2
Licensed by the Market
Behn's Love Letters as Serial Entertainment
Bringing Novelistic Entertainment to the British Market
Long before novels were claimed to be a type of literature, the first novel readers read to be entertained. By entertainment, I mean those recurrent social practices members of a culture use to divert and amuse themselves and one another. Entertainment, in this relatively modern sense, often entails representation. Thus, for example, oral storytelling and dramatic performance were two of the earliest forms of entertainment, and both have been described as precursors of novels. Anthropologists have argued that cultures use narrative to make sense of nature and history, and to articulate values. In literary studies, it is assumed that the representation of life and manners provided by novels tells us something crucial about the culture that consumes them. Why is this so? Because narrative entertainment that is "held among" participants (the word "entertainment" comes from the French verb entretenir , "to hold among") "takes hold" of those who entertain them. In the decisive but enigmatic exchange between the entertainment and the entertained, desire is engaged. Do entertainments gratify preexisting needs, or do they incite new desires? Do they support or challenge social order? Should they describe ordinary life, or offer access to enchanting alternative realities? These questions are taken up repeatedly by those who would reform, defend, or inflect entertainment. The discourse that results from these polemics invariably evidences the cultural unease with entertainment. Plato is one of the earliest of cultural critics to worry that entertaining stories, by their very power to absorb those they entertain, menace the rational and moral grounds of culture. Thus, in the Republic , he condemns the loss of self-control encouraged by many
passages from Homer, and warns that the wise ruler must exercise "a censorship over our storymakers" (Collected Dialogues , 624).
The most basic forms of culture demand a massive instinctual renunciation. In order to avoid uncontrolled sexual rivalry, societies are formed around the taboo on incest (Freud, Totem and Taboo ); in order to acquire the "right to make promises," humans must acquire the sense of guilt necessary to make themselves self-consistent (Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals , II: 1–2); and finally, the greatest achievements in art and science may require the sublimation of desire (Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents ). The repression that is the condition of the possibility of culture not only explains the allure of and resistance to entertainment; it also accounts for the effect of deflection that is most characteristic of entertainment. In order to please, entertainment diverts its consumers away from the ordinary. Through their free assent to the rule-bound space that produces what Huizinga calls the "magic circle of play," the entertained win, for the duration of the entertainment, a reprieve from the inhibitions of culture. But entertainment never constitutes an utterly different world; instead, it sustains an oblique relation to the culture it entertains.
Like all entertainers, Aphra Behn was obliged to compromise with her culture's ambivalence toward entertainment. In Love Letters , Behn promotes a liberation of the reader's desire by allowing her characters to transgress the law that binds subjects into culture. But far from offering purely escapist amusement, her first novel also reasserts the necessity of that law. Behn's crucial role in the history of the early novel does not derive from her being the first novelist, or even from her being the first woman novelist. However, more than any other writer, Behn was responsible for bringing the novel to the British market. Her ability to play this pivotal role has less to do with her literary talents than with her effective exploitation of three convergent factors, involving: (1) a shift in media, whereby the decline of the British theater made the print market the most promising venue for earning money; (2) the new currency of a genre, with the recent success of the short continental novel demonstrating its potential as a form of entertainment; and (3) the spectacle of sexual and political scandal, the elopement of Henrietta Berkeley, a member of a prominent Tory family, with her brother-in-law, Ford, Lord Grey of Werke, a leading supporter of the Duke of Monmouth, offering Behn a way to contribute, during the height of the succession crisis, to the propaganda campaign on behalf of Charles II.
Starting in 1682, several factors push Behn away from writing for the theater and toward the market in printed books. The decline of royal
patronage and the decrease in new productions leads in that year to the union of the two officially sanctioned Restoration companies (those of the king's theater and those of the duke's theater). An intensification of the succession crisis means that, as a dedicated party writer, Behn finds the theater closed to her (Backscheider, Spectacular Politics , 106). Behn's movement from the theater to novel writing charts a path followed by later entertainers, such as Manley, Haywood, and Fielding. By moving from the concentrated spectacle of the theater to the diffuse spectacle of the printed book, Behn can elude the censure directed at her plays. Even before the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695, many factors, from the stubborn noncompliance of the book trade to the unreliability of juries, limit Charles II's Licenser, Roger L'Estrange, from exercising the full control of the press he seeks (Feather, 52–55). The title page of the first installment of Love Letters obscures the identity of both its author and bookseller (Behn, Love Letters , x). Finally, by writing novels, Behn exploits the broad trends that make book reading an increasingly important form of entertainment. The expense of the earliest printed books means that only the most prestigious discourses of culture (for example, those of religion, law, and science) are printed. However, over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the decline in printing costs, together with the expansion of both literacy and the infrastructure supporting the circulation of printed books (the Post, the turnpike, magazines), encourages the emergence of printed books as a form of entertainment (see chapter 4).
In writing Love Letters as a novel, Behn turns to a form of writing whose flexibility and popularity had only recently become evident. Because of the novel's long history in European writing, its sheer plurality, and the amorphous ductility peculiar to novels, it is impossible to define the novel in any definitive way. However, I offer this minimal definition: the novel is short in length (compared with romance), it is written in prose rather than poetry, it usually takes sex and/or love as its topic, and it quite frequently tells a story of contemporary life, rather than of some earlier, ancient or legendary era. When compared with the epic, drama, and romance, the novel has, by the mid-seventeenth century, a rather modest cultural position, and is relatively untheorized by critical discourse.[1] By utilizing this
[1] Two qualifications must be made to this definition: first, novels may be versified, and verse translations of Ovid were routinely considered novels; second, sometimes the stories in novels are as remote in time and space, and as idealized in manner and sentiment, as romances. For an account of the European novel in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Williams' Idea of the Novel in Europe ; while referring backward to Boccaccio (the Decameron) as the most influential modern practitioner of novel writing, Williams offers a survey of the Spanish novellas, such as those of Cervantes (The Exemplary Novels ), and also covers the dizzyingly broad scope of French seventeenth-century practice, which includes the most influential novels of the period—those of Scarron and Lafayette, and Letters from a Portuguese Nun to a Cavalier . For a more fastidiously English account of the early novel, see Paul Salzman's English Prose Fiction . For a recent, much more expansive history of "the novel," comprising all romances and novels back to the ancient Greek and Latin romances, see Margaret Anne Doody's True Story of the Novel .
minimalist definition of the continental novel, one can stay open to the different roles the novel assumes at different historical junctures.
During the seventeenth century, France functions for England as a kind of Hollywood for prose fiction. It sets the standards of taste, develops the new subgenres, advances the theoretical debates, and dominates novel publication with sheer numbers.[2] Three French novels published in the decade before Behn turned to novel-writing provide paradigms for her translation of notorious contemporary scandal—both amorous and political—into the novel. These novels are: Lafayette's Princess of Monpensier (French version, 1662; English version, 1666) and Princess of Clèves (French version, 1678; English version, 1679), as well as the spectacularly successful anonymous Les Lettres Portugaises (French version, 1669; English version, 1678, as Five Love-Letters from a Nun to a Cavalier [translated by Roger L'Estrange]). While Lafayette carries the representation of refined manners and exalted love to new levels of verisimilitude, Les Lettres Portugaises helps produce a mode of representing the passions that seem concise, vivid, extreme, and "natural" by comparison with the heroic romances in vogue in the previous generation (Ballaster, Seductive Forms , 63). By giving an empirical inflection to the continental novel (Misch, Restoration Prose Fiction , vii–xiii; McKeon, Origins of the English Novel ), British writers of the Restoration make novels still more effective vehicles for writing precisely targeted secret histories.
By beginning my cultural history of the early British novel with Behn, I am not claiming that she is "the first real English novelist." After demonstrating in the previous chapter how loaded and tendentious it becomes to ask what the first real novel is, I will not be attempting to enhance the authority of that cultural icon. Having cast suspicion upon the idea of an
[2] Thus Salzman notes that of 450 new works published in England during the seventeenth century, 213 were translations, and 164 of these were originally French. When one considers that some of the English nontranslations were patent rip-offs of French novels, the magnitude of the influence of French models becomes impressive, and after 1660 is only increasing.
inseminating paternal source for the novel's rise, I will refrain from designating a maternal matrix for the novel's birth. There are two problems with such a casting of Behn. The first is a general one: By taking one enlightenment narrative—the rise of the novel as the literary and cultural vehicle for mediating the middle-class subject's coming into its own—and translating it into another—the novel as an instrument of woman's recognition of herself as subject free of tutelage under men—the rise of the novel narrative persists in modified form within several recent feminist literary histories. Thus, Jane Spencer's Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen assumes that a novelist such as Behn must be interpreted in relation to a horizon of development that will properly arrive at "the English novel," as characterized by moral seriousness, national identity, and realist technology.[3] The second problem with casting Behn as the mother of the English novel arises from her particular qualities. In her pioneering essay "Aphra Behn's Love Letters , The Canon, and Women's Tastes," Judith Kegan Gardiner demonstrates why both progressive Whig literary histories of the novel's rise and feminist histories of the rise of women writers have problems accommodating their histories to the incessant sex, the occasional sexism, and the consistent Toryism of Behn's writing. Rather than putting Behn forward as the first English novelist, or the first woman novelist, Ros Ballaster demonstrates the thesis that Gardiner's essay only suggests—that Behn's novels of the 1680s translate into an English vernacular a well-developed tradition of French, Spanish, and Italian novel-writing. The scholarship of Ballaster, Salzman, and Williams puts to rest the thesis carefully cultivated within the rise of the novel tradition: that the continental novel had little importance or popularity in England, and that it should therefore not be considered an influence upon the canonical novels of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding.[4]
[3] For other critics making this claim for Behn, see Gardiner, "The First English Novel," 217; Zimbardo, "Aphra Behn"; and Duffy's introduction to Love Letters , viii.
[4] For another critic's provocative approach to resisting the designation of "the first real novel," see Doody, True Story . Doody demonstrates the indebtedness of European romances and novels to the ancient Greek and Roman novel. By documenting the scope and significance of ancient novels and the history of their publication and reception from the middle ages to the eighteenth century, she makes a strong case for considering these novels as an integral part of the print-media culture of the eighteenth century. Like Doody, I am using the term "novel" in such a way as to enlarge the textual field for the study of novels. The premises and procedures of my study, however, depart from Doody's in two ways. First, my reading of the rise of the novel thesis develops its symptomatic significance within Western modernity in two ways—as part of the Enlightenment's own account of its
Political Loyalty Through Love?
In publishing Love Letters in three novella-length parts between 1684 and 1687, Behn rearticulates prose narratives of love so as to grapple with the political crisis that threatens her culture. Against those who would subject monarchical succession to the authority of Parliament, in the name of English liberty and the rights of citizens, Behn's novel develops a royalist defense of not just one king—Charles II, then James II—but of the institution of kingship. Yet, against the practice of arranged marriages which subordinates the desire of children to the interest of families, Love Letters argues on behalf of "marriage for love." But Love Letters does more than restrain political license or promote erotic freedom. At a time when reading print narratives became the prerogative of ever greater numbers of people, Behn's novels of the 1680s do what popular print culture on the market has done ever since: they legitimize the desires of readers, by gratifying them.
By attempting to reconcile erotic license with loyalty to the monarchy, Behn emerges as one of the central mythographers of Restoration monarchy. King Charles II's libertinage, which makes his personal pleasure a very visible part of his reign, means that it is increasingly difficult over the course of his reign to represent him as an exemplary king or father, even in the most restricted and practical sense of his having provided an heir to secure a stable Stuart succession. The succession crisis refers to the struggle between Parliament and Charles II to determine whether the succession should be by strict descent through the Stuart line or by parliamentary des-
ignation to assure a Protestant, as the only guarantee of "English liberty." The rhythms of this decade-long crisis put the authority of the monarchy in play. During this period, the nation finds itself between monarchy and democracy, no longer secure in the first and not yet arrived at the second. This chronically divided country betrays a fundamental ambivalence about the proper locus of political power and engages a version of the "fort/da" game Freud describes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle : it says to its kings, first, "go away" (1649), then, "no, come back" (1660), then, "no, go away" (1688). Such a vacillation makes it increasingly difficult to assert the naturalness of a single political arrangement and exposes the way any alignment of power is historically contingent and arbitrary. Because these political antagonists use mere words, images, and ceremonies to uphold or challenged monarchy (Backscheider, Spectacular Politics ), this cultural struggle has the effect of exposing the spacey groundlessness of political authority.
