Double Deformity in Aphra Behn's
The Dumb Virgin and The Unfortunate Bride
This paper studies the representation of physically defective characters,
Belvideera, Maria, and Celesia in Aphra Behn's novellas: The Dumb Virgin; or, The
Force of Imagination and The Unfortunate Bride: or, The Blind Lady a Beauty.
It aims to analyze and interpret the significance of the female characters' physical
handicaps: disfigurement, muteness, and blindness. The essay first relates the
definition of woman to the Aristotelian tradition of eighteenth-century misogynist
discourses, which bias and misconstrue female sexual difference as defective and
monstrous. Mirroring this misogynist tradition, Behn presents her young female
protagonists as doubly deformed, as the deformed motherhood produces a second
generation of flawed femininity, while their flaws are further tainted with the exotic,
racial implications of miscegenation and degeneration.
Sexualized and racialized,
Behn's narratives are tragic, in which women are either punished by bearing deformed
children, breeding incest, losing their lovers, or even death.
Aligning herself with
the disabled characters, Behn, as female narrator, also submissively submits herself to
male authorial power, by sidestepping and effacing herself as a mere teller of tales,
rather than an artist and author.
Despite surrendering the authorial power, her
female pen, as agent of her power, exercises her authority and establishes her as a
female fiction-maker.
In contrast to the young heroines, the female teller in the
romantic fictions not only circumvents sex hierarchy and gender/race dichotomy, but
also tacitly points to a possible breakthrough amid the ubiquitous and hegemonic
patriarchal predominance.
Key words: Aphra Behn, The Dumb Virgin, The Unfortunate Bride, double deformity