Recent Articles

BEHN

Åström, Berit. “Referred Pain: Privileging Male Emotions in Narrative Instances of Female Physical Suffering,” Journal of Gender Studies, 20 (June 2011), 125–137.

“Referred pain” in its application to four works, including Behn’s Oroonoko, is defined as the transfer of pain and acute sense of loss from the suffering female to her male companion or protector. Mr. Åström sees this as a transhistorical trope, defying a specific time and place, and seeks to show its operation from Titus Andronicus to two movies, Moulin Rouge and Mission: Impossible 2. From this angle, Behn is following a traditionally male trope by using Imoinda as the source for much of Oroonoko’s heroic agony as she suffers abuse by the old king, enslavement, and death at the hands of her beloved. The focus is always on how Oroonoko is affected, so this is not a feminist reading of the story.

Ballaster, Ros. “Taking Liberties: Revisiting Behn’s Libertinism,” WoWr, 19 (May 2012), 165–176.

The concept of “libertinism” in the seventeenth century is slippery, fraught with issues of power, religion, freedom, and personal and political license to act in one’s own interests. Tracing libertinism in several of Behn’s poems and The Rover in a short space proves a large challenge. Ms. Ballaster’s work on Behn has always been astute, enlightening, exciting. This essay, however, is a dense effort to link Behn’s alleged libertinism to the concepts of “charm,” a word never defined, and then to Lucretius’s atomism by way of Creech’s translation. True, Behn’s use of the word charm in its permutations—more than 250 times in 99 poems—suggests it is an important concept to her, but Behn uses it in a variety of meanings.

Starting with a stretch of wordplay to suggest a pun on Rochester’s name in Behn’s elegy for him, a similar overreach is made to twist the Rover’s name, Willmore, into an extension of the Hobbesian will, although the pun on Willmore’s name is generally recognized as an extended pun on the male anatomy. Ms. Ballaster sees Behn’s poem as a riposte to Suckling’s on the same topic rather than as a response to Alexis’s “Against Fruition,” which immediately precedes her poem in the poetical miscellany published with Lycidus in 1688. Along the way, Ms. Ballaster refers to “the atheist Behn.” While no one is quite sure what Behn’s religious beliefs were—or even when or if she might have held them—”atheist” is a new epithet, and one that calls for weightier proof than the linking of some libertine poems, the use of the word “charm,” and Wilmot’s and Willmore’s rakish behavior.

Benedict, Barbara M. “Editing as Art: Authenticity and Authority in Miscellanies of Dryden and Behn,” Restoration, 35 (Spring 2011), 21–38.

See the entry under Dryden, pp. 121–122.

Curtin, Antoinette. “Aphra Behn and the Conventions of Beauty,” Aphra Behn and Her Female Successors, ed. Margarete Rubik. Zurich: Lit, 2011. Pp. 75–92.

Laying the groundwork for her study of Behn’s conception of “beauty,” Ms. Curtin notes that Behn translated references to women’s “beauty” in Fontenelle’s Discovery of New Worlds as “wit and beauty.” Disappointingly, Ms. Curtin moves through a number of Behn’s plays and fictions, only to conclude that “[we] cannot know what beauty meant to Behn in her daily life.”

Duffy, Maureen. “My Life with Aphra Behn,” WoWr, 19 (May 2012), 222–237.

All familiar with Ms. Duffy’s ground-breaking work know the debt Behn scholars owe her. Like Behn, Ms. Duffy—a novelist, poet, and playwright—has earned her bread by writing and is “not ashamed to owne it” (Behn, in her preface to Sir Patient Fancy). This personal recollection reviews Ms. Duffy’s pursuit of the elusive Behn as she prepared the 1977 biography as well as several other studies of Behn, most recently a 2010 dramatic monologue, Sappho Singing.

Of special interest is her brief discussion of archival digging and how it paid off as she discovered Thomas Culpepper’s...