49. Aphra Behn — The History of a Nun with Dr. Sarah Raff

AMY: Hey, everybody, welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I’m Amy Helmes, here with my colleague Kim Askew, and to entice our listeners today I think I might summarize the work of literature we’ll be discussing today as “The Sound of Music” meets “Quentin Tarantino.”

KIM: Whoa! That is wild, but also, you’re not wrong! Aphra Behn is considered the first woman in England to earn a living as a professional writer, penning plays, novels and poetry — and her works were also pretty eyebrow-raising. 

AMY: Yes, I was first introduced to her in a women’s lit course in college — she was a pivotal pioneer in the history of English literature. Her popularity in her day may have had something to do with the fact that she was not afraid to scandalize with her writing. (In fact, she wrote a comic poem about erectile dysfunction written from a point of view that’s sympathetic toward the woman, and you can be sure we’ll be discussing today, as well.)

KIM: I wish that we had thought to get Viagra to sponsor this episode, but we didn’t, sadly. 

AMY: Aww, darn!

KIM: Yeah. Though at some points in history she’s been disregarded for being “lewd” or “morally depraved,” the reality is, Behn was actually a proto-feminist with really frank and progressive views on motherhood, marriage, and sexual politics. And, remember, we’re talking about a woman from the mid 17th century, before the Age of Enlightenment even began. (And, oh by the way, she was also an international spy.)

AMY: The novelist Virginia Woolf wrote that “All women together ought to let flowers fall on the tomb of Aphra Behn… For it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.”

KIM: That totally makes me want to celebrate an Aphra Behn day… I’m imagining flowers… a graveyard, maybe some dancing.  Anyway, our guest totally agrees with Woolf’s sentiment, and she definitely tipped her hat to Aphra Behn in a very special way, and we’ll get to that in a moment.

AMY: Right after our jaunty little theme song, in fact. So let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[introductory music]

AMY: Our guest today is Dr. Sarah Raff, an associate professor of English at Pomona College in California. A graduate of Yale University’s Ph.d. program, she is the author of Jane Austen’s Erotic Advice, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2014. She’s currently writing a book about fictional guardian/ward interactions in 18th and 19th century novels. She also happens to be a friend of mine. She lives in my neighborhood, our kids went to elementary school together, and I’m thrilled that she agreed to join us for this episode. Sarah, welcome to the show!

SARAH RAFF: Thanks so much for having me on the show, Amy and Kim. I'm thrilled to be here!

AMY: Kim, I need to explain how I met Sarah, because it relates to the author we’re discussing today. So it was the beginning of my daughter’s first grade year in elementary school, and she came home one afternoon talking about all the new friends she’d made in her class. She mentioned a little girl named Aphra, and it stopped me in my tracks, because I’m like, “Could she possibly be named for Aphra Behn?” It got me thinking, like, “Okay, I’ve got to try to meet this girl’s parents. I think they might be my people!” And then a few months later, I did get the chance to meet Sarah and sure enough, I find out she’s an English professor and everything falls into place for me. So Sarah, can you tell us when and where you first discovered Aphra Behn and why you named your daughter for her?

SARAH: I first encountered Aphra Behn in the lovely Virginia Woolf passage that you quoted. And I first read her in a graduate class about the beginnings of the English novel, but we didn't discuss her novel-length work Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister in that class. Instead, we discussed the novella length work, Oroonoco, which is wonderful, but I think the reason we didn't discuss Love Letters is that it was out of print, and there was no cheap copy available. It's a little bit of a weird omission, because you could argue that Love Letters is the very first English novel and ought to be in print in an affordable edition. So I think it's true that on some level, she's no longer lost thanks to the efforts of people like you, but she's still a little bit more lost than she should be.

KIM: And can I just say you said that a woman likely wrote the first novel. Let’s just take a moment and appreciate that.

