The Sexual Politics of Behn's "Rover": After Patriarchy

Stephen Szilagyi

Each woman begins the play bound one of the three fates: Florinda to marriage, Hellena to the nunnery, and Angellica Bianca to well-paid prostitution. Through Carnival, however, these women abandon their prescribed positions with disguises to “be mad as the rest, and take all innocent freedoms,” including to “outwit twenty brothers” . The masquerade serves multiple purposes. First, disguise equalizes the class distinctions, “and even the difference between the categories available to women” . When lost in the festivities, the ladies join all that “are, or would have you think they’re courtesans,” the most sexually liberated women . Their initial costumes as gypsies allow them to approach men in a feminized, desirous way. Gypsies already occupy the role of outcast on the liminal edge of society; by taking on their looks, Florinda and Hellena put themselves and their sexuality outside the confines of cultural expectation. Their decision implies Behn’s opinion that her peers should seek to escape the restrictions that define them.

Behn’s female characters strive for independence within the limitations of the English system of courtship and marriage. In The Rover, the three leading ladies are all capable and proactive young women who exhibit “the initiative and daring reserved for cavaliers” . Over the course of the play, each takes upon herself the position of active wooer. Maidenly Hellena openly vows to do “not as my wise brother imagines but to love and to be beloved” by reeling in a husband . Her virginal sister, Florinda, and the sexually liberated courtesan, Angellica Bianca, adopt similar goals in pursuit of passion. They are nothing like the subordinate females of Puritan propriety, but witty, competent matches for the men they meet. Through their strong personalities, Behn suggests at early British women’s potential to feel and act confidently on sexual feelings, thus “desire” and “ the construction of woman as a self-policing and passive commodity”

Aphra Behn's The Rover: Evaluating Women's Social and Sexual Options :-

The Rover was Performed in 1677, Aphra Behn’s play, The Rover, speaks to this double standard, which limited her female peers’ sexual desires to the realm of convent, brothel, or home. Set loose in the topsy-turvy world of Carnival, her characters demonstrate the active, complicated game required of women seeking to secure personal happiness. The dangers of the chase and the play’s tidy conclusion, on the other hand, suggest at how ladies neither could nor should stray too far into the masculine roles of wooer and possessor. Late Stuart society, Behn seems to lament, offered no place to the sexually free, libertine woman.

The fall of the Puritan Commonwealth did little to dispel the political and religious tensions that affected the early Modern British conception of womanhood. Even after the Protectorate’s end, Roundhead beliefs dictated “the necessity for female subordination and obedience” to her husband, as ordained by several Bible verses . Eve’s role in the division of mankind from God “fuelled conviction of the weakness and sinfulness of women” . Thus female sexuality was perceived as a spiritual flaw to manage. Male governance of the female body, once responsible for Adam’s downfall, led to a Puritan “masculinization of desire the creation of woman as other and as object—that crucial to a sexual ideology that insists on the indivisibility of feminine chastity from feminine identity” . By appropriating sexuality, Roundhead men narrowed the confines of women’s acceptable roles in society to one alone: the wife, family-oriented and sexually pure. Neither Catholic nun nor transgressive prostitute met Puritan expectations for women.

Hellena and Angellica also take on the appearances of men during the play. Such costumes permit them to alter their lovers’ choices and lives. “Dressed in man’s clothes,” Hellena can punish Willmore for his infidelity with “something do to vex him”. She interferes in a meeting of Willmore and Angellica by informing the courtesan of “a young English gentleman” who wooed another woman and then “paid his broken vows to you”. Seeking revenge an act later, Angellica Bianca dons “a masking habit and vizard” and threatens Willmore with a pistol . Her choice of weapon—guns were used almost exclusively by men during Behn’s time—is “symbolic of her attempt to usurp phallic control” of her own sexual desires .Instead of feminizing her lust, Angellica masculinizes herself. By masquerading as men, both women demonstrate how ladies may take ownership of rights associated only male Cavaliers, romance, justice, and sexuality.The “obligatory happy ending” of The Rover reveals the unfairness of the libertine system and the demand indeed, the unquestioned assumption that women would fit into the socially set role of prostitute or wife. Florinda and Hellena’s attempts to challenge their brother’s arrangements are successful; the former marries her lover and the latter escapes a future as “handmaid to lazars and cripples” in the nunnery . However, their enterprising boldness in chasing men leads them into the same wifely duties of most women. Their challenge to “the repression of their autonomy and desires” still leads to the hierarchical man-woman relationship of Puritan wedlock .