In the dedication to part II of Love Letters (1684), Behn is most explicit about her design: Thomas Condon, the young member of a prominent royalist family, can only realize his full loyalty to the king by becoming an impassioned lover, and he can best do this by reading the novel she dedicates to him. Given the way Behn's story of Silvia and Philander will demonstrate the political danger of a transgressive love, why does she tell her young dedicatee to achieve political loyalty through erotic love? After the manifold proscriptions and interdictions of the Commonwealth, the Stuart monarchy seeks a certain liberation of desire. The Tory cultural mythographers, Behn prominent among them, seek to sustain a politically correct and personally satisfying synthesis of desire and loyalty, pleasure and royalism. This synthesis may be seen working in the public persona of the first earl of Rochester and in Behn's most successful play, The Rover; or, the Banished Cavaliers (1677). Yet the central action of the Love Letters—the seduction of the royalist Silvia by the rebel Philander—suggests the problem with this celebration of license. If desire follows the pathway of transgression of the law, it becomes difficult to imagine how to reconcile desire and loyalty. Behn's dedication seeks to solve this problem by teaching Thomas Condon, a politically exemplary but not very amorous adherent of the Tory cause, that the story of the love affair of a "French Whig" and his Tory sister-in-law can make him a better subject, by making him a more ardent lover.
In the dedication of Love Letters , Behn deepens love by developing a contrast: between that love that works only by gazing on dumb pictures, or on the silent charms of the body, and the love that comes from the "intrinsick value" of "wit and good humor"; the latter is "always new" like a
"Book where one turns over a new leaf every minute, and finds something diverting, in eternal new discoveries" (6). Through this comparison, Behn reroutes a superficial momentary desire for beauty—organized around superficial seeing—into a set of amorous exchanges modeled upon reading books and writing letters. Only in this way can love win variety, duration, and interiority.
By expanding the ethical claims for love, Behn articulates love with the highest political virtue: loyalty to the monarch. She closes her dedication with a personal testimonial to the value of love:
who can be happy without Love? for me, I never numbered those dull days amongst those of my Life, in which I had not my Soul fill'd with that soft passion; to Love! why 'tis the only secret in nature that restores Life, to all the felicities and charms of living; and to me there seems no thing so strange, as to see people walk about, laugh, do the acts of Life, and impertinently trouble the world without knowing anything of that soft, that noble passion. . . . [7]
Behn's dedication suggests that her novel should function as an aphrodisiac. She offers a testimonial for this drug, and prescribes it for Lord Condon, who, she claims, has resisted its attractions too long. Although the text that follows suggests the liabilities of love and why it must inevitably frustrate its pursuers, Behn here represents herself as a confirmed addict, and hopes to "turn on" Condon. In Behn's dedication, the seduction of Thomas Condon as reader becomes co-implicated with a seduction of him into love. This double seduction is supposed to tie all readers into the Tory cause she and Condon champion. However, Behn's text reproduces rather than overcomes the contradiction between libertinism and the institution of political order. The arbitrary voluntarism of her articulation of loyalty and love in this dedication helps to predict, against Behn's intentions, the failure of Silvia's love and England's loyalty in 1688.
The double provenance of Love Letters —as a polemical intervention within a political crisis, and as a translation onto the English market of a well-developed species of continental novel—indicates why we should read Love Letters in a fundamentally different way from the way we read novels of a literary type. Nothing is more crucial and symptomatic of this text's remoteness from later conceptions of literariness than its serial publication as three separate novels between 1684 and 1687. Behn responds to the popularity of the first part of Love Letters by producing two successive sequels to the novel—part II in 1685, with a modified title, Love Letters from a Nobleman to His Sister: Mixt With the History of their Adventures ; and part III, in 1687, with a new title, The Amours of Philander and Silvia .
Because Love Letters stays open to the unfolding of an historical crisis and a scandalous affair, each sequel offers the next chapter in an ongoing reallife drama. This publication history helps account for a remarkable fact: conceived as a three-episode series, the three distinct novels that comprise Love Letters were read separately by most readers during Behn's lifetime.[5] My reading demonstrates how the seriality of Love Letters enables it to function as a prototype for later media culture. So as to grasp the patent differences among the three parts of the novel, I will refer to each part by the key word in its original title that most aptly describes the general tendency of each; thus, for part I (1684), I refer to Letters , for part II (1685), Adventures , and for part III (1687), Amours . I reserve the title Love Letters for the assemblage of three parts into one novel.
Loving to the Vanishing Point of Desire; or, A Rendezvous With the Father
Behn's exaltation of erotic love has scandalized her readers ever since the seventeenth century. Because Philander and Silvia are related by marriage but still choose to act out their love, their story develops extraordinary claims to personal freedom. How can "love" motivate such absolute claims to freedom? If one reads through a good deal of the more or less conventional language with which Philander and Silvia justify an incestuous love, this is what one finds: Philander, and then Silvia, takes the other as being the thing which, if the self could possess it, would bring an incomparable bliss and the greatest freedom from the social law. Silvia and Philander shape this idea of each other into a certain enunciation: there is something about the beloved that is radically singular, and only its possession can fulfill the uniqueness of their own love. Since each lover appears as a necessity to the other, it is hardly surprising that shamelessly little persuasion is needed for Philander to win Silvia to the course of action she already desires. The difficulty of achieving the lovers' imagined bliss within any realized social exchange is evidenced by the novel's most unqualified statement of happiness. After the couple has encountered and overcome all the obstacles presented by Myrtilla, rivals such as Cesario and Foscario, and the
[5] No collection of the three novels into one volume is listed in the standard O'Donnel bibliography of Behn until 1694; this 1694 collection is labelled the "second edition" of Love Letters . Paula Backscheider has found an advertisement for a collected 1687 Love Letters , and one copy in a library at Cambridge. Starting in 1694, each edition of Love Letters is a collection of three novels into one volume (with continuous pagination), so each of the three original epistolary dedications is followed by one part of the novel.
crisis posed by Philander's first-night impotence, and after Silvia has arranged a night with Philander that promises unqualified erotic surrender, but before that night actually takes place, Philander writes a letter full of ecstatic expressions of the happiness he imagines. "Mahomet never fansied such a heaven, not all his Paradise promis'd such lasting felicity . . . as Silvia . . . Oh, I am wrap't (with bare imagination) with much a vaster pleasure than any other dull appointment can dispence . . . [T]hou sacred dear delight of my fond doating heart, oh, whither wilt thou lead me . . .?" (86) Philander has only grasped unqualified happiness, prospectively, in the form of an Oriental fantasy, entailing an absolutist possession of the very thing he wants. Philander's way of enunciating his anticipated bliss suggests the impossible temporality of this happiness. He imagines it in the future anterior: not yet come in the present, but imagined as already grasped as experience and thus already in the past.
Silvia and Philander's project is an arduous and radical one: to locate a means to pursue the thing they desire, irrespective of the law against it. Philander's tree markings align his efforts with the pastoral idea of a space and time set apart for clandestine love. In Behn's Miscellany , published in 1684, the year after the writing of the Letters , there are two poems, "A Voyage to the Island of Love" and "The Golden Age," which echo Philander's idea that some time long ago, there was a "golden age," or far away a place, where erotic freedom appeared natural and innocent. Thus, while awaiting another meeting with Silvia, Philander watches the birds at play, and envies their erotic freedom: "[H]ere's no troublesome Honour, . . . but uncontroul'd they play and sing, and Love; no Parents checking their dear delights, . . . every little Nest is free and open to receive the young fletch't Lover; . . . nor do the generous pair languish in tedious Ceremony, but meeting look, and like, and Love, imbrace with their wingy Arms, and salute with their little opening Bills . . ." (35). Warm, mobile, moist, and open, this is a place of continuous possession, where the lover lies forever on the breast of the beloved and there is no pathos of distance. This "golden age" or place for love is a phantasmatic non-place or u-topia constructed through a removal of fathers, mothers, and the law, an Edenic garden without the tree of the knowledge of good and evil or any divine interdictions. But when Philander strides toward Silvia's garden, to act upon his desire, it turns out he is going toward rather than away from the father he would elude. Like the numberless desiring protagonists in later popular fiction, Philander has a rendezvous with the Law.
As long as the love of Silvia and Philander does not move beyond the stream of love letters that passes between them, their letters seem to serve
to license that love, in spite of its violation of the law against incest. However, early in the Letters , Philander wins a rendezvous with Silvia, but proves impotent. Here, sex is not sublimated into a union of two souls, nor is it interpreted as a sign of love or merely reduced to comic bawdry. This scene allows the text to evidence the limit that is internal to their love. The external obstacles to Philander and Silvia's sexual pleasure have been overcome, but at the very brink of possession the indispensable support of their pleasure droops. Why is Philander impotent? In her introduction to the Virago edition of Love Letters , Maureen Duffy suggests that Philander's unexpected impotence is a signifier of license—Philander is "clapped out" and his impotence is "a tell-tale signal that he is not the true lover" he claims to be. There are, however, several problems with this medico-historical explanation of Philander's impotence. Nowhere in part I of Love Letters does Philander say or do anything to indicate that he is anything but extravagantly in love with Silvia. Nor does this impotence recur. In part II, the Adventures , Silvia does not get the pox her sister has warned her against, but instead gets pregnant. If we read the impotence scene with care, we can understand Philander's impotence as an index of the complex resistance—at once cultural and psychological—that menaces what we might describe as love's attempt as self-licensing.
In the letter describing the impotence scene, Philander announces that "my Silvia" is "yet" a "Maid," and wonders what "snatcht my (till then) never failing power" (57). Philander's long, anxious, vexed, and breathless letter poses and reposes this question. He wonders if he is "enchanted by some Magick Spell," if "Silvia's beauty" is "too Divine to mix with Mortal Joys." He confesses that he had "some apprehensions of fear of being surpriz'd" during his stay with her, because of the near encounter with her father in the garden, on the way to her apartment. Philander even tries to blame Silvia, who by "every tender touch still added fuel to [his] vigorous Fire," until by her "delay" it "consum'd it self in burning" (59)But all of these explanations are in turn rejected. His analytical faculty in this letter is as powerless as his physical faculties had been in bed: he writes, "I want Philosophy to make this out,"(59) and then simply describes what happened.
The scenes immediately adjacent to the impotence scene help explain the source of Philander's impotence. There are three parts to the letter narrative; the first and third describe Philander's approach to and withdrawal from Silvia's apartment, while the second, central part describes the lovers together, when Philander's impotence interrupts a sequence that seems headed for sexual gratification. Because of its literal description of sex—
with roving hands, avid gazes, arousing moans, and ambiguous resistance—this is the type of scene that scandalizes later readers, rendering Behn's novel "unreadable" for two centuries. The scene is written in a rapturous style that is a prototype of the "purple prose" with which erotic transport will be described in popular fiction from Haywood to the Harlequin romances. Philander describes himself as drinking in the sight of Silvia as she is ready for sex: "I beheld thee extended on a Bed of Roses, in Garments which, if possible, by their wanton loose negligence and gaiety augmented thy natural Charms" (58). As their kisses intensify, Silvia enunciates the "no" to his desires which he construes as a "yes": "Oh, my Philander do not injure me,—Be sure you press me not to the last joys of Love;—Oh have a care or I am undone for ever; restrain your roving hands,—Oh whither would they wander,—My Soul, my joy, my everlasting Charmer, Oh whither would you go" (58). Silvia's words offer a seventeenth-century model for those scenes of Hollywood film melodrama in which the heroine at first resists but then returns the hero's embraces. Not only does Silvia permit his freedoms, her desire is reciprocal, a fact which brings him to the height of passion when he recognizes it: "I saw (Yes Silvia not all your Art and Modesty could hide it) I saw the Ravishing Maid as much inflam'd as I; she burnt with equal fire, with equal Languishment . . ." (58–59). The restraint of "Art and Modesty," like Silvia's diaphanous garments, only augments the desirabililty of that which they would veil. But when Philander tries to possess the thing he desires, he finds "on a sudden all my power was fled . . . nor all my Love, my vast, my mighty passion, could call my fugitive vigor back again" (59). Philander's libertine ambition has received an internal check. Then the solitude of the lovers is interrupted by a "noise" at Silvia's "Chamber door" that "alarmed us."