SARAH:  I agree. And it's still not part of the story of the history of the novel that's told in scholarship, even. My daughter's name came about, in part, through a philosophical difference between me and my partner. This was years before we were actually going to have a kid but we were sitting around, and it became clear that he wanted a baby name that he had never heard before, and I wanted one that was super familiar. And we had gone through dozens of names, and we couldn't agree on any of them. And his eye passed to a book that I was teaching at the time, by Aphra Behn. And he said, “Aphra. How about Aphra?” And I thought, “Hooray, I love that idea!” And it was perfect, in a way, because it was a familiar name to me, and it was an unfamiliar name to him. And the fact that it was unfamiliar to him again is troubling. He has heard of Daniel Defoe, another contender (but considerably later than Behn) for the prize of first English novelist. And then also when I met Amy ... I think you're the only person I've met in the neighborhood who identified “Aphra” as Aphra Behn. And so that was super fun for me; I was so delighted that Julia's mother knew about Aphra.

AMY: Yeah, we “English people” find each other. 

KIM: Yep. So Aphra Behn lived in Restoration-era England, from 1640-1689. Sarah, what, if anything, do we know about her life independent of her writing?

SARAH: Not very much, unfortunately. She was probably the daughter of a barber and a wet nurse in Kent. And probably, through some wealthy connections, she became acquainted with Thomas Killigrew, who was both a spy master and eventually the manager of one of the two theaters in London: The King's Company. And it's possible that she was already acting as a spy for the English government when probably (though not certainly), she travelled to the English colony in Suriname in South America, which is the setting for her novella, Oroonoco. Back in England, she, again, probably married a man named Behn, who might have been a London merchant, or might have been a ship's captain, and who died or disappeared quite quickly, a few years later. Using a code name, Astrea, which also became her literary pen name and the name by which she was celebrated by other writers in her day (and here, things are finally certain), she certainly acted as a secret agent in Antwerp, which was a job that proved desperately unremunerative. She has all these letters, writing back to the government, “Please, I can't pay my hotel bill — send money!” But she did eventually get some money advanced to her and she got back to England, probably worked as a copyist again for the King’s Company. But when she came out with her first play, it was for the more successful rival company, The Duke’s Company, which came to rely on her as a source of plays that would succeed on stage. There were other women with one play a piece when Aphra Behn got started. But Behn, after the first year, became the only woman writing plays for theatre during the years that she was active. And also she was by far the most prolific of even the few professional writers who were going at that period; so she has four more plays than either of her closest male competitors, John Dryden and Thomas Durfee. She was huge. 

KIM: Wow.

AMY: Very prolific! Churning them out like Danielle Steele!

SARAH: Maybe, her most important love relationship was with a man named John Hoyle, a lawyer who got in trouble with the law; first for stabbing a man (a watchmaker) in the street, and then eventually in trouble for sodomy. So he was bisexual, maybe violent, and possibly, it seems that she was his mistress for a while. He seems not to have been a nice person. She was chronically in need of money, and this may have been one secret to her success; she was writing for money. When the demand for new plays went down with the merging of the two theaters, she was able to pivot to other kinds of writing. She may have gone back to copying, but she also translated romances and scientific works from French. She eventually became very good at French. Possibly she spent some time in France. She also translated stuff from Latin, even though of course, she didn't know Latin, and Janet Todd, her biographer, suggests that Behn was so fluent at writing verses that it might often have been that a friend of hers classically educated would have been sitting there with the Latin book in his hand, and he would have been translating that into English out loud. And she would have been sitting there with a pen writing it down in verse as he went, so kind of on-the-spot versifying,

KIM: Even if she had been a man, her life would still be really remarkable when you talk about all these things that we know she may have done, but doing them as a woman during that time. It's kind of mind-blowing.

SARAH: It really, totally is. Yes. And she was really, I think, at the center of London literary life. She was published by Dryden in one of his collections of poetry. She translated some Ovid for him. She put Aesop's Fables into verse. She translated la Roche Foucault's Maxims. She produced a lot of original poetry and a ton of government propaganda, possibly directly paid for by the court. 

KIM: I know she wasn’t the only woman who was writing around this time, but to have so much professional success in such a male-dominated arena (she was very prolific; she penned 18 plays) How was it socially acceptable for her to be a writer and a spy?

