Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Utopian Longings in Behn's Lyric Poetry
[An American critic and educator, Gardiner has published a study on the verse of English poet and dramatist Ben Jonson and has also contributed essays to several publications devoted to feminist criticism and scholarship. In the following essay, she states that Behn expressed in her verse a desire for the liberation of women from repressive social and political norms.]
Aphra Behn was a poet of astonishing range and accomplishment. In her own time she was praised primarily as a poet, and she hoped that posterity would place her with "Sappho and Orinda" in a female lineage of poetry and in the ageless pantheon of fame. She awed men with her talent and fluency and inspired other women to write. Her later reputation is almost entirely as a playwright and pioneer novelist, however. "With their feeble personification and insipid allegory, almost all" of her poems are "equally dull," complained critic Edward Wagenknecht [in "In Praise of Mrs. Behn," The Colophon 18 (1934)]. "And she—poor lady!—considered herself a poet first of all." Today's feminists prefer her vigorous polemics in behalf of herself and other women to her lyrics on more traditional topics. However, her poetry forms a distinctive part of her oeuvre that should be more highly valued.
In this poetry, traditional tropes of heterosexual love present a longing for community, for a society in which the radical values of liberty, equality, and fraternity would be possible for women and defined in women's terms. Of anomalous social position, Behn mythologized her family of origin, her personal past, and her nation's history; her poetry created a world in which a woman like herself could flourish. She contextualized her longings for a more just and fulfilling life not in Restoration England at large but only in a coterie of fellow poets and a realm of poetry, a pretty pastoral world that took shape in the printed book. In this as in many other respects, she is similar to the other best-known seventeenth-century woman poet, Katherine Philips—known as Orinda, as Behn was known as Astraea—and both women write within the traditions of seventeenth-century lyric established earlier in the century by the canonical male poets John Donne and Ben Jonson. Such similarities between the more private and more public female poets help us understand how for the seventeenth century, the public and private were overlapping rather than polarized: Behn's poetry circulated in manuscripts among friends, was sung on the stage, and reappeared in published books. Such poetry calls into question the categories of public and private often used to organize seventeenth-century literary history and also many conventional literary judgments, for example, those exalting the verisimilar over the artificial and the passionate over the playful.
Behn's best known and most widely admired poem is "Love Arm'd," a song from her 1677 play Abdelazar.
Love in Fantastique Triumph satt,
Whilst Bleeding Hearts a round him flow'd,
For whom Fresh paines he did Create,
And strange Tyranick power he show'd;
From thy Bright Eyes he took his fire,
Which round about, in sport he hurl'd;
But 'twas from mine he took desire,
Enough to undo the Amorous World.
From me he took his sighs and tears,
From thee his Pride and Crueltie;
From me his Languishments and Feares,
And every Killing Dart from thee;
Thus thou and I, the God have arm'd,
And sett him up a Deity;
But my poor Heart alone is harm'd,
Whilst thine the Victor is, and free.
The poem succeeds by the standards of cavalier poetry, expressing turbulent erotic passions in elegantly concise and self-contained tetrameter quatrains. The first quatrain paints an emblem. Personified love sits in a triumphal throne or chariot as in a classical victory pageant or a Renaissance masque, both spectacles of power. Love is a conquering hero at the expense of others who have lost. His "Fantastique Triumph" is both extraordinary and imaginary: The effective trisyllabic fantastic implies both the exaggerated power of love and its origin in the lovers' mental constructs. Love is the creator, although he creates pain rather than the universal harmony attributed to God by Milton's Paradise Lost, which appeared a few years before Behn began publishing. Therefore, love's alien and uncanny "strange" power is "tyrannic"—that is, both absolute and unjust. The seventeenth-century's frequent changes of political regime would certainly have left nearly everyone in Restoration England thinking that they had recently lived under a tyranny of one sort or the other, either Puritan or Royalist. "Tyranny" would not be a dead metaphor, then, but a lively reminder of being at the mercy of people and events beyond one's individual control, of political as well as personal passions. Milton makes Satan a grand tyrant, but Behn domesticates such cosmic references; similarly, she alludes to the baroque splendors of God enthroned and Christ's bleeding heart by painting images that recall contemporary baroque churches while keeping her lyric resolutely modest and secular.
The poem's great power derives from the contrast between its painful and exaggerated sentiments and a controlled and orderly form that seems to accept this situation as proper, normal, perhaps even necessary. The beloved's eyes are the source of love's fire, and love seems to enjoy the pure exercise of his power, hurling lightning bolts "in sport," a gesture huge and reckless enough to balance the lover's eyes, which are filled with enough "desire" to "undo the amorous world." The neat balances of "from me" and "from thee" break down, however. "To undo" is the opposite of creation, perhaps a synonym for the creation of pain, though unlike the woman undone by sexual indiscretion in Restoration London, the wounded lover is not abandoned and alone but is surrounded by bleeding hearts, as though the whole universe is wounded by love.
Similar patterns remain important throughout Behn's poetry: The woman always wants reciprocity, as does the lover of either sex; the man or the beloved wants freedom. Behn frequently depicts relationships of equality that degenerate, perhaps because it is so hard for her to imagine reciprocity and equality in a society devoid of them in which only sexual passion seems to offer the possibility of ecstatic reciprocity. The carefully balanced "me" and "thee" in this poem seem to keep the relationship between the lovers as even as the meter, against the sense, so that the contrast between the poem's form and its emotional content reproduces the dilemma of the woman who is told that a relationship is equal at the same time that she feels more constrained than her lover both psychologically and socially. Equality is defined on his terms: Either lover can enter or leave the relationship at will, but the woman becomes emotionally more attached and more vulnerable because of possible pregnancy or loss of reputation—events such poems do not mention directly.
