SOURCE: "Beyond Incest: Gender and the Politics of Transgression in Aphra Behn's Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister," in Rereading Aphra Behn: History, Theory, and Criticism, edited by Heidi Hutner, University Press of Virginia, 1993, pp. 151-86.

Expressly incestuous and deeply embedded in the politics of regicide and political rebellion, Aphra Behn's Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister is also a text insistently preoccupied with questions of gender, identity, and representation. Published in three parts between 1684 and 1687, Behn's novel is based loosely on an affair between Ford, Lord Grey of Werke, and his wife's sister, Lady Henrietta Berkeley, a scandal that broke in London in 1682, when Lady Berkeley's father published an advertisement in the London Gazette announcing the disappearance of his daughter. Lady Berkeley had in fact run off with Grey, the well-known antimonarchist figure whom Dryden alluded to as "cold Caleb" in Absalom and Achitophel (1681) and who serves Behn here as a model for her character Philander. Prosecuted by Lord Berkeley for abducting and seducing his daughter, Grey was eventually found guilty of "debauchery" but never sentenced. Shortly thereafter, he was also implicated in the Rye House Plot to murder Charles II and was later active in Monmouth's rebellion against Charles's brother, James. In Behn's fiction Grey figures as a political follower and friend of Cesario, the French prince of Condé, whose failed attempt to overthrow his king is modeled on the parallel exploits of Charles's bastard son. Lady Berkeley is Sylvia, the dutiful royalist daughter whom Philander seduces and corrupts. Like the crown for Cesario, she is for Philander a sign of male prerogative and desire, her body the theater across which several dramas of masculine rivalry are played out.

It is not surprising that a text situated so expressly within the political context of the Duke of Monmouth's rebellion against the royal authority of both his father and his uncle should structure itself around the repetition of a series of analogously configured masculine rivalries. Through her elaborate foregrounding of the figure of a woman, however, Behn adds a dimension to this drama of political and familial succession that is manifestly absent from such comparable royalist efforts as Absalom and Achitophel. To what extent Behn's choice to develop the love interest here was motivated by her recognition of the greater acceptability for a woman of the role of romance historian over that of political poet, we cannot know for sure; but when Lady Berkeley's father published his advertisement announcing her disappearance and offering £200 for her return, Behn clearly perceived an opportunity to explore the narrative possibilities (as well as discursive instabilities) inherent in comparing stolen daughters with stolen crowns.

Behn incorporates the scandalous historical fact of the Berkeley-Grey affair into the political, thematic, and figurai dimensions of her fiction by situating Philander's justifications for his adulterous and incestuous desire for Sylvia squarely within the context of Restoration debates over the relationship and relative authority of nature and conventional morality. As Susan Staves has amply demonstrated, an increasing dissociation of natural law theory from theology during the second half of the seventeenth century effectively established the conditions both for changes in the institutional treatment of moral crimes and for the emergence of a new brand of heroism in the imaginative literature of the age. Herculean and libertine stage heroes captured the popular imagination through their bold allegiance to a nature defined not in accordance with, but in opposition to, religion, law, custom, and conventional morality. Such heroes appealed to nature to justify a range of behaviors traditionally regarded as crimes against nature as well as God. Along with adultery, sodomy, and parricide, the deployment of incest as a figure for rebellion against traditional forms of authority became a favorite device on the Restoration stage for articulating cultural anxieties and for giving dramatic play to the multiple tensions inherent in contemporary efforts to rethink the connections between the laws of nature, religion, and social morality.

Behn's libertine hero, Philander, fits the profile of this new literary type in his elaboration of natural justifications for his socially criminal desire for Sylvia. From as early as his very first letter, he invokes the liberatory ethos of a return to original pleasures. The legal institutions of kinship and of marriage, he insists, are mere practical creations inspired by material interests, while his own incestuous and adulterous passion has a primacy that transcends the prudent imperatives of tradition. Philander uses the fact that his relation to Sylvia is affinal (a legal relation created through his marriage to her sister) as opposed to consanguineal (a blood relation) to further question the natural basis for the rules that prohibit his having sex with her: "What kin, my charming Sylvia, are you to me? No ties of blood forbid my passion; and what's a ceremony imposed on man by custom! … What alliance can that create? Why should a trick devised by the wary old, only to make provision for posterity, tie me to an eternal slavery?" In point of legal fact, as Sybil Wolfram's work [In-Laws and Outlaws, 1987] has shown, because the English concept of marriage in the seventeenth century was based on the legal and religious doctrine of the unity of husband and wife, "intercourse between affinal relations was … on a footing with and as much incest as intercourse between close blood relations." But Philander represents an emergent strain of thought that radically questioned the received assumption that incest controverted natural law.

Scripture itself had become a site of theoretical controversy among seventeenth-century moral philosophers, especially at those points where God appeared arbitrarily to command behavior else-where prohibited by His law. Staves cites the story of Abraham's divinely ordered murder of Isaac as one scriptural conundrum that seemed to focus the crisis of authority experienced by moralists, but there were also numerous instances of apparent biblical inconsistency regarding the legitimacy of incestuous practices. One of the most pervasively cited involved a perceived discrepancy between the injunctions of Leviticus, which forbade incest, and those of Genesis, which bade Adam and Eve (whom most commentators regarded as siblings) to increase and multiply.

Thus, in 1625 Hugo Grotius asserted that although marriages between brothers and sisters are illegal, they are forbidden by divine command and not (as appeared to be the case with parent-child marriages) by "the pure law of nature." Here Grotius accepts the Jewish teaching that the prohibition against sibling marriage was given to Adam "at the same time with the laws to worship God, to administer justice, not to shed blood, [etc.] … ; but with the condition that the laws regulating marriage should not have effect until after the human race had multiplied sufficiently." Jeremy Taylor echoed Grotius thirty-five years later when he asserted that, by contrast to parentchild incest, sibling marriages are only "next to an unnatural mixture"; for "if they had been unnatural, they could not have been necessary" as "it is not imaginable that God … would have built up mankind by that which is contrary to Humane Nature." And in 1672, Richard Cumberland took a similarly relative position on the question of sibling incest, arguing that marriages between brothers and sisters "in the first Age of the World" were "necessary to propagate that Race of Men, and to raise those Families, which Reason now endeavours to Preserve, by prohibiting."

Behn's Philander does not emerge ex nihilo, therefore, when he invokes Genesis to justify his incestuous desires. In a manner typically modern and predictably Whig, he disdains the beaten track of conventional morality to assert the prerogatives of an originary state: "Let us … scorn the dull beaten road, but let us love like the first race of men, nearest allied to God, promiscuously they loved, and possessed, father and daughter, brother and sister met, and reaped the joys of love without control, and counted it religious coupling, and 'twas encouraged too by heaven itself." As Ruth Perry has observed [in Women, Letters, and the Novel, 1980], Philander speaks for the authenticity of nature over the artifice of social codes. Posing as the ultimate pastoral lover, he emulates the freedom of creatures in the natural world. There is "no troublesome honour, amongst the pretty inhabitants of the woods and streams, fondly to give laws to nature," he insists, "but uncontrolled they play, and sing, and love; no parents checking their dear delights, no slavish matrimonial ties to restrain their nobler flame." Only "man … is bound up to rules, fetter'd by the nice decencies of honour."

