Fatal Fluency: Behn's Fiction and the Restoration Letter

Fatal Fluency: Behn's Fiction and the Restoration Letter Janet Todd Pardon me Sir that I aply myself to your Lordship: as the ffountaine from whence all the marcy I can expect (it seemes) must spring ... tis true I am sent for home: but tis as true that they knew well I had not money enough to com withall: I could not Beg nor starve heare ... if your Lordship will be pleasd to lett me have a Bill upon mr shaw for on[e] 100 pound more, of which my friend shall have part: I will heare promise your Lordship: if when I com home I can not give you absolute sattisfection I will Justly returne it againe. ... for god ofheavens sake Sir take Pity on me; let me be usd like a Christian & one who would venture her life to gaine your ffavorable opinion & to be permitted amongst the number of my Lord your Lordships most ffaithfull & humble servant: A. Behne. Apostcript adds: "I humbly beg your Lordship to be speedy least I eate out my head."1 This extract is from a letter written by Aphra Behn to Charles n's secretary of state, Lord Arlington. She begs for more money so that she can abort her espionage mission and return to London from Antwerp, where she has been marooned by debt. The following extract is from a poem by Behn about receiving an anonymous love-letter: 1 PRO S.P. 29/182. Reprinted in Janet Todd, The SecretLife ofAphra Behn (London: André Deutsch, 1996), pp. 107-9. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 2-3, January-April 2000 418 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Thus in the mid'st of a careless thought, A paper to my hand was brought ... A Philter 'twas, that darted pain Thrô every pleas'd and trembling vein. A stratagem, to send a Dart By a new way into the heart, Th'Ignoble Policie of Love By a clandestin means to move.2 The first passage is acknowledged as authentic by biographers. The second, discussing how a reader is manipulated by words and creating an image of a desiring writer, is assumed to be a fiction. The passages raise the question, why do we accept "personal" letters as authentic documents which, along with diaries, have special status? The question is even more pointed when the letters are written in the period we call "early modem": that is, before some assumed definitive change has brought about our "modern" subjectivity. When Behn writes that she is a poor stranger in a foreign land who will eat her head out if Lord Arlington does not send her money, historians accept her autobiographical stance; but the poem is assumed to have no biographical significance, though it is one among her many iterations of the theme of ambivalent reading. Yet plainly she did not eat her head out. Surely the generic conventions governing a lowly government employee's letter to the chief minister of state are as tight and constraining as the mies and techniques of a hudibrastic poem. Our assumptions of the authenticity of private writing, however, mean that we value letters because they have the appearance of genuine, modern subjectivity, and because we often ignore their generic, rhetorical features. It is this modem view of letters that, I believe, has helped to exclude Behn's novel Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister from accounts of "the rise of the novel"; otherwise it is hard to explain the critics' cold shouldering. Part 1 of Love-Letters (1684) is a series of letters loosely based on the scandal of the elopement of Ford Lord Grey with his sisterin -law Lady Henrietta Berkeley; it is described as being discovered in a cabinet. Shortly after the Monmouth Rebellion in 1685, in which Grey played a cmcial part, Behn published Love-Letters, part 2, which follows the lovers through their exile on the Continent and the breakdown of their relationship. In part 3, The Amours ofPhilander and Silvia (1687), Behn concludes the story ofthe lovers and deals with the actual events leading up to the Monmouth Rebellion. The letters in parts 2 and 3 are framed by a third-person narrative which carries...