APHRA BEHN

1640–1689

“The Unfortunate Happy Lady. A True

History”
1
 1785

1744
1688 1700
1660
1642
1625
1603
 All women together ought to let
flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra
Behn which is, most scandalously
but rather appropriately, in
Westminster Abbey, for it was she
who earned them the right to speak
their minds
(Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, 1928)

• poised on threshold of recognised greatness

epitaph on the gravestone of Aphra Behn (Westminster Abbey, 3

though not in the Poets' Corner))
And with Mrs. Behn we turn a very important corner on the road. We leave
behind, shut up in their parks among their folios, those solitary great ladies
who wrote without audience or criticism, for their own delight alone. We
come to town and rub shoulders with ordinary people in the streets. Mrs.
Behn was a middle-class woman 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. She 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 . . . for here begins the freedom of the mind, or rather the possibility
that in the course of time the mind will be free to write what it likes. For now
that Aphra Behn had done it, girls could go to their parents and say, You need
not give me an allowance; I can make money by my pen. Of course the
answer for many years to come was, Yes, by living the life of Aphra Behn!
Death would be better! and the door was slammed faster than ever.
(Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, 1928)
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• first professional woman writer in England
• playwright, poet, translator, spy and fiction
writer
• poetic pseudonym - "the Incomparable Astrea"
or "the Lovely Witty Astrea"
• Aka Aphara Amis; Aphra Bayn; Aphra Johnson (b.
Eaffrey Johnson)
• allegations of bawdiness, indecency, "lewdness"

"She might be abused, there might be a clique

determined to destroy her, but at least she was
recognised, at least she had a name that came frequently
up for discussion in the coffee-houses and the drawing-
rooms. She was attacked, but she was not ignored. She
was Madam Behn, she was Astrea, the incomparable, the
admired, the ingenious, the divine, the lovely, the witty,
the heroine of a hundred odes and poems. Side by side
with this adulation ran the current of criticism; she was
belittled on several counts: she allowed her lover to help
her with her plays, she stole plots wholesale, she was
lewd. Against all these accusations she defended herself
with spirit."
(Vita Sackville-West, Aphra Behn: The Incomparable Astrea, 61)5
 "my Masculine Part the Poet"
All I ask, is the Privilege for my Masculine
Part the Poet in me . . . to tread in those
successful Paths my Predecessors have so
long thrived in . . . If I must not, because of
my Sex, have this Freedom, but that you
will usurp all to your selves; I lay down my
Quill, and you shall hear no more of me . . .
for I am not content to write for a Third day
only. I value Fame as much as if I had been
born a Hero; and if you rob me of that, I
can retire from the ungrateful World and
scorn its fickle Favours.
Nell Gwyn (1650-1687)
(Aphra Behn, "Preface" to The Lucky
Chance)
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 Behn's dramatic works
•The Forced Marriage: Or, The Jealous Bridegroom, pr. 1670, pb. Topics:
1671 • battle of sexes
•The Amorous Prince: Or, The Curious Husband, pr., pb. 1671 • the female rake
•The Dutch Lover, pr., pb. 1673 (tragi-comedy) • forced marriage
• “psychological dilemma” – heroine torn
•Abdelazer: Or, The Moor's Revenge, pr. 1676, pb. 1677 (tragedy) between religious vows, parental
•The Town Fop: Or, Sir Timothy Tawdry, pr. 1676, pb. 1677 disobedience, own desire (Ros Ballaster,
•The Rover: Or, The Banished Cavaliers, Part I, 1677 Seducttive Forms, p. 83)
•The Feigned Courtesans: Or, A Night's Intrigue, pr., pb. 1679 • hypocrisy (Puritans, middle class)
•The Rover: Or, The Banished Cavaliers, Part II, 1681 • legitimate privileges of loyalist cavaliers
• women's right to desire and self-
•The City Heiress: Or, Sir Timothy Treat-All, pr., pb. 1682 determination
•The Lucky Chance: Or, An Alderman's Bargain, pr. 1686, pb. 1687 • tyranny of patriarchy
•The Emperor of the Moon, pr., pb. 1687 • masquerade and carnival (restore normality
•The Younger Brother: Or, The Amorous Jilt, pr., pb. 1696 in the world)

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The Rover, or the Banish'd Cavaliers (1677)
carnival(esque)
PROLOGUE TO THE ROVER
Written by a Person of Quality

As for the Author of this coming Play,

I ask'd him what he thought fit I should say,
In thanks for your good Company to day:
He call'd me Fool, and said it was well known,
You came not here for our sakes, but your own.
New Plays are stuffed with Wits, and with Debauches,
That croud and sweat like Cits in May-day Coaches.

