Roses for the Playwright: Acknowledging Aphra Behn's Feminism in The Rover

by Gerald Michael Rolfe


“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.” --- Virginia Woolf, 1929


Whenever we ask of a particular person, “Is she a feminist?” it always begs the preliminary question, “What is a feminist?” After all, when persons as politically diverse as Andrea Dworkin, Camille Paglia, and Ariana Huffington all call themselves feminists, it is apparent that there is some flexibility in the term. If we are to determine whether or not Aphra Behn was a feminist, then, we need to define what we expect of her. Given that her world is essentially alien to our own, we must also be careful not to imprint our own narrow cultural presumptions in seeking the answer. Even the most righteously militant of feminist voices today would find themselves in treacherous straits were they to navigate in Behn’s culture. Any value judgments we make, then, cannot ignore the very different society for which Aphra Behn wrote.

We might take an extreme route. We might say that a feminist would not place her characters in a setting that mirrored her own sexist patriarchal society, that such a placement was capitulation to the male oppressors in that society. But if we say that, we are just punishing Behn for the misfortune of being born in a society that kept women down. We cannot discount her historical circumstances which, for better or worse, were a paradigm within which she had to work if she was to achieve success. Alternately, we could accept a more relaxed standard, one that would have Behn be a feminist simply because she succeeded at a “man’s job” in a society that did everything it could to keep a woman from succeeding at anything professional. But this would deprive us of Behn’s point of view, and would be a patronizing assertion that just because she achieved success she must have believed in feminist principles. It could easily be argued that the existence of successful anti-feminists like Phyllis Schlafly contradicts such assertions. Instead, we should do Behn the honor of reading her words. Perhaps the fairest thing to do would be to identify fundamental feminist principles, principles essential to anyone’s definition of feminism, and look to see how Behn’s characters either advance or inhibit those principles in the course of one of her plays.

If upon nothing else, all feminists agree that women either are, or should be, equal participants in society. Gender equality, then, is a principle we will assume to be fundamentally feminist. Many women assert that a belief in gender equality alone makes one a feminist. But there are many notable others who say that activism is essential. They believe that one must be an active participant against, or a vocal critic of, the forces which oppose gender equality. If we use this latter standard, we can satisfy advocates of both viewpoints, because activism certainly presupposes belief. When observing Aphra Behn’s characters in The Rover, then, we find the theme of gender equality as well as activist tendencies. Behn creates strong female characters who interact with weak male characters. The women are not only equal to the men, but they are actually superior. Likewise, her women are activists. They control the action in the play, and they are critical, both implicitly and explicitly, of the patriarchy that controls them. To know Behn’s characters is to know her heart and mind on the subject of gender equality -- the characters in The Rover are proof that Aphra Behn was a pioneering voice in the struggle for the rights of women.

One of the most apparent aspects of Behn’s feminism, from the standpoint of characterization, is the fact that The Rover’s male characters are unsympathetic stereotypes. From Willmore, the irrepressible rake, to Blunt, the crude and not very amusing country bumpkin, Behn mans her drama with ‘good ol’ boys’ in order to make fun of the ways of men in her society. Even the ostensible hero, Belvile, is ultimately a reprobate who would eschew his humanity in favor of going along with the other men in a vile crime. When Florinda is in danger of being raped, Belvile is ironically unwilling to help her. Because of his supposed loyalty to the patriarchy (whose marriage rules he nonetheless subverts in secret), Belvile does nothing. Instead he frets -- “Yet if I hinder ‘em, I shall discover all” (108). Belvile cares more for appearances among his precious network of men than he does for the woman he supposedly loves. In that, he is the stereotypical dog-of-the-pack, the man defined more by his place in the patriarchy than by anything residing in his own mind. None of Behn’s men are whole -- none of them possesses the will to act against the system, even when they find it abhorrent.