Philander cannot explain his own impotence because he looks for reasons in the wrong place—in himself, in Silvia, in the scene of their encounter, but not in the garden outside Silvia's apartment. Philander's impotence is provoked by the figure who haunts their love tryst, Silvia's father and his own father-in-law, whom he encounters first furtively, then more insistently, on his approach to and withdrawal from Silvia's apartment. From the description of their first encounter, it is clear that the count has a competing scenario for the evening. There is a fear-inducing gothic cast to Philander's account: "coming through the Garden, I saw at the farther end a man, at least I fancy'd by that light it was a man, who perceiving the glimps of something approach from the Grove made softly towards me, but with such caution as if he fear'd to be mistaken in the person, as much as I was to approach him: and reminding what Melinda told me of an assigna-
tion she had made to Monsieur the Count—Imagin'd it him; nor was I mistaken when I heard his voice calling in low tone—Melinda—At which I mended my pace, and e're he got half way the Garden recover'd the Door, and softly unlocking it, got in unperceiv'd . . ." (58). In its description of the figure as indistinct in both gender and identity, this passage reproduces the anxiety Philander felt at the approaching man, for he only gradually pieces together the fact that it is Silvia's father. That approaching figure is described as Philander's double—just as surely on the prowl in the garden for sex, and as fearful of detection, as he.
On his escape from Silvia's apartment, Philander, disguised as Melinda, is importuned still more aggressively by the count to gratify his desires. In contrast to Philander's distressed narrative, which has circled with obsessive prolixity around the symptom of his impotence, the count hails Philander with the concise address of one who knows how to command: "Now Melinda I see you are a Maid of Honour,—Come retire with me into the Grove where I have a present of a heart and something else to make you, that will be of more advantage to you than that of Alexis . . . [D]o you design I shall take your silence for consent? If so, come my pretty Creature, let us not lose the hour Love has given us. . ." (60). When Philander would resist by declaring, "'I am no whore, sir,'" the count rejoins, "'No, . . . but I can quickly make thee one, I have my Tools about me, Sweet-heart, therefore let's lose no time but fall to work'" (61). Who is this person? He is not simply an oversexed father-in-law, nor a nobleman exercising his prerogatives upon the servants of the house. This father is described in such a way as to give him a phantasmatic force and mythical resonance, as one who should be read as a kin to the primal father Freud describes in Totem and Taboo , who controls sexual access to all the women and enjoys a pleasure that is obscene because it is utterly devoid of guilt (
The appearance of this archaic figure has the power to push Philander into a threefold feminization: he is unmanned by his impotence with Silvia; he protectively assumes the disguise of "Melinda's Night Gown and Head Dress" (60); and, finally, he becomes the object of the father's desire. Being disguised as Melinda returns Philander to the garden in precisely the correct garments to play the role of a resisting Melinda within his father[-inlaw]'s plans for an evening of pleasure. The words with which he describes his predicament suggest how this figure of the father doubles his own position: "[T]o go had disappointed him worse than I was with thee before; not to go, betray'd me" (61). But it also reverses it, for while, at the crucial instant, "Philander the Young the Brisk and Gay" (57) had all his power
vanish, the "brisk old Gentleman" presents Philander/Melinda with all-too-material evidence of his vigor: "with that he clapt fifty Guinnies in a Purse into one hand, and something else that shall be nameless into the other, presents that had both been worth Melinda's acceptance" (61). Philander, the narrative suggests, will have his hands full if he tries to compete with this man.
When Philander crosses into Silvia's garden, he discovers that ambivalently charged obstacle to his bliss, the obscene father, who would control the women for himself. This father is much more than the blocking figure that complicates the career of so many lovers in New Comedy. The father in the garden is a fear-inducing residue of the prehistoric order of pleasure—a potent, manipulative, garden-stalking, money- and penis-wielding figure who has the power to interrupt their bliss. This figure is less a real prehistoric figure than he is a phantasm of culture, circulating in this scene, enunciating the implicit "no" of the Father. Philander's very presence there—as a son-in-law who already has legal access to one of his daughters—is a transgression of the law of incest, instituted, Freud hypothesizes in Totem and Taboo , by the sons after the murder of the Father. As in the Oedipus story, the aim of desire transgresses the accustomed social limits for legitimate sexuality. The "no" of the Father haunts Philander at the moment of potential erotic success. That Philander can't forget what he'd prefer for the moment to keep outside his affair—the exteriority inside the love chamber, the "extimate" Father-in-and-of-the-Law—means that a certain negativity cannot be unbound or disentangled from the thing desired. For Philander, Silvia suddenly is the site of certain "discontents of culture" (Lacan, Seminar VII: 150) resulting from the repression of polymorphous pleasure after the killing of the Father.[6] But Silvia and Philander, as venturesome lovers feeling their own internal law of desire, find themselves at war with the discontents culture would enforce. How is this paternal monster able to enter into Silvia's chamber at the moment of the lovers' bliss, to render Philander impotent? He is partly able to do this because he is more than an empowered sexual rival who has prior claims to control the social-sexual exchanges in his household: he is also an object of identification for Philander. Philander aspires to accede to the sort of erotic mastery and freedom this father displays. Because this father is more than an external social agent, because he also makes demands from within Philander and Silvia, he can induce Philander's impotence.
[6] See Lacan, Seminar VII , on the discontents of culture focused into the "thing" desired in courtly love.
Because the obscene father that balks the lovers' desire in this scene is a phantasmatic object, his character wavers. As Silvia's feelings oscillate between a primordial fear and a more moderate social guilt, her father the count changes his demeanor. Before the impotence scene, Silvia presents her father as a dangerous discoverer of their incestuous love: "being rash, and extreamely jealous," "nothing would inrage him like the discovery of an interview like this . . . when you come by stealth; when he shall find his Son and Virgin Daughter, the Brother and the Sister so retir'd, so entertain'd.—What but death can insue, or what's worse, eternal shame?" (49) But after the father actually discovers their affair, he appears as the benign and good oedipal father, one whose moderate love produces not fear but guilt: "my Father enter'd my Cabinet, but t'was with such a look—as soon inform'd me all was betray'd to him; a while he gaz'd on me with fierceness in his eyes, which so surpriz'd and frighted me, that I, all pale and trembling, threw my self at his feet . . ." (90). What follows is a pathetic scene in which her father, instead of storming, "turn'd into a shower so soft and piercing, I almost died to see it; at last delivering me a paper—'here,' (cried he, with a sigh and trembling interrupted voice) 'read what I cannot tell thee. Oh, Silvia,' cried he, '—thou joy and hope of all my aged years, thou object of my Dotage, how hast thou brought me to the Grave with sorrow?'" (90–91)
In their approach to their rendezvous, Silvia and Philander had seemed to want nothing more than to find a utopian time warp within the historical world for the safe conduct of their love. The conventions of pastoral poetry and courtly love help to justify side-stepping the conventional moral law. These lovers feel sublimely confident of the inner good of what they desire, self-blessed and righteous in moving toward one another. Why? The eruptions of the father's "no"—most weakly in Silvia's last defense of her "honor," then in Philander's disabling impotence as the mark of an archaic paternal curse—suggest how their approach to what they desire has been prestructured as transgression. A secret movement toward the negative has been at work in their incestuous object choice: it is no accident that they are "brother" and "sister," nor that within the garden that was supposed to offer a refuge from paternal authority their father appears. Since the language of interdiction directs pleasure, it is only by going back along the trail of these interdictions that the most complete freedom is realized, and it is only there that the most exquisite pleasure is sited. The utopian place apart is an imaginary idea of unity and bliss secretly founded upon the thing—here figured as the primal father and his "no! "—it only apparently avoids. Through the transgression of the law,
the subject turns toward the thing desired as that object acquires a certain thing-like negativity.
Marriages Made in Heaven
On the way to the thing each desires, Silvia and Philander have "bad dreams": the inopportune appearance of the father, the eruption of rivals, and, after Silvia's flight and Philander's implication in a plot against the king, the menace of the Law, all intercede to separate the lovers. To balk these obstacles, Silvia abandons all for her beloved: "Parents and honour, interest and fame, farewell—I leave you all to follow my Philander" (100). To win their freedom, Silvia flees from home, hides in disguise, and escapes from paternal authority through marriage to Philander's "property," his retainer Briljard; Philander escapes from imprisonment; and they both flee the country. Near the end of the Letters , Silvia articulates a remarkably comprehensive claim to freedom in what she herself calls an "invective against Marriage" (112). Silvia's turn toward general social critique is consistent with themes developed in Behn's dramas, in which the young and beautiful brides are "bought" by wasted old city merchants, and powerful families use alliance through marriage to advance declining fortunes. With a bitter irony, Silvia's letter tags these all-too-worldly practices as marriages "made in heaven." But, after discrediting these practices, she ends her letter in a lyrically affirmative key, by conceptualizing the terms with which to legitimize her flight with Philander as a "marriage" heaven truly "designs and means." The subtle rhetorical maneuvers Silvia deploys in this defense of her flight from her family and toward Philander suggest what haunts the radical claim to personal freedom:
[T]hat's a heavenly match when two Souls toucht with equal passion meet (which is but rarely seen)—when willing vows, with serious consideration, are weigh'd and made; when a true view is taken of the Soul, when no base interest makes the hasty bargain, when no conveniency or design of drudge, or slave, shall find it necessary, when equal judgements meet that can esteem the blessings they possess, and distinguish the good of eithers love, and set a value on each others merits, and where both understand to take and pay; who find the beauty of each others minds, and rate 'era as they ought, whom not a formal ceremony binds (with which I've nought to do; but dully give a cold consenting affirmative) but well considered vows from soft inclining hearts, utter'd with love, with joy, with dear delight when Heaven is call'd to witness; She is thy Wife, Philander, He is my Husband, this is the match, this Heaven designs and means . . . [111–112]
If Silvia's critique of the cynical uses of marriage has focused upon the mercenary manipulation of the young by the old, then this passage reconfigures the economy of the marital exchange so that the lovers themselves appear as the only parties to the exchange. Rather than being traded by others, they are at once consumers and products, united by a reciprocal purchase of one another that reconciles rational assessments of intrinsic value with spontaneous feeling. The passage begins by describing the rare condition that makes such a "heavenly match" possible: "when two Souls toucht with equal passion meet." There follow five more "when" clauses describing the thoughtful activities of cognition and assessment that ground a match "when" lovers consider, weigh, take a "true view," esteem and distinguish the "good" in one another. This prepares us for the siting of the action, "where" both "understand to take and pay." This reciprocal purchase has been made by lovers who are bound not by a "formal ceremony" but by "well considered vows from soft inclining hearts, utter'd with love, with joy, with dear delight" within a final modifying condition—"when Heaven is call'd to witness." The whole passage seeks to free the performatives of the marriage ceremony—the reciprocal "I do's" of the participants—from the enabling conditions that give them legal force: a license secured; a legally ordained performer of the ceremony; no "reasons" to prevent marriage; and so on.
