Anchal Soni

BA (H) English: 2nd year

Paper 7: British Poetry and Drama: 17th and 18th centuries
The Rover by Aphra Behn

Discuss why Aphra Behn's The Rover remains a pertinent modern feminist text to date.

The Rover (1677) is a restoration comedy by British Playwright Aphra Behn. It is a comedy of
manners which juxtaposes the carnivalesque freedom with women's agency and gender
constructs of 17th-century English society. This essay analyses these contiguities from a
feminist reading while accentuating the transgressions and resistance of a few characters and
the conventional ending of the plot.

A reworking of Killigrew's closet drama Thomasa or The Wanderer, the text is set in Naples,
Italy in 1656. The carnival as a society-sanctioned license dissolves the conventions of morality
liberating men and women to express their sensual desires. However, a woman expressing her
desires and enforcing her agency becomes extremely vulnerable in Naples as chased,
commodified and threatened. Behn uses her wit to satirize these manifestations of 17th-century
Elite English society with a witty commentary on the Puritan regime of Oliver Cromwell. In the
Prologue itself, she articulates how the play is mercilessly bold and clever in the mockery of
modern society.

Why Wit so oft is demand, when good Plays take,

Is, it that you censure as you love or hate?
-Prologue, The Rover

The theatrical hierarchy like all cultural institutions was male-dominated with few women like
Mary Pix and Delarivier "Delia" Manley. The rebellion of Aphra Behn like these to enter a
"masculine" space is voiced in the Prologue. Elin Diamond in the essay "Gestures and
Signatures in Aphra Behn's The Rover" writes, "To the Puritan mind the presence of women on
stage was an affront to feminine modesty". This crossing of private realms to write about the
political spectrum and mock the elites of the Restoration period is what made Behn influential
for 19th-century Feminist writers like Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. She is attempting
to dissolve boundaries- between a prostitute and woman of 'quality', anarchy and law and
natural and enforced.
As a Restoration comedy, it makes a turbulent shift from the Elizabethan plays where marriage
came as a resolution to marriage as a heteronormative-patriarchal institute.

HELLENA. That Blush betrays you — I am sure ’tis so — or is it Don Antonio the Vice–Roy’s
Son? — or perhaps the rich Don Vincentio, whom my father designs for your Husband?

Act 1, Scene 1
FLORINDA. Hellena, a Maid designed for a Nun ought not to be so curious in a Discourse of
Love.

Act 1, Scene 1

The bordering of women's sexuality in marriage and nunnery which is the society-sanctioned
safe spaces for them are transgressed through different means by Hellena and Florida. Elin
Diamond accentuates how both female "fetishism" of male erotics and "fetishisation of the
commodity" operated in the 17th-century marriage market where women took on "the
phantasmagoric destiny of fetish commodities". The opening act brings about how the
designation of a woman was predestined by the father or brother like Moira decided the fate of
warriors in Homer's epics. Behn through her courtesan Angellica presents the finest critic of
marriage by equating marriage to prostitution.

ANGELICA: Pray, tell me, Sir, are not you guilty of the same mercenary Crime? When a Lady is
proposed to you for a Wife, you never ask, how fair, discreet, or virtuous she is; but what’s her
Fortune — which if but small, you cry — She will not do my business — and basely leave her,
tho she languish for you. —Say, is not this as poor?

ACT 2, SCENE 2

In her essay "Whether She be of Quality or For Your Diversions", Anannya Dasgupta writes by
equating the system of dowry with the price that a prostitute demands her services, Angellica
reveals "the essentially commercial nature of the sexual unions sanctioned by marriage, which
gets subsumed by a rhetoric of love". The "box of jewels" of Florinda and Angellica's portrait
both becomes a symbol of availability. While Florida's availability is a transgression of a virgin
elite threatening her chastity and honour of lineage that of Angellica is state-sanctioned. It is
fascinating to note that the Restoration male narratives like Richard Head's The Miss Display'd
(1675), are told by a narrator critical of prostitutes and women in general. Aphra Behn's
prostitute rebels to seek revenge chooses to fall in love and is presented with a much more
humane narrative where her objectifiers are the elite diction. However, despite this as the
mistress of a deceased Spanish General and a renowned courtesan who charges a thousand
crowns a month for her companionship; she represents the elite. Behn gives the reader a
courtesan of the Petrarchan tradition rather than an underprivileged prostitute who has to
approach clients to have a living. The intersectional array of rebellions Behn presents through
her women remain limited to the class background. Dasgupta writes on Angellica that she "is
likewise available to all men provided they can afford the sum that she commands.
The background of a carnival and the dictum of anarchy make these transgressions a threat to
the woman itself. The societal norms of subjugation shouted throughout the carnival were
watching the "wild cat" as Pedro says becomes significant to keep her chastity intact as despite
the subversions the rape culture continues to mould ethics of conduct. Historically, the female
body is considered to be vulnerable and weak which nullifies any debate against injustice and
subordination. This debate is best taken by Anita Pacheo in her essay "Rape and Female
subject in Aphra Behn's The Rover". She writes, "from the Philomela myth to Shakespeare's
Rape of Lucrece, the woman is only secondarily an object of desire and primarily the terrain on
which inequalities of male power are fought out." Her concern is how the text along with the
repeated attempts of harassment on Florinda also projects a symbolic rape on Angellica by
showing her portrait being stolen by Willmore. She adds, "it is the woman's image rather than
her body that is the site of conflict, but the psychology of rape arguably informs an act of sexual
theft perpetrated by a libertine hero whose sexual impulses are shown to be rooted in
competitive masculinity." Angellica becomes a site of conflict as a commodity which is to be
gained or conquered by any means owing to male fetishisation as Diamond stated earlier.