The phrase "thus thou and I" in the concluding quatrain works syllogistically in the fashion of the best seventeenth-century lyrics, although its conclusions do not spring logically from what has occurred before; instead, the logic is that implied simply by the combination "thou and I"—that is, by the desire that subordinates the lover to the beloved's power. "Thou and I" invent the god and shape its being. Without such deification, Love might be fair rather than tyrannical and sadistic. Once again the apparent union and reciprocity of the lovers breaks down into a power imbalance of female victimage. As Behn emphasizes by the pause late in the poem's last line, to be "free" from reciprocal claims is to be victorious over the committed. A poem written around the time of the English Revolution might well champion freedom although it appears equivocal about its meaning for women. Paradoxically, to be free may be possible only for the victorious, only for tyrants who keep others enslaved. Freedom may also only be possible for the dispassionate, those so cool that they do not care. Throughout her life Behn defended sexual passion as peremptory but also as central to human satisfaction. In a poem "To Desire" she could address it as an old but difficult friend, "thou haunts my inconvenient hours," and, in her paraphrase of the Lord's prayer, she famously expected divine indulgence for an eroticism she could not seriously believe was sinful:
Of all my Crimes, the breach of all thy Laws
Love, soft bewitching Love! has been the cause
…That sure will soonest be forgiven of God.
In its original context, "Love Arm'd" opens Behn's heroic drama Abdelazar, where it is sung by the Queen of Spain, who is foolishly in love with a disdainful Moor who became her lover only for political reasons and who now rebuffs her. The song thus sets up Behn's goal of reciprocal emotion, indicated in meter and word patterning, against a context of power that vitiates reciprocity between men and women. Even though the woman is the active wooer and a queen, she is powerless against a foolish passion for a tyrannic man, and she thus colludes in the eroticizing of power on which this poem, and perhaps modern patriarchy, are based.
The context of that peculiar Restoration literary form, the heroic drama, mythologizes social contexts so that any heroine may be a queen; however, everyone in a play must be marked by class and gender, even if the classes and locale do not correspond to those of Restoration England. Lyric poems dissolve even this imaginary context into the freer space of the poetry anthology, in which "Love Arm'd" appears with no indication of who its speaker or beloved are. Even if love is tyrannical and unjust, such a world remains fair in the sense that the rules of love apparently apply to all lovers, whomever they may be. The roles are not gender-specific, and the lover clearly bears responsibility for the fix she or he is in because love's cruelty cannot exist without the cooperation of both parties. The miniature world of "Love Arm'd" is a cruel but meaningful one, potentially sex-egalitarian but confusing about the conventional alignments of gender.
If the central dynamic of Behn's poetry is the longing for reciprocity in a world in which men and women hold unequal power, then "The Disappointment" is a humorous meditation and an ironic revenge on those conditions. "The Disappointment" may also be seen as an opposite to "Love Arm'd." Where "Love Arm'd" may display the woman suffering from a man's power over her, "The Disappointment" shows a woman suffering from the one form of powerlessness that is specific to men, sexual impotence. The perfect reciprocity that Behn implies ought to exist in sexual love is denied for the woman of "The Disappointment" in two apparently contrasting but reinforcing ways—the man's physical power over her and his lack of power over his own body, a debility Behn heightens in comparison to her source, whose hero later becomes vigorously successful with his mistress. Thus, unlike Ovid's Amores book 3, poem 7, the classical precursor of such poems, or the French "L'Occasion Perdue Recouverte" that Behn's poem partly translates, or even the earl of Rochester's brutal "The Imperfect Enjoyment," Behn's poem does not contrast an incident of male impotence with his otherwise exaggerated virility.
Whereas "Love Arm'd" paints an emblematic fiction of a personified god, "The Disappointment" revels in another artificial world, one Behn creates frequently in her nondramatic verse—that of precious pastoral. Seventeenth-century pastoral is often reviled as artificial and "effeminate," because we moderns prefer forms that seem closer to a direct transcription of social life, the novel aesthetic and aesthetic of the novel form that Behn helped shape in the 1680s. In this poem, however, Behn moves away from social realism, changing its setting from an interior "appartement" in her source to an outdoor "lone Thicket made for Love." This transformation indicates that Behn positively embraced the pastoral; it was not just something she translated for quick cash.
One twilight afternoon "Amorous Lysander" surprises "fair Cloris" in that lonely thicket, and he immediately starts making love to her. The poem's only direct discourse, which is italicized occurs when Cloris protests against her lover's advances, beginning " Cease, Cease—your vain Desire, / Or I'll call out." Because we hear Cloris's words directly, we may feel that it is the woman's consciousness to which we are closest in the poem. Only she speaks directly in Behn's poem, although not in the source, where her lover is voluble; the rest of Behn's "The Disappointment" is reported via an apparently female narrator. Such phrasing highlights female agency in the poem, but the situation is complicated. Behn alters her source to emphasize Lysander's passivity despite the fact that he is the aggressor in the affair: He is "o'er-Ravish'd" and "too transported"; "Excess of Love his Love betray'd." Conversely, Cloris's protests against an apparent rape underline that what a woman says is not necessarily what she means, a view that may alienate Behn from today's women: The narrator insists, like the male lover in the poem, that Cloris means yes when she says no. The narrator, another woman, can correctly read a woman who is either constrained from knowing her feelings or restrained from expressing them by conventional standards of female propriety. Thus, the poem gives us two contradictory ways of reading female reliability and the correspondence of speech to feeling, of expression to passion—Cloris's and the narrator's.
