"The Rover" by Aphra Behn
The Rover, published and first produced in 1677, was Aphra Behn’s most successful play. The original full title, The Rover; or, The Banish ‘d Cavaliers, indicates that the play was a tribute to the formerly exiled cavalier and newly reinstated king, Charles II. The Rover is a dark comedy that mixes themes of prostitution and rape with comic buffoonery. The play expresses its author’s objections to the vulnerability of women in Restoration society. Perhaps ironically, it also appeals to the prurient interests of the audience by putting women in morally compromising situations. Based loosely on her contemporary Thomas Killigrew’s 1564 Thomas; or, The Wanderer(1664), Behn’s play is leaner, less lewd, and more profound. The plot follows the fortunes of opposing lovers, one a woman of quality masquerading as a courtesan and one a wandering rake whose philandering days end when he falls in love with her. Several near-rapes and the tragic case of a jilted courtesan, another character in the play, balance the comic treatment of sexual politics in the seventeenth century. The rover of the title is either Willmore, an exiled English sea captain on shore leave to enjoy the carnival, or Hellena, a young woman hoping to experience life and love before being committed to a convent by her brother. These two rovers meet and fall in love amid witty debates and sexual maneuvering. Willmore has many parallels to Charles II, whose exploits during his twenty-year banishment from England were well known. Charles II enjoyed the play so much that he commissioned a private viewing of it.
Question: 3,Does the use of different terminology to describe prostitutes in the play have an effect on how a given character is perceived, or how the profession as a whole is perceived? Explain.
In The Rover, prostitutes are alternatively referred to as “courtesan” and “whore.” The latter of these terms is stigmatizing, whereas the former lends the profession a somewhat glamorizing tone. Language thus functions in this situation to draw a distinction between the “upper class” and “lower class” prostitutes, and with this distinction comes a variance both in respect and agency. Lucetta, for example, is referred to as a “whore”—which invites the audience or reader to imagine her as a rougher character, one who is perhaps more coarse and conniving. Her actions correspond to this image, as her actions in the play are cold, cruel, and viciously deceptive. Angellica, on the other hand, is alternatively referred to as “mistress” and “courtesan”—terms that have a softer and more dignified feel to them. Her actions are correspondingly more considerate and courtly.
As Belvile rightly pointed out, “..whatever extravagances we commit in these faces, we own may not be obliged to answer ‘em.” The same freedom furthermore led to a very flawed assumption that all gypsies were available for sex.Hellena who is described as ‘a gay young woman designed for a nun’ persists right from the start on her willingness to select matrimony over nunnery which is rejected by her brother, “Do not fear the blessing of that choice. You shall be a nun." She questioned and opposed the lack of agency with resilience: “Prithee tell me, what dost thou see about me that is unfit for love — have not I a world of youth? a humour gay? a beauty passable? a vigour desirable? well shap’d? clean limb’d? sweet breath’d? and sense enough to know how all these ought to be employ’d to the best advantage: yes, I do and will. Therefore lay aside your Hopes of my Fortune, by my being a devotee,..” Unapologetically, she endeavoured to find a suitable match with whom she could have sexual intercourse. Shattering the stereotypical image of a high-class Puritan woman, she asked: “Why must we be either guilty of fornication or murder if we converse with you men? And is there no difference between left to love me, and leave to lie with me?”
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”.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.
Her virginal sister, Florinda, and the sexually liberated courtesan, Angellica Bianca, adopt similar goals in pursuit of passion. They are nothing like the subordinate females of Puritan propriety, but witty, competent matches for the men they meet. Through their strong personalities, Behn suggests at early British women’s potential to feel and act confidently on sexual feelings, thus " desire” and “[subverting] the construction of woman as a self-policing and passive commodity”.A common prostitute dupes the comic figure, Ned Blunt, despite his comrades warning of possible deception. Florinda’s brother Pedro, along with the English band, becomes so absorbed in the libertine hunt for sexual conquest that he nearly rapes his own sister. The blundering behavior of the English cavaliers speaks to the reason and abilities of women and encourages late Stuart Britain to respect the female libertine as a strong, capable lady, not a whore.
Each woman begins the play bound one of the three fates: Florinda to marriage, Hellena to the nunnery, and Angellica Bianca to well-paid prostitution. Through Carnival, however, these women abandon their prescribed positions with disguises to “be mad as the rest, and take all innocent freedoms,” including to “outwit twenty brothers” . The masquerade serves multiple purposes. First, disguise equalizes the class distinctions, “[blurring, criticizing] and…even [satirizing] the difference between the categories available to women” . When lost in the festivities, the ladies join all that “are, or would have you think they’re courtesans,” the most sexually liberated women . Their initial costumes as gypsies allow them to approach men in a feminized, desirous way. Gypsies already occupy the role of outcast on the liminal edge of society; by taking on their looks, Florinda and Hellena put themselves and their sexuality outside the confines of cultural expectation. Their decision implies Behn’s opinion that her peers should seek to escape the restrictions that define them.
At the same time, celebrated sisterhood and female expression of feelings and desires and mocked the rigidity of heteronormative gender roles which were blurred in the carnival festivity where identities were unrevealed and cross-dressing, wizarding were used as tools to create bewilderment for smoother transgression.
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