1
Who Was That Masked Woman?
The Prostitute and the Playwright in the Works of Aphra Behn

Musing in 1821 on the vagaries of literary fashion, Walter Scott tells a story about his great aunt, who at the age of eighty wanted to reread a work of Aphra Behn's that she remembered finding delightful in her youth.

One day she asked me, when we happened to be alone together, whether I had ever seen Mrs. Behn's novels—I confessed the charge.—Whether I could get her a sight of them?—I said, with some hesitation, I believed I could; but that I did not think she would like either the manners, or the language, which approached too near that of Charles II's time to be quite proper reading.

But the "good old lady" insisted.

So I sent Mrs. Aphra Behn, curiously sealed up, with "private and confidential" on the packet, to my gay old grand-aunt. The next time I saw her afterwards, she gave me back Aphra, properly wrapped up, with nearly these words: "Take back your bonny Mrs. Behn; and, if you will take my advice, put her in the fire, for I found it impossible to get through the very first novel. But is it not," she said, "a very odd thing that I, an old woman of eighty and upwards, sitting alone, feel myself ashamed to read a book which, sixty years ago, I have heard read aloud for the amusement of large circles, consisting of the first and most creditable society in London?"^[1]

Behn's book occasions the old woman's astonishment at her younger self and the society that bred her; her question reverberates with the shock of personal and cultural discontinuity, suddenly perceived. We can easily imagine her fragile sense of identity as

[1] From a letter to Lady Louisa Stuart quoted in John Gibson Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott , rpt. in 5 vols. (New York, 1910), vol. 3, pp. 596–97.

she recalls herself publicly applauding what any proper lady, by the standards of the late eighteenth century, should instinctively have recognized as depraved. Such a "change of taste," Scott explains in his commentary on this story, "takes place insensibly without the parties being aware of it." The cultural revolution that Scott's great aunt "insensibly" lived is registered only retrospectively, as a deeply private, self-revelatory sense of shame. The story itself, by giving us three moments in the "life" of Aphra Behn's book, plots the development of this shamed self-consciousness as a shift from the public to the private consumption and eventual suppression of certain kinds of literature. His great aunt remembers public readings, probably in the 1730s,^[2] whereas Scott himself, born in 1760, was no doubt introduced to Behn as a semipornographic writer whose works, though still in circulation, needed to be labeled "private and confidential" and had to be "curiously sealed" (a phrase that nicely catches the stimulating effect of the book's slide into contraband). Finally, the old lady returns the book, this time truly under wraps ("properly wrapped"), and advises that it circulate no more. Her uncanny private experience leads to the resolve that this book never be shared, that the intense sense of shame, which she recognizes as inappropriate to her privacy, remain utterly her own.^[3]

For Scott himself the incident seems not to have such complex personal resonances. He recounts it mainly as an instance of the secret, "insensible" nature of any "change of taste." In most cases, Scott explains, such changes are arbitrary, mere matters of fashion, unpredictable and unaccountable; in the specific case of Aphra Behn, the change reflects progress. The increasingly private and shamefaced reading of Behn represents for Scott "the gradual improvement of the national taste and delicacy." Nevertheless, he concludes enigmatically, "The change that brings into and throws out of fashion particular styles of composition, is something of the same kind." The instability of Behn's reputation, its peculiar vulnerability to fluctuations in the social mores governing sexual propriety, shows the close link between feminine works and

[2] Behn's Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister , for example, was issued in book form in 1735.

[3] On the categorization of Behn's work as pornographic, see Naomi Jacobs, "The Seduction of Aphra Behn," Women's Studies 18 (1991): 395–403.

ephemeral ones. It is not surprising, then, that Scott's tone in telling the story of his great aunt's embarrassment is one of detached amusement.

Walter Scott and his great aunt were not the last commentators to reflect on the phenomenon of Aphra Behn in just these ways. Her works have been objects of both outrage and urbane antiquarian curiosity, and we are still pondering the mystery and significance of her career. If her success later seemed inexplicable to Walter Scott's great aunt, who actually experienced it, how much more mysterious must it seem to us, who must reconcile it with both the disappearance of her works from the canon and our belief in a strong prejudice against women writers in the seventeenth century. Hence, we still marvel at her incredible early acclaim; it strains our historical imagination and our sense of cultural continuity to realize that, after Dryden, Behn was the most prolific and probably the most popular writer of her time, with at least eighteen plays, several volumes of poetry, and numerous works of fiction that were in vogue for decades after her death. She was second only to Dryden also in the number of her plays (four) that were produced at court.^[4] Moreover, the other Restoration playwrights to whom we might compare her, the men whose works were regularly produced by one of the two playhouses, had advantages of education and family that Behn lacked. According to her biographer Maureen Duffy, "Most were of the gentry or nobility, and almost all had university or Inns of Court education."^[5] In contrast, Aphra Behn's origins are obscure, and we are hard-pressed to explain how such a sociological anomaly achieved such cultural prominence.^[6]

[4] Fidelis Morgan, ed., The Female Wits: Women Playwrights of the Restoration (London: Virago, 1981), p. 12. For a brief comparison of the careers of Dryden and Behn, see Deborah C. Payne, "'And Poets Shall by Patron-Princes Live': Aphra Behn and Patronage," in Curtain Calls: British and American Women and the Theater, 1660–1820 , ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1991), p. 107.

[5] The Passionate Shepherdess: Aphra Behn, 1640–1689 (London: Cape, 1977), p. 104.

[6] There are competing early accounts of Behn's birth and social status. Her two most recent biographers draw very different conclusions from the evidence. Assuming that her maiden name was Johnson and that she was born around 1640 in Kent, Maureen Duffy thinks she was the daughter of Bartholomew Johnson, yeoman, and Elizabeth, née Denham, daughter of a "gentleman." Angeline Goreau makes the same initial assumptions but suggests that Behn was the illegitimate daughter of Lady Willoughby, whose husband was founder and governor of the English colony of Surinam. See Reconstructing Aphra: A Social Biography of Aphra Behn (New York: Dial, 1980), p. 13. This account would explain Behn's superior education and her trip to that colony. Both versions of her birth are highly speculative, and we simply do not know how she received her education or her introduction to literary and theatrical circles. Sara Heller Mendelson places her date of birth in the late 1640s; see The Mental World of Stuart Women: Three Studies (Brighton: Harvester, 1967), pp. 116–17. Earlier biographies of Behn include George Woodcock, The Incomparable Aphra (1948; rpt. as The English Sappho [Montreal: Black Rose, 1989]); and Frederick M. Link, Aphra Behn (New York: Twayne, 1968).

If Scott's story only increases our wonder at Behn's success by assuring us that even one who had experienced it could not make sense of it half a century later, his letter nevertheless wraps the odd facts in a more familiar narrative. By linking Behn's decline to "improvements" in "delicacy," Scott gives us a succinct index of the pace of cultural change in the mid-eighteenth century and suggests the impact of that change on standards of decency for women writers in particular. Indeed, stories like Scott's have made Behn into a symbol for those vicissitudes of female literary reputation that are caused by changes in ideas of sexual propriety. Many students who cannot name a single work by Aphra Behn are quick to identify her as the excessively risqué "first Englishwoman to earn her living by her pen." No other author has the very fact of her initial market success so prominently in the forefront of her reputation that it often obscures everything else about her works. Everything, that is, except the infamous "bawdiness" that accounts, it seems, for both their contemporary success and their unacceptability to readers in the prudish centuries that followed. The history of Behn's reception, in short, is better known than her works, and it would be no exaggeration to say that she has become the figure for the volatility of the marketplace in women's literature.^[7]

[7] For a concise overview of Behn's career, see Janet Todd's introduction to The Works of Aphra Behn , ed. Todd, vol. 1 (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1992), pp. ix–xxxv. Mary Ann O'Donnell surveys Behn's career and includes a selection of her work in "Tory Wit and Unconventional Woman: Aphra Behn," in Women Writers of the Seventeenth Century , ed. Katharina M. Wilson and Frank J. Warnke (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1989), pp. 349–72. For a variety of recent critical approaches to Behn's writing, see Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women's Amatory Fiction, 1684–1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 69–113; Bernard Duyfhuizen, "'That Which I Dare Not Name': Aphra Behn's 'The Willing Mistress,'" ELH 58 (1991): 63–82; Judith Kegan Gardiner, "The First English Novel: Aphra Behn's Love Letters , the Canon, and Women's Tastes," Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 8 (1989): 201–22; Dorothy Mermin, "Women Becoming Poets: Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, Anne Finch," ELH 57 (1990): 335–55; Jacqueline Pearson, "Gender and Narrative in the Fiction of Aphra Behn," parts 1 and 2, Review of English Studies 42 (1991): 40–56 and 179–90; Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 42–52; Dale Spender, Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers before Jane Austen (London: Pandora, 1986), pp. 47–66; George Starr, "Aphra Behn and the Genealogy of the Man of Feeling," Modern Philology 87 (1990): 362–72; Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660–1800 (London: Virago, 1989), pp. 69–83; Donald R. Wehrs, "Eros , Ethics, Identity: Royalist Feminism and the Politics of Identity in Aphra Behn's Love Letters," Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 32 (1992): 461–78; and the anthologies Curtain Calls , esp. essays by Frances Kavenik, Jessica Munns, Deborah C. Payne, and Rose Zimbardo; and Fetter'd or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670–1815 , ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1986), esp. essays by Jerry C. Beasley and Robert Adams Day. For a detailed bibliography of scholarship on Behn, see Mary Ann O'Donnell, Aphra Behn: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources (New York: Garland, 1986).

Aphra Behn herself initiated this emphasis on her struggles in the marketplace. In the very midst of her success she complained about a double standard in judging plays. For example, an oft quoted passage from the epistle to Sir Patient Fancy (1678) claims she had been censured for using language that any male playwright might use with impunity.^[8] Following Behn's lead, and citing numerous contemporary attacks on both her character and works, her biographers have concluded that Behn's popularity was gained despite a heavy handicap imposed by her sex.^[9]

However, the double standard Behn complains of did not seem to discourage attendance at her plays, nor is there much evidence that it forced her to change her style or to leave off writing plays in order to take up the less "public" genre of romance. There is a gap in her production of new plays between 1682 and 1685 during which she seems to have written a great many tales, but when she opened a new play in 1686, The Lucky Chance , it turned out to be as full of cuckolding and witty double entendre as anything she ever wrote. Behn was rewarded for this play with both a successful run and a predictable return of criticism, which she immediately used

[8] "I printed this play with all the impatient haste one ought to do, who would be vindicated from the most unjust and silly aspersion . . .; That it was Bawdy , the least and most excusable fault in the men writers to whose plays they all crowd, as if they came to no other end than to hear what they condemn in this." To accept this complaint at face value, as Goreau does on pp. 233–34, one must ignore other evidence. First, in 1678 Behn was not singled out for chastisement because she was a woman; other playwrights were as heavily criticized that year. See Arthur H. Scouten and Robert D. Hume, "Restoration Comedy and Its Audiences, 1660–1776," in The Rakish Stage: Studies in English Drama, 1660–1800 , ed. Robert D. Hume (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 56–64. Second, in concentrating on Behn's complaint about her play's reception, we overlook both its good run and its remaining in the repertory until 1692.

