Aphra Behn (1640-1689): Identity, Alterity, Ambiguity

A conference at the Sorbonne in July 1999 gave rise to this welcome addition to Aphra Behn studies; an anthology of critical essays that deserves a place in any library serving Behn scholars and amateur readers. Among the presenters were leading lights in Restoration, Behn, and women's studies scholarship: Maureen Duffy, Germaine Greer, Angeline Goreau, Derek Hughes, Joanna Lipking, Jeslyn Medoff, Mary Ann O'Donnell, Anita Pacheco, Margarete Rubik, Jane Spencer, and Janet Todd. Their papers add special luster to this illuminating volume of 29 articles addressing both fresh and familiar facets of Behn studies. The introduction claims that the collection is neither comprehensive nor definitive, but in fact it offers an enormous range of useful, provocative lines of inquiry for experienced and novice Behn scholars alike.

Germaine Greer (in the transcribed roundtable that concluded the conference) laments that Behn scholarship "is so resolutely monoglot, which is absurd in the case of an author who was reading French authors all the time" (280). To rectify that linguistic narrowness, the editors include several essays that reach beyond English-speaking boundaries. Bernard Dhuicq's "France and Roman Catholicism: Intertextuality in Aphra Behn's Works" catalogs some of Behn's translations from the French, familiar cases of borrowed plot elements, and frequently noted textual details taken from French models. He reminds us that Catholic and French references might have been Behn's coded commentary on English affairs or simply her attempt to gain popularity by exhibiting familiarity with things foreign. While Behn may have intended to use France "as a foil or mirror" for her English contemporaries to better understand their own history, current events, or culture, the French connections may also have been Behn's pragmatic personal calculation that adopting ambiguity was central to her survival and success "as a woman in a Court whose model was . . .Versailles (6 - 9).

Joanna Lipking's "At London and Paris: Pursuing Behn's French Connections" develops Germaine Greer's suggestion in Slip-Shod Sibyls (1995) that Behn seems to have absorbed so much of French romances, salon culture, forms, and "lightness and elegance" of style as perhaps not to have been Kentish at all. One example, Oroonoko, originated in a 1671 French sea captain's account of the West African coastal slave trade. Lipking speculates that Behn turned this travel memoir into a French-style love story in an English context. More broadly, Lipking situates Behn in "the advance guard of adventurous continental women" like Mme. de Sta?l, George Sand, and Colette (266). The eponymous comic heroine in The Widdow Ranter, with her easy sociability, and the narrator of Oroonoko, who provides a polite haven for Caesar and Clemene to discuss the lives and loves of the Romans, both suggest the French salon model. Behn, Lipking asserts, "came to picture herself as a graceful presiding figure in a mixed society of wits" (267).

Line Cottegnies's "'Aphra Behn Unmasked': A. Behn's Translation of La Rochefoucauld's Reflexions," examines the nature of translation: "appropriating the discourse of the other," "writing [one]self into a preexisting discourse or culture," playful "ventriloquism," and "transforming and transposing" the original to the linguistic, cultural, and gender conditions of the new version (14 -16). Cottegnies notes that Behn tended to feminize and anglicize French male texts in order to empower women and "to make the various elements . . . more intelligible or more in tune with English tastes" (16 -17). She concludes that Behn "moved insensibly and surreptitiously from ventriloquism to creation, read[ing] and writ[ing] herself and her reader into the French text . . . , making this into an original speech-act from which . . . emerges the autonomous female voice" (23).

In her overview essay for francophones, "Aphra Behn: La Premiere narratrice antiesclavgiste de la litterature moderne?" Carminella Biondi concludes that "Meme si Aphra Behn . . . ne s'est jamais exprimee contre l'esclavage, la position de son heros . . . est suffisamment claire pour qu'on puisse affirmer qu'Oroonoko merite de figurer ? l'origine de toute recherche sur l'antiesclavagisme colonial" (130).

Reaching beyond boundaries of traditional English or French connections, Norman Simms ("Aphra Behn: A Conversa from Surinam?") hypothesizes that Behn may not have been a Christian at all, but rather "born in Surinam of Crypto-Jewish parents who . . . came to the South American colony early at the stage of its tentative English settlements from Brazil, perhaps by way of Amsterdam and Livorno, and most likely before the official arrival of Jewish settlers . . . in 1660" (216). Noting that the Hebrew afera means "a disguise or covering to hide the face's identity" (218), that her pseudonym Astrea approximates the popular Jewish name Esther (218), that her attachments to royalism closely resembled "a typically Jewish sense, honed over a thousand years of persecution, that monarchies and kings are somehow safer and more enduring than republics and parliaments" (219), Simms associates many of Behn's traits with those of Marannos and other Crypto-Jews in England, Spain, and the New World. Simms cites Yirmiyahu Yovel's Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Maranno of Reason (1989) to evoke Behn's resemblance to Marannos, whose "patterns include a this-worldly disposition, a split religious identity, . . . and a tendency toward dual language and equivocation" (218). Simms concludes that Behn was "as ambiguous . . . and as secretive about her ethnic or religious identity as she was about her sexual preferences" (221). His notes tantalize further study on Crypto-Jews of the early modern period, seventeenth century Jewish settlement in Surinam and resettlement in England, and further links between Behn and this community which are often overlooked in early modern literary studies.