The only thing the men in The Rover do, in fact, that is not directly linked to their habits of fraternal ‘groupthink,’ is pursue the mindless urgings of their libidos. Where Behn’s women affect the plot through their exercise of reason, or at least through a sincere passion rooted more deeply than lust, the men are epitomized by Willmore, who behaves like a sperm cell. His motive is lust, and his manner is urgency. Willmore’s entire philosophy, such as it is, is revealed in his attempt to seduce Florinda in the garden where he begs, “Prithee, dear soul, let’s not play the fool and lose time---precious time . . . Why, thou mayst be free with me: I’ll be very secret. I’ll not boast who ‘twas obliged me, not I; for hang me if I know thy name” (66). Behn is not catering here to the male facility to enjoy anonymous sexual encounters, she is making fun of it. Willmore’s dialogue throughout is a parody of the carpe diem poems so popular at the time. But even here he is lying to achieve his ends. After all, the value of a sexual encounter to the rake is not just in the having, it is in the telling. There are bragging rights to be gained, the opportunity to strut before one’s fraternal brothers and tell them you got “all the honey of matrimony, and none of the sting” (52). The women, ultimately, are most prized as tools to achieve and maintain status among the men. And so, Behn is not seduced by her rake. She is here to expose him, and the patriarchy which supports him. Surely she has no romantic illusions as she has Willmore tell Florinda that even were he to rape her he would not be punished because “a judge, were he young and vigorous, and saw those eyes of [Florinda’s] would know ‘twas they gave the first blow, the first provocation” (67). Blaming the victim, it would seem, has been with us for a very long time, and Behn wants her audience to look and judge for themselves.

Behn plays the activist because she brings forth these stereotypical behaviors in order to criticize them, not to idealize them. Willmore is consistently foiled in his attempts to bed “virtuous” women, while his success with Angellica is made fun of by rendering it farcical. Everyone in Behn’s audience surely could appreciate the ironic absurdity of the testicularly-motivated male’s fantasy come true, where the aloof and indifferent courtesan not only falls for her suitor, but pays him to boot. It is easy to imagine the raucous Restoration audience, especially the women, roaring with laughter over that one. Blunt, too, is foiled in his attempt to rape Florinda. Though a woman who was not the property of other men was considered a whore, and therefore fair game for the rapacious, Behn does not satisfy this base violence. While a male playwright would probably also not have satisfied his bumpkin in this manner, at the very least he would have had Belvile dash to the rescue. Behn cannot bring herself to do even that, so convinced is she that the bonds of fraternity are stronger than the professed adoration of young men seeking their love object, an object they value for sexual reasons only. Instead, Valeria must save her kinswoman from the hostile force posed by men in a group. Where Belvile is ironically rendered impotent by his association with the patriarchy, Valeria is able to easily control the relentless male procreative impulse, represented here by the pursuing Don Pedro, with a diversion. Behn’s women, as always, are stronger. The men are so weak that they will even abuse the women they love rather than transgress their own archaic fraternal codes, codes which themselves encourage the abuse of women.

The primary code of action, and of central importance to these male characters, is the code of “honor.” For Behn, the pursuit of honor provides numerous opportunities for humor -- but it is humor with a bite. Because the women in the play are subjected to cruelty and commodification as a result of the male pursuit of honor, Behn criticizes the notion, along with its concomitant double standard, by making fun of it. Behn is so adept that she even manages to bring humor into the potential gang rape in Act V. In what we are to regard as a typically male way of resolving disputes, the boys all draw their swords to see whose is the longest -- the winner gets to be the first to rape Florinda. The sexual metaphor is blunt, and funny, at least on the surface. Again, it is the farce that Behn uses in order to lighten a serious situation. But the subtext is a very different thing. Where honor is that which requires the comparing of phallic symbols in order to establish position within the patriarchy, it becomes a thing to be ridiculed. How even more ridiculous to think that these fellows would continue to draw swords to resolve disputes more than once -- we would expect they might know who has the longest sword after the first draw, rendering the procedure moot. But it is Behn’s joke. She too thinks male bluster in pursuit of honor is something to be laughed at. Laughed at, that is, if it weren’t for the fact women’s lives are destroyed under the practices of such folly. If it is not funny, then, it is at least something to be made fun of.

