Thinking Activity:The Rover

The Rover

The Rover or, The Banish’t Cavaliers, comedy by Aphra Behn, produced and published in two parts in 1677 and 1681. Set in Madrid and Naples during the exile of England’s King Charles II, the play depicts the adventures of a small group of English Cavaliers. The protagonist, the charming but irresponsible Willmore, may have been modeled on John Wilmot Rochester, a poet in the inner circle of Charles II. The hero’s real-life counterpart may also have been John Hoyle, who was a lover of the playwright.

What did Virginia Woolf say about Aphra Behn? Do you agree with her? Why?

Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th century authors and also a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.

Whenever Aphra Behn is written about, Virginia Woolf's entreaty is usually pulled out to act as the opening line: 

"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."

Behn had a few female contemporaries but, unlike her, they were aristocratic and certainly not doing anything as vulgar as writing for money. These hobbyist writers would also usually warn potential readers with a notice that the following work was written by a member of the "fair sex", as though apologising in advance. Aphra Behn made no such apologies. She did not ask for permission or acceptance - and it was because she did neither that she proved to be so popular among the ordinary playgoers whose opinion so often goes unrecorded. Operating with striking success outside gender conventions, it was she who paved the way for other women to do the same. What's more, she included as much wit and bawdiness as she could muster, along with a sharp insight into both sex and politics. She was the Restoration's very own combination of Dorothy Parker and Mae West.

Her novel was Oroonoko. This is despite the fact that Behn has been totally overlooked not just by male critics of long ago, but most recently by Terry Eagleton, something which surprised me when I was researching a paper I was writing on Behn and Daniel Defoe last year. In his The English Novel: An Introduction he begins, like most, with Daniel Defoe, despite a gap of almost 30 years between Robinson Crusoe and Oroonoko. A shameful omission.

In fact, Oroonoko is more than just a "novel". It was also the first novel of ideas. It was a call to abolish slavery more than 100 years before Letitia Barbauld's Epistle to William Wilberforce on the Rejection of the Bill for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.

Behn was not just determined to stick two fingers up at convention, she was very clever at managing to turn the tables entirely. Oroonoko didn't simply suggest that slavery was vile and immoral but that, far from being savages, slaves were the ones with the grace, tradition and morals. It was, she makes clear, the colonists who were the barbarous savages steeped in hypocrisy, and it was they who should be learning a thing or two from the people they held captive. At the same time she also managed to include a powerful statement on the political powerlessness of women.

 Here she was, the incomparable Aphra. She had worked as a spy for King and country, served time in debtors' prison, and been called a slut as a writer, not just in her own time but by a whole series of (male) critics since. Here was a woman who did not just appease and beg to be allowed to write to earn a living.

On a previous blog on literary time travel, Aphra Behn was mentioned as someone whom it would be an adventure to visit. But what if we could bring her here, to the present, just for the day? What would she think of a traipse around the bookshops and the writing of noughties women; booksellers' tables groaning under the weight of pastel book covers that, far from defying convention and questioning and confronting, actually conform to the oldest patriarchal conventions?