[9] See especially Goreau's chapter 11, "Success and Attack," pp. 207–35.

as the occasion for her finest self-defense, a fiery, defiant "epistle to the reader." Granted, the last play produced during her lifetime, her commedia dell'arte farce The Emperor of the Moon , might have been taken as evidence of moral reformation; it offended no one. The bawdy, satirical Behn, though, was resurrected in the posthumous production of The Widow Ranter; this play, however, received a relatively lukewarm reception because, a contemporary commentator suggested, "our Author" was dead and unable to supervise or cast the production.^[10]

Even in the next century, although there was certainly a gradual insistence on sexual propriety in the theater, it developed slowly and applied to male as well as female playwrights. As Scott's great aunt testifies, Behn was a highly respected author until the middle of the eighteenth century, and her plays received the same posthumous treatment as her "nouvelles." Curiously, throughout the first half of the eighteenth century audiences seem to have accepted in old plays what they condemned in new ones. Hence, The Rover , certainly one of Behn's bawdiest plays, was a staple of the repertory until the 1760s. The London Stage records productions for almost every year between 1703 and 1743, when the productions began tapering off over two decades before disappearing altogether.^[11] But the same pattern applies to a "classic" like Ben Jonson's Epicoene . Apparently, when standards of propriety became stricter, old plays were at first exempt and were then condemned in a heap, without distinguishing between Jacobean and Restoration, male and female authors.^[12]

Since the evidence does not support the contention that Behn's

[10] The dedication to the 1690 edition of the play complains that "the Play had not that Success which it deserv'd. . . . The main fault ought to lye on those who had the management of it. Had our Author been alive she would have Committed it to the Flames rather than suffer'd it to have been Acted with such Omissions as was made. . . . And Lastly, many of the Parts being false Cast, and given to those whose Tallants and Genius's Suited not our Authors Intention." The Works of Aphra Behn , ed. Montague Summers (London, 1915), vol. 4, pp. 221–22. Unless otherwise noted, subsequent quotations form Behn's works are from this edition, hereafter cited as Works .

[11] Index to the London Stage, 1660–1800 , ed. William Van Lennep, Emmett L. Avery, Arthur H. Scouten, George Winchester Stone, Jr., and Charles Beecher Hogan, compiled by Ben Ross Schneider, Jr. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1979), p. 61.

[12] See Scouten and Hume, "Restoration Comedy and Its Audiences, 1660–1776," pp. 64–81.

career was hindered by general prejudices against either women playwrights or bawdy women playwrights, one might justifiably suspect that the author's complaints and her adversaries' insults were pieces of an elaborate rhetorical interaction that dictated the very terms in which she was conceived. As we will shortly see, Behn's prologues and prefaces were often artfully constructed in a rhetorical tradition that required her defamation. This is not to say that the defamation never took place, that it was a mere trope; it is only to say that Behn depended and capitalized on it. She especially depended on getting a barrage of abuse from wits of a rival political stripe, for, as we will see in Chapter 2, such harassment vouched for her effectiveness as a Tory writer. For the most part, men of her own party supported Behn staunchly, and if we simply count contemporary male judgments of her in print, we find that instances of praise outnumber those of blame by at least ten to one.^[13] To understand this first female authorial success, we must enumerate the many cultural desires she satisfied.

I will be arguing that Behn's career was both enabled and shaped by a certain conjunction of Restoration theatrical, rhetorical, sexual, political, and economic exigencies. Laments about the obnoxious material necessities of one's career or the utter prostitution of one's rivals' careers were the normal language of the Restoration author's self-representations. These, in turn, can best be understood as instances of complicated arguments about the relationship between property and selfhood. Behn often feminized these concerns and created a novel authorial identity in doing so, but she was no more impeded by them than was Dryden or Wycherley. They formed the discourse that called her authorship into being and made her the great success she was.

In examining Behn's use of her gender to present herself as an author in the marketplace, we will encounter a set of Restoration paradoxes pertaining to authorship and self-ownership generally. These paradoxes are not unique in Behn's self-representations, but her gender gave them unusual depth and resonance. This chapter concerns itself primarily with the theatrical representation of the author; it shows why and how she staged her simultaneous pres-

[13] For an itemized list of contemporary references (1677–1700), see O'Donnell, Aphra Behn: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources , pp. 327–43.

ence and absence in the theater, audaciously using the metaphor of the author as prostitute to create distinctions between the obliging playwright and the withholding private person, the woman's body and her self, the stage and real life. She fabricated the impression of a continuous but mysterious authorial identity—never actually embodied on the stage but persisting and transforming itself from play to play—and aligned this idea of authorship with the "no thing" of female sex. The next chapter considers the representation of the author in print; it probes the mystique of a bodiless medium that holds out promises of sovereignty and anonymity in the midst of commodification. Behn typically encapsulates these themes in the figure of the author-monarch, and hence her romance of the sovereign in the marketplace, Oroonoko , is interpreted here as an absolutist fantasy of disembodiment through representation and exchange.

Together the chapters contend that Behn created a complex authorial identity by drawing on seemingly irreconcilable metaphors—the author as prostitute and the author as monarch—that, despite their apparent incompatibility, lead into surprisingly similar explorations of the anomalies of Restoration authorship. Each metaphor rendered that authorship problematic in a different way, but from both Behn emerges as the heroine-victim of the marketplace, utterly sold yet pristinely unsoiled because able to separate herself from her physical being. This paradoxical effect, I will argue, is her ultimate and most compelling achievement as well as her most enduring commodity.^[14]

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We have little documentary evidence about the financial details of Aphra Behn's career. Indeed, it is difficult to locate and describe something we might feel justified in calling a literary marketplace in the late seventeenth century. "Literary marketplace" implies the existence of a mass of buyers of printed works large enough both to offset the costs of producing the books (including the cost of

[14] For different interpretations of Behn's self-presentation as commodity, see Elin Diamond, "Gestus and Signature in Aphra Behn's The Rover," ELH 56 (1989): 519–41; and Todd, The Sign of Angellica , pp. 69–83.

paying the author) and to return a profit to the bookseller. But the high cost of printing in the late seventeenth century and the relatively small reading public meant that book publishing was not yet an industry based on this sort of market. The costs of publication were still often met by private persons, and profits on sales went to the bookseller. Many authors, then, were still paid by wealthy individuals, and most were not paid at all. The financial innovation during this period was the growth of subscription publication, a form of collective patronage that is sometimes seen as a step toward an actual literary marketplace, but individual patronage also persisted.^[15] Aphra Behn's generation is said to be the first in which the "professional writer" appeared, but we should not conclude from that commonplace that authors had suddenly been freed from patronage and were relying on the favor of some anonymous "public."^[16]

Behn does not seem to have taken advantage of subscription publication, and although she published many volumes, she could not have supported herself on her income from books. The minimum standard rate for a play manuscript was only £10,^[17] so even in her most prolific play-writing year, 1682, she might not have made more than £30 from the publication of her plays. In 1684 we

[15] For an assessment of the evidence that Behn might have had income from patrons in the 1680s, see Payne, "'And Poets Shall by Patron-Princes Live': Aphra Behn and Patronage," in Curtain Calls , pp. 105–19.

[16] Relevant accounts of the London book trade in this period include Terry Belanger, "Publishers and Writers in Eighteenth-Century England," in Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England , ed. Isabel Rivers (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982), pp. 1–25; John Feather, "British Publishing in the Eighteenth Century: A Preliminary Subject Analysis," Library 8 (1986): 32–46; Frank Arthur Mumby, Publishing and Bookselling (London: Cape, 1930); Marjorie Plant, The English Book Trade: An Economic History of the Making and Sale of Books (London: Allen and Unwin, 1965); Graham Pollard, "The English Market for Printed Books," Publishing History 4 (1978): 7–48; William Roberts, The Earlier History of English Bookselling (1889; rpt. Detroit: Gale, 1967), chapter 4; Kathleen M. Lynch, Jacob Tonson: Kit-Cat Publisher (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1971); and Shirley Strum Kenny, "The Publication of Plays," in The London Theatre World, 1660–1800 , ed. Robert D. Hume (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 309–36.

[17] John Wilson Bowyer claims that this was the normal rate for a play (The Celebrated Mrs. Centlivre [Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1952], p. 98), but Maureen Duffy, assuming that Behn was paid as much or more for plays as for volumes of poetry, estimates £20–30 (The Passionate Shepherdess , p. 204). Duffy, though, is making guesses on the basis of Behn's arrangements with Jacob Tonson; the booksellers for most of her plays dealt in far cheaper wares. See Payne, "'And Poets Shall by Patron-Princes Live': Aphra Behn and Patronage," pp. 108–09.

find her writing to her publisher Tonson to ask for a £5 increase in her payment for a volume of poems. If we estimate that she earned between £20 and £30 for each volume of poetry and prose, her peak earning year for printed matter would probably have been 1685, when she might have made £90, but for many years she would have had no income at all.

When we speak of Behn making her living by her pen, then, we do not mean she made a living primarily from having books published. Like most of the age's "professional writers"—by which most historians seem to mean people who had no means of livelihood other than writing—Behn was a playwright partly because the structure and financing of drama allowed for the support of writers. The theater as an institution changed abruptly when, after a twenty-year hiatus, it was restored along with the monarchy. The changes made playwriting a more independent, lucrative, and chancy activity than it had been. Earlier playwrights had either been members of the theater companies that produced their scripts and therefore simply shared in the companies' profits, often while performing other tasks as well as writing, or, like Ben Jonson, were heavily reliant on aristocratic or royal patronage. In contrast, Restoration playwrights were paid the receipts (above the house charges) for the third day's performance of their plays.^[18] Each playwright was generally attached to one of the two theater companies licensed to operate in London, though the writers tended not to be on salary or to own shares.^[19] Behn's letter to Tonson claims that in the 1670s playwrights could borrow from the company, but apparently even this practice was discontinued in the 1680s.^[20] Consequently, if a play was not popular enough to hold the stage for three days, the playwright got nothing; if it lasted until the "author's benefit" performance, the playwright's fee would be

[18] If the play was very popular, a sixth-night benefit might also be added. For a history of the development of this mode of payment, see the introduction by Emmett L. Avery and Arthur H. Scouten to The London Stage. Part I: 1660–1700 , ed. William Van Lennep (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1965), pp. lxxix-lxxxiv.

[19] There were exceptions to this rule. Dryden and Settle, for example, were both sharers in the King's Company. See The London Stage. Part I: 1660–1700 , p. lxxii.

[20] "I have been without getting so long yt I am just on ye poynt of breaking, especially since a body has no creditt at ye playhouse for money as we used to have, fifty or 60 deepe, or more," she wrote to Tonson in 1684. The letter is in the Folger Library now. It was printed in the Gentleman's Magazine 5 (1836): 481–82.

roughly proportionate to the play's reputation, based on its first and second nights' reception. The London theatergoing population was small enough for word-of-mouth reporting to spread rapidly through the potential audience. Hence, as numerous commentators have noted, Restoration playwrights were far more dependent financially on the success of individual plays than their Renaissance predecessors had been, with their share in the general profits of the company.

Playwriting had through this process also become a better differentiated activity, for which the writer seemed to receive money almost directly from a grateful audience. This "professionalization" produced a more personal relationship between playwright and audience than had previously existed. The author's benefit night provided an opportunity for rewarding or punishing playwrights quite specifically.^[21]

The audience that gave or withheld this support was by no means a cross section of London's general population, but neither was it the tiny and homogeneous coterie that literary historians of a generation ago seem to have imagined. At the two licensed playhouses, the King's Company and the Duke's Company, both of which produced Aphra Behn's plays, audiences were arranged in four sections, according to a description of 1699.^[22] There was an "upper gallery" where servants stood. Below that were boxes, "one peculiar to the King and Royal Family, and the rest for the Persons of Quality." Then there was the middle gallery, "where the Citizens Wives and Daughters, together with Abigails , Serving-men, Journey-men and Apprentices commonly take their Places, and now and then some disponding Mistresses and superannuated Poets." Finally, there was the pit, inhabited by "Judges, Wits , and Censures . . . in common with . . . the Squires, Sharpers, Beaus, Bullies and Whores , and here and there an extravagant Male and Female Cit ." It is estimated that with both theaters running, daily audiences would

[21] The highest income recorded for a third night is Shadwell's £130 for The Squire of Alsatia in 1668. Perhaps we can estimate that Behn took in around £50 on successful benefit nights and also received handsome gifts from the nobles to whom she dedicated the printed books of the plays. See Duffy, p. 204, and the introduction to The London Stage. Part I: 1660–1700 .

