The female libertine: writing unapologetically about sex
Meet Aphra Behn, considered the first Englishwoman to earn a living from her writing. She spoke up against patriarchy and about sex, and paid the price as women always have.
This essay is part of a series called “Shut Out, Not Shut Up” on women through the ages who’ve written despite being dismissed because of their sex. They persisted.
Previous essays in the series are here.
In 1660, English royalists restored Charles II to the throne, ending the Puritanical rule led by Oliver Cromwell and his heir. Oliver Cromwell had been dead two years when Parliament ordered that his corpse be exhumed just so that it could be hung for treason, before spiking his head outside the Tower of London, where it remained on display for 30 years. Not only did he need killing twice: no dish of vengeance was ever served so cold as those three decades of public degradation. These polar events augured the Puritanical backlash that was to become the Stuart Restoration.
Theatre doors that had been closed by order of the Protectorate swung open, beckoning the pent-up and therefore voracious appetite for licentiousness. The times were ripe for smashing norms. For the first time, women performed onstage in speaking roles, dismaying traditionalists and the easily offended.1 Even more shocking, plays dramatised themes that were often risqué. They were counterpoised by shows that were studiously pure. Middle ground emptied as culture raced to opposing corners, ping-ponging between the chaste and the bawdy.
It is a literature that includes extremes, for it encompasses both Paradise Lost and the John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester's Sodom, the high-spirited sexual comedy of The Country Wife and the moral wisdom of The Pilgrim's Progress. It saw Locke's Treatises of Government, the founding of the Royal Society, the experiments and holy meditations of Robert Boyle, the hysterical attacks on theatres from Jeremy Collier, and the pioneering of literary criticism from John Dryden and John Dennis.
James Runcieman Sutherland, Restoration Literature, 1660–1700: Dryden, Bunyan, and Pepys (Clarendon Press, 1969).
Bawdy comedy had been a staple on the Shakespearean stage, so you might think that it just picked up where it left off when the Puritans stifled immorality. Unleashed, the Restoration’s licentiousness would make Mistress Quickly blush. Another difference was in who penned overtly sexual themes. It’s one thing for John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, acknowledged libertine, and a favorite of the King,2 to write a play titled “Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery.” It’s quite another for a common woman, Aphra Behn, to write “The Dutch Lover,” a play much tamer although critical of arranged marriage and frank in its approach to sex. Critics, begrudging that the playwright was a woman, sabotaged the play and caused it to fail.
Aphra Behn, first Englishwoman to write for a living
At the time the play closed, Behn was an unmarried woman establishing a writing career in order to earn an income. “The Dutch Lover” was her third play, and it continued her advocacy against arranged marriage, a topic she’d explored in her previous plays. She began writing lighter fare, more comedic and bawdier, and found an audience along with much vitriol for daring to write while being female.
Her critics attacked her personally, as trolls do, finding offense in her relationship with a famous author who happened to be bisexual. She wrote prolifically, and was able to secure an audience for her work, including the King, at least for a time.
Behn became increasingly more political in her work. The Whigs and Tories were squaring off over the speculative succession, since Charles II had no heirs. Behn backed the Tories, writing five plays to skewer the Whigs. The King turned against her, and her audience became limited to Tory sympathisers, not a winning profit strategy.
Much like Olympe de Gouges, Behn had strong and varied opinions and the drive to communicate them artistically. She was, in short, a fully engaged human being. She needed money, but even more she needed to express herself using her art.
Aphra Behn’s backstory
Aphra Behn wasn’t born into the aristocracy, so historians have few physical records to fill in her life story. She wasn’t formally educated, yet she had some Latin and French as well as extensive familiarity with literature, primarily verse and plays. She wrote autobiographical remarks that inconsistently describe the facts of her life. She was a storyteller, after all, and enjoyed the freedom to tell hers as she liked.
A few facts are known. After she returned from living in Suriname with her family, she married a merchant named Johan Behn. He died the same year. Once widowed, she maintained her independence for the remainder of her life. What relationships she had were her own business.
Since being a merchant’s widow didn’t provide financial security, Behn needed to earn an income. She used what aristocratic connections she had to obtain work as a spy for King Charles II. Her mission was to go to the Netherlands in an attempt to turn a target to spy for the Crown, making him a double (or triple) agent.
Lacking any monetary advance, she landed in the Netherlands with no money. She sold her jewels for much-needed cash. In the end, her mission wasn’t successful. When she returned to England, she had no money and enough debt to land her (possibly) in debtors’ prison for a brief period. The King failed to pay her for her work as a spy.
In need of money, she decided to take a courageous and pioneering step. She began to write plays, leveraging connections she had in the theatre world to perform them.
The first several were well received. Popularity led to recognition, which brought her to the attention of many male critics. Negative press brought down her next play. After a few subsequent years out of the spotlight, she began writing prolifically: plays, verse, and French and Latin translations. As she wrote, she encountered constant criticism and personal attacks: for being a woman, for being an opinionated woman, for defying social norms controlling women, for being a woman of ill character. She prefaced her writings with notes defending herself against these attacks, which of course did nothing to shut up her critics.
In her late 40s, she wrote one of the first English novels, which she titled “Oroonoko.” With this novel she helped to define the literary form we know as the novel.
