Aphra Behn
Sports Saturday
On Thursday I compared 17th century rake culture and the male anxieties of poet John Wilmot with the macho culture of the NFL. If players like Ray Rice, Greg Hardy, and Ray McDonald have trouble leaving the gridiron behind when they negotiate their relationships with women, what are women supposed to do (other than avoid football players altogether)? Today I write about how one remarkable author imagined women successfully holding their own in their relationships with such men.
Aphra Behn made her living in a man’s profession, writing plays, erotic novels, political propaganda, and other works. In The Rover, she has her heroine go toe-to-toe with a version of Wilmot and come out on top.
The rover of the title is Wilmore, making it clear whom Behn has in mind. Like Wilmot, Wilmore is most comfortable with his fellow rakes and attempts to avoid emotional entanglements with women. (His goal, as he puts it, is to achieve “all the honey of matrimony, but none of the sting.”) At one point he almost rapes one of the play’s heroines, the love interest of his fellow rake Belvile. The incident leads to the following interchange:
Wilmore: By this light, I took her for an errant harlot.
Belvile: Damn your debauched opinion! Tell me, sot, hadst thou so much sense and light above thee to distinguish her woman, and couldst not see something about her face and person to strike an awful reverence into they soul?
Wilmore: Faith, no, I considered her as mere a woman as I could wish.
Through Florinda Belinda warns women what they can expect if they venture innocently into the rakes’ world. Indeed, this is not the only instance in the play where Florinda is almost raped by one of these rakes. The second time she is assaulted by Blunt, who has just been duped and emasculated by a prostitute and who is out to avenge himself on any woman he can find. Behn is telling us that, if a woman can’t rely on the fact that she is sweet and virtuous, then she’s got to find other options.
Angelica, a high-class courtesan, is less innocent than Florinda but even she makes the mistake of thinking that she has a special relationship with Wilmore. She discovers otherwise when he abandons her. In her case, however, she wins back some of his respect by threatening to shoot him. After all, this is a language that he understands. Then she concludes that he’s not worth killing and decides to look elsewhere. I suppose that’s one way that women might respond to the Ray Rices of the world.
But Behn most identifies with the feisty Hellena, who wants a relationship with Wilmore without being victimized by him. After all, he’s an exciting man. She decides that her best option is besting him at his own game. If he thinks that life is competition, then she will turn lovemaking into perpetual competition. She will not be a helpless or an aggrieved woman. She will not play the passive flower to his bee.
To be sure, she will insist upon a marriage contract because she doesn’t want “a cradle full of noise and mischief, with a pack of repentance at my back.” Women face consequences to the sexual act that men don’t. But she will make sure that the marriage that follows will have more of the same. She will keep him off balance at all times.
Note the following interchange after he finally asks her to marry him:
Willmore But harkye—The Bargain is now made; but is it not fit we should know each other’s Names? That when we have Reason to curse one another hereafter, and People ask me who ’tis I give to the Devil, I may at least be able to tell what Family you came of.
Hellena Good reason, Captain; and where I have cause, (as I doubt not but I shall have plentiful) that I may know at whom to throw my—Blessings—I beseech ye your Name.
Willmore I am call’d Robert the Constant.
Hellena A very fine Name! pray was it your Faulkner or Butler that christen’d you? Do they not use to whistle when then call you?
Willmore I hope you have a better, that a Man may name without crossing himself, you are so merry with mine.
Hellena I am call’d Hellena the Inconstant.
And then, in the play’s final lines:
Willmore Whilst we’ll to the Good Man within [the priest], who stays to give us a Cast of his Office. Have you no trembling at the near approach?
Hellena No more than you have in an Engagement or a Tempest.
Willmore Egad, thou’rt a brave Girl, and I admire thy Love and Courage.
Lead on, no other Dangers they can dread,
Who venture in the Storms o’th’ Marriage-Bed.
I’m not necessarily suggesting that the kind of raillery that one hears in locker rooms will necessarily defuse the rage of a Ray Rice, and it is certainly the case that some men will victimize women regardless of what they do. In those cases, the women just have to get out of the relationship and bring charges. But if one has limited options, Behn seems to be saying that it may be possible to manage men in a macho culture by interacting with them in ways that they can understand. That may circumvent the anxieties that prompt them to lash out and maybe that will be the first step towards something that resembles sensitivity and mutual understanding.