by Steven Moore
This is the pornographic novel that the frisky fops who bought The London Jilt were expecting. Published in three installments, the first part is sensational, a masterpiece of erotic intrigue based on a contemporary scandal. Taking advantage of the tabloid interest in the affair between the 27-year-old Lord Grey and his 17-year-old sister-in-law, Lady Henrietta Berkeley, as well as the fad for epistolary novels translated from the French, Behn cunningly begins her novel not at the start of their relationship but a day before the couple plans to consummate it, fanning not “a beginning flame” but “a settled flame that is arrived to the highest degree.”68 Concealed in a farmhouse near Silvia’s family estate, hot-blooded Philander arranges to sneak into his sister(-in-law)’s room the following night—even though they are merely in-laws, their affair qualifies as incest in 17th-century terms—and the first 50 pages count down the hours with mounting excitement as the couple exchanges letters via sneaky servants. Both are “raving” with desire, thrilled at the criminal nature of their forbidden relationship—Silvia especially practically comes at the thought: “I have a thousand streams of killing reflection that flow from that original fountain!” (49)—and in “disordered” prose they arouse each other with rhapsodic expectations for the big night. (If they didn’t masturbate to each other’s letters, I’ll eat my hat. As the narrator says in part 2, a letter “discharges the burden and pressures of the lovesick heart” [221].) The immediacy of the epistolary form tightens the tension: as night falls, they keep exchanging notes with text-messaging frequency, their letters functioning as foreplay. And then? In a sheepish letter sent the next morning, Philander not only apologizes for going limp before Silvia’s “surrendering gates” (56), but recounts how he was almost raped by her father after he sneaked out of Silvia’s room disguised as her maid. (Surprising Philander in the garden, the randy old gent “clapped fifty guineas in a purse into one hand, and something else that shall be nameless into the other” [61].) Still eager to give her soft swain a second chance, still set “to break all laws of decency and duty” (78), Silvia has better luck with Philander the next time, as she purrs in a postcoital letter. Discovered and threatened by her family, she runs away from home and joins Philander in Paris for three months of adulterous bliss before he is jailed for taking part in a political conspiracy. He escapes to Holland, and part 1 ends as Sylvia agrees to his plan to disguise herself as a boy and join him.
Sex and politics intertwine throughout, beginning with the imagery in Philander’s first letter to his “baby” (the first English novel, I believe, in which a guy calls his girlfriend that) where he explains “that after a thousand conflicts between love and honour, I found the god (too mighty for the idol) reign absolute monarch in my soul, and soon banished that tyrant thence” (11). Philander is plotting to overthrow the king, and his affair with Silvia is obviously analogous to his rebellion against the laws of the kingdom. (They also cross party lines: he’s a Whig, she’s a Tory.) The personal is the political in this novel, and as a royalist Behn could not countenance such disloyalty, which may be why she both mocks the lovers’ passions and dramatizes them in exultant, incendiary prose. Even before Philander’s reader-teasing flop and comically humiliating encounter in the garden, Behn describes how one of his letters accidentally fell into the hands of Silvia’s mother who, pretending in front of a neighbor that it was addressed to Silvia’s maid, “turned it so prettily into burlesque love by her manner of reading it, that made madam the duchess laugh extremely” (53). By all accounts a passionate woman, Behn empathizes with the young lovers, but as a loyal subject she mocks them as traitors.
Behn had to wait and see what Lord Grey and Lady Berkeley did next before she could resume writing. After they absconded to Europe (Henrietta married Grey’s servant to get out from under her parents’ legal control), Behn embroiled the young and the restless couple in a soap-operatic plot that gets a little kinky. At night onboard a ship to Holland, Philander’s servant Brilliard “lay so near as to be a witness to all their sighs of love, and little soft murmurs, who now began from a servant to be permitted as an humble companion,” though restricted to aural sex (125). A handsome Hollander named Octavio takes them under his wing and falls for the pretty lad that accompanies Philander (Silvia in drag), suspecting and hoping he is a she, but whom “he resolved to pursue, be the fair object of what sex soever” (124). Silvia, “pleased with the Cavalier in herself, begged she might live under that disguise . . . which did not only add to her beauty but gave her a thousand little privileges which otherwise would have been denied to women,” like flirting with other women (126). A broad-minded bisexual herself, Behn seems to be having fun with all this even as she continues to treat her protagonists as criminals on the lam.
