a Manly, a Behn… have shamefully misapplied their talents”107
Broadly, Behn was in the dichotomy of being modest and lewd during the early years of the eighteenth-century. On the one hand some, like Daniel Defoe in 1700, listed Behn with Cowley, Milton and Rochester. In 1704, Jonathan Swift names Aphra Behn as “Afra the Amazon light of foot”108 in his Battle of the Books. On the other hand, others presented Behn mainly as a standard of corruption or bad taste. In the Spectator dating 28 April 1711, presumably Richard Steele wrote a passage of Behn’s The Rover, claiming that Behn sent “her hero offstage “above once every act” to take sexual pleasure. At the end, her heroine had to have the reward of a “good Gallant.””109
Even Samuel Richardson, who was the great arbiter of women’s fiction, mentioned Behn in his catalogue of disgusting and infamous women. In his 1785 work, Sir Charles Grandison, he makes his exemplary hero refuse to confirm Emily’s poetic ambitions; his reason is that the “titles of Wit and Poetess, have been disgraced too often by Sappho’s and Corinna’s ancient and modern.”110
Those who were interested in the Restoration theatre, kept Aphra Behn current, regardless of her bawdy reputation. The first scientific review of Behn as a dramatist came in one of the English editions of Pierre Bayle’s famous Dictionnaire, entitled A General Dictionary, Historical and Critical in the years between 1734 and 1741 in ten volumes. The third volume, gave a nine-page place on “Aphara Behn.” 111 Most importantly, the volume treats Behn’s work with the seriousness she had long deserved.
107 Todd, 1998, p. 31. 108 G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain, University of Chicago Press, US, 1996, p. 351. Jiraiya, literally "Young Thunder", originally known as Ogata Shuma Hiroyuki, is the title character of the Japanese folk tale Jiraiya Gōketsu Monogatari The Tale of the Gallant Jiraiya". In the legend, Jiraiya is a ninja who uses shapeshifting magic to morph into a gigantic toad. 109 Todd, 1998, p. 34. 110 Samuel Richardson, The History of Sir Charles Grandison. In a Series of Letters, Harrison and Company, Oxford, 1785, p.285. 111 Todd, 1998, p. 34.
40 In 1747, another important encyclopaedic work called Biographia Britannica or, the Lives of the Most Eminent Persons, mentioned Aphra Behn in the first volume, using the name “Aphara.” The work, unfortunately, relied on resources which again provoked comments on Behn’s tendency to promiscuity, by including bedroom farces.
Aphra Behn’s translations, along with her plays, were attacked by critics as well. Her translation of Fontenelle’s A Discovery of New Worlds in 1688, was considered to be good, but was still criticised for containing some mistakes due to her lack of philosophical skills. She was criticised to be presumptuous, and thus she was revealed as “out of her sphere, and engaged in a kind of writing, for which nature had not formed her.”112
Aphra Behn’s works in other genres were unfortunate in terms of literary criticism as well. Except Oroonoko, her novels were criticised to be mainly translations, while “her Poetry is none of the best.”113 Her comedies were considered to be full of improper scenes and expressions, though having a slight of wit and humour.
In 1735, Theophilus Cibber gave fifteen pages to Behn in his section “Mrs. Aphra Behn” in Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, to the Time of Dean Swift. She is given a place between Edward Howard, a mediocre playwright and a personal friend of Aphra Behn and George Etherege, the star of the early Restoration theatre. The only other woman in the volume is the poet Lady Chudleigh. Aphra Behn’s place in the society with class distinction was secured in the volume; the “celebrated poetess of the last age, was a gentlewoman by birth.”114 The previous encyclopaedias considered Aphra Behn as almost equal to Katherine Philips—the Matchless Orinda. However, Cibber extols her “great strength of mind and command of thought.”115 He did not conceal that Behn wrote for bread:
112 Ed. William Oldys, Biographia Britannica: Or the Lives of the Most Eminent Persons who Have Flourished in Great Britain and Ireland, From the Earliest Ages, Down to the Present Times, Volume 1, W. Innys, London, 1747, p. 664. 113 Todd, 1998, p. 36. 114 Theophilus Cibber & Thomas Coxeter, The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland: To the Time of Dean Swift, Volume 3, R. Griffiths, 1753, London, p. 17. 115 Todd, 1998, p. 37.
41 let those who are ready to blame her, consider, that her’s was the sad alternative to write or starve; the taste of the times was corrupt, and it is a true observation, that they who live to please, must please to live.116 He further adds that
Mrs. Behn, perhaps, as much as any one, condemned loose scenes, and too warm descriptions; but something must be allowed to human frailty. She herself was of an amorous complexion, she felt the passions intimately which she describes, and this circumstance added to necessity, might [be] the occasion of her plays being of that cast.117 Additionally, in protection of Aphra Behn, Cibber bitterly comments on the famous lines of Pope about her putting all her characters to bed:
there are marks of a fine understanding in the most unfinished piece of Mrs. Behn, and the very worst of this lades compositions are preferable to Durfey’s best. It is unpleasing to have the merit of any of the Fair Sex lessened. Mrs. Behn suffered enough at the hands of supercilious prudes, who had the barbarity to construe her sprightliness into lewdness; and because she had wit and beauty, she must likewise be charges with prostitution and irreligion.118 Towards the middle of the eighteenth-century criticism made against both women and male writers was turned against female writers alone. In 1752, the antiquarian George Ballard wrote a biographical dictionary of female intellectuals called Memoir of Several Ladies of Great Britain: who have been celebrated for their writings or skill in the learned languages, arts and sciences without mentioning the name of Aphra Behn. It was not surprising that this book which concentrated only on women and their distinctive femaleness did not enter her into the list. Because the work had a didactic aim that “women should emulate the learning and piety,”119 it was not surprising that Aphra Behn was not included in this “Memoir of Several Ladies.”
However, in 1755, Poems by Eminent Ladies, edited by George Colman and Bonnel Thornton included Aphra Behn among the respectable company of eighteen prominent ladies. The poems included under the name of Aphra Behn were her more respectable ones. In their preface, the editors give Aphra Behn and her contemporaries their due:
116 Margaret J. M. Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History, John Hopkins University Press, USA, 1996, p. 89. 117 Todd, 1998, p. 37. 118 Todd, 1998, p. 37. 119 Todd, 1998, p. 38.
42 standing proof that great abilities are not confined to the men, and that genius often glows with equal warmth, or perhaps with more delicacy, in the breast of a female. The Ladies, whose pieces we have here collected, are not only an honour to their Sex, but to their native-country; and there can be no doubt of their appearing to advantage together, when they have each severally been approved by the greatest writers of their times.120 George Colman’s appreciation of women’s genius shows how fast opinions and judgements of women writers changed over years. Aphra Behn’s popular plays The Rover and The Emperor of the Moon continued to be staged regardless the abuse she received from men. However, through the last years of the eighteenth-century, the plays were not often performed, and Behn started to be forgotten in the theatrical sphere. The moralising structure of the theatre controlled the taste and thus led not only Behn’s but also many Restoration men playwrights’ plays to fall out of fashion.
The Rover, for example, which was very popular in the first part of the eighteenth-century, was recorded in The London Stage to have been performed fifty-one times in 1730. Just as Jane Spencer points in her The Rover and the Eighteenth Century, “a theatregoer could have seen the play in three different productions”121 However, until the end of the eighteenth-century, the play was not seen again. In 1790, the play met with the audience in a revised version called Love in Many Masks, by John Philip Kemble, an actor of the time. This version of The Rover was described as revealing “the insipidity of emasculation”122 by Aphra Behn’s early twentieth-century editor Augustus Montague Summers. Consequently the play was not performed until the late twentieth-century, for it was already diluted in various staging. In the 1740s cuts were made into a more respectable form.