SARAH: These are fascinating questions. For “socially acceptable,” it depends on which social circle you're talking about. And this is a society that's cut into many groups at the time. To most literate people, a woman writer (especially a woman writer as bawdy as Aphra Behn) would probably not have been socially acceptable. But at Charles II’s restoration in 1660, there were still a lot of Puritans around who had succeeded in getting the theaters shut down altogether. And there were plenty of people who were totally horrified by the licentiousness of the new court, with its French ways. Charles II had scads of illegitimate children, and his milieu was associated with sophistication and high art and wit, but also with extravagance and sexual license and full-on debauchery. And the theater was a kind of mirror of the court, and strangely enough, in this period, given the precariousness of the court’s power and the fact that there were spies all around, and given that there's a population full of people who had cooperated with the interregnum governments, performing acts of outrageous libertinism was actually a way of showing allegiance to the crown. And Aphra Behn was loyal!

AMY: She was way loyal!

KIM: As loyal as they come!

SARAH: But it is true that actresses who had just joined the stage before the Restoration (of course, [before that] the women's parts had been played by boys), they were always being accused of prostitution (sometimes justly), Behn, too, attracted that slur both in her period and later. One contemporary condemned her as a new, “Sapho, Famous for her Gout and Guilt for Punk and Poesie agree so pat/You cannot well be this and not be that. 

AMY: I love that. That’s like a rap song.

KIM: Totally. You know what? If she’s already getting called it, She might as well just go for it.

AMY: So I guess it boils down to: Yes, she was popular, but that doesn't mean she was acceptable. It doesn't mean that she was classy. 

SARAH: I love it. Yeah.

AMY: Okay, so then, speaking of the king, like you said, she was a favorite of the king, until at one point she used one of her plays to attack his illegitimate son, which was kind of a mistake on her part. Charles II ordered her arrested for slander in fact. 

KIM: Right. And she wasn’t held for long (if at all), but note to self, don’t piss off your theatrical patron--especially if he’s the king, right? On the other hand, that’s pretty bold of her.

AMY: She obviously had something on her mind. And here’s some other interesting gossip from a few years before that. Behn was apparently really good friends with an actress who was also the king’s mistress. Her name was Nell Gwynn. When another actress named Moll Davis looked to be positioning herself to supplant Nell in the king’s affections, it is, I guess, rumored that Aphra helped Nell slip laxatives into Moll Davis’s tea cakes before an evening she was supposed to be spending with the king. I don’t know if that’s true. Sarah, I don’t know if you’ve heard that anecdote. It does sound like the sort of thing she would have included in one of her plays; it does sound like a plot point for her.

SARAH: I hadn’t actually heard that, but I love it.

KIM: Yeah, it sounds, based on what you said, like something that wouldn’t be impossible for her to do. Let’s put it that way. But unlike Shakespeare, we don’t really see Behn’s plays staged too often by modern theatrical companies. Are they too antiquated for this day and age? Or too racy? It almost feels like the time is rife to resurrect her work for a wider audience?

SARAH: I agree. an awkward issue for staging Aphra Behn (and I suppose for reading her as well) and other writers of her time is that she does not draw the same bright line that we do between seduction and rape. And she doesn't condemn rape as strongly as we do. The seduction stories of that period challenge our current ideas about consent, and that can make them really hard to process, but also fascinating. I do agree it would be wonderful to see Behn's plays performed more often today (and certainly her poetry and her prose read) a lot more often.

AMY: So in the later years of her life, she sort of transitioned. She gave up writing for the theater and focused more on fiction-writing and poetry. As you said, she's kind of most known for her novella Oroonoko. It's also called The Royal Slave. It’s set on a British plantation in Suriname, and it's important in that Behn really humanizes the title character, a slave. And it also depicts the slave masters as the villains. So this was pretty progressive for Behn; we can see that she had forward-thinking ideas about society. And I actually am interested to read this one given that it's her most famous novel. At the same time, now that you talked about the one that's the quote unquote, first, that's drawing my interest as well. And that one is ... what did you say? Letters?

SARAH: Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, which is slightly less scandalous than it sounds because “sister,” in this case, means sister in law.

AMY: Oh, okay.

KIM: Okay. Anyway, at the same time, if you are brand new to Aphra Behn and want to just dip your toe in, we’re going to be discussing a short story called The History of a Nun or The Fair Vow-Breaker, and that really is a perfect place to start, we think. As Amy said at the beginning of the episode, the elevator pitch for this one is  “The Sound of Music” meets “Quentin Tarantino.” So that’s pretty enticing, right?

