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

It should be noted, though, that whereas the men actually are promiscuous, the women's bargaining is only hypothetical and never (in the plays) acted on. It only demonstrates that the woman is "a little waggish" and independently-minded: she can use the threat of her promiscuity to extract other concessions from the man, but at this point she's not able to actually act on her threats. Nonetheless, even the fact that sympathetic female characters are allowed to express these desires, even hypothetically, and to criticise the hypocrisy of male promiscuity, is a big step up from previous (and following) eras.

[Todd makes the point that, at least in Behn's play, the woman's desire for promiscuity is what attracts men to her; but the desire cannot be respectably acted upon (even when the man, as here, is willing to 'allow freedoms forbidden in Spain'), and so instead the pair negotiate monogamy for both in the happy ending.]


Ravenscroft, incidentally, was apparently meant to provide a prologue to 'The Dutch Lovers', but couldn't, because he was distracted by his unpleasant treatment for a venereal disease. This is the occasion of Behn's poem affectionately mocking him for his 'whoring' and its consequences. This is also interesting, not only for the scandalous subject matter, but also because she addresses him, in the title, as "a Brother of the Pen". Claiming siblinghood with a playwright was obviously a claim to her own status as a writer - perhaps exuberant (in the wake of her early success) or perhaps defiant (if there were still critics of a woman being a writer); but it's particularly bold to claim membership of that fraternity and subculture in a poem that talks acceptingly (there's gentle mockery and pretend condemnation of womankind for infecting him in this way, but no condemnation of the man) about the sexual promiscuity that was rife in that fraternity. Earlier female writers had made a point of distancing themselves from the immorality of male (and professional) writers, but Behn is eager to proclaim herself one of the boys, even while talking about the boys frequenting brothels.

"Thus, despite his sudden promise of marriage to the veiled Euphemia, Alonzo finds himself in a compromising position with Clarinda which, since she turns out to be his sister, he happily fails to exploit. The opposite good fortune attends Silvio, who learns that his father is in fact the great Spanish minister, Count d'Olivarez: thus he and his seeming sister Cleonte can now indulge their passion with propriety: 'I must own a joy greater than his fit for a virgin to express,' say Cleonte.
[...] Less easy to resolve is the predicament of Hippolyta. Having been seduced by Antonio and placed against her knowledge in a brothel, she grows tired of playing the victim, assumes male dress and intends to fight and kill Antonio in a duel. [...] After the fight, Antonio proposes to compensate for his sadistic treatment of Hippolyta by marriage, transforming the woman he had humiliated as a whore into his wife."

^--- ahh, the typical popular Restoration play...

As previously foreshadowed, Behn is now dating Hoyle.

Hoyle's previous claim to fame was that, as a law student, he allegedly stabbed an unarmed watchmaker to death (he took six days to die). There were many witnesses, but the jury acquitted him (Todd suggests bribery).

In any case, it's easy to recognise the portrayal of Hoyle. Todd calls him a 'pitiless and violent man', and notes that 'it was not sex but conquest Hoyle desired... his enjoyment was in the humbling of female pride.' She notes that 'he pretended insouciance but was all calculation and desire for sexual power'. Hoyle mostly ignores and/or insults Behn, belittling her and making her feel undesirable and perverse (Todd believes this is made worse by Hoyle's homosexuality being incompatible with Behn's open desire for him), but rewarding her self-abnegating groveling with outbursts of tender affection.

As always, Todd goes beyond the sources, but this picture does seem to fit with the Hoyle in the poems. Unfortunately, for the details Todd relies almost entirely on the love-letters Behn wrote to Hoyle... which are almost certainly fictional. Indeed, Todd is quick to dismiss one letter, in which Behn blames Hoyle's neglect on his homosexuality, because Todd's Behn is entirely accepting of sexual diversity. But all the other letters are presented with barely a quiver of doubt.

Todd continues to have some double standards over Behn's sexuality.
Because she wants to make male neglect and the need for male attention central to Behn's psychology, she eagerly accepts the posthumously-published love-letters to Hoyle as genuine, even though they almost certainly aren't.
But at the same time, she casts doubt on the 'supposed' posthumously-published love-letters to Emily Price, as 'possibly forgeries'.