A bitextual romp that has it both ways, part 2 alternates between letters and prose as the plot thickens: for political reasons Philander goes into hiding for a few months, during which time both Octavio and Brilliard begin to lust for Silvia—back in provocative women’s clothing (Behn often notes her slutty fashion sense)—which the jilt sidesteps by way of a complicated bedtrick involving both of them, her maid Antoinette, and an overdose of aphrodisiacs, while Philander falls for the young, convent-bred wife of a 70-year-old man, writing to Octavio with all the juicy details of how he seduced her without knowing she’s Octavio’s sister. (Philander also seduces her maid, living up to his name as a horny philanderer and thereby relieving Octavio and Brilliard of their loyalty to him.) It would have been a formidable technical challenge to convey all this new material in epistolary form, a challenge Behn was apparently in too much of a hurry to face. Then again, she was nothing if not resourceful, and a decade’s experience writing for the theater would have aided her, but the third-person narrative is a more convenient way to explore the characters’ psychology and motives. (Some of it is in the present tense, which retains some of the immediacy of the epistolary mode.) In a way, the contents forced her hand: in part 1, the two principals write sincerely to each other in love’s rhetoric, “for true love is all unthinking artless speaking, incorrect disorder, and without method, as ’tis without bounds or rules” (188), so the letters speak for themselves. But in part 2, the letters are written “with all the art and subtlety that was necessary” for all four characters to pursue their private ends (200), including forgery in Brilliard’s case, all of which would be difficult to follow without Behn’s director’s commentary. In a metafictional glimpse of the novelist at work, Silvia writes a letter in response to one of Philander’s, rethinks it and writes/discards two alternatives, adds more to her first letter, rereads Philander’s and adds a little more, then re-rereads his letter and adds even more—a more effective dramatization of her seesawing emotions than a series of postscripts to her first letter would have conveyed had Behn stuck to a strict epistolary format. An adulterated form suits her adulterous couple. Make that polygamous: part 2 ends as Silvia accepts Octavio’s marriage proposal, conveniently forgetting that she is legally married to Brilliard (who may be already married) and essentially Philander’s common-law wife—and a few months pregnant. Plus, Philander is still married to Silvia’s sister. As I said, a real soap opera.
The third and longest part, published two years later, is entitled The Amours of Philander and Silvia, with Love Letters et cetera relegated to the subtitle, and quite rightly so, for this part contains the fewest letters. But the prose is prosaic, summarizing rather than dramatizing events that were no longer front-page news. By this time (1687), Lord Grey had disgraced himself in the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685—a failed attempt to prevent the Catholic James II from succeeding the Protestant Charles II—and Behn had busied herself writing a few plays and other works. By the time she returned to Love Letters, she seems to have lost some interest in it and wrote it just to wrap up the story and make a few pounds. Instead of imaginatively recreating what her protagonists might have gone through, she mostly sticks to recorded history (as Todd’s annotations reveal), merely substituting he
r characters’ names for the real ones. A sympathetic critic could argue that the shift from passionate love letters to prosaic summary formally enacts the deterioration of Philander’ and Silvia’s relationship, but I suspect the shift was more a matter of expediency than strategy. “He writ in haste and disorder,” the narrator says of one of Octavio’s letters, “as you may plainly see by the style” (296). Part 3 is longer than the others for the same reason Pascal gives a correspondent for an overly long letter, apologizing that he didn’t have time to make it shorter.
