Aphra Behn

Portrait of Aphra Behn, aged approximately 30, by Mary Beale.

Aphra Behn (July 10, 1640–April 16, 1689) was a prolific dramatist of the Restoration and was one of the first English professional female writers. Her writing participated in the amatory fiction genre of British literature.

Early life

The personal history of Aphra Behn, one of the first Englishwomen credited to earn their livelihood by authorship, is difficult to unravel and relate. Information regarding her, especially her early life, is scant, but she was almost certainly born in Wye, near Canterbury, on July 10, 1640 to Bartholomew Johnson, a barber, and Elizabeth Denham. The two were married in 1638 and Aphra, or Eaffry, was baptized on December 14, 1640. Elizabeth Denham was employed as a nurse to the wealthy Colepeper family, who lived locally, which means that it is likely that Behn grew up with and spent time with the family's children. The younger child, Thomas Colepeper, later described Behn as his foster sister.

In 1663 Behn visited an English sugar colony on the Suriname River, on the coast east of Venezuela (a region later known as Suriname). During this trip Behn is supposed to have met an African slave leader, whose story formed the basis for one of her most famous works, Oroonoko. The veracity of her journey to Suriname has often been called into question; however, enough evidence has been found that most Behn scholars today believe that the trip did indeed take place.

Though little is really known about Behn’s early years evidence suggests that she may have had a Catholic upbringing. She once admitted that she was "designed for a nun" and the fact that she had so many Catholic connections, such as Henry Neville who was later arrested, would certainly have aroused suspicions during the anti-Catholic fervor of the 1680s (Goreau 243). Her sympathy to the Catholics is further demonstrated by her dedication of her play "The Rover II" to the Catholic Duke of York who had been exiled for the second time (247).

Though Behn was sympathetic to Catholics, she was firmly dedicated to the restored King Charles II. As political parties first emerged during this time, Behn was a Tory supporter. Tories believed in absolute allegiance to the king, who governed by divine right (246). Behn often used her writings to attack the parliamentary Whigs claiming "In public spirits call’d, good o’ th’ Commonwealth…So tho’ by different ways the fever seize…in all ’tis one and the same mad disease." This was Behn’s reproach to parliament which had denied the king funds. Like most Tories, Behn was distrustful of Parliament and Whigs since the Revolution and wrote propaganda in support of the restored monarchy (248).

Biographer George Woodcock was an anarchist and wrote The Incomparable Aphra in 1948. He believed that "the most culturally vital periods in history were those of political disorder" Restoration was considered one of these periods and Behn favored "freedom". Even though she was about gaining freedom, she was loyal to the king. Behn believed in individual human dignity and fought against customs such as arranged marriages (Todd 69).

Behn takes an anti-slavery position in her work Oroonoko. Woodcock claims that’s Behn established a "once and for all right of women to make a vocation of literature". Behn made a great contribution to women’s emancipation (70). Another critic named Duchovnay claims Behn was a member of the Church of Rome (72). As Goreau mentioned previously, Behn seemed to be sympathetic to the Catholics according to her works.

Life in England, writing career, work as a spy

A sketch of Aphra Behn by George Scharf from a portrait believed to be lost.

Shortly after her return to England in 1664 Aphra Johnson married Johan Behn, who was a merchant of German or Dutch extraction. Little conclusive information is known about their marriage, but it did not last for more than a few years. Some scholars believe that the marriage never existed and Behn made it up purely to gain the status of a widow, which would have been much more beneficial for what she was trying to achieve. She was reportedly bisexual, and held a larger attraction to women than to men, a trait that, coupled with her writings and references of this nature, would eventually make her popular in the writing and artistic communities of the 20th century and present day.

By 1666 Behn had become attached to the Court, possibly through the influence of Thomas Culpepper and other associates of influence, where she was recruited as a political spy to Antwerp by Charles II. Her code name for her exploits is said to have been Astrea, a name under which she subsequently published much of her writings. The Second Anglo-Dutch War had broken out between England and the Netherlands in 1665. She became the lover to a prominent and powerful royal, and from him she obtained political secrets to be used to the English advantage.

Aphra's exploits were not profitable, however, as Charles was slow in paying (if he paid at all) for either her services or her expenses whilst abroad. Money had to be borrowed for Behn to return to London, where a year's petitioning of Charles for payment went unheard, and she ended up in a debtor's prison. By 1669 an undisclosed source had paid Behn's debts, and she was released from prison, starting from this point to become one of the first women who wrote for a living. She cultivated the friendship of various playwrights, and starting in 1670 she produced many plays and novels, as well as poems and pamphlets. Her most popular works included The Rover, Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, and Oroonoko. Amongst her notable critics was Alexander Pope, against whom she has been defended.

Aphra Behn died on April 16, 1689, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Below the inscription on her tombstone read the words: "Here lies a Proof that Wit can never be / Defence enough against Mortality." She was quoted as once stating that she had led a "life dedicated to pleasure and poetry."

Status among other writers throughout history

In author Virginia Woolf's reckoning, Behn's total career is more important than any particular work it produced. After a hiatus in the 19th century, when both the writer and the work were dismissed as indecent, Behn's fame has now undergone extraordinary revival. She dominates cultural-studies discourse as both a topic and a set of texts.

Woolf wrote, "All women together, ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn... for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds."

More recently people have taken more notice of what she actually wrote, as opposed to just her career.

In an age of libertines, Behn undertook to proclaim and to analyse women's sexual desire, as manifested in her characters and in herself. She has since become a favourite among sexually liberated women, many of bisexual or lesbian orientation, who proclaim her as one of their most positive influences.

