None_provided Essay, Research Paper

[...] a Devil on’t the Woman damns the Poet.

– Aphra Behn, Preface to The Lucky Chance

Aphra Behn (1640-1689) was not the first woman writer; neither was she the only

woman writer of her day. But Aphra Behn holds the singular distinction of being the

first professional woman writer in the English language. That’s right, ladies — Aphra

Behn was the first woman writer who did it for money.

It was a natural choice for this young woman, a recent spy for the crown and a widow

at the age of 26, to turn to selling herself (in a manner of speaking) in order to

survive.Many other women of the period did so; but instead of novels and plays, they

sold something much more fundamental and far more common. Single women,

whether spinsters or widows, often allowed themselves to be kept by rich men of the

commons and nobility alike. Mrs. Behn chose not to sell herself but her wits and

words, and was branded a whore for her efforts.

Not much is known of her origins. Most biographers seem to agree she was born Aphra Johnson in or around

1640, and that she acquired her education and her connections at court through a noble childhood friend for

whom her mother acted as a wet-nurse. She very likely traveled with her family to Surinam in her early 20s; at the

age of 26, after having been briefly married to a Mr. Behn (of which nothing is known), she went to Antwerp as a

spy for the crown. The mission was singularly unsuccessful, and she returned to England a debtor (very likely

serving a short term in prison).

When she got out, she began to write, at first “for bread,” but soon she made it clear that she was writing not only

for money but for fame — and also to fulfill what she called “my masculine part, the poet in me” — clearly asserting

her rights as an artist despite her gender. She was not interested in modesty or in timidity, and during her career

tackled several genres with equal ease — a feat certainly not matched by many male authors of the period.

“She was a mere harlot who danced through uncleanness and dared [the male dramatists] to

follow.” — John Doran (19th-century theatre historian)

The “Punk and Poetesse,” as she was soon dubbed (”punk” meaning “prostitute”), was the single most prolific and

successful dramatist in Restoration England with the exception of John Dryden, the country’s poet laureate. She,

like Shakespeare before her, took existing bad plays with decent plots and turned them into very good plays –

unlike Shakespeare, this work of hers was likened to “the birthing of bastards.”

Not only content with writing for the theatre, she became one of the first novelists in the English language, writing a

racy epistolary roman ? clef about an affair between a nobleman and his sister-in-law. Other prose works dealt

unflinchingly with issues of class, politics, gender and race in a way that was not attempted by many of her male

colleagues. She was also well known for her poetry, much of which was quite erotic (but not without humor), her

political tracts and propaganda for the Stuart monarchy, and her foreign-language translations.

Aphra Behn was an outsider and an observer from the beginning, and much of her work reflects that. She often

played with the image of the prostitute which was from the beginning associated with her — “selling” herself as a

woman writer, but all the time insisted that the pen had no gender, that there was no topic that was not

appropriate for a woman. Many of her writings explore the question of desire — who wants what, and why, and

what keeps them from it — and often from the female point of view. As a professional writer, she was the only

woman of the time whose work was created and put out not only for her personal satisfaction but for the praise

and criticism (and coin) of others.

All women together ought to let flowers fall on the tomb of Aphra Behn[...], for it is she who

earned them the right to speak their minds. It is she — shady and amorous as she was — who

makes it not quite fantastic for me to say to you tonight: Earn five hundred a year by your

wits. — Virginia Woolf

Unfortunately for Mrs. Behn, the tendency both during her life and after it was to equate an author’s subject

matter with the author’s actual life; what in male writers became worldly experience in her was named

unsalvageable baseness. While she lived, men and women alike vilified her as a whore, and she was seen as a sort

of prostitute even by those who were her friends. After her death, she was all but forgotten except as a bad

example; even those who did present her works (often expurgated) usually did so with apologies. It was

unseemly, monstrous, and undoubtedly unfeminine for a woman to write for money and repute, and Behn suffered

for it for three centuries. Her work was reviled, belittled and ignored.

(A memorable opinion from an anonymous writer in the Saturday Review at the end of the last century: “Mrs.

Behn is still to be found here and there in the dusty, worm-eaten libraries of old country houses, but, as a rule, we

imagine, she has been ejected from all decent society for more than a generation or two. If Mrs. Behn is to be

read at all, it can only be from a love of impurity for its own sake[...]. It is true that [her scandalous reputation] did

not prohibit her from attaining honorable burial in Westminster Abbey, but it is a pity her books did not rot with

her bones.”)

Within the last century, however, people are starting to take a new look at Aphra Behn. Although some

biographers and critics have fallen prey to the (admittedly strong) temptation of merely portraying Mrs. Behn as a

feminist icon, by virtue of her “shady and amorous” lifestyle, while ignoring or slighting her vast catalogue of written

work — a practice which serves her no better than the former centuries’ censure — we are now beginning to see

serious, critical and biographical studies of not only Mrs. Behn’s important place in the history of women’s writing

but of her work itself. Her writings (many of which have been long out of print until the 20th century) are being

recognized as the groundbreaking pieces that they are, and explored for all their wit, humor, longing, sadness and

anger, and how those play their roles in the conquest of satisfying one’s appetites — whether emotional, political,

carnal or merely literary.

In an age where women were expected to use themselves as their only commodity, Aphra Behn chose to control

her body and sell her thoughts instead. Because of her, writing for women became not only an expression of

fancies, but, as Virginia Woolf described it, a matter of “practical importance.” The seed was planted: women

could earn their keep by their pens, could contribute to their own support, could manage and even thrive on their

own. By peddling her literary wares and making a living at her craft, Aphra Behn made it possible for other

women to do so as well.

“All I ask, is for the privilege for my masculine part, the poet in me (if any such you will allow

me), to tread in those successful paths my predecessors have long thrived in…If I must not,

because of my sex, have this freedom, but that you will usurp all to yourselves; I lay down my

quill, and you shall hear no more of me [...]; for I am not content to write for a third day

only. I value fame as much as if I had been born a hero; and if you rob me of that, I can retire

from the ungrateful world, and scorn its fickle favors.”

– Aphra Behn, The Lucky Chance