It's not that Todd refuses to accept that Behn might have been bisexual, in some sense. Indeed, she explains that as a 'bisexually inclined' woman, she wouldn't have desired sexual penetration by a man, just protection and safety. [...kind of a logical leap there, I'd have thought, but anyway...]. But she systematically downplays that side of Behn, as an aesthetic whimsy or childish extravagance, an extension of her fondness for Catholicism and fine architecture.

So for instance, in the (admittedly probably forged) letters to Emily Price, Aphra demands that Emily respond to her love through actions, not words, and proclaims that otherwise she (Aphra) will "cease to live". But Todd describes these letters as merely describing some possible "emotional promiscuity", a 'safety valve' and distraction, akin to her 'writing and humour', from her real love for Hoyle. It's a frustratingly dismissive attitude.

Of course, the letters probably are forgeries, as the ones to Hoyle are. We really don't have any clue about Aphra's true sexuality. And even if the letters were real, we probably couldn't deduce much from them, due to changes in stylistic fashion: yes, the letters are passionate to the point of being histrionic, and adoring to the point of obsequiousness... but that seems to have been a very common mode of writing among literary figures of the period. [likewise, though Todd accepts at face value that Aphra must have been of lifelong 'indifferent health', it's hard not to cynically speculate that a certain amount of female self-described swooning and languishing - which didn't seem to get in the way of her social life beyond occasionally giving an excuse for a country holiday - was simply an affectation of the era's fashion]

So Todd's fixed preconceptions don't perhaps obscure the 'real' Aphra (because the real Aphra, if she ever existed, is virtually unknowable now), but it's hard not to get the feeling that she's playing on a slanted table here.

[likewise: one reason she gives for doubting the letters to Price is that they suggest Aphra prefers the country to the city, whereas Todd knows that Aphra loved the city and its excitements. But she has no real reason for knowing this. Certainly she chose to live in London, and must in some way have appreciated its liberality, which permitted her her profession. But at the same time, again and again, when Aphra is called upon to describe paradise - whether in fantastic plays, or in whimsical imagination, or even in her own memory - it's an unreal, Arcadian idyll she returns to. I mean, her own codename, Astraea, is the name of a shepherdess. And sure, again, this could all easily be conceit - the buccolic idyll was in fashion at the time, and was also very useful for expressing libertine and transgressive ideas - but it's what Aphra says in her own words, so Todd hardly seems to have reason to find the idea of Aphra (who was probably born in and grew up in a small rural town) as a lover of the countryside, so uncreditable!]

Before moving on, some more female gaze/gender fluidity: Aphra's poem imagining Lysander (probably Hoyle) "charmingly extended on a cloud" both gives us an unusually predatory female gaze, and an unusually feminine adult male for the era.

For a start, she describes the combination of seeing a pretty boy and hiring a pop song in orgasmic terms: it "raised the pleasure then to ecstasy", as experienced by "ravished lovers in each other's arms", which is about as explicit an orgasm as you can expect from a woman writing for publication in the 18th century.

And then, other than the hint of violence that always accompanies Hoyle, the description is almost exactly how a male poet of the time might describe a young woman:

I saw the softness that compos'd your face,
While your attention heighten'd every grace:
Your mouth all full of sweetness and content,
And your fine killing eyes of languishment:
Your bosom now and then a sigh wou'd move,
(For Music has the same effects with Love)

and:
A careless and a lovely negligence,
Did a new charm to every limb dispense

...except that then she goes a little further than a more decorous male poet might:

Your body easy and all tempting lay,
Inspiring wishes which the eyes betray

However, while heavenly comparisons aren't unusual, I think there is something a little masculine, in a renaissance way, about her conclusion, "so look young angels" - angels having no gender theologically, but generally being depicted as male, posed for by young boys.


I'm not a scholar, but I wonder how long after Behn it would be before another woman described a man in such terms in published verse in English?

Of course, this raises the question of why she described him in that way. Scholars with different priorities might suggest answers like:
- she's just speaking the poetic language she's inherited from male poets
- she's intentionally co-opting the language of male poets and turning it against men, objectifying and feminising them as male poets had done to women
- she just naturally is attracted to 'feminine' characteristics, and so choses to focus on these - perhaps not a complete coincidence for a bisexual woman
- given that she was (probably) bisexual, and given that, as usual, the recipient of the poem is only identified pseudonymously, perhaps the reason she sounds almost exactly like a male poet describing a woman is that she IS describing a woman, just giving her a male pseudonym and male pronouns. Either for decorum, or because portraying beautiful women as male was something that she did (most famously, c.f. "To the fair Clarinda", in which Clarinda is described as constantly transitioning between male and female).

