This blog Task was assigned by Megha Ma'am (Department Of English) In this blog task, I have given some answers to the assigned questions.
Q-1 Angellica considers the financial negotiations that one makes before marrying a prospective bride the same as prostitution. Do you agree?
Introduction
When Aphra Behn’s The Rover was first performed in 1677, it shocked and delighted Restoration audiences with its wit, sensuality, and bold portrayal of gender politics. At its heart stands Angellica Bianca, a courtesan whose sharp insight slices through the hypocrisy of her society. Her claim that the financial negotiations surrounding marriage are no different from prostitution remains one of the play’s most subversive moments. Far from being a cynical outburst, Angellica’s statement exposes the commodification of women in both the marriage market and the sex trade, challenging the moral and social codes that separate the “respectable” from the “fallen.”
Marriage as an Economic Exchange
In Restoration England, marriage was rarely about romantic affection. As Elaine Hobby (1995) notes, it was an institution grounded in property, inheritance, and patriarchal control, where women were exchanged as tokens of alliance and stability. The dowry and marriage settlement reduced women to economic assets, their value determined by beauty, virtue, and social rank. Angellica’s claim is therefore less an exaggeration and more a piercing observation: if a woman is given to a man in exchange for wealth or social advancement, is that not, at its core, a transaction of the body for money?
Behn’s dramatization of this economic reality echoes what Janet Todd (1989) identifies as her “consistent interrogation of female dependency.” Angellica’s position as a courtesan may be morally condemned, but she, unlike the “virtuous” Florinda, openly acknowledges the monetary foundations of male-female relationships.
Double Standards and Patriarchal Hypocrisy
Behn’s insight into sexual politics anticipates later feminist thought. Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One’s Own (1929), famously recognized Behn as the first woman who “earned her living by her pen,” asserting that she made female expression possible in public life. Angellica, likewise, embodies that courage to speak what polite society prefers to conceal. Her critique of marriage highlights a double standard that privileges male desire and punishes female autonomy.
As Catherine Gallagher (1988) observes, Behn’s courtesans often function as mirrors of social hypocrisy: they are “both exploited and exploiters, revealing the blurred boundaries between economic survival and moral judgment.” Angellica’s profession may be condemned, but her honesty makes her morally superior to those who disguise financial motives beneath the veil of matrimony.
The Psychology of Desire and Power
Behn’s play also operates within what Edwin Berry Burgum (1944) calls the Neoclassical obsession with order and decorum, yet it simultaneously undermines it through psychological realism. Angellica’s emotional turmoil her struggle between love and economic security reveals the human cost of treating affection as a commodity. Once she falls in love with Willmore, she becomes vulnerable, losing the very control that once defined her independence. Behn uses this to critique a society where a woman’s only power lies in the trade of her beauty.
Angellica’s tragedy, then, is not her profession but her humanity: she desires love in a world that values only transaction. Behn, as Paula Backscheider (2000) suggests, transforms the courtesan figure into a vehicle for exploring female subjectivity, asserting that women’s emotions and intellects deserve recognition, not suppression.
The Broader Feminist Context
Critics such as Jane Spencer (1986) and Jacqueline Pearson (1986) situate Behn within the early development of women’s authorship, arguing that she carved a literary space where female experience could be voiced. In this sense, Angellica’s insight into marriage as a form of prostitution becomes a metaphor for women’s position in patriarchal society: both wife and courtesan are bound by economic necessity, denied full independence, and judged by male moral codes.
Behn, through The Rover, dares to unveil what others only hinted at that female virtue was not a moral truth but a social construct maintained for male convenience.
Conclusion: Angellica’s Truth and Behn’s Legacy
Yes, Angellica’s claim is justified. Her comparison between marriage and prostitution exposes the uncomfortable truth that both institutions depend on the exchange of female sexuality for financial or social gain. Behn, with her characteristic wit and courage, turns this observation into a broader social critique, dismantling the façade of romantic idealism to reveal the economic realities beneath.
In doing so, Aphra Behn not only gave voice to women like Angellica but also laid the foundation for feminist thought in English literature. Her pen like Angellica’s speech challenged silence, hypocrisy, and injustice. As Woolf recognized, every woman writer who dares to speak her mind owes a debt to Aphra Behn, the woman who first named the price of freedom in a world that sought to buy and sell it.
Q-2 “All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.” Virginia Woolf said so in ‘A Room of One’s Own’. Do you agree with this statement? Justify your answer with reference to your reading of the play ‘The Rover’.
Introduction
Virginia Woolf’s tribute to Aphra Behn in A Room of One’s Own remains one of the most powerful statements in feminist literary history:
“All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.”
Woolf’s words capture more than admiration they recognize Behn as a revolutionary figure who transformed the silence imposed on women into speech, authorship, and agency. Through her play The Rover (1677), Behn did not simply entertain; she challenged the patriarchal ideologies of her age, dramatizing women’s struggles for freedom, self-expression, and desire.