The unpleasantness of the threatened rape scene in The Rover was obviously cut during the 40s but it was back in the 1757 version, and in the 1790 version it was much shortened—some parts being entirely removed. Another play of Aphra Behn The Emperor of the Moon did not undergo the changes like The Rover. With its stock characters introduced to the English stage, the play was well known during the early eighteenth-century.
120 This footnote is available in: Todd, 1998, p. 38-39. However it has been cut in this source, thus we have referred to the original source. For the original source, see: George Colman-Bonnel Thornton, Poems by Eminent Ladies, R. Baldwin, Oxford, 1775, p. 5. 121 Todd, 1998, p. 40. 122 Todd, 1998, p. 40.
43 In the final years of the eighteenth-century Aphra Behn ’s reputation was all summed up in Charles Dibdin’s A Complete History of the English Stage as loose, plagiarising, and given to obsequious dedications. In the second edition of the Biographia Britannica in 1780, English conformist clergyman and biographer Andrew Kippis revised the article on Behn from the 1747 version, adding his personal critical comments by reorganising the first versions of author’s entries:
The writer of the article Behn, in the General Dictionary, enters largely into her poetical character, and recited many testimonies of applause, which have been bestowed upon her….Most of his testimonies, however, are either from authors whose judgement is of little weight, or else are the encomiums of those who might be led to some undue praises of her, from personal acquaintance and friendship. The Biographer himself, after all, though he allows her to have been a genius, will not grant that she was of the first or perhaps second rate….123 Kippis is touched by Behn’s writing although his impression about Behn is obtained only from his reading some selected parts of The Voyage to the Island of Love. From his limited readings he is
struck with the marks of genius, invention, and fire, with which, amidst many inaccuracies and worse faults, it undoubtedly abounds; and could not help assigning her a high rank among the female poets of Great Britain. Later on, he changed his opinion when he learned from Gerard Langbaine, an English dramatic biographer and critic, that The Voyage to the Island of Love was merely a translation from the French version. However, as a defence he comments on Behn’s “genius, adventures, and writings, gave her… such celebrity in her time, that she could not be omitted in a work of this kind.”124 But nonetheless, he recorded that she was “very deficient in moral qualities.”125
Her amorality did not prevent Aphra Behn from popularity. She was welcomed by female readers. Her popularity was referred to in Sir Walter Scott’s memory, recorded in Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart by John Gibson Lockhart. Walter Scott remembers that his eighty-year-old aunt Mrs. Keith of Ravelstone, told that she had heard Aphra Behn’s novels in the 1760s which she enjoyed and “read aloud for the amusement of large circles of the first and most creditable society.”
123 Todd, 1998, p. 42. 124 Todd, 1998, p. 43. 125 Todd, 1998, p. 43.
44 Clara Reeve, in her work in the form of a conversation among ladies called The Progress of Romance, declared that all of Behn’s writings have “strong marks of Genius.” Unfortunately, Reeve comments that there are certain parts in Behn’s works that are improper to be read by virtuous wives and youngsters. However, supporting Thophilus Cibber’s argument on Behn she makes clear that
Behn lived in a loose and licentious age and was inevitably marked by it. Indeed, in the fictional conversation, Behn is almost excused entirely because of her historical context. She was a lady with fine and amiable qualities, as well as a genius for writing.126 As we see Behn’s reputation changed from bad to worse or from bad to good depending on critics’ judgements and the conventions of society. Except a few literary interests she became almost forgotten in the pages of biographies, literature and history with negative criticisms predominating the positive ones. The eighteenth-century was a period that got rid of obscenity in plays. This left Aphra Behn behind, for she was seen unchaste and promiscuous as a character writing lewd. Though few women wrote with her penname Astrea, almost all women successors abstained from giving Behn as an open reference. Within a century’s time, views on Behn change so fast, mostly from a positive to a negative one. Besides all the unfortunate criticisms, still she is not in entire oblivion.
126 Todd, 1998, p. 43.
45 3.2. APHRA BEHN THROUGH THE EYES OF VICTORIANS
The Victorian period was characterised by many historical changes, which started discussions and arguments about the nature and role of woman, which was referred to as ‘The Woman Question’ by Victorians. The Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867 which were proposals to reform voting in the British parliament, forced to remove certain inequalities including women’s political rights. Although women in England did not have the right to vote until 1918, requests to Parliament in favour of women’s right to vote was introduced in the 1840s. Additionally, the Industrial Revolution brought changes for women as well. They started working in factories and industries in serious conditions. The changing lives of women revealed new ideas of woman’s place in society and encouraged them to write on subjects including “children, marital and filial relations, and helpless victims.”127 In A Woman’s Thoughts About Women, for example, the nineteenth-century poet and novelist Dinah Maria Mulock Craik compares the possibility of Tom, Dick, and Harry, who leave school and start working to earn their living, with the girls who finish their education, come home and stay at home. She laments that the only difference between men and women is that women “have literally nothing whatever to do.” 128 Moreover, as regards women’s place during the new century, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, a prominent English poet, essayist, literary critic, editor, and children’s author of the nineteenth-century, emphasised in a poem called “On a Lady’s Writing” that “propriety was the female goal in art and life.”129 This view continued to be felt in almost all of the women’s writing in the century. Though women had the right to work, write, and accomplish anything appreciated, they reserved their traditional place and conventional feminine vision. Florence Nightingale, who became an icon of the Victorian culture known as ‘The Lady with the Lamp’, is another example. Though she was the founder of modern nursing, her image of helping wounded soldiers is perceived as a traditional view of woman’s mission.
Due to the lack of resources concerning the chapter, I had to mainly depend on: 1. Ed. Todd, 1999. 2. Todd, 1998. 127 Ed. Todd, 1999, p. 3. 128 http://wanna-bewriter.com/tag/dinah-maria-mulock/, (10.02.2015). 129 Todd, 1998, p. 44.
46 In light of this, the nineteenth-century was an even harder critical time for Aphra Behn, for she was condemned by both male and female anthologists, historians, and writers. The changing reputation of Aphra Behn is noticeable between the mid- eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Mrs. Keith’s enjoyment of Behn’s novels in the 1760s (see page 50) can be a clear example to Behn’s changing fame. When, in 1821, Mrs. Keith of Ravelstone, at the age of eighty, wanted to reread a work of Behn’s, Walter Scott sent the books “curiously sealed up, with ‘private and confidential’ on the packet” despite his warning that they were improper readings for a lady. Walter Scott, then narrates what happened next;
The next time I saw her afterwards, she gave me back Aphra, properly wrapped up, with nearly these words: “Take back your bonny Mrs. Behn; and, if you will take my advice, put her in the fire, for I found it impossible to get through the very first novel. But is it not,” she said, “a very odd thing that I, an old woman of eighty and upwards, sitting alone, feel myself ashamed to read a book which, sixty years ago, I have heard read aloud for the amusement of large circles, consisting of the first and most creditable society in London?”130 Queen Victoria, too, represents a similar paradox. In the well-known 1846 picture called The Royal Family by Franz Xaver Winterhalter,
Queen Victoria is skilfully depicted as both sovereign and mother. The scene is one of domestic harmony, peace and happiness, albeit with many allusions to royal status: grandeur in the form of jewels and furniture, tradition and the continuation of the royal lineage.131 And though she was the queen of the British Empire, her identity is represented in conventional feminine relationship. The emphasis on proper femininity embraced Aphra Behn as well. She, despite being considered skilled as many of her male contemporaries, was presented only in the company of her own sex, among ladies, and poetesses in the nineteenth-century. In 1827, Alexander Dyce published Specimens of British Poetesses, which was known as the most academic nineteenth-century anthology of women writers. He included Aphra Behn’s eight poems commenting on her poetry as colourful and powerful, while he did not pass over her plays by declaring that they were examples of “grossness.”132
130 Catharine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820, University of California Press, California, 1995, p. 1. 131 http://www.royalcollection.org.uk/collection/405413/the-royal-family-in-1846, (10.02.2015). 132 Todd, 1998, p. 44.
