Aphra Behn's English Feminism: Wit and Satire
Despite its title, Aphra Behn’s English Feminism: Wit and Satire is largely concerned with Behn's interest in incorporating Spanish texts in her plays and her narrative prose. In her introduction, Dolors Altaba-Artal convincingly suggests that "Behn's treatment of Spanish literature is parallel to her development as a writer, and both are clarified through modern theories and studies on the novel and drama" (15). Recently Behn's continental influences have received much needed critical examination, as in Dianne Dugaw and Amanda Powell's excellent essay "Sapphic Self-Fashioning in the Baroque Era: Women's Petrarchan Parody in English and Spanish," and Altaba-Artal's study surely helped to set some of this scholarship in motion. The translations that she provides along with her impressive knowledge of Spanish literature help demonstrate the wideness of Behn's reading.
Aphra Behn's English Wit is divided into ten fairly short chapters in which Altaba-Artal rapidly moves through Behn’s plays and novels. Behn's poetry and translations are not considered. So often these were based on French texts; even a brief analysis of Behn's use of French and even Latin source texts would have complicated and probably enriched Altaba-Artal's argument. In chapters two through six Altaba-Artal deals with Behn's plays. Her final four chapters focus on Behn's prose narratives. This is a large amount of material to cover in a monograph. In order to maintain the momentum of her study, Altaba-Artal would have needed to develop a stronger theoretical framework, a clearer trajectory for her argument, and a wider variety of interpretations. As it is, the material often feels repetitive and incompletely analyzed.
Since Altaba-Artal published her book in 1999, Behn has received considerable critical attention, which means there are many points where Altaba-Artal lacks information that has since become available. She should not be faulted for this, although there are a few egregious omissions in her bibliography—she fails to consult Ros Ballaster’s Seductive Forms (1992) and Janet Todd’s biography The Secret Life of Aphra Behn (1996), among other things. Less forgivable is her use of the critical material to which she did have access. She relies heavily on Rose A. Zimbardo's A Mirror to Nature (1986). Zimbardo's study is an important one, and Altaba-Artal makes some useful points by drawing on it but does not provide a clear enough description of Zimbardo's stages before using them as shorthand. More onerously, Altaba-Artal repeatedly uses quotations to make points without giving references in the text. Normally she attributes these in footnotes, but there are several passages that she sets off as quotations without identifying their author at all.
Compounding Altaba-Artal's problematic overuse of information from secondary sources (cited or otherwise) is her emphasis on plot summary. Although perhaps useful for readers new to Behn's works, the overall effect is that Altaba-Artal’s finest points are buried. Many sections of the book seem simply to re-tell the stories of Behn’s works. Critical commentary of a sentence or two (most of which, again, Altaba-Artal has drawn from other secondary sources) seems insufficient and often poorly executed. For example after an extensive description of the plot of Behn’s Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister, she notes: "Definitely, Behn's 'handling of the picaresque narrative [is] brisk and convincing.' Therefore, it is clear that gathering, among other material, the Spanish voice, she organizes it into a new text" (141). Here as elsewhere Altaba-Artal integrates a quotation into her prose without noting its author, and the quotation is only tangentially relevant to her own argument.
Moreover, it is difficult and sometimes nearly impossible to follow Altaba-Artal's argument because of some major stylistic and syntactical issues, including an overuse of the passive voice. The first sentence of her introduction forebodes the passive constructions to come: "The Spanish voice in Aphra Behn's plays and novels is appreciated once the author and her works are placed in the historical background of Restoration England, the literary criticism of her time is seen as influencing her creative writing, and the enormous influx of Spanish texts and, consequently, Spanish ideas are understood" (15). Altaba-Artal invokes a number of major issues in this dense sentence, but she loses her reader in the contorted prose.
These criticisms notwithstanding, Altaba-Artal makes several insightful points about Behn's employment of heteroglossia and dialogism. She indicates how Behn shifts her source material in ways that point up her own gendered position in the context of Restoration literary, political, and religious cultures. She also highlight's Behn's literary skill by pointing out ways in which she altered the pace, structure, themes, and imagery of her source materials. And although her claims for the influence of Spanish writers on Behn are not always fully substantiated, her larger project gives a sense of the richness of Behn's works, the complexity of Behn’s intellectual contexts, and the volatility of this interval in British literary history that gave rise to the novel.
