Cross-Dressing Ladies: Aphra Behn's The Widow Ranter

DARING: Give me thy hand, Widow, I am thine--and so entirely, I will never--be drunk out of thy company--Dunce is in my tent--prithee let's in and bind the bargain.
RANTER: Nay, faith, let's see the wars at an end first.
DARING: Nay, prithee, take me in the humour, while thy breeches are on--for I never liked thee half so well in petticoats.
RANTER: Lead on, General, you give me good encouragement to wear them.
--Act IV, Scene iii, Aphra Behn, The Widow Ranter; or, the History of Bacon in Virginia

Behn’s tragicomedy The Widow Ranter was her last play, and it was produced posthumously, in 1689. At the time, it was not a success on the stage. The dedicatory letter with which it was published in 1690 complains that “the Play had not that Success which it deserv’d, and was expected by her Friends; The main fault ought to lye on those who had the management of it. Had our Authour been alive she would have Committed it to the Flames rather than have suffer’d it to have been Acted with such Omissions as was made."
   Recent scholarship has suggested that the mis-production of the play, or even the fact that it hit the stage at the time of Williamite-Jacobite War in Ireland, does not completely account for its lack of success. Adam Beach suggests instead that it is Behn’s overly positive portrayal of the New World and the colonies, rather than the standard negative view of them at the time, that doomed the play. We might attribute, however, still other reasons for the play’s failure in the theater: its confusing plot, its romanticization of monarchical authority, its mis-representation of the real history of Nathaniel Bacon in Virginia, or even its somewhat misleading title, as the Widow Ranter gets very little stage time. This last fact is quite a shame, actually, as the Widow is a fascinating character: a smoker and heavy drinker who curses, fights and, as the quote above indicates, cross-dresses during the course of the play.
    Female cross-dressing was par for the course on the Restoration stage--and throughout the eighteenth century in England. The change in laws in the 1650s that allowed for women to take the stage altered the dynamics of performance. The idea of putting female characters into men's clothes was nothing new; after all, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night or The Merchant of Venice are only two or many examples of Early Modern plays that relied on this premise. The change in the Restoration, however, of having actual women play these parts meant that the female body could now be displayed in the scanty dress of tight breeches and waistcoat rather than covered up with bulky petticoats and dresses. Thus, the breeches part became an important component of the stage culture in the long eighteenth century. Aphra Behn's play exploits this trend--and complicates it.

Ann Bracegirdle as Semernia.

   For, in addition to the Widow's cross-dressing, which, in many ways, is quite conventional (she cross-dresses as a soldier in order to go searching for the man she loves, Lieutenant-General Daring, during the dangerous, final battle of the play), the play also contain the cross-dressing of another woman--the New World Indian Queen, Semernia (a fictionalized version of a real-life Indian queen who lived in Virginia at the time of the rebellion). Semernia cross-dresses as an Indian warrior (though how she achieves this is left to modern-day reader's and dramatists' imaginations) during the latter half of the play as a disguise so that she and her followers can elude the English. She, like Ranter, is initially so well-disguised that no one, not even her lover, can recognize her, and when Bacon and his men come upon her, (spoiler--sorry!) Bacon wounds her mortally. 
   Behn sets up these two women as foils for one another. Ranter, though low-born and coarse, finds money and love in the colonies. Her cross-dressing serves the purpose of literalizing her manly ambitions and mannerisms, while also, as we might surmise by Daring's desire to wed her while she is still in breeches, showing off the actress's body to advantage on stage. The figure of Semernia, by contrast, suffers through her contact with the English and her ultimate fate stands in for the fate of most of the New World Indians in the 17th and 18th centuries. Cross-dressing becomes not only the way to make these women mirrors of each other, but also to question issues of gender normativity, race, class, and imperialism. 
    Thus, while many Restoration and eighteenth-century plays put actresses in breeches either in breeches roles or in travesty parts (where an actress would play a male role), Behn's is one of very few (perhaps the only?) to portray a woman of color cross-dressing. One of the play's central themes is that of identity, and while cross-dressing proves one avenue for changing or asserting one's identity, the conclusion seems to suggest that the clothes one wears can never truly change one's essence.