What Lysander seeks is less a particular woman than a cosmic power centered in the female body:
His daring Hand that Altar seiz'd,
Where Gods of Love do sacrifice:
That Awful Throne, that Paradice
Where Rage is calm'd, and Anger pleas'd;
That Fountain where Delight still flows,
And gives the Universal World Repose.
Immediately thereafter, in a passage that Behn expands from her source, the lovers enjoy a union that is reciprocal, passionate, and simultaneously physical and emotional.
Her Balmy Lips incountring his,
Their Bodies, as their Souls, are joyn'd;
Where both in Transports Unconfin'd
Extend themselves upon the Moss.
The body language of the poem hints at the possibility of true reciprocity; her hand touches his breast—a touch Behn adds to the original—then his hers. In the moments building up to the humorous climax, we hear of idyllic pleasures that cannot be sustained, a wordless reciprocity where his body and hers first mirror one another and then melt and blend. The language describing their rapture echoes that of Donne's poems like "The Extasie," describing a union that transcends the mere flesh. And Cloris and Lysander melt into just such a perfect, perhaps even idyllically infantile union, one that nostalgically recalls the poetry written before the English Civil War, the rosy Elizabethan bloom. This initial period of union in "The Disappointment" is mutual and consensual. The poem's references to higher loves and historical allusions help create its context, not a spiritually transcendent realm but a lost garden of earthly pleasures.
At the crucial moment, however, "The too transported hapless Swain / Found the vast Pleasure turn'd to Pain." The woman responds:
Cloris returning from the Trance
Which Love and soft Desire had bred,
Her timerous Hand she gently laid
(Or guided by Design or Chance)
Upon that Fabulous Priapus,
That Potent God, as Poets feign;
But never did young Sherpherdess,
Gath'ring of Fern upon the Plain,
More nimbly draw her Fingers back,
Finding beneath the verdant Leaves a Snake:
Than Cloris her fair Hand withdrew,
Finding that God of her Desires
Disarm'd of all his Awful Fires,
And Cold as Flow'rs bath'd in the Morning Dew.
Who can the Nymph's Confusion guess?
Like Lightning through the Grove she hies,
Or Daphne from the Delphick God.
The diction here is both erotic and witty. The primary joke is that the disappointed woman runs away like a frightened virgin. The encomium to Priapus, classical god of the phallus, unlike the earlier one to Cloris's "altar" of love, is both exaggerated and ironically undercut. Internal rhyme makes the "Fabulous Priapus" already comic, and the alliterations of "that potent god, as poets feign" link male poetry, faking, and the myths or fables that govern society.
If male power is the dominating fact over female life, male impotence may seem a balancing justice, a kind of cheery revenge—even though part of the joke is that male impotence becomes another kind of power, that of withholding pleasure from the woman, for whom heterosexual pleasure is only available when he wants and when he can. In the double binds that Behn so frequently shows men putting women in, the man may well treat the woman as an object to be discarded when he has had his pleasure, but he blames her even more severely when he cannot have his pleasure. This approach contrasts with Behn's source, where Cloris is angry but Lysander pledges eternal love and apologizes for his failing, explaining that her "Beauty" in his "Soul … joynd Respect and Love in one" to cause his embarrassment. As the woman speaker of Behn's lyric "To Alexis in Answer to his Poem against Fruition" complains, women can't win against their male lovers:
They fly if Honour take our part,
Our Virtue drives 'em o're the field.
We lose 'em by too much desert,
And Oh! they fly us if we yeild.
In Behn's version of "The Disappointment," the man's anger at the woman is just as strong as if his lost satisfaction sprang from the lady's denial rather than from his own impotence. The narrator claims, "The Nymph's Resentments none but I / Can well Imagine or Condole." Cloris keeps these imagined resentments to herself, in contrast to the French poem, in which she insults her lover's "Scottish Lump" and calls him "weakly mann'd." Behn's Lysander does not plead with his woman or languish in despair but "curs'd his Birth, his Fate, his Stars; / But more the Shepherdess's Charms." In the French source, he blames first the devil and then Cloris's heavenly beauty. In Behn, he charges that Cloris's "Charms" or spells have bewitched him to the "Hell of Impotence"—hardly a benign reference in an age when male impotence was a common complaint against witches and women were hanged for witchcraft. Even though the woman within the poem is disappointed and blamed, however, the female narrative voice seems just a bit gleeful at the philanderer's discomfort.
Critic Richard Quaintance assumes that when Behn varies from her source, she errs, a victim of poetic incompetence: "Checked by indifference, inability, or the economy of the stanza form she chose, she totally missed some of the sense as well as the words of her original," he lectures [in "French Sources of the Restoration 'Imperfect Enjoyment' Poem," Philological Quarterly 42 (April 1963)]. If we assume, however, not that she misunderstood the tradition but that she wished to redirect it, we can understand her relation to the male poetic tradition through her changes from her source. Quaintance laments that Behn "has turned a success story, prolix and jolly, into … an object lesson on the risk of self-absorption during love, a pragmatic warning against acting in love with love while Cloris is waiting." Behn "may be blaming" the man "out of a feminine sympathy," he says, apparently without realizing that his own disappointment with the poem may be the result of a masculine sympathy that Behn's poem deliberately invokes and then mocks. This sympathy springs from an identification with the male hero so strong that it causes the modern male critic to misread Behn's poem, in which, unlike the source, Lysander does not noticeably act self-absorbed or in love with love at all as "Mad to possess, himself he threw / On the Defenceless Lovely Maid."
