Abstract
Aphra Behn’s kaleidoscopic authorial personae, alternately defiant and needy, amorously insinuating and zealously patriotic, mocking and self-pitying, have fascinated scholars since the late 1980s, when Jacqueline Pearson and Janet Todd called attention to her use of the prostitute as a figure for the woman author.1 According to Catherine Gallagher’s influential reading of her authorial personae, Behn appeals for the sympathy due a woman who must please men for money, who must sell herself by neglecting her own taste to obey the market’s demands and pander to vulgar expectations with the seductive tricks of the authorial trade. In Behn’s theatrical prologues and epilogues, Gallagher finds her vacillating between erotic flattery and pathos, first seducing her audience, then satirically commenting on stage eroticism. By her refusal to inhabit a consistent persona, Behn represents herself as the owner and purveyor of a series of alienable selves, each of which gestures towards an elusive “real” self. She repeatedly enacts a contradiction between her authorial claim of mastery over the self and its creations and her need to sell, a process Gallagher calls “the splendors and miseries of authorship.”2 Gallagher’s persuasive depiction of Behn as a brilliant manipulator, as well as a victim, of the codes of marketplace ideology has influenced most subsequent Behn studies and supported the view of Behn as a “public woman” whose role is structured by the logic of the marketplace and her own commodification.3
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Notes
Jacqueline Pearson, The Prostituted Muse: Images of Women and Women Dramatists, 1642–1737 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988)
Janet M. Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing, and Fiction, 1660–1800 (London: Virago, 1989).
Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 87.
For a critique of this view, see Derek Hughes, The Theatre of Aphra Behn (London: Palgrave, 2001).
Danielle Bobker, “Behn: Auth-Whore or Writer? Authorship and Identity in The Rover”, Restoration and 18th Century Theatre Research 11, no. 1 (1996): 32–9.
“To Mrs. Wharton”, in Edward Young, The Idea of Christian Love, Being a Translation, at the Instance of Mr. Waller, of a Latin Sermon, 1688, vii-viii. See also Janet Todd, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 264.
Montague Summers, ed., The Works of Aphra Behn, 6 vols. (London: W. Heinemann, 1915), 6:119-21.
Robert A. Erickson, “The Generous Heart: Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, and the Woman Writer”, in The Language of the Heart, 1600–1750 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 147–84.
See Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 31–7.
Albert O. Hirschman, Rival Views of Market Society and Other Recent Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 36.
Felix Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964).
In a related argument, Ros Ballaster distinguishes between economic and political interest as motives for women’s authorship and surmises that Behn may have preferred to represent herself as a promoter of her own economic interest rather than as the agent of a political interest. Ballaster, “Seizing the Means of Seduction: Fiction and Feminine Identity in Aphra Behn and Delarivier Manley”, in Women, Writing, History, 1640–1740, ed. Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 93–108.
Warren L. Chernaik, The Poetry of Limitation: A Study of Edmund Waller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968)
Earl Roy Miner, The Cavalier Mode from Jonson to Cotton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971).
Joshua Scodel, “The Cowleyan Pindaric Ode and Sublime Diversions”, in A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration, ed. Alan Craig Houston and Steven C. A. Pincus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 180–210.
Raymond A. Anselment, Loyalist Resolve: Patient Fortitude in the English Civil War (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1988)
Erma Kelly, “’small Types of Great Ones’: Richard Lovelace’s Separate Peace”, in The English Civil Wars in the Literary Imagination, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 81–101.
Cyril Hackett Wilkinson, ed., The Poems of Richard Lovelace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), 38–40.
Thomas N. Corns, “Marvell, Lovelace, and Cowley”, in Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 221–68.
Anselment, Loyalist Resolve; James Loxley Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars: The Drawn Sword (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997)
Alan Rudrum, “Royalist Lyric”, in The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution, ed. N. H. Keeble (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 181–97.
George Thorn-Drury ed., The Poems of Edmund Waller (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), 133.
Paul H. Fry, The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 5.
Joshua Scodel, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 145–96.
Peter Hughes, “Wars within Doors: Erotic Heroism in Eighteenth-Century Literature”, in The English Hero, 1660–1800, ed. Robert Folkenflik (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1982), 168–94.
James Grantham Turner, “The Properties of Libertinism”, Eighteenth-Century Life 9, n. s. 3 (1985): 75–87.
Messenger, Pastoral Tradition and the Female Talent: Studies in Augustan Poetry (New York: AMS Press, 2001), 33–4.
Heidi Laudien argues that the nurturing capacity of Nature in Behn’s pastoral poems derives from Theocritus. Laudien, “Ladies of the Shade: The Pastoral Poetry of Aphra Behn and Elizabeth Singer Rowe”, in The Female Wits: Women and Gender in Restoration Literature and Culture, ed. Pilar Cuder-Domínguez, Zenñn Luis-Martínez, and Juan A. Prieto-Pablos (Huelva: Universidad de Huelva, 2006).
Alvin Snider, “Atoms and Seeds: Aphra Behn’s Lucretius”, CLIO: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History 33, no. 1 (2003): 1–24.
Erickson, The Language of the Heart, 1600–1750 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 147–84.
On Behn’s subtle criticism of the new regime here and in her ode to Dr. Burnet, see Stella P. Revard, Politics, Poetics, and the Pindaric Ode: 1450–1700 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2008), 169–76.
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© 2013 Mary E. Trull
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Trull, M.E. (2013). Interest and Retirement in Aphra Behn’s Odes. In: Performing Privacy and Gender in Early Modern Literature. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137282996_6
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