by Janet Todd
Nor did Aphra Behn fit in with the progressive sense of literature, the rise of the woman novelist, for example, in compensatory tandem with the rise of the male. Later eighteenth-and nineteenth-century fiction simply differed from Behn’s supposed masterpiece, Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister, a long work that had more in common with old historical romance and postmodern pastiche than with the realist novel—although, if one is searching for ‘the first novel’, it is hard to see why Robinson Crusoe or Pamela should be preferred to this. Her poetry too did not conform. It did not learn to express the woman in any absolute distinctive way. The French feminist writer Hélène Cixous wrote that ‘Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies—for the same reasons Woman must put herself into the text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement.’9 Behn did not exactly do this, not in these terms, for she wrote in many respects identically to men. But she did do an equally revolutionary thing: she made a public space for women. All five of the female playwrights who suddenly flourished just after her death, ‘Ariadne’, Catherine Trotter, Mary Fix, Delarivier Manley and Susannah Centlivre, saw her as their most important precursor.
Now post-Restoration, post-Victorian and postmodern, we should be able to cope with Aphra Behn, for, although secretive, she has many advantages for her reader. She thought a good deal about images of women and the strategies they used to find their way through life. Her historical moment, buttressed by her own temperament, situated her in a place between two patriarchal concepts of woman, one biblical, the other secular: of woman seen through the misogyny of the Bible as the weaker vessel of sin and sex, and of woman as a physical, emotional and intellectual entity distinct from a man, ruled not by Eve’s fault but by her oversensitive body. Behn was curiously, although not completely, free from the first, while her antipathy to the second fuelled many of her irritated generalisations about women; opposing both, she asserted female desires and appetites when the prevailing culture taught that God had ordained women to delegate most of these. She also thought about writing and the relation of writing to the self and to the state which was its context. Sexual politics was certainly her subject, but so was sexy politics and political sex—as it was for many in her circle who saw the entanglement of sex and power. She was fascinated by the interface between political and personal, the world and the word, culture and acts.
Here is another hurdle. We are used to seeing outspoken, ground-breaking women in a liberal mould, for feminism, liberalism and the rights of man (and woman) have become yoked. Behn, however, held to the very tradition that Milton and other icons of protest so ringingly deplored: that of divine-right monarchy and elitist aristocratic culture. In public pronouncements, she was a snobbish high Tory. For the people, slaves or the London rabble, and for democracy of any sort she expressed nothing but contempt. To her, the prerogative of a single distinctive man ensured freedom more satisfactorily than the will of a majority swayed by un-investigated desires and the loudest demagogues. She had grown up under Puritan rule and she associated any movement towards Parliamentary democracy with moral coercion, venality and vulgarity. From a modern point of view she was not even consistent in reaction: she was a patriarchalist in state politics, a Cartesian in psychology, and a contract theorist in family matters.
Now Aphra Behn has come into vogue, read and taught throughout the English-speaking world. Fittingly, her arrival has been due to the work that gave her currency after her death (albeit in another play-wright’s dramatisation), her short story of an African slave-prince, Oroonoko. This no longer seems, as it did in the eighteenth century, a sentimental romance in exotic setting, but, rather, the very model of twentieth-century interest in issues of gender, race and class. That Behn expressed none of these in an entirely palatable way makes her teasing and seductive. In fitting contemporary fashion, she renders them unsteady categories.
Behn wrote in almost all available genres—except the sermon. These demanded different poses, the pastoral lover, the appealing playwright, the prophetic singer, the bawdy actress, the humble admirer, and the supplicant. She is more than any one of these, but never less than their sum. Each genre demanded an audience to be seduced in distinct ways, through different voices displaying coyness, pathos or dignity. It was the repertoire of the whore, she knew. She also knew that all writing had its whorish element.
Aphra Behn was a professional spy, code-named Astrea and agent 160, before she became a professional writer. When she wrote her secret reports to London from Antwerp, she wrote partly in cypher. The habit persisted into her literary works, which also need decoding. In secret letters, one name may stand in for another, a commercial report be really a political one, an amorous encounter a treacherous one. In similar fashion, Behn’s works transform and transmute their material so that they function on many levels. The black slave Oroonoko may stand in for the white British king, the male aristocrat for the female hack writer. A romantic novel may become a warning and a presentiment.