47 Leigh Hunt, an English critic, essayist, poet, and writer, was one of the Romantic poets and writers who were impressed with what they have learned of Aphra Behn, after reading Dyce’s work Specimens of British Poetesses. Being one of Dyce’s friends, Leigh Hunt wrote in an 1828 review that Aphra Behn “affects and makes us admire her, beyond what we looked for. Her verses are natural and cordial, written in a masculine style and yet womanly withal.” 133 He added that if Behn was the poet only of the poems which Alexander Dyce had included in his work, she would have been known and admired in the nineteenth-century. Despite his admiration for some of Behn’s verses, Leigh Hunt agrees with Dyce in that Behn’s plays are indeed alarming, but adds that the bawdy language is due to the “thoughtless good-humour” of Behn.134 About twenty years later, in 1847, in Specimens of British Poetesses, Leigh Hunt spoke in praise of Aphra Behn, this time for her lyricism.
Interestingly, William Wordsworth, also one of Dyce’s friends, in his letters, mentioned Specimens of British Poetesses. He claimed Dyce’s volume superior to Colman and Thornton’s Poems by Eminent Ladies (see page 48) and commented insultingly on Behn’s included works by blaming the editors:
how injudicious that Selection is in the case of Lady Winchilsea, and Mrs. Behn, from whose attempts they are miserably copious, I have thought something better might have been chosen by more competent persons.135 By the mid-nineteenth century, women’s role and image in the society was very clear. Modest women writers of moral and spiritual qualities were to be enjoyed by both male and female readers. This image was so fixed that the American anthologist George Bethune in his 1848 volume The British Female Poets with Biographical and Critical Notices did not include Aphra Behn at all. In his volume, he declares that
he has quoted some women of real merit or accidental distinction, while reserving the bulk of the book for more copious extracts from those whose writings were most highly appreciated for moral and poetical excellence.136 In the same year of 1848, Aphra Behn appears in The Female Poets of Great Britain by Frederic Rowton. Although he, like others, favoured feminine qualities, he
133 Todd, 1998, p. 45. 134 Todd, 1998, p. 45. 135 Todd, 1998, p. 45. 136 Todd, 1998, p. 45.
48 believed that it was necessary to provide all extracts from the whole three centuries of women’s writing. Rowton, like Bethune, supported the Victorian ideology that man is the head and intellect, and woman is the heart and emotion of being, but added that in his volume he wanted to “supply a want which must have been frequently experienced by every student of our literary annals;—the want of a History of our Female Poets” to provide “the memorials of the Female Mind.”137 His bold approach helped him to notice that if women functioned more widely in the world, “humanity would have been far wiser, and better, and happier than it is.” Women would have softened and tempered “Man’s coarser spirit,” which has made the world “too gross, material, sensual, and violent.”138 Eventually, Rowton’s description of a poetess refers to women who address the heart, not the mind, whose presence exist for virtue not for immorality. “It is for man to ameliorate our condition; it is for woman to amend our character.”139
From this perspective, Aphra Behn was concretely unfit, for her poetry did not laud men and exemplify moral women. Though she is included in Rowton’s volume, she receives less space than Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, and Anne Finch. Also, Behn was not included in his list of women who had helped stimulate moral progress. The very beginning of his volume includes his thoughts on female writing. There he explains how he finds men’s verse to be more exciting and interesting than those of women’s. He claims that there is no female Shakespeare or Milton, but admits that there are some exceptions: the eighteenth-century Anne Finch can be considered William Copper’s counterpart—once again by omitting Aphra Behn. Behn takes her place in the volume as “one of the most prominent, but one of the least estimable, of the British Female Poets.” 140 He includes Behn’s most approved poems in favour of the Victorian taste, dealing with domestic themes and shows delicate sensibility. He finds Behn’s Love in fanstastique triumph as the most suitable of all. In Behn’s verse he sees liveliness and happy expressions. He adds that Mrs. Behn’s fluency and harmony of style “has scarcely a superior in our language. I do not know a
137 Ed. Todd, 1999, p. 3. 138 Ed. Todd, 1999, p. 3. 139 Todd, 1998, p. 46. 140 Todd, 1998, p. 47. It is as in the original.
49 poem that flows more smoothly and musically than the following.” 141 But, when it comes to his moral views on Behn’s verse, he comments that:
To a fine and subtle humour she joins great grossness of thought; and to a lively and laughing imagination she unites an essential coarseness of passion which disfigures and depraves nearly all she writes.142 In Behn, Rowton feels the licentiousness is not something gained additionally, but has always been present. Again, the plays are declared to be “amongst the grossest productions ever given to the world.”143
Another critic, Eric Robertson in his English Poetesses: A Series of Critical Biographies in 1883, makes his opinion clear that women’s works are mainly reproductive and can never be compared to those of men’s. For him, the seventeenth- century and Augustan women were unfeminine in their way of expression. He feels sorry to have included Aphra Behn in his biographies. Robertson remarks that it is a pity that “mention should be made of so unsexed a writer as Mrs. Aphra Behn”144 Reading her plays was, for him, a fearful task. He admitted her wit and genius, but still it was a pity for him that “such plots and such dialogue should suffice to preserve on any shelves the writings of so impure a pen.”145
Behn became the blush for later generations, declared the poet, author and critic Edmund Gosse in his 1880 English Poets. Gosse labelled Behn’s The Voyage to the Island of Love as bawdry and graceless. Gosse’s negative thought on Behn takes its place in his sketch of Thomas Otway, a friend of Behn, in Seventeenth-Century Studies in 1883. In the work, Gosse mocks Otway’s reference to Behn as a representer of morality.