Blunt: Cruel, adsheartlikins as a Gally-slave, or a Spanish Whore: Cruel, yes, I will kiss and
beat thee all over; kiss, and see thee all over; thou shalt lie with me too, not that I care for the
Enjoyment, but to let you see I have taken deliberated Malice to thee, and will be revenged on
one Whore for the Sins of another; I will smile and deceive thee, flatter thee, and beat thee, kiss
and swear, and lye to thee, embrace thee and rob thee, as she did me, fawn on thee, and strip
thee stark naked, then hang thee out at my Window by the Heels, with a Paper of survey Verses
fastened to thy Breast, in praise of damnable Women—Come, come along.
Act- 4, Scene 3

The threat and humiliation that Florinda faces despite her image as a lover of the Royalist
Belvile and a conventional pursuit of a "saviour" raise the question that whether chastity, a
patriarchal construct, makes women insulted by the threats on her body. The consequent rapes
attempted on her become repercussions for a woman who doesn't follow the conventions of
following the "designed" male narrative. Aphra Behn is criticised by Pacheo for participating "in
the concealment of rape that her play has systematically revealed as a characteristic patriarchal
strategy." Similarly, Dasgupta writes how "she ends the play conventionally making the final
impact of the play feeble." The text fails to establish any transgressions that the post-modern
feminists have asserted such as intersectional class representation in feminist theory. However,
as a proto-feminist Aphra Behn subverts patriarchal conduct in the limitations of the diction of
the Restoration stage which is inspired by characters like Hellena, Angellica and Lucetta.

Hellena: I am resolv’d to provide myself with this Carnival if there be e’er a handsome Fellow of
my Humour above Ground, tho I ask first.
Act 1, Scene 1

The ambiguity of the title between describing Willmore or Hellena or both as "rovers" places
Hellena on par with Willmore. Hellena's resistance to the nunnery along with the infidelity of
Willmore makes her a rebel against the 17th-century dictum. She escapes to the carnival and
ventures to fall in love. Interestingly her protest against the church becomes the sanctimonious
institute of marriage itself. In the case of Angellica choosing to fall in love with Willmore is
against the code of conduct of a courtesan. Her rebellion doesn't end here and continues till the
last act where she threatens to kill Willmore with a pistol, a male phallic symbol. Angellica
holding a pistol alters the control that so far chauvinist males had over her portrait. Diamond
alludes to how Angellica's transgression focuses on the "demystification and authentication" of
herself. She writes, "by eliminating her value form, Angellica attempts to return to her body to a
state of nature, to take herself out of circulation. These resistances also show how the
conventional norms are being transgressed repeatedly to return to a natural agency of freedom.
Even the most condemned out of the lot of women Lucetta portrays this reversal finely. In the
essay "Revising the female body", Heidi Hunter writes how Lucetta by stripping Blunt of his
clothes reverses "the traditional seduction in which the woman as the object of desire, is
seduced and abandoned." The radical reversals throughout the plot makes the text a advocate
of feminism.

The Rover while accentuating itself as a satire on the heteronormative patriarchal machinery
that control women's bodies, lives, partners and professions. Aphra Behn's heroines -Florinda,
Hellena and Angellica though use the means of conventional marriage norms to transgress but
their motive against a more powerful diction makes them rebels. This is to say that although the
plot reflects English traditions the characters reflect how during restoration freedom was
prioritised over the Puritan conventions of Oliver Cromwell.

Bibliography:

Aphra Behn. (2004). The Rover, or, The Banished Cavaliers, Whitefish, Mt: Kessinger Pub.
Diamond,Elin. Gestures and Signature in Aphra Behn's The Rover. ELH 56(1984): 519-541
Pacheco, Anita (1998). Rape and the Female Subject in Aphra Behn’s The Rover. ELH, 65(2),
323–345.
Dasgupta,Anannya. 'Whether She Be of Quality or For Your Diversions': The Harlots and Ladies
in The Rover
Hutner, Heidi. (1993)."Revising the female body",Rereading Aphra Behn : history, theory, and
criticism, Charlottesville: University Press Of Virginia.