[22] The Country Gentlemen's Vade Mecum is the source of the description that follows; it is quoted in Peter Holland, The Ornament of Action: Text and Performance in Restoration Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), p. 15.

have been between three and five hundred, although the capacity of the theaters was closer to one thousand. Peter Holland tells us these numbers indicate that theatergoers were "a substantial proportion of the wealthy," including aristocrats, gentlefolk, and comfortable bourgeois citizens, with a sprinkling of the lower classes among them.^[23] Moreover, it appears to have been an audience full of habitual, rather than occasional, playgoers; Samuel Pepys's practice of attending the theater, indeed attending the same production, more than once a week was common. Holland claims that "any play that ran for more than four or five nights must have been playing to an audience many of whom were seeing it for the second or third time."^[24] We might also conclude that a third-night audience for a very popular play must have contained many returnees.

The theater, then, does begin to look like a peculiarly intimate market for literary wares, "public" because anyone with the price of admission could attend, but by no means anonymous. The more one reads accounts of theatrical London in the 1670s and 1680s, the more one senses both the momentous theatricality and the personal immediacy of the exchange between playwright and "public." Dryden's epilogue to Sir Martin Mar-all captures these qualities exactly:

But when the Curtain's down we peep, and see
A Jury of the Wits who still stay late,
And in their Club decree the poor Plays fate;
Their verdict back is to the Boxes brought,
Thence all the Town pronounces it their thought.^[25]

That immediate judgment after the fall of the curtain, with the company lingering onstage to listen, could bring a full house on the third night, with many of the "wits" returning to reward the playwright. Behn's prologues also frequently remind the audience of its duty to the playwright in particular. The prologue to Abdelazer , for example, complains,

[23] Holland, p. 17.

[24] Holland, p. 17. On the Restoration audience, see also Harold Love, "Who Were the Restoration Audience?" Yearbook of English Studies 10 (1980): 21–44; and Robert D. Hume and Arthur H. Scouten, "'Restoration Comedy' and Its Audiences, 1660–1776," in The Rakish Stage , pp. 46–81.

[25] The Works of John Dryden (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1966), vol. 9, p. 209.

You come not sharp, as you are wont, to Plays;
But only on the first and second Days.^[26]

By thus frequently recurring to the simultaneously public and personal nature of the exchange between author and audience, the playwrights staged versions of the mutual obligation between themselves and their public, several of which will be discussed in this chapter. All the versions, however, stressed that the audience was being asked to respond immediately, indeed to make its response a part of the theatrical event, and to be mindful of the playwright as a distinct individual.

This sense of personal mutual obligation played out in public was only increased by the many opportunities for patronage that lingered in the third-night system. Indeed, the very name of the event, the author's benefit (sometimes also referred to as the gift), reveals its association with patronage in the period. Moreover, the "benefit" was particularly linked to women, since the concept of allocating the profits of certain performances to specified groups or individuals originated as a way of bestowing a "gift" on "the women of the house," the actresses.^[27] Hence the author's benefit had overtones of gallantry as well as patronage, and Behn, as we will see, reminded her audience of the former. Authors could also make use of individual patrons under the third-night system by selling them expensive seats. Occasionally a fashionable patron could announce that he or she would attend the play on the third night, and the theater would be filled with playgoers who actually had come to see the patron.^[28] The system also allowed for adverse attention from the great: eminent individuals could loudly cry down a play and others would follow suit. Sometimes powerful cliques managed to disrupt and spoil performances so thoroughly that the plays failed.^[29] In short, the relative social diversity of the

[26] Works , vol. 2, p. 7.

[27] See The London Stage. Part I: 1660–1700 , p. lxxix, where Samuel Pepys's diary for September 28, 1668, is quoted: "Kneep's maid comes to me, to tell me that the women's day at the playhouse is to-day, and that therefore I must be there to increase their profit . . . the house, for the women's sake, mighty full."

[28] The London Stage. Part I: 1660–1700 gives several instances of this form of patronage. See pp. lxxxi-lxxxii.

[29] The only example we have of successful factional opposition to a play by Behn concerns the revision of The Younger Brother staged in 1695 by Charles Gildon. Gildon complained that "I may reasonably impute its miscarriage to some Faction that was made against it, which indeed was very Evident on the First day, and more on the endeavours employ'd, to render the Profits of the Third, as small as possible" (dedication to The Younger Brother; or, the Amorous Jilt [London, 1696], n.p.). Aphra Behn had been dead for six years by this time, so the faction must have been formed against Gildon, who would have had the third day's profits as the play's reviser.

Restoration audience did not mean that plays prospered or failed on the basis of an undifferentiated, impersonal "public" opinion.^[30]

Words like "professionalization" and "marketplace," while not altogether inaccurate in this case, can therefore be rather misleading unless we understand the jointly theatrical and personal nature of the third night. Moreover, it is only as part of this specialized financial arrangement that we can fully appreciate Aphra Behn's construction of her various authorial personae. Like other Restoration playwrights, Behn presents herself as a person to whom something is owed individually; she tries to engender a relationship of mutual obligation that will bring in an audience on the third night. Also like her fellow playwrights, she insists on her struggle against the staleness of theatrical effect that might arise from the very continuity of personality she stresses. She presents herself as a playwright whose credit is based on a personal appeal, the appeal of the familiar author to whom the theatrical habitué is obliged, but who consequently must work to keep herself interesting, to dispel the boredom of familiarity. But unlike other Restoration playwrights, in constructing the first of her personae to be analyzed here, she uses explicitly and shockingly feminine tropes.

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Conscious of her historical role, Aphra Behn introduced to the world of English letters the professional woman playwright as a newfangled whore. This persona has many functions in Behn's work: it titillates, scandalizes, arouses pity, and indicates the perils of public identity and the poignancy of authorship in general. The author-whore persona is the central figure in a dark comedy Behn played throughout her career, a comedy in which she exposes the bond between the liberty the stage offered women and their confinement behind both literal and metaphorical vizards. I will begin

[30] Goreau, Reconstructing Aphra , discusses Restoration stage financing, pp. 122–23.

exploring the development of this persona in several short pieces: the epistles to The Dutch Lover (1673) and Sir Patient Fancy and the prologue to her first play, The Forced Marriage (1670). I will then describe the theatrical and larger cultural contexts informing the author-whore persona; and, finally, I will discuss one of her later plays, The Lucky Chance .

Introductory epistles to the printed plays, whether addressed to the general reader or a patron, created authorial effects very different from those produced by the plays' spoken prologues and epilogues. Normally appearing after the author's benefit night, the printed introductions cannot be seen as part of the immediate solicitation of the audience for support. Nevertheless, they were crucial to creating a sense of a "real" person behind the play and thus contribute importantly to the development of a long-term relationship between public and playwright, a sense of obligation that carried over from play to play. Behn's first such self-presentation, the epistle to The Dutch Lover , was continuous with the portrayals of the playwright in the early prologues and epilogues; this Aphra Behn, in a sustained tone of comic raillery, insists on her feminine seductiveness and the levity of her enterprise:

Good, Sweet, Honey, Sugar-Candied Reader,
Which I think is more than anyone has called you yet, I must have a word or two with you before you advance into the Treatise; but 'tis not to beg your pardon for diverting you from your affairs, by such an idle Pamphlet as this is, for I presume you have not much to do and therefore are to be obliged to me for keeping you from worse employment.^[31]

The comic feminine persona in this discourse is an adaptation of one that harks back at least to Chaucer's Wife of Bath; it is ribald, debunking, racy, digressive, and slightly madcap. Perhaps because it employs such obvious comic conventions and emphasizes its own inauthenticity, however, it proved less powerful than the rhetoric that emerged five years later, in the epistle to Sir Patient Fancy . This is the first of the epistles to be taken by commentators as an expression of Behn's actual sentiments. It is not a comic seduction but a complaint against what Behn presents as her ill-

[31] Works , vol. 1, p. 221.

treatment at the hands of some female critics. She addresses her female readers here, claiming that the ladies should have been particularly forgiving of the play's bawdiness, for

they ought to have had good Nature and justice enough to have attributed all its faults to the Authours unhappiness, who is forced to write for Bread and not ashamed to owne it, and consequently ought to write to please (if she can) an Age which has given severall proofs it was by this way of writing to be obliged, though it is a way too cheap for men of wit to pursue who write for Glory, and a way which even I despise as much below me.^[32]

In addressing the ladies, Behn invokes the anomaly of her economic situation, its pathetic inappropriateness to an implied womanly norm. That very anomaly, however, is founded on the condition Behn shares with the ladies she addresses: a lack of independent property that obliges all women to earn their livelihood by pleasing men. Behn appeals to ladies for understanding because her very deviation from their pattern reveals a common female condition: she "ought . . . to please (if she can)." In the author's case, this shared condition enforces impropriety; it is only proper that she be improper, for what she "ownes" is only her lack of property. This is the unhappy situation of the prostitute, but Behn insists it is not a blamable one. Indeed, she describes it to prove her innocence; by selling bawdiness and then complaining of the necessity to do so, she assures her female readers that there is an innocent self above the exchange. Authorship for the marketplace and selfhood are here dissevered, for the author that can be inferred from the work is merely a "way of writing" dictated by the age, an alienable thing outside and beneath the true self. But it is precisely this severing, this inauthenticity, that is supposed to oblige the audience, to make them feel an obligation to the compromised author.

The effect of an authentic female self that Aphra Behn produces in such passages is based on the very need to sell her constructed authorial self. By making her authorial self an emanation of the marketplace, then, she saves this putative authentic self from

[32] Works , vol. 4, p. 7.

contamination. The implied author of the plays is fashioned in the service of the male audience's fancy; but the implied author of the epistle claims to be Aphra Behn's unexchangeable, but also largely unrepresentable, self. Each of these authors is, in essence, an effect of the other, although the illusion created is that of the ontological priority of the woman who regrets her misrepresentations. All we know of this woman, however, are those misrepresentations, for in the case of the female author, as in the case of the prostitute, self-sale creates the illusion of an unknowable authenticity by never giving anything away, both in the sense of refusing to give free gratification and in the sense of refusing self-revelation. The epistle stresses that the professional woman author as prostitute is internally divided: what can be seen of her is never what she is, but the theatrical inauthenticity of what can be seen implies the existence of some hidden woman directing the drama of her self-sale.^[33]

Behn was certainly not the only writer to create such a split persona. In the Restoration it seems to have been quite common to advertise that plays in general and comedies in particular were not the expression of the author's "true" self, but were instead a means of "obliging" the audience. Dryden, for example, although constantly thrusting the poet's skill into the consciousness of both auditors and readers of his plays, distinguishes between his personal taste and that which he adopts to please his audience. In his preface to The Indian Emperour , he declares,

My chief endeavours are to delight the Age in which I live. If the humour of this, be for low Comedy, small Accidents, and Raillery, I will force my Genius to obey it, though with more reputation I could write in Verse. I know I am not so fitted by Nature to write Comedy: I want that gayety of humour which is required to it. My Conversation is slow and dull, my humour Saturnine and reserv'd: In short, I am none of those who endeavour to break Jests in Company, or make reparties, so that those who decry my Comedies do me no injury, except it be in point of profit.^[34]

[33] For a contrasting interpretation, one that offers a sanitized version of Behn's authorial personae in the prologues, epistles dedicatory, and epilogues, see Cheri Davis Langdell, "Aphra Behn and Sexual Politics: A Dramatist's Discourse with Her Audience," in Drama, Sex and Politics , ed. James Redmond (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 109–28.