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breeches part (masculinised persona)
fascination with crossdressing (pre-Restoration theatrical practice)
"subversive mimesis" (Luce Irigaray)

"Throughout her varied literary career, in drama, poetry and prose, Behn was
fascinated by the possibilities of the female writing subject, what she might be,
and how she might survive within a masculine literary history. The narcissistic
inscription of the figure of the female writer into her fiction, however, serves
specific political and literary ends, and should not be reduced, as it has been in the
main, to random insertions of biographical evidence. The figure of the female artist
in Behn's writing releases a meditation upon, and an unsettling of, the nature of
poetic and authorial identity. This in turn leads to an exploration of the women
writer's capacity to produce meaning against the interpretative will of the reader, as
well as the potential to capitalise upon the erotic and seductive effects of the text
upon the reader for political purposes"
Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms. Women's Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740, p. 71

"women could share the libertine philosophy with men and experience its liberating
effects, in much the same way as she was able to compete on relatively equal terms
with the best male playwrights of her time"
Frances M. Kavenik, "Aphra Behn: the Playwright as 'Breeches Part.'" qtd. In
Behn, Aphra, The Rover (Russell, Anne Elizabeth ed.), Broadview Press, 1999
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 Fiction

– Proto-novel/novella: Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave

– novellas, short stories
The Unfortunate Bride
The Unfortunate Happy Lady
The Dumb Virgin
The Fair Jilt
The History of the Nun
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Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave (1688)

• proto-novel influenced by historical romance

(Madeleine de Scudéry, Honoré d'Urfé, La Calprenède)
• Aphra Behn's prose writings - transition between the
prose romances of the Renaissance and the early 18th-
century novel
• Oroonoko
– valiant prince + noble savage – “a crucial early text in the
sentimental, antislavery tradition”
OR
– symbolic representation of the martyred king, Charles I
(Laura Brown, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-century
English Literature, Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993, pp. 26, 59)

• “novel deeply involved with contemporary political

controversies, despite its claims to ‘romance’”
(Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms, p. 82)
"Recent criticism of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko has attempted to untangle its complex web of political
and ideological investments, an approach encouraged by the novel's representation of the
seventeenth-century English colonial project that in many significant ways has shaped the modern
world. Set in Coramantien on the coast of Africa and in an English colony in Surinam, Oroonoko tells
the story of an African prince captured into slavery by an unscrupulous English slave-ship captain.
Prince Oroonoko had befriended the captain when selling slaves to him; the prince thought he was a
guest on the ship, but the captain saw him as a potential commodity. When they arrive in the
Caribbean, Oroonoko becomes a paradoxical 'royal slave': the other slaves bow down before him as
their king (even though he may have traded some of them into their current slavery); the English, who
also recognize his nobility, keep him in an elegant plantation house, guarded and entertained by the
novel's narrator. The English promise, but never deliver, freedom for Oroonoko and his wife Imoinda.
Oroonoko's royalty means that he does not suffer the usual hardships of slavery; still, he longs for
release. Imoinda's pregnancy brings the narrative to a crisis over the fate of their child: Oroonoko
leads a rebellion to secure their liberty, but it fails due to the lack of resolve among the other slaves.
(The wives beg their husbands to stop fighting; as in Oroonoko's story, domestic interests compete
with the defence of honour.) The English promise clemency, but instead torture the African hero.
Desperate and furious, the prince kills his pregnant wife to protect her from rape (and presumably
from producing more slaves as well), but in his grief over Imoinda's death he becomes helpless to
wreak the revenge he had planned. Oroonoko dies through a process of slow, horrific
dismemberment at the hands of the colonial authorities; his enemies divide his body into pieces and
send each one to a different part of the colony."
(Laura J Rosenthal, "Oroonoko: reception, ideology, and narrative strategy," in Derek Hughes and Janet Todd (eds.), The
Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn,12151)
 “The Unfortunate Happy Lady. A True History”

