Aphra Behn: A Secret Life

by Janet Todd

  Aphra Behn had certainly been in love—the public assumed a long affair with Hoyle, which she herself invoked when she wished to pass as an expert on amorous affairs. With Hoyle, however, sexual love may rarely have been satisfying, may even have been unconsummated. Later, it was transformed into something between obsession and friendship. No other lover had been publicly talked about for Behn. Now, after a time of relative propriety, hard work and some ill-health, she appears to have become rejuvenated possibly from her travels, with renewed sexual and literary energy, prepared to declare that life was not worth living or literature written without some sexual impetus.

  Loving and writing coalesced in a poem called ‘To Damon’ in which Behn wrote to ask if ‘Damon’ could identify a writer of some anonymous verses. Desire, she noted, crept up on a person ‘In lone recesses’. Its pimp was the letter. The received verses had been

  fill’d with praises of my face and Eyes,

  My verse, and all those usual flatteries

  To me as common as the Air;

  Nor cou’d my vanity procure my care.

  All conventional stuff, but mind worked on words to render them a philtre darting ‘pain / Thro every pleas’d and trembling vein’. Then the body blushed and trembled. The whole experience had been mediated by writing; the reader brushed the verses with her imagination and formed an erotic ‘Image’ that enthralled her body.

  An awakening to sex is caught, too, in another poem of this period called ‘On Desire’. Desire is a poetic spot of time, properly existing in the fantastic Golden Age, in Arcadia; in the real world it is transgressive and wounding, a subtle disease. It was an apt image, since Behn knew well that any sexual passion would at this stage be at odds with her ‘fame’ and would, if known, make her ridiculous:

  Oh! mischievous usurper of my Peace;

  Oh! soft Intruder on my solitude,

  Charming disturber of my ease,

  That hast my nobler fate persu’d,

  And all the Glorys of my life subdu’d.

  Most irritating was the untimeliness of the emotion. Had Behn had such a passion at more suitable years, she might have combined love with interest or honour. She was probably exaggerating when she wrote that ‘princes at my feet did lye,’ but she could certainly have coupled herself with or been kept by a man of some status, had she had her feelings more opportunely. In an early poem, ‘Damon, being asked a reason for Loveing’, a young woman rebuffs a well-heeled lover by taunting him with his taciturnity. Given Behn’s later pride in her fluency and Hoyle’s complaints over her garrulity, this might well convey a memory. In the past, men’s words, their beauty, their gifts and offers had failed to awake ‘the unform’d somthing—to desire’.

  Yes, yes, tormenter, I have found thee now;

  And found to whom thou dost thy being owe,

  ’Tis thou the blushes dost impart,

  For thee this languishment I wear,

  ’Tis thou that tremblest in my heart

  When the dear Shepherd do’s appear,

  I faint, I dye with pleasing pain,

  My words intruding sighing break

  When e’re I touch the charming swain

  When e’re I gaze, when e’re I speak.

  Thy conscious fire is mingl’d with my love,

  As in the sanctify’d abodes

  Misguided worshippers approve

  The mixing Idol with their Gods.

  In vain, alas! in vain I strive

  With errors, which my soul do please and vex,

  For superstition will survive,

  Purer Religion to perplex.15

  Her only comfort is her usual arrogant assumption, that what she feels others also feel, and that chaste and apparently asexual women are fraudulently hiding similar sexual feelings.

  The novel which I believe Aphra Behn began at this time seems to have been written in the white heat of resurgent erotic feeling, which may well have been confined to the head and pen. Hoyle had told Behn she was too passionate and unrestrained and, by portraying a series of intense women who lost in the sex game through being uncontrolled, she had implicitly agreed. She was now over forty, the age of the absurd mothers and widows of Restoration comedy like Lady Wishfort and her own Lady Knowell, who were advised by the ends of their plays to leave sex to their daughters. Perhaps writing was a way of neutralising what had so embarrassingly come upon her in middle age. But the book was also a celebrating of an aristocratic promiscuous concept of love that took no notice of what was abandoned for it. By now, Behn was certain that there should be no Whiggish hoarding of the self for fear of religion or ridicule. One must take risks since

  who can be happy without Love? for me, I never numbred those dull days amongst those of my life, in which I had not my Soul fill’d with that soft passion; to Love! why ’tis the only secret in nature that restores Life, to all the felicities and charms of living; and to me there seems no thing so strange, as to see people walk about, laugh, do the acts of Life, and impertinently trouble the world without knowing any thing of that soft, that noble passion, or without so much as having an intreague, or an amusement... with any dear she, no real Love or Cocettre.16