AMY: Yeah, she certainly knows how to tell a shocking tale, let’s just say that. This one was published the year Behn died, actually, at the age of 48. And in the story’s dedication (she wrote this for an Italian duchess living in London) she mentioned that it is based on a true event. And I’m a true crime buff, so I’m like, “What?!!” You know, this story is just so bonkers; so it left me thinking, could this possibly have been “ripped from the headlines?” Sarah, what do you got on that?

SARAH: As far as I know, alas, the claim that this story is based on real life has not been independently corroborated by scholarship. But Behn certainly did base some of her works on real life. So for example, her novella The Fair Jilt, (which is also very much worth reading) comes straight out of the newspaper; also a murder and a nun. And her novel Love Letters, which we've just been talking about, was a full-on roman à clef, which was meant to be understood as an account of some scandalous episodes in the lives of some rich and powerful rebels against the king. The names were changed; the setting was changed from England to France; but everyone knew to whom the story referred. And we tend to think of the novel as defined precisely by its fictiveness, by the fact that it's not about real people. So this very topicality has, I think, helped to deprive Behn of the central place in the history of what is today the dominant literary genre, and that’s the novel. And yet when Behn was writing, people were constantly looking for coded references to contemporary events. A huge proportion of Restoration plays should be understood as commenting on the politics of the moment, even when they were set in a distant past or faraway place.

AMY: You can imagine that readers or theater goers I mean, even today, we love juicy stories about things that really happened. You know?

KIM: We want to guess who it’s really about. Yeah, we’re intrigued by that. Absolutely.

AMY: It’s popular. Yeah.

SARAH: And Behn had a kind of following there. Another woman, Delarivier Manley, came after her also writing “scandal fiction” — sex lives of the rich and famous, but “I'm going to take out the names and you're going have to guess who exactly I'm talking about.” And she, like Behn, just got swept aside in literary history and has only been revived in, you know, the last half-century or so.

AMY: And I feel like Delarivier Manley ... we mentioned her in an episode where we were talking about possible “real-life Lady Whistledowns” of their day. And that makes sense that she would have been writing about the town gossip and things like that.

SARAH: Completely.

KIM: So back to The Story of A Nun, so Behn starts off this story with a little bit of sermonizing about young women. Sarah, would you care to read a passage from this section to give our listeners an idea of Behn’s tone?

SARAH: Yes, I love the complexity of Ben's opening here. We know from the subtitle that we'll be dealing with “a fair vow-breaker.” And after the dedication, Behn's narrator begins with a generalization, “of all the sins incidental to human nature, there is none of which Heaven has took so particular visible and frequent notice and revenge as on that of violated vows, which never go unpunished.” And she goes on to explain, you might think that all is fair in love and war, and that the false promises and misleading flirtations of lovers are outside the scope of moral judgment, and that they're rightly dismissed as mere gallantries. But in fact, heaven does punish them in the form of unhappy marriages. And this is a point that Austen was going to make more than 100 years later: that seducing and abandoning women represents a real betrayal and a real deception and does cause real harm and is (or should be) noticed by Heaven. That just because a vow is to a woman doesn't mean it isn't a vow and doesn't mean that a man of honor gets to break his word. You know, the libertine code is usually that, “Well, I said it to a woman so my honor isn't really at stake. It's okay to lie.” And then Behn goes on to observe that men break vows and they boast of the numbers of women that they've ruined, and that women are more constant than men by nature. But after men have betrayed them once, they, too, learn how to break vows. It's kind of curious that after this opening, we never actually do see a man breaking a vow — the men here are quite constant; we don't get a “used and abandoned” story at all. And Behn is really setting up a comparison between broken vows among lovers and the sacred vow that a nun makes to God, wherein the young beauty weds herself forever to the service of God. And if these vows to God are broken, says Behn, then you get the most notorious and severe revenge, which is from God. So girls should be really careful before they make such vows. And then Behn has this really tantalizing moment of first-person recollection, which biographers have really wondered about. She says, I once was designed a humble votary in the house of devotion. But she says, I decided against it and, quote, “I could wish for the prevention of an abundance of mischiefs and miseries that nunneries and marriages were not to be entered into till the maid so destined were of a mature age to make her own choice, and that parents would not make use of their justly assumed authority to compel their children, neither to the one or the other.” And Behn is developing an idea that was quite new at the time; that there should be an age of consent, that before a certain stage of development, you shouldn't be bound to the contracts that you make. And she's also, you know, against women getting compelled to marry, just as she's against women getting compelled to enter nunneries.