To the Fair Clarinda: Imagining Aphra Behn

We don’t know much about our friend Aphra and her life (1640-1689), and what we do know is often contested. Unlike some authors who left us copious diaries or whose lives were documented by contemporary historians, Behn and her life are shrouded in mystery. She may have gone to Surinam; we’re really not sure. She was probably a spy for Charles II, Behn was probably her married name, and she was probably the first woman in England—or one of the very first—to make a living with her writing. We know she was a Royalist and a Catholic devoted to the house of Stuart, and the connection between her plays and political views are discernible in her works—although even that line of inquiry is often contentious.

            Even more uncertain, however, are her personal views on a variety of topics that she addresses in her works, which span several genres, from plays to poetry to novels and novellas. What did she think of the native peoples of the Americas? Of black slaves and slavery in general? Was she a feminist? A realist? An imperialist?

            Feminist scholars have held up Behn as an early promoter of women’s rights, a writer for whom the plight of women in the second half of the 17^th century was of utmost importance and critique. Her poem “To the Fair Clarinda” suggests that she may have been sexually fluid (I prefer that term to saying she was bisexual), and in this poem she seems to be writing about loving a hermaphrodite or someone who embodies the traits of both men and women. Her short fictions “The Fair Jilt” and “The Fair Vow-Breaker” and the poem “The Disappointment” each appear to clearly critique the stifling social expectations of women in Restoration England.

Charles II after his
1660 Restoration to the throne

On the other hand, Behn was also at the court of Charles II, a notorious libertine who enjoyed drinking, philandering, and generally having fun. As John Wilmot, 2^nd Early of Rochester and another famous libertine once put it in his satire against Charles II, “thy prick, like thy buffoons at Court,/ Will govern thee because it makes thee sport.” Thus, some of the more problematic depictions of women in her plays, such as in The Rover, are often chalked up to the playwright’s need to appease her patron. 

By far her most famous work, the novella Oroonoko, which takes place in Africa and Surinam and contains both New World Indians as well as African Slaves, is often interpreted as an allegory about the fall of Charles I. It is also often faulted for portraying a romanticized view of the tragic African slaves, especially those who were supposedly of "royal" descent in their native Africa, as Oroonoko and his wife Imoinda are. The white female narrator of Oroonoko is usually read as Behn's problematic alter-ego, an Imperialist Englishwoman who at once sympathizes with but also Orientalizes the New World and its non-white inhabitants.

The Widow Ranter, her play which takes place in colonial Virginia, was by all accounts a failure when it was produced (which did not happen after her death). It is also considered by many scholars to be a metaphor for the fall of the house of Stuart in the wake of the Exclusion Crisis. Others see the play as further proof that she really did live in the Americas at some point during her lifetime and that the play’s failure was less about royalist politics and more about the fact that the English just didn’t like or respect Americans, which Behn portrays in both positive and negative lights in the play. The Widow Ranter may be interpreted as having problematic portrayals of Indians while taking the presence of black slaves for granted as merely set-pieces of the English colonies. Conversely, we might interpret the play as critiquing precisely the issues that some scholars believe her to be complacent about.

Was she truly a "feminist," an abolitionist, an adamant critic of imperialism and slavery? Or was she making use of timely topics to make good drama? As a feminist scholar myself, I like to think the former, and I believe that the bigger picture of her works confirms a deep-running vein of critique of the treatment of women and slaves in her works, even if, at times, her depictions of non-white peoples are somewhat romanticized. In the end, however, I think that what makes her works so intriguing is that they seem to epitomize what Barthes would call a writerly text: we as readers construct the text as we read it, and the text and its meaning are constantly eluding us. It is precisely the contradictory elements of Behn’s oeuvre that make her so fascinating to read and return to.

What did she even look like?
This portrait looks quite different than some of the others.

“A poet is a painter in his way, he draws to the life, but in another kind; we draw the nobler part, the soul and the mind; the pictures of the pen shall outlast those of the pencil, and even worlds themselves” 

–Aphra Behn, Oroonoko