Given Behn's royalist politics, Philander's defense of incest may seem at first blush a simple alignment of Whiggism with transgression, the act of regicide—as René Girard has noted in another context [in Violence and the Sacred, 1977]—constituting an equivalent in the political realm of parricide or incest within the family. Those who violate loyalties to their king, Behn seems to want to say, are also apt to violate the other bonds on which the social order and its civilizing systems of difference depend. Behn's creation of a heroine of royalist birth who draws the better part of her appeal from her success in outdoing Philander at the game of transgressiveness, however, destabilizes this easy, politicized opposition between authority and rebellion and suggests a more complex and heterogeneous notion of transgression than a simply negative political coding would allow. As more than one critic has noted, Behn's treatment of gender often seems to complicate and refract, if not indeed to contradict, her party politics, creating in her work the sense of multiple and incommensurate ideological agenda. Love-Letters exemplifies this tendency through its own rhetorical excess, inviting itself to be read with a certain burlesquing tonguein-cheekiness, as if it wants to make us ask—and it does make us ask—why (if this is first and foremost a political scandal novel) Behn would choose to defend the royal cause through so protracted a portrait of untamed female insubordination.

Is it true, as Janet Todd and Maureen Duffy both suggest [in The Sign of Angellica, 1989, and introduction to Love-Letters, respectively], that Behn wants to promote the values of sincerity and authenticity as they are embodied in the figure of Philander's friend and rival, Octavio, by showing us that Philander's appeal to nature is nothing more than base hypocrisy? Perhaps, at the most manifest level; but why then does her narrative read so much like a celebration of the pleasures and powers of role-playing and artifice whereby the indomitable Sylvia sacrifices Octavio to her revenge against Philander? If, as Perry suggests, Behn's characters are designed to show us "where disrespect for law and order can lead," why does Behn's relation to her heroine's depravity seem so very fraught with irony? The narrator tells us that Sylvia is imperious, proud, vain, opinionated, obstinate, censorious, amorously inclined, and indiscreet, and yet Behn seems to revel in the emotional resilience the heroine's duplicity affords. Jane Austen rarely assumes a more heteroglot relation to her heroines than Behn does when, reflecting on the ease with which Sylvia is able to transfer her affection from one lover to the next, she writes: "Nature is not inclined to hurt itself; and there are but few who find it necessary to die of the disease of love. Of this sort was our Sylvia, though to give her her due, never any person who did not indeed die, ever languished under the torments of love, as did that charming and afflicted maid." The nature appealed to here is elusively construed, gesturing ironically toward an unstable opposition between female nature and artifice in a world where a natural female impulse toward self-preservation requires the performance, nearly unto death, of the artifice of languishing femininity.

Feminist critics have taken differing positions regarding the significance of the incest in Behn's text. To Janet Todd, it is merely a sensationalist device meant to keep Behn's book in print but not an important theme developed at any length. For Judith Kegan Gardiner, on the other hand, Sylvia's willing participation in an incestuous adultery with her brother-in-law is the paradigmatic instance of her transgressiveness as a heroine and the conceptual point of departure for a complex reconfiguration of literary history [Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 8 (Fall 1989)]. Reading Love-Letters as a story of brothersister incest that does not follow a familiar and traditionally valorized oedipal logic but instead avoids "both father-son and mother-daughter paradigms for a transgressive sexuality in which the woman is not exclusively a victim but a willing and desiring agent," Gardiner makes the case that a revaluation of the importance of Behn's text in the history of the novel genre opens the way to imagining an alternative paradigm of literary history, one that displaces an oedipal by what she calls "an incestuous model of the novel's origins."

But is Behn's heroine stably figured as a willing agent of incestuous desire? Does the text of Love-Letters in fact support Gardiner's assessment that incest functions for Sylvia, as it does for Philander, as the expression of a liberatory eros? Behn may indeed refuse an oedipal model of female desire, but does she therefore necessarily embrace an incestuous ideal of feminine transgression? I shall argue that, on the contrary, far from replacing an oedipal with an incestuous ideal, Behn's narrative effectively displaces the conceptual grounds of a heterosexual matrix of assumptions that encodes incestuous desire as a form of freedom from patriarchal law.

There is a great deal more at stake here than a subtle difference of reading. Where we locate the transgressiveness of Behn's heroine has critical implications not just for the place Behn will occupy in contemporary conceptions of aesthetics and of literary history but also for a feminist analysis of narrative representations of incestuous desire, especially for recent efforts to theorize the role of incest in modern discursive inscriptions of female desire. In making the case for Sylvia's incestuous agency without taking into account how she is located specifically as a female subject in relation both to incest and to the law that produces it as an object of repression—without regard, that is, to the patriarchal power structure within which incest derives its meaning and transgressive force to begin with—Gardiner allows a dangerous slippage to occur in her argument. Assuming that incest always inevitably constitutes transgression (indeed reading incest as the ultimate transgression), she relies on a characteristically modern discursive coding of incestuous desire as natural—an emergent cultural inscription in seventeenth-century England, as we have seen, but one that I would argue Behn's narrative actively refuses to underwrite.

In fact, I would suggest, far from elaborating a simple equivalence or correspondence between incest and transgression, Behn uses both categories to register the shifting positionality of gendered subjectivities, producing a variable model of the transgressiveness of incest and the incestuousness of transgression for her male and female characters. Rather than inscribing incest as a stable and univocal marker of transgression, she destabilizes incest as a trope of liberation by exposing the ways it is differently constituted for her hero and heroine. In the process, she radically problematizes the question of desire's origins, representing what Gardiner reads as original desire in Sylvia not as an intrinsic essence but as an effect of power. Sylvia's transgressiveness as a heroine is situated not in her incestuous agency but elsewhere; it emerges rather in a conceptual and performative space made available to her only by the eventual recognition that Philander's exaltation of incest as a liberation from prohibitive patriarchal law actually functions as an instrument of power. Incest operates in Behn's text, in other words, not as a simple figure for transgression but as a complex discursive site where the oppositional ideologies of patriarchy and individualism intersect, at once confronting each other and, in the process, exposing their joint complicity in (and their shared dependence on) the appropriation and cooptation of female desire.

This is hardly to revert to Todd's assessment of the essential insignificance of the incest in Behn's text. On the contrary, it is to read Sylvia's incest as a necessary part of Behn's complex critique of Whig libertarian politics. At the level of plot, after all, the incest does take Sylvia outside her father's house; it thus establishes the conditions within which Behn is able to show that that outside is always already inside—always on the verge of reinscribing the very law it would subvert. To be successfully transgressive on Behn's terms, Sylvia will have to move beyond the illusory liberation of naturalized incestuous desire—outside the outside of an oedipal dyad in which women are mere theaters for the playing out of male desire. The serial nature of Love-Letters allows Behn to effect these consecutive displacements compellingly, by creating an opportunity for her to write her heroine out of and beyond the limits of the typical romantic plot.

I. PHILANDER'S "PHALLIC HANDSHAKE" AND THE LIMITS OF THE LIBERTINE CRITIQUE OF PATRIARCHY

I approach my subject through a reading of several key episodes that help to establish the context within which the incest in Behn's narrative acquires meaning. My aim is to illuminate the extent to which the incestuous relation between Philander and Sylvia is conditioned by the dynamics of a system of homosocial exchange in which the daughter's desire functions not as a locus of agency but as a site of confrontation between paternal and fraternal interests. Because familial conflict is coded politically in Behn's novel, this reading also necessarily involves discussion of the way Sylvia's body functions in a double symbolic register as a political as well as familial battleground.

