Aphra Behn and the Roundheads

JEMCS 4.1 (Spring/Summer 2004) Aphra Behn and the Roundheads Kimberly Latta In a secret life Iwas a Roundhead general.1 The unacknowledged fact is that Aphra Behn frequently identified herself as a prophet. In the dedicatory epistle to The Roundheads (1682), for example, she begged the priv ileges of the "Prophets ... of old," to predict the future and admonish the populace. To the newly ascended James II she boasted, "Long with Prophetick Fire, Resolved and Bold,/ Your Glorious FATE and FORTUNE I foretold.^ When the Whigs drove James from power and installed William of Orange in his place, she represented herself standing mournfully, "like the Excluded Prophet" on the "Forsaken Barren Shore."3 In these and other instances, Behn clearly and consciously drew upon a long-standing tradition in English letters of associating poets with prophets. But the figure of the prophet cannot be isolated to that literary tra dition at this time in England, particularly when we are talking about a woman struggling to assert her own literary authority. We often remember Behn as the first profession al woman writer, but we more frequently forget that she wrote in the wake of several hundred religious women writ ers, self-styled prophetesses, and visionaries who had been publishing in the burgeoning capitalist marketplace for many years before her. Although the poet herself remarked of religion, "we have scare other Theme; 'tis grown so gener al a Mode, that even the Sword-men are now fiercer dis putants than heretofore the lazier Gown-men were," most 2 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies critics have dismissed its importance to Behn and her cul ture.4 Because religion "is the master-code in which issues are conceived and debated in pre-capitalist societies" and "the cultural matrix for explorations of virtually every topic: kingship, selfhood, rationality, language, marriage, ethics, and so forth" (Jameson 37; Shugar 6), we need to take it into account as a category of historical analysis when we read Behn. As Adorno reminds us in an important essay on ideo logical commitment in art, literature is "inherently collective [and] impenetrable to the mere subjective intentions of the author" (181). Even ifBehn did not overtly iterate the kinds of pieties that dominate the published work of her immedi ate, sectarian literary foremothers, she shared many of their assumptions. That is, her work endorses ideas she did not openly countenance, such as the idea that women were spir itually equal tomen and therefore had sufficient authority to become authors. Some feminist critics, rather than representing Behn's declaration ofwriterly authority as a dynamic process, have generally focused on the ways inwhich the playwright defied limitations presumed to be static, a set of iron bars or imprisoning beliefs and attitudes which she slipped through or re-fashioned to her own ends. The argument, for example, about Behn as a "poet-punk" too quickly assumes that all writers who published their thoughts were disparagingly consigned to the status of "public women," or whores, and that Behn embraced this stereotype. Scholars who make this argument have relied on the viewpoint of a scurrilous, nar row-minded poet, Robert Gould, whose scathing attack on "Ephelia" and other female poets, including Behn, finally and appropriately inspired more spirited defenses of female wit from others than poetic acclaim for himself. Gould noto riously wrote: For Punk and Poesie agree so pat, You cannot well be this and not be that. (7) Commenting on these lines, Catherine Gallagher writes, "the equation of poetess and 'punk' . . .was inescapable in the Restoration." This belief "rested on the evidence neither of how a woman lived nor on what she wrote. Itwas, rather, an Latta 3 a priori judgment applying to all cases of female public lan guage (Nobody's Story 23)." Yet, Robert Gould, for one, did not apply this judgment to all women. In the very stanza in which he makes that infamous leap from poet to punk, Gould specifically attacks hackney writers; elsewhere in the same poem he commends Katherine Phillips (19). Although there is no doubt that some women who spoke out in public were vil ified as "whores," little evidence suggests that Behn adopted...