The Rover

 ☞ What did Virginia woolf said about Aphra Behn?

The fourth chapter from Woolf's critical text 'A Room of One's Own' discusses the importance of literary forerunners and their influence on the work of later great writers. Woolf puts much acclaim upon Aphra Behn,

 "A woman forced to make a living on her wits",

and traces the evolution of female authorship from the sixteenth centry to the Victorian period. In this chapter Woolf claims that, due to Behn, writing for a woman became practical and serious - a means of making money when all other support failed. Such is her importance to female authorship that

 ''All women together' suggests Woolf 'ought to let flowers fall on the tomb of Aphra Behn''⚘

                       - virginia woolf

☞Views on virginia woolf's comment on Aphra Behn

With her feminist opinions, she revolutionized writingand her impacts in the 17th century wouldchange modern daywriting. Behn was a clever writer who wrote lively, vibrant plays and poetry. Behn impacted the world, not only with her writing, but also with her determination and voice about her feminist opinions.

Articles on Aphra Behn's The Rover

 

1. Carnival Politics, Generous Satire, and Nationalist Spectacle in Behn's The Rover

          Adam R. Beach

Ball State University

In the article to The Rover. Or, the Banish't Cavaliers(1677), Aphra Behn demarcates a set of faulty interpretive practices and directs the audience to the proper reading of her play by negative example. The unidentified speaker begins by performing a hysterical, puritanical reaction to the basic elements of the play: "The Banisht Cavaliers! Here, Behn attempts to school her audience in the politics of reading by anticipating, and therefore dismissing, a particular anti-Catholic, anti-court that she associates with the .  when they presume to judge the play, which is a classic formulation of Behn's Royalist politics. Two  Behn is telling her audience to disregard the judgment of those who underestimate the serious political message of The Rover and who erroneously believe that the Stuart court would not be pleased by her nationalist and Royalist depiction of the Cavalier exile during the Interregnum.

The interpretive guidance offered by Behn's epilogue has not been heeded by modern critics, who have neither fully addressed the play as a serious rewriting of the Stuart exile nor accounted for its remarkable appropriation of Elizabethan nationalist discourse in the service of a pro-Stuart agenda. Because The Roverwas performed just before the eruption of the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis, it has not been included in recent considerations of Behn's more strident political plays written during those turbulent times. I on Willmore's drunkenness and blundering, his attempted rapes of Florinda, and his creating difficulties for Belvile, many scholars have argued that Behn's play represents an earnest feminist attack on the character of the rake and the sexual audacity of the Stuart court, while others have asserted a more general ambivalence about Cavalier libertine ideology. 

The fact that the play was embraced by the court suggests that The Rover expresses a pro-Stuart ideology, yet its position was moderate and flexible enough to allow its survival beyond its historical moment and, unlike her plays of the later Exclusion Crisis period, stay in the repertoire.

2.The sexual politics of Bhen's Rover :

After patriarchy

By stephen szilagyi

Aphra Behn’s play, The Rover, speaks to this double standard, which limited her female peers’ sexual desires to the realm of convent, brothel, or home. Set loose in the topsy-turvy world of Carnival, her characters demonstrate the active, complicated game required of women seeking to secure personal happiness.  The dangers of the chase and the play’s tidy conclusion, on the other hand, suggest at how ladies neither could nor should stray too far into the masculine roles of wooer and possessor.  Late Stuart society, Behn seems to lament, offered no place to the sexually free, libertine woman.

Crime and desires of women

The actions and treatment of women in Aphra Behn’s play expose the narrow social limitations within which early Modern British women found themselves. Hellena and Florinda have the potential to explore their sexual freedom at Carnival, but they focus instead on securing financial futures with men they like.  Sex may be used, as Hellena shows, as a bartering chip to obtain a promise of marriage; when loosed for a young woman’s pleasure, however, sexuality keeps her from happiness.  Through Angellica, Hellena, and Florinda, Behn reveals that the libertine female has no place in late Stuart society.  The playwright’s observation comes as a wistful warning at a time when women seemed to push the limits of tradition.

  Actresses appearing on stage might feel they had found a career of bodily expression, but from Behn’s experience as a woman with male colleagues, the freedom is a façade.  Women on stage faced fetishization and loss of status.  Behn’s commentary on women’s position in the late Stuart period serves to point out the double standard of libertinism in court life and the public sphere.  By exposing and mocking the Puritanical and Cavalier restraints imposed on ladies, she encourages viewers to reevaluate women’s limited roles in the new age.