‘Thou monarch of my Panting Soul’: Hobbesian Obligation and the Durability of Romance in Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters

Abstract

Aphra Behn’s novel Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1685–87) imagines the conditions of political obligation during Monmouth’s Rebellion, when James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, tried and failed to unseat his Catholic uncle, James II, after the death of Charles II in 1685. Because Love-Letters speaks to both the history of genre and to the history of social contract theory, I suggest in this essay that it must be read as a novel and as political philosophy at once. Behn’s text coordinates the possibility of narrative truth with the possibility of Tory loyalty by representing the partial breakdown of Thomas Hobbes’s vision of political consensus, a consensus Hobbes predicates upon the uniformity of the passion that moves every person to become a subject. Love-Letters’ representation of a political crisis that culminates in 1688 with the forced ‘abdication’ of James II links the failure of Hobbesian political theory, I will suggest, to the voice of the novel’s narrator; this narrator enters Love-Letters locally to determine when its actors might still incarnate passion’s truth.