I have perhaps made a more political Behn than some would wish, fetishising this aspect as the central one of her story. All I can plead is that I did not start out with this conception. In his play Volpone, the Renaissance dramatist Ben Jonson created an English knight called Sir Politic Would-Be, who believed that meat could be cut in cyphers and coded messages delivered through cabbages and Colchester oysters. I would not like to be associating Behn with a butt of Ben Jonson, a playwright for whom she had most ambivalent feelings. Yet, coded state politics does seem to me to be at the heart of Behn’s later professional life, however she may have struggled against it. She wrote in political modes; sometimes she assented to their assumptions, at other times not. In this biography, I have argued for a woman growing into Royalist politics, partly as the buttress of social coherence, partly as a grounding of personal identity, and partly as support for an aesthetic enterprise. I have accepted that Behn’s public Royalist expression, so reiterated, must have had some authenticity beyond desire for financial reward. Yet she was a hack as well as an artist, needing to eat before she could write, and I have assumed that, while I am telling a primarily public tale of professional loyalties, other more scandalous tales might be told of hidden deviousness, of gutter politics and of writing sold to the highest bidder. There is much not entirely explained by the Royalist Behn—the persistent ascription to her of anti-Royalist works, her part in the compiling of anti-government satires for men who very definitely opposed what she overtly served, her involvement with turncoats, republicans and trimmers.
Inevitably there is instability in what follows, both in tone and material. There is much speculation, along with some scholarship. It is a curious venture to write the biography of a woman whose first twenty-six or twenty-seven years are not securely known. Michael Holroyd has said that biographies of writers are written in collaboration with the posthumous subject of the biography. I have to say that I have had less than perfect collaboration from dead agent 160.
For much of the time I have used the words ‘perhaps’ and ‘possibly’ and kept to the subjunctive. Sometimes, however, I have lapsed and left speculation in the declarative. Not everything here is ‘true’; nor is it likely to be proven one way or the other, for the Restoration so shocked the English people that they were still mythologising its wickedness far into the next century, from which moment many of the stories of its actors derive. I can only hope that not too much flatly and absolutely contradicts what I have said. As a discerning reader will no doubt notice, the story of Aphra Behn in Kent as a child is corroborated only by a couple of jottings in private books and nothing links her incontrovertibly with Surinam or definitively explains why she should be there. What countries she visited except Flanders and when is not known and what propaganda she wrote and for whom is hidden. Whether or not she married is unclear, whether she had an abundance of lovers, male or female, whether she bore childr
en as Wycherley said she did, whether she was a whore or just a scribbling woman, all this is opaque. All I can hope is that the reader, the one Aphra Behn cajoles as her ‘Good, Sweet, Honey, Sugar-Candied Reader’, will begin this biography with ‘perhaps’ and ‘possibly’, and end it murmuring ‘probably’.
Yet I would not have attempted this biography if I had not thought that, through all the vagueness of historical fact and uncertainty of late twentieth-century opinion, there was some definite personality emerging, a woman who wrote, tried, yearned, changed a little and stayed much the same. Aphra Behn was a feminist in the sense that she thought as a woman and thought through being a woman, but she was an awkward one. She was not separatist or much involved in the modern feminist business of revising culture and reviewing experience, except in her laments for a mythical golden age of female education. Nor was she much interested in rights of any kind. Her feminism was interactive and dialectical, speaking in many voices, and it remains disturbing in its context of a cynicism so deep it undercuts all fixities. I am sympathetic to the image that has emerged to me from Aphra Behn’s writings, but I have not tried to write what she was so well able to write for herself in her addresses to her readers: a polemical defence.
