“Love, Liberty, and Lust: The World of Aphra Behn’s The Rover”
Hello!! Myself Nidhi Pandya. I am currently pursuing my Master of Arts Degree in English at M K Bhavnagar University. This blog task is assigned by Megha Trivedi Ma'am which contains topic of The Play the Rover by Aphra Behn.
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➤ Background and Context
Author: Aphra Behn (1640–1689)
Year of Publication: 1677 (Restoration period)
Genre: Restoration Comedy of Manners / Comedy of Intrigue
Setting: Naples, Italy, during the carnival season
Source: Based on Thomas Killigrew’s play Thomaso, or The Wanderer
➤ HISTORICAL AND SOCIAL CONTEXT
The Restoration Age (1660–1700)
- After the Puritan Commonwealth ended, King Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660.
- Theatres reopened after being banned by Puritans for nearly 18 years.
- The court and society became decadent, witty, and sexually open, reflected in Restoration comedies.
The Rise of the Libertine Hero
- Men like Willmore represent the cavalier spirit witty, charming, and amoral.
- Libertines believed in pleasure, freedom, and skepticism of social morality.
- Behn, however, critiques this culture: she exposes how libertinism exploits women and hides male hypocrisy.
Aphra Behn’s Unique Position
- Behn (1640–1689) was the first English woman to live by her writing.
- A royalist, spy, and playwright, she had lived in Suriname before returning to London to write.
- As a woman in a male-dominated literary world, she faced social hostility.
- Her plays often celebrate wit, sexuality, and female autonomy revolutionary ideas for her time.
- The Rover literally means “wanderer” or “vagabond.”
- Willmore, the central male figure, “roves” across lands and women symbolizing the wandering of the English Cavaliers exiled during the Civil War.
- Metaphorically, “roving” applies to all characters:
- Hellena roves from the convent into the world of love.
- Angellica roves between power and passion.
- Florinda roves between love and danger.
- English cavaliers (Belvile, Willmore, Blunt, Frederick) are in Naples.
- Florinda loves Belvile but her brother Don Pedro wants her to marry Don Vincentio.
- Hellena, destined for a convent, wants to experience love before she becomes a nun.
- They disguise themselves and go to the carnival, meeting Willmore.
- The carnival introduces freedom and disguise a world turned upside down.
- Women cross social and gender boundaries by wearing masks.
- Behn sets the stage for sexual politics women exploring independence under the cover of festivity.
- The cavaliers encounter Angellica Bianca, a courtesan whose portrait hangs for sale.
- Willmore flirts with her, though he has no money.
- Angellica falls for his reckless charm, breaking her professional detachment.
- Meanwhile, Blunt meets Lucetta, who seduces and robs him a comic revenge against male gullibility.
- Behn compares prostitution and marriage:
- Angellica sells love openly for money.
- Society sells women through dowries secretly.
- Angellica’s fall into genuine love humanizes her and critiques the double standard that condemns female sexuality.
- Blunt’s humiliation exposes male foolishness and moral hypocrisy.
- Florinda and Belvile try to elope, but chaos reigns.
- Willmore, drunk, nearly assaults Florinda, not recognizing her.
- Belvile rescues her, unaware it was Willmore who attacked her.
- Later, Willmore tells Hellena about his flirtation with Angellica, making her jealous.
- This act darkens the comedy.
- The attempted rape shows how libertine behavior easily turns violent.
- Behn uses irony: the “hero” Willmore almost destroys the honor of the heroine.
- This shows the precarious position of women in a world where male “freedom” endangers them.
- Angellica confronts Willmore at gunpoint for his betrayal.
- Hellena and Florinda continue disguising themselves.
- Florinda seeks shelter in Blunt’s room, but he and Frederick, angry about Lucetta’s trick, nearly assault her again.
- Belvile intervenes and saves her once more.
- Angellica’s rage is one of the first expressions of female emotional power in English drama.
- Her love humanizes her, while Willmore’s betrayal reveals male irresponsibility.
- The repetition of sexual assault scenes emphasizes that female virtue is constantly under threat.
- Behn balances comedy and critique: laughter masks social critique.
- More mistaken identities occur.
- Don Pedro, thinking Willmore is Antonio, tries to force Florinda to marry him.
- Eventually, all disguises are removed.
- Florinda marries Belvile; Willmore and Hellena reconcile.
- Angellica is left heartbroken, possibly arrested.
- The play ends with marriages and carnival celebration.
- The ending appears comic but is ironically bittersweet.
- Marriage restores social order, yet the dangers women faced remain unresolved.
- Angellica’s exit signals that women who love outside convention suffer.
- Behn’s tone is both festive and tragic a feminist irony beneath the laughter.
- Represents male liberty, charm, and irresponsibility.
- A soldier with no money, he lives by wit and seduction.
- His charisma masks moral emptiness.
- Behn uses him to show how men enjoy social and sexual freedom denied to women.
- Though he marries Hellena, it’s uncertain if he will reform his “roving” nature persists.