[34] The Works of John Dryden , vol. 9, pp. 7–8.

Here we have another wide gap between the obliging comedy writer and the self ("those who decry my Comedies do me no injury"), but the self is certainly not the elusive creature glimpsed only fleetingly in Behn's prologues. Instead, the numerous prologues and critical essays that introduce the first editions of Dryden's plays present the man behind his "profit" as a consistently serious-minded critic capable of passing negative judgments on his own plays but nevertheless condescending to please the audience. Dryden gives us his true mind at great length, and the wider the gap between that critical tone and the comic work, the more the audience feels itself indebted for the favor of having been humorously indulged by such a fiercely penetrating and learned man.

Dryden's rhetoric of authenticity, then, resembles Behn's in splitting the true poetic self from the comic playwright but differs from hers in actualizing and elevating his real, judgmental, self. Dryden is both known and known to be superior to his audience. "I made the Town my Judges," he declares in the preface to The Wild Gallant , and since his audience judges only by his fiat, he is not really imagined to be at their mercy. Rather, the very act that creates the gap between Dryden and the comic writer seems to be yet another instance of Dryden's superiority. The authentic Behn in the epistles to her early plays, on the other hand, breaks with her comic persona only momentarily to reveal the self-pity in every woman who must sell herself. Unlike Dryden, she is not above her audience; their obligation to her stems not from her condescension but from her regrettable feminine dependence on their approval.

The theme of the writer's self-alienation had already been made explicitly sexual in the spoken prologues to Behn's early plays, but in these the interaction between playwright and audience remained comically and excessively theatrical. Prologues and epilogues were not always written by the author of the play, but they were nevertheless often about the author. Unlike forewords and epistles to the printed plays that aimed at authenticity, prologues and epilogues often created the author as a merely theatrical persona; they pushed into the foreground the author who stages herself and discourses waggishly on the nature of her exchange with the audience. They were often directed very pointedly at the third night. The author's inventiveness in presenting new perspectives on this exchange, in dramatizing herself and the audience's obli-

gation in new terms, was one of the skills deserving recompense.

Behn's femaleness gave her unique opportunities for self-presentation in her prologues and epilogues. The first prologue of her career incorporates standard conventions and carries them a step further by inviting the audience, through the metaphor of prostitution, to reflect on the self-alienation, and hence theatricality, of exchange in general. This prologue to The Forced Marriage (1670) is staged not only as a novel presentation of a playwright, but also as a staged novelty in which the author wittily allows her strategies to be laid bare so ostentatiously that the revelation of the strategy itself seems strategic. The prologue presents Aphra Behn's play-writing as an extension of her erotic play. In it, a male actor pretends to have temporarily escaped the control of the intriguing female playwright; he comes onstage to warn the gallants in the audience of their danger. This prologue added a sexual dimension to the Restoration convention of betraying the playwright: the comic antagonism between playwright and audience also becomes a battle in the war between the sexes. Playwriting, the actor warns, is a new weapon in woman's amorous arsenal. She will no longer wound only through the eyes, through her beauty, but will also use wit to gain a more permanent ascendancy.

Women those charming victors, in whose eyes
Lie all their arts, and their artilleries,
Not being contented with the wounds they made,
Would by new stratagems our lives invade.
Beauty alone goes now at too cheap rates
And therefore they, like wise and politic states,
Court a new power that may the old supply,
To keep  as well as gain the victory:
They'll join the force of wit to beauty now,
And so maintain  the right they have in you.

Here, woman's playwriting is wholly assimilated to the poetic conventions of amorous battle that normally informed lyric poetry. If the male poet had long depicted the conquering woman as necessarily chaste, debarring (and consequently debarred from) the act of sex itself, then his own poetry of lyric complaint and pleas for kindness could only be understood as attempts to overthrow the conqueror. Poetry in this lyric tradition is a weapon in a struggle that takes as its ground rule a woman's inability to conquer through

sexual consummation: for the doing of the deed would be the undoing of her power.

Aphra Behn's first prologue stretches this lyric tradition to incorporate theater. Just as in lyric poetry, writing becomes part of a larger erotic contest. The woman's poetry, however, cannot have the same end as the man's. Indeed, according to the prologue, ends, in the sense of terminations, are precisely what a woman's wit is directed against. Writing is certainly on a continuum here with sex, but instead of leading to the act in which the woman's conquest is overturned, playwriting extends the woman's erotic power beyond the moment of sexual encounter. The prologue thus situates the drama inside the conventions of male lyric love poetry but then reverses the chronological relationship between sex and writing; the male poet writes before the sexual encounter, the woman between encounters. She thereby actually creates the possibility of a woman's version of sexual conquest. The woman now can have a "right" in the man that is not automatically self-canceling. She will not be immediately conquered and discarded because she will maintain her right through her writing. The woman's play of wit is the opposite of foreplay; it is a kind of afterplay specifically designed to resuscitate desire and keep a woman who has given herself sexually from being traded in for another woman. If the woman is successful in her poetic exchange, the actor warns the gallants, then they will no longer have the freedom of briskly exchanging mistresses:

You'll never know the bliss of change; this art
Retrieves (when beauty fades) the wandring heart.

Thus writing retroactively enables sex by ensuring its continuance, a point emphasized by the fusion of military and commercial metaphors. That is, war in the prologue is not a contest ending in a mere moment of conquest; rather, it resembles a battle for commercial advantage. Motivated in the first place by an unfavorable balance of trade ("Beauty alone goes now at too cheap rates"), it is designed not to destroy the enemy but to establish a monopoly, another sense of "right," on a growing number of sexual exchanges.

Aphra Behn, then, inaugurated her career by taking up the role of the seductive lyric poet. The drama the audience is about to see

is framed by the larger drama of erotic exchange between a woman writer and a male audience. This prologue does what so many Restoration prologues do, makes of the play a drama within a drama, a series of conventional interactions inside another series of conventional interactions. But the very elaborateness of this staging, combined with the novelty of its metaphor, makes the love battle itself (the thing supposedly revealed) seem a strategic pose in a somewhat different drama. What kind of woman would stage her sexual desire as her primary motivation? The answer is a woman who might be suspected of not having any real affection, a woman for whom professions of amorousness and theatrical inauthenticity are the same thing: a prostitute.

Finally, just in case anyone in the audience might have missed this analogy, a dramatic interruption occurs, and the prologue becomes a debate about the motivation behind all this talk of strategy. The actor calls attention to the prostitutes in the audience, who were generally identified by their masks, and characterizes them as allies of the playwright, jokingly using their masks to expose them as spies in the amorous war:

The poetess too, they say, has spies abroad,
Which have dispers'd themselves in every road,
I' th' upper box, pit, galleries; every face
You find disguis'd in a black velvet case,
My life on't; is her spy on purpose sent,
To hold you in a wanton compliment;
That so you may not censure what she's writ,
Which done they face you down 'twas full of wit.

At this point, an actress comes onstage to refute the suggestion that the poetess's spies and supporters are prostitutes. Returning to the conceits linking money and warfare, her speech thus enacts the denial of prostitution that was all along implicit in the trope of amorous combat. She claims that the legion of the playwright's supporters, unlike prostitutes,

          scorns the petty spoils, and do prefer
The glory not the interest of war.
But yet our forces shall obliging prove,
Imposing naught but constancy in love:
That's all our aim, and when we have it too,
We'll sacrifice it all to pleasure you.

What the last two lines make abundantly clear, in ironically justifying female promiscuity by the pleasure it gives to men, is that the prologue has given us the spectacle of a prostitute dramatically denying mercenary motivations.

The poetess, like the prostitute, is she who "stands out," as the etymology of the world "prostitute"^[35] implies, but it is also she who is masked. Indeed, as the prologue emphasizes, the prostitute is she who stands out by virtue of her mask. The dramatic masking of the prostitute and the stagy masking of the playwright's interest in money are parallel cases of theatrical unmasking in which what is revealed is the parallel itself: the playwright is a whore.

When we put the spoken prologue to The Forced Marriage together with the printed epistle to Sir Patient Fancy , we notice that they both imply a woman hidden behind her own representations. In the prologue and the epistle the explanations for Aphra Behn's authorship are the two usual excuses for prostitution: addressing herself to the women, she claims the motive of want; addressing herself to the men, she claims the motive of love, but in a way that makes the claim seem merely strategic. The two motivations can be arranged into a narrative. Driven by financial necessity, the mistress pretends to take an amorous interest in her lover, to be desirous, like the lyric poet, simply of erotic intercourse. At the same time she might, as she implies in the epistle, despise the entire interaction. What all this amounts to is the dramatization of her lack of self-representation, which then implies that her true self is the sold self's seller. She thus implies the existence of an unseeable selfhood through the flamboyant alienation of her language.

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Hence Aphra Behn managed to create the effect of a distinctively female integrity out of the very metaphor of prostitution. In doing so, she capitalized on a commonplace slur that probably kept many less ingenious women out of the theatrical and literary marketplaces. "Whore's the like reproachful name, as poetess—the luck-

[35] From pro , meaning "before," and statuere , meaning "to set up or place." To prostitute is thus to set something, oneself perhaps, before someone else to offer it for sale.

less twins of shame," wrote Robert Gould in 1691.^[36] The equation of poetess and "punk" (in the slang of the day) was inescapable in the Restoration. A woman writer could either deny it in the content and form of her publications, as did Katherine Philips, or she could embrace it, as did Aphra Behn. But she could not entirely avoid it. For the belief (Gould again) that

Punk and Poesie agree so pat,
You cannot well be this , and not be that

was held independent of particular cases. It rested on the evidence neither of how a woman lived nor of what she wrote. It was, rather, an a priori judgment applying to all cases of female public language. As Angeline Goreau, one of Aphra Behn's biographers, has pointed out, the seventeenth-century ear heard the word "public" in "publication" very distinctly, and hence a woman's publication automatically implied a public woman.^[37] The woman who shared the contents of her mind instead of reserving them for one man was literally, not metaphorically, trading in her sexual property. If she was married, she was selling what did not belong to her, because in mind and body she should have given herself to her husband. In the seventeenth century, "publication," Goreau adds, also meant sale due to bankruptcy, and the publication of the contents of a woman's mind was tantamount to the publication of her husband's property. In 1613 Lady Elizabeth Cary, in a strikingly inconsistent act, published these lines on marital property rights, publication, and female integrity:

Then she usurps upon another's right,
That seeks to be by public language graced;
And tho' her thoughts reflect with purest light

[36] Satirical Epistle to the Female Author of a Poem called "Sylvia's Revenge" (London, 1691). The poem acknowledges that the lines paraphrase one of Rochester's poems, and the sentiment is a commonplace. The lines are also quoted by Goreau, p. 311.

[37] This discussion is heavily indebted to Goreau, esp. pp. 144–62. Goreau and I cite much of the same evidence but draw very different conclusions. Goreau writes that Behn "savagely resented" the charge of immodesty and makes no references to the playwright's own sly uses of the author-whore metaphor. For a discussion of Behn's self-presentation that recognizes her use of this trope, see Duffy, The Passionate Shepherdess , esp. pp. 94–104. For more general discussions of the metaphor of prostitution in women's writing in the period, see Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica; and Jacqueline Pearson, The Prostituted Muse: Images of Women and Women Dramatists, 1642–1737 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988).