Multiple approaches to particular Behn works make this collection a true colloquium. On Sir Patient Fancy, for example, Sue Crowson's "Mother, Stepmother, and the Mother Tongue: Women beyond the Grotesque in Aphra Behn's Sir Patient Fancy" and Derek Hughes's "'Silent in th'inchanting Circle': Women and Language in Sir Patient Fancy" consider complementary angles. Crowson studies the two maternal characters, Ladies Knowell and Fancy, who represent "rejected female stereotypes [and in turn] reject the repressive morality and societal constraints imposed upon them" (187). Hughes approaches the play as a system of signs, visual and linguistic, that replace "the old symbolic order" of received authority and male power with one "based on enumeration [and] method . . .[that] reduce authority to competing, atomistic private codes. . ., automatically contradict[ing] the idea of a fixed, universal order decreeing the subjugation of women" (191 -193). Hughes concludes that Behn makes two serious points in this comic play: "that there is no such thing as a natural sign system and that arbitrarily contrived systems can easily be used to dominate those who are not party to contriving them" (194). Behn, then, is a foremother of both feminism and deconstruction.

Three essays address the breakdown of Old World authority in The Widdow Ranter. Margarete Rubik's "Estranging the Familiar, Familiarizing the Strange: Self and Other in Oroonoko and The Widow Ranter" argues that here, as in Oroonoko, Behn destabilizes the civilized/savage trope whereby in-groups claim moral superiority and political authority over others. Rubik locates the play's only "completely internalized. . . European code of civility" in Cavarnio and Semernia, the Indian king and queen (36f.). Rubik notes that the play's only "unequivocally likeable character" is the Widow Ranter herself, hardly an in-group figure with her smoking, hard-drinking, swearing, trouser-wearing, sword-wielding vulgarity, who "always speaks her mind but is so genuinely good-humored and unaffected that she wins even Daring's heart" (37 -38).

Liz Bridges' "'We Were Somebody in England': Identity, Gender, and Status in The Widdow Ranter" maintains that in the New World individuals feel free "to become authors of themselves," pointing out that Hazard, the Widow, Bacon, the Justices, and Mrs. Flirt have all reconstructed themselves in Virginia and thus challenge commonplace notions that birth or breeding will "out." Bridges concludes that Behn may have intended to point out "that identity is complex and unstable, that the world is changing, and that the old pointers [may no longer be] applicable or useful" (80).

Shannon Ross' "The Widdow Ranter: Old World, New World - Exploring an Era's Authority Paradigms" argues that Behn "explores the schism in notions of authority," turning "the tragedy of the Old World. . . toward a fundamentally comic New World order" (81). The debased use of honorifics in the speech of the foolish Justices symbolizes the destabilization of the concept of honor, reducing it from an absolute based on rank and received authority to a fragmented, individualistic condition. The empty use of "Sir" and "Your Honour" by men like Timorous, Whimsey, and Whiff is the comic equivalent of Bacon's serious act of civil disobedience and further underscores Behn's ironic treatment of the issue of authority. Ross concludes optimistically that "there is always a second chance in the New World, which is . . . characterized by attributes of comedy: mercy, negotiation, compromise" (85). Curiously, none of the three Widdow Ranter essays refers to Cavarnio's moving denunciation of Old World values in the New World: "We were monarchs once of all this spacious world, till you an unknown people landing here, distressed and ruined by destructive storms, abusing all our charitable hospitality, usurped our right and made your friends your slaves" (II.i).

Not surprisingly, numerous contributors examine Oroonoko on topics related to the conference subtitle: the identity of the author behind the narrator, racial and New World otherness, and gender ambiguities. Particularly noteworthy are Jeslyn Medoff's "Amalgamating an Author: Aphra Behn in Two Biographies of the Long Eighteenth Century," Jorge Figueroa Dorrego's "Viragos and 'Soft' Men: Androgyny in Aphra Behn's Fiction," Shirley Tatum's "Oroonoko and the Anxiety of Decay," Maureen Duffy's "Aphra Behn Revisited" (which discusses 'Biyi Bandele's adaptation of Oroonoko, which was performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in its 1999 - 2000 season), and Mary Ann O'Donnell's "Myth and Mythmaking in the Works of Aphra Behn."

Dorrego notes that, like many male protagonists in French heroic romance, Oroonoko combines manly and womanly qualities, especially "feminine sensitivity and masculine freedom of choice and action . . . , strength and nobility conjoined with 'that Softness. . . capable of the highest Passions of Love and Gallantry'" (27-28). Tatum examines Behn's description of the corpses of Imoinda and Oroonoko, noting that it "demonstrates Behn's anxiety not only about her own physical decay, but the decay of her literary reputation" and also that it symbolizes the lovers' return to stabilized gender roles - roles that had been "rendered ambiguous in the course of the narrative" (131). The woman's body, the site of fecundity and reproduction, putrefies, while the male body is apotheosized, "ritualistically thrown into a fire [and] giving up the Ghost, the smoke of the pipe rising toward heaven" (136). Tatum concludes that "the fate of Oroonoko represents the transcendent nature of the print text itself, . . . bypassing the writer's physical limitations" and defying decay (137).

O'Donnell considers which of Gerard Langbaine's verbs most accurately describes the extent of Behn's borrowing: "borrowed, founded on, taken from, . . . stolen" (102), finally resolving that the process has less to do with plagiarism and theft than with the synthesis of folk, classical, and proximate material, through which, as Langbaine himself admits, "'Tis also her Commendation, that whatever she borrows she improves for the better." O'Donnell notes that Behn did with others precisely what Southerne, Hawkesworth, Gentleman, and Ferriar in the eighteenth century, and 'Biyi Bandele in our own time, have done with her. O'Donnell concludes with an elegant tribute to Behn's importance as a "mythmaker to a subsequent era": "What she saw as narrative possibilities in the myths and legends of the noble savage and the Herculean hero, others then appropriated. They reshaped Behn's hero to form a new heroic figure - not Behn's, but their own - whose mythic proportions served the tastes and judgment of the next century and fed into a romantic mythology that still influences our own (108).