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Saint and Sinner: Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn

Paul Salzman

in Reading Early Modern Women's Writing

This chapter deals with the two self-conscious writers who were engaged with a variety of literary genres — Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn. It explains that Philips' work shares Cavendish's ... More

This chapter deals with the two self-conscious writers who were engaged with a variety of literary genres — Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn. It explains that Philips' work shares Cavendish's Royalist politics, and that they have a glancing association with the same Royalist artistic circle that gathered around Henry Lawes. Philips created a very different literary image and career to that of Cavendish, combining the carefully controlled circulation of her poetry in manuscript with the late publicity and fame related with the performance of her translation of Corneille's Pompey in Dublin in 1663. In contrast, Aphra Behn is a Royalist writer who established herself on the professional stage from 1670. Behn's and Philips' engagement with politics was very different and must be assessed in some detail as part of any evaluation of reception of their writing and later attitudes toward them.Less

Pleasure and Poetry: The Behn Myth

Jane Spencer

in Aphra Behn's Afterlife

This chapter considers three aspects of the making of Aphra Behn's reputation: discussions of her within her lifetime; the growth of Behn biography in the years following her death; and the reception ... More

This chapter considers three aspects of the making of Aphra Behn's reputation: discussions of her within her lifetime; the growth of Behn biography in the years following her death; and the reception of Behn's verse. What unites these different parts of her story is the growth of a myth about Behn, which both drew on received notions of the relationship between a female writer and her work, and set the tone for the reception of later women writers. The myth is that Behn's writing reflects a life pre-eminently concerned with sexual love. The image of Behn which was to become dominant in the 18th century was that of a woman for whom (sexual) pleasure and poetry were intermingled. This view began to emerge in her lifetime, representing the narrowing-down of an originally much wider conception of her as a writer.Less

Her Wit, without Her Shame: Women Writing after Behn

Jane Spencer

in Aphra Behn's Afterlife

The evidence of 18th-century women's literary history shows many different ways of responding to Aphra Behn. This chapter has divided consideration of Behn's effect on her female successors into ... More

The evidence of 18th-century women's literary history shows many different ways of responding to Aphra Behn. This chapter has divided consideration of Behn's effect on her female successors into three sections. The first deals with the 1690s, when the recently deceased Astrea is an inescapable point of reference. In the second, the chapter focuses on the relations between Behn and a number of individual writers in the first half of the 18th century, arguing that for Susanna Centlivre and Delarivier Manley, Behn was most significant as a role-model for professional writing, while Jane Barker is influenced in a more complex and troubled way by Behn's work. The third section considers women writers' use of Behn in the later 18th century. Historical distance and an established female writing role allowed for a new detachment in the attitudes of women writers to her, but Hannah Cowley's adaptation from Behn showed that she could still be a significant influence.Less

The Sons of Behn

Jane Spencer

in Aphra Behn's Afterlife

This chapter explores the connections between notions of influence, generation, and genealogy in the construction of literary traditions, and asks: what would it mean to be able, by the addition of ... More

This chapter explores the connections between notions of influence, generation, and genealogy in the construction of literary traditions, and asks: what would it mean to be able, by the addition of the odd ‘h’, to talk about the sons of Aphra Behn? Undoubtedly Behn was a source to many 18th-century writers, but in current thinking this does not make her an influence. In this chapter, Harold Bloom explains his own very influential theory of influence. Clearly poetic fatherhood is here conceived as a spiritual relation, quite distinct from the transmission of mere verbal material. The importance of maintaining this matter-spirit distinction is evident in the contempt Bloom expresses for ‘those carrion-eaters of scholarship, the source hunters’, whose project may at first seem to resemble his own, but who show by their obsession with matter, and dead matter at that, that they do not understand the living spirit that passes between poets.Less

Introduction

Jane Spencer

in Aphra Behn's Afterlife

This book approaches the construction of literary authority and the literary canon during the 18th century through a study of the reception of the work of Aphra Behn. As one of the first professional ... More

This book approaches the construction of literary authority and the literary canon during the 18th century through a study of the reception of the work of Aphra Behn. As one of the first professional writers of either sex in England, she participated in the redefinition of the author that attended the new literary market; and as the most prominent woman writer of the Restoration, she had an immense and complex significance for women writers in following generations. The 18th-century construction of Restoration writing in general, and Behn's in particular, as decadent and salacious, had profound effects on the tenor of that influence, and made her legacy to later female writers an uneasy one. Over the hundred years following her death, her image played an important, and very mixed, part in the process of the legitimation of the woman writer.Less