  Behn admitted her own situation, that she still had the torments of love while living without its fulfilment. Such objectless erotic feeling, although inconvenient, was still preferable to sexless calm and indifference:

  (A Medium, I confess, I hate,)

  For when the mind so cool is grown

  As neither Love nor Hate to own,

  The Life but dully lingers on.17

  Behn’s mind was not ‘cool’, then, when she sat down to fictionalise the scandal of Lord Grey and Lady Henrietta, and she had her own agenda beyond the political one. In the past, she had been attacked for the sexual charge in her plays, but prose could deliver it a hundred times more effectively. Thus, an intended piece of propaganda became a great erotic novel: Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister.

  Perversely, having denied or ignored her sources in so many of her plays, Behn here invented one: a French text to which she would keep ‘close’. The novel was set in a France which she might know—indeed, as part of the pretence that the story was French not English, she made the probably true claim that she had been in France earlier in the year. In the fiction, the civil wars of the French Fronde were supposedly raging, but no English reader could fail to see the allusion to Monmouth in Cesario, to his lover Lady Grey in Mirtilla, to her husband Lord Grey in Philander, to his lover and her sister Lady Henrietta Berkeley in Silvia, and to Henrietta’s husband-of-convenience Turner in Brilljard.18

  Politics comes to the fore early in the book and Silvia is Tory to Philander’s Whig. Silvia assumes that Philander aims at individual glory in his plotting and that she can use the good character of the King to persuade him out of it:

  What has the King, our good, our gracious monarch, done to Philander? How disoblig’d him? Or indeed, what injury to mankind? Who has he oppress’d? Where play’d the tyrant or the ravisher? What one cruel or angry thing has he committed in all the time of his fortunate and peacable reign over us? Whose ox or whose ass has he unjustly taken? What orphan wrong’d, or widow’s tears neglected? But all his life has been one continued miracle; all good, all gracious, calm and merciful: and this good, this godlike King, is mark’d out for slaughter, design’d a sacrifice to the private revenge of a few ambitious knaves and rebels, whose pretence is the public good, and doomed to be basely murdered.19

  As a description of Charles II this is laughable;20 yet it allows the erotic and the royal to merge in the King’s body: ‘I never approach his sacred person,’ writes Silvia breathlessly, ‘but my heart beats, my blood runs cold about me, and my eyes overflow with tears of joy, while an awful confusion seizes me all over.’ The images of Charles and James in Behn’s royal panegyrics will stress the erotic quality of power, in keeping with the renewed Stuart mythography, in which the body of the king holds the authority he wields. Such image
s express the divine-right doctrine, but without stating what had by now become a rather discredited, even absurd, notion.21

  Philander is represented as a libertine. Yet, instead of making her earlier link of Royalism and exciting libertinism, Behn here allowed another common cultural connection: of libertinism, selfishness and rebellion. Philander embodies her considered belief that those who opposed tyranny and authority did so not out of desire for universal liberty, but from desire of power for themselves. Philander poses as a Whig, but he is in fact an unprincipled and power-hungry individualist, resenting the sexual affront of Monmouth while taking no heroic action, and disliking the rule of anyone, whether legitimate king or ‘bastard’.22 He exists in a Hobbesian natural realm beyond Royalist authority and Whiggish Parliamentary contracts.