The plot continues to grow more sordid: Octavio decides to postpone his marriage to Silvia until she is “delivered of what belonged to his rival” (316; we never learn what becomes of the baby), moving in with his uncle who promptly falls in love with Silvia, who strings him along until the night he is accidentally shot as he surprises them having sex, which forces Octavio to go on the run. Philander impregnates Octavio’s sister and then helps her steal away from home, during which she shoots her aged husband. (She is so disgusted at Philander and herself afterward that she becomes a nun.) Double-dealing Silvia alienates both Philander and Octavio (who, like his sister, joins a monastery), and craftily allows long-suffering Brilliard to have his way with her to keep him under her thumb. The Duke of Monmouth, a pretender to the throne, is introduced in the person of Cesario, who is as lusty as Philander, underscoring Behn’s equation of political treachery with illicit sex: Before he is shot, Octavio’s uncle lectures him that “to neglect the nation for a wench is flat treason against the state,” and that wenches like Silvia are the equivalent of spies and deserve to be shot (281). I can imagine what he would have thought of Cesario’s mistress, who is into witchcraft and employs a sorcerer to aid her lover’s political ambitions. Behn continues to play with gender confusion and homosexual desire—Philander is aroused to see how closely Octavio’s sister resembles his friend, and Silvia returns to crossdressing and almost teases a young nobleman into switching teams—implicitly condemning all these destructive, dishonorable characters as deviants from political, religious, and sexual orthodoxy. The novel ends with the failed rebellion, partly due to Philander’s betrayal of Cesario on the battlefield, but only the pretender suffers. Cesario’s lover dies of grief, but her sorcerer gets off scot-free, Silvia runs off with her pimp Brilliard “and daily makes considerable conquests where e’er she shows the charmer,” and Philander is forgiven and “came to Court in as much splendor as ever, being very well understood by all good men” (439).
That sardonic conclusion would have been unthinkable by most earlier novelists. Bunyan would have sent them all to hell, and others would have at least put the worst possible construction on their fates. But worldly Behn knows better: “Let the censuring world say what it would who never had right notions of things, or ever made true judgments of men’s actions” (425). This is the way of the world, not the way of the romance novel. She makes it clear she opposes acts “beyond the musty rules of law and equity” (399), but she also shows considerably sympathy for these scoundrels, acknowledging that cheaters often prosper and, if nothing else, make for good copy.
There are a few admirable scenes in part 3, as when Silvia and Octavio sit next to each other in silence as the narrator darts back and forth between their thoughts, and the comic transformation of Octavio’s uncle from a Talibanic misogynist—“Whip ’em, whip ’em, replied the uncle, I hate the young cozening baggages. . . . He said if he were to make laws, he would confine all young women to monasteries where they should never see man till forty, and then come out and marry for generation sake, no more” (285)—to a foppish lover. Octavio’s public induction into holy orders is narrated in a luxuriant, sensuous manner that has the female audience swooning. There’s a necromantic scene that anticipates Gothic horror, and the erotic realism throughout is startling, considering this was a novel intended for general audiences (unlike The London Jilt). Behn’s depiction of the boredom and disgust that creeps into a relationship based on sex is modern, as is her psychologically acute portrayal of people who return to ex-lovers no matter how badly they were mistreated. So despite some stylistic laziness, part 3 brings the novel to a strong, morally complicated conclusion. Fortunately, the sum is greater than its parts, making Love Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister a milestone in the development of the English novel, and even “the first English novel” in the opinion of at least one critic.69
The first-person narrator who gradually encroaches on part 3 of Love Letters, accounting for how she came by certain information and even witnessing one episode, gate-crashes Behn’s most famous novella, Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave (1688), and turns this exemplary history into a story about herself. This is one of the earliest examples of a conflicted narrator—like Ishmael in Moby-Dick, Marlow in Heart of Darkness, Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby—for whom a charismatic figure forces a reevaluation of his or her moral values. The first word of Oroonoko is “I,” and the reader needs to keep an eye on that pronoun as she tells the exotic story of an African prince who falls in love with a woman named Imoinda, only to see her claimed by his grandfather for his harem. In a replay of the older/younger men rivalries in Love Letters, Oroonoko sneaks into the harem and has sex with her before his impotent grandfather can, but he is devastated when he hears a false report of her death. Shortly after, he is tricked into slavery and transported to Surinam (then an English colony on the northeast coast of South America), where his inherent nobility and non-African good looks exempt him from slave labor. He is delighted to learn that Imoinda is not dead but in Surinam as well, and pregnant with their child. But when Oroonoko suspects his English “hosts” do not intend to fulfill their promise to return him and his new family to Africa, he leads a poorly conceived slave revolt, which is easily put down. He is tortured, and vows revenge, willing to die in the effort if necessary: he first kills his wife (with her eager assent), but then lingers for days around her beheaded corpse and loses the strength and will to resist when the English colonists track him down (via the corpse stench). They then slowly mutilate him in one of the most gruesome scenes outside Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, and the novella ends with the narrator’s vow to enshrine his memory in her book.