Title:
• oxymoron (why?)
• tautology (why?)
• the use of articles (definite, indefinite)
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Behn's novellas "raise difficult issues about generic terminology, and
their shortness may make them seem like a dead end in the rise of the
novel: Ian Watt's classic The Rise of the Novel (1957), for instance,
relegates Behn to a couple of footnotes, seeing the 'rise' of the novel as
a wholly male-dominated phenomenon identified with new concepts
of realism and the individual, and the associated rise of the middle-
classes. This is surely not the case, however, since Behn's short fiction
seems to meet all the criteria for the status of novel adduced by J. Paul
Hunter: contemporaneity; credibility and probability; familiarity;
rejection of traditional plots; tradition-free language; individualism,
subjectivity; empathy and vicariousness; coherence and unity of
design; inclusivity, digressiveness, fragmentation; self-consciousness
about innovation and novelty"
(Jaqueline Pearson, "The Short Fiction." In Derek Hughes and Janet Todd, The Cambridge Companion
to Aphra Behn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 188-203)
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 Behn as a precursor of realist novelistic fiction
"The traditional narrative of the
English novel in the eighteenth
century holds that its origins were
male, however much writers such as
Jane Austen, Frances Burney, and
Charlotte Smith came to dominate
the genre. More specifically, Daniel
Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Samuel
Richardson, the triumvirate
proposed in Ian Watt's The Rise of
the Novel (1957), created the works
that founded the realist English
novel. And yet such a paradigm
occludes the rich tradition of early
fiction by women, not only the
works of Aphra Behn and Delarivier
Manley, but also those by novelists
active in the 1720s: Eliza Haywood,
Penelope Aubin, Mary Davys, and
Elizabeth Rowe.“
(Kate Williams, "Women Writers and the Rise of the
Novel," in Ros Ballaster (ed.), The History of British
Women's Writing, 1690–1750, London: Palgrave, 2010,
p. 113)
“from a perspective of narrative structure the fiction of Aphra Behn was crucial
to the invention of the novel […] Since Ian Watt's pioneering study (Watt 1957)
the realist novel has been conceived as starting with Defoe. In this book I argue
that it is actually Aphra Behn who was the first real novelist, but - like Watt - I
use the term realist to apply to the novel from its earliest times, linking the
notion of realism not to the nineteenth-century movement of Realism but to the
novel's mimetic evocation of reality both from a sociological and psychological
perspective. Verisimilitude and realism in fact correlate very closely. Realism
refers to a realistic portrayal of the fictional world in the sense that secular non-
fantastic explanations can be provided for the plot and seemingly fantastic
experiences are eventually explained in `realistic' terms. In contrast to other
definitions I do not, however, reduce the setting and fictional personae of
realism to the bourgeois milieu: realism can embrace the aristocracy as well, but
it needs to do so in a non-Arcadian setting, eschewing the generic alignments of
romance and pastoral. The motivational aspect of realism links with the novel's
increased psychologism. Novels spend more space on explaining characters'
motives, and they also portray characters' deep-seated emotions and fears,
reflections and enthusiasms in verisimilar terms. Unlike the generally mannered
and formalistic soliloquy of the Renaissance romance, novelistic renderings of
characters' minds move away from the rhetorical set piece to a representation
that evokes more individualistic emotions. Realism therefore links up with an
individual's very personal experience and the verisimilar rendering of it in the
text. Realistic elements in narrative such as the pregnant repartee in dialogue, or
the description of gestures, the adding of the odd detail with an effet de reel
[…]”
(Monika Fludernik, Towards a Natural Narratology, London: Routledge, 1996)
 Verisimilitude, claims to truth-telling & veracity
female narrator, female focaliser
Behn “not only narrates the stories, but insists she was there”
“Behn’s stories are a form of bearing witness, ensuring the posterity of her
hero or heroine. […] Thus, Philadelphia’s story in The Unfortunate Happy
Lady was delivered to her by ‘one who lived in the Family and from whom
[she] had the whole Truth of the Story. […] Behn denies her own authorship
of her stories. They are not, she claims, imaginative fictions but bare facts to
which she simply testifies”
“insistent presence of a narrative ‘I’ in Behn’s novels. […] In her prose
writing, Behn effectively employs 2 kinds of narrative voice:
– the objectifying, specularising Astrea who (like Scheherazade) accrues power over
her audience through her story-telling
– a desirous, subjective, first-person narration, put into the mouths of the central
actors and providing an intense psychological display”
(Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms, pp. 93-4, 102)
 heteroglossia (different-speechness, polyphony, carnivalization of
language)
(Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 1981)
• < Gk. hetero, “other,” “different” + glossa, glotta, “tongue”
• variety, heterogeneity, diversity of languages used in the novel (e.g. language
representing author’s attitudes and opinions and language used by
individual characters, etc. dialogic interplay)