Her mind, if not peculiar, is not chaste.
   For in a wife it is no worse to find
   A common body, than a common mind.^[38]

Publication, adultery, and trading in one's husband's property could all be thought of as the same thing as long as the female self remained an indivisible unity. As Lady Cary explained, the idea of a public mind in a private body threatened to fragment female identity, to destroy its wholeness:

When to their husbands they themselves do bind,
Do they not wholly give themselves away?
Or give they but their body, not their mind,
Reserving that, tho' best, for other's prey?
     No, sure, their thought no more can be their own
     And therefore to none but one be known.

The unique unreserved giving of the woman's self to her husband is the act that keeps her whole. Only in this singular and total alienation does the female self maintain its complete self-identity.

It was precisely this ideal of an integrated woman, preserved because wholly given away, that Aphra Behn sacrificed to create a different idea of identity, one complexly dependent on the necessity of multiple exchanges. She who is able to repeat the action of self-alienation an unlimited number of times is she who is constantly there to regenerate, possess, and sell a series of provisional, constructed identities. Self-possession and self-alienation, then, are two sides of the same coin; the repeated alienation verifies the still maintained possession. In contrast, the wife who gives herself once and completely, and thus has no more property in which to trade, attains a whole inviolate selfhood by ceasing to possess herself. She can be herself because she has given up having herself. Further, as Lady Cary's lines make clear, if a woman's writing is an authentic extension of herself, then she cannot have alienable property in that without disintegrating.

Far from denying these assumptions, Aphra Behn's early au-

[38] The Tragedie of Mariam, the Faire Queene of Jewry (London, 1613), lines 1237–48. These lines are spoken by the play's "chorus," and Barbara Kiefer Lewalski maintains that in Senecan dramas such as Mariam , the chorus's opinion is often not definitive: "[T]he chorus is expected to speak from a partial, not an authoritative, vantage point." See Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993), p. 198.

thorial persona and much of her comedy are based on them. Like her contemporaries, she presented her writing as part of her sexual property, not just because it was bawdy, but because it was hers. All her properties, like those of other women, were the potential property of another; she could either reserve them and give herself whole in marriage, or she could barter them piecemeal, accepting self-division to achieve self-ownership and forfeiting the possibility of marriage. In this sense. Aphra Behn's self-presentation fits into the most advanced seventeenth-century theories about the self: it closely resembles what C. B. Macpherson has called "possessive individualism,"^[39] in which property in the self both entails and is entailed by the parceling out and serial alienation of the self. For in this theory property, by definition, is alienable. Aphra Behn's, however, is a gender-specific version of possessive individualism, one constructed in opposition to the very real alternative of keeping oneself whole by renouncing any claim in the self. Because the husband's right of property was in the whole of the wife, the prior alienation of any part of her had to be seen as a violation of either actual or potential marital propriety. As we will see in analyzing The Lucky Chance , Behn belabors this opposition between woman as inalienable and woman as alienable property in order to prepare for a comic collision of the two concepts. Nevertheless, their opposition was assumed in the period, and hence a woman who, like Aphra Behn, embraced possessive individualism, even if she was single and never bartered her sexual favors, could do so only with a consciousness that she thus contradicted the notion of female identity on which legitimate sexual property relations rested.

Publication, apart from the contents of what was published, ipso facto implied the divided, doubled, and ultimately unavailable self whose female prototype was the prostitute. By flaunting her self-sale, then, Aphra Behn embraced the title of whore; by writing bawdy plays that she then partly disclaimed, she capitalized on her

[39] See C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). Although ultimately this chapter challenges Macpherson's characterization of the political implications of the theory of possessive individualism, his remains a useful description of the model of personhood that Behn develops in her writing. For a critique of Macpherson see J. G. A. Pocock, "Authority and Property: The Question of Liberal Origins," in Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 51–71.

supposed handicap. Finally, she even used this persona to make herself seem the prototypical writer, and in this effort she certainly seems to have had the cooperation of her male competitors. Thus, in the following poem, William Wycherley slyly acknowledges that the sexual innuendos about Aphra Behn rebound on the wits who make them. The occasion of the poem was a rumor that the poetess had gonorrhea. Wycherley emphasizes that the "Sappho of the Age" is more public than any normal prostitute, that her fame grows as she loses her fame, and that the rate of the author-whore is cheaper than that of her sister punk. But he also stresses how much more power the poetess has since in the world of wit, as opposed to the world of sexual exchange, use increases desire, and the author-whore accumulates men instead of being exchanged among them:

More Fame you now (since talk'd of more) acquire,
And as more Public, are more Mens Desire;
Nay, you the more, that you are Clap'd to, now,
Have more to like you, less to censure you;
Now Men enjoy your Parts for Half a Crown,
Which, for a Hundred Pound, they scarce had done,
Before your Parts were, to the Public known.^[40]

Appropriately, Wycherley ends by imaging the whole London theatrical world as a sweating house for venereal disease:

Thus, as your Beauty did, your Wit does now,
The Women's envy, Men's Diversion grow;
Who, to be Clap'd, or Clap you, round you sit,
And, tho' they Sweat for it, will crowd your Pit;
Since lately you Lay-in, (but as they say,)
Because, you had been Clap'd another Way;
But, if 'tis true, that you have need to Sweat,
Get, (if you can) at your New Play, a Seat.

If Aphra Behn's sexual and poetic parts are the same, then the wits are contaminated by her sexual distemper. Aphra Behn and her fellow wits infect each other: the theater is her body, the play is a case of gonorrhea, and the cure is the same as the disease.

Given the general delight of the Restoration in equating mental,

[40] William Wycherley, Miscellany Poems , in The Complete Works of William Wycherley , ed. Montague Summers (London, 1924), vol. 3, pp. 155–56.

sexual, and theatrical "parts" and its frequent likening of writing to prostitution and playwrights to bawds, one might argue that if Aphra Behn had not existed, the male playwrights would have had to invent her in order to increase the witty pointedness of their cynical self-reflections. For example, in the prologue written to Behn's posthumously produced Widow Ranter , the actor chides the self-proclaimed wits for contesting the originality of one another's productions and squabbling over literary property. Drawing on the metaphor of literary paternity, he concludes:

But when you see these Pictures, let none dare
To own beyond a Limb or single share;
For where the Punk is common, he's a Sot,
Who needs will father what the Parish got.^[41]

These lines would lose half their mordancy if the playwright were not Aphra Behn, the poetess-punk, whose offspring cannot seem fully her own but whose right to them cannot be successfully challenged, since her promiscuous literary intercourse would make disputes about fatherhood unresolvable. By literalizing and embracing the playwright-prostitute metaphor, therefore, Aphra Behn was distinguished from other authors, but only as their prototypical representative. She became almost an allegorical figure of authorship for the Restoration, the writer and the strumpet muse combined. Even those who wished to keep the relationship between women and authorship strictly metaphorical were fond of the image: "What a pox have the women to do with the muses?" asks a character in a play attributed to Charles Gildon. "I grant you the poets call the nine muses by the names of women, but why so? . . . because in that sex they're much fitter for prostitution."^[42] Given the ubiquity of the metaphor, it seems almost inevitable that Behn should have obliged the age by "owning" it.

Aphra Behn, therefore, created a persona that skillfully intertwined the age's available discourses concerning women, property, selfhood, and authorship. She found advantageous openings where other women found repulsive insults; she turned self-divi-

[41] Works , vol. 4, p. 224.

[42] The lines are spoken by Critick, the comically negative wit in A Comparison between the Two Stages (London, 1702). The other characters in the play defend the writers under discussion, who are Mary Pix and Delarivier Manley.

sion into identity and impropriety into property. To understand her plays, we first have to understand these paradoxical relationships she helped construct between the female self and her written representations. However, we also have to remind ourselves once again that the primary nexus of exchange constituting these plays was not publication but theatrical production. Although these two phenomena were closely related in the period, they were not identical, and for a fuller view of the creation of Behn's authorial persona, we must return to the particularities of the Restoration stage, especially its staging of the female.

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In thus shifting our perspective, we are not entirely turning away from the topos of prostitution. If the simple combination of femaleness and authorship implied prostitution, female authorship for the stage entailed it doubly. We need hardly rehearse here all the well-known associations between prostitution and the theater, from the Middle Ages, when women were explicitly barred from the stage in England to keep them from using it as a platform for solicitation, to the Restoration, when they appeared as professional actresses but were still often connected in the public mind with the prostitutes who had made the theater their haunt through all the centuries that denied women the boards.

If seventeenth-century texts about the theater often assume that actresses are actual or potential prostitutes, texts about prostitution are altogether certain that whores were essentially actresses or, more precisely, rhetoricians and actresses combined. The anonymous Whores Rhetorick (1683) stresses that the essence of prostitution is not exchanging sexual favors for money but dissimulating affection in words and actions. The old bawd in the first of the Rhetorick 's dialogues instructs the novice:

Interest is the subject of this art; and what ever an insatiable avarice can either pretend to, or desire, may be included in the object thereof. Invention is principally necessary in this Art, to frame new pretexts, and a diversity of expression, with reference to the circumstances of person, time and place: and to impose probabilities, or even things utterly false, as certain, and true. A good memory is requisite to

avoid contradictions, and those inconveniences, the repetition of the same frauds and artifices would infallibly produce.^[43]

The bawd continues through the divisions of oration, elocution, and the doctrine of tropes and figures ("only I omit the barbarous . . . names"). The whore's behavior, like her language, the bawd stresses, must be entirely illusionary: "[Y]ou must put on a seeming modesty, even when you exercise the most essential parts of your Profession: you must pretend a contempt of money, that your most amorous caresses are purely the effects of love; . . . your whole life must be one continued act of dissimulation." Prostitutes clustered around the theater because there they learned the romantic parts that played well with their "cullies" or gallants, according to John Dunton's Night-Walker; or, Evening Rambles in Search after Lewd Women , a series of pamphlets published in 1696–97. The clients themselves, in the following account of a theater-frequenting whore, seem in search of a dramatic, as much as a sexual, experience:

I use to be attended with a fine Spark, who uses to ask me, How I lik'd the Play to Day, and then we pass our Censures upon every one's part, admiring such a one's sweet Voice, another's fine Meen and noble Deportment, the witty Replies of a third, the surprizingness of the Plot and the delicate Turns and great Thoughts in the Prologue and Epilogue, and after we had drank plentifully then my Gallant and I used to fancy our selves the Lovers represented in the Play, he would damn himself if I was not as amiable an Object in his sight as ever Cassandra was in the Eyes of her Orondates, or Cleopatra in the Esteem of her Anthony, and a thousand such soft and charming Expressions: And on the other hand; I would tell him, That he was as lovely in my Eyes as Orondates was to Cassandra, or Anthony to Cleopatra, and this gave our Pleasures high Gust and Relish.^[44]

If prostitution, then, was often imagined as acting, to unmask an actress as a prostitute was simply to reveal her as an actress. What was essential to both arts, indeed what collapsed them into one,

[43] The Whore's Rhetorick: Calculated to the Meridian of London and Conformed to the Rules of Art. In Two Dialogues (London, 1683; rpt. New York: I. Obolensky, 1961), p. 46.

[44] John Dunton, The Night-Walker; or, Evening Rambles in Search after Lewd Women, with the Conferences Held with Them, etc. , no. 3 (November 1696), pp. 16–17.

was the successful maintenance of a gap between self-representation and the "real" woman.^[45]

In Behn's first prologue, this way of conceiving of actresses and prostitutes is assumed. It is the actress who intervenes to save the playwright from identification with the prostitutes in the audience, but as we have seen, it is also the actress who, by theatrically disclaiming mercenary motives, helps establish another aspect of that identification: its reliance on concealment. The actress, like the prostitute, is always playing roles, even when she is playing the role of the actress distinguishing herself from the prostitute. Behn's identification with the actress, then, is another way of thematizing the self-division of the woman in the marketplace, of reminding the audience that self-reserve is the condition of self-sale.