Pastoral settings were associated especially with women authors and audiences in the Restoration; they were considered effete and phony by many men. It makes sense, then, to consider its advantages for a female author like Behn, who translated continental pastorals like "The Golden Age" and who transferred other poems into pastoral settings. One advantage of the pastoral is that it reformulates social class. Supposedly set in the lowest class of rural society and often in a purportedly primitive stage of social evolution, the pastoral masks the real class imbalances of the contemporary urban scene. The theatrical set to which Behn belonged was a privileged slice of London where the classes could mix—but only while following certain rules that traded female sexual respectability for access to men of rank and wit. Behn's pastoral games and identifications by initials play peekaboo with social class—advertising their acquaintance with titled men and women by references to "My Lady Morland" or "Sir R.O." but teasing us about unknown others so that our sexual voyeurism about who is currently sleeping with whom is conflated with our print-reading outsiders' voyeurism about the upper classes.
Modern privacy was being invented in Behn's historical period, privacy with reference to one's relations to God, to bodily functions, to reading, and to sex. One might even argue that the conventions of literary voyeurism helped create conventions of privacy and that silently watching people became assimilated with that other private and recently silent activity, reading. Pornography increased in the late seventeenth century, as did female literacy and misogyny. Earlier in the century John Donne wrote intense, passionate, and apparently private love poetry, yet in his lyrics passionate love for a woman was often predicated on the man's seduction being overheard, his erotic behavior overseen, by another man, the reader's surrogate—even in those poems that protest being looked at or talked about. "For God's sake hold your tongue and let me love," the lover tells his friend in "The Canonization." In Donne's "The Extasie," a pastoral lyric that had enormous influence on later seventeenth-century writers, the lover invokes a male spectator "by love refined" who would stand "within convenient distance" to view the lover and his beloved in an ecstatic embrace. Only in terms of this voyeurism can the world-denying perfection of Donne's sexual love be affirmed. Behn makes such hidden voyeurism explicit, often to deliberately pornographic effect; at the same time, she reveals and alters its gendered dynamics. Although the seventeenth-century woman is already accustomed to being a spectacle for male viewers, Behn's poetry subjects both men and women to the scandalizing attention accorded sexual objects. "On a Juniper Tree, cut down to make Busks" develops this erotic theme, covertly combining it with a convention of religious personification.
By adopting the persona of a juniper tree, Behn recalls Christian poems about the true cross while seeming to evade gender completely. The tree begins the poem by boasting that it was "The Pride and Glory of the Wood," then that its glory springs from its role in a sexual encounter between two lovers. "Beneath my shade the other day, / Young Philocles and Cloris lay." At one point the juniper sees itself as a "Rival Shade" to the lover and hence as male; it finds the woman desirable, steals kisses from her, and wants to be near her, echoing male erotic poetry from Catullus on. At another point it compares itself to women, however: "My Wealth, like bashful Virgins, I / Yielded with some Reluctancy." Insofar as Behn's voice sounds behind the personification, such allusions to virginity are ironized. The tree further claims to be the pander, duenna, and bridal chamber of the lovers all in one; the editors of Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women's Verse (1988) note that in revising the poem, Behn made the woman's role more active.
Upon my Root she lean'd her head,
And where I grew, he made their Bed:
Whilst I the Canopy more largely spread.
Although by bending down its branches, the tree "had the blisse, / To rob the Shepherd of a kiss," Behn portrays the ideal sexuality between the lovers as completely mutual and reciprocal, not stealthy, a Donne-like merger of bodies and feelings:
[The lovers] mingled melting Rays,
Exchanging Love a thousand ways.
Kind was the force on every side,
…..
His panting Breast, to hers now join'd,
They feast on Raptures unconfin'd;
Vast and Luxuriant, such as prove
The Immortality of Love.
For who but a Divinitie,
Could mingle Souls to that Degree;
And melt 'em into Extasie?
Now like the Phenix, both Expire,
While from the Ashes of their Fire,
Sprung up a new and soft desire.
The poem runs through a medley of motifs best-known from Donne's love poetry: melted souls, an ecstasy, a phoenix, and the play with religious language. In Behn's version, however, "immortality" alludes not to divine truth but simply to the renewed desire for sex: Her lovers "did invoke, / The God! and thrice new vigor took." After three bouts the woman humorously expresses doubts about her complaisance. Fortunately for her, her lover is still devoted to her. For him, "Loves sacred flame, / Before and after was the same"—clearly a Utopian wish from Behn's viewpoint, as many of her poems register disappointment that men are so much less interested in women after than before the act.
After recording the lovers' perfect union, the tree returns to its perverse role: "The Shepherdess my Bark carest, / Whilst he my Root, Love's Pillow, kist." Andrew Marveil plays on such images of "vegetable love" more metaphysically in "The Garden," for example, in which the solitary speaker boasts that "Stumbling on melons, as I pass, / Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass." Whereas Marvell's speaker transcends the libertine garden tradition for the purer joys of contemplation, only sexual voyeurism provides Behn's tree a semblance of pleasure. Nature in Behn's poetry has no independent joys and needs human sexual love to animate it. Behn's pastoral is antinatural and thoroughly anthropomorphic. If, in the words that Pope so memorably rewrote, Behn calls "Wit … no more than Nature well exprest," one might also say that for her, nature was little more than human wit well expressed in poetry.