Breaking Silence: Behn and the Birth of the Woman Writer
Aphra Behn’s achievement lies not only in being one of the first English women to earn a living through writing but in doing so publicly and unapologetically. As Janet Todd (1989) observes in The Sign of Angellica, Behn turned authorship into “a profession possible for women,” at a time when women were expected to be silent, domestic, and dependent.
Paula Backscheider (2000) similarly emphasizes that Behn’s very presence in the literary marketplace “made possible the existence of the woman writer as a visible social category.” Before Behn, women’s creative work was often anonymous or dismissed. After her, it became undeniable. She wrote not from privilege, but from survival and in doing so, claimed both intellectual and economic independence.
Women Who Think and Choose: The Rover’s Feminist Voices
The Rover gives theatrical form to Woolf’s claim. Behn’s women Hellena, Florinda, and Angellica Bianca are not passive or ornamental. They speak, question, desire, and defy. Hellena’s witty defiance of patriarchal authority captures Behn’s spirit perfectly. Forced into a convent, Hellena insists on her right to love and choose her partner. Her boldness transforms her from a silent daughter into a self-determined individual.
Florinda’s resistance to forced marriage similarly exposes the objectification of women in Restoration society, where marriage was an economic transaction rather than an emotional bond. Meanwhile, Angellica Bianca, a courtesan, delivers one of Behn’s most radical critiques of gender and morality. As Catherine Gallagher (1988) notes, Angellica blurs the boundaries between virtue and vice, exposing the hypocrisy of a world that condemns her for selling love while sanctifying marriage as a respectable form of the same transaction.
Through these women, Behn dramatizes Woolf’s vision: the assertion that women have intellect, emotion, and moral depth equal to men’s, and that their voices matter.
Speaking Truth to Power: Behn’s Challenge to Patriarchal Society
Behn’s courage extended beyond her characters. Writing during the Restoration an age obsessed with wit, order, and male authority she inserted a distinctly female consciousness into public discourse. As Jacqueline Pearson (1986) explains in The Daughters of Pandora, Behn transformed the “male literary marketplace into a stage where women could perform intellect and independence.”
Behn’s female characters subvert patriarchal norms not through rebellion alone but through wit, reason, and moral clarity. Hellena’s verbal battles with Willmore reveal that women are capable of both passion and intellect. In this way, Behn anticipates later feminist writers like Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft, who also insisted that women’s reasoning power be recognized.
A Legacy of Courage and Creation
Virginia Woolf’s recognition of Behn’s importance is deeply rooted in this audacity. In Woolf’s view, Behn’s greatest contribution was not merely her literary skill, but her act of writing itself her refusal to be silenced by gender. Elaine Hobby (1995) highlights that Behn’s professional authorship was revolutionary because it “redefined female virtue as self-sufficiency rather than submission.”
By earning her living with her pen, Behn redefined what it meant to be a woman in the public sphere. She broke the taboo of women writing for money, turning what was once seen as scandalous into a symbol of empowerment.
Conclusion: The Flowers on Behn’s Tomb Still Bloom
Yes, Virginia Woolf was right. Aphra Behn deserves flowers not just at her tomb, but in every classroom, stage, and library that celebrates women’s voices today. Through The Rover, she gave women characters who could speak, think, love, and resist, and through her own life, she showed that the act of writing could be an act of liberation.
Behn’s pen opened the door for all who came after from Jane Austen to the Brontës, from Woolf herself to every woman who writes today. Her legacy is not only literary but moral and political: the courage to speak one’s mind in a world that insists on silence.
In that sense, every woman writer indeed, every woman who dares to use her voice is still standing in the light that Aphra Behn first lit.
References
Behn, Aphra. The Rover; or, The Banished Cavaliers. 1677. Edited by Janet Todd, Penguin Classics, 1996.
Burgum, Edwin Berry. “The Neoclassical Period in English Literature: A Psychological Definition.” The Sewanee Review, vol. 52, no. 2, 1944, pp. 247–65. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27537507
Hobby, Elaine. Aphra Behn’s The Rover and Other Plays. Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Peters, M. A. “Satire, Swift and the Deconstruction of the Public Intellectual.” Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol. 51, no. 13, 2019, pp. 1299–1307.
Pearson, Jacqueline. The Daughters of Pandora: Women Writers and the Literary Marketplace in the 17th Century. Harvester Press, 1986.
Todd, Janet. The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660–1800. Columbia University Press, 1989.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. Edited by Susan Gubar, Harcourt Brace, 2005.
Spencer, Jane. The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen. Blackwell, 1986.
Backscheider, Paula R. Aphra Behn: Biography. Ohio University Press, 2000.
Gallagher, Catherine. “Who Was That Masked Woman? The Prostitute and the Playwright in the Comedies of Aphra Behn.” Women’s Studies, vol. 15, no. 1–3, 1988, pp. 23–41.
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