We may detect what menaces Silvia's staging of her marriage by taking note of the wording that culminates her general description of "a heavenly match": "She is thy Wife, Philander, He is my Husband." This double enunciation is spoken from a mixed vantage point, one that is both inside ("my") and outside ("she") the reciprocal purchase the passage had seemed to make the necessary and sufficient ground for their marriage. The first part of this clause finesses this absence of a third vantage point by simulating the words of a legally constituted authority for marriages—the words of the minister at the end of the Protestant marriage ceremony: "I pronounce that you are man and wife" (Book of Common Prayer , 304). But ending the second clause by describing the "husband" as "my" instead of "your" makes Silvia the enunciator of this crucial sentence. After this declaration of their marriage, the "this" in "this is the match, this heaven designs and means" seems to slide between the general match the passage has described and the more particular match between Silvia and Philander this letter seeks to legitimize. The sudden shift from the general to the particular enables Silvia to elide the particular difficulties that embarrass this marriage: the fact that Silvia and Philander are "brother" and "sister," which makes the arrival of a third standpoint of enunciation, especially of
a legally authorized one that is empowered to make the lovers husband and wife, impossible.
Silvia's carefully developed metaphor for their "marriage"—as a simultaneous, reciprocal purchase of each by the other—seems to free the lovers by shifting them from objects to subjects of the transaction. But the surreptitious insertion of the third authorizing position suggests the lack at the heart of this formulation. The rhetorical development by Silvia of the concept of a heavenly, because freely contracted, love is itself an implausible idealization which overwrites the logic of the negative and transgressive that has motivated their desire. The postscript appended to this very letter suggests the continued insistence of the law, breaking into an affair they would sequester and protect: "since I writ this, I say the House where I am is broken open with Warrants and Officers for me, . . . it seems they saw me when I went from my lodgings and pursued me; haste to me, for I shall need your Counsel" (112). Neither is Philander free of the problem of the father-in-and-of-the-Law. He writes to Silvia from the Bastille, telling her that "I am arrested at the suit of Monsieur the Count, your Father, for a Rape on my lovely Maid" (107). After solving the problem of the father's suit to repossess his daughter through Silvia's marriage to Briljard, Philander is arrested for his part in the novel's version of the Rye House plot of 1683, and writes that he "may fall a sacrifice to the anger of an incens'd Monarch" (114). Within the political allegory the Letters elaborates, the love of Silvia and Philander, in spite of all its pastorale excess, is proffered as a regulative model for a people's loyalty to a monarch: love and loyalty are conferred not with a "cold consenting affirmative" but with "well considered vows . . . uttered . . . with dear delight." It is not until the sequels to the Letters that the reader is confronted with the corrosive effects, for both Silvia's love and Behn's propaganda, of Silvia's defiant object choice.
Serial Entertainment
Throughout the early modern period, scandalous trials have often seeded the most avid consumption of print media.[7] On November 23, 1682, Ford, Lord Grey of Werke was brought to trial at the King's Bench by George Earl of Berkeley the father of Henrietta Berkeley, for her abduction. The charge read against Lord Grey and his five co-conspirators suggests, with delicious
[7] See Private Lives and Public Affairs , Sara Maza's study of the trials in pre-Revolutionary France, for an account of the power of trials to produce a media event through which cultural critics can read the obsessions of a culture.
hyperbole, the extent of Grey's transgression, claiming that they acted "falsely, unlawfully, and devislishly, to fulfil, perfect, and bring to effect, their most wicked, impious, and devilish intentions . . . to commit whoredom, fornication, and adultery, . . . [and] against all laws, as well divine as human, impiously, wickedly, impurely, and [in order] scandalously, to live and cohabit, did tempt, invite, and solicit . . ." (Behn, Love Letters , 444). In a private letter to Henrietta, Dr. John Tillotson, later Archbishop of Canterbury, urges her to do what she steadfastly refused to do in the trial—return to her father's side. Tillorson describes her sin as "of that heinous nature as to be for ought I know without example in this or any other Christian nation" (ibid., 465). The trial became the source of newspaper commentary and political satire and resulted in the publication of the transcript as The Trial of Ford Lord Grey (1682). In publishing the Letters , Behn gave the curious readers of the Trial more of what they wanted. Behn draws many elements of the intrigue of Silvia and Philander from the Trial , and uses the elopement to write "political propaganda" for the royalist side (Backscheider, Spectacular Politics , 110–117). For Behn, the entertainment potential of Henrietta's story arises from all that Silvia's model Henrietta does to win freedom from the father and his legal surrogates: she elopes with her brother-in-law (Lord Grey/Philander), marries his instrument (William Turner/Briljard), and, when Grey is implicated in the Rye House Plot, flees the country. Behn's central inflection of the trial comes from imagining the extent of the amorous passion necessary to do what Silvia/Henrietta does in defying "all laws, as well divine as human" (444).
As a fictionalized rendering of the action behind a scandalous trial, part I of Love Letters , the Letters (1684), is already inscribed in the logic of seriality. However, Behn wrote the Letters so it could stand alone. Paradoxically, the historical incompleteness of the love story—the elopement of Lord Grey/Philander and Henrietta/Silvia—and the political action—the succession crisis—recounted in the first part of Love Letters prompts Behn to give the novel a provisional sense of narrative closure, through the deus ex machina of Philander's surprise escape from prison, and his arrangement for Silvia to flee with him into exile. In this way, the end of the novel reaches the end of the action as summarized in the "Argument" that precedes the novel. The continuation of the narrative in the Adventures (1685) is neither required nor prefigured by any words or actions in the Letters . What intervenes to "incomplete" the Letters and call forth a sequel is its popularity.
In writing a sequel to the Letters Behn is, once again, giving her readers more of what they want. She composes the Adventures (1685) so it faces
both backward toward the Letters and forward toward its continuation in the Amours (1687). The Adventures gathers the earlier action into its own forward movement by encrypting retellings of the Letters in at least two points in the action, and by reinterpreting the action of the Letters so that Philander appears as a calculating libertine who only feigned true love for Silvia. In addition, the Adventures ends using the classic "to-be-continued" techniques for serial fiction on the market, leaving many threads of the action untied and making an explicit promise to "Faithfully relate" in a sequel what is labeled Silvia's "Fate" as an "unhappy Wanderer" (252). Although the publication of the Adventures seems the direct result of Behn's need for money and her support for the Stuart cause, her continuation of a novel that had seemed to reach closure has important implications for the future of print entertainments on the market. By developing the formal techniques for writing sequels, Behn helps to chart a path toward a market-based print-media culture that others, such as Manley, Haywood, and Richardson, would follow. By reading the sequels of the Letters , we can analyze the pleasure-seeking ethos that may be endemic to serial entertainments.
A sequential reading of these three novels allows us to grasp the heterogeneity of texts only retroactively given a limited interpretive coherence: Though the three novels never achieve a simple unity, they are not an inchoate collection. As royalist propaganda, they are like letters addressed to the shifting moods of a public, in the brace of the shifting political rhythms of the succession crisis. One cannot get these three-novels-in-one to close around the single formal structure or authorial intention that some literary critics have sought to discern in Love Letters .[8] If Love Letters does not meet the usual expectations for novels, what kind of coherence does it have? That question can only be developed by taking account of its seriality. In order to capitalize upon the success of Letters , Behn shaped each of
[8] Janet Todd's 1993 edition has performed an invaluable service to scholars by restoring the original seriality of Love Letters . By contrast, in the first modern edition of the novel, that published in 1987 by Penguin Virago, Maureen Duffy seeks to make Love Letters conform as much as possible to what the novel came to be after its institution within literary studies: a work that subordinates its invocation of history to its fictionality, that gives priority to private and domestic concerns over any political and public ones, and that provides consistent characters moving through a unified plot disclosing a focused set of themes, all of which allows readers to divine the coherent design of the author. In order to shift Love Letters toward this modern understanding of the novel, Duffy excises the most direct expressions of Behn's participation in a male political culture—the three dedications published with each installment of the novel.
its two sequels in such a way that they obeyed the logic of serial fiction on the market: each sequel meets the reader's demand for comforting continuity and enticing variation. This has enormous consequences for the way in which the novel progresses over the course of its three-year publication. Between installments, characters such as Philander and Silvia do not so much develop as undergo mutation; the plot does not unfold according to a single linear logic, but instead proliferates as a repetitive but variant ensemble of plots, often with a self-parodying resemblance; and, finally, such themes as love and loyalty undergo surprising reversal. Paradoxically, it may be most historically precise to look in Love Letters for the properties of a series that are familiar from a medium such as television.
Although the three parts of Love Letters do not develop according to principles and forms that later become mandatory for "the novel," an alternative coherence arises from the way the parts contain common events and scenes. This produces the odd resemblance to each other of three novels in a series which yet remain quite different. Each sequel repeats with a difference the general situation of the first installment: lovers seek to overcome that which blocks their desire. But in each novel, characters take different positions within this scenario. Thus, for example, Silvia is the "naive" beloved become pure lover in the Letters , but Octavio occupies this position through most of the Adventures and Amours , as Calista does in Philander's narrative (in Cologne). Philander is the conspiring seducer in the Letters and in his Cologne narrative, while Octavio and Briljard assume that role in the Adventures , and Silvia does so in the Amours . The count and Myrtilla are blocking figures in the Letters , but Philander acquires some of that role in the Adventures , the Count de Clarinau takes the role in Philander's Cologne narrative, and Sebastian assumes it in the Amours . Finally, each novel begins with a similar opening situation: at the beginning of the Letters , Silvia and Philander have just discovered their passion, and now must confront its complications; at the beginning of the Adventures , Silvia and Philander have escaped as lovers on a honeymoon and are befriended by Octavio, only to have Philander forced from her side; at the beginning of the Amours , Silvia and Octavio have escaped to a village to be married, but are immediately arrested by an agent of the Dutch parliament. When Sebastian rescues Silvia from arrest, takes her to his house, and bars his nephew Octavio from easy access to her, there is a return to the initial situation of Silvia and Philander in the Letters . Each novel contains one big, lush sex scene—a late-night assignation that is interrupted; an "honest" lover forced out of character to lie; scenes in which a lascivious father-figure is tricked by young lovers; an abduction; a harsh political verdict that separates lovers;
a duel or threatened duel; and the discovery of an illicit act of infidelity. These repetitions have the cumulative effect of putting in question claims to love made by particular characters at particular moments in the action. Further, since characters assume different positions within variable narrative sequences as they expand and transform over the course of the three novels, narrative does not support the stable identity of character. This has been a recurrent critical complaint against the novel.[9] In the Amours , the only way Behn's narrator can secure the moral coherence of Octavio's character is to remove him from the compromising flux and reflux of the serial narratives.
The Fall into Diplomatic Subjectivity
The shift in the narrative form and plot situation from the Letters to the Adventures suggests that Behn engages in something of a thought experiment. She seems to be asking herself, What would happen if my outlaw lovers were given what they have sought throughout the Letters —almost complete freedom from the restraint of fathers and the Law? Will they find that utopian place apart that they have envisioned in their letters? And what sort of novelistic narrative will such a relaxation of cultural restraint entail? The modification of the title—to the old title Love Letters from a Nobleman to his Sister is added Mixt with the History of their Adventures —only hints at the sea change that has overtaken the novel. The Letters makes the love letters between Philander and Silvia its central axis. Although the ideal communication circuit of "love letters between"—with its shared project, utopian goal, and assumed transparency of meaning—is periodically interrupted by others, the first-person letter narratives of the Letters indulges the desire-laden claims to reciprocal understanding made by the young lovers. By contrast, as a mixture of "letters" and "history," the Adventures gives the love letters of Philander and Silvia a sub-
[9] The problem with reading Love Letters through modern concepts of novelistic character may be demonstrated by a sentence from Maximillian Novak's essay, "Some Notes Toward a History of Fictional Forms: From Aphra Behn to Daniel Defoe." After alluding with approval to Barbara Hardy's Jamesian proposition that "an author's moral vision . . . must ultimately be considered part of the form," Novak diagnoses the "problem" with Behn: "Aphra Behn's problem with Love-Letters (1684–1687) arises precisely from her incapacity to sustain any consistent attitude toward her characters and their action" (127). While she views Behn much more favorably than Novak does, Duffy's efforts to legitimize Love Letters by demonstrating the consistency of character and authorial intention seems to me as misguided as Novak's condescension. Critical attempts to read Love Letters as a novel avant la lettre only end up making it appear as a novel manqué .
sidiary place to new correspondences as well as to the story of their "adventures," a word that suggests the extraordinary doings of these entangled agents.