The nineteenth-century anthologies of women writers compiled by men, did not include Behn’s greater public poems such as The Disappointment, To the fair Clarinda, and The Golden Age. When women, like Mary Hays, Mary Matilda Betham, Jane Williams, and Julia Kavanagh, started to compile anthologies and biographical
141 Todd, 1998, p. 47. 142 Todd, 1998, p. 47. 143 Todd, 1998, p. 47. 144 Todd, 1998, p. 48. 145 Todd, 1998, p. 48.
50 dictionaries during the nineteenth-century, Aphra Behn’s position does not appear to have improved. Usually, women compilers at the time had to make a literary living out of it, and therefore most probably like the male compilers did not have time to read much of the female writing, but took the opinions from their predecessors. The novelist Mary Hays, best known for her belief in radical feminism and her provocative history of women, for example, might have found much to admire in Aphra Behn if she had read her writings with an open mind. In her 1803 Female Biography, Hays includes Aphra Behn by repeating the indelicacy of her writings. A year later in 1804, an English poet and woman of letters Mary Matilda Betham in her Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country, simply condemned Behn’s extremism. Jane Williams in her 1861 The Literary Women of England, reveals Behn’s life and works as immoral, part of an age of “pert mediocrity and profligate folly” that trailed all who wrote in it. 146
The Irish novelist Julia Kavanagh devoted two chapters to Behn, the first chapter of which reviewed Behn’s work in general and the latter to Oroonoko in her 1863 English Women of Letters: Biographical Sketches. Kavanagh also had a passion for female morality, claiming that the history of the novel is a progress toward delicacy. She accepted the fact that women cannot surpass men in the construction of writing,
but they have gone far beyond them in the feminine attributes of delicacy, tenderness, and purity. […] Too much delicacy or refinement was not the sin of poor Aphra Behn, or of the times when she wrote. […] The inveterate coarseness of her mind sullied Aphra Behn’s noblest gifts; beauty, sincerity, wit, an eloquent tongue and a ready pen, perished on that wreck of all that is delicate and refined in woman.147 For Kavanagh, the noble examples of Mademoiselle de Scudéry and Madame de La Fayette were lost on her. Instead of being an example of grace to men, she fell to the level of men’s grossness. Kavanagh believed that Behn’s works had fallen into oblivion, and she had sunk “on those obscure shores of literature… till she reached a grave consecrated by neither honour nor fame.”148 But Oroonoko, which took its place in the second chapter of Kavanagh’s work, was described as fresh and pleasant. Behn’s ability to penetrate into the reader’s feelings was considered to be far more successful than that
146 Todd, 1998, p. 49. 147 Goreau, 1980, pp. 14-15. 148 Todd, 1998, p. 50.
51 of Scudéry and La Fayette in the work. For Kavanagh, Behn’s freshness and truth made Oroonoko one of the first great works of English fiction.
Despite all the accusations, Behn’s works were favoured by many as well. The Retrospective Review of 1853 titled as ‘Mrs. Behn’s Dramatic Writings,’ for example, dealt with Behn as “the earliest English female comic writer of any worth. […Being] a woman of diversified talent, for she shone in her day, not only as a dramatist [… but also as a] poet and a novelist.”149 For the author of The Retrospective Review article, Behn’s plays show a woman symbolising the world, and perhaps for them her works are the “vivid picture of English society in the latter half of the seventeenth century, than those of any other writer of the same class.”150 At the same time, they “exhibit a brilliance of conversation in the dialogue and a skill in arranging the plot and producing striking situations, in which she has few equals.”151 The review concludes that as a writer of comedies Behn had a place of genius rather than possessing a low place in the literary sphere. Her plays might be the perfect examples of the drama of the late seventeenth century, with its merits and defects. And if one wanted to know the manner of London in the Restoration, one should study Behn’s comedies. Despite all the praise, the writer of the article in The Retrospective Review, ended the article in the conventional nineteenth-century way by asserting that if Behn’s works were not licentious they would have deserved to have been remembered.
In A New History of the English Stage in 1882, Percy Fitzgerald asserted that though Behn was of the few major women playwrights, her writings revealed their own dramatic sewage. As a rescue for her reputation, the anonymous ‘Novels and Novelists: Mrs. Behn,’ attributed to J. Cordy Jeaffreson, in the Dublin University Magazine of March 1856, praises Behn as an author who was successful and much praised in her lifetime. Her poems were “allowed to be good […] the town flocked to see her [plays] acted; […] Charles the Second was fascinated by her powers of conversation and her
149 Todd, 1998, p. 51. 150 Todd, 1998, p. 51. 151 Todd, 1998, p. 51.
52 beauty.” 152 Jeaffreson claims that Behn imitated the men, and was censured as a woman:
That the beautiful, witty Aphara, gentle and refined in appearance as she was generous at heart, could put her signature to ribald comedies, and that she was only a pupil painting after a copy, were truths that wounded and humiliated the wits of the theatres.153 For Jeaffreson, Behn, like men, was the only woman to surpass the boundaries and stand strong, whereas Philips and Cavendish apologised for writing. A nineteenth century American abolitionist and author Harriet Beecher Stowe with her 1852 Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped Behn’s Oroonoko to contribute to people’s better understanding of abolition novels. In the anonymous ‘England’s First Lady Novelist’, published in The St. James’s Magazine in 1863, Behn started the discussion of slavery in England, provoking the author to compare Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Oroonoko. Similarly, in the 1896 The Development of English Novel by Wilbur L. Cross, Oroonoko is declared as the first humanitarian novel in English.
The novelist Anthony Trollope takes Behn’s stories as “detestable trash”154 in his chapter ‘On Novels and the Art of Writing Them’ of his 1883 Autobiography. He asserts that Behn’s stories should only be read in order to understand the development of the English novel. Some like W.A. Morgill believed that Behn, with her Oroonoko, helped to establish the English school of novelists. Others, like Bayard Tuckerman in his 1882 The History of English Prose Fiction: Malory to George Eliot believed that Oroonoko was interesting but based on real life.
The English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic Algernon Charles Swinburne goes even farther when he compared her with Villion:
François Villon and Aphra Behn, the two most inexpressibly non respectable of male or female Bohemians and poets, were alike in this as well; that the supreme gift of each, in a time sufficiently barren by lyrical merit, was the gift of writing admirable songs and this, after all, has perhaps borne better fruit for us than any gift of moral excellence.155
152 Todd, 1998, p. 53. 153 Todd, 1998, p. 54. 154 Todd, 1998, p. 55. 155 Woodcock, 1989, p. 8.
53 Swinburne also compares her to William Blake and Harriet Beecher Stowe. For him, she is like Blake in the sense of “her delicacy of ear and power of hand.”156 He sees Oroonoko as an excellent literary ability in compare with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. For Swinburne, Oroonoko shows “Behn’s Christianism and her noble impulse of womanly compassion.”157 In his 1894 Studies in Prose and Poetry, Swinburne is appreciating Behn again, but he still is a typical Victorian when he wishes to liken her to the eminent contemporary feminine.
As Todd states in her The Critical Fortunes of Aphra Behn, the 1886 Le Roman anglais: Origine et formation des grandees écoles de romancers du XVIIIe siècle, J. J. Jusserand assigns Oroonoko the only English novel of the seventeenth century with the best primitive condition and nature. Similarly, he even goes further by referring to Behn in his 1887 Le Roman au temps de Shakespeare as qualified enough to place among the novelists of the eighteenth-century. After having read the French translation of Oroonoko, the French novelist and sociologist André Lichtenberger in his 1898 Le Socialisme utopique praises Behn under the title ‘Mistress Afra Behn’. Lichtenberger lauds Behn’s description of a primitive man, and her viewing nature as the best educator. Alexandre Bejlame, too, depended on Oroonoko as an example of fine sentiment and precious language, admired in Behn’s time in his 1881 Le Public et les homes de lettres en Angleterre au dix-huitième siècle.
By the end of the nineteenth century in England, Behn appeared as a forerunner of Rousseau and Romanticism from time to time. Generally she was seen as a pioneer of realism. In 1895 A. M. Williams in “Our Early Female Novelists” gives Behn’s short novel an innovatory place: “Oroonoko marked the beginning of the sustained attention to realism that went on well into the eighteenth century.”158 In his 1897 Idle Hours in a Library, William Henry Hudson accepts that Behn wrote nastily, and adds that all these helped the English novel settle into its precise position.