- Spirited, bold, and witty she challenges female confinement.
- Her name (“Hellena”) suggests both “Helen of Troy” (beauty) and “hell” (rebellion).
- She actively courts Willmore a reversal of gender norms.
- Represents female sexual curiosity and intellectual equality with men.
- Through Hellena, Behn gives women a voice in love and choice.
- Symbol of romantic idealism and female virtue.
- Her attempted assaults show the danger of male-dominated society.
- She wants love, not financial marriage asserting her emotional agency.
- Her survival and marriage to Belvile show that love and virtue can coexist, but only narrowly.
- A courtesan whose love is for sale.
- Her “portrait” as advertisement symbolizes the commodification of women.
- When she loves Willmore, she becomes tragic punished for feeling.
- Angellica is the play’s moral conscience, questioning the world’s hypocrisy:
- Through her, Behn exposes how both marriage and prostitution exploit women.
- Comic counterpart to Willmore a “country fool” seduced by Lucetta.
- His humiliation is social satire showing men’s arrogance when faced with clever women.
- His later attempt to assault Florinda shows how easily humiliation turns to cruelty.
- Behn uses him to ridicule both male pride and Restoration moral decay.
- Patriarchal authority figure.
- Controls his sisters’ futures, obsessed with family honor.
- His hypocrisy visiting courtesans while controlling Florinda highlights male double standards.
- Behn’s women are active subjects, not passive victims.
- Hellena pursues love, Florinda chooses her husband, Angellica earns her living.
- Behn asserts that female desire is natural and intelligent, not sinful.
- Male guardianship (Don Pedro) and libertinism (Willmore) both threaten women’s freedom.
- The “brotherly protection” of honor often masks male control.
- Behn exposes how patriarchy uses “virtue” to limit women.
- Both involve financial negotiation.
- Florinda’s dowry and Angellica’s price both reduce women to property.
- Angellica’s speech reveals that marriage is a respectable form of prostitution.
- Masks and disguises allow women to speak, flirt, and choose.
- Carnival represents temporary chaos a space for rebellion.
- Yet, once the festival ends, normal patriarchy returns showing freedom is temporary.
- Men like Willmore are celebrated for sexual freedom.
- Women like Angellica are condemned for the same.
- Behn reveals moral hypocrisy: society praises male desire but punishes female honesty.
- Florinda’s repeated near-assaults dramatize the constant threat to women.
- Beneath Restoration comedy lies a dark truth liberty for men often means danger for women.
- Prose: lively, colloquial, witty dialogue.
- Verse: used rarely mostly prose, giving realism and speed.
- Tone: playful yet ironic.
- Disguise and mistaken identity
- Parallel plots (romantic vs. sexual)
- Carnival setting for social inversion.
- Behn’s language blends comedy and critique, using laughter as a weapon against patriarchy.
- Behn is a pioneer of feminist drama.
- She gives her female characters voice, wit, and choice.
- The Rover shows women as desiring and reasoning beings.
- Critics like Virginia Woolf saw Behn as the first woman to “earn women the right to speak their minds.”
- The play exposes the commercial nature of relationships.
- Love, virtue, and marriage are all commodities in a capitalist patriarchy.
- Willmore’s “roving” desire reflects male anxiety about loss of control.
- Angellica’s emotional suffering shows the punishment of female desire in a phallocentric society.
- The cavaliers’ wandering reflects English exile and displacement after the Civil War.
- Naples represents both pleasure and danger the moral chaos of postwar Europe.
- Serious plot: Florinda–Belvile (romantic love, virtue, danger)
- Comic plot: Willmore–Hellena, Angellica–Willmore, Blunt–Lucetta (satire of lust and deception)
- Symmetry: Each pair reflects aspects of love ideal, sensual, or economic.
- Pacing: Fast-moving; constant disguises and mistaken identities keep tension alive.
- Moral Structure: Comedy hides a serious feminist question “What freedom do women truly have?”
- Aphra Behn’s The Rover is a dazzling Restoration comedy that fuses wit, passion, and social criticism.
- It celebrates the spirit of carnival but exposes the tragedy beneath laughter a world where women crave liberty but live under patriarchal power.
Answer:
Yes, I agree with Angellica’s perspective, because Aphra Behn, through The Rover, exposes the deep hypocrisy of a patriarchal society that commodifies women in both marriage and prostitution, merely disguising the economic transaction in moral and social respectability.
1. Economic Parallels Between Marriage and Prostitution
Angellica’s argument is rooted in economic realism. Both marriage and prostitution, in Behn’s Restoration world, involve a financial exchange for sexual or emotional companionship. In a patriarchal structure, women had no independent economic agency; their survival often depended on male support. When Angellica says that the negotiation of a marriage settlement is no different from bargaining for a prostitute’s services, she unveils the uncomfortable truth that both institutions objectify women and reduce them to commodities of male desire the only difference being that one is socially sanctioned and the other condemned.