  Most people are stupid and are led by whoever has the will, Philander believes. One of these is Cesario himself, whom Philander can use for his own ends: ‘he is so dull as to imagine that for his sake, who never did us service or good, (unless cuckolding us be good) we should venture life and fame to pull down a true monarch, to set up his bastard over us.’ Philander continues with Cesario / Monmouth, he confesses to Silvia, because, in the vacuum that would follow a coup, there is no reason why he himself should not be the new power as well as another:

  when Three Kingdoms shall ly unpossest, and be expos’d, as it were, amongst the raffling Crowd, who knows but the chance may be mine, as well as any others, who has but the same hazard, and throw for’t; if the strongest Sword must do’t, (as they must do’t) why not mine still?23

  The only genuine ruler is appetite in a commonwealth world where anyone with strength and cunning can control. Shorn of divine significance, the King is indeed but a man. In this case why should not any individual be king, if he has enough self-assertiveness, strength and desire?

  Despite some sexualised politics, however, the domestic and erotic intrigues are Behn’s main subject in her book. She makes little of the known political plots and less of the dramatic trial of Lord Grey, although she uses some of the telling details. For example, Lady Henrietta was said ‘to have gone away with only a night gown and slippers’—a lampoon added that it was a multi-coloured, striped night gown or loose morning dress, and the petticoat was symbolically red and white. Behn exaggerated the informality in her fiction: Silvia ‘thus undrest, walk’d towards the Garden’, then dashed outside to the waiting chariot. The lack of clothes means that she must stay suggestively in bed until Philander arrives.

  Although there are a few letters from others, the bulk of the book unfolds the sexual passion and develops the writing skills of the central pair. Philander, the elder, almost coaches Silvia in rhetoric. This is appropriate since it is the ‘irresistible Idea of Silvia that attracts him, the woman mediated through his imagination, which she herself can help to create. The body itself may fade, his mental image will not. Platonics supersedes erotics at times and Philander becomes the imaginist of sex. He desires to ‘encounter what I already so much adored in Idea, which still I formed just as my fancy wished’.

  In Behn’s poem ‘On Desire’, the erotic blurs sight, so that the ideal not the real can be contemplated. Such a state is romance or disease, and it is this that Silvia suffers at the outset: ‘a strange disorder in my blood, that pants and burns at every Vein...’.24 She is then coached in writing and soon she sees that desire is not enough. She must go about to raise desire or recapture it in the object if she is to keep her man. She also learns that her own desire and simulation of desire are interchangeable in their effect of arousing desire in another. The great temptation of erotic epistolary fiction is narcissism. The eighteenth-century novel, often written by men pretending to be women, was addicted to mirror scenes, in which heroines stare fixedly in their glasses and then form their bodies into images of desire for their lovers and their readers, and almost for themselves. In Love-Letters, the erotic description of the beloved by the lover consciously panders to this narcissism at first. Both Philander and Silvia respond lustily to pictures drawn of each other and of themselves and, as they grow more sophisticated, the pictures become more aware, more hyperbolic. But, as hyperbole increases, so individuality decreases, and the reader sees, in the end, the ‘hot brute’ drudging on. There is a price for the woman’s development: ‘we are only safe by the mean Arts of base Dissimulation, an ill as shameful as that to which we fall.’ Narcissism turns into an assessment of the self for another, a commodification of the body.

  Such representing is connected with what Lucretius had perceived at the heart of sexual politics: desire for mastery. Behn had read that the desire to dominate and destroy was the dark side of love, and she had experienced it herself. The irrational, destructive and almost brutal idea of sexuality emerged in the presentation of the love act as close to violence, ‘vain violence’ of sex in Dryden’s phrase:

  often with a furious Kiss

  They wound the balmy Lip; this they endure

  Because the Joy’s not perfect, ’tis not pure:

  But still some STING remains, some fierce Desire

  To hurt whatever ’twas that rais’d the FIRE....