As we have seen, the nineteenth century had an increased attack on Behn. Female writers including Mary Hays, Matilda Betham, and Julia Kavanagh agreed that
156 Todd, 1998, p. 55. 157 Todd, 1998, p. 56. 158 Todd, 1998, p. 56.
54 Behn’s writing was corrupt and unfit to be read by the Victorian reader. The anonymous critic in the 1872 The Saturday Review titled as “Literary Garbage” asserted that Behn was dismissed from all decent society for more than a generation or two, and added that “if Mrs. Behn is read at all, it can only be from a love of impurity of its own sake, for rank indecency of the dullest, stupidest, grossest kind, unrelieved by the faintest gleam of wit and sensibility.”159 The anonymous critic continues that even her contemporaries considered her works to be bawdy:
it is true that this did not prevent her from attaining honourable burial in Westminster Abbey, but it is a pity her books did not rot with her bones. That they should now be disinterred from the obscurity into which they have happily fallen is surely inexcusable.160 Though having plenty favour both in France and England, it is still a fact, that Aphra Behn had lived under a dark cloud of Victorian etiquette for her so called licentious way of life and writing.
159 Ed. Hutner, 1993, p. 2. 160 Goreau, 1980, p. 14.
55
CHAPTER IV
REVIVAL: WOMAN WRITER’S CONQUEST
4.1. FROM OBSCURITY TO FAME
The twentieth century was more interested in Behn than the previous centuries. Yet, by many she was not considered worthy as a playwright, but was seen as a fictionist who contributed to the development of the novel with her Oroonoko. Continental interest in Behn increased by the beginning of the century as well; the French started to see “Behn as the philosophical precursor of Rousseau and the champion of the noble savage.” So did Germans, who regarded her as a literary producer. 161
In 1901, Paul Siegel published the volume Aphra Behns Gedichte und Prosawerke in Germany, dealing with Behn’s literary career. Siegel puts Oroonoko at the top of her works as “the most moral of the stories despite its sensational elements.”162 This work inspired the American Charlotte E. Morgan to include Behn in her 1914 doctoral study The Rise of the Novel of Manners, A Study of English Prose Fiction between 1600 and 1740. For Morgan, Behn was a good story-teller but did not make good progress in “the conversational and episodic stage; her imaginative range
161 Todd, 1998, p. 58. 162 Todd, 1998, p. 58.
56 was limited to matters of detail.” 163 Morgan further adds that Behn deserves an important place for she uses devices of realistic effects such as realistic settings in the Oroonoko, that are later seen in Daniel Defoe.
The British remained indifferent to the continental views on Behn, and kept their conventional view of her. Felix E. Schelling, in the 1912 The Cambridge History of English Literature under the chapter The Age of Dryden, claimed that the time Behn started writing; the morality English drama was at its lowest fall. Additionally, Behn was even below her times with her gross and bawdy plagiarism with his words; “the lady’s art was predatory, and she took any author’s property as her own.”164
In 1905, E.A. Baker collected Behn’s short fiction in The Novels of Mrs. Behn, with an apologetic introduction aiming to introduce Behn as an important figure in the history of novel. In his introduction, he apologetically asserts that her novels can be reprinted not because they are of intelligence but because they can be appreciated welcomingly with a modern taste less offensive than it used to be in the previous centuries.
The English educator, scholar, author and an opponent of the Suffragete movement, Ernest Bernbaum, in his 1913 article Mrs. Behn’s Biography a Fiction, developed a rather different form of accusation from that of immorality. For Bernbaum, Behn
never was in Surinam. She never saw a marble palace floating on the English Channel, therefore never saw Surinam. No relation of hers was appointed lieutenant-general of Surinam; her description of the colony was stolen from George Warren’s Impartial Description of Surinam; and the events in which she says she participated were imaginary.165 In 1915, the eccentric Augustus Montague Summers—an English author and clergyman, known primarily for his scholarly work on the English drama of the seventeenth century, as well as for his idiosyncratic studies on witches, vampires, and werewolves—produced a six-volume edition of her works, who “substantially shaped Behn’s modern reception.”166 Though not all, Summers took on the task to publish
163 Todd, 1998, p. 59. 164 Todd, 1998, p. 59. 165 Ernest Bernbaum, “Mrs. Behn’s Biography a Fiction”, PMLA, 1913, Vol.28, No.3, p. 434. 166 S.J. Wiseman, Aphra Behn, Northcote House, California, 2007, p. 9.
57 Behn’s seventeen plays, and “the poems which Behn separately printed and did not include in her anthologies […] He also omitted her Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister.”167 The work “may be considered erratic, sometimes capricious, and incomplete” 168 but even so, Summers’ edition was highly helpful, allowing more information on Behn, and making him “Behn’s first modern editor.”169 He delivered Behn in an affectionate manner, and he presented her as an energetic, generous, and a confident figure:
So she comes before us. A graceful, comely woman, merry and buxom, with brown hair and bright eyes, candid, sincere, a brilliant conversationalist… warm-hearted, perhaps too warm-hearted, and ready to lend a helping hand even to the most undeserving….In truth, Aphra Behn’s life was not one of mere pleasure, but a hard struggle against overwhelming adversity, a continual round of work. We cannot but admire the courage of this lonely woman, who, poor and friendless, was the first in England to turn to the pen for a livelihood, and not only won herself bread but no mean position in the world of her day and English Literature of all time.170 Summers’ contribution to draw attention to Behn was great. A tangible effect was seen in a review of July 1915 in the Times Literary Supplement, where women writers and politicians were becoming recognised despite their morality. Additionally, the American journalist, critic, essayist and Christian apologist Paul Elmer More responded in the September and October 1916 issue of The Nation titled as A Bluestocking of the Restoration. Up until More, Behn was never labelled as bluestocking, a term coined in the eighteenth-century which was used for women with considerable scholarly, literary, or intellectual ability or interest. Behn was unconventional and modern to the British literary scholar Allardyce Nicoll, who applauded Summers for “establishing Behn as simply a Restoration playwright rather than a monstrous woman, […] for Behn was unconventional and modern, no more or less moral than her contemporaries.”171
167 Ed. Todd, 1999, p. 5. 168 Wiseman, 2007, p. 110. 169 Wiseman, 2007, p. 9. 170 Todd, 1998, p. 61. 171 Todd. 1998, pp. 61-62.
58 After the First World War, in the 1920s, the close friends Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf both discovered Behn. They remarked that “a respectable woman might now utter the name of Behn without apology.”172
Vita Sackville-West published a brief biography, Aphra Behn: The Incomparable Astrea in 1927. Sackville-West considered “herself as supplementing Summers’s work.”173 Sackville-West followed Summers in appreciating that Behn wrote as a woman in the history of women’s writing, but she was dismissive of Behn’s talent and competence as a writer. For Sackville-West, Behn was both an “impecunious, vulgar hack, zestful, with naturally coarse tastes, and a woman capable of sincere passion and suffering” and at the same time “moral and idealistic.”174 Although Behn had a naturally coarse taste—a coarseness typical of her age, Sackville-West’s Behn is both moral and idealistic:
although she might lay her scenes in brothels and bedrooms, although her language is not to be recommended to the queasy, and although in her private life, she followed the dictates of inclination rather than of conventional morality, Aphra Behn, in the history of English letters, is something much more than a mere harlot. The fact that she wrote is much more important than the quality of what she wrote. The importance of Aphra Behn is that she was the first woman in English to earn her living by her pen.175 Interestingly, Sackville-West concludes her work on Behn by growing fond of her though she puzzled and annoyed her. One cannot take leave without respect to Aphra Behn, concludes Sackville-West, with her “gay, tragic, generous, smutty, rich of nature and big of heart, propping her elbows on the tavern table, cracking her jokes, penning those midnight letters to her sad lover by the light of a tallow dip” characteristic.176
We learn of Virginia Woolf’s first mention of Aphra Behn in 1920 when Woolf responds to Arnold Bennett’s Our Women: Chapters on the Sex-Discord. Bennett’s view on women’s intellectuality as inferior and that no amount of education and liberty would change the fact was challenged by Woolf. She argues that in comparing the Duchess of Newcastle with Jane Austen, the matchless Orinda with Emily Brontë, Mrs
172 Ed. Todd, 1999, p. 5. 173 Wiseman, 2007, p. 113. 174 Sackville-West, 1927, p. 49. 175 Sackville-West, 1927, p. 12. 176 Sackville-West, 1927, p. 85.