2. The Marriage Market as a Transaction
In Restoration England, marriages were often arranged based on dowries, inheritance, and status, not affection. Behn’s characters like Florinda and Hellena are constantly constrained by their family’s economic ambitions, while Angellica, a courtesan, openly profits from her beauty rather than pretending virtue while engaging in the same exchange. Thus, Angellica’s stance questions the moral duplicity of a world where respectable women are bought through dowries while prostitutes are punished for doing the same thing transparently.
3. Behn’s Feminist Irony
Behn’s portrayal of Angellica is not purely condemnatory. She is a tragic figure both powerful and vulnerable. Her moral reflection blurs the line between virtue and vice, challenging audiences to rethink female agency. Through her, Behn suggests that what society calls “sin” in prostitutes is often the same negotiation that occurs in the “holy” bond of marriage. Angellica’s moral clarity exposes the hypocrisy of social institutions that exploit women in both forms.
4. The Emotional Dimension
When Angellica falls in love with Willmore, her emotional collapse illustrates another layer: even a woman who sells love for money yearns for genuine affection, just as a married woman does. This humanizes her and strengthens Behn’s feminist critique the desire for love and autonomy is universal among women, regardless of social label.
Conclusion
Therefore, Angellica’s comparison between marriage and prostitution is a radical feminist insight into the gendered economics of her time. Aphra Behn uses her as a mouthpiece to expose the illusion of moral superiority in patriarchal institutions and to assert that until women gain economic and personal independence, they will always be subject to forms of commodification, whether inside or outside the marriage contract.
Answer:
Yes, I completely agree with Virginia Woolf’s statement. Aphra Behn, through her bold authorship and outspoken female characters in The Rover, truly gave women a literary and social voice in an era that silenced them. She not only wrote as England’s first professional woman playwright but also portrayed women as intelligent, witty, and self-determining, asserting their right to speak, desire, and choose.
1. Aphra Behn: A Pioneer of Female Authorship
In the seventeenth century, women were discouraged from public writing or theatrical performance. Behn defied these conventions by earning her living through her pen an act of rebellion in itself. Woolf’s remark recognizes Behn as the first woman who dared to write without apology, thus opening doors for future women writers to express themselves freely. Behn’s life was her protest she lived independently, intellectually, and politically engaged, in a society where women were expected to be silent.
2. Women’s Wit and Voice in The Rover
In The Rover, women like Hellena and Florinda embody Behn’s vision of female freedom and intellect. Hellena refuses to be a passive participant in the marriage market; she actively pursues her own desires with Willmore, using wit and disguise to control her destiny. Her quick repartee and assertiveness mark her as a woman who refuses patriarchal control. Florinda’s determination to marry for love rather than property further challenges social conventions. Through these heroines, Behn dramatizes Woolf’s idea that women can and must speak for themselves.
3. Sexual Agency and Feminist Expression
Behn’s representation of sexual desire was revolutionary. At a time when female sexuality was suppressed, she depicted women as beings with erotic intelligence and emotional depth, not merely as objects of male lust. Angellica Bianca’s struggle between love and economic independence also illustrates a woman’s complex inner life. Behn’s open treatment of sexuality was an act of literary emancipation she wrote what men wrote about, but from a female consciousness.
4. Subverting Patriarchal Ideology
Through comedy and irony, Behn subverts traditional gender roles. Male characters like Willmore often appear reckless and morally unstable, while women demonstrate strength, rationality, and moral clarity. This reversal allows Behn to question the male monopoly over power and moral authority, giving women a platform to challenge double standards. In this way, she embodies Woolf’s praise: Behn’s pen became a sword of resistance for generations of women who followed.
5. Legacy and Justification of Woolf’s Tribute
Virginia Woolf’s tribute in A Room of One’s Own acknowledges that before women could “speak their minds,” they needed a voice in literature and Aphra Behn gave them that voice. She showed that a woman could write professionally, critique male privilege, and still be artistically brilliant. Every female writer after her from Wollstonecraft to Woolf herself walked through the door Behn opened.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Aphra Behn’s The Rover is not merely a Restoration comedy; it is a manifesto of female liberation, disguised in wit and romance. She gave her heroines words, wit, and agency and through them, she gave all women the courage to speak their minds. Virginia Woolf was right: the flowers laid upon Behn’s tomb are not merely for her as a writer but for what she made possible the voice of womanhood itself.
Words : 2577
Photos : 4
References:
- Jajo, Reem. Sexuality, Agency, and Independence in the Work of Aphra Behn, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Virginia Woolf. MS thesis. San Diego State University, 2021.
- Jelínková, Ema. "A prostitute as the unsung heroine in Aphra Behn’s The Rover." Ars Aeterna 14.2 (2022): 12-21.
- Stewart, Ann Marie. Rape and attempted rape in the plays of Aphra Behn. University of Colorado at Boulder, 2002.
- The Rover by Aphra Behn Summary: https://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-rover/summary
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