After the lovers leave the woods, the juniper tree is desolate:
And if before my Joyes were such,
In having heard, and seen too much,
My Grief must be as great and high
When all abandon'd I shall be,
Doom'd to a silent Destinie
…..
No more a joyful looker on.
Woefully isolated, the tree wants to participate not just in sex but in the human community. Bereft, the tree cries "Christal Dew" over Cloris. She responds as to a lover, with "Pity" because her "Soul is made of Love." Her loving response is ironic, however, that of a metamorphosing Ovidian god who objectifies lovers.
She cut me down, and did translate,
My being to a happier state.
No Martyr for Religion di'd
With half that Unconsidering Pride
[as the tree did].
The tree's top is burned for incense, while its
body into Busks was turn'd:
Where I still guard the Sacred Store,
And of Loves Temple keep the Door.
Thus the juniper ends up as part of a woman's corset, a homey, familiar, and humorous counterpart to other poetic metamorphoses or ways of getting near the beloved. Here the tree continues to act as pander or duenna, the complicit third to others' erotic coupling, or as a member of the woman's family, guarding her virtue.
The entire poem is an extended personification in tetrameter couplets, a light form appropriate for a bit of pastoral pornography. As a perversely enthusiastic voyeur, Behn's juniper is not simply part of a lush, natural setting, as we would expect from a tree, but participates, like the reader, in the pleasures of vicarious sex. As frequently happens in Behn's soft porn, the tree's voyeurism is satirically presented yet not undercut, and the poem invites the reader to engage in such dubious pleasures—admittedly weaker pleasures than those the lovers experience, but stronger and more pleasant fare than readers normally receive. Such pornography celebrates the joys of peeking more than the joys of sex; it depends on and incites a sense of sexual behavior as secret, forbidden, and titillating—more so, for example, than in erotic medieval fabliaux, where sexual couples are often humourously and publicly caught in the act.
Behn writes in one tradition of Donne, the tradition of witty erotic verse. This tradition is firmly androcentric, making women its objects, and hence it is difficult for women to take it seriously. Behn does not. Instead, she uses the pastoral setting to create alternatives to the world around her. One might argue that an identification with artifice works better than an identification with nature for women because women have too often been inscribed within a restrictive definition of nature, and the social as constituted in Behn's time was no better: Appeal to an artificial nature conspicuously unlike any nature one could see in contemporary London or in the countryside around it defines her pastoral. In poems like "The Disappointment" and "On a Juniper Tree," Behn creates a nature that responds to women's as well as men's desires; however, it never aspires, as does the nature of some male Restoration writers, to the sublime. The limits against which her poetry strives are not those of the intractable flesh, because she implies that social restrictions, not those of nature, limit women most. To concede that the limits imposed on women were natural would be to give up the possibility of being a woman poet altogether.
Behn in this respect differs dramatically from her friend and patron John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, a man who had everything except a conviction of the value of anything, a cynic who asked transcendental questions because social power was so clearly already his that his dissatisfaction had to reach beyond it. For Restoration women, who did not have everything and could not get it, Rochester's pose made no sense. Such women did not probe the paradoxes of embodiment in literature because they were always already assumed to be identical with their bodies; they therefore needed instead to explore the overcoming of embodiment. Moreover, women like Behn did not share male disgust with human flesh, although at the end of the century many women championed chastity over the difficulties of marriage. This disparity in the perspectives of male and female writers in the seventeenth century perhaps accounts in part for male critics' judgment that women's poetry of the period is shallow. Such critics may take the social order for granted and hence underestimate its restrictive powers on women, especially for women who do not respond to these restrictions by seeking social revolution. Restoration women did not, like some men of the time, need to seek in sexual experience a loss of identity they could find nowhere else, because they found loss of identity everywhere. Like male poets erotic and mystic, women writers did seek ideal unions. They were much more likely than the men to dwell primarily on the reciprocity within union, however, perhaps otherwise fearing that in sex and religion as well as in marriage, the one flesh and one spirit of the joined couple would always be his. For a sense of reciprocity and fluidity, some religious women turned to a flexibly gendered God. Secular women writers like both Behn and Philips instead renamed themselves and others as a way of moving out of their defined social circumstances into new and ideal imaginary communities where they could be equal participants with other artists, lovers, and friends.
A crucial biographical fact about Behn is her social isolation from the usual familial supports at the time she became a professional author. Whereas other women writers relied on the categories of virgin, wife, or mother to provide them acceptability, Behn had no husband and no known husband's relatives, as other widows did, no children, and no known family of origin; this apparent familial vacuum indicates deliberate effort on her part to obfuscate those facts that would fix her social identity. Instead, she springs from nowhere onto the stage, via South America, Continental spying, and jail. Gossips around her assumed that such a self-made woman must be man-made. Contemporaries alleged that her works were written by male lovers, and even some modern feminist editors cannot resist categorizing her as a prostitute: "There is no evidence that she chose the profession of writing: there is every sign that she was reduced to making a living by her wits. We may honour her for refusing the other obvious alternative, prostitution, if only we could be sure that she did" [Germaine Greer et al., eds., Kissing the Rod.] If we look at the literary consequences of Behn's self-creation rather than worry its sexual economics, however, we see that such self-creation in a closed and hierarchical society demands the simultaneous creation of a new social order into which the new self fits. In their oriental courts, European carnivals, and American wildernesses, Behn's plays partially reformulate their societies, but the poetry is freer still to invent idealized, imaginary worlds.