This is not to say that Sylvia entirely lacks transgressive agency. It is rather to suggest that we must first understand the structuring homosocial frame within which her incest is enacted ultimately to appreciate the process whereby she manages to move beyond the possibilities for transgression it delimits into a space subversively generated by a parodie repetition of its terms. For, however paradoxically, it is only after Sylvia comes to recognize her status as a sign within a drama of masculine rivalry, to understand that as a woman she is always already a representation within a homosocial matrix of desire, that she opens herself to the possibility of taking performative control of her enactment of desire and gendered subjectivity.

I take as my point of entry Philander's account of an episode that occurs relatively early in part one, immediately after his first nocturnal tryst with Sylvia. As a dutiful royalist daughter, Sylvia early expresses considerable anguish over Philander's attempts to prevail upon her "honour"; she finally concedes, nevertheless, to a private interview, which she justifies as a trial of her virtue and resolution. And as Philander's letter recounting the details of their first night alone together reveals, Sylvia does remain "a maid" despite the opportunity for physical conquest on his part.

The cause of Philander's forbearance, as he explains, is neither his regard for Sylvia's honor (on the contrary, he says, her resistance inflames him all the more) nor her physical attractions (these, he insists, are overwhelming) but a fit of sexual impotence brought on by a state of overstimulation. Having "overcome all difficulties, all the fatigues and toils of love's long seiges, vanquish'd the mighty phantom of the fair, the giant honour, and routed all the numerous host of women's little reasonings, passed all the bounds of peevish modesty; nay, even all the loose and silken counterscarps that fenced the sacred fort," instead of receiving "the yielding treasure," Philander had fallen "fainting before the surrendering gates," a circumstance he goes on to associate with the weakness of old age. In a rhetorical maneuver that underscores his physical prowess even as it acknowledges a lapse in his "(till then) never failing power," he attributes his attack of impotence to the envy of the gods; one "malicious at [his] glory," he suggests, has left him full of "mad desires," but "all inactive, as age or death itself, as cold and feeble, as unfit for joy, as if [his] youthful fire had long been past, or Sylvia had never been blest with charms." Indeed, the excess of passion has so paralyzed Philander that he curses his youth and implores the gods to give him "old age, for that has some excuse, but youth has none."

The dialectic of youthful vigor and old age within which Philander here encodes what amounts to an averted incestuous consummation is, as we have to some extent already seen, precisely the dialectic within which he has attempted to justify his incestuous and adulterous desire from the start. From as early as his very first letter to Sylvia, he has idealized his affection for her by casting the older generation as guardians of a threatened domain of power, invested only in the jealous retention of control over the future. The institutions of kinship and of marriage are mere "trick[s] devised by the wary old" who, like the gods, arbitrarily wield the reins of political power even as they fear and envy Philander's authentic passion and youthful virility.

Philander reproduces this dialectic at a more literal level in his reference later in the same letter to a parallel sexual plot involving another male predator and another "reluctant maid." For even as Philander—"the young, the brisk and gay"—is engineering an interview with Sylvia, Sylvia's father—that "brisk old gentleman"—has been counting on a garden assignation with Melinda, her refreshingly worldly serving maid. Few readers will forget the hilarious "accident" by which plot and comic subplot here intersect, enabling Behn to play irreverently with the ironies, multiple meanings, and shifting power relations produced when the "maid" Sylvia, "mistress" of Melinda, plays "mistress" to Philander while her "maid," Melinda, plays "mistress" to Sylvia's father. Much as Defoe would later point to the ironies inherent in the homonymous relation contained within the honorific Madam, Behn here uses the shifting and multiplying of subject positions to baldly expose the illusory forms of power invested in all varieties of mistresses and maids.

According to Philander, no consummation takes place between master and "mistress" here any more than between Philander and Sylvia. Alarmed by a noise that makes the young lovers fear discovery, Philander steals into the garden disguised in Melinda's nightgown and headress, only to be mistaken for Melinda by the eager old gentleman. Here is his account of events as they unfold: "Monsieur the Count, … taking me for Melinda, … caught hold of my gown as I would have passed him, and cried, 'Now Melinda, I see you are a maid of honour,—come, retire with me into the grove, where I have a present of a heart and something else to make you.'" It is now Philander's turn to play the role of reluctant maid: "With that I pulled back and whispered—'Heavens! Would you make a mistress of me?'—Says he—A mistress, what woulds't thou be, a cherubin?' Then I replied as before—'I am no whore, sir,'—'No,' cries he, 'but I can quickly make thee one, I have my tools about me, sweet-heart; therefore let us lose no time, but fall to work.' … With that he clapped fifty guineas in a purse into one hand, and something else that shall be nameless into the other, presents that had been both worth Melinda's acceptance".

Combining many of the key motifs and topoi of Love-Letters (among them masquerade, gender reversal, class and generational encounter, and homosocial exchange of a most literal variety)—all within an epistolary frame—Philander's garden adventure offers a veritable object lesson in the problematics of reading Behn. It is possible to take Philander's narrative at face value, to accept the hero at his word, as Gardiner does when she reads Philander's disguise as providing a sort of comic externalization of his demeaning impotence. Philander, as she sees him here, is a whining buffoon—"a ludicrously declassed and feminized figure"—whose exposure through Behn's publication of his private correspondence realizes his own worst fear, as he expresses it in his letter, of being publicly ridiculed ("Where shall I hide my head when this lewd story's told?"). In Philander's account of his comic adventure with Beralti, Gardiner suggests, Behn not only casts doubt on the virility of the notoriously promiscuous Lord Grey but "undercuts the admiration accorded to Don Juans" generally. His withdrawal from the garden, which leaves his father-in-law in a state of sexual frustration is, Gardiner argues, a burlesque of "his own frustrated romantic seduction of Sylvia."

But Gardiner's reading does little justice to the hermeneutic instabilities generated by the epistolary nature of Behn's text, instabilities that produce the immanent possibility—if not the eminent probability—that Philander is only feigning impotence. The only grounds we have for validating what really happened on that disappointing night are, after all, Philander's words—his own dubious representation of events. And in light of the strategies of seduction he has deployed up to this point, it makes perfect sense to read his attack of impotence not as a fact but as a performance (or what might more appropriately be termed a magnificent antiperformance in this case). Far from constituting a form of humiliation, this episode actually helps Philander to consolidate his power over Sylvia.

Philander's "retreat" from consummation at this moment of peak excitement and opportunity is thoroughly in keeping with the strategies of deferral by which he has gained entry into Sylvia's bedchamber in the first place. From the outset, he has moved with a certain deft belatedness. As early as her third letter, Sylvia pines for word from Philander: "Not yet?—not yet?" she laments, "oh ye dull tedious hours, when will you glide away? and bring that happy moment on, in which I shall at least hear from my Philander; … Perhaps Philander's making a trial of virtue by this silence." In her next, still waiting ("Another night, oh heavens, and yet no letter come!"), she even entertains the thought that Philander may in fact be toying with her: "Is it a trick, a cold fit, only assum'd to try how much I love you?" Predictably, Philander has an excuse, although in presenting it he also betrays a certain disingenuity: "When I had sealed the enclosed, Brilliard told me you were this morning come from Bellfont, and with infinite impatience have expected seeing you here; which deferred my sending this to the old place; and I am so vain (oh adorable Sylvia!) as to believe my fancied silence has given you disquiets; but sure, my Sylvia could not charge me with neglect."