Behn is remarkable for keeping herself through her work. Since she did, she knew she wrote as well as anyone and, since popularity demands conventionality, she also knew she wrote like any appreciated man. With all her role-playing, her wheedling of the reader and the audience, her expressed contempt for the popular taste she so easily pleased, her staging of herself as a cozening whore, pathetic female, and unmerciful satirist, she emerges as a rare object indeed: a public female intellectual, a woman of supreme intelligence, a woman of letters.
In the 1670s and 1680s Behn surpassed even the Poet Laureate, John Dryden, in the number of plays performed, and she was courted by several factions as a political poet. Her works are topical, as fits with the times in which she wrote, but they are also, on occasion, subtle and complex, open to irony, ambiguity, and equivocation. At the end of her life, fatigued with pleasing and politics, she wanted literary fame—a shocking stance in the context of later women writers who came before the public in an attitude of profound apology and submission. She deserves this fame both for her cultural importance and because she wrote many competent, energetic works, some of the first order: a few plays like the two The Rovers, Sir Patient Fancy and The Luckey Chance, the prose Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister, Oroonoko and The Fair Jilt, and the poems ‘Desire’, ‘Love Arm’d’ and ‘The Golden Age’. They are a substantial achievement. For all her secrecy and obscurity, Behn deserves biography too, several biographies—as long as authors and readers share her sense of identity as masquerade and of fact as partly fictive, and accept her memoirist’s humility before the ‘ingenious’ subject:
The reader must remember that there are few Astreas arise in our age, and till such an One does appear, all our Endeavours in Encomiums on the last, must be vain...
Chapter 1
Beginnings in Kent
‘a most beautifull woman, & a most Excellent Poet’
Aphra Behn’s age was the Restoration, that vibrant, violent and shoddy period which began with the arrival in Kent of King Charles II in 1660 and ended with the flight of his brother, James II, in 1688. No one had quite anticipated its style. In 1654, under the rule of Oliver Cromwell, the Royalist gentlewoman Dorothy Osborne wrote of the ‘folly that possesses young people of this age, and the liberties they take to themselves’; she concluded that ‘the want of a Court to govern themselves by is in great part the cause of their ruin’.1 She could hardly have been more wrong. When the Restoration came and the court returned to London, scarred by years of living in exiled hope and fantasy, it delivered a rude shock to the country, which did not easily recover its equilibrium. Gilbert Burnet, a chronicling Anglican cleric, saw ‘a spirit of extravagant joy’ overspreading the nation, causing people to turn from ‘the very professions of virtue and piety: all ended in entertainments and drunkenness, which overrun the three kingdoms to such a degree, that it very much corrupted all their morals’.2
Burnet’s assessment was in the future. At the time, the rejoicing was almost universal, as the nation responded to Charles II’s desire to make his return a theatrical show. In style the Interregnum had not been the mass of unrelieved grey and black the Royalists liked to depict and the Oxford antiquarian, Anthony à Wood, had been appalled at the lavish dress of junior scholars, all Presbyterians and Independents, who sported ribboned hats, powdered hair, laced bands and tassels, snake-bow bandstrings and long cuffs.3 But the King and his courtiers brought with them far more extravagant French fashions, as well as some naughty ones: buttoned smocks for easy access were said to have been adopted by the King’s current mistress.
King Charles II arrived in Dover, travelling across from the Continent on the Naseby, a name recording a Parliamentary victory—the ship was speedily renamed The Royal Charles and its sailors promised a month’s extra pay. He journeyed from Dover to Canterbury where he attended Sunday service in the cathedral, met his new Privy Council, and gave the Order of the Garter to General Monck, soon to be the Duke of Albemarle, who had largely brought about the royal return by switching sides. He delayed his arrival in London to coincide with his thirtieth birthday on 29 May.
