Aphra Behn Essay -- Literary Analysis, The Rover

Aphra Behn, who is the low female to achieve status of a professional playwright attempt to alter and influence the literary cannon through her writing, which was a rickety occupation scarcely allowed literature to evolve in a wider range. Behn was to a fault one of the wittiest and entertaining as evidenced through her most historied play, The Rover, which is a restoration, yet dark comedy set in seventeenth century Italy while under the colonial reign of Spain. The large send packing of characters becomes embroiled in scenes and consist a mix of themes of infidelity, seduction, misrepresentation, and elaborate swordplay, which execute tension and confusion in addition to many comedic episodes. The play expresses its authors objections to the photograph of women in Restoration society. Perhaps ironically, it also appeals to the prurient interests of the audience by putting women in morally compromising situations. Based loosely on contemporary Thomas Killigrews 1564 unperform ed play, Thomaso, or The Wanderer (1664), Behns play is slight lewd and more profound. The Rover has been widely acclaimed by critics to be a womens rightist play, in particular a proto- feminist play which defined by The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms as a philosophical customs duty that anticipated modern feminist concepts and the discussion of womens issues when the term feminist was nonexistent prior to the twentieth century. The writing is concerned with the unique exist of being a woman or alternatively writing intentional to challenge existing preconceptions of gender. (Baldick, 2009 128) In The Rover, Behn places characters in morally corrupted situations and wad to force audiences to reconsider preconceptions, inspiring the new movement in feminist thi... ...uality keeps her from happiness. Through Angellica, Hellena, and Florinda, Behn reveals that the libertine female has no place in deep Stuart society. The playwrights observation comes as a wistful standa rd at a time when women seemed to push the limits of tradition. Actresses appearing on symbolize might feel they had found a career of bodily expression, but from Behns experience as a woman with male colleagues, the liberty is a faade. Women on stage faced fetishization and loss of status. Behns scuttlebutt on womens position in the late Stuart period serves to maneuver out the double standard of libertinism in court life and the familiar sphere. (Staves, 2004 73) By exposing and mocking the Puritanical and Cavalier restraints imposed on women, she encourages viewers to reevaluate womens limited roles in the new age by giving her female characters a louder voice.