It may be revenge for Sylvia's ambivalence about surrendering herself to him, indeed for the tenacity with which she clings to the imperatives of honor, that drives Philander to these delays. For although Sylvia often longs for him, she is just as often grateful for his neglect: "Let me alone, let me be ruin'd with honour, if I must be ruin'd.—For oh! 'twere much happier I were no more, than that I should be more than Philander's sister; or he than Sylvia's brother: oh let me ever call you by that cold name." Philander, however, will be satisfied with gaining nothing less than absolute control over the representation of Sylvia's desire. Early on she describes herself as the very embodiment of disorder and indeterminacy: "Could you but imagine how I am tormentingly divided, how unresolved between violent love and cruel honour, you would say 'twere impossible to fix me any where; or be the same thing for a moment together." Onto this doubt and indecision, Philander fixes his own desire, reading Sylvia as he wishes—like Adam, dreaming her doubt into desire for his advances and then naming it as love. "I know you love," writes Philander to Sylvia. "He soon taught her to understand it was love," asserts the narrator in the novel's "Argument"; "thou art the first that ever did inform me that there was such a sort of wish about me," writes Sylvia to Philander. Such phrases echo as a refrain throughout part one. And Sylvia does at last defer to the authority of Philander's reading of her, both in finally accepting his diagnosis of her alienation from desire and in conceding to his accusations of her fickleness and inconstancy along the way.

In the context of this series of deferrals, Philander's impotence simply constitutes a culminating moment in the production of desire in Sylvia. Although in prior letters she had vacillated wildly between attraction to her brother-in-law and a perfectly catechismal defense of patriarchal honor, in the two letters that she writes in quick succession immediately following Philander's "lapse" in potency, she describes herself as experiencing a degree of desire she has previously not known. "I have wishes, new, unwonted wishes," she writes, "at every thought of thee I find a strange disorder in my blood, that pants and burns in every vein, and makes me blush and sigh, and grow impatient, ashamed and angry." She now further concedes that her previous "coldness" must have been dissembled, as she was "not mistress of it. (This concession by Sylvia is of interest for our reading of Philander, as it admits the possibility that coldness may be feigned.) Sylvia continues, "there lies a woman's art, there all her boasted virtue, it is but well dissembling, and no more—but mine, alas, is gone, for ever fled." In the process of increasingly surrendering to Philander's "cause," Sylvia now begins in several instances to echo his very words and arguments, mirroring his early references to "fond custom" and "phantom honour" as well as the opportunistic and somewhat desperate arguments he had used to justify his commitment to the political interests of the treacherous Cesario. Just as he had there described himself as being "in past a retreat" and declared that "though the glorious falling weight should crush me, it is great to attempt," so Sylvia now casts herself in the role of heroic martyr to her love: "I am plunged in, past hope of a retreat; and since my fate has pointed me out for ruin, I cannot fall more gloriously. Take then, Philander, to your dear arms, a maid that can no longer resist, who is disarmed of all defensive power: she yields, she yields, and does confess it too." Sylvia's response to Philander's impotence, in short, is to renounce every doctrine she has hitherto been taught by the "grave and wise." He induces her to give up a "coldness she is not mistress of by, in effect, being master of his own. One more instance of deferral (occasioned this time by Cesario's calling him away) will secure his romantic victory; to prove his passion, Philander will offer to disregard the summons, but Sylvia—now thoroughly identified with his interests—insists that he respond, promising that Philander's obedience to the commands of Cesario (whom earlier she had regarded as a rival) will be rewarded in her arms.

If, as Sylvia is here driven to presuppose, affecting coldness is "a woman's art"—a prerogative or sign of femininity—then feigning impotence is for Philander, in more than one sense, "putting on" the maid. It is a way both of putting Sylvia on (i.e., controlling her through deception) and of doing so by performing a woman's part (affecting coldness), a strategy made literal in Philander's garden performance as Melinda. Appropriating to himself a dissembled coldness that he identifies as a female strategy, Philander does not invite Sylvia to become a better mistress of her own standoffishness, but instead maneuvers her into accepting the coercive fiction of her own natural desire for him. Her longing for him is thus understood not as the effect of a performance on his part but as an essence intrinsic to her, a "natural propensity" poorly masked in her case by a shabby cloak of artificial virtue. As she does at several other points throughout her text, Behn here problematizes the question of desire's origins in depicting Sylvia's grasping after a causal narrative: "I am the aggressor," she declares eventually, "the fault is in me, and thou art innocent." Thus does Philander take control rhetorically of their courtship by inducing Sylvia to own an "unaccountable" passion over which she has neither prior knowledge nor control.

It remains, however, to determine the role of Philander's garden performance as a reluctant maid in his project of displacing all traces of reluctance in Sylvia. I have argued that what to Gardiner is whining and buffoonery on Philander's part can also, if we refuse to assume the hero's authenticity, be understood as a form of strategic selfdramatization whereby Philander acquires power by performing impotence. Philander's account of his "pleasant adventure" in the garden similarly serves his ends with Sylvia by enlisting her collusion as a reader in a comic undermining of paternal authority. By reducing the count to a rather embarrassing travesty of the predatory excesses of youth, it offers a repetition and amplification of Philander's successful manipulation of the signs of impotence and femininity to establish the conditions for sexual victory. It is not just that Philander has prior knowledge from Melinda of Beralti's sexual indiscretions while Beralti himself remains ignorant of Philander's dalliance with his daughter. There is also the fact that the old man is prepared to pay for Melinda's services, a detail that, while it bespeaks Beralti's economic prowess, also makes him compare unfavorably with Philander. The fifty guineas intended for Melinda may stand as a mark of Bellfont's class as well as gender supremacy, but they are also a sign of his maid's affective indifference to him—an indifference that, as we have seen, stands in stark contrast to the passion Philander arouses in Sylvia (despite, if not indeed because of, his temporary lapse in potency). In fact, the comic circumstance of Melinda's physical absence at the moment when the fifty guineas is bestowed makes an utter mockery of the count's physical power over her. The scene in which the father both literally and figuratively attempts to impose the phallus is also the scene in which the paternal phallus is inadvertently exposed, not simply to the laughter of the son-in-law but, through him, to the daughter's laughter too.

But Beralti's garden vigil for the daughter's maid takes place at the very moment when Philander is preparing the stage for the theft of the daughter's maidenhead. The identity of role between Philander and the count as predatory males is thus complicated by their status as rivals. They are not simply mirrors of one another—males in quest of separate objects of desire—but competitors for control of Sylvia. (Could not Beralti's dalliance with the maid in fact be read as a phastasmatic rendering of the eroticized relation between father and daughter that underpins the entire sexual drama of part one?) To the extent that they situate Sylvia's alienation from her father within the context of a drama of masculine rivalry in which she figures not as an agent but a sign, the familial dynamics here are critical. Philander's inclination to flout paternal authority and to infringe upon the father's right of rule is an aspect of his political character as a follower of the regicidal Cesario. But the link does not end there. Like Cesario, Philander functions in the capacity of a son, a role that he has acquired by his marriage to Sylvia's sister, Myrtilla, and one that involves not just the acquisition of certain privileges but also the institution of specific prohibitions. The rules of kinship that give Philander freedom of access to Beralti's daughters also presuppose the assumption of countervailing filial responsibilities. Sylvia alludes to both these prerogatives and their limits when she contemplates the consequences of her father's discovery of their affair: "my father being rash, and extremely jealous, and the more so of me, by how much more he is fond of me, and nothing would enrage him like the discovery of an interview like this; though you have the liberty to range the house of Bellfont as a son, and are indeed at home there; but … when he shall find his son and virgin daughter, the brother and the sister so retired, so entertained,—What but death can ensue? Or what is worse, eternal … confusion on my honour?" In seducing Sylvia (by, in effect, usurping the father's prerogative to dispose of her virginity), Philander violates the authority invested in him as a brother—an "authority" that, as the following passage testifies, Sylvia recognizes as "lawful." Describing herself as impaled by a sense of familial obligation in the face of his advances, as "a maid that cannot fly," she entertains a moment of regret: "Why did you take advantage of those freedoms I gave you as a brother? … but for my sister's sake, I play'd with you, suffer'd your hands and lips to wander where I dare not now; all which I thought a sister might allow a brother, and knew not all the while the treachery of love: oh none, but under that intimate title of a brother, could have had the opportunity to have ruin'd me … by degrees so subtle, and an authority so lawful, you won me out of all."