The actress, however, is more than just a metaphor for the playwright; she is also the playwright's proxy. She speaks the author's words, bodies forth her ideas. She stands in relation to the playwright as body to mind, and, as we are about to see, part of the thrill of Aphra Behn's plays in the Restoration seems to have been the combined novelty of a literally feminine body representing, standing for, a "really" feminine mind.^[46] Hence, although the idea of concealment, of an internal difference, is implicit in Behn's very identification with the actress, so too is an idea of revealing sameness. A real woman on the stage speaks the words of a real woman playwright; like represents like.

In general, Restoration playwrights seem to have done all they could to capitalize on the new spectacle of the female body onstage. In the Renaissance, physical femaleness had been represented by low stature, high voices, and women's clothes. The bodies onstage had all been male; femaleness had been a costume, a way of disguising the actual body. As if to emphasize their break with the past in this regard, Restoration comedy writers took every opportunity to demonstrate that their women's bodies were real by undressing them, presenting them in dishabille, or showing off

[45] For a much more thorough discussion of contemporary discourse on prostitution, see James Grantham Turner, "Sex and Consequence," Review 11 (1989): 133–77.

[46] For a discussion of this reality effect in the staging of Restoration actresses, even in male-authored plays, and its reliance on the prostitute-actress connection, see Katherine Eisaman Maus, "Playhouse Flesh and Blood': Sexual Ideology and the Restoration Actress," ELH 46 (1979): 595–617.

their legs in pantaloon parts. Indeed, pantaloon parts were a favorite spectacle because they so neatly reversed the cross-dressing of the Renaissance stage and showed the Restoration's superiority in being able to costume and undress simultaneously. The epilogue to Dryden's Secret Love , for example, comments on the eroticism of physical female presence, enhanced by the woman's being dressed (or rather undressed) in tights. The cross-dressed actress addresses the audience:

What think you Sirs, was't not all well enough,
Will you not grant that we can strut, and huff?
Men may be proud, but faith for ought I see,
They neither walk, nor cock, so well as we.
.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 
Oh would the higher Powers be kind to us,
And grant us to set up a female house.
Wee'l make our selves to please both Sexes then,
To the Men Women, to the Women Men.
Here we presume, our Legs are no ill sight,
And they would give you no ill Dreams at night.
In Dream's both Sexes may their passions ease,
You make us then as civil as you please.^[47]

This epilogue cleverly stresses both the reality of the female body on the stage and its status as a body of representation, both a spectacular literal presence and an invitation to imaginative embellishment onto which even masculinity might be grafted. But adding masculine costumes to feminine bodies on the Restoration stage was not the simple inversion of adding feminine costumes to masculine bodies on the Renaissance stage, because Renaissance actors had put on skirts whereas Restoration actresses took them off. In short, on the Restoration stage, the act of imagination was supposed to accompany the revelation, not the concealment, of the actual body.

The difference between the two theaters in this regard is neatly summarized by Davenant's revision of The Tempest . As Dryden explained, Davenant wished to "complete" Shakespeare's play by inventing a "counterpart to Shakespeare's Plot, namely that of a Man who had never seen a Woman."^[48] That is, Davenant, somewhat

[47] The Works of John Dryden , vol. 9, pp. 202–03.

[48] Dryden's preface to his own Tempest; or, the Enchanted Island , in Complete Works , vol. 10, p. 4.

oddly imagining that Miranda had never laid eyes on any man at all, gave her a lover who, like the early Restoration playgoer, had never before had the theatrical spectacle of an actual woman. The Restoration playwright thus revised the Renaissance to make the revelation of woman the wonder. The brave new world of the Restoration stage was indeed the female body.^[49]

Behn turned this innovation to her special advantage in several ways. According to Peter Holland, she made the spectacle of the undressed woman one of her hallmarks. In ten of Behn's comedies, he claims, there are eighteen "discovery" scenes of undressing, dressing, or going to bed, and almost all of these involve women: "No other dramatist is even half as preoccupied with bedroom scenes."^[50] Such a preoccupation certainly justifies Pope's famous couplet on Behn:

The stage how loosely does Astraea tread
Who fairly puts all characters to bed!^[51]

The lines are not so much a sexist slur motivated by the double standard as a simple recognition of what made Behn's plays stand out for her contemporaries: far more than her male colleagues, she exploited the spectacle of the undressed body and incessantly presented the scene of sexuality itself. One of the commodities, then, that Behn consistently promises and delivers is the female body in a particularly "literally" exposed state.

As I suggested earlier, part of the power of such moments must have been that they were a staging of a female by a female, increasing the effect of literalness, of reality, or at least of a symbolic economy in which things are represented by things like themselves.

[49] Of course, some older plays completely lost their point under these circumstances. The Restoration fashion for exposing women's legs lasted well into the eighteenth century and led one director, for example, in 1776 to cast a woman in the role of Jonson's Epicoene; when she removed her skirts, revealing not the boy the script called for but a woman in boy's tights, "the audience felt themselves rather trifled with than surprized." See Ben Jonson: Volume 1 , ed. and introd. Brinsley Nicholson and C. H. Herford (New York: Scribner's, 1957), pp. 113–14.

[50] Holland, The Ornament of Action , p. 41. For an analysis of Behn's use of breeches parts, see Frances M. Kavenik, "Aphra Behn: The Playwright as 'Breeches Part,'" in Curtain Calls , pp. 177–92.

[51] "First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace. To Augustus," in Alexander Pope: Collected Poems , ed. Bonamy Dobree and introd. Clive T. Probyn (London: J. M. Dent, 1987), p. 300. The context of these lines is a general satire on comedy, and Behn is one of several instances of "how seldom even the best succeed."

The female character is created by a female writer and represented on the stage by a female actress. Thus Pope can imagine that it is Behn herself who loosely treads the stage, even as he distinguishes between the playwright and the characters by turning the former into a kind of procuress or perverse "mother" putting her characters to bed. The more literal-minded Robert Gould in "The Play-house. A Satyr" flatly equates the spectacle of the actress who plays Lady Galliard in The City Heiress with the character and both with Behn:

              the lewd Widow comes, with brazen face
Just reeking from a Stallion's rank embrace.^[52]

Such a bare equation of author and character may seem naive, cruel, and slanderous to us now, but it was similar to, and probably motivated by, the writer-actress-character identification that Behn exploited.

Although satires like Pope's and Gould's reveal something important about Behn's unique procedures and appeal, they ignore Behn's skill at playing with the decorum of the stage without ever allowing the levels of representation to collapse. Her care to distinguish between actresses and characters, between literal bodies and what they represent, for example, is evident even in her staging of the exposed body. The bedroom scenes that abound in her comedies are, appropriately, "discoveries" (scenes upstage, furthest from the audience) that are in progress when the curtain opens to "discover" them. Behn, therefore, even as she thus increased the sensation of voyeurism, kept her undressed actors upstage, apparently to keep them in character, to keep them from being confused with actors whose "undress" was supposed to designate that they were temporarily out of character, that is, playing the role of the actor. As Holland explains, "the Restoration styles of forestage acting encouraged the identification of actor and character simultaneously far more than does upstage acting."^[53] Behn's exploitation of the body, then, relied on the very distinction of symbolic levels that it threatened to collapse.

The distinctions among playwright, actress, and character were

[52] In Poems Chiefly Consisting of Satyrs and Satyrical Epistles (London, 1689), rpt. in Montague Summers, The Restoration Theatre (New York: Humanities Press, 1964), p. 305.

[53] Holland, p. 42.

similarly crucial to Behn's mode of self-presentation. As we have already noticed, Restoration playwrights needed to make themselves prominent in the imagination of the audience. For example, in his "Defence of an Essay of Dramatique Poesie" Dryden insists on the preeminence of the poet in the audience's experience of the play. Refuting the idea that "a Play will . . . be supposed to be a composition of several Persons speaking ex tempore ," he claims, "a Play is suppos'd to be the work of the Poet, imitating, or representing the conversation of several persons."^[54] Dryden's is not an expressive aesthetic; the playwright does not represent himself. Nevertheless, the play is his work of representation and must be viewed as such. This emergence of the poet in the foreground of the audience's consciousness as a being distinguishable from both the object and the theatrical means of representation is, as I have already noted, the basis of the playwright's entitlement to a separate benefit. Like her male colleagues, Behn had to create a separate, authorial, persona, but her work, unlike theirs, relied for its novelty and power partly on an identification of heroine, actress, and playwright. Behn, then, had a delicate representational task to perform: she had to draw a sense of her difference out of the very materials of her identification. The self-presentation we have been tracing through the metaphors of prostitution and acting was partly a solution to this problem. Her identification with the prostitute and actress signals her ultimate elusiveness, the difference between what she is and what she seems, even as it tells the audience what she is "like." Her relationship to the actress is like the prostitute's relationship to her own body: the mask that hides the face signals the availability of the body but also implies the impenetrability of the controlling mind.

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It is in Behn's comedies that these relationships are most complexly enacted and that the perils of such a means of authorial empowerment come into view. Through their exploration of the relationships between women and property, the plays examine the dynamics of

[54] The Indian Emperour; or, the Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards , in The Works of John Dryden , vol. 9, p. 6.

desire, gratification, and representation. If the poetess-punk is she who is identified by her disguise, she whose nature is marked by her mask, whose mode of self-representation is that of hiding to produce desire, then the implied "real" self is both a phenomenon created by representation and one implying its limits. The poetess is by definition the person not representing herself, the person behind representation. She inspires desire through disguise, and hence it is not she , properly speaking, who is the object of desire. And yet she is the implied first cause of desire as well as its epiphenomenon. This authorial self in the land of Aphra Behn's representations is a mere shadow, darkened with the sense of exclusion, with a sense that her involvement is predicated on her "nothingness," her absence from the scene. The sold self's seller, the exchanger on the other side of representation, "Aphra Behn" is often felt as just a suggestion of a lack of gratification.

This hint of authorial dissatisfaction should not be confused with the disapproval of turning women into items of exchange that is so often expressed by characters in the comedies.^[55]The Lucky Chance , which will serve here as Behn's exemplary comedy, all too readily yields a facile, right-minded thematic analysis centering on women and property exchange. The play's three plots can easily be seen as variations on this theme: Diana is being forced into a loveless marriage with a fop because of her father's family ambition. Her prepossession in favor of the young Bredwell is ignored in the exchange. Diana's father, Sir Feeble Fainwood, is also purchasing himself a young bride, Leticia, whom he has tricked into believing that her betrothed, who had been banished for fighting a duel, is dead. Julia, having already sold herself to another rich old merchant, Sir Cautious Fulbank, is being wooed to adultery by her former lover, Gayman. All three women are both property and occasions for the exchange of property: Diana is part of a financial arrangement between the families of the two old men, and the intended bridegroom, Bearjest, sees her merely as the embodiment of a great fortune; Leticia is bought by "a great jointure"; and

[55] For overviews of the theme of forced marriage in Behn's plays, see Marc Lussier, "'The Vile Merchandize of Fortune': Women, Economy, and Desire in Aphra Behn," Women's Studies 18 (1991): 379–93; and Jessica Munns, "'I by a Double Right Thy Bounties Claim': Aphra Behn and Social Space," in Curtain Calls , pp. 193–210.

though we know, interestingly, nothing of Julia's motives, we are told that she had also married for money. It is easy, then, to make the point that the treatment of women as property is the problem that the play's comic action will set out to solve. Women as forms of property and items of exchange, whether they married for property, like Leticia and Julia, or were married, like Diana, for dowry, seem to be the play's point of departure, and the urge to break that identification seems, on a casual reading, to license the play's impropriety. One could even redeem the old men's giving of all the women to their lovers in the end by pointing out that this is, after all, a comedy, a form that requires female desire to flow through established channels.

