Aphra Behn:
Inventor of Girlboss
Mia Torres
THEA 201 Section 01: Theatre History
Jadd Davis
November 27, 2021
Born in 1640 England, Aphra Behn is noted for her financial success as a playwright, poet, and novelist during her lifetime. She wrote between nineteen and twenty plays and several poems and novels.[1] She not only broke the glass ceiling by entering a male-dominated work field, but she made it no secret that she had opinions about the maltreatment of women and slaves by the white man. As a result, her work is riddled with statements on women’s rights, colonial oppression, slavery, and other important topics that transcend history and are still relevant centuries later. Though much of her early history is unrecorded, there is scholarly speculation that she had a fascinating upbringing, and much of the guesswork is done based on her writing.
She spent her early years under the rule of the Puritan Commonwealth. She found their authority incredibly boring and repressive and made it no secret that she preferred the monarchy, for whom she would later work as a court playwright. [2] She based her most famous novel, Oroonoko, the tragic tale of a slave about pretty privilege, class conflict, love, violence, and corruption in the British colony of Surinam. Where it is speculated, she spent a great deal of time before the restoration of Charles II. In fact, there is a scholarly debate about whether she might have been born in the West Indies and spent her first eighteen years there. Regardless, preceding her return to London in 1664, convinced by her friend and future fellow playwright and monarchist, Thomas Killigrew, she became an English Spy and political informant under the codename Astrea.[3] She returned to England and married a mysterious Dutch merchant named
Mr. Behn, who either died or separated himself two years later. Aphra Behn was eventually sent
to Antwerp in the summer of 1666 to convince her former rumored lover William Scott to turn double agent and support the English crown. But a great fire sabotaged the mission, destroyed everything, and left her broke and with no way home. She eventually had to beg her former employers, who had lost interest in her services, to pay her way back to England. Unfortunately, she was never paid for her services and spent time in debtor’s prison upon returning to England.[4]
When she was free again, she reunited with her friend Thomas Betterton, a part of a theatre company, and she wrote and published her first play, The Forced Marriage, in 1670, which was performed seven nights in a row. The following year, her second play, The Amorous Prince, was also a hit. Her first two plays that she wrote were the only ones that were completely original. The rest of her works are adaptations of other plays. This was not an unpopular move; in fact, nearly all theatre-makers of the time did this to sell enough plays to support themselves financially.5 Still, she was frequently accused of plagiarism, but she boldly defended herself and her work, writing in the postscript of her most famous play, The Rover or The Banished
Cavaliers:
“I should have had no need of imploring that justice from the critics, who are naturally so kind to any that pretend to usurp the dominion, especially of our sex: They would doubtless have given me the whole honor on’t. Therefore I will only say in English that the famous Virgil does in Latin: I make verses, and others have the fame.” [5]
Essentially, she states that no one would have said anything about her adaptations if it hadn’t been for her success as a woman. Her friend and fellow playwright John Dryden is noted for
remarking her work as bawdy and scandalous, but that there was no criticism on his part, for his work was equally, if not more, sexually provocative.[6]
Behn’s work tackled many themes, but some of the most relevant were marriage and
sexual assault. These themes appeared in her first play but recur throughout all her work. She concerned herself with the fate of women in her society and addressed the double standards between genders about sex and courtship. She exposes the unfairness and pain of arranged marriages and portrays women as complex and intelligent. Her plays were inherently feminist– despite a need to appeal to the predominantly male audience–because she gave female characters faculty and wrote them as more independent and daring than their male counterparts. Overall, her female characters control the dramatic action. Behn also frequently presented the theme of rape in her work.8 She presents rape as a masculine routine and displays the unfortunate frequency that women are forcibly sexually assaulted. She made it clear that there is never any safety for a romantic heroine in a world where men can choose to rape women for spite.9 This very scenario occurs in The Rover when one of the male Cavaliers aims to rape one woman to have revenge on the entire gender.10 Though the play is about courtship and marriage, she illustrates the closeness that prostitution and rape have to the central theme. Behn’s female heroines that manage to escape those situations only ever do so because of their higher-class status. By writing this, Behn illustrates the struggle for women of the lower class that are helpless to save themselves. On a similar note, Behn also notes in The Rover that marriage is no
less a mercenary affair than prostitution.[7] She makes this clear by giving the most desired prostitute in the play the line: “Nothing but gold shall charm my heart.” [8] Behn’s moral of the story is a somber one. She concludes that romance is a male invention, and true love is a lie, women that fall for men’s trap will be miserable and destitute once they discover that men’s true intentions are to have sex and enrich themselves.[9]
Something quite notable about Behn’s writing is that she consistently demonstrates characters’ morals through their outward appearance. For example, in her novel Oroonoko, the African prince Oroonoko escapes many situations for being a beautiful person, and his wife is also saved because of her beauty. However, she allows the outward beauty of Oroonoko to enable him and his wife to live a more luxurious life in slavery. But eventually, Oroonoko looks past his pretty privilege and realizes that slavery negatively affected other people in his life, and he decides to rebel. Unfortunately, this fails, and he realizes that he will never be able to escape the horrors of slavery, and he meets his tragic demise. Though the first half of the story seems to illustrate slavery as something that is nicer than it is, it eventually turns into a pro-abolitionist tale that recounts several horrible instances of unethical human treatment. The novel became very popular because of the graphic descriptions of the torturing of slaves.[10] Although her descriptions are racist in that she describes the black characters as beautiful through a
Eurocentric lens and by Romanizing them, her piece was groundbreaking. Her views on slavery and the depiction of colonizers manipulating indigenous people on the American continents were fresh and unheard of.
