The Position Of Women In The Rover Analysis

The Position of Women in The Rover
The end of the English Civil War gave a crushing defeat to feudalism and effected a permanent change in the existing social relations in England, with the establishment of the Puritan Commonwealth by Oliver Cromwell. There is no second though about how much Republicanism appealed to the multitude. Still, there were certain others who swore by tradition and the accepted codes of behaviour. In a period marked by swings between orthodoxy and modern attitude, the sacred and the profane, one was left wondering what was desirable. People were uncertain about the religious codes to be followed, leading to a kind of moral emptiness marking the entire society. To elaborate, the Republicans
They believed that people should only indulge in productive, sensible work that would lead to the progress of the nation as a whole. As is self-evident, with the fall of the Protectorate in 1960 and restoration of monarchy, there was a profusion of pleasure seeking, something quite apparent in The Rover. The lifestyle marking the Restoration was largely hedonistic, marked by a cornucopia of parties, sex and extravagant spending. This libertinism, however, did not extend equally to both sexes. The dismantling of the Puritan Commonwealth did little to dispel the archetypal conceptions of the early modern period about womanhood. Female active sexuality was considered a spiritual flaw, something that was to be managed by the masculine man. . Although the ladies, too, did yearn for greater social, political and sexual autonomy, their roles were pigeonholed within the boundaries of three roles: nun, prostitute, wife. Between the categories of “virgin” and “whore” lay a void,
From my understanding of the text and the background it is set in, the only two options available to women during those times were: (a) to become, well, a wife or (b) to become part of the marketplace. As aforementioned, it was not a very egalitarian society as far as pleasure seeking and manifestation of sexual drive was concerned. Women, as it were, never started on an equal footing in any way. Probably more so because the consequences of pleasure seeking were far more immediate for them (in the form of physical visibility through impregnation, that is). As far as the Restoration period is concerned, there was clearly a haunting gender blindness in almost all spheres. It separated the economic & sexual freedom AND identity of the women, which in a sense, made them more vulnerable. This gave the women an illusion of a certain kind of freedom that did not actually exist. Their economic dependence on their families did not give them the independence to sexual freedom. This entire setup, then, only benefited the newly liberated cavaliers. What does this kind of setup has to offer to the latter kind of women, the one belonging to the marketplace as Angellica Bianca does? To quote Susan Carlson in this context, “Behn's courtesan, Angellica Bianca, shares with