Today, the affinities between Behn's work and that of Romantic writers seem more pronounced than the different level of publicly acceptable discussion of sexuality. It has been written that "Behn's writings unveil the homosocial role of male rivalry in stimulating heterosexual desire for women and explores the ways in which cross dressing and masquerade complicate and destabilize gender relations. Behn also analyzes female friendships and, more rarely, lesbianism". One source of speculation has been the identification of Behn with some of her characters. For instance in The Rover, the similarity in names between Behn and the prostitute Angellica Bianca is interesting.

"I, vainly proud of my personal judgement, hang out the Sign of Angellica"

In several volumes of writings by author Janet Todd, Behn's explorations of some of the key issues in Romantic studies, such as the role of incestuous and homosocial bonding in romance, the correlations between racial and gender oppression, female subjectivity, and, more specifically, female political and sexual agency are detailed.

The noted critic Harold Bloom calls Behn a "fourth-rate playwright" and notes her resurgent popularity as a case of "dumbing down."

She appears as a fictional character in the Faction Paradox novel Newtons Sleep.

Her exploits as a spy, and the misuse of the intelligence she gathered is alluded to in Patrick O'Brian's novel Desolation Island.

Aphra Behn’s writing is unique for its time because of her use of the narrator’s voice and her innovative use of visual deceptions in her plays. According to Dawn Lewcock, Behn’s narrative voice is "sometimes as the dispassionately passionate observer in Oroonoko, sometimes in an ironic aside with the implicit assumption of a common understanding with her readers, as in her shorter novels and longer poems" (66). She takes on a narrative voice that is characteristically her own by using a removed but somehow still involved narrator in Oroonoko and changing to a different, ironic voice in other works. For Francis F. Steen, Behn’s narration can be dangerously frank: "…Behn openly reveals what by rights should be the secrets of her trade. Must not her common readers be kept in the dark about this secret coalition between the author and state power? Is her openly professed loyalty tantamount to a betrayal?" (93) The possibility of rejection and failure is increased by her honesty in a matter that other playwrights of the time would not concede to the audience.

Behn’s plays were also novel because she used visual cues in a way that they had never before been used. Dawn Lewcock comments on this ingenuity, saying "What is unique to Behn is not only her appreciation of the visual effects of a performance but also the way that she uses this to affect the perceptions of the audience and change their conception and comprehension of her plots and/or her underlying theme as she wishes by integrating the theatrical possibilities into her dramatic structure" (66-67). Lewcock goes on to explain this with the mistaken identities present in The Amorous Prince where disguises play a crucial role in the plot of the play.

Bibliography

Plays

• The Forced Marriage (1670)
• The Amorous Prince (1671)
• The Dutch Lover (1673)
• Abdelazer (1676)
• The Town Fop (1676)
• The Rover, Part 1 (1677) and Part 2 (1681)
• Sir Patient Fancy (1678)
• The Feigned Courtesans (1679)
• The Young King (1679)
• The False Count (1681)
• The Roundheads (1681)
• The City Heiress (1682)
• Like Father, Like Son (1682)
• The Lucky Chance (1686) with composer John Blow
• The Emperor of the Moon (1687)

Posthumously performed

• The Widdow Ranter (1689)
• The Younger Brother (1696)

Novels

• The Fair Jilt
• Agnes de Castro
• Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684)
• Oroonoko (1688)

Short Stories

• The History of the Nun: or, the Fair Vow-Breaker (1688)

References

Biographies and writings based on her life

• Maureen Duffy (1977). The Passionate Shepherdess. The first wholly scholarly new biography of Behn; the first to identify Behn's birth name.
• Angeline Goreau, Reconstructing Aphra: a social biography of Aphra Behn (New York: Dial Press, 1980). ISBN 0-8037-7478-8
• Angeline Goreau. Aphra Behn: A scandal to modesty (c. 1640-1689) in Spender, Dale (ed.) Feminist theorists: Three centuries of key women thinkers, Pantheon 1983, pp. 8-27 ISBN 0-394-53438-7.
• Derek Hughes (2001). The Theatre of Aphra Behn. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-76030-1.
• Janet Todd (1997). The Secret Life of Aphra Behn. Rutgers University Press. ISBN 0-8135-2455-5. a biography concentrating on the political activism of Behn, with new material on her life as a spy.
• Vita Sackville-West (1927). Aphra Behn - The Incomparable Astrea. Gerald Howe. A view of Behn more sympathetic and laudatory than Woolf's.
• Virginia Woolf (1929). A Room of One's Own. One section deals with Behn, but it is a starting point for the feminist rediscovery of Behn's role.
• What Is Triumph in Love? with a consideration of Aphra Behn, Nancy Huntting

Other sources

• Hobby, Elaine. Virtue of necessity: English women's writing 1649-88. University of Michigan 1989
• Summers, Montague (ed.). Aphra Behn: Works. London 1913
• Lewcock, Dawn. Aphra Behn studies: More for seeing than hearing: Behn and the use of theatre. Ed. Todd, Janet. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.
• Steen, Francis F. The Politics of Love: Propaganda and Structural Learning in Aphra Behn's Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister. Poetics Today 23.1 (2002) 91-122. Project Muse. 19 Nov. 2007.
• Todd, Janet. The Critical Fortunes of Aphra Behn. Columbia: Camden House, 1998. 69-72.

External links

• Portrait from University of Aberdeen
• Works by Aphra Behn at Project Gutenberg
• Aphra Behn's Grave, Westminster Abbey
• University of Adelaide biography and etexts (a source for the list of works)
• The Aphra Behn page at list-arts.net
• The Sign of Angellica: An Aphra Behn Site
• The Complete Works of Aphra Behn on e-book