Aphra Behn: A Secret Life

by Janet Todd

  Death of Charles II and Coronation of James II

  ‘there is an unspeakable pow’r and pleasure in obliging’

  Aphra Behn entertained a number of ideas which were especially unconventional for a woman. She believed that sexual passion should result in enjoyment in the flesh and not be allowed to develop into a mind-binding construction such as love or romance. Romantic love was the enemy of necessary self-promotion and she saw it as a mistaken result of culture. Sexual desire was implicated in women’s social and psychological oppression, and, while it could be eulogised as the fuel of life at one moment, at another it was an inevitably masochistic and addictive drug. Nowhere was sexual desire free from other desires, for ease, for significance, for mastery and for degradation. On her own pulse she knew that one did not always act in accordance with one’s insights and that there was a perversity at the heart of things. She might mock those who believed in romance, but she too had been inspired by desire for the unattainable, perhaps more than once. Over the next months, Behn investigated her ideas of romance and perversity and, in the process, inevitably scrutinised herself as a sexual being.

  First, however, she had a debt to pay. Fletcher’s late Renaissance play Valentinian had been adapted by the Earl of Rochester before his death. Rochester had retained much of the wording of the old work but radically changed the effect. Both new and old plays aired the perennial problem of what to do with a bad ruler but, where Fletcher had solved it by assassination, then revenge, Rochester had left the future ambiguous and democratically allowed common soldiers to commit the resolving murder. The rape of Lucina by the Emperor sets matters in motion in both works, but, far more than Fletcher, Rochester luxuriated in the act, making the passive, sensuous body of the victim centre stage in voyeuristic Restoration fashion. Behn may not have cared for this exposure of vulnerable female flesh which, after her earliest works, she tended to avoid. While sharing its absorption in royal sexuality she may also have disapproved the play’s obvious attack on Charles II in the person of the libidinous Emperor. Yet, she probably had enough admiration for the play, and for Rochester to feel complimented if she were, as seems possible, invited to prepare (or help to prepare) Valentinian for the stage, as well as providing a prologue.

  Since she had listened to his strictures on the ‘vile’ Mrs Behn, Anne Wharton’s enthusiasm for Burnet may have cooled. He had too ardently praised the hated Mulgrave’s Essay Upon Poetry, which censured her uncle Rochester, the ‘late Convert’, for his ‘Bawdry barefac’d’ and his ‘nauseaous Songs’.1 So, when she planned to organise a performance and printing of her uncle’s work, Wharton may have felt free to approach Behn for professional help. She occasionally came from the country to stay at her husband’s lodgings in London, but, since she was near death and suffering from headaches, sore throats and sore eyes, complicated by the effects of mercury treatment, she probably did not actually meet Aphra Behn. It was just as well since Wharton was notorious for her social pride, the ‘desperate greatness’ of her spirit.2

  Rochester’s manuscript of 1679 had a cast list suitable for the King’s Theatre of the time, but there is no record of an actual performance. When it was staged sumptuously on 11 February 1684 by the United Company, the female lead – the raped Lucina – was taken by Elizabeth Barry, and a prologue written by Behn was spoken by Sarah Cooke. In the acting career of both Barry and Cooke, the Earl had been instrumental. So the play became a tribute to Rochester from four women on whom he had had great influence: the poets Aphra Behn and Anne Wharton, and the actors Elizabeth Barry and Sarah Cooke.3

  In the revised play, a few of Rochester’s scenes are shifted to make more contrasts in tone, but the potentially offensive subject of homosexual paedophilia remains. The Emperor wantons with the ‘sweet-fac’d Eunuch’ in whose ‘moist Kisses’ he bathes his ‘Love-scorch’d Soul’. When interrupted by his would-be murderer, he is prompted to one of the few moments of tenderness Rochester added to Fletcher’s text: ‘spare the gentle Boy! / And I’le forgive thee all.’4 Later, when her own work was attacked yet again for being bawdy, Aphra Behn listed Valentinian as one of the best plays she knew, noting that its bawdiness was ignored by women because it had been written by a man. Possibly her own part in its presentation made this ironic.

  Speaking Behn’s prologue for the first day, Sarah Cooke argued that Valentinian was like an assured beauty; so railers had better talk among themselves rather than criticise:

  Fam’d and substantial Authors give this Treat,

  And ’twill be solemn, Noble all and Great.