In this new communication situation, the lovers' claim to singularity becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. The nearly omniscient third-person narrative shifts easily from one character perspective to another and frames a much more complex and varied set of communications. Now correspondence from the same site of writing becomes fractured and multiform; thus, after his flight to Cologne, Philander writes three very different letters to three different characters. In addition, reception by a single reader becomes disjunct: Silvia writes to Octavio, telling him, "We French Ladies are not so nicely ty'd up to the formalities of vertue, but we can hear Love at both ears" (142). This fundamental change in the novel's communication network entails a concomitant shift from the radical honesty of self-disclosure in secret to a rhetoric of writing that observes diplomatic protocols of self-interest and disguised intention. As correspondences bleed into one another, who shows which letter to whom and what is known to have been shown to whom become the pivots of power and influence. Within this tangle of communication, the third-person narrative of the Adventures frames letter narratives so as to qualify their truth and casts a harshly ironic light on the amorous pretensions of its "love letters." Letters are so emptied of their declared meanings that characters and the reader are encouraged to read through them, as well as the hollow pretensions of the speaker, to reach some withheld meaning.
What in the novel's situation helps explain this mutation in the circuits of communication? Many of the immediate plot complications of the Adventures result from problems carried over from the Letters : because Silvia first appears in Holland not as the openly avowed mistress of Philander, but as a fugitive disguised as a boy, she becomes the object of Octavio's fascination; because Silvia and Philander are impecunious strangers in Holland, they accept Octavio's help; and, finally, because Philander is discovered to be an enemy of the French monarch, the Dutch parliament drives him away from Silvia's sickbed into a second exile in Cologne. But these tribulations are symptomatic of a more global change in the lovers' situation. While Letters tells the story of an extravagant love seeking to overcome the authority of the father and the Law, the Adventures unfolds in a space of relative equality and horizontal affiliation in which love problems develop out of the rivalry of equals for the thing each desires. If the Letters traces the transgressive turn that afflicts absolute claims to freedom made in the father's house, the Adventures , by following the diplomatic
maneuvers of equal subjects, apparently free of fathers or the Law, takes characters through perverse deflections of desire.
To make up for the absence of binding laws between states and avoid the dangers of perpetual warfare, early modern states developed diplomacy. Essentially agonistic in structure, and guided by the wish to advance the interests of one's own state, diplomacy developed the ethos and protocols for a relatively lawful pursuit of self-interest. The first treatise on diplomacy, by François de Callières, is entitled On the Manner of Negotiating with Princes (1716). Cognate with a broad vein of Renaissance thought about the centrality of self-interest in all human behavior, developed originally by Machiavelli, Hobbes, and La Rochefoucauld, the discourse of diplomacy developed a more restrained, formalized, and rule-bound fashion to advance ends which remain essentially self-interested. The word "diplomacy" is derived from the Greek, diploma, "folded letter," in reference to the letters diplomats sent back and forth to their princes. Important early practitioners of a correspondence, diplomats disguised their communications in several ways: they folded their letters to hide their contents, which were often kept secret by being written in a ciphered code, and they discussed the most effective way to conceal their true intentions behind apparent ones. The movement between the Letters and the Adventures involves the eclipse of the idealized, honor-bound, vow-strewn correspondence Philander and Silvia had exchanged as lovers, and their development of a discourse, subjectivity, and modus vivendi appropriate to diplomacy. While this shift can be traced through Philander's change from lover to libertine, it is most decisive in Silvia's gradual change from a relatively simple amorous subjectivity to a divided diplomatic subjectivity. This metamorphosis of character is the central event in the Adventures .
Silvia as the Erotic Body of the License of Others
7How and why does Silvia change? During the short time during which Silvia and Philander live together in Holland, Silvia falls sick and Philander is forced into exile in Germany, and political imperatives explode the love dyad into a fantastic geometry of proliferating triangles: Octavio becomes the friend of Philander and the (secret) lover of Silvia; Briljard, the tame instrument of Philander and clandestine husband of Silvia, emerges as a secretly aspiring lover; Briljard seduces Silvia's lady-in-waiting, Antonett, who harbors an infatuation with Octavio; Philander seduces Calista, sister to Orlando, away from the Count of Clarinau, while continuing to profess his love for Silvia in letters to her. To complicate these heterosexual love
triangles, there is a strong homoerotic current between women as well as between men, which is quite explicitly addressed by the text. Arranged in a complex multiple entanglement, and thrown into potentially antagonistic relations, these characters must depend on one another, but their interests and desires diverge.[10]
It is only through practicing a new kind of reading, writing, and acting that Silvia wakes from the plenitude she has imagined her love with Philander to be and accepts the imperatives of her new situation. Her change begins with the lack she feels upon reading the first letter Philander writes after he takes up residence in Cologne. In her reply, Silvia complains that Philander's letter is "cold—Short—Short and cold as a dead Winters day. It chill'd my blood" (144). She feels its difference from those "soft" letters he used to write her: "Loading the Paper with fond Vows and Wishes, which e're I had read o'er another wou'd arrive, to keep Eternal warmth about my Soul . . ." (147). With continuity and softness, surplus and warmth, Philander's remembered letters delivered maternal sustenance. Cut off from that warm presence, Silvia finds herself thrown into a dim half-awareness of a sign she dare not interpret: that of Philander's infidelity. The rest of the Adventures unfolds around Silvia's approach to and withdrawal from this sign, which is familiar yet strange, impossible and
[10] I have benefited from Ellen Pollak's essay "Beyond Incest: Gender and the Politics of Transgression in Aphra Behn's Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister ." In a reading of Love Letters indebted to Eve Sedgwick's Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire , Pollak interprets Silvia's desiring relations with men as a subordinate term in a phallic and homoerotic rivalry between men—explicitly, between Philander and Silvia's father, between Philander and Cesario, and between Philander and Octavio. Silvia's "semiotic education" is said to consist in learning this (feminist) truth. Pollak confers a valuable political valence on Silvia's career as a cross-dressing libertine at the end of the Amours in two ways: by seeing it both as Silvia's savvy rejoinder to her previous inscription within a homoerotic commerce between men and as a way to expose the arbitrariness of this patriarchal sexual economy. In this way, Silvia's play with her gender acquires the sort of self-conscious performativity that Judith Butler makes the only pathway to an equivocal liberation from the constraints of heterosexual normativity. In spite of the rigor of Pollak's reading of Love Letters , I find two problems with it. First, because she makes sexuality an effect of power (not something related to power, but a mere ruse of power), Pollak cannot make any sense of the positive valence Behn gives to love in all her writings, nor can she give any credit to Behn's probing critique of Silvia's decline. Second, Pollak's understanding of gender is anachronistic in the way it assumes the centrality of sexuality as a primary radical of human identity. Foucault's writings have argued the modernity of this assumption. For me, part of the interest of Restoration texts such as Love Letters comes from the way in which their polymorphous play with gender and sex suggests an alternative to modern concepts of social identity.
necessary—in other words, uncanny. But Silvia is not yet willing to become an active interpreter. When she consults Briljard about the meaning of this letter, his own motives lead him to push her toward the knowledge she fears. Simply trying to enunciate the possibility of Philander's falsehood makes her faint: "'Oh, Briljard, if he be false—If the dear Man be perjur'd, take, take kind Heaven! the life you have preserv'd, but for a greater proof of your revenge'—And at that word she sunk into his Arms . . ." (148).
The aggressive and unseemly assault Briljard makes on Silvia's body begins a sequence of scenes in which the pursuit of self-interest transmogrifies the amorous transactions of the novel and gradually divides Silvia from an earlier, relatively naive and unreflected subjectivity. There are several stages in this progress: Briljard, suddenly in physical possession of Silvia in the privacy of her bedroom, feels a surge of desire for her. His kinky "rape upon her Bosom" (149) while Silvia is unconscious takes him to the point of actual rape, when Octavio and Antonett suddenly interrupt them. Briljard quiets Antonett's suspicions by starting an affair with her. Octavio's suspicions, both in Briljard's presence and after his withdrawal, so alarm Silvia that she initiates her own investigation. Alone again with Briljard, she uses a tour de force of stage acting to draw him into a confession of his physical assault upon her. Over the arch of this sequence of scenes, Silvia goes from being the pathetic victim of the plots of others—Philander, Briljard, and Octavio—to being a diplomatic player with a scheme of her own: to uncover the proof of Philander's infidelity.
As Silvia's role in the action becomes more active, her body goes from being the passive thing that attracts the designs of others to being the surface for her own artful inscriptions. When Silvia faints at the thought of Philander's infidelity, Briljard seeks to open her body to his desiring arms, hands, lips, and eyes. The argumentative structure of this passage from the third-person narrative gives a justifying turn to Briljard's attempt on Silvia by allowing the reader to relax his or her own censor and consume, with a certain shocked pleasure, an action which is at once tawdry and improbable.
. . . she sunk into his Arms, which he hastily extended as she was falling, both to save her from harm and to give himself the pleasure of grasping the lovely'st body in the World to his Bosome, on which her fair face declin'd cold, dead and pale, but so transporting was the pleasure of that dear burden, that he forgot to call for, or to use any aid to bring her back to life, but trembling with his love and eager passion he took a thousand joys, he kist a thousand times her Luke-warm lips, suckt her short sighs, and ravisht all the sweets her bosome (which but guarded with a loose
Night Gown) yielded his impatient touches. Oh, Heaven who can express the pleasures he receiv'd, because no other way he ever cou'd arrive to so much dareing . . . urg'd by a Cupid altogether malicious and wicked, he resolves his cowardly Conquest, when some kinder God awaken'd Silvia, and brought Octavio to the Chamber door. [148]
This passage is rife with casuistical excuses. It begins by recounting the "lucky" circumstances that suddenly bring Briljard the very thing he desires, with a pleasure so great he "forgot" to call for help. Then the narrative deploys the trope of an apostrophe to the absent rhetorical powers necessary to express a pleasure so extreme—"Oh, Heaven who can express . . ." This apostrophe prepares for the long, momentum-gathering period which describes how Briljard develops the transgressive impulse to carry his "rape upon [Silvia's] Bosom" to the point of actual rape, before Octavio's interruption. First Briljard feels the magnetism of this accessible body, despairs "by fair means to win her," recalls the happy circumstance of her having secured the door herself, uses the nearness of the bed to move her body there, remembers witnessing the "killing joys" she had given Philander, and then "resolves his cowardly Conquest." Several factors alibi the moral baseness of this attempted rape. The syntax of this long period, built out of a chain of hurried paratactic clauses, indexes the automatism of that passion that takes control of the subject's action. A fortuitous chain of circumstances naturalizes the taking of this "luckey opportunity." The invocation of mythic agents ["love," "Cupid"] and the use of euphemism ["killing joys," "conquest"] allows the narrative to soften Briljard's brutal transgression of the most basic codes of civilized love.
Why does the narrator alibi and naturalize an action she clearly abhors?[11] Such a narrative allows this unseemly action to initiate an expansion of the novel's libidinal economy around Silvia's vulnerable body. Thus the bare imagination of what has transpired between Briljard and Silvia in her locked bedroom eroticizes the gaze of the jealous Octavio as he scans Silvia's bedroom for signs of a sexual transgression. His pointed interrogation of her forces her to look at herself in the mirror, in which the disarray of her dress serves as evidence that she's been the object of an erotic attack she cannot remember.