Within the discursive economy of Behn's text, in short, Sylvia's honor—represented both by her virgin body and her desire to fulfill her f(am)ilial obligations—becomes Philander's political battle-ground. As "daughter to the great Beralti and sister to Myrtilla, a yet unspotted maid, fit to produce a race of glorious heroes," Sylvia recognizes that all her actions reflect on the honor of "the noble house of the Beraltf' and that Philander seeks "to build the trophies of [his] conquests on the ruin of both Myrtilla's fame and [her own]." From a political perspective, it is not sufficient that he ruin Myrtilla only, as Sylvia yet remains to "redeem the bleeding [royalist] honour of [her] family". As Myrtilla puts it in her one admonitory missive to her sister, Sylvia is "the darling child, the joy of all, the last hope left, the refuge" of "the most unhappy [family] of all the race of old nobility." Philander's corruption of Beralti's dutiful younger daughter through the illicit appropriation of sexual rights over her in this sense constitutes a Whig usurpation of the royalist right of rule.

One sees here, better perhaps than at any other point in her text, the logic of Behn's interweaving of sexual and political narratives; for what Behn's complex structuring of her tale makes evident is the profound interimplication—indeed the mutually constitutive nature—of sexuality and politics. The relationship between plots here is more than merely analogical, more than the simple matter of a metaphor in which sexual conquest serves as a figure at the level of private life for a more public, political form of victory. It is rather a relationship of discursive interdependence in which the categories of the private and the public, materiality and meaning, desire and the law reveal their inherently contingent and unstable identities. Gardiner accepts the efficacy of a stable distinction between private and public life when she rests her reading on the difference between Philander's positive political power and his lack of familial authority over Sylvia. But this is precisely the distinction Behn destabilizes when she exposes the intensely political nature of individual desire. Philander's binary opposition between private and public life is, she suggests, an illusion created to sustain the liberatory fiction that legitimates the operations of masculine privilege.

Philander represents his incestuous love for Sylvia as an expression of unconstrained desire that marks a liberation from a materialist economy of sexual exchange. Against the institution of marriage—"a trick devised by the wary old only to make provision for posterity"—he urges the authenticity of "pleasures vast and unconfin'd." And eventually, in the invective against marriage to which she devotes her penultimate letter in part one, Sylvia too comes to embrace such a libertine philosophy, asserting that only adulterous love can occasion genuine heterosexual reciprocity ("That's a heavenly match," she writes, "when two souls touched with equal passion meet, … when no base interest makes the hasty bargain, … and … both understand to take and pay.") Ultimately, however, by showing how the very act of erotic transgression that Philander proffers as an individualist solution to the problem of hierarchical repression ultimately reinscribes Sylvia's specular status in reciprocal relations between men, Behn exposes the limits of the libertine critique of patriarchy.

The assymmetrical and nonreciprocal character of Sylvia and Philander's relationship will become increasingly clear, both to Sylvia and to the reader, as the events of parts two and three of the narrative—especially those involving the relationship between Philander and Octavio—unfold. But even within the limits of the love plot of part one, that inadvertent "phallic handshake" between father and sonin-law in the garden—a savage burlesque of the gentleman's agreement by which the gift of the daughter is legitimately exchanged—reveals (even as it figures the bypassing of legitimate succession) the homosocial ground of both patriarchal law and its transgression. Fifty guineas and that "nameless" entity, the father's penis, may be "presents … both worth Melinda's acceptance," but only Sylvia—phallic representative of the Father's Name and Law—is worth Philander's. Just as Sylvia's ensuing marriage to Philander's "property," Brilliard, will expose the underlying ironies of the libertine's dependence on the legal artifice of marriage to secure control over the body of his lover, so Behn here shows that an incestuous challenge to the law of patriarchal prerogative does not necessarily constitute a challenge to the law of masculine privilege.

II. ROLE-PLAYING, CUCKOLDRY, AND CROSS-DRESSING: SYLVIA'S SEMIOTIC EDUCATION

It is crucial to recognize the extent to which Philander's performative strategy of playing the maid in part one of Behn's narrative is embedded in the male homosocial dynamics that organize her plot more generally. Abounding in the representation of erotic triangles, Love-Letters may be read as a veritable proving ground for analysis of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick not long ago identified [in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, 1985] as the homosocial bases and gender assymmetries of triangular heterosexual desire. Of special relevance here is Sedgwick's analysis of the dynamics of cuckoldry and their relationship to the "masculinizing potential of subordination to a man" as it is elaborated in psychoanalytic accounts of male psychosexual development. Sedgwick quotes Richard Klein's gloss on Freud's account of "the little boy's progress towards heterosexuality" to call attention to the way in which modern constructions of heterosexual masculinity presuppose the existence (and repression) of a prior homosexual stage of feminized subordination to another male. The male child, writes Klein, "must pass … through the stage of the 'positive' Oedipus, a homoerotic identification with his father, a position of feminized subordination to the father, as a condition of finding a model for his own heterosexual role."

A dynamic of homoerotic identification similar to the one Freud posits and Klein describes is central to the male relationships represented in Behn's text. It is evident not just in Philander's struggles with his father-in-law, where playing the maid becomes simultaneously the means by which the hero usurps paternal authority and the occasion (however burlesque) for a homoerotic encounter with the father, but also in the prolific instances of cuckoldry recounted elsewhere in the narrative. For Sylvia is not just the space across which Philander aspires to homosocial sameness with "the father"; she is, interestingly, also the conduit whereby he asserts masculine identity with Cesario.

A brief review of the prehistory of the incestuous lovers' affair clearly reveals the extent to which Sylvia functions for Philander simultaneously as a locus of deflected homoerotic love and as a means of resolving his own desire to be like Cesario. The founding circumstance of Sylvia and Philander's love is a prior sexual rivalry between Philander and Cesario over the heart and body of Sylvia's older sister, Myrtilla. After promising to marry the prince, Myrtilla had been drawn instead into a marriage with Philander, only to return at last to an adulterous affair with Cesario. Here again, as in the matter of the affair between Philander and Sylvia, Behn makes the origins of desire problematic, introducing ambiguity in her "Argument" as to whether the impulse toward conjugal infidelity originates in Philander or Myrtilla. Philander nevertheless produces his own causal narrative in an early letter to Sylvia, where he makes the case that Myrtilla was the first to violate her vows. Especially striking here is his response to that alleged betrayal:

Myrtilla, I say, first broke her marriage-vows to me; I blame her not, nor is it reasonable I should; she saw the young Cesario, and loved him. Cesario, whom the envying world in spite of prejudice must own, has irresistible charms, that godlike form, that sweetness in his face, that softness in his eyes and delicate mouth; and every beauty besides, that women dote on, and men envy: that lovely composition of man and angel! with the addition of his eternal youth and illustrious birth, was formed by heaven and nature for universal conquest! And who can love the charming hero at a cheaper rate than being undone? And she that would not venture fame, honour, and a marriage-vow for the glory of the young Cesario's heart, merits not the noble victim.