  Wit, sacred Wit, is all the bus’ness here,

  Great Fletcher, and the Greater Rochester.

  Now name the hardy Man one fault dares find,

  In the vast Work of two such Heroes joyn’d.

  Behn’s prologue was printed first in the edition of the following year, which Anne Wharton may have organised. It preceded one for the second day, intended for Barry and written by another of Rochester’s protégés, the young satirist John Grubham Howe.5 This sneered at ‘Ladies of mature Age’, bidding them go home and quench their embers with their pages, rather than sit patched and painted in the boxes. The edition also had a preface, written specifically to counter Mulgrave’s attack on Rochester. It had probably been commissioned by Anne Wharton from a friend she shared with her uncle, the bulky Robert Wolseley. Wolseley had been all eagerness for the task, fancying himself the Earl’s literary heir, and he had contributed a long, learned and initially unsigned piece having nothing to do with the play, but much with the vindication of Rochester.6 In it, the Earl was seen as Anne Wharton also saw him, not as a libertine but as a ‘continual Curb to Impertinence, and the publick Censor of Folly’.

  Subsequently, Wolseley, Howe, and others concerned with Valentinian were attacked in a lampoon called ‘Letter to Julian’ (Julian was a notorious distributor of libels, mainly of a Whiggish tenor).7 Only Behn was omitted, as she had been from Wits Paraphrased, the attack by Matthew Stevenson on Dryden’s Ovid volume, to which she had contributed ‘Oenone’. This also had come from the workshop of Julian, to whom it was dedicated. Perhaps Behn had friends in low places, or perhaps her own copying past (and present) allied her with some of the lampoon-writers who, in response, withheld their mockery.

  Happily, satirists were unaware of Behn’s authorship either of Love-Letters or of a companion play. The Younger Brother, published and performed after her death, cannot be firmly dated, but reference to the exhibition of a rhinoceros in 1684 suggests composition about this time, as does its central subject of female sexual adventuring. In The Younger Brother, Mirtilla is an unfaithful woman who is unmasked but left unrepentant at the play’s end. She has followed her desires, unperturbed where they led, and has thus spent much of the play enamoured of a youth who is in reality her lover’s sister. When enlightened, she is not greatly disturbed.

  Being married and possessing the social and sexual security no unmarried woman could have, Mirtilla appropriately speaks lines that echo Willmore’s in The Rover, although she is a better rhetorician and narrator than he and far more adroit in intrigue: ‘Till now I never found the right Use of long Trains and Farthingals,’ she exclaims when hiding a lover in her skirts. Taxed with falseness to her oaths, she responds, ‘shou’d Heav’n concern its self with Lover’s Perjuries, ’twou’d find no leisure to preserve the Universe.’ Marriage is a ‘Fond Ceremony’, a trick devised by age to ‘Traffic ’twixt a Portion, and a Jointure’—though, like the heroines of Sir Patient Fancy, The Fair Jilt and Love-Letters, Mirtilla has not been married off by a tyrannical parent but has bestowed herself. She pursues pleasure and power, but, as a woman, she must use her sexual desirability to fulfil her desire for power: so she claims her conquest of a prince gives her as much pride as a man would have ‘if thou hadst won his Sword... Look round the World, and thou shalt see... Ambition still supplies the Place of Love. The worn-out Lady, that can serve your Interest, you swear has Beauties.... All Th
ings in Nature Cheat, or else are Cheated... You never knew a Woman thrive so well by real Love, as by Dissimulation’.8

  The recipient of this speech of Mirtilla’s is George Marteen, given the name and character of the man Behn so much admired in Surinam two decades before. So the play is a comic allusion to her own obscure past, both physically (in Surinam) and politically (she had openly admired republicans and Parliamentarians in the 1660s—possibly as men rather than politicians, and possibly in part due to her complex, never quite resolved, relationship with William Scot). George Marten had succumbed to the plague just after Behn left Surinam, but his famous republican brother Henry had, despite his regicide past, only recently died, thus perhaps jogging her memory of the family. In her play the brothers Marteen (the lengthened name indicates which Marten Behn meant, since Henry was very particular about the spelling with an ‘e’) were spendthrift and self-indulgent, to the disgust of their puritanical father Sir Rowland (based on the parsimonious Sir Henry Marten). In contrast to his more robustly dissolute brother, the hero George lives a schizophrenic life, passing for a sparkish leisured gentleman on purloined money, while forced to appear an apprentice to his father. Seeing the commercial possibilities of so handsome a piece of flesh as his son, old Marteen decides to ‘sell the young Rogue by Inch of Candle’—auction him as long as a candle burns.9 Mirtilla had at least marketed herself.10

