THE LANGUAGE OF GENDER AND A TEXTUAL PROBLEM IN APHRA BEHN'S "THE ROVER" Author(s): James Fitzmaurice Source: Neuphilologische Mitteilungen , 1995, Vol. 96, No. 3 (1995), pp. 283-293 Published by: Modern Language Society Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43346105 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Neuphilologische Mitteilungen This content downloaded from 42.110.147.5 on Mon, 08 Mar 2021 02:50:50 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 283 THE LANGUAGE OF GENDER AND A TEXTUAL PROBLEM IN APHRA BEHN'S THE ROVER When Willmore asks Hellena to marry him in Act V of The Rover (1677), his tone is teasing and his approach a little comic. He does not even phrase his proposal as a question but rather makes it a unilateral declaration. Nay if we part so, let me dye like a bird upon a bough, at the Sheriff's charge, by Heaven both the Indies , shall not buy thee from me. I adore thy Humour and will marry thee, and we are so of one Humour, it must be a bargain - give me thy hand. - [Kisses her Hand. ] And now let the blind ones (Love and Fortune) do their worst. 1 He sounds like a man who has taken charge, but he is actually admitting defeat. He would have much preferred to have bedded Hellena without recourse to what she, teasing and serious at the same time, calls "old Gaffer Himen " and a "Priest." (80) Her insistence on marriage would seem to be the usual feminine point of view: A woman needs the protection offered by matrimony. Hellena, however, has nothing to gain financially from the union with Willmore and has reason to believe that he will not remain faithful to her after their nuptials. Marriage, itself, is not much of a desideratum , and it is not the goal we see her pursue in the play. Rather, her main concern is the marriage proposal. Hellena's interaction with Willmore is a contest of resolve, and if he proposes she wins. If he does not, she loses. As the play comes to an end, Hellena is the winner though still unmarried, and she gives Willmore notice that she will not become pliable after the marriage has taken place. If she chooses, she can be "Hellena the Inconstant." Willmore says that he and Hellena are "of one Humour," but that is not quite true. He is a male who lives by traditional masculine values. That is, he believes in bold and decisive action, he frankly acknowledges his physical desires, and he is slow to relinquish his freedom. At one time or another Hellena invokes each of these values but does so from a womanly perspective. Womanly as her view is, not all of the women in the play are so adventurous. Florinda, for instance, is not the sort of person to insist on her own freedom to the point of suggesting that she might be inconstant. By the same token, daring as Hellena is, she does not begin to approach Willmore's libertinism. Freedom gives Willmore license to womanize. Freedom for Hellena allows the throwing off of unwanted restrictions on her behavior and helps her to challenge male prerogatives. She wants to be able to move around unescorted out of doors, and she is not afraid to claim equal rights to extramarital involvement. It is quite clear, of course, that she has little interest in cuckolding Willmore as long as he is faithful to her. Hellena's victory over Willmore, then, is not just a matter of her stronger resolve and his weakening. It is also a victory for anyone who is unwilling to be bound by strict distinctions of sex and gender. Elin Diamond writes that "Hellena seeks knowledge 'more than' or This content downloaded from 42.110.147.5 on Mon, 08 Mar 2021 02:50:50 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 284 JAMES FITZMAURICE beyond the gender script provided for her," but Hellena is not simply a disinterested investigator. (527) Hellena is an active and successful competitor.2 Likewise, Angellica's failure with Willmore derives from her being too circumscribed by narrowly feminine hopes for elevated love and noble passion. She thinks, talks, and acts too much like a princess from a French romance.3 Janet Todd quite rightly finds the literal sign outside of the house of Angellica to be an indicator of the "professionalism" of Behn. Nevertheless, Angellica, herself, is anything but cold and businesslike in the way she talks to Willmore. ( 1 ) Hellena's use of language, on the other hand, supports important forays into the world of masculine values, and the wording of her reponse to Willmore's marriage proposal is telling, if one sticks closely to the text of early printings of the play. She says, "Whe God-a-mercy Capain ! ' ' (80) The sentence functions as a statement of her acceptance of the marriage, proposal, but it also has important implications where gender is concerned. Willmore calls Hellena and every other woman he finds attractive, "child." This is a term that stresses his knowledge of the world in all its bold, devisive masculine forms. Hellena responds time and again by sarcastically calling him "Captain," thereby ridiculing his claims to special manly knowl- edge and rendering silly the image of daring sea dog that he is trying to create for himself. "Whe" is a more difficult word to explain than "Captain," but it is, indeed, a word and one that is used twenty-nine times during the course of the play. "Whe" is clearly some sort of exclamation, and it is uniformly found in the first four editions of The Rover. Beginning in the 1720s, however, it was emended to "why." Recent editors have not given their reasons for this emendation and have not even noted it in textual apparatuses, but their thinking may well be as follows.4 "Whe" does not occur under that spelling in the OED. "Whe" could be a variant of "whoa" or some other interjection, but "why" makes good sense and was the choice of editors working within fifty years of the death of the author. These early editors also have not given their reasons for emendation, but they have left a few clues. Some felt freer than modern editors to change words and even drop speeches, and some may have believed that "whe," while a word, was a little too coarse to be spoken by a lady. "Why," they may have thought, was more genteel. There is one main argument that "whe" is an independent word in The Rover and two sources of strong support for that argument. The main point is that many characters in The Rover use "whe" in ways that show its linguistic separation from "why." The sources of support are as follows. First, "whe" also appears in two other early printed editions of plays by Behn: The Second Part of the Rover (thirty-three times) and The Feigned Courtesans (thirty-seven times). Characters in these two plays are connected with the word in much the same way as they are in The Rover. Second, "whe" fits with what we know about the printing of the plays in question. The word cannot be simply a matter of house style nor can it be a typesetting error. John Amery printed The Rover (1677), an edition that includes both "whe" and "why." He also printed Behn's The False Count (1682), in which only "why" appears.5 If "whe" were a matter of This content downloaded from 42.110.147.5 on Mon, 08 Mar 2021 02:50:50 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The Language of Gender and a Textual Problem in Aphra Behn 's The Rover ' 285 house style, then it should be found in all books produced by a particular printer and such is not the case. Since it is to be seen nearly a hundred times in the three plays, it does not make sense as a proofreading error either, especially given the fact the three texts are otherwise quite clean. Also Behn paid particular attention to the printing of The Rover. If "whe" were a typesetting error, she scarcely could have missed it.6 Finally, the word shows no signs of being an indicator of dialect. What sort of word is "whe," then? It is very definitely a man's word, even though it is sometimes used by women. Willmore and Blunt each employ it eleven times, while Florinda and Angellica do not use it at all. Angellica does use "why" once as an interjection but never "whe." Other characters use "whe" in varying degrees, and sometimes on significant occasions. It appears in several specific contexts. While discussing male sexual appetite, Belvile observes of Blunt, "That's thy joy, a cheap Whore." (7) Blunt, who respects honesty in erotic matters, responds, "Whe I 'Seartlikins I love a Franck Soul." (7) The word "Seartlikins" points to another "manly" association for the word, cursing, though "Sheart- likins" is a silly curse and one for which Blunt is unlikely to burn in hell.