Roving Hellena:
The Portrayal of Women's Roles in Aphra Behn's The Rover
Upon a headstrong daughter keep strict watch,
Lest, finding liberty, she use it for herself. - Apocrypha, Ecclesiasticus 26:10
A woman's honor is not worth guarding when she has a mind to part with it. -
The Rover, Act V
Aphra Behn was a unusual woman, and lived quite a remarkable life. Not only was she the first Englishwoman to earn her living by writing, she was often the center of scandal in post-Commonwealth London, as well as a spy for the crown. Men who wrote for money were common; playwrights and actors who dabbled in espionage were as well. Women did write in the period, but they were mostly genteel ladies of the nobility who claimed to write for their friends and for their own enjoyment rather than for fame or financial recompense. Many actresses of the period were also spies -- after all, if one could play a part on the stage well enough, one could certainly play a part in the world theatre.
None of these pigeonholes fits Aphra Behn. Mrs. Behn was a middle-class widow who wrote for money, who walked among men as herself and as someone else, and enjoyed a unique status in society. Even though she holds this singular position among her peers, her experiences would not be all that uncommon were they described as the life of a man in the same era; in fact, she has often been belittled and dismissed as little more than a picturesque, even eccentric figure of the Restoration in the years after her death.
Much is made of the fact that her plays derive their source material from earlier works (however, critics and historians do not seem so concerned with pointing this out about other English dramatists such as Shakespeare and Marlowe). Yet in her play The Rover, not only did she take an unwieldy and unworkable source and turn it into an orderly and charming comedy -- vastly improving the original, which was a trick of Shakespeare's as well - she makes some interesting and challenging statements about women and their role in society, especially through the character of Hellena (who, it could be argued, holds the distinction of being the title character).
As soon as we hear the opening lines of The Rover, we know it will be different from the average rake-run-amok play so popular in the drama of the Restoration period. Unlike other works in the genre which - whether by glorification or demonization - focus on the men, The Rover begins with women's voices, and carries them throughout the story.
From the start, we know that this play will belong to someone else, an "impertinent" girl "full of questions." She is Hellena, sister of Florinda and the shrewd and wily counterpart to that more conventional romantic heroine. There were strong and clever women characters being written in Restoration drama, but none are quite like Hellena. Hellena has, as is often the case with second daughters, been reared for a life in the convent (under the commonly-held principle that it is difficult enough to marry off one liability). She, however, has no intention of living her life behind the sisters' grate.
From her first speeches we see that she is clever, confident, and eager for romantic conquest. She might as well be a man, especially when her outlook on love and romance is compared to Florinda's. Both young women want relationships, but Hellena searches as much for sport as for love -- indeed they are both important to her. The only fate she believes as worse than the convent is a loveless, arranged marriage like the one the young women's brother Don Pedro tries to arrange for Florinda: "Is't not enough you make a nun of me, but you must cast my sister away too, exposing her to a worse confinement than religious life?" (I,i. p.11)
Her opinions on the sanctioned societal places for women are clear. Hellena wants action, and she's not afraid to go looking for it. The Carnival at Naples provides her the perfect hunting ground. Costumes, cloaks and masks are staples of espionage and the comic tradition alike, and provide the latter a wealth of material for the making of confusion and mayhem.
Behn, perhaps because of her espionage experience, is interested in this play with how people walk through their roles in society, and how those roles are used in their favor or to their disadvantage. She pays particular attention to the roles and appearances of women, and the judgements which are made against them.
Within the space of one act, Florinda is assaulted not once but twice based upon her appearance. In Act III, Scene v, she is set upon by a drunken Willmore because she has left her door open in hopes that Belville would come to see her; Willmore sees the open door and Florinda's déshabillé and, in his own words, considers her "as mere a woman as [he] could wish" (p. 70). For all that it is perhaps unwise for a young woman to sit in her garden at night in her nightdress, it should still not constitute justification to take that young woman for "an errant harlot."
Her second narrow escape occurs in Act IV, Scene v, when she inadvertently crosses the path of Blunt, who, betrayed and robbed by the thief Lucetta, sets out to exact revenge "on one whore for the sins of another" (p. 99). Only Florinda's possession of a large diamond ring staves off her fate long enough for her "quality" to be vouched for and her safety re-secured. In this world, Behn tells us, women are only as good as the face that they show the world and the assets which can be translated into money for the men who control them.
No one is interested in Florinda's goodness until after she can show them the goods, and it is very likely only because the play is essentially a comedy that she is given the chance to do so.
Next... "Rather than being happened to, Hellena makes things
happen."
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