  It is unclear why Behn did not stage The Younger Brother at its moment of writing, but, having failed to do so, she could not easily insert it into another season. It had good moments, but the exposition of the plot at the beginning is undramatic, more like some of the short stories than a play, and there are creaking parts. After Behn’s death, her young friend, Charles Gildon, possessed the manuscript. He made no immediate effort to put the play on. In April 1695, theatrical competition resumed and new works were wanted. The Middle Temple lawyer and soldier turned dramatist, Thomas Southerne, drew especial attention to Behn by scoring great success with his plays based on her stories, particularly Oroonoko, staged in late 1695. So Gildon rushed Behn’s play into performance early in the next year. It flopped, although he claimed he had made it suitable for the times by cutting ‘that old bustle about Whigg and Tory and adding a ‘Rake-hell’. (Gildon was not treating Behn with especial irreverence, since he went on to ‘improve’ Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure in 1699.) The Younger Brother was probably not bettered by the changes, which, in any case, did not address the problem that, by the late 1690s, elderly fooled cuckolds and successful jilts had fallen from fashion on the stage. Of course it is possible that, like some of the late short stories, this posthumous play was all forgery, inspired by the single remark in Behn’s Oroonoko that she had displayed George Marten on the stage. If so, it is curious that Gildon would have misjudged popular taste with so morally lax a work. The scene in which Mirtilla ‘Opens Olivia’s Bosom, shews her Breasts’ to prove her a woman is close to a similar raffish scene in Wycherley’s Plain-Dealer (a probable source of much of the play), and is more in tune with the 1670s and early 1680s than with the late 1690s.11

  With its easier anonymity and its option for private reading rather than public performance, the novel was a better medium than drama for Aphra Behn to investigate what Mirtilla embodied and which did not much concern male writers: female rakishness and desire. So now she may well have taken up her pen to continue Love-Letters, interrupted to prepare the poetry volumes for the press and compose another play.

  Sequels were always a problem, for they had difficulty equalling the original. Behn solved this by writing in a different mode. She moved her lovers out of the erotic pastoral world of Part I which they shared with Lysander and Aminta of The Island of Love, past mutual love, and into the stage world of sexy intrigue and duplicity, encapsulated in The Younger Brother. Part I had followed the Lettres portuguaises in allowing letters to stand alone; in Part II, however, they were accompanied by a decidedly unreliable narrator. Consequently what had once appeared sincere because it expressed a single passionate point of view was now undercut, whilst characters read for ulterior as well as surface meanings. Moving from Part I to Part II of Love-Letters, then, the reader learns of Behn’s un-Puritan opinion, that language did not refer to a true inner life at all, but was always instrumental, social, and rhetorical, and that it could be distorted at will.

  Much of Part I of Love-Letters is paralleled in Part II, often farcically, for example in the sexual experiences of Philander and his servant Brilljard, husband of convenience to Silvia. A useful nullity in Part I, Brilljard has now woken up to his manhood and desires the wife he has married for the convenience of his lord. When he believes himself about to bed Silvia at last, to rise to the challenge and avoid his master’s initial ‘disappointment’, he takes an aphrodisiac. Unluckily other bodily needs come to the fore and ‘intollerable gripes and pains’ have him dashing in and out of bed in most unamorous manner.12

  Before Silvia had left her father’s house, her abandoned sister had told her what to expect from a future with Philander who had betrayed one woman and would another, leading his victim for ever beyond the pale of polite society. Her arguments echoed those made to Lady Henrietta Berkeley by Bishop, later Archbishop, Tillotson, urged by the family to bring the erring daughter back to virtue. Yet, however the historical Lady Henrietta responded, Behn’s Silvia did not follow the common trajectory: she was abandoned certainly, but she did not recant or die. Instead she adapted to betrayal.

