• Home
• Articles
• Essays
• Add site

Aphra Behn

Aphra Behn (July 10, 1640 - April 16, 1689) is a forerunner in English literary history in various ways. She can be considered as the first professional woman writer, and also as a significant innovator in the form of novel. Aphra Behn was a highly creative dramatist of the Restoration, and her writing participated in the amatory fiction genre of British literature.

Aphra Behn is considered as the first women in England to earn a living as a writer even though her complete details are still a mystery. Little is known about her background, about her parents, and her birth place. However the known details of her life paint the portrait of an intriguing woman. Aphra was in Surinam for few years which have highly inspired her life. She earned her livelihood by authorship. It is almost certainly that she was born in Wye (near Canterbury), on July 10, 1640. Her parents were Bartholomew Johnson, a barber, and Elizabeth Denham. Her parents were married in 1638 and Aphra was baptized on December 14, 1640. Her mother was employed in the wealthy Culpepper family as a nurse, and that it is likely that Aphra spent her childhood with the children of that family. The younger child of the family, Thomas Culpepper, mentioned Aphra as his foster sister, later. In 1663 Aphra made a trip to English sugar colony on the Suriname River, situated on the east coast of Venezuela (Suriname). She is assumed to have met an African slave leader during this trip, the story of whom formed the foundation of one of her most famous works, Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave (1688). The truth about her journey to Suriname is still questioned, but most Behn scholars today believe that the trip had really taken place. Aphra was married but was widowed at an early age of 25. She was employed by King Charles II as a spy and was sent to Belgium. The King, however, refused to fund her return trip and she had to be in debtor's prison after borrowing the return funds.

Aphra tried to make a living after leaving prison and was found capable of supporting herself. She could establish herself as a successful playwright and novelist in London. She wrote poetry too. Her poetry gave emphasis to romantic relationships with both women and men, spoke much about on rape and impotence, discussed a woman's right to sexual pleasure, and even contained various scenes of eroticism between men.

The Forced Marriage (1670), The Dutch Lover (1673), The Town Fop (1676), The Amorous Prince (1671), Sir Patient Fancy (1678), Abdelazer (1676), The Young King (1679), The False Count (1681), The City Heiress (1682), The Feigned Courtesans (1679), The Lucky Chance (1686) with composer John Blow, The Emperor of the Moon (1687), The Roundheads (1681), and Like Father, Like Son (1682) are the plays of Aphra Behn. Her novels included The Fair Jilt, Agnes de Castro, Oroonoko (1688) and Love-Letters Between a Noble-Man and his Sister (1684).

Aphra Behn's opinions were truly unconventional. She expressed her viewpoints openly through her writing and in her lifestyle and was seen as scandalous. Her works were greatly admired by lots of people and was as scandalous as her reputation. She was even nicknamed as "The Incomparable Astrea" (from her spy codename of Astrea) by her admirers. Some of her famous quotes are "Variety is the soul of pleasure" and "There is no sinner like a young saint". She commented that "Love ceases to be a pleasure, when it ceases to be a secret". She made some more meaningful quotes like "Money speaks sense in a language all nations understand".

The very title of Aphra Behn's illustrious short story or novel, Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave, A True History, itself says out that the author wanted the narrative to be understood as an original factual account (a history) rather than a fiction. The author placed herself as an "eye-witness" to the vast events related to her narrative and offers an unimpeachable source for the remainder of her information, as she points out that "what I could not be witness of I received from the mouth of the chief actor in this history, the hero himself, who gave us the whole transactions of his youth". Even though it is quite obvious that Behn was undoubtedly influenced by the French romances of La Calprenede, Honore d'Urfee and Mademoiselle de Scudery, she was careful enough to highlight that her story is not the "adventures of a feigned hero" as she wanted the work to look realistic to the audience who were obsessed with realism.

Thus the narrator of story tried much to reinforce and highly validate the credibility and accuracy of the description. The narrator is not just an observer, and the author often stresses her own role in the events of the work. The whipping and torture of the hero in the starting of the novel happens in the absence of the narrator and she was found assuring the reader that "I suppose I had authority and interest enough there, had I suspected any such thing, to have prevented it". Likewise Oroonoko was murdered when the narrator was on a visit to a neighbor's plantation. Behn also frequently mentioned her status as a female author, in the play, telling out the fact that Oroonoko's "misfortune was to fall in an obscure world that afforded only a female pen to celebrate his fame".

She held the topic alive throughout and concluded the novel expressing her hope that "the reputation of my pen is considerable enough to make his glorious name to survive to all ages". In the novel, it is mainly the narrator's gender that encouraged her relationship with the royal slave, as he "liked the company of us women much above the men", and enables her to have a privileged access to his personal history and thoughts.
Even though it may be true that Behn had really visited to Surinam in the early 1660s, this cannot necessarily label Oroonoko as an autobiography and cannot confirm that she was really acquainted with a wrongly enslaved African prince. Even though the detailed descriptions of the Carib Indians and the information given about the contemporary figures, like Trefry and Byam, in the colony (in the setting of the novel) shows some familiarity with Surinam, the plot of the novel is not completely original. The love between Oroonoko and Imoinda, which resulted in their exile and enslavement, is like the love between Oroondates and Statira, the similar fated lovers in La Calprenède's Cassandre.