  The male desire to rape emerges even from the early letters: ‘violent’ love attracts Philander and he fantasises rushing on Silvia with no ‘respect or Awe’, wanting ‘excess of pleasure’. He threatens to express his masculinity ‘and force my self with all the violence of raging Love... and Ravish my delight’.25 When the private fantasy becomes public, Philander sees vast masculine scenarios of erotic power: he will enter Silvia’s house and put it ‘all in a flame’ to prevent her marriage to another man. He visualises stabbing the bridegroom at the altar and torturing the bride. Even when Philander enters the feminised pastoral world, the Arcadia into which he claims love has pulled him, he manages to bring violence with him: for Philander, the rural wind becomes the male lover of coy boughs, which are treated ‘with a transported violence’. At one point he expresses the hedonistic Arcadian vision so dear to Behn with its infantile sexual passivity: he wants ‘to take [Silvia] without controul to shades and Palaces, to live for ever with her, to gaze for ever on her, to eat, to loll, to rise, to play, to sleep, to act o’er all the pleasures and the joys of life with her’.26 The vision is so passive, however, that he cannot accommodate it and he soon thinks of death.

  Sexual experience also moves the now educated Silvia to a kind of violence by destroying her feminine inhibitions. It brings her closer to a man in the thermal categories of the time, which saw males as naturally hotter than females. Once suppressed in the name of femininity, burning anger flows free, and what only discomposed Silvia when she was a maid ‘now puts me into a violence of rage unbecoming my sex’. In other writers, desire exaggerated, then thwarted, becomes feminine hysteria; it is a measure of Behn’s innovation with the character of Silvia that she makes her neither an hysteric nor a melancholic, but something closer to a violent man. Yet she never equates men and women—their social conditions are simply too different. However robust, Silvia must always fear abandonment, as did Ovid’s women, the Portuguese Nun, the writer of ‘Love-Letters to a Gentleman’—and ‘Mrs Affora’ herself when suspecting herself deserted in Antwerp.

  Long after the politics had subsided, sexual explicitness kept Love-Letters popular with the public. Within the conventions of the time, it is indeed an arousing book. Here is Philander approaching Silvia:

  I beheld thee extended on a Bed of Roses, in Garments which, if possible, by their wanton loose negligence and gaiety augmented thy natural Charms: I trembling fell on my Knees by your Bed-side, and gaz’d a while unable to speak for transports of joy and love... I ventur’d to press your lips with mine... [and]... by degrees ravisht a thousand Blisses... her short and double breathings heav’d her Breast, her swelling snowy breast, her hands that grasp’d me trembling as they clos’d, while she permitted mine unknown, unheeded to traverse all her Beauties, till quite forgetting all I’d faintly promised, and wholly abandon
ing my soul to joy, I rusht upon her, who all fainting lay beneath...27

  Despite all this impassioned, erotic prose, however, Behn’s mocking obsession with male sexual failure still makes comic the first effort at consummation between Silvia and Philander. The passage above continues: ‘my useless weight, for on a sudden all my power was fled.’ Not all his beloved’s charms, clasps and sighs can call the ‘fugitive vigor back’. When this is coupled with Silvia’s statement, that Philander’s ‘complection render’d him less capable of the soft play of Love, than any other Lover’, it appears that he, perhaps like John Hoyle, is not good at foreplay.

  Here erotics and politics come together again. Behn had already realised that the comic quality of the rake, so brilliantly exposed in The Rover, could be harnessed for propagandist purposes. The powerful Philander with his impotence, his ravings, his extreme language and his inept planning, is often absurd. The absurdity is neatly caught in the aftermath of the failed consummation. Philander has to escape from Silvia’s room in female clothes, symbol of his late disappointing performance. In these he is apprehended by her amorous father, who falls on the disguised man, now forced to counterfeit a female voice and demeanour. As a ‘failed’ lover, a kind of woman, Philander must submit to the father who can boast, ‘I have my Tools about me’ and places a bag of money in one of his hands and a penis in the other.

  Humour not only serves politics, it could also fulfil a personal purpose. In her love for Hoyle, Behn seems to have gone deep into herself and come close to obsession. Without entirely losing her emotional dependence on Hoyle, she had then moved from this self-destructive phase, concentrating on the surface, taking on more and more masks, gaining friends and using her humour to deflate any rising panic. Although she might burn and sigh erotically, she was not, she hoped, a candidate for romantic martyrdom a second time—as Love-Letters suggested. She intended to be armed with a lethal combination of erotics and humour to offset her obsessive nature.