THE ROVER

* WHAT DID VIRGINIA WOOLF SAY ABOUT APHRA BEHN? DO YOU AGREE WITH HER? WHY? 

                    The fourth chapter from Virginia Woolf's critical text 'A Room of One's Own' discusses the importance of literary forerunners and their influence on the work of later great writers. Woolf puts much acclaim upon Aphra Behn, a woman 'forced to make a living on her wits', and traces the evolution of female authorship from the sixteenth century to the Victorian period. In this chapter Woolf claims that, due to Behn, writing for a woman became practical and serious - a means of making money when all other support failed. Such is her importance to female authorship that 'All women together' suggests Woolf 'ought to let flowers fall on the tomb of Aphra Behn'.

                        Aphra Behn was the first English woman to earn her living solely by her pen. The most prolific dramatist of her time, she was also an innovative writer of fiction and a translator of science and French romance. The novelist Virginia Woolf wrote, 

                   “All women together ought to let flowers fall on the tomb of Aphra Behn . . . For it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.” 

                       Minds and bodies. Behn was a lyrical and erotic poet, expressing a frank sexuality that addressed such subjects as male impotence, female orgasm, bisexuality and the indeterminacies of gender.No woman would have such freedom again for many centuries. (And in our frank and feminist era Behn can still astonish with her mocking treatment of sexual and social subjects like amorphous desire, marriage and motherhood.)

                              During the two more respectable or prudish centuries that followed her death in 1689, women were afraid of her toxic image and mostly unwilling to emulate her sexual frankness. In her day, Behn had the reputation of a respected professional writer and also of a “punk-poetess.” For a long time after her death, she was allowed only to be the second.

                         Beyond her successes on the stage and in fiction, Aphra Behn was a Royalist spy in the Netherlands and probably South America. She also served as a political propagandist for the courts of Charles II and his unpopular brother James II. Thus her life has to be deeply embedded in the tumultuous 17th century, in conflict-­ridden England and Continental Europe and in the mismanaged slave colonies of the Americas. 

                            Her necessarily furtive activities, along with her prolific literary output of acknowledged and anonymous works, make her a lethal combination of obscurity, secrecy and staginess, an uneasy fit for any biographical narrative, speculative or factual. Aphra Behn is not so much a woman to be unmasked as an unending combination of masks and intrigue, and her work delivers different images and sometimes contradictory views.

                            Much is secure about her professional career as dramatist, but there’s a relative paucity of absolute facts about Aphra Behn’s personal life. Coupled both with the sly suggestions she throws out and with her wonderfully inventive method of weaving experience and fancy with historical fact, this circumstance suggests that speculation and intuition are at times appropriate modes for her biographers. 

                              People of the Restoration made mirror and distorted mirror images of themselves. Fooling and deceit were art forms. So identifications in her life story are tentative, and the characters in her “true” narratives and poems, relatives, friends and lovers, may be composite—or imaginary. I continue to see with varying degrees of clarity a “real” woman and a protean author of protean works.

                             APHRA BEHN

                          The past 20 years of critical commentary tell me that, as an author, Aphra Behn is secure in the canon of English literature. She is taught in colleges and universities in English-speaking countries. Where Restoration drama is on the syllabus, she is there with the other great playwrights, William Wycherley and William Congreve. 

                                 As author of some startling and innovative fictions, she enters as an originator or precursor of the modern English novel, along with Daniel Defoe and the trio of early women writers, Margaret Cavendish, Eliza Haywood, and Delarivier Manley. Because of its setting in Surinam, her celebrated novella Oroonoko about a princely black slave is favoured in postcolonial studies. Finally, in women’s studies courses, Behn is hailed as the first thoroughly professional woman writer, concerned with her craft, with details of publication, and with her status in the literary world.

                          For all this critical activity, Aphra Behn is still not as high in appreciation and recognition as I believe she deserves to be—and as I expected her to be when I began thinking about her in the heady 1970s, that decade of rediscovery when so many past women writers were allowed out of the shadows. 

                                 With her craft and experimental techniques, her exciting female perspective on everything from politics to domesticity and sex, I thought her on a level with Jane Austen in literary importance. I still do. And it’s hard to imagine a more striking and adventurous life—even if a good deal of this life is and was intended to be secret!

                              Most of the articles and comments on Behn in the last two decades have been scholarly and subtle. They have responded to the changing fashions of the discipline of English and Cultural Studies. Second Wave Feminist criticism that brought her to greater notice in the 1960s and 1970s has given way to other “Waves” much concerned with the performative and with amorphous and polymorphous desire, while the emphasis in postcolonial  studies, that other growth area within the discipline, is still overwhelmingly concerned with race and ethnicity. 

                             Aphra Behn as writer of sexually explicit poems and portrayer of England’s early colonies has much to say in both areas of study.

                               Recent scholarship has concerned Behn as dramatist and poet. It throws new light on her stagecraft, her shifting and often prominent position in the theatrical marketplace, as well as on her complex interactions with male colleagues and competitors such as John Dryden and Thomas Shadwell. 

                                        In her theatrical dedications Behn uses flattery in ways that both amuse and dismay present critics and, in her plays, she portrays rakes and whores with the kind of ambiguity that can be disturbing—as well as funny. Behn was fascinated by rank, by the notion of nobility, its honor, and the manifold ways in which it could be dishonored. 

                                She returned to the topic over and over again in her drama, investigating the allure and vulnerabilities of personal and political authority. Critics have applauded her lively enthusiasm for sexual games and her irreverence about the masculinity that dominated the age and which she expresses so well in her plays and in her frank and risqué poems. 

                                 If her treatment of sex astonishes readers less than it did a century ago, Behn can still shock when she handles subjects such as rape and the seductions of power. In many areas of gender relationships, then, her drama, fiction and poetry are still capable of destabilizing our own assumptions.

                           So, too, can her utopian moral and political schemes, where desire and reality coalesce or clash, and where the body is left to subvert the mind.

                “Behn was fascinated by rank, by the notion of nobility, its honor, and the manifold ways in which it could be dishonored.”

                             If Aphra Behn’s depiction of gender and race can be assimilated to our modern ideas or at least celebrated for its difference, her politics when separated from the moral and social results of Restoration government often remain troublesome. 

                             Many critics worry over the apparent conflict between her feminist understanding and her staunch Tory royalist stance. Recent work has looked at her attitude to the various plots of the age, the Popish Plot and the Meal-Tub Plot and her mockery of false rulers like the would-be king and rebel, the Duke of Monmouth. The work sheds light on some of the difficulties in interpretation.

                             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.

          "The Spy Who Lived by Her Pen"

                                   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.

                              Aphra Behn's life is not easy to reconstruct, but Goreau has put together a lively and readable account. Behn was probably born Aphra Johnson in 1640, somewhere near Canterbury, Kent. While in her early twenties, she spent part of a year in Surinam.

                             On her return to England, she was recruited as a spy in Charles II's intelligence service, and she played an active part in the second Anglo-Dutch War through her espionage activities in Antwerp. When the king neglected to pay her for this work despite repeated petitions, she spent time in a debtor's prison in London.

                               Needless to say, none of these activities was typical for women in 17th-century England. So, even before she turned to writing, Aphra Behn had distinguished herself from the expectations of her day. And from the outset, she wanted her writing to give her financial independence. 

                         Her first success came from the theatre; The Forced marriage, produced at Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1670, was her literary debut. In all, she wrote 23 plays (20 were performed during her lifetime), 14 works of fiction (most of them published posthumously), two volumes of poetry, eight state poems, three miscellaneous long poems and three translations.