It is not by accident that Don Pedro ends up drawing the biggest sword. Here, Behn is criticizing the commodification of women. Because Don Pedro owns Florinda according to his code of honor, he also owns and controls his sister’s sexual being. To Behn, this is not so far removed from rape itself. When he is chasing his disguised sister in order to rape her, Don Pedro says “As if I did not know ye, and, and your business here” (109). The line is highly ironic -- he does know her business because it is his business, that is, he is in the business of selling his own sister as sexual property. Behn would have us know that this is the ugly essence of arranging a woman’s marriage -- the father or brother is no better than a pimp and, like a pimp, he may as well be helping himself to what he offers on the open market. It is not, at its root, a pretty picture, and it is not supposed to be. Don Pedro, being a man of highest honor, is “better bred than not to leave her choice free” (109). Again, the dramatic irony is that he has prevented Florinda from exercising her freedom of choice in perhaps the most intimate aspect of her being, her sexuality. In criticizing this, Behn is way ahead of her time, and arguing against a mindset that is still common in the world today.

As one-dimensional and shallow as are the male characters in The Rover, we know it is not for Behn’s lack of facility with her craft, because her female characters have spirit, personality, and depth. It is they who move the plot where it must go, and they who aim the brainless compulsions of the men toward something resembling an acceptable resolution. Even Angellica, who plays the scorned woman, is more than just a stereotypical female reactionary -- she is a character, in fact, who initially has all the societal sensibilities of a man, but who becomes feminine again through her ability to love. It is this contrast between the characterization of men and women that makes the strongest argument in favor of Behn’s feminism.

It is difficult to say who is more compelling, Angellica or Hellena, but the latter is certainly the play’s heroine. Hellena is strong from start to finish. As to her brother’s assertion that she shall enter the convent (so he may be rid of the worry of her as a sexual commodity) she is self-assured in her aside: “Shall I so? You may chance to be mistaken in my way of devotion. A nun! . . . No, I’ll have a saint of my own to pray to shortly, if I like any that dares venture on me” (13). It is Hellena who is in charge of Hellena’s sexuality. No brother will force her into celibacy, and no rake will convince her to surrender her chastity prematurely. And it is not because she is cold or indifferent. On the contrary, Hellena is as lusty as any of the men who inhabit the play. In fact, we glimpse the depth of Hellena’s desire when she says to Willmore, “He that will be satisfied with one kiss will never die of it” (123). Here we smile at the rake being upbraided by the virgin for the fact that his passion is a trifle compared to her own -- more masterful Behn irony. And Hellena’s comments are not reserved simply to her own circumstances. At the beginning, we see where she, and through her, Behn, stands on the issue of arranged marriage. The image Hellena draws of such marriages is clear: “…the giant stretches itself, yawns and sighs a belch or two as loud as a musket, throws himself into bed, and expects you in his foul sheets” (12). The reason for such unappetizing imagery is because Behn finds the arranged marriage distasteful, and Hellena, as her heroine, serves her as a most outspoken detractor of the practice.

Angellica is, like Hellena, a woman who controls her own sexuality. In a world where it is the men who commoditize and market women, Angellica is nearly unique in that she markets herself, and yet remains above the label of “whore.” That she so easily acquiesces to her own commoditization is not a derogation of her, but it is again a criticism of her society. Angellica is strong because she meets the male world on her own terms -- she recognizes the only aspect of her being upon which she is allowed to profit, her sexuality, and then exploits it to procure her survival. Unfortunately for her, she has become hardened, deciding that “inconstancy’s the sin of all mankind, therefore nothing but gold shall charm [her] heart” (35). It is in this state that Angellica’s attitudes toward sex mirror those of the men in the play. The difference for her, however, is that she succumbs in short order to the “general disease of [her] sex . . .being in love” (35). Where none of the men ever grow out of their inclination to objectify and commoditize, Angellica becomes a whole woman again. She throws away all thoughts of herself as a product, and merely strives, upon an albeit misguided passion, to complete a union of love with Willmore. We are left to think it is Angellica’s loss and Hellena’s gain that Willmore is finally to wed Hellena, but given Behn’s propensity for irony, she could not have helped thinking privately that Angellica ended up with the better part of the bargain.