• “In The Unfortunate Happy Lady, finance, commercial, and banking

languages are predominant, but other types of language are also present by
including the unsuccessful careers of a poor soldier and of an international
trader. The novel combines dialogues of landed nobility, liberal professionals,
and the working and lower cases in their everyday informed speech. Clear
descriprions of a brothel and rich, London homes follow one another. Thus,
in Behn's text there is a reduction and an expansion in types of speech that
creates a greater dialogisation.”
(Dolors Altaba-Artal, Aphra Behn’s English Feminism. Wit and Satire. London: Associated uNiv Press, 1999, p. 192)
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 Behn’s narrative innovations
“… the development of a new holistic pattern of narrative which supplants the episodic structure of the epic
(and the oral tale), replacing it with a teleologic shape which reposes on a substructure of scenes. . […] The
realist novel's series of scenes concatenated by means of report sections allows for the establishment of a larger
compositional structure of narrative intrigue which typically relates to a teleological pattern. Holistic shape, a
constitutive factor of the oral episodic structure, re-emerges as a characteristic of the teleologic framework as
well, but it is of course an entirely different holistic shape. Such a new pattern of narrative became necessary
since fiction was now no longer able to rely on prepatterned discourses (French romances, Latin models or
traditional storytelling schemata) but, by inventing new stories, had to invent their holistic shape along with
them. […] Behn experiments with prose structure in a wide range, from what we would now call the tale or
novella (e.g. `The Lucky Mistake'), to the brief novel (Oroonoko), and a full-blown `three-decker', Love-Letters
Between a Nobleman and his Sister (1684-87). In these she can be observed to have perfected the new narrative
structure. Behn additionally should be credited with the introduction into English literature of the consciousness
novel, anticipating in surprising detail some of the features noted for Clarissa, The Castle of Otranto and the
writings of Jane Austen. Finally, by experimenting with the (French) novel of letters – and superseding this model
in the direction of the realist psychological novel – Behn prefigures in Love-Letters the history of the novel from
the time of Richardson to the mid-nineteenth century, an anticipation that is also reflected in her attitude
towards history as a pre(-)text of/for her fiction. Behn's main claim to historical significance, however, is to
having refined the dramatic scene for the purpose of narrative. This rests on two grounds: on the overall
structure of her writing, and on the invention of the `consciousness’ scene which initiates what later in the
history of the novel will develop into the tradition of the consciousness novel”
(Monika Fludernik, Towards a Natural Narratology, London: Routledge, 1996)
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“What precisely is it that makes Aphra Behn the first practitioner
of the novel, the first ‘modern’? As I will argue, the work of Behn
constitutes a key point in the development of the novel mainly in
three areas:
1. elaboration of orientational sections
2. restructuring of narrative discourse such that (scenic)
macroepisodes emerge to replace the earlier episodic pattern of
narrative
3. the invention of the consciousness scene”
(Monika Fludernik, Towards a Natural Narratology, London: Routledge, 1996)