AMY: Kim, who is this reminding you of?

KIM: Mary Astell. Yeah.

AMY: We just did an episode on Mary Astell, the first feminist, and she kind of makes the same arguments. Like, girls need to wait — girls need to be educated first.

SARAH: I'm so excited that you're thinking of her, because I, too, thought of her. I mean, there she is just a few years later, saying, “Wouldn't this be a brilliant way to figure out what to do with women instead of making them get married? They could enter institutions for women.” And at one point she calls them monasteries and that we could have places for them to live.

AMY: Sarah, you complete me. [laughs]. I do love that Behn has that whole part that you mentioned, which is just like, “Hey, fellas, guess where we learned to break our vows? We learned it from watching you. Like that old drug commercial. 

AMY: So anyway, to set the stage for the story, we have a young woman named Isabella, who is sent by her father to live at a nunnery with the one provision that she will be able to decide for herself, at the age of 13, whether she wants to devote her life to god or not. But until that point in time, she was going to experience everything the material world has to offer: Fine clothes, society, and parties ... you name it. It kind of reminded me of the Rumspringa Amish tradition where teenagers get to experience the outside world a little bit before they commit fully to a life in the Amish community. 

KIM: Yeah, only this sounds even more fun. During her “debut” in society, Isabella is sought after by many an “eligible bachelor” — the finest of them all being a wealthy, highly regarded young man named Villenoys. Unfortunately for Villenoys,  he doesn’t manage to turn Isabella’s head — she’s convinced that the only husband for her is the LORD. (I mean, she’s 13-years-old, so what is she supposed to think?) So she heads back to  the convent. She commences being the perfect young nun. Behn writes: “she was most exemplary devout in the cloister, doing more penance and imposing a more rigid severity and task on herself than was required, giving such rare examples to all the nuns that were less devout…” 

AMY: Yeah, so unlike Fraulein Maria, she is neither a will-o-the-wisp or a flibbertigibbet. She is a good, model nun, which is really what makes the rest of the story so damn shocking. Everything begins to unravel when another young nun named Sister Katteriena starts getting daily visits from her brother, a total hottie named Monsieur Henault. Isabella’s attraction to him is instant and intense, and there is overwhelming (and I mean overwhelming) romantic angst on display. 

KIM: Yeah, it’s very Romeo and Juliet, right? Sarah, do you have a favorite moment from this section of the story, and is this sort of intense longing typical in Behn’s depictions of love?

SARAH: It is typical, and here's a very intense but also a very conventional passage: “But the more she concealed her flame, the more violently it raged, which she strove in vain by prayers and those recourses of solitude to lessen. All this did but augment the pain and was oil to the fire, so that she now could hope that nothing but death would put an end to her griefs.”

AMY: Cue the telenovela music. 

SARAH: Everybody's threatening to die of love! But you mentioned “Romeo and Juliet” and Shakespeare, and so I can't resist bringing up another Shakespeare play here. The fact that Isabella is, as you say, a model nun “imposing more rigid severity” reminds me of a “Measure for Measure” nun (also in Isabella). I'm sure that Behn was thinking of “Measure for Measure.” There's a similar setup. There are three possible partners for the heroine: there are two men and God. And then in “Measure for Measure,” there's a regent in charge of Vienna who wants to extort sex from Isabella in exchange for committing her brother's sentence of death. Isabella refuses to break her vows, even to save her brother's life. But at the end, when the extortionist villain is foiled and the brother’s saved and the restored ruler makes Isabella an offer of marriage that we have to assume that she can't refuse … she doesn't accept it. She famously says nothing when he says, “Marry me.” We've got a secular authority who is obliging the nun to break her vows. Behn's Isabella does not have that excuse, alas.

AMY: Behn’s Isabella has only her lust to blame! So yes, needless to say, owing to the intensity of her feelings for Henault, Isabella ends up busting out of the nunnery under cover of night, thus breaking her vow as a bride of Christ. The lovers run away together, but Henault eventually goes off to war and is killed.