I don't know which it is (Todd doesn't say explicitly, but broadly speaking her version of Aphra is just naturally attracted to (feminine-coded) beauty).

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Meanwhile, further gender fluidity reference: in the (probably fraudulent) "letters" to Hoyle, there's reference to a page-boy who carries the letter, whom "Aphra" codenames "Bellario". Who is Bellario? A female character in a play by Beaumont and Fletcher who disguises herself as a page. [although in the original play, of course, this would have been a male actor disguised as a woman disguised as a boy. By Aphra's time, the role would have been re-analysed as a great excuse to put an actress in tight breeches]
Whether or not Aphra herself wrote the letter, it's further evidence of the concerns of her age, and of how she was perceived. Again, she, or the public image of her, is seeing a feminine beauty in a man, by imagining him as a woman in disguise.

[it's also an interesting reminder of the external reality of the theatre! There's a danger in this book of seeing the theatre as just this dark pool that plays are dropped into - they only have short runs, and while they may be revived the original author has little practical involvement in that. And of course a great deal of information about how plays were received is simply not available to us now. But this little allusion is a reminder that in Aphra's time - at least, at this point in her life - Fletcher's plays, written half a century earlier, still dominate the London stage, outpacing both Shakespeare and Jonson (the literati may have debated the relative literary merits of Shakespeare and Jonson, but it was Fletcher people actually wanted to see performed). It's an illustration both of what Aphra was up against, and of the sort of immortality she perhaps may have aspired to.


Oh, and the man-disguises-as-woman-disguising-as-man plot happens to be directly inverted in an anonymous play (perhaps Aphra was involved?) in which Aphra's friend, Elizabeth Barry [her beloved 'Amoret'; Todd never suggests a sexual dimension to their relationship, though there are certainly some hints] plays a man who dresses as a woman in order to seduce a nymph named... Astrea, which is of course Aphra's chosen alter-ego.


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Finally, we have an actual semi-factual datapoint: somebody mentioned in their memoirs that Hoyle "kept" Behn at some time. Ridiculously, one old man's memory of something having been said to be common knowledge is actually a remarkably solid and reliable piece of evidence, compared to all the circumstantial phantomry that otherwise makes up Aphra's recorded life.

"Keeping", anyway, was somewhere between a romantic relationship and an overt prostitution. Whether a kept woman was a whore was somewhat unclear - she was able to claim otherwise officially, but unofficially people would have Opinions. Including the woman - Nell Gwynn, for instance, was famously angry at her servant for getting into a fight with someone who called her a whore, because, Gwynn reminded him, she WAS a whore, and she'd rather he be beaten for opposing a lie than for denying the truth. Given Aphra's own ambiguous relationship with the concept of prostitution - not openly declaring herself a whore, but publically teasing the idea that she might be, and her positive (or possibly exploitative!) attitude toward sex work - it's good to have this concrete point of fact (assuming we take the memory at face value). Aphra wasn't just a woman falsely accused of impropriety on account of her invisible husband and her unusual, insalubrious occupation; she was someone who was concretely known (/believed) to be in an ambiguous keeping relationship with at least one man. Given how quickly she went from the fear of a debtor's gaol to a position of seeming comfort without any obvious income, it seems likely she was established as a kept woman, if not outright prostitute, even before she met and came to be kept by Hoyle. Frankly, this seems to add a sympathetic element of authenticity to her character, which can otherwise come across a little "good girl likes to talk about naughty she is because it excites the male audience" at times. I mean, I still think that probably IS what she's doing sometimes, but it feels more earned if she actually had the experiences to back the striptease up.

[Aphra's reputation at least seems not to have been as colourful as that of her friend, Barry, a "mercenary, prostituting dame", of whom one man wrote: "should you lie with her all night, she would not know you the next morning, unless you had another five pound at her service". Todd sees this as just misogynistic rumour spread about the era's most visibly strong and independent female celebrity. On the other hand, the association of acting with sexual freedom in the era was clearly not entirely unfounded [cf Gwynn], and Barry did date the famously and explicitly libertine Rochester, so it's also exactly implausible. It's so frustrating that so little concrete is known about so many of these people, and so much that is 'known' takes the form of rumours and lampoons!]