Angellica’s attempt to unite her sexuality with true love fails. She is initially immune to “the general disease of [the female] sex…that of being in love” . She can sleep with whomever she wants and has found a way around Behn’s observation that women need reliable male support. However, her life lacks the romantic passion of the hedonistic lifestyle. Moreover, Angellica’s sexual liberation, for which lovers must pay to experience, contributes to her inability to snag Willmore’s long-term affection. His lust could have been satiated with her portrait since someone else would “have the thousand crowns to give for the original” . Her relegation back to courtesan shows how transgressive, premarital sex and proper marriage cannot mix. As a sexual female, Angellica has no place in world when in the throes of libertine love: she can be neither indifferent courtesan nor devoted wife.

The actions and treatment of women in Aphra Behn’s play expose the narrow social limitations within which early Modern British women found themselves. Hellena and Florinda have the potential to explore their sexual freedom at Carnival, but they focus instead on securing financial futures with men they like. Sex may be used, as Hellena shows, as a bartering chip to obtain a promise of marriage; when loosed for a young woman’s pleasure, however, sexuality keeps her from happiness. Through Angellica, Hellena, and Florinda, Behn reveals that the libertine female has no place in late Stuart society. The playwright’s observation comes as a wistful warning at a time when women seemed to push the limits of tradition. Actresses appearing on stage might feel they had found a career of bodily expression, but from Behn’s experience as a woman with male colleagues, the freedom is a façade. Women on stage faced fetishization and loss of status. Behn’s commentary on women’s position in the late Stuart period serves to point out the double standard of libertinism in court life and the public sphere. By exposing and mocking the Puritanical and Cavalier restraints imposed on ladies, she encourages viewers to reevaluate women’s limited roles in the new age.

Whatever professional activity women in the theatre performed – whether playwright or actress - they soon lost their good reputation. It was seen as immoral to be an actress and thus, an actress was always assumed to be a prostitute when she displayed herself on-stage. This meant that women in the theatre were regarded as sexually available and no actress had "effective protection against male advances". In fact, many of the actresses during the Restoration period were actual prostitutes off-stage. In this way, they tried to handle the libertine belief of men that all theatre women were fair game and to retain at least some kind of reputation. If they were not prostitutes, actresses could achieve a good position through sexual patronage.

Female playwrights, however, were considered to be intruders on male territory as literature and poetry were exclusively meant for men. Women's writing existed but was rather restricted to writing letters in private. As soon as a woman published her works, she violated a woman's virtue of modesty, i.e. to be passive, quiet and cautious. Modesty was equated with chastity. Thus, women who published literary works were seen to making themselves public and therefore shameless, characteristics which were assumed as leading to eventual sexual excess and promiscuity. Being a female playwright was even worse because drama represented the most public literary genre, which meant that whatever opinion the playwright had it was made known to the public as soon as the play was shown on-stage. Hence, displaying a woman's opinion in public was the highest violation of modesty and therefore it was not worth regarding that woman as being respectable.

Aphra Behn's play The Rover subverts the traditional concept of women as the property of men and as being modest and thus, presents a new type of woman - the female rake. The following chapters will show how language manifests sexual domination. The next chapter presents different characters of the play and also looks at the characters' way of speaking and behaving. The third chapter then will examine how those different characters act when they meet. Finally, a conclusion will be drawn as to whether there is a relationship between language and sexual domination.