Instead of faulting Myrtilla for her disloyalty, Philander identifies with her desire for Cesario. Granted, his letter is part of an elaborate textual strategy of seduction—one that requires that he provide Sylvia with irrefutable justifications for his own adulterous love. But the hyperbolic portrait he paints of Cesario, surpassed in erotic extravagance only by the protracted and probably parodic inventory of Myrtilla's physical attributes in the novel's "Argument," exceeds the demands of Philander's rhetorical project and prepares us for his ensuing account of the "joyful submission" and "shameful freedom" he experiences when Cesario cuckolds him:

But when I knew her false, when I was once confirmed,—when by my own soul I found the dissembled passion of hers, when she could no longer hide the blushes, or the paleness that seized at the approaches of my disordered rival, when I saw love dancing in her eyes, and her false heart beat with nimble motions, and soft trembling seized every limb, at the approach or touch of the royal lover, then I thought myself no longer obliged to conceal my flame for Sylvia; nay, ere I broke silence, ere I discovered the hidden treasure of my heart, I made her falsehood plainer yet: even the time and place of the dear assignations I discovered; certainty, happy certainty! broke the dull heavy chain, and I with joy submitted to my shameful freedom, and caressed my generous rival; nay, and by heaven I loved him for it, pleased at the resemblance of our souls; for we were secret lovers both, but more pleased that he loved Myrtilla; for that made way to my passion for the adorable Sylvia!

At the climax of this passage, it is difficult to disentangle Philander's pleasure from Myrtilla's. But Philander's text ultimately takes a turn whereby its writer comes to occupy more than a single position in the complex network of triangular desire. At one and the same time, he manages to identify with Myrtilla's pleasurable submission to Cesario and, through the mediating figure of Sylvia, with Cesario's position of conquest over him. For Philander, that is, Sylvia is not just a double for Myrtilla (not just another version of prohibited woman-hood) but a locus of deflected homosocial love—a substitute, in effect, for Cesario. As in Philander's night of impotence or his garden encounter with Beralti, where playing the maid serves as a strategy for appropriating paternal prerogatives, so here identification with the position of Myrtilla becomes a conduit for his assertion of masculine privilege. By providing the possibility for Philander to occupy multiple subject positions simultaneously, Sylvia creates the conditions whereby he is able to convert his sense of admiration and envy for his rival into a version of identification with him.

"'To cuckold,'" writes Sedgwick, "is by definition a sexual act, performed on a man, by another man…. The bond of cuckoldry … [is] necessarily hierarchical in structure, with an 'active' participant who is clearly in the ascendancy over the 'passive' one." In the homosocial scheme that underwrites this bond, moreover, "men's bonds with women are meant to be in a subordinate, complementary, and instrumental relation to bonds with other men." The world of Love-Letters both exemplifies this ethos and, through the heroine's ability to identify it, provides a critique of its structuring principles.

As Philander notes early on, being cuckolded is hardly an abuse over which it is worth risking one's life, let alone one's friendship with a male rival. "Let the dull, hot-brained, jealous fool upbraid me with cold patience," he writes in defense of his response to Cesario's cuckoldry, "let the fond coxcomb, whose honour depends on the frail marriage-vow, reproach me, or tell me that my reputation depends on the feeble constancy of a wife, persuade me it is honour to fight for an irretrievable and unvalued prize, and that because my rival has taken leave to cuckold me, I shall give him leave to kill me too."

Sylvia displays a similar cynicism when she demands in a moment of resistance to Philander, "What husband is not a cuckold? Nay, and a friend to him that made him so?" Philander, of course, claims transcendent passion for Sylvia as grounds for his casual dismissal of Myrtilla, insisting that "only she that has my soul can engage my sword." But his actions in the ensuing narrative will belie these early protestations and expose the deep contradictions inherent in Philander's libertine debunking of the interested codes of patriarchal honor. Sylvia will perceive these contradictions with clarity by the middle of part two, when pregnant and betrayed by Philander after having joined him in his flight to Holland to escape political prosecution (as in real life Henrietta Berkeley had in a similar circumstance followed Grey), she angrily begins a course of increasing cunning and self-sufficiency. Entertaining the advances of another suitor while allowing Philander to continue to believe in her fidelity to him and in her ignorance of his infidelity to her, she will ultimately outstrip Philander at the game of inconstancy. The Dutch nobleman Octavio, illegitimate son of the House of Orange as well as Philander's confidante and friend, fittingly becomes her instrument of revenge.

The ensuing rivalry between Philander and Octavio reproduces the competing demands of love and honor that dominate Philander's seduction of Sylvia, only to recast them in an ironic light. To all appearances, Octavio is the very embodiment of honor and authenticity; but Behn makes a mockery of his honorable punctilios in her portrait of his bumbling efforts to "protect" Sylvia from the secret of Philander's infidelity. Unable to restrain his love for the abandoned Sylvia, Octavio dutifully confesses all in letters to Philander, only to discover that the latter has taken up with Octavio's own virtuous, married sister, Calista, and is altogether willing to surrender Sylvia's body to the encroaching erotic advances of a friend. While Octavio nourishes resentment over the honor of Calista (of whose familial identity Philander yet remains ignorant), he nevertheless resolves that his friendship for Philander will surpass all other ties, including both his duty to his sister and his passion for Sylvia. Finding solace in being able to act honorably toward (i.e., with permission from) his rival in satisfying his desire for his new object, Octavio thus agrees to what amounts to a double transaction with Philander: namely, the prostitution of his sister to gain a lover ("rifle Calista of every virtue heaven and nature gave her," he declares, "so I may but revenge it on the Sylvia!" and the exchange, in effect, of his sister for Philander's. Behn underscores the similarity in difference between incest and exchange here by building a clearly incestuous charge into Octavio's voyeuristic consumption of letters in which Philander elaborately details his erotic encounters with Calista. Through her repeated doubling of the categories of sister and lover, she lodges a deft critique of aristocratic codes of masculine honor that deploy sisters as well as lovers as enabling grounds for the enactment of male prerogative.

Cognizant of the extent to which Octavio and Philander's gentleman's agreement reduces her to a mere object of circulation among men, Sylvia at length confronts Octavio with the double moral standard underlying his devotion to male honor:

"Oh, you are very nice, Octavio … in your punctilio to Philander; but I perceive you are not so tender in those you ought to have for Sylvia: I find honour in you men, is only what you please to make it; for at the same time you think it ungenerous to betray Philander, you believe it no breach of honour to betray the eternal repose of Sylvia. You have promised Philander your friendship; you have avowed yourself my lover, my slave, my friend, my every thing; and yet not one of these has any tie to oblige you to my interest…. And here you think it no dishonour to break your word or promise; by which I find your false notions of virtue and honour, with which you serve yourselves, when interest, design, or self-love makes you think it necessary."

Finally, it is neither Sylvia's inconstancy with Octavio nor the latter's erotic rivalry that inspires Philander to raise his sword against his friend; it is rather the perception that, in betraying the "secrets of friendship" to Sylvia, Octavio has allowed a heterosexual tie to supercede their homosocial bond. This transgression alone is able to move Philander, as it were, out of the boudoir and onto the battlefield.