Briljard's "rape" upon Silvia's bosom, Octavio's investigatory accusations, and Silvia's response precipitate a change in Silvia. She is no longer
[11] Though for much of the Adventures this gender is downplayed, her gender is suggested here, and later, during Octavio's investment, the narrator's identification with female witnesses makes her gender explicit.
willing to play the forlorn and jilted lover. Her situation requires that she employ the sort of conscious manipulation that has most characterized Briljard, the "low" character from whom she would differentiate herself. Silvia's investigation is advanced in a scene containing the quick wit and ingenious reversals familiar from Restoration stage comedy. To win an amusing tit-for-tat revenge for Briljard's assault on her body, Silvia not only must act what she does not feel, she must also make cynical use of her body as a lure to a desire in which she has no share:
. . . meeting [Briljard] with a smile, which she forc'd she cry'd, "How now Briljard, are you so faint hearted a soldier, you cannot see a Lady dye without being terrifi'd." "Rather Madam," (replied he blushing a new) "so soft hearted I cannot see the loveliest person in the World fainting in my Arms, without being disorder'd with grief and fear, beyond the power of many days to resettle again." At which she approacht him, who stood near the door, and shutting it, she took him by the hand and smiling cry'd, "And had you no other business for your heart but grief and fear, when a fair Lady throws her self into your Arms, it ought to have had some kinder effect on a person of Briljards youth and complexion." And while she spoke this she held him by the wrist, and found on the suddain his pulse to beat more high, . . . "Oh Madam do not urge me to a confession that must undo me, . . ."—"You that know your sentiments may best instruct me by what Name to call em, and you Briljard may do it without fear.—You saw I did not struggle in your Arms, nor strove I to defend the kisses which you gave."—"Oh Heavens" cry'd he transported with what she said, "is it possible that you cou'd know of my presumption and favour it too? . . .; my hands, my eyes, my Lips were tir'd with pleasure, but yet they were not satisfied, oh there was joys beyond those ravishments of which one kind Minute more had made me absolute Lord:" "Yes and the next" said she, "had sent this to your heart"—Snatching a Penknife that lay on her Toylite, where she had been writing, which she offered so near to his bosome that he believ'd himself already pierc'd, so sensibly killing were her words, her motion, and her look, he started from her and she threw away the Knife, and walking a turn or two about the Chamber, while he stood immovable with his eyes fixt to earth, and his thoughts on nothing but a wild confusion . . ." [158–159]
Silvia uses her language and touch to move Briljard toward the disclosure of what he had done to her. First, she playfully asks him about his fainthearted response to her fainting; then she stokes his desire by talking dirty with innuendo and double meaning; she uses her touch to turn him into the sensitive and responsive body whose pulse races and breast heaves with sighs. Finally, Silvia draws a full disclosure by pretending a consciousness of his assault. When, in his unsuspecting effusions, Briljard describes the
pleasures he has stolen from her, and the still greater pleasures he barely missed, Silvia responds with her "killing" "words." Part of the pleasure of this scene comes from the way Silvia pulls off a full reversal of power positions: here the ravisher is ravished, the rape upon her bosom is repaid with a theft of his secret desire.
This scene offers its reader the pleasure of the battle of transparent egos. By the end of Silvia's successful investigation, nothing remains hidden. Thus she turns feminine "weakness" and vulnerability to advantage, and emerges as the masterful actress with a resolute heart. But behind her witty manipulation of appearances, Silvia prototypes the central figure of the formula fiction of the first decades of the next century: the self-interested ego pursuing personal advantage at the expense of others. Her exposure of Briljard is not an isolated set piece. Coming at the end of a sequence which begins with Briljard's attack on her bosom, this scene inaugurates Silvia's full participation in the self-interested manipulation and disguise characteristic of a diplomatic subjectivity. As if she understood that Silvia's use of trickery and disguise requires a fundamental shift in her character, the narrator shows a certain awkwardness in introducing Silvia's stratagem: "she call'd up all the Arts of Women . . . [and] assumed an Artifice, which indeed was almost a stranger to her heart, that of Gilting [Briljard] out of a secret which she knew he wanted generosity to give handsomely . . ." (157–158). But with the success of this "artifice," Silvia cannot return to the sort of naiveté and innocence that had been ascribed to her prior to this sequence in the novel. The reduction of love to a subordinate term in the struggle of egos contending for power becomes the underlying assumption of the libertine narrative Philander sends Octavio, describing his sexual intrigue with Calista. At the same point in the narrative, Antonett delivers her lecture to Silvia on the delicate art of reconciling love and interest. She urges Silvia to view love as a species of gambling, whereby even if you lose, you must keep on playing. By analogizing love and gaming, Antonett assumes the fungibility of desire, as well as the substitutability of erotic objects. The resultant acceleration of the circulation of the subject as an object of desire offers a strategy for maximizing Silvia's value. But by emphasizing the compulsive cast to gambling and loving—whether one wins or loses, one must "continue the game"—Antonett's words of advice suggest the more sinister turn of the subsequent action. While her advice has a limited aim—to nudge Silvia toward taking advantage of the opportunities provided by Philander's absence and Octavio's passion—its ludic characterization of love suggests the pathway that the novel's action takes as it moves from "love" to "adventures" to "amours." Once Silvia begins diplomatic negotiations, in order to
protect her interests among a field of contending egos, she cannot stop. Life becomes a continuous negotiation.
Extreme Masquerade
Two-thirds of the way through the Adventures , there is a scene that climaxes the unbridled rivalry of desiring subjects. Placed near the center of Love Letters , it marks a crucial shift from the "love" that dominates the Letters and the erotic intrigue that will predominate in the Amours . In a scene of extreme masquerade no one appears as himself or herself to others; instead, four major characters arrive to receive, but none finds the thing he or she desires. This scene is produced at the intersection of two designs shaped around disguise and substitution (Silvia's and Briljard's) and an accident: Octavio is called away by his prince, and then returns unexpectedly, at the very moment when he will see Silvia's (apparent) betrayal of him. But this extreme masquerade is the culmination of a much broader set of incidents precipitated by Philander's letter narrative to Octavio. As a proof of his declared love, Silvia demands that Octavio hand over the letter narrative from Philander ("Come, come, produce your credentials . . ." [195]). She hints with gay eyes that if Philander has proven false she will reward Octavio with what he wants. Octavio wavers between love and honor. Silvia's fit of rage with Octavio means she does not notice the moment at which he relents and would have handed her the letter. Letters passing between Silvia and Octavio negotiating the exchange of Philander's letter for sex with Silvia are intercepted by Briljard. For Octavio's delicate and indirect proposals, Briljard substitutes forged responses that are crassly direct. In anger at this indelicacy, Silvia makes a perverse object choice. Instead of enjoying the lover to whom she is becoming increasingly attracted, Silvia plots the maid-substitution trick with Antonett so as to dupe Octavio out of his letter. Octavio freely volunteers Philander's letter to Silvia in advance of any assignation, but Briljard intercepts it and takes it to the rendezvous he has planned under Octavio's signature. Briljard prepares for his night with Silvia by taking a philter to enhance his potency. When the scene unfolds, it is narrated from the vantage point of Octavio, the only character who does not play someone else, but who instead watches as a voyeur off stage. Briljard (thought to be Octavio) delivers the letter to Silvia (thought to be Antonett), and is led up to her (Antonett's) mistress's bed chamber to have his reward with Antonett (thought to be Silvia). Octavio seems to receive ocular proof of Silvia's infidelity. Because he's taken an overdose of "love philtre," Briljard (as Octavio) is impotent,
leaving both himself and Antonett frustrated in the (imagined) gratification of their desires. Downstairs, Silvia weeps over the letter that proves Philander's infidelity, while Octavio waits outside to confront the unknown rival for Silvia's favors, who never appears.
Because this scene is controlled and comprehended by no one agent within the novel, because none even knows what is happening in the scene as it unfolds, and because it overthrows the design of all of its participants, this scene produces disturbances in the narrative that are only cleared up by the end of the Adventures . What is happening is only known, at the time of its happening, to the narrator and reader: we see Briljard's forgery substitutions (but no one else does); we see Silvia's substitutions (as only Antonett does); and so, in following the assignation from Octavio's vantage point, we see him mis-seeing. It is only after a protracted exchange of letters, which at first merely compound their misunderstandings, that Silvia and Octavio at last discover the truth.
What is the meaning of this scene? At the moment when the characters would possess the thing they desire, it vanishes before their eyes. Hoping against reason for a sign that would vindicate Philander's love, Silvia reads the letter that proves his infidelity; Briljard gains Silvia (actually Antonett) but is impotent; Antonett receives Octavio (actually Briljard) but is left dissatisfied; Octavio comes to Silvia's apartment for love and sees another take his place. Through this action, each experiences the collapse of the sublime object of their desire. In a space where there is no law to prohibit access to the object one desires, in the space of mobile desire—the masque—the negative appears in a particular form: desire is not reciprocal but chiasmic. Everyone gets double-crossed. Thus the perverse detouring of desire: Antonett (together with the narrator) desires Octavio, who, with Briljard, desires Silvia, who desires Philander, who desires Calista . . . This series is open-ended. Although Silvia and Octavio use mutual disclosures to recover from the collapse of value this scene in the Adventures effects, the scene rehearses the pure erotic agon that becomes central in the Amours . Then each character either enters the contest to take over the phallic function of shaping the direction of a seedy common action, or simply withdraws.
The Return of the Father
By imagining potentially utopian spaces of relative equals, like the masquerade and the communal living arrangement, the central narrative of Adventures allows its characters to pursue the thing they desire with remarkable freedom. Obstacles to gratification erupt from among the
rivals. By contrast, the Amours is marked by the return of the central obstacle to erotic bliss that is present in the Letters —the specter of paternal authority, in both its public political form and its private familial guise. At the same time, the narrative of the Amours gradually draws back from the close identification with the subject positions and emotional investments of particular lovers. Readers are given the effect of a reverse zoom. In other words, what gradually asserts itself is the viability of alternative vantage points from which to view and evaluate the actions of the many different lovers of Love Letters . This is most literally the case in the passage near the beginning of the Amours in which the narrator describes Silvia's disguised rendezvous with Octavio in a small Dutch village. The whole account is told from the vantage point of the spy sent by the Dutch parliament. Because of Briljard's calculated accusations, the Dutch spy suspects Octavio of consorting with French spies against the House of Orange. While the messenger is at first skeptical of the charge against someone of Octavio's character, his doubts fade as he hears that Octavio is waiting in the inn for two French gentlemen:
He waits at some distance from the House unseen, tho' he could take a View of all; he saw Octavio come often out into the Balcony and look with longing Eyes towards the Road that leads to the Town; he saw him all rich and gay as a young Bridegroom, lovely and young as the Morning that flattered him with so fair and happy a Day; at last he saw two Gentlemen alight at the Door, and giving their Horses to a Page to walk a while, they ran up into the Chamber where Octavio was waiting, who had already sent his Page to prepare the Priest in the Village Church to marry them. [263]
When the arresting officer serves his warrant "to secure him as a Traytor to the State, and a Spy for France ," the spy's address to the disguised Silvia is comically inappropriate. But although the spy misconstrues the action, the arresting officer still functions as the blocking figure in the romance of Silvia and Octavio. The lovers' "amour" is always already entangled with competing social interests. By representing Dutch political authority, this episode folds the love story back into the active political horizon that had been latent since Philander's exile from Holland in the Adventures . At the same time, Briljard's attempt to use political intrigue to separate the lovers reactivates the oedipal tensions of the text. When Silvia and Octavio are in the power of the Dutch parliament, their love becomes subject to the moral judgments and strictures of Octavio's prudish old uncle Sebastian. Although Sebastian rescues them from Briljard's false charges, he warns Octavio to break off this affair, because its "wild extravagances" have
ruined his reputation in the provinces. When, through a reversal that comedy so often inflicts on those who are skeptical about love, Sebastian himself falls in love with Silvia, the lovers are returned to the coordinates of oedipal rivalry, interdiction, and the obscenely desiring father whom Philander and Silvia had confronted in the Letters . In pursuing Silvia, Sebastian begins as a comically inept elderly novice, but quickly turns on Octavio, suspects him of having sex with Silvia, and becomes arbitrary, vengeful, and angry, to the point of driving Octavio from Silvia's company. As the zeal of blocking "fathers" such as Sebastian and the Count of Clarinau becomes blatant, the rebellion of the younger generation becomes aggressive. When Octavio watches in hiding as Sebastian and Silvia go toward their planned marriage, his feelings of envy, desire, and murderous intent express primal fantasies of oedipal victory over the father. When, in the midst of dangerously transgressive sex with Silvia in Sebastian's house, Sebastian is accidently killed by Octavio's pistol, which discharges during a struggle, Octavio's oedipal wish is realized, but in such a way as to keep his "virtue" intact.
