Wastrel’s Reviews > The Secret Life of Aphra Behn > Status Update

Specifically, Behn's religious adulation of Harsenet's appearance (she sees her at the altar, and notes that "more hearts were giv'n /
To you that day, then were addressed to Heav'n", while even the priest forgets to read from the gospel he's so dumbstruck by Harsenet's beauty) is not simply couched in terms of understanding why men are attracted to her. She seems to make a point of stressing Harsenet's universal attraction:
I called Amyntas faithless Swain before,
But now I find 'tis just he should adore.
Not to love you, a wonder sure would be,
Greater than all his perjuries to me.
And whilst I blame him, I excuse him too;
Who would not venture Heav'n to purchase you?*

Not just 'what man', but 'who' - it doesn't sound like Behn is excluding herself from that. Likewise, her words suggest someone who is struck by infatuation, not a disinterested observer of beauty - "I came, and saw, and blessed my destiny".

Structurally, too, the motion of poem is odd if we assume that the focus is Behn's boyfriend: Behn begins (after some classical allusions) by describing her first sight of the stunning young woman, accepts that her boyfriend is right to desire her, but warns her off him as not worthy of her (and in any case as fickle), and concludes the poem with four whole lines telling the woman that she really needs some other, 'virgin-hearted' suitor, "that ne'er found / It could receive, till from your eyes, the wound".

Todd assumes that this is all about female jealousy: Behn is anxious that her man may be taken from her. And there may be some of that. But it seems odd to me that rather than briefly suggesting Harsenet find someone else, Behn describes this hypothetical someone at length, and ends her poem with this - and that she would begin a poem by describing what sounds like her sudden, unexpected physical infatuation with a woman, and end the poem by suggesting the woman deserves a lover who has been struck by an unprecedent and unexpected infatuation (as Behn seemingly was). Note also that Behn emphasis that this, you know, hypothetical friend she might have, would have been struck by Harsenet's eyes, in particular - the "conquering" eyes, as Behn breathlessly describes them earlier in the poem, with the "deserving glories". It's also striking that while the discussion of her boyfriend, Amintas, is filled with "he"s, the instant she contrasts him with this hypothetical virgin-heart, she talks of this suitor not as a person, but as this 'heart' - which, oh-so-conveniently, means that they are referred to as 'it' (the heart), saving Behn from having to commit to an expected 'he' or a transgressive 'she'.

All of this makes me surprised that Todd doesn't even consider that Behn's real point here is not "please don't steal my boyfriend, he's not even worth it, go find someone better and let me keep him", but rather "why are you wasting time with my boyfriend when I'd be a much better catch?"

[slightly interesting as well that Behn addressed Harsenet as "Cloris", a more-than-randomly similar name to the one she gives her "Fair Clarinda, who made love to me"... indeed, reading that poem again, she actually compares Clarinda to both "Cloris" and "Alexis", suggesting that Cloris (Harsenet, at least on this occasion) was a prior object of love, if perhaps (from the context of the poem) not consumated]

There may be reasons why this reading isn't valid. Indeed, though Todd doesn't raise this possibility, it seems entirely possible that much or even all of Behn's apparent homoeroticism is really just a tease to titillate her male audience - Behn was clearly not entirely honest in how she portrayed heself, and she used her sexual notoriety as an advertisement for her writing. But it's surprising to me that Todd doesn't even consider this possibility.

More generally, Todd does accept that Behn may have been "almost" as attracted to female beauty as to male, in much the same way that she also admired good architecture. But whereas her version of Behn has a lot of anxieties and obsessions around male-female interactions and their inherent sexuality, Todd seems to treat Behn's (apparent) attraction to women as an afterthought to be acknowledged only when it is unavoidable.




*so, Behn actually wrote this poem twice. The version I've quoted here is the first-published, but possibly second-written. [this version is addressed to Lady Morland, while a posthumous version is addressed to Mrs Harsenet, which was Lady Morland's maiden name - so it may be a later reprint of an earlier draft.] The two are the same is their gist, but differ in a few lines.

The 'first' version does not have the weird 'purchase' - instead, it says "who can be innocent who looks on you?" The addition of 'purchasing' does sound like a later Behn addition - the woman who declared that all woman would be whores if they dared liked to play on the theme of love and sex as financial transactions - but the earlier version strikes me as even more explicitly homoerotic. Likewise, "not to love you, a wonder sure would be" seems toned-down from the original "not to love you, if such a Sin could be". Again, the later "and I to Heaven no other petition made" feels like backtracking from the earlier, plainer, "I only thought of you, and prayed". On the other hand, the original "I came, I saw, and I confess / I wished my beauty more, or yours less" is perhaps more sincere, but actually less lovestruck, than the later "I came, I saw, and blessed my destiny / I found it just you should out-rival me". Overall, I think Aphra's intentionally-published version doesn't necessarily tone down the homoeroticism, but does seem more guarded and conventional than the original.

