Aphra Behn's The Rover: Evaluating Women's Social and Sexual Options
Aphra Behn 's The Rover: Evaluating Women 's Social and Sexual Options
Following the collapse of the Puritan Protectorate in 1660, the halls of court seemed to buzz with a festive attitude: “Out with the old and in with the… older.” Cavalier revelries under Charles II regained the notoriety of their pre-Cromwellian counterparts. Britain’s king led his noblemen by example with a hedonistic lifestyle of parties, sex, and extravagant spending. The social and sexual freedom of this “libertinism,” however, did not extend to ladies. Although women might crave higher degrees of autonomy and sexual expression, their lives still fit within the boundaries of three roles: nun, prostitute, or wife. Between the categories of “virgin” and “whore” lay a void, not a spectrum; one could give “the whole cargo or nothing” (Behn 164).
Performed in 1677, Aphra Behn’s play, The Rover, speaks to this double standard, which limited her female peers’ sexual desires to the realm of convent, brothel, or home. Set loose in the topsy-turvy world of Carnival, her characters demonstrate the active, complicated game required of women seeking to secure personal happiness. The dangers of the chase and the play’s tidy conclusion, on the other hand, suggest at how ladies neither could nor should stray too far into the masculine roles of wooer and possessor. Late Stuart society, Behn seems to lament, offered no place to the sexually free, libertine woman.
The fall of the Puritan Commonwealth did little to dispel the political and religious tensions that affected the early Modern British conception of womanhood. Even after the Protectorate’s end, Roundhead beliefs dictated “the necessity for female subordination and obedience” to her husband, as ordained by several Bible verses (Hughes 295). Eve’s role in the division of mankind from God “fuelled…[a cultural] conviction of the weakness and sinfulness of women” (295). Thus female sexuality was perceived as a spiritual flaw to manage. Male
Following the collapse of the Puritan Protectorate in 1660, the halls of court seemed to buzz with a festive attitude: “Out with the old and in with the… older.” Cavalier revelries under Charles II regained the notoriety of their pre-Cromwellian counterparts. Britain’s king led his noblemen by example with a hedonistic lifestyle of parties, sex, and extravagant spending. The social and sexual freedom of this “libertinism,” however, did not extend to ladies. Although women might crave higher degrees of autonomy and sexual expression, their lives still fit within the boundaries of three roles: nun, prostitute, or wife. Between the categories of “virgin” and “whore” lay a void, not a spectrum; one could give “the whole cargo or nothing” (Behn 164).
Performed in 1677, Aphra Behn’s play, The Rover, speaks to this double standard, which limited her female peers’ sexual desires to the realm of convent, brothel, or home. Set loose in the topsy-turvy world of Carnival, her characters demonstrate the active, complicated game required of women seeking to secure personal happiness. The dangers of the chase and the play’s tidy conclusion, on the other hand, suggest at how ladies neither could nor should stray too far into the masculine roles of wooer and possessor. Late Stuart society, Behn seems to lament, offered no place to the sexually free, libertine woman.
The fall of the Puritan Commonwealth did little to dispel the political and religious tensions that affected the early Modern British conception of womanhood. Even after the Protectorate’s end, Roundhead beliefs dictated “the necessity for female subordination and obedience” to her husband, as ordained by several Bible verses (Hughes 295). Eve’s role in the division of mankind from God “fuelled…[a cultural] conviction of the weakness and sinfulness of women” (295). Thus female sexuality was perceived as a spiritual flaw to manage. Male
Cited: Behn, Aphra. The Rover. Restoration Comedy. Ed. Trevor Griffiths and Simon Trussler. London: New Hern Books, 2005. 129–224. Burke, Helen M. “The Cavalier Myth in The Rover.” The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn. Eds. Derek Hughes and Janet Todd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 118–134. Hughes, Ann. “Puritanism and Gender.” The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism. Eds. John Coffey and Paul C. H. Lim. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 294–308. Hunter, Heidi. “Revisioning the Female Body: Aphra Behn’s The Rover, Parts I and II.” Rereading Aphra Behn: History, Theory, and Criticism. Ed. Heidi Hunter. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993. 102–120. Kreis-Shinck, Annette. Women, Writing, and the Theater in the Early Modern Period. Madison: Associated University Presses, 2001. Owen, Susan J. “Sexual Politics and Party Politics in Behn’s Drama, 1678-83.” Aphra Behn Studies. Ed. Janet Todd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 15–29. Pacheco, Anita. “Rape and the Female Subject in Aphra Behn’s The Rover.” EHL 65.2 (Summer 1998): 323–345. Staves, Susan. “Behn, Women, and Society.” The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn. Eds. Derek Hughes and Janet Todd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 12–28.