59 Heywood with George Eliot, Aphra Behn with Charlotte Brontë, Jane Grey with Jane Harrison
the advance in intellectual power seems to me not only sensible but immense; the comparison with men not in the least one that inclines me to suicide; and the effects of education and liberty scarcely to be overrated. In short, though pessimism about the other sex is always delightful and invigorating, it seems a little sanguine of Mr Bennett and Affable Hawk to indulge in it with such certainty on the evidence before them.177 Nevertheless, Woolf might still mean that in comparing Behn with Charlotte Brontë, Behn has a relative lack of education and freedom, and Brontë has a greater social and intellectual freedom than Behn. In 1929, Virginia Woolf took a very similar view with Vita Sackville-West in her influential essay A Room of One’s Own. Woolf narrates that Behn “had to work on equal terms with men. She made, by working very hard, enough to live on. The importance of that fact outweighs anything that she actually wrote.”178 For Woolf, Aphra Behn was a middle-class Mrs Behn “with all the plebeian virtues of humour, 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.”179 By this, Woolf’s earlier contrast with Charlotte Brontë is replaced by a substantial acknowledgement of Behn’s importance of contributing to women’s freedom. Woolf’s previous account of Behn probably changed not because she had been reading deeply the Summers’ edition, but by reading and being influenced by Sackville-West’s work or by simply being influenced by her father Leslie Stephen’s Dictionary of National Biography, where Karyn Z. Sproles—the author of Desiring Women: The Partnership of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West—argues that the women writers included in the fourth chapter of A Room of One’s Own fall between A and F, namely Austen, Bronte, Burney, Behn, Cavendish, Carter, Eliot and Finch, where Woolf took the names she appreciated from her father’s biography. In the memorable and often quoted phrases of A Room of One’s Own, Woolf emphasises the unique role of the writer, “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.” 180 Similar to Sackville-West’s
177 Christine Froula, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War Civilization, Modernity, Columbia University Press, 2013, p. 76. 178 Woolf, 2008, p. 82. 179 Woolf, 2008, p. 82. 180 Woolf, 2008, p. 85.
60 depiction, in Woolf’s version of Aphra Behn, she “remains a fascinating woman and never becomes an artist.”181
After Sackville-West’s and Woolf’s portrayal, Aphra Behn was termed England’s first professional woman writer; Rosamund Gilder’s “Aphra Behn: England’s First Professional Woman Playwright,” in Enter the Actress: The First Women in the Theatre of 1931 can be an early example for this.
Between the 1920s till 1960s there were several studies that include Behn, Myra Reynold’s 1920 The Learned Lady in England, 1650-1750 places Behn with other educated ladies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1930 Joyce Mary Horner sees Behn as a liberated woman who did not need any apology in her “The English Women Novelists and Their Connection with the Feminist Movement (1688-1797)” in Smith College Studies in Modern Languages. The Early 1930s Queenie Dorothy Leavis and the mid-1940s Bridget G. MacCarthy were one of the most important female cultural and literary historians. Q.D. Leavis, in her 1932 Fiction and the Reading Public, defends Behn and criticises the Victorian attitude for not being able either to understand or gain Behn’s humour. Leavis also criticises the literary comments of the Bloomsbury Sackville-West and Woolf for their emphasis on the “plebeian” and the “coarse,” for she thought that Behn “had the grace of an aristocratic society [… and that she finds in her writing not coarseness but] ease and simplicity.”182 MacCarthy’s 1944 and 1946 The Female Pen: Women Writers Their Contribution to the English Novel 1621-1744, stood out against a need for an apology and similarly to Leavis, treats her women authors as artists rather than exceptional women.
After the Second World War, Behn as a writer gains more recognition with the publication of The Incomparable Aphra (1984) and Aphra Behn: The English Sappho (1989) by the Canadian writer of political biography and history George Woodcock. Woodcock had been aware of Aphra Behn since his childhood, thanks to his eccentric bibliophile father.183 For Woodcock Behn was “a radical in a culturally revolutionary
181 Todd, 1998, p. 64. 182 Todd, 1998, p. 66. 183 Woodcock, 1989, p. xii.
61 age and he appreciated what she wrote as much as the fact that she wrote.”184 He commended Behn in all ways; that for him she “was much more like a twentieth century woman than George Etherage or William Wycherley was like a twentieth century man.”185 Woodcock further remarks that Behn is an important literary figure for she had opened a gate of theatrical world that never closed behind her; she was followed by “Susanna Centlivre, Mary Manley and Eliza Haywood, to be followed by Fanny Burney and Sarah Fielding and eventually, as the eighteenth century drew to an end, by Jane Austen.” 186 He commended Behn’s prose style by comparing her with such writers as Fanney Burney who “wrote comedy but never had it staged, and Jane Austen wrote only novels; in this way Aphra Behn’s really innovative writing, which is fiction rather than drama, had its lasting effect.” 187 Furthermore, Woodcock persists in Behn’s influence on the development of the English novel.
Because of the increasing interest in cultural studies in gender, class and race, Behn also attracted the scholars’ attention. In her 1950 novel Purple Passage: A Novel about a Lady Both Famous and Fantastic, the American Emily Hahn ends her work “with a rescue of Behn from debtor’s prison by her lover, John Hoyle, and the happy performance of her first play on the London stage.”188 Some literary scholars like W. Macqueen-Pope and Florence Stevenson went too far with their 1952 Ladies First: The Story of Woman’s Conquest of the British Stage and 1953 Loose-Lady of the Couplets.
During the 1960s Behn’s studies came with two publications; William Van Lennep’s 1960-1968 The London Stage 1660-1800 and William J. Cameron’s 1961 New Light on Aphra Behn. The latter prints “nineteen documents from the Public Record Office with extensive footnotes, making them available to any scholar who might wish to hear Behn’s less formal literary voice,”189 for the first time.
There were some arguments on Behn as a chief dramatist during the 1970s. Robert D. Hume’s 1972 Diversity and Development in Restoration Comedy, 1660-1679
184 Todd, 1998, p. 6. 185 Woodcock, 1989, p. xii. 186 Woodcock, 1989, p. xiv. 187 Woodcock, 1989, p. xiv. 188 qtd. in, Todd, 1998, p.70. 189 Todd, 1998, p. 71.