The reactivation of the analogy between love and politics in the Amours , and the return of accounts of the rebellion led by Cesario that lay behind the action in the Letters , does not mean that we get much by way of official history; quite the contrary, in fact. A secret history of events leading up to the Monmouth Rebellion entails oedipally fraught love stories which comport quite easily with the "amours" of the central narrative. Thus, when Tomaso tells the story of Cesario, and Briljard continues the narrative later on, we get an account of the progress of a rebellion, involving Cesario's temporary reconciliation with his father the king, the progress of Cesario's fatal passion for the older Hermione, his perverse failure to break with the rebellion, and the machinations surrounding leadership of the rebellion, whereby Hermione and Fergusano compete for control of Cesario's will. Because Cesario's love object, Hermione, is an aging busy-body, and because of the way in which Cesario persists in an attempt to kill his own father, Cesario appears as one whose mother fixation evidences a failure to surmount his oedipal desires. In vacillating between the council of Fergusano and that of Hermione before his invasion, Cesario seems to be a child lost without his father. Like Silvia, he is drawn into a series of unsavory compromises that gradually engulf him in a defeat which appears tragically unnecessary. Just as Silvia's developing libertinage causes her to lose touch with the restraints of a loyal love, so Cesario loses touch with the natural attachments to father, custom, and law. In both, the result is the same: a riot of self-interest and delusion. These "amours" are
seen from the outside, so less weight is given to any personal subject position. When Tomaso recounts the way he hides from the king's men who try to capture him during a visit to his lover—he conceals himself on the top of a huge four-poster bed (339)—love escapades acquire anecdotal value as entertainment. Stories of amorous political intrigues take on the same fictional cast as Philander's embedded narrative of the seduction of Calista. Because the number of stories of intrigue and amours keeps increasing, and because we are viewing them from a greater distance, the Amours develops a pervasive sense of irony.
Magical Sex
As the Amours becomes an anthology of amours, as each becomes more ingeniously fictional than the last, and as the echoes between the different intrigues become evident, repetition corrodes the novelty, uniqueness, and value Behn and her narrator have tried to ascribe to love throughout the first two novels of Love Letters . In order to develop a counterforce to the comic neutralization of love's power, the narrator uses the mastery of her own language to offer the reader the magic of sex. Thus, after Silvia and Octavio's arrest, but before Uncle Sebastian becomes a troublesome rival, the narrator moves the lovers toward another big scene of sexual bliss. Because of similar yet distinct external conditions, this scene at once resembles and differs from the erotic scenes between Silvia and Philander in the Letters and between Philander and Calista in the Adventures . The narrator's asymmetrical treatment of Silvia and Octavio indexes the central dilemma of the Amours —that of how to narrate the individual's (relentless) pursuit of pleasure at the same time that the narrator affirms the higher ethical potential of loyal love. While the Letters allow Silvia and Philander to argue the higher spiritual value of love and the Adventures stages a cynical tongue-in-cheek affirmation of sexual pleasure through Philander's seduction of Calista, the narrator of the Amours describes a scene of magical sex in order to defend her new pair of lovers—Silvia and Octavio—from the criticism that her own narrative breeds.
The narrator sketches the conditions for the climactic erotic union of Silvia and Octavio. First, Octavio has been warned by his uncle of the political dangers of dalliance with the married Silvia, and Silvia is still true to the vows of fidelity she swore to Philander in imagining "marriages made in heaven." The narrator describes the qualities in Silvia that make her receptive to Octavio's love yet also a love object who will eventually torment and jilt him. This account of Silvia's character swerves away from
familiar ethically neutral clichés about "woman," and toward a much more tendentious remarking of Silvia's use of sex to gain power:
. . . and we must conclude Silvia a maid wholly insensible, if she had not been touch'd with Tenderness, and even Love it self, at all these extravagant marks of Passion in Octavio; and it must be confess'd, she was of a Nature soft and apt for Impression; she was, in a word, a Woman. She had her Vanities, and her little Fevibleses, and lov'd to see Adorers at her Feet, especially those in whom all things, all Graces, Charms of Youth, Wit and Fortune agreed to form for Love and Conquest: She naturally lov'd Power and Dominion; and it was her Maxim, That never any Woman was displeased to find she could beget Desire. [278]
While the narrator is unqualified in her praise of Octavio, the characterization of Silvia is much more equivocal. The narrator does not appear to see any contradiction in declaring Silvia to be one "touch'd" with "Tenderness" and "even Love" at the same time that she "naturally" "lov'd Power," and spouts a maxim to justify this manipulative use of others' desire. Yet even here, early in the Amours , as Silvia is falling into love and sex with Octavio, the narrator remarks the tendencies that will explain her development, over the course of the Amours , into an unprincipled, power-hungry woman of intrigue.
The narrator describes the punctual contingent moment when the lovers spontaneously lose themselves in sex. Here, the narrator marshals all her own rhetorical powers to defend the erotic necessity of this moment against the skepticism about the spiritual union of two souls that earlier moments in this series inevitably provoke. This casuistical defense of the lovers' transgression, through the elaborate ebb and flow of syntax and idea, allows the narrator to practice her own seduction of the reader:
[Octavio] longs and languishes for the blessed Moment that shall give him to the Arms of the ravishing Silvia, and she finds but too much yielding on her part, in some of those silent lone Hours, when Love was most prevailing, and feeble Mortals most apt to be overcome by that insinuating God; so that tho' Octavio could not ask what he sigh'd and dy'd for; tho' for the Safety of his Life, for any Favours; and tho', on the other side, Silvia resolv'd she would not grant, no, tho' mutual Vows had passed, tho' Love within pleaded, and almost unresistible Beauties and Inducements without, tho' all the Powers of Love, of Silence, Night, and Opportunity, tho' on the very Point a thousand times of yielding, she had resisted all: But oh! one Night; let it not rise up in Judgement against her, you bashful modest Maids, who never yet try'd any powerful Minute; nor you chast Wives, who give no Opportunities: One night—they lost themselves in
Dalliance, forgot how very near they were to yielding, and with imperfect Transports found themselves half dead with Love, clasp'd in each others Arms, betray'd by soft Degrees of Joy to all they wished. 'Twould be too Amorous to tell you more; to tell you all that Night, that happy Night produc'd; let it suffice that Silvia yielded all, and made Octavio happier than a God. At first he found her weeping in his Arms, raving on what she had unconsidering done; and with her soft Reproaches chiding her ravished Lover, who lay sighing by, unable to reply any other way, he held her fast in those Arms that trembled, yet with Love and new-past Joy; he found a Pleasure even in her Railing, with a Tenderness that spoke more Love than any other Language Love could speak. Betwixt his Sighs he pleads his Rights of Love, and the Authority of his solemn Vows; he tells her that the Marriage Ceremony was but contrived to satisfy the Ignorant, and to proclaim his Title to the Crowd, but Vows and Contracts were the same to Heaven: He speaks—and she believes; and well she might, for all he spoke was honourable Truth. He knew no Guile, but uttered all his Soul, and all that Soul was Honest, Just, and Brave; thus by degrees he brought her to a Calm. [279–280]
In order for Silvia to yield "all," and for Octavio to utter "all his Soul," each of the characters within the scene, and the narrator in the way she narrates the scene, must break through manifold reticences and interdictions. Before sex, Octavio cannot "ask what he sigh'd and dy'd for"; though dismayed to find herself yielding "too much," "Silvia resolv'd she would not grant [Favours], . . . she had resisted all." Within the ellipsis of this period, which describes Silvia's successful resistance of her own desire, we get a series of four embedded "tho'" clauses that build up a counterpressure to her abstinence by describing all that pushes her toward yielding: "tho' mutual Vows had passed," "tho' Love within pleaded, and almost unresistible Beauties and Inducements without," "tho' all the Powers of Love, of Silence, Night, and Opportunity," and "tho' on the very Point a thousand times of yielding." Here the old metaphor of the lady's heart as a besieged fortress has been psychologized so as to make her mind the site of an affective ambivalence.
In a sudden reversal, the erotic knot is cut with the sharp punctuality of one interjection: "But oh! one Night." This "one Night" locates the occasion of the lovers' lapse, while the "oh!" is the ejaculation of the narrator, spoken in sympathy for the distress supposed to be felt by the heroine and her lover. Before describing what happened one night, the narrator offers a casuistical defense of her characters, addressed to the two types of women supposed to be most severe in assessing this moment in the heroine's lapse—"you bashful modest Maids, who never yet try'd any powerful Minute; nor you chast Wives, who give no Opportunities." Here, differ-
ences in perspective and circumstance are used to alibi in advance the transgressive moment the narrator then describes. In the way Behn describes not what "he" or "she" did, but what "they" did "one Night," two agents become one, and there is a shift from active to passive voice: "they lost . . . forgot . . . they found themselves . . . clasped in each others arms, betrayed . . . to all they wished." Who or what betrayed them to all they wished? The syntax and rhythm of this sentence are carefully shaped by the narrator to shift the lovers, without any intervening conscious intention, from collective agents to passive recipients of a consummated passion. Paradoxically, they are brought to "all they wished," by something other than themselves, which is at once everything (in the situation) and nothing (in their conscious intention). This is the alibi and riddle of their passion.
The erotic rhythm of this passage comes from the incessantly renewed tension between law and desire, the "no" and "yes" spoken not just in the lovers' hearts, but in the narrator's language as well. Thus the narrator does not simply yield "all" of the scene she claims to know. Instead, she withholds a part of it by introducing her own excisions into her representation of the "all" that Silvia yields as sex and that Octavio returns as vows. The narrator resorts to oblique suggestion, euphemism, and ellipsis to censor the description of sex in the name of propriety: "'Twould be too Amorous to tell you more; to tell you all that Night, that happy [i.e., lucky] Night produc'd; let it suffice that Silvia yielded all, and made Octavio happier than a God." The hyperbole and euphemism of "happier than a God" and the repetition of "Night, that happy Night" are flourishes that denote the excessive gratifications of the moment at the same time that they observe the propriety of a narrator who won't tell the "all" she insists was "yielded."
With the words "At first he found her weeping," the narrator returns the characters and reader to the ordinary present from that utopian time-outside-time of sex. In this moment, each lover articulates the contradiction between gratification and guilt. Silvia weeps and raves, and utters "soft reproaches" to Octavio, whose body expresses his passion, while Octavio holds her "fast," his "Arms" "trembled, yet with Love and new-past Joy . . ." (279). The "railings" of Silvia, who is swept up within ambiguous countercurrents of speech and body, please Octavio with a "Tenderness that spoke more Love than any other Language Love could speak" (280). First speechless before these reproaches, Octavio then delivers a highminded moral defense of what they have done. This vindication of the extreme marriage of two hearts should have a familiar ring to the careful reader of Love Letters . It recapitulates the critique and defense of "marriages made in heaven" that Silvia had developed in her letter to Philander after
her elopement (see above). At the center of this defense is the idea of the separate legitimacy of the exchange of lovers' vows: "he tells her that the Marriage Ceremony was but contrived to satisfy the Ignorant . . . but Vows and Contracts were the same to Heaven: He speaks—and she believes" (280).