The novella has been read as a critique of slavery and colonialism, but such readings miss the point. Oroonoko himself captures and sells slaves, and when his fellow blacks cave, he angrily admits he made a mistake “endeavouring to make those free who were by nature slaves, poor wretched rogues fit to be used as Christians’ tools; dogs, treacherous and cowardly, fit for such masters . . .” (66; my italics). Oroonoko is not about slavery or race but about nobility and honor; he has those qualities, the other Africans don’t, and the real evil (Behn implies) is failing to distinguish between those who are by nature noble and those who aren’t. It’s a matter of character, not race, for many of the white colonists are also “treacherous and cowardly.” One of them “was a fellow whose character is not fit to be mentioned with the worst of slaves” (64). Nor does the narrator condemn colonialism; she wishes only that Charles II had appointed better administrators, had recognized Surinam’s potential, and hadn’t traded it later to the Dutch for Manhattan. Colonialism isn’t the problem, the narrator feels, only colonial mismanagement by dishonest, ignoble people.
It is religion, not slavery or colonialism, that receives the brunt of Behn’s criticism. Oroonoko’s diatribe against his fellow slaves continues: “they wanted only but to be whipped into the knowledge of the Christian gods to be the vilest of all creeping things, to learn to worship such deities as had not the power to make them just, brave, or honest” (66). The novella is a sustained attack against not merely those Christians who don’t live by Christian principles, but against religion itself. The novella begins with the narrator’s rapturous description of Surinam’s Edenic qualities, adding, “religion would here but destroy that tranquillity” (11). She contrasts Oroonoko’s “heathen” morals with the “ill morals . . . practiced in Christian countries, where t
hey prefer the bare name of religion and, without virtue or morality, think that’s sufficient” (17). When Imoinda is ordered to join the elderly king’s harem, she receives “the Royal Veil,” which evokes the Catholic practice of taking the veil by “brides of Christ” solicited for His celestial harem. There’s a sharper dig at Catholicism when the narrator explains why the Surinam natives would make easy converts: “by the extreme ignorance and simplicity of them, it were not difficult to establish any unknown or extravagant religion among them, and to impose any notions or fictions upon them. For seeing a kinsman of mine set some paper afire with a burning-glass, a trick they had never before seen, they were like to have adored him for a god, and begged he would give them the characters or figures of his name that they might oppose it against winds and storms, which he did, and they held it up in those seasons and fancied it had a charm to conquer them, and kept it like a holy relic” (58). This isn’t imperialistic condescension but a recognition of the superstitious nature of all religions. The narrator is one of the English colonists and dutifully makes an effort to instruct Imoinda and Oroonoko in “the knowledge of the true God” in addition to other Western beliefs, “But of all discourses [Oroonoko] liked that the worst, and would never be reconciled to our notions of the Trinity, of which he ever made a jest; it was a riddle, he said, would turn his brain to conceive, and one could not make him understand what faith was” (49).70