In Behn's erotic poetry, sexual knowledge creates its own community of values. In "The Willing Mistress," for example, after mutual kissing, the woman is "willing to receive / That which I dare not name." Her lover's eyes alone "tell their softning Tale" to woo her; without words he "lay'd me gently on the Ground, / Ah who can guess the rest?" The poem, an entirely verbal construction, describes an experience that claims to be entirely physical, unmediated by language. But the poem works only by its appeal to a linguistic community that can freely and easily translate the physical into a shared verbal world. We all already must know what "that which I dare not name" must be, and the final rhetorical question solicits the smug answer that all of us readers can "guess the rest." The shared joke requires shared knowledge, not of the idiosyncracies of any individual lover but of physical experience common to us all, and it expects us to laugh, too, at conventional verbal and social structures that pretend that we, including the women among the poem's readers, do not all know what sex is about and enjoy it equally well.
One possible community in opposition to patriarchal Restoration society was that of closely bonded women; that is, the society that Behn's poetic predecessor Katherine Philips tried to create in her poetry and in her life. Like Philips, Behn eroticizes female friendships, most notably in "To the Fair Clarinda, who made Love to me, imagin'd more than Woman." That poem, however, equates the "weak" with the "Feminine" and assumes a heterosexual norm so strong that female bonds are necessarily "innocent" and derivative on heterosexual models:
without Blushes I the Youth persue,
When so much beauteous Woman is in view,
…..
In pity to our Sex sure thou we'rt sent,
That we might Love, and yet be Innocent.
Apparent innocence, as always in Behn, nods to the community of readers in the know: "For sure no Crime with thee we can commit; / Or if we shou'd—thy Form excuses it."
More frequently, Behn expresses ties to women not through coupled relationships but indirectly through sexual triangles in which her female speakers typically cast themselves as the other woman, a discarded mistress. Older and less attractive than her rival, such a woman ingratiates herself with the rival by praising her and complaining about the man. Because she draws herself and the fickle male lover as morally equivalent, however, such praise ejects the rival into a superior but distant position above the speaker and her former lover. This sexual triangle made up of three people of both sexes allows Behn to shift positions and identifications; she does not, like so many male poets, simply use it to elide the sexual other and return to homosocial bonding.
In "To My Lady Morland at Tunbridge," Behn establishes a parallel between crowds who come out to admire the conquering hero who won a war and those that stare at the famous beauties of the hour: "I wish'd to see, and much a Lover grew / Of so much Beauty, though my Rivals too." Submitting to the woman rival, not the lover, the speaker judges that "Not to love you, a wonder sure would be, / Greater then all his Perjuries to me." Traditional male love poetry allows its characters only two positions, and only one of them gets to speak: Transfixed by a female beauty, the male lover gazes and spouts verse. For a woman to look at a woman's beauty in this convention turns the woman into an envious rival eager to replace the first woman. In "To Damon," "Mrs. A. B." rejects the position of being a sexual object lulled by "all those usual flatteries" praising her "face and Eyes." Instead, the position of rival allows her to look actively at the other woman; as in other poems, like "To Lysander at the Musick-Meeting," the female speaker can gaze admiringly at a man, feeding her "greedy Eyes" with his "Heav'nly Form." In "To My Lady Morland" the speaker moves from a male erotic pose to a male heroic one, echoing Caesar's famous boast only to reverse its narcissism and grandiosity; she becomes the conquered, not the conqueror. "I came and saw, and blest my Destiny; / I found it Just you should out-Rival me." As she continues to praise the rival, however, she begins to undermine the rival's liaison with the lover to which at first she seemed to acquiesce. Claiming only the best of motives, she suggests that the rival deserves to have a better suitor than her own former lover; she deserves, in fact, a "Virgin-Heart," not that used-up old rake, who would be better off returning to the speaker, his discarded mistress. Shakespeare's sonnets accustom us to poems in which an aging lover harangues and excuses a dishonest beloved about a lovely rival, though he genders his more complicated triangles differently. Another Behn poem switches positions in the sexual triangle in comparison with "To My Lady Morland." In "Selinda and Cloris," Selinda asks Cloris whether her "Friendship" or her "Jealousie" led her to confide that Selinda's lover first belonged to Cloris. Thus, Behn's poems link their female speakers with other women by means of a chain of lovers that expands into a network of complex emotional relationships.
By adopting a heroic stance, that of the brave soul who comes to see what to conquer, Behn's speakers set their loyal feudal values against greedy, selfish, and implicitly capitalistic ones. Like Donne, Behn chastises the turning of personal relationships into commodities at the same time that she uses the language of the market to denounce unfair competition: "I hate Love-Merchants that a Trade wou'd drive," the female speaker responds in "To Lysander, on some Verses he writ, and asking more for his Heart than 'twas worth." She lectures him about the true value that love should have:
A Heart requires a Heart Unfeign'd and True,
Though Subt'ly you advance the Price,
And ask a Rate that Simple Love n'ere knew:
And the free Trade Monopolize.
In this poem the speaker is explicitly a jealous woman, furious that her equally jealous male lover imposes faithful isolation on her while having affairs with other women:
And every Hour still more unjust you grow,
Those Freedoms you my life deny,
You to Adraste are oblig'd to show,
And give her all my Rifled Joy.
Miserable and alone, the speaker says that she feels the "Fragments" of the lover's "Softness," while the other woman, the better capitalist, "takes the welcome rich Return" on what was originally the first woman's investment. The rules are unfair, and Behn does not know how to make them fair on a woman's terms. Unable to find a vocabulary of equality that does not assume a male norm, the poem attacks the double standard:
Be just, my lovely Swain, and do not take
Freedoms you'll not to me allow;
Or give Amynta so much Freedom back:
That she may Rove as well as you.
