Adapting Desires in Aphra Behn’s The History of the Nun

Aphra Behn’s The History of the Nun; or the Fair Vow Breaker (1689) was the originary text of at least five more versions throughout the eighteenth century. This lurid tale of broken vows, excessive desire and shocking violence encodes within it a sharp critique of patriarchal ideology. By examining the subsequent versions through their “adaptive events—textual moments created by adaptors to explain the protagonists motivations—it becomes clear that subsequent texts try, in various ways, to simplify, clarify, extenuate, pathologize or in some way explain and contain Behn’s plot, even as they cannot help but replicate the sharp critique of patriarchy which the original tale encodes.