Behn’s women overshadow her men because Behn herself had a feminist conception of men and women. She recognized the gross injustices of her time, recognized that men expended an extraordinary amount of energy either pursuing women to use them, or keeping them in their place so that other men would not use them without first paying a price. But she must have also recognized that she was not entirely outside that reality. Like Angellica, Aphra Behn was an entrepreneur, an independent woman operating in the perilous waters of the male economy. Also like Angellica, she would most certainly have adopted some male attitudes in the process. We can therefore criticize Behn for what we perceive to be her catering to the male point of view. We can say that because her rake gets the girl in the end, and because certain distasteful societal notions about rape were exposed during the play, that Behn was just a patsy to the ubiquitous patriarchy. But to do so, we would have to be as unjust as her sexist society. We would have to ignore her wit and ironic humor, and we would have to ignore that her female characters care about one another, and are not merely trying to scratch each other’s eyes out as they compete for men.

No doubt Behn could have created men who controlled the plot, men who were more than hormones and clever pub platitudes spouted to impress their buddies. But she didn’t. Instead, she gave us Hellena, who told about the evils of arranged marriage, and who scrambled with her own healthy libido far away from the cloistered confines of the convent. She is the autonomous female will, the one that demands that dealing with her “‘tis but getting [her] consent” (122) -- but what a revolutionary concept that was in a world where only male consent had the status of law. Behn also gave us Angellica, who demonstrated the price a woman has to pay in order to survive in a world where men make women the stuff of barter. Angellica is equal to men in the game of buying and selling sex -- equal, that is, until she regains her humanity by remembering that “were [Willmore’s] fortune as large as is [his] soul, / [He] shouldst not buy [her] love” (45). And finally, or perhaps primarily, Behn gave us Florinda, the innocent abroad in a world that despises and abuses innocence, a woman who would have been raped by nearly every man in the play at one time or another if not for some fortuitous intervention. Florinda represents simultaneously that icon of purity and virtue that the men strive to possess, as well as that quality, innocence, that their possession ironically destroys. A such, Florinda elicits our sympathy as much as her tormentors arouse our contempt.

In contrast, Behn gives us men who are hardly worth the energy expended by her heroines to secure them in matrimony. The ineffectual Belvile would do best not to have daughters himself, because one suspects he will not be able to protect his “merchandise” when the bidding war begins subsequent to their puberty. His love lacks conviction, at least so far as going against the rules of patriarchy is concerned. Willmore is submitted as evidence that although rakish men are charming, and catchable, that they remain irredeemable and not to be trusted. His character does not develop so much as it succumbs to Hellena’s superior strength. Blunt and Frederick are the paltry scraps left over, with nothing at all to recommend them to womankind other than that one supposes they must somewhere, at some time, have had mothers. As we leave Blunt, he is still malevolent and vengeful, wishing “‘twere lawful to pull off . . . false faces that [he] might see if [his] doxy were not amongst” the otherwise merry assemblage (127). That Behn was purposeful in her characterizations is evident by our strong feelings either for, or in Blunt’s case, against them.

Given this contrast between male and female characters, it is not difficult to see where the playwright’s sentiments lay with respect to women in her society. Not only did she think them and portray them to be the equals of men, she created them to be better than the men under whose injustice they suffered. We should not be fooled into a false condemnation of the playwright. Just because she easily assimilated the forms and conventions of Restoration drama does not make her a dupe of the patriarchy that these plays often celebrated. It is often necessary for one to work from within various institutions if one is to effect change. Behn had legitimate criticisms to make regarding the lot of women in 17th and 18th century Europe. As such, she was able to reach a wider audience with her criticism by draping it in the familiar garb of the contemporary theatre. Outspoken women of her time were most often ignored, or regarded as mad. Behn’s genius was in her subtlety, in her ability to walk the fine line of humor and in so doing to expose the injustice she perceived. In this way, she was an active proponent of feminist principles while avoiding the vilification of those in power, and while reaching the widest possible audience for her message. In this she was exemplary of the satirical sensibilities of her age, but what is more, she was quintessentially a feminist, believing in gender equality, and practicing an activism to promote that equality. And just as importantly, Behn herself exemplified the principles of feminism by the example of her life, and by her success despite the odds against it. As such, Aphra Behn was a feminist by anyone’s definition, and is worthy of our respect and admiration for her social consciousness, her wonderful abilities with the pen, and finally, the strength of her own very abundant character.





Works Cited

Behn, Aphra. The Rover. Edited by Frederick Link. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967.
Woolf, Virginia. “A Room of One’s Own.” In The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol 2. 6th ed. Edited by M.H. Abrams, et al. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1993, p. 1961.