KIM: Yes, and that’s when Villenoys, the thwarted suitor from the beginning of the story reappears. After several years, Isabella agrees to marry him.

AMY: And here is where we cue “Days of our Lives,” soap-opera craziness, because guess who didn’t really die after all? Henault! Poor Isabella. She kind of panics and goes full “Lifetime Movie psychopath.” Yes. Cray-cray. After Henault comes back and is like, “Ta-da! I’m alive!” After he goes to sleep in the castle (or wherever they are), Isabella smothers him with a pillow. She totally freaks out and smothers him to death. So then when her current husband, Villanoys, comes home, she gets her Oscar-worthy drama on, basically… shows him the corpse. So Villanoys, to protect his wife’s honor, puts the corpse into a sack so that he can carry it to a nearby bridge and drop it into the river. He’s just going to try to dispose of the body. However, when he goes to hoist it onto his shoulders, little Isabella secretly stitches the sack of Villanoys’s coat so that when he throws Henault, the corpse, in the river, he too falls in and drowns! I mean, you gotta hand it to her — it’s quick thinking! But it’s really twisted. Suffice to say, things do not end well for poor Isabella. And in the end, Aphra Behn states the moral of the story, which is that you shouldn’t break your vows, ladies! But Sarah, do you think she was offering up any other deeper commentary here?

SARAH: So much! One thing I think is really interesting is that Isabella kills her second husband through an act of needlework. This is an era when people still needed help dressing; they often had to be actually sewn into their clothes and sewn out of their clothes. So the idea that Villanoys drowns because something is sewn onto his coat is maybe not as implausible as it might sound to us. In the Renaissance, women were exhorted to spin and weave and sew at all times, to prevent the wickedness that comes from idleness. And so it's pretty neat that Isabella uses stitching precisely to accomplish this fabulous murder. It presents the murder maybe as an act of feminine self-assertion, but also as women's work or as a perversion of women's work. And one woman who was held up as a paragon of wifely industriousness in that period (and earlier) was Homer's Penelope, the wife of Odysseus in The Odyssey. [She’s] besieged by suitors while Odysseus is gone for years fighting in the Trojan War. And all day, she weaves a funeral shroud for Laertes, and she tells the suitors that she's going to choose a husband among them when she's finally finished weaving that shroud. But every night when she's alone, she unravels the thread so that the task will be never-ending. And it seems to me that on one level, Behn's Isabella is a reverse Penelope; instead of staying faithful to her husband and welcoming him home, Isabella remarries, and then when her first husband returns, she kills both husbands. The murder of the second husband might seem kind of puzzling from the point of view of the love story. She's fallen out of love with her first husband, but she is in love with her second, and you would think that she would just need to get rid of the first one. But I think the return of the first husband reminds Isabella of her very first husband, the one she's sworn to, namely, God who really does have the priority. There's some question of priority between the two human husbands, but she's got to get rid of both of those earthly husbands because of the rights of her spiritual husband who came first. The earthly bigamy that she's committed is a shadow of the bigamy that she knowingly committed when she married Henault after making vows to God. And I think you're absolutely right, that this story is very Tarantino-esque. There's a kind of gusto to this murder spree, and there's a kind of reveling in a female capacity for violence. And I think there's also a kind of absurdist comedy here (I’m thinking of Kill Bill, especially), and on some level, unlike Tarantino, the story may seem kind of doubtful about the possibilities for female empowerment. Isabella starts the novel with huge capacities and talents and ambition. Her community glorifies her. Is it spiritual ambition or is it social ambition? It’s not totally clear, maybe she just loves that everyone thinks of her as miraculously virtuous. But anyway, she's done in by love. And when you think about Mary Astell coming later, you think how she could have been in a community of women ruled by a woman, and in which she could have developed her intellectual capacities. And instead, she fell in love. And she's probably going to hell, (though, arguably Behn didn't really believe in hell.) But on one level, it just seems so unfair.

AMY: Yeah, it’s sort of a commentary that women just don’t have any good choices. They’re very limited in their options for what their life is going to be.