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 narrator’s reliability?
authenticating strategies
I cannot omit giving the World an account, of the uncommon villany of a Gentleman of a good Family in
England practis'd upon his sister, which was attested to me by one who liv’d in the Family, and from whom I
had the whole Truth of the Story. I shall conceal the unhappy Gentleman’s own, under the borrow'd names of
Sir William Wilding, who succeeded his Father Sir Edward, in an Estate of near 4000l. a Year, inheriting all that
belong’d to him, except his Virtues. ‘Tis true, he was oblig’d to pay his only Sister a portion of 6000l. which he
might very easily have done out of his Patrimony in a little Time, the Estate being not in the least incumbred.
But the Death of his good Father gave a loose to the Extravagancy of his Inclinations, which till then was hardly
observable. The first Discovery he made of his Humour, was in the extraordinary rich Equipage he prepar'd for
his Journey to London, which was much greater than his fair and plentiful Fortune cou'd maintain, nor were
his Expences any way inferior to the Figure he made here in Town; insomuch, that in less than a Twelve-
Month, he was forc'd to return to his Seat in the Country, to Mortgage a part of his Estate of a Thousand
Pounds a Year, to satisfy the Debts he had already contracted in his profuse Treats, Gaming and Women, which
in a few Weeks he effected, to the great Affliction of his Sister Philadelphia, a young Lady of excellent Beauty,
Education, and Virtue; who, fore-seeing the utter Ruin of the Estate, if not timely prevented, daily begg'd of
him, with Prayers and Tears, that might have mov'd a Scythian or wild Arab, or indeed any thing but him, to
pay her her Portion. To which, however, he seemingly consented, and promis'd to take her to Town with him,
and there give her all the Satisfaction she cou'd expect.
(TUHL)
-

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 Behn’s proto-novelistic innovations
- clear logical connections
- Philadelphia's plight, merely glossed over here (presented from outside, little empathy)
- omniscient narrator – unhindered access to Philadelphia’s psyche
- Philadelphia becomes a proper character of the story only when the narrative starts to focus on her
experiences (near-rape - dialogue scenes in which she defends her virginity – she becomes the focaliser of
the narrative
- relative chronology - contraction of months (then years)
- the narrative becomes more logically stringent, chronologically and spatially concrete
- Behn's major structural innovation - not large plot, but move from the episodic plot arrangement to a
sequential dynamics of narrative
- “Behn contrives to anticipate in nuce the central features of the realist tradition in the novel: the flashback,
the report-cum-scene structure, the independence of description, authorial omniscience (though here still
in the hands of a personalized narrator figure), reliable (evaluative) narration as a guideline to the textual
meaning(s), and subjective presentation of consciousness”
- “the invention of the consciousness scene. Unlike later full-blown instantiations of reflectoral narrative
(pure internal focalization), Behn's texts do not employ interior monologue or extensive free indirect
discourse but tend to render the internal drama of her protagonists' minds chiefly by means of descriptive
psycho-narration, with very few clauses of free indirect discourse interspersed with this narratorial version
of internal events”

(Monika Fludernik, Towards a Natural Narratology, London: Routledge, 1996)

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 "The Unfortunate Happy Lady. A true History“
questions
• Analyse the plot, the unity of design, the narrative frame, the narrator. How are the aspects
of credibility and plausibility ensured in this proto-realist fiction? Is the narrator objective or
is there rooms for exploring the subjectivity of the protagonist?
• Is Behn’s story positioned between romance and realistic conventions? Give examples of
features that would support this idea.
• Discuss the urbanization of space – London.
• Comment on the religious references in the short narrative. Does Behn’s fictional universe
become evidently secularised?
• Discuss the question of agency in relation to the fact that Philadelphia gains control over the
plot of her own and the others’ life. How does the narrative challenge gender stereotypes?
How would you define Aphra Behn’s gender politics?
• Issues of class distinctions and financial aspects are closely entwined with the rise of the
middle classes that, according to Ian Watt, fostered the growth of novel writing and reading
practices. How are these aspects reflected in the narrative?

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 Sources
• Altaba-Artal, Dolors. Aphra Behn’s English Feminism. Wit and Satire. London: Associated
Univ Press, 1999
• Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays.Austin: Univ of Texas Press, 1981
• Ballaster, Ros. Seductive Forms. Women's Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740. Oxford:
Clarendon, 1992
• Behn, Aphra. The Rover (Anne Elizabeth Russell, ed.). Broadview Press, 1999
• Brown, Laura. Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-century English
Literature, Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993
• Diamond, Elin. Unmasking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre. NY: Taylor & Francis,
1997
• Fludernik, Monika.Towards a Natural Narratology, London: Routledge, 1996
• Hughes, Derek and Janet Todd (eds.). The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn, CUP, 2004
• Wiseman, S.J. Aphra Behn. Tavistock, GB: Writers and their Work, 2007

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