Fire and Sword: Aphra Behn and the Materials of Authority

Christopher F. Loar

in Political Magic: British Fictions of Savagery and Sovereignty, 1650-1750

This chapter examines the role of sacral objects or fetishes in the production of sovereignty. Examining Behn’s Oroonoko in conjunction with two of her dramatic works (The Widow Ranter and The ... More

This chapter examines the role of sacral objects or fetishes in the production of sovereignty. Examining Behn’s Oroonoko in conjunction with two of her dramatic works (The Widow Ranter and The Roundheads), it explores the use of “magical” objects or devices to produce sovereignty and civility. In Behn’s fictionalized colony, savages are civilized by a performance with a burning glass; in her drama, this object is supplanted by others that mark either the sacred object’s embodiment of value or the prop’s utility in performances of power. The chapter concludes that Behn’s texts mourn the collapse of the world of divine right, chivalric virtue, and enchanted objects, envisioning a world of extreme violence and massacre that takes its place, in which maimed corpses take the place of magical objects. Her props gesture toward techniques for operating in this disenchanted regime of pragmatism and popular sovereignty.Less

On Lingering and Being Last: Aphra Behn and the Deterritorialized Sovereign

in On Lingering and Being Last: Race and Sovereignty in the New World

In Virginia and in Surinam something new is revealed to Aphra Behn's eyes: sovereign authority exists as empty form only — both stories have absent governors — and the disarticulation of power and ... More

In Virginia and in Surinam something new is revealed to Aphra Behn's eyes: sovereign authority exists as empty form only — both stories have absent governors — and the disarticulation of power and embodiment is complete. A kind of spatiotemporal distortion has gripped the entire legitimating apparatus. Janet Todd tellingly describes Behn's frame of mind at the time of her American works as a kind of spatial disorientation: “With the state shuddering [in 1688], she saw that there was really no inside in England, no safe place and she felt in London a similar sense of duplicity and instability to that experienced years ago in Surinam. Everywhere was ‘America’.”Less

Oroonoko

Jane Spencer

in Aphra Behn's Afterlife

This chapter traces the metamorphosis of Oroonoko into a vehicle for anti-slavery sentiment, showing how this change coincided with a tendency to play down the significance of Aphra Behn as narrator ... More

This chapter traces the metamorphosis of Oroonoko into a vehicle for anti-slavery sentiment, showing how this change coincided with a tendency to play down the significance of Aphra Behn as narrator and as author. Abolitionists had very little to say about Behn herself, and that little was not favourable; and the complex relationship between the black hero and the white woman who takes it on herself to tell his story was dropped from later versions. Here, the chapter concentrates on the way the tragedy of Oroonoko and Imoinda came to function in the early 18th century as an expression and encouragement of feminine feeling. Composed in the mixed tragicomic form that violated neo-classical standards but was popular in the late 17th century, the play was originally presented as an entertainment to suit all moods.Less

The Dramatist and the Novelist

Jane Spencer

in Aphra Behn's Afterlife

This chapter traces the different trajectories of Aphra Behn's 18th-century life as a dramatist and as a writer of fiction. Behn's fiction remained current in the later 18th century, with editions of ... More

This chapter traces the different trajectories of Aphra Behn's 18th-century life as a dramatist and as a writer of fiction. Behn's fiction remained current in the later 18th century, with editions of Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister being published up to the 1760s and of Oroonoko up until 1800. The decisive shift in Behn's reputation as a novelist came with the novel's rise in status in the middle years of the century. In particular, the moralization of popular fiction, already under way with Penelope Aubin's work in the 1720s and consolidated by Samuel Richardson in the 1740s, led to new and unfavourable assessments of her novels. The chapter argues that the era of stage-reform, far from ruining her dramatic reputation, actually helped Behn to achieve the status of the first woman dramatist to become a long-running success on the London stage.Less

The Rover

Jane Spencer

in Aphra Behn's Afterlife

This chapter traces the history of The Rover in 18th-century performance, a history that one can reconstruct patchily but in some detail from a number of sources, including contemporary playbills, ... More

