- Name : Aarti Bhupatbhai Sarvaiya
- Batch : M.A. Sem. 1 (2022-2024)
- Enrollment N/o. : 4069206420220027
- Roll N/o. : 01
- Subject Code & Paper N/o. : 22392 - Paper 101: Literature of the Elizabethan and Restoration Periods
- Email Address : aartisarvaiya7010@gmail.com
- Submitted to : Smt. S. B. Gardi Department of English – Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University – Bhavnagar – 364001
- Date of Submission : 31 October, 2022
- Aphra Behn (1640? - 1689)
Aphra Behn, the 17th-century poet, playwright and fiction writer, was hailed by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own (1929) for having ‘earned [women] the right to speak their minds’.
- Subtitles of the Assignment :-
- Introduction
- Who is Aphra Behn ?
- Short Biography of Aphra Behn
- Aphra Behn as A First Woman Writer
- Her Notable works
- Response to her Death
- Conclusion
- References
- Introduction :-
In this assignment, I'm going to discuss Aphra Behn's life and her works and also discuss the topic Aphra Behn as a First Woman Writer and how she writes her works and what are the situations she faced during the writing and publishing of her works.
- Who is Aphra Behn ? :-
Aphra Behn is one of the most extraordinary playwrights in history. A mystery, wrapped in an enigma, drenched in poetry and social commentary. A spy during the Dutch-Anglo war, a former prisoner and the first woman to make a living solely as a playwright in an exceptionally patriarchal society, Aphra Behn is a genuine trailblazer. (Cullen)
Behn was a playwright, poet, translator; she was a woman in a world of men, a staunch Royalist, a spy, and a scarlet woman condemned for loose morals. She was also the first woman in England to identify herself as a professional writer. She wrote to the occasion, and she wrote to make money. There has been a consistent tendency to see Aphra Behn as a personal phenomenon, rather than as the author of a series of works that are interesting in their own right.
As a woman, she was excluded from the sorts of institutions from which historians usually glean their records, such as Oxford and Cambridge, the Inns of Court, or the Middle Temple. If she'd been an aristocrat, there might have been records surviving at her country seat. If she'd been a religious non-conformist, she might have recorded her thoughts and ideas about her inner life in a spiritual journal, or diary, as so many women did. But as neither a man, nor an aristocrat, nor a nonconformist, she proves peculiarly resistant to biographical recovery.
Because of the lack of reliable bibliographical information and because of the fascination Behn holds as an individual rather than as the creator of a body of literary work, Behn has been co-opted into a range of political agendas in the past.(Abigail and O'Connor )
- Short Biography of Aphra Behn:-
She was born in 1640 during the lead-up to the English Civil Wars, possibly in Canterbury to a barber father and wet-nurse mother, though in adulthood she moved in aristocratic, courtly circles.
During the Second Anglo-Dutch War, which broke out in 1665, she is said to have acted as a spy in Bruges (her code name was Astrea) on behalf of the court of Charles II. Espionage was not a lucrative career, though, and Behn seems to have returned to London within the year.
In England, Behn turned her attention to writing. We know that she began working for the King’s Company and the Duke’s Company, two theatre companies authorised by Charles II after the Restoration, first as a scribe and then as a playwright.
Behn had a steady career as a playwright (writing 19 plays in total and probably assisting in the composition of several more).She also wrote novels, poems and literary translations up until her death in 1689 at the age of 49. She is buried in Westminster Abbey, though not in Poets’ Corner.(Lely)
- Her Career :-
Much of Behn’s work was published anonymously during her own lifetime. Now, Behn is best known for her novels The Fair Jilt and Oroonoko – the latter of which, though not expressly anti-slavery, was unusual in its time for the respectful attention it pays to a non-white, non-English protagonist – and for her poetry. Her poetry is frequently frank about female sexual pleasure and humorous about male sexual dysfunction (as in ‘The Disappointment’), and some of it was originally attributed to her male contemporary, the famously bawdy Earl of Rochester.(Todd)
- Aphra Behn as a First Woman Writer :-
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.
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 post-colonial 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.
Recent scholarship has concerned Behn as a 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.
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.
In her plays and stories readers have found conflicting political messages. Some see occasional critiques of the royal brothers Charles II and James II, others simply an exaggerated loyalty against apparent odds and the currents of history. Perhaps, as contemporary readers, we find splits between desire and hierarchy, between women and dominating monarchy, and between hedonism and loyalty where she and her age found no necessary distinctions.(Todd)
- Her Notable works :-
Plays | Posthumously performed | Novels |
The Forced Marriage (1670) | The Widow Ranter (1689) | The Fair Jilt |
The Amorous Prince (1671) | The Younger Brother (1696) | Agnes de Castro |
The Dutch Lover (1673) | Love-Letters Between a Noble-Man and his Sister (1684) | |
Abdelazer (1676) | Oroonoko (1688) | |
The Town Fop (1676) | ||
The Rover (1677-1681) | ||
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) | ||
The Emperor of the Moon (1687) |
( et al.)
Behn’s early works were tragicomedies in verse. In 1670 her first play, The Forc’d Marriage, was produced, and The Amorous Prince followed a year later. Her sole tragedy, Abdelazer, was staged in 1676. However, she turned increasingly to light comedy and farce over the course of the 1670s. Many of these witty and vivacious comedies, notably The Rover (two parts, produced 1677 and 1681), were commercially successful. The Rover depicts the adventures of a small group of English Cavaliers in Madrid and Naples during the exile of the future Charles II. The Emperor of the Moon, first performed in 1687, presaged the harlequinade, a form of comic theatre that evolved into the English pantomime.(Luebering)
Though Behn wrote many plays, her fiction today draws more interest. Her short novel Oroonoko (1688) tells the story of an enslaved African prince whom Behn claimed to have known in South America. Its engagement with the themes of slavery, race, and gender, as well as its influence on the development of the English novel, helped to make it, by the turn of the 21st century, her best-known work. Behn’s other fiction included the multipart epistolary novel Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–87) and The Fair Jilt (1688).
