IV. Behn's Deployment of the Female Narrator: A Breakthrough
In the face of each of the two disastrous denouements, Behn, as witness/narrator,
is either speechless, or helpless.
In The Dumb Virgin, the narrator, witnessing a
series of violent deaths of father, daughter and son, is "struck dumb by the Horror of
such woeful Objects" and "cou'd make no Answer" (444).
In The Unfortunate Bride,,
the same narrator fails to make any impact on averting the tragic ending, despite
claiming herself as a "particulary intimate Acquaintance" of the heroine Belvira" and
to have successfully retrieved the seized letters.
Arriving too late with Frankwit and
that "bundle of Papers" to prevent her bosom friend from marrying Wildvill,
Frankwit's best friend, the narrator laments, "What Tongue, what Pen can express the
mournful Sorrow of this Scene" (413), as she looked on helplessly the sad reunion of
the two lovers.
The striking resemblance in Behn's narrative strategy of the feminocentric
novellas presents "a complex interplay of these two poles of vision and writing" (202),
as Ros Ballaster points out interestingly.
Ballaster illustrates that "woman is
represented as simultaneously subject (the female writer) and subjected (the female
character) within the social order, are a register of confusion, as well as an attempt to
resolve it" (189). Whether Behn's strategic deployment of woman as "writer" and
"character" in the narratives would stamp "a register of confusion" is open to further
discussion. What is unique is the gender of the narrator in the English prose fiction
during this period of time. Though Behn and Defoe are both regarded as the
pioneers of the early modern novel, and both are committed to authenticating the
account of the narrative, their stories present two very different views.
While Defoe from time to time comes to the fore and exercises censorship in
supervising his female discourse, Behn all too often keeps herself in the background.
Thus, in the preface to Moll Flanders, the editor claims to have tailored the "leud
ideas" and "immodest Turns" in Moll's recount that "some of the vicious part" is either
"quite left out" or "very much shortn'd; what is left 'tis hop'd will not offend the
chastest Reader, or the modestest Hearer" (1-2).
In contrast, Behn, the female
narrator, is either "struck dumb" or helpless in changing the course of her stories.
In
her dedication to another fiction "The Fair Jilt," Behn even effaces herself as a prose
writer by playing down her talent for poetry.
Apparently insinuating herself into the
favour of peer male critics, she hides her light for poetic creation in the bushel, saying
"Poetry (my Talent) has so greatly the Ascendant over me, that all I write must pass
for Fiction" (70).
In light of this self-effacement as a female fiction writer, Ellen Pollak's
elucidation, in The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift
and Pope, highlights the pervasive infiltration of patriarchy in all aspects of life:
As patriarchal notions of divine-right monarchy were rejected by political
theorists . . . as empiricist philosophy increasingly designated the human
subject as the locus both of psychic and of referential truth, new terms in
keeping with these individualist traditions gradually evolved to
accommodate the ongoing subordination of women to men in social,
political, economic, intellectual and domestic life. Fuller and more
complex strategies begin to emerge for resolving the increasing
autonomy of the masculine subject . . . and the denial of either desire or
autonomy in women. (2)
To brave and survive prevalent male dominance in "social, political, economic,
intellectual and domestic life," Behn literally gives in her authorial power, and
diminishes herself as a mere teller of tales, rather than an artist and author.
However
this spontaneous surrendering to patriarchal power and self-abasement for a lesser,
secondary narrative space in fact not only provides Behn with a protective shield
against the omnipresent "subordination of women to men," but allows her to express
her "desire" and exert her "autonomy" between the lines. By doing "Justice" (423,
444) to her characters, men and women alike, her female pen has at the same time
done her "Justice" and establishes Behn as a female fiction-maker.