Aphra Behn's The City Heiress : Feminism and the Dynamics of Popular Success on the Late Seventeenth-Century Stage

For all the attention devoted to Aphra Behn's fiction, poetry, and plays over the last twenty-five years, few critics have focused on what remains a crucial problem in the scholarship on her work: the half-acknowledged tensions between her critical and commercial success on the Restoration stage and the current consensus that emphasizes her resistance to and protests against the endemic antifeminism of her time.¹ Paradoxically, the more critics insist on Behn's iconoclastic significance as a pioneering woman writer, the more difficult it seems to explain cogently the appeal of comedies, such as the second part of The Rover (1681), The Roundheads (1680), and The City Heiress (1682), that travesty "proper" feminine behavior, ridicule male authority figures, and debunk romantic love. Although the "resentful realism" of these comedies indicates that Behn and her audiences recognized only too well the constraints on women in late seventeenth-century society, her concern with restaging, in comic form, the emotional and financial difficulties of women's lives does not in itself account for her string of theatrical successes.² In their ironic treatment of female chastity and masculine constancy, as I have argued elsewhere, her comedies present a sophisticated and sympathetic understanding of the ideological complexities of women's existence in a misogynistic society.³ By demystifying the masculinization of desire that constructs women only as sexual objects, Behn undermines the ideological assumptions and values that make female identity dependent on inviolate chastity and rigorous self-policing; she can then legitimate female desire by inverting the gender politics of her spectators' gaze and turn her libertine heroes into self-parodying objectifications of masculine desirability.⁴ This process of defamiliarizing the gender dynamics of the wit comedy of the 1670s allows Behn to exploit the ironies that her regendering of desire creates: sexually compromised women become heroines; rich heiresses remain willfully blind to the consequences of their own desire; and wits become libertine performance artists who have limited success in manipulating women. In this respect, Behn implicates her audience—men and women alike—in participatory spectacles of ideological recognition and disavowal, and it is this complex process of interpellation that gives her comedies their ironic leverage. In The City Heiress, Behn brilliantly stages the comic struggles of her characters to come to terms with their cynical participation in social rituals that mirror those of fashionable Restoration society: her heroes and heroines recognize that they, like the audience, are complicit in the very practices and beliefs that frustrate their desires.

In this essay, I want to explore the complex relationship between Behn's protofeminist skepticism, her ironic questioning of love and marriage, and the popularity of a play that intrigued her contemporaries. In her preface to The Luckey Chance (1687), Behn responds to her critics by asserting that "unbyast Judges of Sense" have to acknowledge that she "had made as many good Comedies, as any one Man that has writ in our Age."⁵ This claim is not an exaggeration, and by invoking the theatrical success of her "good Comedies," she yokes the aesthetic quality of her plays to their commercial success. The City Heiress was singled out by her contemporaries as one of her "good" and particularly lucrative comedies, although comparatively few modern critics have discussed it at length.⁶ The contemporary theater historian Gerard Langbaine remarked that the "play had the luck to be well receiv'd in the Town."⁷ The Whig dramatist Thomas Shadwell attacked it in The Tory Poets: A Satire; Robert Gould reacted with moralistic horror at the sex scene between the widow Lady Galliard and the hero Wilding; and in his poem, "To the Sappho of the Age, suppos'd to Ly-In of a Love-Distemper, or a Play," William Wycherley, in his typically labored verse, jumbles images of sex, childbirth, venereal disease, and Behn's public fame to celebrate the play as one of the "easiest Off-springs of [her] Wanton Brain":

Thus, as your Beauty did, your Wit does now, The Women's Envy, Men...