Behn’s versatility, like her output, was immense; she wrote other popular works of fiction, and she often adapted works by older dramatists. She also wrote poetry, the bulk of which was collected in Poems upon Several Occasions, with A Voyage to the Island of Love (1684) and Lycidas; or, The Lover in Fashion (1688). Behn’s charm and generosity won her a wide circle of friends, and her relative freedom as a professional writer, as well as the subject matter of her works, made her the object of some scandal.(Luebering)
Aphra Behn’s Best Plays :-
- The Rover (1677)
- The Rover pt 2 (1681)
- The Dutch Lover (1673)
- The Emperor of the Moon (1687)
- Sir Patient Fancy (1678)
- The Town Fop (1676)
- Abdelazer (1676)
- The Young King (1679)
- Like Father, Like Son (1682)
- The City Heiress (1682) (Cullen)
- The Rover :-
The Rover, in full The Rover; or, The Banish'd Cavaliers, comedy by Aphra Behn, produced and published in two parts in 1677 and 1681. Set in Madrid and Naples during the exile of England’s King Charles II, the play depicts the adventures of a small group of English Cavaliers. The protagonist, the charming but irresponsible Willmore, may have been modeled on John Wilmot Rochester, a poet in the inner circle of Charles II. The hero’s real-life counterpart may also have been John Hoyle, who was a lover of the playwright. (Luebering)
- Oroonoko :-
Oroonoko, in full Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave, novel by Aphra Behn, published in 1688. Behn’s experiences in the Dutch colony of Surinam in South America provided the plot and the locale for this acclaimed novel about a proud, virtuous African prince who is enslaved and cruelly treated by “civilized” white Christians. A prince in his own country, Oroonoko has been educated in a Western manner. Behn’s suggestion that “primitive” peoples are morally superior to Europeans was taken by many of her contemporaries as an abolitionist stance. Still her best-known work, the book is one of the earliest examples of the philosophical novel in English, and it influenced the development of the novel in general. Oroonoko was adapted for the theatre by Thomas Southerne and performed in 1695. (Luebering)
- Response to her Death :-
When Aphra Behn died in April 1689, her literary reputation was considerable, despite the fact that she was politically out of favour with the new monarchs, William and Mary. She was buried in Westminster Abbey, which had recently become the resting place of honour for poets. Only a few days after her death the anonymous An Elegy Upon the Death of Mrs A Behn, the Incomparable Astraea. was published. The author, 'a young lady of quality' starts by praising Behn as a female champion, asking:
"Who now of all the inspired Race,
Shall take Orinda's Place?
Or who the Hero's Fame shall raise?
Who now shall fill the Vacant Throne?"
She then presents the loss of Astraea as a triumph for men, who can now reassert their rule over women:
"Let all our Hopes despair and dye,
Our Sex for ever shall neglected lye;
Aspiring Man has now regain'd the Sway,
To them we've lost the Dismal Day..."
However, along with this lament for the 'female champion' comes the recognition that while Behn might have presented an enabling model for women writers, her lack of virtue in her private life compromised this: the elegist says:
'Twas a pity that she practised what she taught'.
Behn is two things here: a champion of women, and a writer whose literary skill in describing the arts of love in her poetry and fiction is inextricably, and problematically, linked to her personal sexual experience. These two emphases are both rooted in a sense of Behn not as a constructor of imaginative fiction but as a model: an exemplar.(Abigail and O'Connor )
- Conclusion :-
In a time when very few authors—let alone female authors—could support themselves through their craft, Aphra Behn was a well known and highly regarded writer in London. She wrote many plays for the London stage, penned poetry, and wrote what some consider the first English novel (though others consider it a novella or a somewhat long short story). Much of her work decries the unequal treatment of women in her era, and she suffered the consequences of these claims by enduring harsh criticism and even arrest.
- References :-
- Abigail , Williams, and Kate O'Connor . “Aphra Behn.” Great Writers Inspire, 19 June 2012, writersinspire.org/content/aphra-behn.
- "Aphra Behn." New World Encyclopedia, . 31 Oct 2021, 11:53 UTC. 31 Oct 2022, 13:40 <https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/p/index.php?title=Aphra_Behn&oldid=1059614>.
- Cullen, Patrick. “The Best Plays of Aphra Behn: Must-Read Playwrights.” StageMilk, 25 May 2020, www.stagemilk.com/the-best-plays-of-aphra-behn/.
- “The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica.” Edited by J E Luebering and The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 8 Apr. 2009, www.britannica.com/editor/The-Editors-of-Encyclopaedia-Britannica/4419.
- Lely, Sir Peter. “Aphra Behn .” British Library, www.bl.uk/people/aphra-behn.
- Todd, Janet. “Behn, Aphra [Aphara] (1640?–1689), Writer.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 23 Sept. 2004, doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/1961.
- Todd, Janet . “The First English Woman to Make a Living as a Writer Was Also a Spy.” Literary Hub, 7 Aug. 2017, lithub.com/the-first-english-woman-to-make-a-living-as-a-writer-was-also-a-spy/.
References :- 07
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