The liberal language of freedom, justice, and equality appears to establish a fair standard, a standard to be aspired to, and Behn was clearly fascinated by the Restoration "Rover" or heroic philanderer, like the hero of her best-known play. One could not simply reverse the double standard by giving women permission to be as bad as men, however. What Behn wants instead is a community on her terms, an equality of mutual devotion that she imagines as free of capitalistic "interest": "Let us then love upon the honest Square, / Since Interest neither have designd." But the poem ends anticlimactically because the speaker can blast the hypocrisy of the double standard only by falling herself into the male role of mercenary scoundrel. "For the sly Gamester, who ne'er plays me fair / Must Trick for Trick expect to find." And, as mercenary interests are anathema to true love in Behn's scheme, so is jockeying for power: "A Pox of Foolish Politicks in Love," as "An Ode to Love" expostulates.
Behn's love poetry expresses a longing for community that is more overt in what we might call her fraternal poetry, and she seeks ideal reciprocity not only through sex but through the writing of poetry. She does not elaborate on the stresses the solitary poet faces while toiling to find rhymes at her lonely writing table. Instead, she describes the poetic craft as a collective one. By making explicit the favors poets do one another to give all of them more work and more pleasure, Behn produces a community of egalitarian insiders, a mutual admiration society. By publishing these poems about poetry writing, she then invites us outsiders to be provisional members of this inner community or to enviously define ourselves by our exclusion.
"A Letter to a Brother of the Pen in Tribulation" addresses the "Brother" from the viewpoint of one of the boys. The speaker asserts that friendship and the confraternity of writing are more important than sexual difference, although she agrees that sex can get one into trouble and, under the circumstances, the brother who caught venereal disease has a right to be angry at women: "'tis but Just thou shouldst in Rancor grow / Against that Sex that has Confin'd thee so," she comforts him, although she is a member of "that sex" herself. If liberty is a value, then, being confined is intolerable, especially being confined not to the love of one woman but to the love of none and the nasty "Sweating-Tub" used to cure such diseases. Although Behn commiserates with her friend, she is also razzing him about his unlucky disease, clearly the fault of his own habits as well as the woman's, and she is willing to tease him with a sibling-like rivalry that accepts the poem's readers as its confidantes. Her cozy footnotes explain the inside references to us readers: "I wanted a Prologue to a Play," she says of the occasion for the poem, and she teases the brother by revealing the secret she has just found out; "He pretended to Retire to Write" when he was really recuperating from "An Interlude of Whoring."
Another fraternal poem is more casual, less competitive. "To Damon. To inquire of him if he cou'd tell me by the Style, who writ me a Copy of Verses that came to me in an unknown Hand" links the female speaker with a male friend in a union that is more intimate than the one she may establish with her unknown suitor, the writer of an anonymous poem in her honor. The title assumes that the speaker's friend Damon knows all the likely male poets well enough to tell by the style, not just the handwriting, whose verses pique her interest, and she therefore seems to share with Damon an easy camaraderie that is itself free of sexual tensions and full of mutual confidences. The unknown lover, in turn, deserves her interest and respect because he chose to woo her entirely and unphysically through disembodied words. She says that before the poem arrived to disturb her, she was "Free as the Air, and calm as that," a perfectly inhuman kind of freedom she does not really relish, although she enjoyed a sabbatical from thinking about "the faithless sex," as she calls men, reversing their criticisms of women. That stoic composure was only a pose, she admits:
calm and innocent I sate,
Content with my indifferent fate
(A Medium, I confess, I hate.)
The anonymous poem attracts her, she says, not because it was "fill'd with praises of my face and Eyes, / My verse, and all those usual flatteries" but through the quality of its verse, which she thinks reveals the "Soul" of the man. Her artistry necessarily matches his: "I drew him all the heart cou'd move." Then she falls in love with the "dear Idea" she has formed, a love that allies her with the greatest, if most foolish, of male artists, "Pigmalion," who "for the charms he made, he sigh'd and burn'd." So Behn eroticizes not merely the object of poetry but also its author and poetry-making in itself. She shares a community with the recipient of her poem while asking him about the man who sent her one. Poems circulate, and Behn is both poet and subject of poetry, sender and receiver in a community of interpretation that is the basis of both love and friendship and in which Behn imagines herself in both traditionally masculine and traditionally feminine roles. Other Behn poems, too, celebrate this poetic circulation, as in "The Sence of a Letter sent me, made into Verse; To a New Tune" and "On a Copy of Verses made in a Dream, and sent to me in a Morning before I was Awake."
In comparison to these playful and erotic poems of camaraderie, "To Mr. Creech (under the Name of Daphnis) on his Excellent Translation of Lucretius" lifts the conventional pastoral disguise to praise her friend in his own name—and to comment directly on the impediments to women's equality that the other poems address imaginatively through their pastoral names and settings. Behn is unequivocal that women's faults are social rather than natural in origin, not universal but historically specific:
Till now, I curst my Birth, my Education,
And more the scanted Customes of the Nation:
Permitting not the Female Sex to tread,
The mighty Paths of Learned Heroes dead.