62 observes Behn as a proof of the change of taste in the 1670s as she developed in her plays from tragicomedy through humour to influential low comedy. On the contrary, Frederick M. Link sees Behn more as an interesting figure rather than a great writer in 1968. He adds that “whores were often created simply to titillate the audience. The increasingly praised fiction is found to be largely unoriginal […] Link firmly believes that Behn made no contribution to the form.”190
In 1969 Charles Mish treats Behn with the honour noting that her work overshadowed all others both in quantity and quality of her time in his English Sort Fiction in the Seventeenth Century. There were examples like Ian Watt in his 1957 The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, who simply ignored Behn and praised the male literary figures. The major female critics, Elaine Showalter, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar were all indifferent or little concerned with Aphra Behn in their highly influential works.191
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, two major biographies on Behn appeared within three years of each other; Maureen Duffy’s The Passionate Shepherdess: The Life of Aphra Behn 1640-1689 in 1977 and Angeline Goreau’s Reconstructing Aphra: A Social Biography of Aphra Behn in 1980. Duffy and Goreau helped Behn to transform “from being a fairly unknown minor Restoration writer into one of the major resources of feminist and new historicist scholarship, a gift for doctoral students wanting to combine study of women writers with the increasingly fashionable mode of gender and race analysis.”192
A contemporary British novelist, poet, playwright, nonfiction author and activist, Maureen Duffy’s main interest in publishing about Behn was to make her works available for “a wider public who wanted to know more about the earliest
Low comedy has been called "elemental comedy," in that it lacks seriousness of purpose or subtlety of manner and has little intellectual appeal. Some features are: quarreling, fighting, noisy singing, boisterous conduct in general, boasting, burlesque, trickery, buffoonery, clownishness, drunkenness, coarse jesting, wordplay, and scolding. See: http://www3.dbu.edu/mitchell/comedydi.htm#Low Comedy:, (13.10.2015). 190 Todd, 1998, p. 72. 191 Todd, 1998, p. 73. 192 Ed. Janet Todd, 1999, p. 7.
63 professional women writers.”193 She has included much more detailed information on the family history on her mother’s side, her upbringing, education and connections. Although Duffy’s careful scholarship helped Behn to be judged by her works, she did not “make great claims for Behn’s literary importance.”194
Angeline Goreau’s 1980 Reconstructing Aphra was “less historical and more literary critical and cultural, more readable and less detailed.”195 Goreau saw Behn as a contradictory figure in its positive sense; for it was Behn who said the words “… these women have so much contradiction in ’em, that ’tis ten to one but a man fails in the art of pleasing” in her Sir Patient Fancy. For Goreau, Behn is contradictory as a woman and as a writer. She claims that “one Aphra could not live without independence; the other could not give up her dependence. She would not be a “slave to love,” she said, but still wrote for her lover begging him not to leave her, promising humility.”196 Nonetheless, Goreau understands all her uncertainties and conflicts, and likens her to today’s and every times’ women.
Some being general and some being detailed, many works including Behn came in between Duffy and Goreau, such as Robert L. Root Jr. with his 1977 Aphra Behn, Arranged Marriage, and Restoration Comedy. By comparing her with other playwrights of the period, he analyses the structures of arranged marriages in Behn’s works. Nancy Cotton too deals with Behn in a comparative discourse, devoting a whole chapter to Behn. She describes Behn as “a hard-driving, professional playwright, independent, bawdy, witty, and tough.”197 Katharine M. Rogers questions Behn whether she was a feminist or not, for “Behn’s work was too masculine and reproduced attitudes of male libertines,”198 for her. She discusses in her 1979 Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea; an Augustan Woman Poet that Behn was not a feminist at all, and that “Behn defended women and women writers in her prefaces, prologues, epilogues but did not use this
193 Duffy, 2000, p. 12. 194 Ed. Todd, 1999, p. 7. 195 Ed. Todd, 1999, pp. 7-8. 196 Goreau, 1980, p. 5. 197 qtd. in, Todd, 1998, p. 75. 198 Todd. 1998, p. 81.
64 defines in her creative works, which reveal the values and perceptions of contemporary patriarchy.”199
The final touch for Behn’s critical adoption was made by Mary Ann O’Donnell’s bibliography Aphra Behn: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources in 1986. By including 106 works written, edited and translated by Behn O’Donnell meticulously listed “661 critical commentaries carefully describing the editions of Behn’s writings, sifting attributions and banishing ghosts, it cleared up many misdatings, identified faulty texts and established Behn scholarship on a firm basis.”200
Behn started to appear in overviews of early women’s writing by the late 1980s. In 1986 Jane Spencer in The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen, in 1988 Elaine Hobby in Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing 1649- 1688, and in 1989 Janet Todd in The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing, and Fiction 1660-1800 included her in their works.
Jane Spencer’s primary concern was “the fact that women’s role in the novel’s rise has been underestimated. As the novel has gained critical prestige women ’s past in it has been as fas as possible edited out of the historical account, in a familiar move to belittle and suppress women’s achievements. [Her] intention [was] to recall some of these achievements, and thus contribute to the feminist project of uncovering women’s history.”201 Spencer goes on to trace the development of the female novel from the playwrights of the seventeenth century, also mentioning Aphra Behn. She discusses Behn’s Oroonoko praising its originality of its narrative technique, by giving a special emphasis on her writing ability. Many eulogists considered Behn as a feminine of love, but Spencer “did not see love as an essentially female theme, simply as an important poetic one: ‘it was a poet, simply, that she wanted to be remembered’.202 Disagreeing with Katherine Rogers’s notion than Behn’s work was too masculine; Spencer defends
199 Todd, 1998, p. 76. 200 Ed. Todd, 1999, p. 8. 201 Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen, Blackwell, 1993, Cambridge, p. viii. 202 Ed. Todd, 1999, p. 8.
65 Behn as not being concerned with women’s freedom in her plays, but being supportive with her attitude.
Elaine Hobby’s Behn is a rather different one. She is uncertain about her. For her, Aphra Behn speaks up for women’s equality, but she also wrote the first anti- slavery novel, and helped to create the myth of the noble savage. Yet, Hobby did admire Behn for the wit and humour of her response. Hobby’s work discussed Behn in its two sections. The first section discussed her fiction, presenting a world both economically and ideologically ruled by men and very little is given to women, the second section discussed her plays; “Hobby argues that Behn’s plays are less bawdy than those of her most popular male contemporaries, and that one of the principal characteristics of her rewriting of her sources is the reduction of sexual explicitness.”203 Janet Todd’s history of early women’s fiction took its name from Behn’s Angellica Bianca character in The Rover. Like Angellica, a famous courtesan in Spain, the mistress of a once powerful deceased Spanish general, Aphra Behn too had problems as regards her image and representation. The work emphasises on Behn’s Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister and portrays the image “of an aristocratic woman transforming herself into a whore and its narrator watching the transformation with horror and admiration.”204
In the late 1980s and 1990s, Behn fitted easily into interdisciplinary studies, feminist and new historicist criticism, as well as race and gender studies in many colleges. In 1987 Laura S. Brown, who is now a writer and speaker on feminist therapy theory and practice, wrote ‘The Romance of Empire: Oroonoko and Trade in Slaves.’ And Margaret Ferguson wrote ‘Juggling the Categories of Race, Class and Gender: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko’ in 1991. Rose Zimbardo’s Behn is an interesting figure for the critic who would like to explore the origins of the novel. In the 1989 Aphra Behn in Search of the Novel, Zimbardo sees Behn as “an innovator in the search for the novel who changed the course of literary history.”205 Janet Todd’s 1985 Dictionary of British and American Women Writers 1660-1800 and the same year Moira Ferguson’ s First Feminists: British Women Writers 1578-1799 include Behn extendedly in their works.