On the day before he is to take Holy Orders in part three of the narrative, Octavio—now broken by Sylvia's treachery—is visited by Philander, who comes to beg Octavio's pardon for offenses he has committed against him and to persuade him to abandon his determination to retire from the world. Not only has Philander debauched Octavio's sister, who has by now retired pregnant to a convent, but he has ravished from him Sylvia, the very mistress he had not long before abandoned to his friend. As a pledge of his friendship at this critical moment in the text, Philander now assures Octavio that he would never have violated his sister, Calista, had he known of her relationship to him. He would, moreover, as he wryly notes, gladly "quit [Sylvia] to him, were she ten times dearer to him than she was," if doing so would deter Octavio from his desperate intent. Although these protestations of friendship from Philander fail to dissuade Octavio from his resolve, they nevertheless elicit this reciprocal profession of his love:

"Sir, I must confess you have found out the only way to disarm me of my resentment against you, if I were not obliged, by those vows I am going to take, to pardon and be at peace with all the world. However, these vows cannot hinder me from conserving entirely that friendship in my heart, which your good qualities and beauties at first sight engaged there, and from esteeming you more than perhaps I ought to do; the man whom I must yet own my rival, and the undoer of my sister's honour. But oh—no more of that; a friend is above a sister, or a mistress.' At this he hung down his eyes and sighed."

Uttered on the eve of the hero's initiation into the fraternal order of St. Bernard, this simple maxim—"A friend is above a sister or a mistress"—is perhaps the baldest statement we have of the sexual hierarchies that underpin Behn's plot. Granting the pardon Philander begs, Octavio seals it by taking "a ring of great value from his finger," which he presents to Philander as a pledge of his love, in much the same spirit that Philander had earlier pledged Sylvia. Like the ring, Sylvia is the gift that cements and the token that signifies relations between men.

Sylvia's specular status in relations between men is neatly literalized by her frequent appearances in male attire. It is, in fact, during the first of these episodes of cross-dressing that Octavio initially falls in love with her. Drag enhances Sylvia's attractions as an object of male desire (she "never appeared so charming and desirable" as when dressed as a man if for no other reason than that it enables her male admirers both to identify with the sexual conquests of the young cavalier whom she impersonates and to experience a certain rivalry with him. These at least are the peculiar pleasures of Octavio's experience: "Octavio saw every day with abundance of pleasure the little revenges of love, on those women's hearts who had made before little conquests over him, and strove by all the gay presents he made a young Fillmond (for so they called Sylvia,) to make him appear unresistible to the ladies; and while Sylvia gave them new wounds, Octavio failed not to receive them too among the crowd, till at last he became a confirmed slave, to the lovely unknown; and that which was yet more strange, she captivated the men no less than the women."

In the long run, however, cross-dressing has another—a productive as opposed to a merely specular—potential that Sylvia in time learns to exploit with increasing skill and that goes beyond according her that freedom of physical movement and those other "little privileges … denied to women." Over the course of her career, Behn's Ovidian letter-writer undergoes a dazzling metamorphosis from corrupted innocence to triumphant depravity—a transformation that culminates in part three of the narrative in an exhilarating escapade in which she elevates the game of sexual conquest from a means of revenge into an art. Having become a consummate fiction-maker and role player (as well as a wealthy courtesan who capitalizes on the weaknesses of unsuspecting men), she here undertakes as a "frolic to divert herself conquest of the heart of Don Alonzo, a young Spanish-born gentleman distinguished most significantly for being the only man ever to have succeeded in outdoing Philander at the game of inconstancy. When Alonzo boasts of having "reduced … to … a lover" an unconquerable Dutch countess whose heart even Philander could not command, Sylvia resolves to go him one better by determining to fix his own wandering heart on her. She succeeds in her determination by enacting a masquerade in which she plays both male and female parts: a handsome cavalier named Bellumere and his lovely sister, Mme de—.

By means of a ring that Alonzo gives to Bellumere as a pledge of male friendship and that Mme de—later vaunts upon her tour, Sylvia deftly turns Bellumere into a suspected rival of Don Alonzo for her favors. She thus plays an interesting variation on the homosocial code whereby mistresses typically stand in as obligatory heterosexual displacements of prohibited objects of homoerotic male desire. By creating a male version of herself through which to lure her victims into a homoerotic attachment, she paradoxically ensures her own status as a primary object of desire instead of merely an intermediate term in a phallocentric sexual and symbolic economy. In this instance, she also cleverly turns Alonzo's imagined rival into a brother, to whose authority over the disposal of her favors she presents herself as determined to defer. Sylvia imposes her own authority, that is, by means of the pretense of deferring to Bellumere's, thus creating a drama in which she at once reproduces and subverts the hierarchy of authority that informed her early relation with Philander. Both producing and controlling Alonzo's desire for her, she now manages her own circulation as a sign of femininity.

This episode makes stunningly clear the extent to which Sylvia has appropriated Philander's performative strategies of symbolic deferral by the novel's end. As we have seen, the relation between sign and referent in Philander's garden escapade with Beralti following his alleged attack of impotence in part one is neither as stable nor transparent as Gardiner suggests when she reads it as a simple externalization of the hero's demeaning impotence. Nor does it involve a simple masking of the "truth" of Philander's inherent dominance. It is, rather, a productive relation in which Philander consolidates his power by using theater to produce material effects. This, we might say, is his type of sorcery, the basis of that power to charm by which he creates effects in some instances as tangible as those wrought by philtres upon the body of Brilliard or by alchemy on the heart and eyes of Cesario. For Behn, his performances are occasions for displacing the natural ground of the opposition between inner and outer experience, psyches and surfaces, artifice and authenticity. Philander treads an extraordinarily fluid line between role-playing and reality, dissembling so well at times that, as Behn's narrator notes late in the text, "he scarce knew himself that he did so."

By the time Sylvia encounters Don Alonzo, she has learned how to exploit the productive nature of performance so as to move beyond her status as a specular representation of male desire, a mere player in a drama controlled by men, both to create and variously represent herself. She has not, however, always recognized the productive potential of her own radical deracination as a sign (a performer) of femininity. Although she has from the start intuited the insufficiency of the written word to express her soul completely, she is fairly confident initially of its ability to simulate, if not entirely to substitute, for presence. "While I write," she declares in an early letter to Philander, "methinks I am talking to thee; I tell thee thus my soul, while thou, methinks, art all the while smiling and listening by; this is much easier than silent thought, and my soul is never weary of this converse; and thus I would speak a thousand things, but that still, methinks, words do not enough express my soul." Still a fairly naive reader, Sylvia believes this insufficiency can be made up for by the supplement of presence, by merely adding voice to text: "to understand that right, there requires looks; there is a rhetoric in looks; in sighs and silent touches that surpasses all; there is an accent in the sound of words too, that gives a sense and soft meaning to little things, which of themselves are of trivial value, and insignificant; and by the cadence of the utterance may express a tenderness which their own meaning does not bear; by this I wou'd insinuate, that the story of the heart cannot be so well told by this way, as by presence and conversation." A more savvy reader of Philander might by now have recognized the dangers of ventriloquism, which he betrays in his third letter when he describes the emptiness of his public performances: "I move about this unregarded world, appear every day in the great senate-house, at clubs, cabals, and private consultations; … I say I appear indeed, and give my voice in public business; but oh my heart more kindly is employed." But Sylvia, though she sometimes doubts his word, still finds Philander's letters more reassuring than ominous. Clinging to an idealized notion of presence, she buys into the rhetorical opposition between private and public life on which Philander erects the fiction of his own sincerity.

