“Writing Against Silence: Aphra Behn’s The Rover and the Origins of Feminist Authorship”
Introduction
This blog is written under the guidance of Megha Ma’am Trivedi, whose insightful discussions on Restoration literature inspired a deeper exploration of women’s voices in early modern drama.
In the grand narrative of English literary history, Aphra Behn stands as a luminous yet often underestimated figure — the woman who transformed authorship from privilege to profession. Her play The Rover (1677) does more than entertain; it interrogates the patriarchal economy that binds women’s speech, desire, and autonomy. Long before Virginia Woolf urged women to claim “a room of one’s own,” Behn had already claimed a stage of her own, inscribing the female voice within the very structure of public discourse.
Through characters like Hellena, Florinda, and Angellica Bianca, The Rover becomes a subversive dialogue between silence and self-expression — a literary rebellion that paved the way for Woolf’s later assertion that women owe their right to speak their minds to Aphra Behn. This study thus revisits Behn not merely as a Restoration dramatist but as the precursor to modern feminist consciousness, a writer who turned her pen into an instrument of liberation.
1) Angelica considers the financial negotiations that one makes before marrying a prospective bride the same as prostitution. Do you agree?
“The Price of Virtue: Angellica’s Defiance and the Economics of Desire in The Rover”
“Marriage is but a more solemn prostitution.”— Aphra Behn , The Rover (1677)
In Aphra Behn’s The Rover, Angellica Bianca’s biting assertion that the financial negotiations preceding marriage are no different from prostitution tears through the moral fabric of Restoration society. Beneath its laughter, masks, and carnivalesque chaos, Behn’s play performs a daring exposé of how women’s bodies are commodified under the guise of love, virtue, and legality.
Angellica’s insight destabilizes the patriarchal economy that disguises sexual commerce as social order. As a courtesan, she names her price and is condemned; as a bride, a woman’s price is negotiated for her and sanctified. Both are forms of transaction, but only one is socially blessed. In this inversion lies Behn’s radical critique — a world that praises “virtue” while punishing female agency over desire.
Janet Todd, in The Secret Life of Aphra Behn (Cambridge University Press, 1997), observes that Behn “collapses the fragile boundary between wife and whore,” revealing that both are ensnared within patriarchal economies of power. Angellica’s self-awareness gives her more autonomy than Florinda or Hellena, who remain pawns in the marriage market. Yet her awareness is also her undoing — she sees too clearly the cost of womanhood in a man’s world.
Heidi Hutson, in Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture (JSTOR, 1993), describes Behn’s portrayal of marriage as “a legalized form of sexual commerce sanctified by moral hypocrisy.” Angellica’s tragedy, then, is not that she sells love, but that society refuses to confront its own prostitution of virtue. Behn uses her to unveil the economic logic behind gendered morality — the same logic that silences women who dare to profit from what men freely desire.
Through Angellica, Behn writes an early chapter in feminist resistance. Her courtesan’s lament anticipates Simone de Beauvoir’s critique of female objectification in The Second Sex and Laura Mulvey’s analysis of the “male gaze.” Angellica’s defiance, her financial autonomy, and her emotional vulnerability all converge into a haunting portrait of a woman punished for her economic and erotic independence.
Behn’s The Rover thus becomes more than a Restoration comedy — it is a subversive text that turns the language of trade into the language of truth. In Angellica’s world, the wife’s dowry and the courtesan’s price are two faces of the same patriarchal coin.
Modern Reflection:
Three centuries later, Angellica’s question still reverberates. From celebrity marriages shaped by wealth to social media economies built on curated desirability, women continue to navigate a culture where value is negotiated, not freely lived. Behn’s Angellica stands as an early prophet of that dilemma — a woman who dared to see, and to say, that in a world governed by transaction, virtue itself has a price.
2) “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.” Virginia Woolf said so in ‘A Room of One’s Own’. Do you agree with this statement? Justify your answer with reference to your reading of the play ‘The Rover’.
create a image of “Flowers for Aphra Behn: The First Voice of Women’s Freedom in The Rover*”*
“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.”
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929)
create a image of “Flowers for Aphra Behn: The First Voice of Women’s Freedom in The Rover*”*
“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.”
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929)
Virginia Woolf’s tribute to Aphra Behn in A Room of One’s Own is more than a gesture of literary gratitude; it is a recognition of Behn as the founding mother of women’s intellectual and creative autonomy. I fully agree with Woolf’s assertion — Aphra Behn’s The Rover (1677) is not only a Restoration comedy but a radical act of female authorship that challenged the silence imposed on women’s voices and bodies in a patriarchal society.
In a period when writing for money was considered scandalous for a woman, Behn broke the cultural taboo by earning her living through her pen — becoming England’s first professional female playwright. As Woolf (1929) notes, “it was Aphra Behn who made writing thinkable for women.” Through The Rover, Behn claimed a space for female expression both on stage and in society, a space previously monopolized by men.
Behn’s Women: Speaking Desire, Claiming Agency
In The Rover, Behn crafts female characters — Hellena, Florinda, and Angellica Bianca — who speak their minds with wit, sensuality, and defiance. They are neither passive victims nor voiceless ornaments of patriarchal morality. Hellena mocks convent life and insists on exploring her own desires; Florinda resists her family’s attempts to commodify her through marriage; and Angellica Bianca asserts her economic autonomy as a courtesan.
Each of these women uses language as rebellion — dialogue becomes their weapon and stage their battlefield. As critic Jacqueline Pearson observes, Behn’s heroines “claim the right to speak, desire, and choose — privileges traditionally reserved for men” (The Prostituted Muse, Harvester Press, 1988). In doing so, Behn anticipates the feminist argument Woolf would make centuries later: that a woman must first have freedom — financial, intellectual, and sexual — before she can create.
From Silence to Speech
What makes The Rover revolutionary is Behn’s transformation of female silence into spectacle and speech. In Restoration drama, women were often displayed as objects of male desire; Behn subverts this gaze by letting them speak back. Hellena’s verbal agility rivals Willmore’s libertine wit, and Angellica’s eloquent self-awareness dismantles the moral hypocrisy surrounding marriage and prostitution.
This was, in itself, an act of defiance. Behn gives her women not only the right to feel but also the right to articulate those feelings, turning the Restoration stage into an early feminist arena. As Woolf would later write, “for now every woman has a room of her own because Aphra Behn had a pen of her own.”
The Legacy of Aphra Behn
Behn’s The Rover opened a literary door that Woolf and later generations of women writers would walk through. She transformed lived experience into art, commercialized her creativity without apology, and wrote female desire into public consciousness.
Woolf’s metaphor of laying flowers upon Behn’s tomb is thus profoundly apt. Behn’s courage to write publicly, to claim financial and sexual independence, and to give women the right to speak their minds laid the groundwork for feminist self-expression. Her legacy lives not only in her plays but in every woman writer who refuses silence.
Conclusion
Works Cited
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translated by H. M. Parshley, Vintage, 1989.
Behn, Aphra. The Rover. Edited by Anne Russell, Oxford University Press, 2008.
Hutson, Heidi. “Marriage as Market: Sexual Commerce in Aphra Behn’s The Rover.” Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1700, vol. 17, no. 1, 1993, pp. 43–58. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43293472.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, 1975, pp. 6–18.
Pearson, Jacqueline. The Prostituted Muse: Images of Women and Women Dramatists, 1642–1737. Harvester Press, 1988.
Todd, Janet. The Secret Life of Aphra Behn. Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Hogarth Press, 1929.
Comments
Post a Comment