KIM: Yeah. So as we mentioned, The History of a Nun is a really quick read and a great jumping in point for reading Behn. But there’s another work of hers that a lot of people tend to reference. It’s a poem called “The Disappointment.”

AMY: All about male impotence. Let’s read part of it, shall we?

KIM: Yes!

AMY: Yes!

AMY: Okay, so to set things up… “The Disappointment” starts off as your typical pastoral love poem… we have the “Amarous Lisander” who is trying to make some time with “fair Cloris” — the shepherd and shepherdess are alone in a thicket and Lisander gets a little too worked up, I guess you could say. About halfway through the poem Behn writes: 

He saw how at her length she lay,

He saw her rising Bosom bare,

Her loose thin Robes, through which appear

A Shape design'd for Love and Play;

Abandon'd by her Pride and Shame,

She do's her softest Sweets dispence,

Offring her Virgin-Innocence

A Victim to Loves Sacred Flame ;

Whilst th' or'e ravish'd Shepherd lies,

Unable to perform the Sacrifice.

8

Ready to taste a Thousand Joys,

Thee too transported hapless Swain,

Found the vast Pleasure turn'd to Pain :

Pleasure, which too much Love destroys !

The willing Garments by he laid,

And Heav'n all open to his view ;

Mad to possess, himself he threw

On the defenceless lovely Maid.

But oh ! what envious Gods conspire

To snatch his Pow'r, yet leave him the Desire !

It goes on quite a bit from there. Cloris ends up running away, leaving Lisander mortified and furious. So Sarah, let’s talk about this one briefly.

KIM: Is this a revenge poem?

SARAH: I do think it's a revenge poem. [laughing] It's interesting, what makes this unique, in part, because it's, it's part of a large literary tradition concerning impotence. The one thing it could be playing with is the idea that it's not unique. In fact, it's actually based on a French poem, which it cuts and translates, but Ovid had an impotence poem in the Amores and Petronius, in The Satyricon, has this guy struck with impotence harshly reprimanding his own penis. And you've got the brilliant libertine poet and patron and troublemaker John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, whom Behn did know, who has a hilarious and obscene poem called “The Imperfect Enjoyment,” in which he's elaborately cursing his impotent member after boasting about all his accomplishments from earlier days. And we’ve got [Nathaniel] Lee and a poem from the same period on the same theme called “Love’s Opportunity Neglected.” And you've got William Wycherley’s play “The Country Wife,” in which a man spreads the false rumor that he's impotent in order to get access to other men's wives. And Janet Todd proposes that Behn may have written this poem, in company with the last writers that I mentioned, as a kind of parlor game among literary wits: “Let's all write an impotence thing!” And according to Todd, this is more explicit than anything that Behn or any other woman had thus far ever written in English (or we have knowledge of having written) and it differs from other impotence works in that it's presenting a woman's point of view, as much as a man's. But Behn has impotence running throughout her works, and it may have been a factor, says Todd, in her relationship with John Hoyle. In Love Letters, you've got the first tryst between the central lovers and the man suddenly cannot go through with it. He ends up fleeing dressed up as a woman. And I wonder whether there isn't a kind of involuntary expression of love and care and mercy on his part in that act; a kind of reprieve. Because here's this woman with her whole life before her, and she's about to completely ruin her life by sleeping with her sister's husband. This is supposed to be the highest expression of love, and yet it's going to cause one party irreparable harm, however willing she may be. And I think you get that same paradox very much emphasized in “The Disappointment.” The willing woman is compared to a town that's besieged and no longer protected by its army. “All her unguarded beauties lie the spoils and trophies of the enemy.” And in the lines that you read, the lady is “a victim to love’s sacred flame” and the man is about to sacrifice her. But the impotence of the male lover results in the tables being turned on him in a reversal of the scenario that usually plays out between two lovers when a man gets a woman to agree to sleep with him. At the beginning of the poem, she basically gives in. She lacks what Behn calls the power to keep resisting, even verbally, but then he lacks the power as well, physically. Suddenly the bad things that would ordinarily happen sooner or later to the woman who agrees to sex start happening quite immediately to him. So he found “the vast pleasure turned to pain,” and he gets abandoned. “From  Lysander’s arms she fled, leaving him fainting on the gloomy bed.” So he experiences some of the losses that literature of this period warns us that women who sleep with men outside of marriage will inevitably suffer. And I think we're laughing, as we always do with these impotence poems, but we're laughing, in part, in vindictive solidarity with Cloris. But it is an ambivalent ending, I think, because Aphra Behn is a very sex positive kind of a feminist, and the disappointment is real, I think, even for Cloris — for both of them, it's real. You've got these really menacing final lines with Lysander, vanquished, but not subdued, and seeming dangerous, at least to me. He's not cursing his own penis. Instead, he's blaming Cloris. “He cursed his birth, his fate has stars but more, the shepherdess’s charms, whose soft bewitching influence had dammed him to a hell of impotence.” It's funny, but it's also very creepy.