Taking seriously ideas about the enobling nature of literature, she once again connects the roles of poet and hero. To debar women from the one is to debase their chances of ever attaining the other. Like other feminists from the Renaissance through Virginia Woolf, she decries the meagerness of women's education, their relegation to inferior and disposable vernacular texts, and their exclusion from that classical culture that was coming to mark the English gentleman rather than the professional scholar: "The Fulsome Gingle of the times, / Is all we are allow'd to understand or hear." Then her friend Creech's translation of Lucretius
dost advance
Our Knowledg from the State of Ignorance,
And equals us to Man! Ah how can we,
Enough Adore, or Sacrifice enough to thee.
Cocky and self-confident with politicians or fellow playwrights, Behn shares some of the self-abasing admiration with which other seventeenth-century women writers treat male classicists, convinced by the culture around them that the lack of a classical education meant the lack not just of a body of knowledge but also of any possibility for full personal, intellectual, and moral development. Equality is obviously an unstable concept for Behn if women must "Adore" as a god the person who "equals us to Man" by sharing his learning.
This double assertion of equality and inferiority runs through Behn's poems to members of the nobility or clergy, like the earl of Rochester and Bishop Burnet. In thanking the poet Anne Wharton in "To Mrs. W. On her Excellent Verses (Writ in Praise of some I had made on the Earl of Rochester) Written in a Fit of Sickness" Behn again praises "The Great, the God-like Rochester" who spoke to her "worthless" self:
With the same wonted Grace my Muse it prais'd,
With the same Goodness did my Faults Correct;
And careful of the Fame himself first rais'd,
Obligingly it School'd my loose Neglect.
The ideological barriers to her self-esteem clearly were formidable. She responded in part by adopting both sides of many contradictions, especially those that separated feminine attitudes from "my Masculine Part the Poet in me" (preface to The Lucky Chance), but she had other defenses as well. One was to define herself as a woman who could simultaneously inhabit the usually masculine roles of both poet and hero, even if in subsidiary ways, a technique that resulted in Behn's seeing herself as perhaps lesser than, but not different from, the men. Thus, she commends "the Honourable Sir Francis Fane, on his Play call'd the Sacrifice" by saying that she read his poetry "with pleasure tho I read with shame" its superiority to her own. As with rival female beauties, she sustains community by praising the other and admitting her own inferiority of quantity but not of kind. When she reads his work, "the tender Laurels which my brows had drest / Flag, like young Flowers, with too much heat opprest." Bested, she is still crowned and garlanded, still one of the noble poet's guild.
In another poem celebrating a male translator of classical poetry, "A Pastoral to Mr. Stafford," she is especially grateful for the translator's reclamation of female role models, and the classical precedent of female heroism allows her to display her own credentials as a female hero, a loyal royalist who has done her king dangerous public political service: "Once," she says
by th' … Kings Commands,
I left these Shades, to visit forein Lands;
Imploy'd in public toils of State Affairs,
Unusual with my Sex, or to my Years.
Her own unusual heroic experiences enable her to appreciate Stafford's translation of Virgil's Camilla, who "shews us how / To be at once Hero and Woman too." Camilla's heroism validates Behn's and makes it, though in an unbelieving and critical age, more plausible. For other models of how one can be a woman who is also a hero, Behn looks to classical history and myth, as the men did, and confirms her views by exchanging them with her brothers of the pen. Thus, she writes "To Amintas. Upon reading the Lives of some of the Romans" to laud
That age when valor they did Beauty name,
When Men did justly our brave sex prefer,
Cause they durst dye, and scorn the publick shame
Of adding Glory to the conqueror.
If the erotic triangle of the fraternal band of poets provided Behn with her best model of community and her substitute for the marital family she did not have and apparently did not want, her Tory party allegiances provided her with a voluntary substitute for a family lineage and a family name, a family of descent that bestowed at once rank and history on its members. Behn's political poetry seems silly to us in part because it was silly; praising the unpopular James II as beloved by his people or the publicly philandering Charles II as a devoted husband who died like Jesus Christ, "A Bleeding Victim to attone for all," seemed fatuous then, as it does now. "A Congratulatory Poem to her most Sacred Majesty on the Universal Hopes of all Loyal Persons for a Prince of Wales" celebrated hopes for the Roman Catholic James II's future progeny that were hardly universal in Protestant England. Modern distaste for this political poetry may also result from the fact that the modern alignment of the political with the public was just beginning in the Restoration, yet bedroom politics still ruled the nation. Much of Behn's political verse celebrates personal female matters like pregnancy and childbirth that determined dynasties. Behn addresses royal women as wives and mothers and royal men as husbands and fathers; even her rather more successful political satire attacks political opponents through their sexual pecadilloes, as in the pleasant song "When Jemmy first began to Love" that alluded to Charles II's illegitimate son, the duke of Monmouth.
In her last sick and painful hours, political loyalty seems to have sustained Behn's sense of herself as a poet identified with a bygone age and a cause nobly lost. Behn sets this personal loyalty to the Stuart family against political expediency in her "Pindaric Poem to the Reverend Doctor Burnet," written when she was dying. Although Burnet urged her to celebrate William and Mary's assumption of the crown in the Glorious Revolution of 1689, she pleaded that "Loyalty Commands with pious force" and "stops" her pen. Even with history and possibly the good of the nation arrayed against her and the Stuarts, she founds her integrity on her loyalty to them:
Tho' I the Wond'rous Change deplore,
That makes me Useless and Forlorn,
Yet I the great Design Adore.
Behn died as she had lived—a new woman longing for an imaginary past golden age and creating myths of a world where to be a public woman was not to be a whore but to be a hero and a poet, someone surrounded not by creditors or catcalls on a London street but by the Utopian society organized through the communal dedications in a volume of her own lyric poems.
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