The narrative begins her description of the Carib Indians native to Surinam whose tranquil surroundings and lifestyle, with references to the Indians' calmness, innocence, honor and intrinsic goodness, reflects back to the accounts of the mythical golden that proceeded man’s fall, which permeated contemporary poetry. Behn makes out a clear distinction between the Indians, along with the settlers lived "in perfect amity, without daring to command them, but on the contrary caress them with all the brotherly and friendly affection in the world". In contrast to the special, exotic and romanticized language used to talk about the Caribs, the slaves are referred unimaginative in terms of trade and commerce.

The works of Aphra Behn were found encouraging and advancing research that focuses on matters of gender and/or women's contribute in the arts of early modern culture. Her life period (1660-1800) was a celebrating period for women in the arts. Not only writing for the theatre, she became one of the first novelists in the English language, moving around every live topic that prevailed then. Her prose works dealt mainly with issues of class, politics, gender and race in special and novel way that was not attempted by many of her male colleagues. With the epistolary form of Lettres portugaises as a model and mixing it with the elements of the drama, she created the first true epistolary novel with Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister. Aphra Behn, in Oroonoko, used a narrative voice that blended proximity to her readers with a special and unusual wealth of detail, when the plot itself contained one of the first examples of the idea of "noble savage" in literature.

Behn was not only the first female English writer who writes for the stage, but she made valuable contributions for the development of the English novel though her detailed account about the settings for her novels. She explored various new and controversial topics such as slavery, with her power and talent to write a 'moralizing novel'. Behn as a poet wrote some of the most acclaimed poetry of the period.

At first there were not many commercially successful women writers. Women writing mainly for pay were rare and it was controversial. But by the end of the eighteenth century, there were lots of successful women writers and by the end of the nineteenth century writing population was flooded with women. Aphra Behn opened the door of opportunity for women to the writing arena. As she opened a new profession for women in the era when women did not had any opportunity to earn a living, Behn must be found on the top of the list of the most influential women, the world has seen.

On her attempt for finding a prose form that is suitable for stories with contemporary rather than strictly heroic settings and themes, Aphra Behn created her novels in a special conversational tone filled with personal references such as, "I have already said...", "I forgot to ask how...,", preparing an ongoing conversation with her readers and an everyday tone to her tales unlike the earlier prose forms. Moreover, narrator's presence as the interpreter of the tale gives her a role in the narrative herself. In the works of Aphra Behn works this presence goes beyond the usual authorial narrative strategy and the narrator takes part in the story very often. Aphra Behn's narrative strategy is a perfect example of omniscient narrative voice like that of Henry Fielding, George Eliot and Jane Austen. Aphra Behn's narrators are more original and intrusive and relate events perfectly by emphasizing the narrating voice.

Particularly remembered for Oroonoko and her play The Rover Aphra always wished to be remembered as a poet. There is a great interest in the works of the woman writers of the early modern period and this interest has resuscitated interest in Behn, and resulted in the new editions of her works. Aphra Behn's poetry was very much vibrant and robust, and her beautiful poems made her remember as a poet. Love Arm'd is frequently anthologized, The Disappointment is even is often equated to Rochester's The Imperfect Enjoyment. A Paraphrase on Oenone to Paris was appreciated even by Dryden and was published in his Ovid's Epistles (1680) Even though the contemporaries, few successors and the prudish eras later, vituperated and belittled Aphra Behn's popularity and her accomplishments as a writer quoting her wild and unapologetic use of sexual subjects, current critics judge her on her merits alone. Even though there were numerous celebrated female writers before her, particularly Katharine Philips and Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn was the first to take writing as a profession. She was "forced to write for Bread and not ashamed to own it." Her career was a big breakthrough for women (writers especially) after her, which prompted Virginia Woolf's famous lines:

"All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, ...for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds".




References

Blashfield, E. W. "Aphra Behn". Portraits and Backgrounds. New York, NY: C. Scribner's Sons, 1917.
Goreau, A. Reconstructing Aphra: a social biography of Aphra Behn. New York: Dial Press, 1980.
O'Donnell, M. A. Aphra Behn: The Documentary Record. Cambridge: CUP, 2004.
Salzman, P. "Chronology". Aphra Behn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Janet_Todd&action=edit" \o "Janet Todd" Todd, J. HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Secret_Life_of_Aphra_Behn&action=edit" \o "The Secret Life of Aphra Behn" The Secret Life of Aphra Behn. Chapel Hill, NC: Rutgers University Press, 1997.
2501

Posted by: SANJUANA T. TORRES

Best Custom Writing Sites

Sites that provide custom writing services are better alternative to downloading pre-written paper samples, especially if you temporarily can't handle writing your own paper for some reason, and can not afford risking your course and reputation for plagiarism detection failure. The prices for custom written essays are affordable, but if you need 15-pages long master level report overnight, you better prepare to spend a noticeable sum.