Overall, Aphra Behn was a groundbreaking artist, both as a theatre practitioner and as an author. She paved the way for female artists to publish their works under their own names and defend their work when criticized for the author’s gender. Author Virginia Wolfe is remembered for saying, “All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn… for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.” [11]
End Notes
[1] Jacobus, Lee A., “Aphra Behn.” The Compact Bedford Introduction to Drama, 6th ed., 316. (Boston, Massachusetts: Bedford/St. Martins, 2009).
[2] Jacobus, 316.
[3]Jacobus, 316.
[4] Dr. Mair, Katy, and Elaine Hobby. “Aphra Behn: Memoirs of a Shee Spy: The National Archives.” Archives Media Player. The National Archives, May 26, 2021. 5 Jacobus, “Aphra Behn,” 316.
[5]Behn, Aphra, and Lee A. Jacobus.The Rover: or,The Banished Cavaliers.The Compact Bedford Introduction to Drama, 356. Postscript, 23-30. (Boston, Massachusetts: Bedford/St. Martins, 2009)
[6] Wilson, Edwin, and Alvin Goldfarb. “Chapter 9 The Theatre of the English Restoration.” In Living Theatre: A History, 280. (New York, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018 8 Jacobus, The Compact Bedford Introduction to Drama 317. 9 Hobby, Elaine, and Lee A. Jacobus. “Commentary: Courtship and Marriage in The Rover.
1989”The Compact Bedford Introduction to Drama, 357. (Boston, Massachusetts: Bedford/St. Martins, 2009)10Hobby, 357.
[7] Hobby, “Courtship and Marriage in The Rover ,” 358.
[8] Behn, The Rover, or The Banished Cavaliers, 2.1.163.
[9] Hobby, “Courtship and Marriage in The Rover ,”358.
[10]Estoc ProductionsOroonoko: or the Royal Slave - Literature Summary/Review.YouTube, 2018.
[11] Jacobus, “Aphra Behn,” 316.
Bibliography
Behn, Aphra, and Lee A. Jacobus. The Rover: or, The Banished Cavaliers. Play. In The Compact Bedford Introduction to Drama, 320–56. Boston, Massachusetts: Bedford/St.
Martins, 2009.
Dr. Mair, Katy, and Elaine Hobby. “Aphra Behn: Memoirs of a Shee Spy: The National
Archives.” Archives Media Player. The National Archives, May 26, 2021.
https://media.nationalarchives.gov.uk/index.php/aphra-behn-memoirs-of-a-shee-spy/.
Hobby, Elaine, and Lee A. Jacobus. “Commentary: Courtship and Marriage in The Rover. 1989” Afterword. In The Compact Bedford Introduction to Drama, 357–59. Boston, Massachusetts: Bedford/St. Martins, 2009.
Estoc Productions Oroonoko: or the Royal Slave - Literature Summary/Review. YouTube.
YouTube, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9Eid3m80D0&list=WL&index=2.
Jacobus, Lee A., “Aphra Behn.” Chapter. In The Compact Bedford Introduction to Drama, 6th ed., 316–59. Boston, Massachusetts: Bedford/St. Martins, 2009.
Wilson, Edwin, and Alvin Goldfarb. “Chapter 9 The Theatre of the English Restoration.” Essay. In Living Theatre: A History, 272–301. New York, New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 2018.
[1] Jacobus, Lee A., “Aphra Behn.” The Compact Bedford Introduction to Drama, 6th ed., 316. (Boston, Massachusetts: Bedford/St. Martins, 2009).
[2] Jacobus, 316.
[3] Jacobus, 316.
[4] Dr. Mair, Katy, and Elaine Hobby. “Aphra Behn: Memoirs of a Shee Spy: The National Archives.” Archives Media Player. The National Archives, May 26, 2021. 5 Jacobus, “Aphra Behn,” 316.
[5] Behn, Aphra, and Lee A. Jacobus. The Rover: or, The Banished Cavaliers. The Compact Bedford Introduction to Drama, 356. Postscript, 23-30. (Boston, Massachusetts: Bedford/St. Martins, 2009)
[6] Wilson, Edwin, and Alvin Goldfarb. “Chapter 9 The Theatre of the English Restoration.” In Living Theatre: A History, 280. (New York, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018 8 Jacobus, The Compact Bedford Introduction to Drama 317. 9 Hobby, Elaine, and Lee A. Jacobus. “Commentary: Courtship and Marriage in The Rover.
1989” The Compact Bedford Introduction to Drama, 357. (Boston, Massachusetts: Bedford/St. Martins, 2009) 10Hobby, 357.
[7] Hobby, “Courtship and Marriage in The Rover ,” 358.
[8] Behn, The Rover, or The Banished Cavaliers, 2.1.163.
[9] Hobby, “Courtship and Marriage in The Rover ,”358.
[10] Estoc Productions Oroonoko: or the Royal Slave - Literature Summary/Review. YouTube, 2018.
[11] Jacobus, “Aphra Behn,” 316.