Gender and (Im)morality in Restoration Comedy: Aphra Behn's The Feigned Courtesans

Gender and (Im)morality in Restoration Comedy Aphra Behn’s The Feigned Courtesans Leah Lowe Recent critical analyses of the comedies of Aphra Behn (1640–89), often guided by interpretive strategies designed to illuminate differences between Behn and her male contemporaries, reveal interesting tensions between her female characters and the roles they play in the male-dominated narratives in which they appear. Composed for the notoriously sexual Restoration stage, Behn’s plays deal with licentious rakes and knowing women embroiled in narratives thick with intrigue. As a female playwright in a competitive marketplace, Behn drew on theatrical models that were successful, including that of the marriage-plot comedy that ¤rst challenges conventional morality through its celebration of sexual license and then reconciles itself to social mores through a predictable conclusion in which “the beautiful people are married with the blessing of the guardians.”1 Like those of her male peers, Behn’s comedies featured rakish heroes intent on sexual conquest and grati¤cation regardless of social consequences. At the same time, Behn created active female characters who display wit, intelligence , and sexual desire of their own, throwing into sharp relief the different social standards by which male and female sexual behaviors were judged. Behn’s female characters, while of their own particular historical moment and subject to its signi¤cant restrictions, trouble the sexual politics of the worlds they inhabit by demonstrating a sexuality that is responsive to their own desire, as well as to the strict social constraints that bind it. A reading of Behn’s The Feigned Courtesans; or, A Night’s Intrigue (1679) offers ample opportunity to explore Behn’s representations of gender differences in relationship to prevailing moral codes within the generic outlines of the Restoration marriage-plot comedy. The main plot follows the adventures of two attractive aristocratic Italian sisters , Marcella and Cornelia, as they outwit their aged guardian, Count Morosini, and escape an arranged marriage (in Marcella’s case) and a celibate life in a convent (in Cornelia’s). The socially respectable and chaste young women run away to Rome, where they disguise themselves as courtesans and pursue, and are ultimately betrothed to, two dashing young British cavaliers of their own choice. Marcella, the more socially conventional and romantic of the two, disguises herself as the courtesan Euphemia to pursue the equally conventional Fillamour. Her witty sister , Cornelia (who poses as La Silvianetta), is after his rakish friend, Galliard. Fillamour and Galliard, confused by the women’s disguises, also pursue Marcella/Euphemia and Cornelia/Silvianetta respectively, though in different ways with different goals in mind. An important secondary plot focuses on a third rich and beautiful virgin, Laura Lucretia , who also disguises herself as a courtesan and also adopts the name La Silvianetta in order to avoid an arranged marriage and win Galliard’s love, further complicating the elaborately tangled confusion of identity that characterizes the play’s action. In the end Count Morosini and Octavio, Marcella’s ¤ancé, relent and withdraw their objections to the unions of Marcella and Cornelia with their respective cavaliers. Though the play is ultimately resolved by the unions typical of romantic comedy and both Marcella and Cornelia are promised to the appropriate cavalier, Laura Lucretia does not win the man of her dreams, inserting an ambivalent note in an otherwise typical happy ending. Marriage-plot or romantic comedy, structured around the development of a heterosexual union (or, in the case of The Feigned Courtesans, three of them), tends to follow a familiar three-part narrative pattern. Northrop Frye observes that an initial oppressive situation is altered through the course of a topsy-turvy phase of the story in which identities are often disguised, social statuses reversed, rules broken, and social standards challenged. The typical romantic comedy is ultimately resolved , Frye argues, through the establishment of a transformed society, usually symbolized by a marriage, in which social control passes from the father or paternal ¤gure to the son, who, ¤nally united with a female partner, is ready to create a new family.2 Female characters often play crucial roles in romantic comedies. Because they are generally of lower social status in the patriarchal worlds they inhabit, their prominence through...