KIM: I remember reading Aphra Behn in college too, but when exactly did she start making a resurgence among academics, and what prompted that?

SARAH: Well, as you know, with the inexorable increase in prudery over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, she became a totally unsafe ancestor to claim for women writers. In 1915, Montague Summers came out with a collected edition. And speaking of Lost Ladies of Lit, in 1927, the novelist and aristocrat Vita Sackville-West wrote a biography of Behn, The Incomparable Astrea. And Sackville-West was in a relationship with Virginia Woolf at the time, and this was one year before A Room of One's Own. But for academics, what really, I think, brought attention to Behn was the rise of feminism in the 60s and 70s. And in an attempt to find those lost ladies of literature, even though Behn's work didn't completely necessarily fit the model of covert rebellion that a lot of people were looking for. And today, she's become even more fascinating to even more contingents of people. She's got of a lot of pictures of same-sex desire (especially among women), and of gender ambiguity. She's got these fascinating treatments of colonialism, and race. And then, of course, she's also offering this window on the rise of the novel — not as big a window yet as she deserves to have, I think, but that's coming.

AMY: Interesting. I didn't know Vita Sackville-West wrote a biography of her either — that's new to me. Um, so you've mentioned a couple of your favorite Behn works, but if our listeners wanted to check out something else by her, which would you suggest people check out next?

SARAH: Maybe next, Oroonoco and The Fair Jilt. They're just so entertaining. And also, certainly, this gender-bending poem called “To the Fair Clorinda: Who Made Love to Me, Imagin’d More Than Woman.” And her other poems are pretty fabulous as well. But one play that I particularly love is called “The City Heiress,” and like several other Behn works, it shows a very charming rake or libertine figure — a man of pleasure. He’s choosing between a virgin and a non-virgin woman, and we see the non-virgin woman, the virtuous widow, succumbing to the extreme wit and seductiveness of this libertine man's talk, even though she knows that he's going to abandon her after she sleeps with him. And Behn makes the path of that sexually experienced woman (and the seductiveness of the clever man) completely convincing. It's a really hard book to find, but I do recommend it, “The City Heiress,” as one of the most marvelous Behn plays.

AMY: I think what I love about reading Aphra Behn (what I’ve read so far) is that, while it’s true she does draw you in with the shocking and the titillating, once she’s nabbed you with the entertainment value, she also has a message (an often feminist message) to impart. 

KIM: Yes, and Sarah, it’s been wonderful to have your professorial guidance on today’s show to help us navigate the ins and outs of this amazing writer, who basically paved the way for every woman writer who came after her (and maybe every writer who came after her). Thank you so much for joining us — it’s been a blast having you here and I can’t wait … the book about guardianship sounds amazing. Oh my gosh. That’s right up my alley. 

SARAH: You guys are inspiring me to think that I need to look at Behn for that, too. But yeah, I'm so enjoying writing it. It is so interesting. And it's leading me to look at the early, early novel, and that is just so unexpected and mind-blowing. She was a hole in my book, Aphra Behn, that I kept thinking, “I need to go back to Aphra Behn,” and you've led me to do that.

KIM: That’s fantastic; I love it. 

SARAH: And thank you so much for having me! I've loved talking to you both!

KIM: Yeah, this was fantastic. You just brought so much to this conversation. I loved it.

AMY: So cool. That's all for this episode. Don't forget to rate and review us wherever you listen to this podcast, and you can subscribe to our newsletter at Lostladiesoflit.com to find out about all the upcoming authors we’ll be discussing on the show. Bye, everybody!

KIM: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.