Oroonoko
This short narrative (my copy is 63 pages long) tells the life of an African prince who was brought to Suriname and enslaved.3
Oroonoko is a handsome, talented, and intelligent general in love with a beautiful woman, Imoinda. A local king forces Imoinda to join his household; she cannot refuse because he is the king. She remains virginal, using her wiles (much like Homer’s Penelope) to keep the old king at bay, while she’s imprisoned in his household.
Oroonoko and Imoinda manage to consummate their own marriage. This enrages the king, who sells Imoinda to colonialists who take her to Suriname to live in slavery. Eventually Oroonoko too is captured and sent to Suriname. There, he’s sold to a kindly plantation owner who renames Oroonoko ‘Cesar’ and inadvertently brings Oroonoko and Imoinda together. They conceive a child.
Although Oroonoko is treated reasonably well, he grows increasingly frustrated by delays in his long-promised release to return to Africa. He leads an uprising but the other enslaved Africans desert him. His and Imoinda’s lives end tragically.
Lacking meaningful dialogue and any depth of character development, the principals in this story are at best ideas of people. Behn romanticizes the Oroonoko character and raises him to almost equal footing with the colonialists: his beauty is Romanesque, he’s given a Roman name in Suriname, he mingles with the colonialists after they recognize his worthiness. He is a man apart from the other Africans who’ve been enslaved, and who demonstrate their lack of intelligence and courage in their flight away from the insurrection. He’s meant to be an Othello character, even to the act of killing the wife he loves. Which is to say, Oroonoko is profoundly tragic, in every sense of the term.
Behn’s novel explores the harmful and ultimately existential impacts of controlling other people and their relationships. The topic of slavery provides an exotic context, but Behn is once again dramatizing how power is used against women and men who lack access to power. The novel treats the Africans and colonialists as equally complicit. The African king wants Imoinda simply because of greed. He’s not in love with her; her body is fungible to him. This act is the first of many dominoes that leave a trail of broken loves and lives.
The book proposes Enlightenment ideals a century before they existed. Behn posits a world in which nature is subverted by its opposite, a state-supported power structure that’s fundamentally un-natural. The Homeric and Roman ideals, to which Behn nods, are embodied in the honorable man whose worth derives from divine intervention, and who overcomes obstacles by means of his exemplary valor. The classical Western hero is unmistakable: he stands apart from other men, who readily acknowledge his superiority. He overcomes his character flaws and finds redemption. Shakespeare took that hero and highlighted his fatal flaws: a Shakespearean tragic hero is the source of his own eventual downfall.
Behn regards the Western hero concept and pushes back against it. Valor and exceptionalism don’t protect the hero from disaster. He’s vanquished not by personal failure but by a power structure that’s allowed to use that character’s body however it wishes. The power structure itself is a perversion of nature since it attempts to control others’ natural desires.
The hero, in fact, can be a heroine. The facts that a woman’s body is not her own, that she has no rights in marriage and inheritance, that she is condemned for doing what men are free to do—these facts don’t damage a woman’s worth. They indict the patriarchy that uses women for profit.
In this, Aphra Behn not only became one of the first novelists, she wrote what may be the first recognizably modern, as well as the first abolitionist and humanitarian, novel.
Aphra Behn’s legacy
Behn died less than a year after the publication of “Oroonoko.” She was living in poverty and quite ill, so much so that she could barely hold a pen. Despite her poor health, she managed to publish three prose works the year of her death. She was 49 years old when she died.
Although a few women writers tributed her posthumously as their inspiration, Behn was as reviled in death as she was in life for being morally depraved and a writer of only minor significance. The prudish class that took over English theatre and literature in the 18th century had no time for her, and her writing's legacy languished.
Virginia Woolf, in “A Room of One’s Own,” credits Aphra Behn as a model for professional women writers.
All women together, ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn... for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds... Behn proved that money could be made by writing at the sacrifice, perhaps, of certain agreeable qualities; and so by degrees writing became not merely a sign of folly and a distracted mind but was of practical importance.
Since the 1970s Behn has become a popular subject for feminist writers. Her frank discussions of female and male sexuality, which made her a pariah in her own time, finally came into fashion 300 years later. You may not know Aphra Behn, but she had more influence, acknowledged or not, on literature than did any of her contemporary critics.
She wrote to earn money for bread.
She wrote because she had much to say, and the courage to say it.
She imagined a role for women as professional writers, then claimed it for herself and every woman who followed.
Ellie’s Corner
Spring is finally here. Ellie couldn’t be happier in her sunny domain. When the sunbeams move, she sometimes paws at the rug to drag them back to her. What a diva.
Thanks for reading,
Earlier in the century, Queen Anne had been fond of staging masques in which aristocratic women appeared, sometimes dressed provocatively, acting out the plot while a man narrated the script. Anne commissioned masques from established playwrights like Ben Jonson, and paid to have them performed in the private homes (mansions) of the court aristocracy. These performances weren’t, however, open to a paying public. So, the appearance of women in speaking roles during the Restoration was shockingly new. (“Shakespeare’s Sisters: How Women Wrote the Rennaissance,” Ramie Targoff, 2024.)
Wilmot was played by Johnny Depp in the 2004 movie, “The Libertine." John Malkovich played Charles II. The movie’s final scenes portray Wilmot late in life with a fake nose, his own having been lost to syphilis. And critics said Aphra Behn was too much.
Behn claimed to have met the man on whom the story is based when she lived in Suriname. I’d take that with a grain of salt.