Janet Todd Reconsiders Aphra Behn's Complicated Past
If you snoozed through those survey classes, it might be because your teacher didn't mention how swashbuckling Aphra Behn really was. At Literary Hub, Janet Todd muses on Behn's lesser-known reputation for being a spy and "punk poetess." Although Todd asserts that Behn's position in the canon is secure, "For all this critical activity, Aphra Behn is still not as high in appreciation and recognition as I believe she deserves to be—and as I expected her to be when I began thinking about her in the heady 1970s, that decade of rediscovery when so many past women writers were allowed out of the shadows." Let's pick up there:
With her craft and experimental techniques, her exciting female perspective on everything from politics to domesticity and sex, I thought her on a level with Jane Austen in literary importance. I still do. And it’s hard to imagine a more striking and adventurous life—even if a good deal of this life is and was intended to be secret!
Most of the articles and comments on Behn in the last two decades have been scholarly and subtle. They have responded to the changing fashions of the discipline of English and Cultural Studies. Second Wave Feminist criticism that brought her to greater notice in the 1960s and 1970s has given way to other “Waves” much concerned with the performative and with amorphous and polymorphous desire, while the emphasis in postcolonial studies, that other growth area within the discipline, is still overwhelmingly concerned with race and ethnicity. Aphra Behn as writer of sexually explicit poems and portrayer of England’s early colonies has much to say in both areas of study.
Recent scholarship has concerned Behn as dramatist and poet. It throws new light on her stagecraft, her shifting and often prominent position in the theatrical marketplace, as well as on her complex interactions with male colleagues and competitors such as John Dryden and Thomas Shadwell. In her theatrical dedications Behn uses flattery in ways that both amuse and dismay present critics and, in her plays, she portrays rakes and whores with the kind of ambiguity that can be disturbing—as well as funny. Behn was fascinated by rank, by the notion of nobility, its honor, and the manifold ways in which it could be dishonored. She returned to the topic over and over again in her drama, investigating the allure and vulnerabilities of personal and political authority. Critics have applauded her lively enthusiasm for sexual games and her irreverence about the masculinity that dominated the age and which she expresses so well in her plays and in her frank and risqué poems. If her treatment of sex astonishes readers less than it did a century ago, Behn can still shock when she handles subjects such as rape and the seductions of power. In many areas of gender relationships, then, her drama, fiction and poetry are still capable of destabilizing our own assumptions. So, too, can her utopian moral and political schemes, where desire and reality coalesce or clash, and where the body is left to subvert the mind.
Read more at Literary Hub.