203 Todd, 1988, p. 82. 204 Ed. Todd, 1999, p. 9. 205 Todd, 1988, p. 79.
66 As a historical figure, Behn appears in historical surveys and critical overviews with her contemporary women’s writing. Paul Salzman’s 1985 English Prose Fiction deals with Behn as a perfect user of the narrative techniques available at the Restoration. Jacqueline Pearson, too, deals with Behn with her contemporary women playwrights, comparing all of them with men. Pearson’s The Prostituted Muse: Images of Women and Women Dramatists 1642-1737 of 1988, argues that Behn was one of the leading figures for women’s writing during the late seventeenth-century. Pearson argues whether Behn is a feminist or not. She agrees that Behn can be accepted as a feminist, for she deals with the women issue implicitly in her plays, and explicitly in her prefaces, prologues, and epilogues. For Pearson, Behn’s heroes are actually mocked by Behn as being “the passive centre of the intrigues of women, [… by allowing] female characters to speak the first lines in her plays […] and includes a good number of women-only scenes.”206
Two useful academic works were published in 1987 and 1989 by Sara Heller Mendelson and Germaine Greer, each respectively. Germain Greer’s The Uncollected Verse of Aphra Behn included all the works and political poems that were left out by Summers’s 1915 edition. Mendelson’s Mental World of Stuart Women gives all the accepted facts about Behn by making what is and is not known about her life clear.
Behn’s verse was little discussed until the 1980s; the first and most innovating approach came from Richard E. Quaintance in the 1963 French Soures of the Restoration ‘Imperfect Enjoyment’ Poem. He dealt with Behn’s most notorious poem The Disappointment noting that she had freely translated “this poem from the first part of the contemporary French “L’occasion perdue reconverte” by Jean Benech de Cantenac" who lived around 1630-1714.207 But Behn, differently, sifts the point of view from a man’s to a woman’s. In 1980, Judith Kegan Gardiner deals with her The Disappointment as well in her Aphra Behn: Sexuality and Self-Respect. For Gardiner Behn “created a poetic identity for herself as Astrea, muse of a lost golden age combining female sweetness and manly grace […] She could identify with the male role
206 Todd, 1998, p. 82. 207 https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/html/1807/4350/poem142.html, (07.03.2015).
67 while modifying its view of women.”208 Following Gardiner, in 1989, Bruce Thomas Boehrer deals with the poem too. He concentrates on the ironies made by Behn that mocks the conventional attitudes of men to the mistress.
Although there were many works on Behn during the twentieth century and although she recognised fame in compare with the previous centuries she remained a mystery to the literary study and was still mainly dealt as a historical but not a current figure except some of her plays to be staged. By the end of the 1980s, Aphra Behn’s plays started to be staged again. Similarly to the eighteenth-century stage either The Rover or The Emperor of the Moon were found more suitable. Exceptionally in 1984 The Luckey Chance was staged in 1984 by the Women’s Playhouse Trust at the Royal Court in Glasgow, and Sir Patient Fancy was staged by the Manchester University Dramatic Society in 1989. Now that for three hundred years, Behn is appearing in print and stage, “a life that would meet the standards of modern scholarship is yet to be written.”209
One can conclude that the twentieth-century was a more interested period for Behn. Positive comments are shadowing the negative criticisms. Deserving the titles ‘The English Sappho’ and ‘The Incomparable Astrea’ after such a long dismissive history, Behn is finally seen as an elegant, generous, respectable and confident figure. For many, Behn’s plays were less bawdy than those of her most popular male contemporaries, valuing her realistic use of devices in her settings than the language she used. Now, seen as a feminist figure, Behn is likened to today’s and every times’ women deserving a great thanks “for it was she who earned [women] the right to speak their minds.” 210
208 Todd, 1998, p. 85. 209 Robert Adams Day, “Aphra Behn’s First Biography”, Studies in Bibliography, 1969, Vol.22, p. 227. 210 Woolf, 2008, p. 85.
68
CONCLUSION
My current thesis aims to examine Aphra Behn throughout centuries and show her perseverance as the first professional woman writer. The first chapter is devoted to the research subject, purpose and methodology along with the study’s limitations. The second chapter deals with Aphra Behn’s life and the condition of women in the seventeenth century alongside Behn’s contemporaries’ comments on her. It is possible to conclude from the chapter that the seventeenth century saw women inferior to men. This led to a general understanding that women cannot write nor can make money of it. Even if they did, as in the case of Behn, they were humiliated, cursed, looked down on, and pitied for writing immoral and bawdy pieces, though they tried to write to the taste of the society as their men contemporaries did. Despite all the mystery behind her biographical details, Aphra Behn broke the chains of loyalty and silence, standing bravely to the dominating negative criticisms of her contemporaries.
The third chapter discusses the two hundred years of neglect on Behn. The eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries were periods that got rid of the seventeenth-century obscenity in their plays. Thus, Behn did not have the chance to gain respect from the majority of eighteenth and mostly nineteenth-century critics and readers. Behn was published and read under the pseudonym Astrea which was used by some women writers of the following ages, but was never given an open reference. Though she was not seen a writer of merit and intellect, still her presence was not in entire oblivion up until the twentieth century.
The final chapter analyses Behn from the beginning of the 1900s. It was only the twentieth century that gave her credit and recognised her as a distinguished professional
69 woman writer paving the way for her successors. The century with its new wave of feminism argued the place of women and the literary merit given to them within the history. In terms of literature, when they looked back through the starting point of women’s writing, Aphra Behn showed her appearance gaining fame after an ignorance of three centuries.
To sum up, Aphra Behn’s mystery still remains in the field of English Literature. Throughout centuries she had her ups and downs in that many issues as regards her literary performance and personal life are still being debated and questioned. In her rich and productive life she was seen as ‘a mere harlot,’ far from carrying the morals of a woman, she was humiliated for her intellect, she was ‘a blush for later generations’ for some, and seen as a master of plagiarism rewriting the real stories written by others. However, there have always been critics, scholars, historians and writers who hailed her in her entirety. She was the woman to surpass the boundaries and stand stronger than men against the fierce attacks of her critics and rivals. Her style was unique in terms of exhibiting a brilliant conversational method in her novels, plays and poems, thus exercising her craft in a variety of genres. All these stages helped Behn to be the subject of curiosity for many critics and literary men. Leaving aside the negative and positive views on her, she was read, reread, constructed and reconstructed up until today. She is now the “English Sappho”, and the “incomparable Astrea”, being introduced to the literary world as an important figure and literary foremother of English Literature. While she had no any female writer as a model, she herself became a real “mother writer” for posterity.
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75 CV
Kişisel Bilgiler
Adı ve Soyadı : Yeşim Sultan Akbay
Doğum Yeri : Erzurum
Doğum Yılı : 1990
Eğitim Bilgileri
Lisans : İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı, FEF, Süleyman Demirel Üniversitesi, 2012.
Yüksek Lisans : Batı Dilleri ve Edebiyatı, SBE, Süleyman Demirel Üniversitesi, 2015.
Yabancı Diller
İngilizce : İleri seviye
Almanca : Orta seviye
Fransızca : Orta seviye
Flamanca : Orta seviye
İspanyolca : Başlangıç seviye
İş Deneyimi
2012 – 2013 : SDÜ, Yabancı Diller Yüksek Okulu, İngilizce Okutmanı
2013 – 2014 : ERASMUS, Katre School of London, İngilizce-Türkçe Öğretmeni
76