  This came quickly. Shortly after their arrival on the Continent, Philander is separated from the pregnant Silvia. Love depends on the body and, in its absence, he cools—although, unlike the Henrietta of lampoons who was ‘ugly grown’, Behn’s Silvia continued resplendently beautiful.13 The betrayal devastates Silvia and, initially, she responds like the Portuguese nun, imagining her own death or at least reclusiveness. Then, however, she veers from the path. She will survive in the world, and for this she needs money. Her maid points out the only way forward: ‘love and int’rest always do best together, as two most excellent ingredients in that rare Art of preserving beauty!’14 Silvia sees that she must market herself: young and greedy, ‘she considers her condition in a strange Country, her Splendor declining...’. She must not only use her body but become a decoder and analyst of the language of the body the better to manipulate other bodies and understand her own. In his satire on the libertine Tory translators, the hostile Matthew Prior had told Behn to ‘Describe the cunning of a jilting Whore, / From the ill Arts her self has us’d before’. Concerned with her public reputation, Behn cannot have relished this advice, but she was fascinated by the stratagems of women in the sexual market-place. Silvia was an excellent medium for such a study, as for a reply to a version of Behn’s long-standing question: is a female rake, especially an unmarried one, possible?15

  In Part I of Love-Letters, the ingenue heroine had faced the sophisticate Philander; now in Part II, the worldly Silvia and Philander face other ingenuous characters, a brother and sister Octavio and Calista who have not been steeped in Restoration court culture. Octavio is a sincere man, believing love to be absolute, true and uncontingent; he takes the passions of the heart as his authority and is self-deluded. Fascinated with Philander, he never sees his love for Silvia as part of a homoerotic tie, and, enthralled by Silvia, he does not consider her disgrace and cruelty aspects of her allure.16 For Octavio and others like him, the knowing Silvia is a sort of fire-ship, the contemporary term for a woman carrying venereal disease. Her disease is the provocation of romantic love or desire in others, which leads them inevitably to poverty and degradation.

  Once her ‘condition’ and value are no longer fixed, the theatrical Silvia consciously plays parts, fending off her lover Octavio in imitation of the selfish tyranny of virginity. She does not actually fake virginity, like the whores in Cleland’s Fanny Hill, but she reveals its artificial nature by acting out its supposed results. Under this tyranny, Octavio becomes a ‘slave’ and the hauteu
r which she derives from a just sense of her market value Octavio insists on converting into the self-esteem of the virginal heroine of romance. Indeed Silvia seems now thoroughly aware of the male desire that women appear a touch infantile and capricious. Freud sees this as narcissism, fascinating to men because it allows them to seek the fantasy of a lost childhood paradise in women. Absolutely no child, Silvia plays at being a child, for what else is the enigmatic female supposed to be?17

  That Silvia utterly fascinated her author is clear from the treatment in the final part of Love-Letters, completed by Behn a year or so after Part II.18 Offered marriage, wealth and security by Octavio, Silvia abandons them all for the momentary gratification of feeling renewed power over Philander. Meanwhile, with far less to lose, Philander has been intrigued at the sight of his leader Cesario besotted anew by his ageing love, Hermione (she is over thirty), and wonders if he too can resurrect passion; Philander’s obvious test is Silvia. The result is that the pair fall into each other’s arms. Then, inevitably, ‘Love decay’d, and ill Humour increased: They grew uneasy on both sides, and not a Day passed wherein they did not break into open and violent Quarrels, upbraiding each other with those Faults, which both wished that either would again commit, that they might be fairly rid of one another.’19

  To free herself from Philander Silvia requires more money and, here, she is helped by the much duped Octavio, who, reduced by her treatment to entering a monastery—albeit with great baroque éclat20—bestows a pension on her in the mistaken belief that she is penitent. Her other aid is her once despised husband, Brilljard, who becomes her lover and confidant, helping her to use Octavio’s money for greater allure. Soon she has entrapped a rich young nobleman Alonzo by playing in quick succession a young boy, a loose woman, and a romantic object. (A role she resolutely refuses to play is that of mother. It is difficult to remember that, during her progress, Silvia has borne a child.21)