This chapter traces the history of The Rover in 18th-century performance, a history that one can reconstruct patchily but in some detail from a number of sources, including contemporary playbills, comments and criticisms, a promptbook copy of the text, and two altered editions. The Rover flattered the Restoration court with a nostalgic image of its cavalier past. Much of this appeal remained in the 18th century, and was not overshadowed by the changes in the political situation and social mores that curtailed the stage-lives of some of Aphra Behn's other plays. Nevertheless, the play was also successfully performed at the court of William and Mary, and in later times, its royalism could easily shade into a kind of general patriotism perfectly well suited to the years of Whig ascendancy.Less

Seduction and Resistance: Behn's Love‐Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister

Toni Bowers

in Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance, 1660-1760

In 1682, Lady Henrietta Berkeley eloped with her brother‐in‐law Ford, Lord Grey, one of Monmouth's closest personal friends and an avid follower in his rebellion. The scandal, much‐watched in the ... More

In 1682, Lady Henrietta Berkeley eloped with her brother‐in‐law Ford, Lord Grey, one of Monmouth's closest personal friends and an avid follower in his rebellion. The scandal, much‐watched in the popular press and the subject of avid contemporary gossip, found its most memorable representation in Aphra Behn's Love‐Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–7), arguably the first novel in English. Love‐Letters draws on the salacious details of the Berkeley–Grey affair, including details that emerged in the subsequent trial, and places the story of sexual perfidy and perversion squarely in the context of the Monmouth Rebellion. Against that backdrop, Love‐Letters delineates the complexities of late seventeenth‐century tory sensibility and attacks what Behn saw as the faithlessness and treason of exclusion‐era Whig ideology. Familiar seduction topoi and gender roles are satirically revised, while sexual encounters are shown consistently to complicate the categories of rape and seduction, undermining the regime of “force or fraud.”Less

The Prince

Marta Figlerowicz

in Flat Protagonists: A Theory of Novel Character

The first chapter examines Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688). This early narrative shows that the forms of character construction traced throughout the book accompany the emergent novel from the outset. ... More

The first chapter examines Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688). This early narrative shows that the forms of character construction traced throughout the book accompany the emergent novel from the outset. The chapter complicates Martha Nussbaum’s accounts of the novel as a means of expanding our “circles of concern” as human beings. Oroonoko depicts its protagonist as a potential model for larger patterns of social behavior, but also emphasizes how easily his words and gestures are trivialized or distorted by the partial responses they incite from his communities. To understand his plight, Behn suggests, requires one not to extol its generalizability, but to accept how difficult it is for this particular represented person to model the values and virtues he thinks he ought to sustain.Less

Conclusion

Jane Spencer

in Aphra Behn's Afterlife

Aphra Behn was a significant influence on 18th-century literature and theatre. As the author of one of the most popular Restoration comedies, she was influential in British theatre, and as the ... More

Aphra Behn was a significant influence on 18th-century literature and theatre. As the author of one of the most popular Restoration comedies, she was influential in British theatre, and as the originator of the powerful Oroonoko myth, she had a much wider-reaching impact. In part that impact must be attributed to her deliberate emphasis on ‘my Masculine Part the Poet in me’. Taking on a masculine poetic tradition, she achieved her greatest fame with heroes, the comic Willmore and the tragic Oroonoko, rather than with heroines. Her refusal to be confined to feminine subjects or styles was crucial to her achievement. She entered, took part in, and made her distinct contribution to, traditions of writing that had been predominantly masculine; and she influenced the men, as well as the women, who followed her.Less

Legitimizing Conspiracy: Anne Halkett, Rachel Russell, Aphra Behn

Susan Wiseman

in Conspiracy and Virtue: Women, Writing, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England

This chapter investigates the discursive importance of gender in the politicised writing of the 1670s and 1680s and traces relationships among the apparently highly distinct politicised prose genres ... More

This chapter investigates the discursive importance of gender in the politicised writing of the 1670s and 1680s and traces relationships among the apparently highly distinct politicised prose genres of memoirs, letters, and scandalous history. It analyses the claims to virtue made in the memoir of Lady Anne Halkett and the letters of Rachel Russell, and ends with a discussion of Aphra Behn's Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister as a response to the politicised rhetoric of authenticity. Halkett wrote two kinds of texts in which she is obliquely and fairly directly critical of some aspects of the very monarchy on which her significance as a political actor depended. It is not simply that letters and memoirs by women as well as men participate in the battle to possess political ‘truth,’ but that an acknowledgement of this allows us to begin to qualify and reinterpret the political and porno-political genres and vocabularies of the Restoration.Less