The simple and vivid reciprocity of "He speaks—and she believes" should bring the conceptual development of the passage and scene to a close. But because this defense of illicit love repeats an earlier defense of the illicit love of Silvia and Philander, and because, in receiving Octavio's vows here, Silvia is violating the vows she made in her earlier letter to Philander, Octavio's defense has a corrosive effect on the uniqueness he is claiming for his own love and fidelity. The singularity of vows is imperiled by the machinery of textual repetition. Perhaps sensing that she cannot control this dramatic irony at her hero's expense, the narrator makes an extraordinary gesture. She draws upon her privileged relationship to the temporality of the narrative diagesis—she knows where the story she is telling is going to end—and deploys her powers as a quasi-omniscient narrator to enter the mind of her protagonist and offer a guarantee of the truthfulness of Octavio's vows. Silvia is right to believe Octavio's vows because, the narrator assures us, "all he spoke was honourable Truth. He knew no Guile, but uttered all his Soul, and all that soul was Honest, Just, and Brave; thus by degrees he brought her to a Calm" (280). These words of the narrator propel Octavio into a sphere beyond social compromises; his vows, and the narrator's confirmation of them, are not only a warranty against infidelity; they also assure the reader that if things should go wrong the fault must be found elsewhere—most obviously in the receiver of these vows, Silvia. Further, this passage suggests the gendered desire at work in the narrator's idealization of Octavio. The only way that there can be a man's love that is not a hostage to fortune, the only way that there can be a man immune to the love-destroying philandering of a Philander, is for there to exist someone like Octavio: someone whose truth, soul, honesty, justice, and bravery can be fully articulated; one, in short, whose "all" can be focused into a vow spoken in one moment, but that is good for all time. Octavio is the character who, because he has the "right to make promises," affirms the speculative possibility of a "marriage made in heaven." Throughout the rest of the Amours , Octavio becomes a vehicle for that wish and idea.
Disavowing Silvia in the Name of Love
Behn's narrator seems to recognize that the ethical coherence of Love Letters can only be sustained by splitting the characters of the novel between those who can honor vows (Octavio and Calista) and those to
whom vows are merely a way to dupe others (Philander and Silvia). How much is one to weight this final enunciation of the value of vows ? Aphra Behn seems to try, in the series of novels called Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister , to post love, and the ecstatic pleasures of sex, as a counterweight to the egotism and me-firstism implicit in the desire for freedom. Love seems, at points in this text, to offer a magical reconciliation of freedom and necessity, bodily impulse and circulation within a social symbolic. However, the action of Love Letters —in which singularity is overtaken by repetition and love objects prove all too open to substitution—suggests the difficulty of this reconciliation. Even Octavio's valedictory claims for his vows have something implausible about them: they are, as he and the narrator seem to realize but not be able to fully accept, hopelessly out of tune with the ruling ethos of the Amours . If Behn's Love Letters gives considerable reign to an ethos of personal freedom from instituted authorities, it also explores the question—given special urgency by the succession crisis—of what could ground human relations freed from instituted ethical authority by a desire open to endless substitution of erotic objects. The final assertion of the value of vows is entirely consistent with the royalist argument that too many subjects of the Stuart monarch were finding ways to disavow their vows of loyalty to their king. But, within the central love story of Love Letters , this solution is practiced in the mode of paradox: Octavio can only affirm the value of his love by disavowing the woman he loves.
The plot of the Amours attempts to resolve the discrepancy between a cynical social practice and the values Behn is determined to assert. At the same time that Octavio is withdrawn from the amorous action of the Amours , Behn makes him the vehicle for affirming the possibility of loyal love. This solution is orchestrated in the lavish stagecraft of Octavio's admission into the monastic Order of Saint Bernard. There, the narrator as subject comes to the fore as an eye-witness who speaks in the mode of personal testimony: "I my self went among the rest to this Ceremony" (379). Aligning herself throughout the ceremony with the pathetic responses of female observers, the narrator writes, "For my part, I swear I was never so affected in my Life, with any thing, as I was at this Ceremony" (383). What affects the narrator is a gorgeous baroque ceremony, offered as a set piece to the reader, that takes Octavio heroically beyond Silvia and all she has come to represent. For the narrator, this elevation of Octavio into "heaven" confirms his special grace and his spiritual movement beyond the compromises of amorous intrigue. By enfolding Octavio within a pious religious spectacle, the narrator consoles herself for the loss of the happy union between Silvia and Octavio that the narrative had seemed to
promise: "for my part, I confess, I thought my self no longer on Earth; and sure there is nothing gives us an Idea of real Heaven, like a Church all adorn'd with rare Pictures, and the other Ornaments of it . . ." (381). After the religious service but before his investiture, Octavio is described as kneeling to submit his "delicate Hair" to the scissors of a "Father": "at which a soft Murmur of Pity and Grief, fill'd the Place: Those fine Locks, with which Silvia had a thousand times play'd, and wound the Curles about her snowy Finger, she now had the dying Grief, for her Sake, for her Infidelity, to behold sacrificed to her Cruelty, and distributed amongst the Ladies, who at any Price would purchase a Curl" (382–383). Parts of Octavio's body circulate as relics of a profane hagiography. This pathetic climax of the sacrifice of youth and beauty not only fixes blame squarely on Silvia; by cutting and distributing Octavio's locks for a price, the erotic pleasure of the couple is lost, yet at the same time recuperated, in the mode of entertainment.
While the generous, sympathetic language of the narrator elevates Octavio to sublime heights, Silvia receives all the rigors of the narrator's skeptical critique. This results in a drastic downward revision in Silvia's value. In the passage that describes her response to Octavio's investiture, the narrator not only displays Silvia's vanity and selfishness, she also goes from a fairly straightforward description of Silvia's suffering to ironic qualifications of Silvia's grief, to generalizations about Silvia's "wretched" qualities, and to a rather surprising reinterpretation of Silvia's first love for Philander:
It was a great while before [Silvia] could recover from the Indisposition which this fatal and unexpected Accident had reduced her: But as I have said, she was not of a Nature to dy for Love; and charming and brave as Octavio was, it was perhaps her Interest, and the loss of his considerable Fortune, that gave her the greatest Cause of Grief. Sometimes she vainly fancied that yet her Power was such, that with the Expence of one Visit, and some of her usual Arts, which rarely fail, she had power to withdraw his Thoughts from Heaven, . . .: But again she wisely considered, tho' he might be retriev'd, his Fortune was disposed of to Holy Uses, and could never be so. This last Thought more prevailed upon her, and had more convincing Reason in it, than all that could besides oppose her Flame; for she had this wretched Prudence, even in the highest Flights and Passions of her Love, to have a wise Regard to Interest; insomuch that it is most certain, she refused to give herself up intirely even to Philander; him, whom one would have thought nothing but perfect Love, soft irresistable Love could have compell'd her to have transgress'd withal, when so many Reasons contradicted her Passion: How much more then ought we to
believe that Interest was the greatest Motive of all her after Passions? [383–384]
At this point of the narrative, the narrator arrogates a new freedom of interpretation. She not only speculates that it is "perhaps" Silvia's interest which leads her "wisely" to consider that she could not retrieve her fortune, she also deflates the "power" that Silvia "vainly fancied" she has to seduce Octavio from his new vocation, power that the narrator herself has described as magically efficacious over the course of the Adventures and the Amours . In addition, the narrator also condemns what she calls Silvia's "wretched Prudence, even in the highest Flights and Passions of her Love." She extends this charge with a surprising interpretation: that even in Silvia's first passion for Philander, where one would think that only the purest love would counter all the reasons for not fleeing with Philander, interest has been crucial. Since this interest vitiates her first love, it is no surprise that it has operated in all her "after Passions." Here the narrator's claim is rather strange. What is the interest or prudence working in Silvia's flight with Philander? While she asserts that one interest has been decisive, the narrator does not specify what it is. Here, the narrator seems to refuse the sequential, transformational, après-coup interpretation that has shifted the terms of the narrative, characters, and action in each installment. In other words, the narrator resists the central logic of serial form so evident over the course of the three parts of the novel, and implicit in the antiethics of her libertine protagonists. The narrator's retroactive interpretation of Silvia's initial love for Philander composes her history into one incriminating whole. This interpretation seeks to foreclose any sympathy the reader may have had for Silvia as one who has been thrown into love, and into a vortex of action and suitors she cannot really control, in both the Adventures and the Amours . What does this accomplish? The narrator seems to be taking a personal interest in degrading Silvia, the erotic object of the narrator's object of erotic fascination, Octavio. It gratifies the narrator's wish to debase the value of the former heroine at the same time that Octavio is sublimated, raised up, and preserved (in the mode of nostalgia) as too perfect for this world. In the Amours , the lens through which we see the heroine has shifted: the narrator's attack upon her female protagonist contributes to Silvia's loss of any consistency of character. The narrator has become as biased as her characters.
After the investment of Octavio and his removal from the erotic triangle that has dominated the novel since the beginning of the Adventures , Silvia becomes an adventuress. Undergoing a devolution in character, she is
emptied of any nuanced subjectivity and removed from any of the constraints of the social law. Silvia is a prototype of the protagonist who has figured prominently in formula fiction ever since, and who is a simple, selfpromoting ego who pursues a complex career of intrigue and action in hopes of advancing his or her interest and pleasure. Now love is no more than a series of ways to advance one's power, within a continuous zero-sum struggle for advantage. When Silvia pursues her amorous schemes deep into her own pregnancy, the narrator is most explicit and harsh in describing her decline: "only her Shape was a little more inclining to be Fat, which did not at all however yet impare her fineness; and she was indeed too Charming without, for the deformity of her indiscretion within; but she had broke the bounds of Honour, and now stuck at nothing that might carry on an Interest, which she resolved should be the business of her future life" (375). Silvia is here anathematized as a spiritual monster, whose outward beauty has an ironic relationship to her inward "deformity." By the end of the Amours , Silvia is precisely the opposite of what Richardson will make Pamela and Clarissa, who, as ideal realizations of the modern author function, are responsible, consistent, self-conscious, and exemplary. However, the narrator's efforts to interpret Silvia retroactively never quite work. Moralistic condemnations of Silvia fall short of the complex and shifting character positions projected earlier in the series. The human faults of the embattled heroine of the Letters must be sacrificed to the exigencies of the series into which Behn has plotted her.
Ready to leave behind any of the parameters of consistency of character, Silvia launches a career of pure adventurism. Here, the sort of masquerade that appeared as an inadvertent collaborative moment at the climax of the Adventures is exploited in a cynical and instrumental fashion in Silvia's seduction of Don Alonzo. This threefold seduction—in which she first disguises herself as the male "Bellumere," then as the nameless but dazzling court beauty, and finally appears as herself—anticipates the vertiginous disguises of Haywood's Fantomina (1725). Silvia's escapade provides a paradigm for the sort of formula fiction that Manley and Haywood would popularize in the first decades of the eighteenth century. As a projector who is passionate, vacillating, self-interested, deceitful, and fascinatingly various, Silvia appears less as a single character than as a sort of personification of the novel on the market. By assuming the role of author of her own amours, Silvia engages yet manipulates the exchanges endemic to fiction on the market and expresses the most dubious aspects of Behn's female authorship (Gallagher, Nobody's Story , 14–34). Through the lead character's devolution from something better—the Silvia of the Letters —the
novelistic series entitled Love Letters already encodes an ethical critique of the sort of novel it helps to bring to the British print market. Thus the overdetermined legacy of Love Letters for eighteenth-century novelists: it displays the novel of amorous intrigue in formation at the same time as it develops a probing ethical critique of its agonistic ethos. It interrupts the same narrative pleasures it promotes.