While the Sylvia of part one may still believe naively in the possibility of her own and others' authenticity ("I have no arts, heaven knows, no guile or double meaning in my soul, 'tis all plain native simplicity," her maid and "too fatal counsellor," Melinda, nevertheless detects her mistress's performative potential early on. In the letter she writes to Philander just before his fateful night of impotence, Melinda alludes to the late occurrence of "many ominous things." Among these she cites an incident that has aroused suspicions in Sylvia's mother regarding her daughter's romantic activities. Melinda presumably wants to alert Philander on the eve of his assignation with Sylvia to the perils of heightened parental vigilance, but her letter also provides him with a warning glimpse of Sylvia's budding semiotic education. It shows the heroine's incipient ability to exploit not just the dangerous excesses of script but the dangerous supplementarity of presence and voice itself. Although Sylvia had early lamented the intransigence of her "guilty pen," bemoaning the insidious tendency of writing to betray her best intentions, she here shows an almost instinctive urge to master the treachery of the letter and to exploit its openness as a form of self-defense. Discovered by her mother in the act of writing to Philander, physical evidence in hand, Sylvia brilliantly avoids being implicated in her own guilt through an ingenious act of textual deferral. In the exigency of the moment, she concocts the fiction that she is writing as a surrogate for Melinda to the latter's lover, using pseudonyms to protect that guilty "maid," and she adds demonstrative proof of her claim by, in effect, performing her text aloud with an altered—an essentially ironic—emphasis. As Melinda reports, she "turned it … prettily into burlesque love by her manner of reading it" (italics added).

This cunning transformation of material fact into plausible fiction by creating a multiplicity of referents through the act of reading forms a stark contrast with the later example of Clarissa, who is characteristically victimized by the uncontrollable openness of her own letter texts. When Clarissa finally does learn to exploit the ambiguities of script, moreover, she can do so only by closing them around the referent of the father. Writing to Love-lace that she is "setting out with all diligence for [her] Father's House," in her famous trick of lying truthfully, Clarissa points to a superabundance of father figures not to an open field of interpretive possibility. And indeed one can not help feeling that the imperatives of honesty and sincerity that control Clarissa's writing play a rather sinister role in determining the range of choices she is able to imagine for taking retributive action against Lovelace's treachery. It is not until the topos of the daughter's guilty pen recurs in Frances Burney's Evelina or Jane Austen's Lady Susan that we again encounter an exploitation of the formal openness of the letter as subtle and subversive as the one Behn offers in this single episode from her text.

This scene, in which Sylvia reads her own love letter as if she were only playacting the lover, resonates in several crucial ways throughout Behn's text. In one sense, it serves as a paradigm in small of Behn's novel as a whole—a figure, as it were, for the distancing effect of parody Behn herself achieves at the level of narration through her characteristic cultivation of rhetorical excess. As the first instance in the narrative when Sylvia instinctively plays the role of "maid," moreover, it foreshadows the freedom she will ultimately realize by abandoning the presupposition that she possesses a natural bedrock of desire and a core of stable self-identity. By introducing the possibility that Sylvia's letter may be itself only a script—that the very text she generates as the sincere expression of her soul may be symptomatic of a role she plays but over which she does not have performative control—it exposes the radically contingent nature of her desire and the performative as opposed to natural basis of her subjectivity.

If Sylvia's original letter text is merely an imitation of originality and if presence and voice are not reliable markers of substance but dangerous forms of supplementarity, then the very possibility of an origin—of an authentic ground from which one's actions and one's utterances proceed—becomes problematic. In the space opened by these unsettling possibilities, Sylvia is freed from the promise of an incestuous fulfillment of original desire into an open field of signifying possibility. Behn gestures toward this openness in the penultimate paragraph of her text, where she sends her heroine daily in search of new conquests "wherever she shews the charmer." The physical body—that most corporeal of figures—finally emerges as the most unstable of all sites of meaning. The ultimate charmer, it obliterates the very ground of truth and falsehood required for the enactment of personal authenticity. In Behn's world of apparently infinite displacements, there is finally no essence or original that is not constituted in the dialogics of performance or the contestations of power politics. Even so allegedly authenticating a gesture as incest is finally exposed as substituting for the law it would subvert.

III. CODA

Libertine rhetoric exalts the female as an iconic substitute for the father-king, promoting the flattering fiction that woman is the source of both desire and prohibition. "Glorious woman was born for command and dominion," declares Philander, "though custom has usurped us the name of rule over all." In fact, he insists, Sylvia's sovereignty is the motivating force for all his political ambitions. He seeks political empire only to be able to trade it for romantic slavery:

Let me toil to gain, but let Sylvia triumph and reign; I ask no more than the led slave at her chariot wheels, to gaze on my charming conqueress, and wear with joy her fetters! Oh how proud I should be to see the dear victor of my soul so elevated, so adorn'd with crowns and sceptres at her feet, which I had won; to see her smiling on the adoring crowd, distributing her glories to young waiting princes…. Heavens! methinks I see the lovely virgin in this state, her chariot slowly driving through the multitude that press to gaze upon her, she dress'd like Venus, richly gay and loose, her hair and robe blown by the flying winds.

By novel's close, Philander's vision of Sylvia's triumph as spectacle (however disingenuously it has been offered) is realized, as the heroine, "dressed in perfect glory," is pursued by gazing crowds through the streets of Brussels, a rival of even Cesario's elegant mistress, Hermione. But unlike Hermione, who invests all her own ambition in Cesario's success only to meet her demise in his defeat, Sylvia does not depend for her glory on Philander's toil and enterprise; she achieves it on her own. She makes the punctilious Octavio an instrument of her revenge against Philander and to that passion she eventually sacrifices him. By the end of the narrative, moreover, she has resourcefully managed to turn even Philander's servant, Brilliard, (originally deployed to maintain Philander's authority over her) to the promotion of her material interests. Now using Brilliard as a prop in her own self-serving schemes, she manipulates him (by once again exploiting a homosocial bond) into extorting an inheritance from the retired Octavio on the spurious promise of her own penitence and retirement. Then, "impatient to be seen on the Tour, and in all public places," she promptly furnish es herself with "new coach and equipage, and … lavish … clothes and jewels."

The irony of Behn's political defense of royalism is that it ends with the triumph not only of the king but also of the woman who most quintessentially embodies unregenerate female defiance of male supremacy. Cesario's rebellion fails and Philander opportunistically embraces monarchy, while in a savagely ironic twist on this double defeat of the Whig cause, Sylvia makes good the libertine promise of female sovereignty. At one level Behn seems to want to point to divinely appointed kingship as the ultimate locus of truth and authority—the original object of worship of which all other objects of desire are failed imitations and empty substitutes. But the figure at center stage in Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister, the one that absorbs the reader's gaze, is not the king at all but the spectacularly protean body of Sylvia. That this body is also figured without much comment for the better part of Behn's narrative not as the virgin body Philander invokes but as an eroticized maternal presence, a curiously denaturalized point of physical origin in the shape of a pregnant eros, is perhaps not so very insignificant a detail after all, so thoroughly disruptive as it is of any binary relation between displacement and origin. Much as Sylvia signifies the physical power to generate nameless and presumably endless substitutions, so Behn proliferates meanings beyond the binary frame that constitutes incest as a counter to patriarchal law or legitimate king-ship as an ultimate site of meaning and of power.