Hello everyone!
Today I would like to talk about Aphra Behn, and about the fact that she was the first female writer who made a life from her literary works.
Several women authors made important contributions to the development of the Engish novel at the end of the XVIIth and beginning of the XVIIIth century. Aphra Behn is one of the most important writers in English Literature, as she is known as the first professional female writer in England. She wrote during the English Restoration, being famous for her witty plays, poems, and prose (novels and short stories). In this period, women were excluded from the ranks of institutions that keep the records, so there is very little information and documentation about her, and most of her life remains unknown: what we know about her life is sustained on what she wrote, themes and characters, and rumours about her life.
During the Restoration, with the merge of the novel, literature became a product. The genre of the novel has always shown an interest on domestic issues, and the protagonists of them have always been women and men. But men did not like that women, with an evident lack of education, could write, and female writers were mocked, disdained and disrespected by men. Actually, what men really hated was that women could be “equal” to them, in the sense that it was not fair that “illiterate” women could publish and captivate the public in the same way as men did.. But Behn proved that she could “write like a men” in a male dominated literary world. Writers such as Dryden encouraged her, and she became part of a literary set which she called her “cabal.” At a time when only rich women were allowed to write privately in their rooms, Aphra Behn proved that not only wealthy and powerful women were capable of writing. Moreover, she proved that she could make a living by using her pen.
She became the first woman to earn a living as a writer and, during the first twenty years of her career, she was the only female playwright. All her plays show a great ability and wit, but we can’t deny that some of them were written under the pressure of necessity. Behn herself said that she wrote her first plays “forced to write for bread.” As I said before, this fact proves that she had the necessity of making a living out of her literary work.
Her importance as a female writer is explored in works such as Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, where she wrote “All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds. It is she -- shady and amorous as she was -- who makes it not quite fantastic for me to say to you tonight: Earn five hundred a year by your wits.” According to Woolf, Behn gave women the chance to rise in a world dominated by men, and the opportunity to earn a living by doing what they really liked. As Behn herself said: “All I ask, is the privilege for my masculine part the poet in me. . . . If I must not, because of my sex, have this freedom. . . I lay down my quill and you shall hear no more of me.” She also said “I value fame as much as if I had been born a hero.”
Injustice in every form, the suffering of those who are not treated as human, but as something less… all these themes are reflected throughout her work. She added female characters that help exploring themes such as race and gender oppression, and role of women and sexuality, both from the personal and the political point of view. These characters play an active and independent role in the novels and plays. We can take as an example the strength of Imoinda and the narrator in Oroonoko. For this reason, and because of her Royalist opinions, she was considered a “shameless” writer, whose themes were smutty and rude. This can be seen in something that the Marquis of Halifax said: “The unjustifiable freedom of some of your sex have involved the rest in the penalty of being reduced." In this statement he blames Behn for the oppression of the rest of women. About her, Pope wrote:
“The stage how loosely does Astraea tread,
Who fairly puts all characters to bed!”
However, nowadays, she is considered as a great writer, pioneer of her time, who explored themes of love, gender, race, class and political status in a very refined way.
“A woman wit has often graced the stage”, Dryden wrote. And we owe Behn for speaking her mind and defending woman's rights, being the first woman who dared to write in a men’s literary world.
