Shristi Singh 149/2019
Analyse the attitude towards matrimony in The Rover
The Rover or the Banished Cavaliers is a 17th century Restoration comedy play set in Madrid
and Naples during the exile of England’s King Charles II, written by the British playwright
Aphra Behn. The play revolves around the escapades of a band of banished English cavaliers
and their amorous adventures at Carnival time in Naples. Willmore, the rover and a naval
captain, falls in love with a noble Spanish woman named Hellena, who has been fated to enter
a nunnery by her father. Hellena’s sister, Florinda, wants to marry her lover, Colonel Belvile,
as opposed to the Viceroy’s son, whom her brother has chosen for her. The play concludes as
Florinda and Belvile get married, and Hellena and Willmore get engaged.
The play strings together multiple subplots and themes of a Restoration drama. It opens with
Florinda and Hellena conversing critically about their male relatives and trying to take charge
of their lives. The sexuality of women in the 17th century was seamlessly integrated into the
circuits of profit and power as men controlled the lives of both the promiscuous prostitute and
the chaste, noblewoman. As Pacheco observes, Florinda’s so-called properties namely “beauty,
birth and fortune”, that sustain her claim for autonomy are also the ones for which her father
and brother cherish her, which make her a prized asset on the marriage market. Angellica
wields her beauty as an alternative form of power yet ends up depreciating her value in the
market by falling in love with Willmore. It is this rebellion of these women against the rigid
gender and class hierarchies that tries to destabilize their position within patriarchy. In the
several instances of women donning masculine attires, the play reveals their need to conceal
their femininity to fulfil their desire for freedom and expression because as Szilagyi argues,
“dominance is still gendered masculine”.
In her most notable work, Behn indorses a suspicious attitude toward marriage as an institution
and moreover, an outright disdain for arranged marriages, the matches which she portrays as
benefiting the bride’s male relatives are at the expense of the bride’s happiness. The alternative
to arranged marriage is a system in which couples themselves discuss and negotiate the terms
of their union, which she finds problematic as well. While such an arrangement offers more
independence for young people and women in general, for young women this independence
comes with a price. By arranging their own matches, exercising choice women become active
contributors rather than mere commodities in the marriage market, a step that threatens to
undermine the private-public distinctions made between chaste and unchaste women. Although
Behn celebrates female independence in The Rover, she also openly illustrates that “women
cannot easily transition between being objects in the marriage market to subjects operating
within the marriage market, a profoundly masculine realm where feminine intervention is
quickly categorized as an unchaste transgression”.
The will of a woman is measured by her place in one of the two divisions as prescribed by men:
those who are the exclusive sexual property of their male relatives, and those who are the
common property of all men. However, this notion finds little ground when Willmore attempts
to rape Florinda, a wealthy noblewoman. The several rape attempts in the play also have very
patriarchal, misogynist undertones. Willmore quite unapologetically tries to defend his rape
attempt on Florinda by calling it seduction on the basis of her conduct and appearance. As
Pacheco notes, Willmore believes that “rape is simply not something that happens to a woman
whose behaviour so flagrantly flouts prevailing ideals of feminine virtue”. Florinda’s resistance
is seen as a tease to the male desire she herself aroused. The rational qualities of wit and wisdom
are stereotypically restricted to the male sex, but Behn emphasizes that women can possess
these assets too. It is Hellena’s wit that initially attracts Willmore to her. Thus, the concept of
wit changes the usual dimensions of sexuality and seduction in this period by establishing a
female attractiveness that runs deeper than the mere aesthetic. Hellena and Willmore’s
sexualities are described similarly by virtue of their wits which serves to make the distinction
between their desires less relevant. Yet, Pacheco argues that this female subjectivity has limited
capacity to challenge the play’s rape culture.
The Restoration comedy reveals the problem that occur in marriages arranged by purely
practical or economic factors - couples mismatched in age or disposition, lack of mutual
respect, husbands and wives living essentially separate lives, and extramarital affairs. Often
infidelity was sanctioned not only by the society but also by one’s spouse, as it was believed
that love was something that existed outside the realm of marriage and household. In contrast
to the bleak images of practical marriages, Restoration comedy attempts to insert love into the
marriage equation by glorifying love matches, and particularly exaggerating plots focused on
romance and courtship. Yet these matches could not be described as depicting the triumph of
love over practicality. The lovers might occasionally be successful in overcoming the
conventional blocking parent, but their success is always depicted as an exceptional case in
which not only does love coincide with practicality but also the couple is able to successfully
subvert familial control. The difficulty encountered by these couples prior to their marriage
and the characterisation of their experiences as outside the normal marriage practices subtly
plays into the underlying paradigm that the institution of marriage not only forced one to choose
between practicality and romance, but in fact pitted the desires for money and love against each
other.
The Rover questions the traditional boundaries between genders attributing masculine and
feminine qualities to both sexes. Behn, despite belonging to the Early Modern period, draws
careful attention on the pre-modern belief that women cannot have erotic appetites. Behn’s
female characters are witty and self-willed who actively seek their self-fulfilment. As a
seventeenth century female writer, Aphra Behn holds great authority, carving a niche for
herself amidst a group of majorly male authors. Set in the Carnival time, the play functions
within an economy of exchange while trying to dismantle the various social constructs of the
period.
References:
Aphra Behn’s The Rover
Anita Pacheco “Rape and the Female Subject in Aphra Behn's The Rover.”,1998
Stephen Szilagyi “The Sexual Politics of Behn’s “Rover”: After Patriarchy.”,1998
Leslie Michelle Morrison “We never part with our money without desire: Marriage
Economics and attempted rape in the comedies of Behn and Centlivre,” 2006