Eager to come to the attention of the restored King, the young Earl of Rochester hymned, ‘loyall Kent renews her Arts agen, / Fencing her wayes with moving groves of men.’ But it was in London that the initial enthusiasm grew hottest and even the usually dour diarist, John Evelyn, glowed,
This day came in his Majestie Charles the 2d... to London after a sad, & long Exile, and Calamitous Suffering both of the King & Church: being 17 yeares: This was also his Birthday, and with a Triumph of above 20000 horse & foote, brandishing their swords and shouting with unexpressable joy: The wayes straw’d with flowers, the bells ringing, the streetes hung with Tapissry, fountaines running with wine: The Major, Aldermen, all the Companies in their liver[ie]s, Chaines of Gold, banners; Lords & nobles, Cloth of Silver, gold & vellvet every body clad in, the windos & balconies all set with Ladys, Trumpets, Musick & [myriads] of people flocking the streetes & was as far as Rochester, so as they were 7 houres in passing the Citty, even from 2 in the afternoone ’til nine at night: I stood in the strand, & beheld it, & blessed God.4
The revelry grew so intense that Charles had to make a proclamation against drinking, swearing and debauching in his honour. Yet he was not the man to dampen celebration and dissipation overmuch. He was already involved with the woman whom Gilbert Burnet called ‘vicious and ravenous’, she of the naughty unbuttoned smocks, Barbara Castlemaine, later Duchess of Cleveland. Under royal influence and patronage, brothels turned glamorous and theatres reopened. At both, Nell Gwyn, soon to supplant Lady Castlemaine, found her employment—although she insisted she had been a serving-maid in the former. At home in his rambling, dirty palace of Whitehall, Charles II seemed to be presiding over a perpetual masquerade party. It was soon too much for most people: just over a year after the Restoration, even the loyal diarist and civil servant Samuel Pepys was recording the ‘lewdness and beggary of the Court’.5
None the less, this court had come to stay. Charles re-established the magical custom of touching for the King’s Evil or scrofula and he declared himself in the twelfth year of a reign that had started with his father’s death. There had been no Interregnum and all was as it had been in the Stuart past.
A few poets failed to join in the collective eulogy that greeted the accession and coronation. Andrew Marvell was silent, while his friend John Milton bitterly exclaimed: ‘For this extolled and magnificent nation, regardless both of honour won, or deliverances vouchsafed from heaven, to fall back or rather creep back...to their once abjured and detested thraldom of kingship!’ But Milton and Marvell were exceptions: Dryden, Edmund Waller, and Abraham Cowley all showered the King with complimentary verses, despite
recent panegyrics to his foes. During the Interregnum Waller, for example, had been so terrified when caught plotting for the Royalists that he had thrown himself on to the other side with a fulsome poem to Oliver Cromwell. When the new King commented that the verses to him did not measure up to those for the Protector, Waller diplomatically replied, ‘Sir, we poets never succeed so well in writing truth as fiction.’6 Horribly aware that his last public poem had been ‘Heroical Stanzas’ on the death of Cromwell, Dryden rushed to make the very sun and thunder answer royal need.7 His haste mirrored his anxiety: the King had arrived in London at the end of May and his Astrea Redux was in the shops by mid-June.
The eulogistic activity suited the Stuart concept of kingship, which demanded the almost manic interpreting of act and accident as providential. The King himself was quick to tell the story of his romantic escape after the defeat of Worcester in 1651, especially his seclusion in the Boscobel Oak, an adventure that cried out for symbolic interpretation, given the nation’s patriotic link with oaks. Over the years he would tell it so often that the young Earl of Rochester yawned—despite his father’s heroic role in the escapade. Less well-born poets gleefully leapt on the incidents, so avoiding entanglement with the immediate past and its murky collusions. Perhaps they privately marvelled at the Stuart ability to capitalise on failure.
In this festive time, young Aphra may have been one of the maidens who strewed herbs along the leisurely royal route through Kent and wondered at the height and swarthiness of the new King. Or she might have joined the perpetual party in London. In either case, she was transfixed in a posture of admiration she never publicly changed. Yet, with Pepys who, despite his enthusiasm, noted that the King’s dog shat in the boat like other dogs, Aphra commented on the ordinariness of royalty for all its pomp: in a fictional Restoration in her first written play, The Young King, she makes the onlookers recognise the King only by the people kneeling to him; they cry in response, ‘Good lack a day, ’tis as a Man may say—’tis just such another body as one of us, onely he looks a little more terrably.’