There's quite a few interesting bits in this chapter. I liked Rochester's elegant phrase (for the customary female dissembling of the age): "the conscious blush". On the other hand, he's less graceful in describing the three activities in London: women, politics and drinking.

A friend of Rochester summed up the role of women at court by asking a debutant whether she intended to be "a beauty, a wit, a miss, or a politician".


At this point, Behn was in massive money troubles. She may even have been imprisoned for debt (I know some biographers think she definitely was, though others think this unproven). She herself admitted that, unlike most playwrights with their lofty artistic ambitions (and lawyerly backgrounds), she was writing 'for bread'. She didn't own her own home (at least, she's not in the tax records), and probably, Todd suggests, needed a second job as a copyist (copyists being innumerable in London at the time, and usually women)...

...and yet Todd assumes that as a result of this crushing penury, Behn (the barber's daughter) would have been reduced to maintaining only two servants in her quarters. [she definitely had servants in Antwerp, where she was deeply in debt and lucky to escape without imprisonment]. It's a reminder in a way of the invisibility of servitude: no matter how poor someone is, if they're of the class to be mentioned in history books, they must have had servants, yet the servants can only be detected by reading between the lines. [would Behn have taken her servants with her to the debtor's prison?]

Anyway, with minimal income and multiple servants, it's no surprise that Behn must have been, Todd (reasonably) thinks, "kept" by one or more men, at least until her career took off. [I guess an alternative might be that she did eventually succeed in getting some sort of payment from the king for her secret service work, but that's the sort of thing that never seems to have happened...]


I'll also just mention in passing, although I think I mentioned it last time I was reading this book: Todd insists that at this stage, having served the King since childhood and risked her life for him and his cause, Behn "had not yet thought much about politics". Again, Todd insists on painting Behn as as naive and overwhelmed as possible...

Fun fact: the salary for a normal Restoration playwright* was the entire house takings for the third night of the production.


*a few playwrights obtained better terms; Dryden had a proper salary, while Settle sold, in effect, an option (a flat yearly sum in exchange for first refusal rights). But apparently third-night takings was the norm.

Correction: I got my attributions muddled up above. "The conscious blush" is a phase by Wycherley, while it was Rochester himself who spoke of 'women, politics and drinking' as the occupations of London.

Interesting stuff here as well about the genre of the prologue/epilogue, added to a play (sometimes by the playwright, sometimes not), in the form of a direct address from an actor to the audience. The actor was often a woman, and the prologue would often refer to her sexual preferences and physical attributes, as well as playing with gender in her/his relationship to the audience, which could be portrayed as a male or female suitor. An actress could threaten to withdraw her services if the audience wasn't appreciative enough - which Todd delicately points out had something of an edge, given that actresses were generally providing 'services' off-stage as well. More straightforwardly, these monologues would often mock the play itself.


Apparently there's been some controversy lately around scantily-clad young women on Twitch, claiming to be 'chatting' while happening to be sitting in a paddling pool in a bikini, knowing that it's not the chat that their fans are there for; so it's nice to see that little changes. Actresses in the Restoration would perform in their dressing rooms - men would pay to come and watch them getting changed, under the pretext of having a conversation; Nell Gwynn was famous for her "bawdy talk" in the "tiring room". It was controversial back then too, as Charles tried to ban it; Todd notes that his perspective was skewed by having 'other opportunities' for voyeurism himself (he was sleeping with most of the leading ladies).


Todd also points out a few things that indicate what Behn's experience of working for the theatre may have been like. For one thing, the man running her company, Betterton, was famous for demanding that all the women working for him agree to sleep with him: "being Chief, each playing Drab to swive / He takes it as his Just Prerogative". [that's from a satirical lampoon, so of course may not be accurate, but at the very least demonstrates what was considered plausible in the industry, and what the public would have assumed about Behn]. The entire scene was considered toxic for 'good' women - decades later, The Female Tatler still warned, "no woman ever turned poetess but lost her reputations by appearing at rehersals... the treatment authors meet with from the players is too gross for a woman to bear".

However, we shouldn't assume the theatre was entirely dominated by heterosexual men and their excesses: although Betterton managed the company, it was as an employee of the theatre's ultimate boss, Mary Davenant. And the most popular of their actors was a man affectionately known as "Buggering Noakes"...