This superficial thematic analysis of The Lucky Chance fits in well with the image of Aphra Behn her most recent biographers promote: that of an advocate of "free love" in every sense of the phrase and a heroic defender of the right of women to speak their own desire. However, such an interpretation does not bear the weight of the play's structure or remain steady in the face of its ellipses, nor can it sustain the pressure of the play's images. For the moments of crisis in the play are not those in which a woman becomes property, but those in which a woman is burdened with a selfhood that can be neither represented (a self without properties) nor exchanged. They are the moments when the veiled woman confronts the impossibility of being represented and hence of being desired.

Before turning to those moments, though, I will outline the larger organizational features of the play that complicate its treatment of the link between women and property. First, we should notice the emphatic way in which the plots are disconnected in their most fundamental logic. The plots of Diana and Leticia rely on the idea that there is an irreversible moment of matrimonial exchange after which the woman is "given" and cannot be given again. Thus the action is directed toward thwarting and replacing the planned marriage ceremony, in the case of Diana, and avoiding the consummation of the marriage, in the case of Leticia. However, the interaction of even these two plots oddly affects the very sense of urgency that each plot individually tries to elicit; how can we see the marriage ceremony as the crucial, irretrievable step in Diana's plot if Leticia, who has just taken the same step, is somehow still

marriageable? That is, both plots contain a logic of crisis, but they are slightly mutually disorienting because of their different accounts of just what is critical.^[56]

Yet even more devastating to our sense that these actions signify is their alternation with Julia's adultery plot. Julia has crossed all the thresholds and is still somehow free to dispose of herself. The logic on which her plot is based seems to deny that there are critical or irremediable events in female destiny. Hence, in the scene directly following Leticia's intact deliverance from Sir Feeble Fainwood's bed and Diana's elopement with Bredwell, we find Julia resignedly urging her aged husband to get the sex over with and then stop meddling with the affairs of her heart: "But let us leave this fond discourse, and, if you must, let us to bed."^[57] Julia proves her self-possession precisely by her indifference to the crises structuring Diana's and Leticia's experiences.

On the one hand, Julia's plot could be seen to undercut the achievement of resolution in the other plots by implying that there was never anything to resolve: the obstacles were not real, the crises were not crises, the definitive moment never did and never could arrive. But on the other hand, we could argue that the crisis plots drain the adultery plot not only of moral credibility but also of dramatic interest, for there seems to be simply nothing at stake in Julia's plot. Indeed, Julia's plot seems itself to be bent on making this point, turning, as it so often does, on attempts to achieve things that have already been achieved or gambling for stakes that have already been won. These two responses, however, tend to cancel one another, and we cannot conclude that either plot logic renders the other nugatory. The Lucky Chance achieves its effects,

[56] Susan Staves has noted that this casual attitude toward marriage vows is a distinguishing feature of much Restoration comedy; she examines "how weak the traditional obligations imposed by the religious vows of marriage could seem when the individuals they joined could not respect each other." See Players' Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1979), chapters 3 and 4; the quotation is on p. 180. See also Harold Weber, The Restoration Rake-Hero: Transformations in Sexual Understanding in Seventeenth-Century England (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1986); and John Harrington Smith, The Gay Couple in Restoration Comedy (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1948). On Behn's adaptation from Fletcher of these conventions regarding marriage in The Lucky Chance , see Kavenik, "Aphra Behn: The Playwright as 'Breeches Part,'" pp. 178–80.

[57] The Lucky Chance; or, an Alderman's Bargain (performed first in 1686), in The Female Wits , ed. Morgan, p. 135. Subsequent quotations from this edition are cited parenthetically in the text.

rather, by presenting, alternately, the problem and its seeming nonexistence. The imminent danger of becoming an unwilling piece of someone else's property is at once asserted and denied.^[58]

The alternation of assertion and denial emphasizes the discontinuity between the two "resolutions" of women's sexual identity that I discussed earlier: one in which the giving of the self intact is tantamount to survival; the other in which the self is maintained in a series of exchanges. This very discontinuity, as I have already pointed out, is part of a discursive pattern of juxtaposition. The proof of self-ownership is repeated self-sale; hence Julia needs no exculpating story of deceit or coercion to explain her marriage to Sir Cautious. But the complete import of what she does, both of what she sacrifices and what she gains, can only be understood against the background of a story like Leticia's that imagines the alternative of a marriage that maintains the whole self.

Each story thus highlights the assumptions of the other through juxtaposition. Nevertheless, our inability to perceive these plots within a single dramatic perspective reveals the oppositional relationship between the two seventeenth-century versions of the female self as property discussed earlier in this chapter. Built into this very disjunction, therefore, is a complicated explanation of why women cannot cease to be property. In the play, the exchange, by women themselves or by someone else, of women as property appears inevitable, and the action revolves around the terms of exchange. The crisis plots, of which Leticia's is the most important, posit wholeness as the precondition of exchange and as the result of its successful completion. The unitary principle dominates the logic of this plot and also, as we are about to see, the language of its actors and its representational rules. Julia's plot, in contrast, assumes not only the fracturing and multiplication of the self as a condition and result of exchange but also the creation of a second order of reality: a reality of representations through which the characters simultaneously alienate and protect their identities.

The disjunction in the deep assumptions of the plots, then, is accompanied by the second general formal feature I will discuss

[58] For a discussion of women and exchange in two other Behn plays, see Lussier, "'The Vile Merchandize of Fortune': Women, Economy, and Desire in Aphra Behn."

before turning to the topic of feminine representation: the split in representational procedures that can be detected in the very first scene, where it differentiates the characters of the leading men. In the play's opening speech, Bellmour enters, complaining that the law has stolen his identity, has made him a creature of disguise and the night. His various complaints in the scene cluster around a central fear of de-differentiation, of the failure properly to distinguish essential differences. Thus it is the

      rigid laws, which put no difference
'Twixt fairly killing in my own defence,
And murders bred by drunken arguments,
Whores, or the mean revenges of a coward
(p. 76)

that have forced his disguise, his alienation from his own identity. That is, the denial of the true, identity-ensuring, difference (that between duelers and murderers) necessitates false difference, disguises, and theatrical representations that get more elaborate as the plot progresses. The comedy is this series of disguises and spectacles, but its end is to render them unnecessary by the reunion of Bellmour with his proper identity and his proper wife.

The very terms of Bellmour's self-alienation, moreover, emphasize stable identity and sameness by assuming that like must be represented by like. Bellmour has taken a life in a duel, and for that he is deprived of the life he thought he would lead. He has destroyed a body with his sword, and for that a body that belongs to him, Leticia's, will be taken from him also, through puncturing. Even the comic details of Bellmour's reported death are consonant with this mode of representation:

Ralph: Hanged, Sir, hanged, at The Hague in Holland.

Bellmour: For what, said they, was he hanged?

Ralph: Why, e'en for high treason, Sir, he killed one of their kings.

Gayman: Holland's a commonwealth, and is not ruled by kings.

Ralph: Not by one, Sir, but by many. This was a cheesemonger, they fell out over a bottle of brandy, went to snicker snee, Mr. Bellmour cut his throat, and was hanged for't, that's all, Sir.

The reductio ad absurdum of like representing like is the commonwealth in which everyone is a king. Within this comically literalist system of representation Bellmour is imagined to have had his neck broken for slitting the throat of a cheesemonger. It is no wonder that the climax of Bellmour's performance is a simulation of the exchange of like for like. As Sir Feeble Fainwood approaches the bed on which he intends to deflower Leticia, asking her, "What, was it ashamed to show its little white foots, and its little round bubbies?" Bellmour comes out from between the bed curtains, naked to the waist. And, all the better to ward off that which he represents, he has Leticia's projected wound painted on his own chest and a dagger ready to make another such wound on Sir Feeble. The whole representational economy of this plot, therefore, has an underlying unitary basis in the notion that things must be paid for in kind. Even Leticia's self-sale seems not to be for money but for the jewelry to which she is often likened.

Like Bellmour, Gayman also enters the first scene in hiding, "wrapped in his cloak," but the functional differences between the two kinds of self-concealment are soon manifested. The end of Gayman's disguises is not the retrieval of his property but the sexual use of what he thinks is the property of others: "Are you not to be married, Sir?" asks Bellmour. "No Sir," returns Gayman, "not as long as any man in London is so, that has but a handsome wife, Sir" (p. 77). He attempts, not to reestablish essential differences, but rather to blur them. "The bridegroom!" exclaims Bellmour on first seeing Sir Feeble. "Like Gorgon's head he's turned me into stone." "Gorgon's head," retorts Gayman, "a cuckold's head, 'twas made to graft upon" (p. 79). Gayman's dizzying swiftness in extending Bellmour's metaphor speaks a desire to destroy the paired stability of exchanges. Looking at the bridegroom's head, Bellmour sees an image of immobilizing female sexuality, the Gorgon. Thus the bridegroom represents the alienated sexuality of Leticia. Gayman disarms this image by decking it with horns to introduce the idea that if Leticia has been unfaithful, she may, by continuing on the same course, be persuaded by Bellmour to cuckold Sir Feeble. But this seems no solution at all to Bellmour, since it only further collapses the distinction between lover and husband, merging him with Sir Feeble at the moment he agrees to the alienation of "his"

sexual property right in Leticia: "What, and let him marry her! She that's mine by sacred vow already! By heaven it would be flat adultery in her!" (p. 80). "She'll learn the trick," replies Gayman, "and practice it the better with thee." The destruction of the "true" distinctions between husband and lover, cuckold and adulterer, proprietor and thief is the state for which Gayman longs.

Bellmour's comedy, then, moves toward the reinscription of true difference through the creation of false differences; Gayman's comedy moves toward the erasure of true differences through the creation of false samenesses. Gayman is in disguise because he cannot bear to let Julia know that he is different from his former self. He wishes to appear before her always the same, to hide the new fact of his poverty. He tries to get money from his landlady so that he can get his clothes out of hock and disguise himself as himself to go on wooing Julia. On the same principle of the effacement of difference, Gayman later tries to pass himself off as Julia's husband when he, unbeknownst to her, takes the old man's place in bed.

Moreover, just as the false differences of Bellmour's comedy conform to a unitary like-for-like economy of representation, the false samenesses of Gayman's plotting are governed by an economy of representation through difference, the most obvious example of which is the use of money. Money in this plot often represents bodies or their sexual use, and such exchanges generally emphasize the differences between the body and money. For example, in the scene of Gayman's two prostitutions (the first with his landlady and the second with his unknown admirer) the difference between the women's bodies and the precious metals they can be made to yield is the point of the comedy. The landlady is herself metamorphosed into iron for the sake of this contrast: Gayman describes her as an iron lady who emerges from her husband's blacksmithing shop. She is then stroked into metals of increasing value as she yields "'postle spoons and caudle cups" that Gayman exchanges for gold. But Gayman's expletives remind us that this sexual alchemy is being practiced on an unsublimable body that constantly sickens the feigning lover with its stink. Even more telling is the continuation of this scene in which Gayman receives a bag of gold as advance payment for an assignation with an anonymous

woman. Here the desirability of the gold (associated with its very anonymity) immediately implies the undesirability of the woman who sends it:

Some female devil, old and damned to ugliness,
And past all hopes of courtship and address,
Full of another devil called desire,
Has seen this face, this shape, this youth,
And thinks it's worth her hire. It must be so.
(p. 94)

Of course, as this passage emphasizes, in both cases the women's money, which indicates Gayman's sexual worthiness, again marks a difference, the difference in the desirability of the bodies to be exchanged.

