Aphra Behn on Justice

Aphra Behn

This semester I’m teaching an upper-level English course on Restoration and eighteenth-century literature. We started with two works by Aphra Behn: the play The Widow Ranter (1689) and the short fiction The Fair Jilt (1688). The first tells the story of a disparate band of Englishmen and women in the Jamestown colony in Virginia at the time of Bacon’s Rebellion, a historical event that Behn modifies for the purposes of drama. The second is a work of “amatory fiction” that recounts the scandalous amours of an evil, plotting young woman named Miranda, who, when she can’t get what she wants, resorts to extremes (lies, deception, murder—the usual). In both works, however, as in many of her others (the play The Rover, for example, or her novella Oroonoko), the notion of justice and its inverse, injustice, play a prominent role.

           In The Widow Ranter, justice has been suspended for the colonists, as in the wake of a power vacuum, the colonial council makes all the decisions. The council is made up of a motley crew of immigrants to the new world, many of whom have extremely dubious credentials. As Friendly tells his newly-arrived pal Hazard, “for want of a governor we are ruled by a council, some of which have been perhaps transported criminals, who having acquired great estates are now become Your Honour, and Right Worshipful, and possess all places of authority” (Act I, Scene I). The members of the council are indeed scoundrels, as represented by Behn in the play. With names like Timorous, Whimsey, Whiff, and Boozer, it is evident that the council members are not to be trusted. In fact, they are all great cowards, and their cowardice becomes part of the comic relief, even as it suggests one of the play’s most overt critiques of power and governance.

Real life Nathaniel Bacon.

            In Act III, Scene I, we enter the courtroom, and Hazard is accused of drawing without provocation against two members of the council. The entire courtroom scene is a farce of justice, as the play portrays the justices indulging in punch in the courtroom and presiding at the hearing while drunk. Further, when all is revealed, we learn that Hazard was defending himself against Dullman and Boozer who struck him first. The questions of what is allowable “under the law” surfaces in this scene, where it is comic, but inflected with serious consequences. The problem of what is legal and what is just is painted in broader strokes in the case of Bacon and his rebellion. The inhabitants of the colony bemoan that what Bacon, the brave and valiant Bacon, did by inciting his own war against the Indians without leave from the council, was perhaps just, but it was not legal.

            In The Fair Jilt, the miscarriages of justice are, if possible, even more complex. Miranda manipulates the justice system in order to get the object of her affection convicted of rape. Father Francisco refuses her overtures of love, and she, obsessive young maiden that she is, contrives to make it look as though he has raped her. He is convicted and put indefinitely into prison. While he molders in jail, Miranda meets Prince Tarquin, seduces him, marries him, and begins spending extravagantly. She spends her own dowry as well as that of her unmarried, much younger sister Alcidiana. When Alcidiana prepares to marry and demands her dowry, Miranda seduces a young page, Van Brune, and convinces him to kill Alcidiana for her. The attempt ends with Van Brune’s confession, his conviction and death, and Miranda’s disgrace. Miranda doesn’t learn, however, and resorts to even greater extremes: she convinces her husband, Tarquin, to commit the murder of her poisoned-but-not-killed sister. He shoots and misses; he is caught; he and Miranda are both imprisoned. Miranda is banished, and Tarquin is sentenced to death by beheading; the beheading is botched, however, and he is saved by the crowds, recovers, and reunites with his banished wife. At the end, we learn that the two of them live a long and happy life and that Miranda is repentant.

            My students were rather unsatisfied, to say the least, with Miranda’s happy ending. They wanted her to receive a proper punishment for the way she had lied, manipulated, deceived, and caused the imprisonment and/or death of innocent people. Is the ending of The Fair Jilt an injustice to all those Miranda harmed with her obsessive selfishness? Does it illustrate the dangers of not educating women and allowing them to become obsessed with their own youth and beauty and their powers of seduction? Or is this a searing indictment of male blindness? In Behn’s works, nothing is simple or easy, even if we are momentarily tempted to consider The Fair Jilt nothing more than a silly telenovela.

            Behn lived in a tumultuous time, and her own life story, what we know of it, seems to suggest that she witnessed many injustices. Her works are full of melodrama and comedy, yet their complex relationship to issues of justice, the law, money, power, and relationships force us to re-examine the darker side of these stories. The law, she reminds us, is made by men, and men are fallible, petty, blind, jealous, selfish, and power-hungry. They project these same negative qualities onto women—yet they embody these qualities themselves and with much more far-reaching and dangerous results.

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.