The freedom and perils, especially the perils for women, that such systems of representation through difference introduce into erotic life are explored in the conflict between Julia and Gayman. And that exploration returns us to the issue of feminine authorial representation. Julia, like many of Aphra Behn's heroines, confronts a familiar predicament: she wishes to have the pleasure of sexual intercourse with her lover without the pain of losing her honor. "Honor" is not a matter of conscience in the play, since secret actions are outside its realm. Rather, to lose honor is to give away control over one's public representations. Hence, in the adultery plot, as opposed to the crisis plot, women's bodies are not the true stakes; representations of bodies, especially in money and language, are the focal points of conflict.

Gayman's complaint against Julia, for example, is that she prefers the public admiration of the crowd, which she gains through witty language ("talking all and loud" [p. 99]), to the private "adoration" of a lover, which is apparently speechless. Julia's retort, however, indicates that it is Gayman who will betray the private to public knowledge for the sake of his own reputation. It is Gayman who will "describe her charms,"

Or make most filthy verses of me
Under the name of Cloris, you Philander,
Who, in lewd rhymes, confess the dear appointment,
What hour, and where, how silent was the night,
How full of love your eyes, and wishing mine.

We have, by the way, just heard Gayman sing a verse about Cloris's wishing eyes to his landlady. To escape being turned into someone else's language, losing the ability to control her own public self-presentation, Julia subjects herself to a much more radical severance of implied true self from self-representation than Gayman could have imagined. At once gratifying her sexual desire and preserving her honor, she arranges to have Gayman's own money (in some ways a sign of his desire for her) misrepresented to him as payment for sexual intercourse with an unknown woman.

Julia, then, hides behind the anonymity of the gold that passes between them, relying on its nature as a universal equivalent for desire, universal and anonymous precisely because it does not resemble what it stands for and can thus stand for anything. But in this episode, she is erased by the very anonymity of the representation. For as we have already seen, Gayman takes the gold as a sign of the difference between the woman's repulsiveness and his own desirability. Apparently, moreover, this representation of her undesirability overwhelms the tactile experience itself, so that when they finally couple, Gayman does not actually have Julia but rather another version of his landlady. As he later reluctantly describes the sightless, wordless encounter to Julia (whom he does not suspect of having been the woman), "She was laid in a pavilion all formed of gilded clouds which hung by geometry, whither I was conveyed after much ceremony, and laid in a bed with her, where, with much ado and trembling with my fears, I forced my arms about her." "And sure," interjects Julia aside to the audience, "that undeceived him." "But," continues Gayman, "such a carcass 'twas, deliver me, so shrivelled, lean and rough, a canvas bag of wooden ladles were a better bedfellow." "Now, though, I know that nothing is more distant than I from such a monster, yet this angers me," confides Julia to the audience, "'Slife, after all to seem deformed, old, ugly." The interview ends with Gayman's final misunderstanding: "I knew you would be angry when you heard it" (p. 118).

The extraordinary thing about this interchange is that it does not matter whether Gayman is telling the truth about his sexual experience. The gold may have so overwhelmed his senses as to make Julia feel like its opposite: a bag of wooden ladles rather than precious coins; and, indeed, the continuity of images between this description and Gayman's earlier reactions to women who give

him money tends to confirm his sincerity. The bag of ladles reminds us of the landlady, who was also a bag, but one containing somewhat more valuable table utensils: "'postle spoons and caudle cups." However, Gayman, to prevent Julia's jealousy, may be lying about his experience. Either way, Julia was missing from that experience. Whether he did not desire her at all or desired her as someone else is immaterial; what Julia feels as she sees herself through this doubled representation of money and language is the impossibility of keeping herself to herself and truly being gratified as at once a subject and object of desire.

This economy of difference, in which Julia's representations are not recognizably hers, leaves her in a state of unexchangeability. The drive for self-possession removes her "true" self from the realms of desire and gratification. Because she has not given herself away, she finds that her lover has not been able to take her. Surprisingly, however, the play goes on to overcome this difficulty, not by taking refuge in like-for-like exchanges, but by remaining in the economy of difference until Julia seems able to adjust the claims of self-possession and gratification.

The adjustment becomes possible only after Julia has been explicitly converted into a commodity worth three hundred pounds. The process leading up to this conversion merits our scrutiny. Gayman and Sir Cautious are gambling; Gayman has won three hundred pounds and is willing to stake it against something of Sir Cautious's:

Sir cautious: I wish I had anything but ready money to stake: three hundred pound, a fine sum!

Gayman: You have moveables Sir, goods, commodities.

Sir cautious: That's all one, Sir. That's money's worth, Sir, but if I had anything that were worth nothing.

Gayman: You would venture it. I thank you Sir. I would your lady were worth nothing.

Sir cautious: Why so, Sir?

Gayman: Then I would set all 'gainst that nothing.

Sir cautious: What, set it against my Wife?

Gayman: Wife, Sir! Ay, your Wife.

Sir cautious: Hum, my Wife against three hundred pounds! What, all my Wife, Sir?

Gayman: . . . Why, Sir, some part of her would serve my turn.

Sir Cautious begins this dialogue with a comical identification of everything with its universal equivalent, money. Everything he owns is convertible into money; hence, he believes that money is the real essence of everything that is not money. Hence, everything is really the same thing—money. For Sir Cautious the economy of difference collapses everything into sameness. The only thing that is truly different, then, must be "nothing," a common slang term for the female genitals. One's wife is this nothing because she is at once female and, in the normal course of events, not a commodity: "Why, what a lavish whoremaker's this? We take money to marry our wives but very seldom part with 'em, and by the bargain get money" (p. 126). Her usual nonexchangeability for money is what makes a wife different from a prostitute; it is also what makes her the perfect nothing to set against three hundred pounds. We could say, then, that Julia is here made into a commodity only because she is not one. She differs from everything that is worth anything and thereby becomes the principle of universal difference for her husband. She is a cipher that can safely stand in for any of Sir Cautious's other things, which are all "money's worth, Sir." She is, then, a kind of counter-money that takes the place of all the exchangeable things without exactly becoming one of them. As a principle of universal difference, a "nothing," she paradoxically seems ideally suited to be exchanged for the universal equivalent, money. However, this very exchangeability then blurs the distinction between the counter-money and money itself, the distinction that motivated the exchange in the first place.

Hence, Sir Cautious finds himself in a logical double bind and is unable to rest content with his bargain. What originally distinguishes his wife, or her "part," from the rest of his property is her putative inalienability. As a merchant, Sir Cautious imagines that owning something gives him the right to sell it. He defines ownership as an absolute property right to do whatever he chooses with his belongings. It is this relatively "new" way of conceptualizing property that leads him to see everything as money, for the exchangeability of things is the ultimate proof that they belong to

him.^[59] The one thing in which Sir Cautious seems to have a property right that denies rather than entails marketability is Julia's "part." For a woman, if she can be conceived of as property at all, is a very anomalous sort of property in Sir Cautious's mental universe. She can only "belong" to a man under heavily qualified notions of ownership. Under the strictest patriarchal rules whereby a woman could be conceived of, in Lady Cary's words, as "wholly" given "away," the property rights of the male in the female could never be absolute, for the father, who had the right to exchange her, could not have the right to possess her sexually, and the husband, who had the right to possess her, could not have the right to exchange her. It is the paradox of such an inalienable property that traps Sir Cautious. If he owns Julia's "part," he should be able to exchange it, like any other possession, for money; but if he exchanges it for money, he fears that Julia will no longer be his wife. The concept of an inalienable property is foreign to him, but its very incomprehensibility makes it the only kind of property he can imagine as "nothing."

What we have here, then, is the comic collision of possessive individualism with the very idea of marital propriety, a collision that wipes out all Sir Cautious's claims to property in Julia. Moreover, the episode decisively links Julia's liberation with the triumph of representation through difference. Her prostitution parallels Gayman's, in which, as we have seen, money also marked difference. But the sequels of the two scenes are strikingly dissimilar. Gayman is once again in Julia's bed, but his, rather than her, identity is supposedly masked. Whereas in the first encounter Gayman went to bed with what he thought was an old woman, in the second, Julia goes to bed with what she thinks is her old husband. The difference between these two scenes in the dark as they are later recounted stems from the relative inalienability of male sexual identity. Even in the dark, we are led to believe, the

[59] On the growth of this notion of property in seventeenth-century England, see both Macpherson and Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978). For a consideration of the politics of the mobility of property, see Pocock, "The Mobility of Property and the Rise of Eighteenth-Century Sociology," in Virtue, Commerce, and History , pp. 103–23.

difference between men is sensible because their selfhood is not easily effaced: Gayman says,

It was the feeble husband you enjoyed
In cold imagination, and no more.
Shyly you turned away, faintly resigned . . .
Till excess of love betrayed the cheat.
(p. 139)

Gayman's body, even unseen, is not interchangeable with Sir Cautious's. Unlike Julia's body, Gayman's will undo the misrepresentation; no mere idea can eradicate this palpable sign of identity, the tumescent penis itself. Hence, when Gayman takes Sir Cautious's place in bed, he does not really risk what Julia suffered earlier: "after all to seem deformed, old, ugly." Gayman's self will always obtrude into the sphere of representation—another version of the ladle, but one that projects from the body instead of being barely discernible within it.

This inalienable masculine identity, although it seems at first Gayman's advantage, is quickly appropriated by Julia, who uses it to secure at once her own good reputation and complete liberty of action. Once again we are given a scene in which the speaker's sincerity is questionable. When Gayman's erection reveals his identity, Julia appears outraged at the attempted deception: "What, make me a base prostitute, a foul adult'ress? Oh, be gone, dear robber of my quiet" (p. 139). We can only see this tirade as more deceit on Julia's part, since we know she tricked the same man into bed the night before. Indeed, Gayman himself knows the truth at this point in the play. But since her deceit was not immediately discovered and his was, she is able to feign outrage and demand a separation from her husband. The implication, although once again it cannot be represented, is that Julia has found a way to secure her liberty and her "honor" by maintaining her misrepresentations.

It is, then, precisely through her nullity, her nothingness, that Julia achieves a new level of self-possession along with the promise of continual sexual exchange. But this, of course, is an inference we make from what we suspect Julia of hiding: her pleasure in Gayman's body, her delight that she now has an excuse for separating from her husband, her intention to go on seeking covert

pleasure. All of this is on the other side of what we see and hear; it consequently conjures the shadow of the controlling but unrepresentable woman. This shady effect also constitutes our idea of the author of The Lucky Chance , a being who appears as an afterimage of her disappearance. The very shadiness allows us to imagine her as at once triumphantly elusive and poignantly dissatisfied, as heroine and victim of her exchanges. She is herself the nothing that might equal anything.

Hence, for all her staginess and explicit sexuality, the Aphra Behn of the comedies might nonetheless be seen as a kind of "Nobody." Associating herself with tokens of internal division (prostitutes, actresses, commodities) or with emblems of blank anonymity (money and the "nothing" of women's genitals), she eludes our desire for a positive identification. Although I will argue in later chapters that "Nobody" achieves both her explicitly "fictional" nature and her full stature only with the ascendancy of the novel in the middle of the eighteenth century, we can already see in Aphra Behn's comic authorial persona that "Nobodiness" appears when the topics of femaleness and commercial exchange are combined in the rhetoric of authorship.