The Rover

Introduction

Aphra Behn stands as a revolutionary figure in English literary history — the first professional woman writer in the Restoration era and an unapologetic voice of female desire, wit, and intellect. The Rover (1677), perhaps her most acclaimed play, is a brilliant blend of wit, erotic energy, and social critique. Set in Naples during the Carnival, the play exposes the hypocrisy of patriarchal double standards, the economic entrapments surrounding marriage, and the commodification of women within both respectable and illicit spheres of life.

The Restoration period, following the re-opening of theatres in 1660 after the Puritan ban, was marked by libertine excess, masculine dominance, and an emerging commercial culture. Within this dynamic backdrop, Behn subverted conventions by portraying women not merely as objects of exchange but as subjects capable of desire, negotiation, and defiance.

This essay addresses two interrelated questions that foreground Behn’s radical interrogation of gender and economics:

Angellica Bianca’s view that the financial negotiations made before marrying a prospective bride are the same as prostitution. Do we agree?

Virginia Woolf’s assertion that “All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.” Do we agree, and how does The Rover justify this claim?

Through a close reading of The Rover and engagement with feminist literary criticism, this essay argues that Behn uses Angellica and other female characters (Hellena, Florinda, Lucetta) to expose the intertwined systems of commerce, marriage, and sexual politics. Furthermore, it affirms Woolf’s claim, demonstrating that Behn’s audacious authorship and her portrayal of outspoken women paved the way for later female writers to articulate their truths.

Part I – Marriage and Prostitution: The Economics of Female Virtue in The Rover

1. The Marketplace of Desire: Contextualizing Angellica Bianca

Angellica Bianca, the courtesan of The Rover, epitomizes Behn’s critique of a world where women’s bodies are commodities subject to male desire and economic exchange. Her character embodies both empowerment and entrapment. Unlike virginal heroines such as Florinda and Hellena, Angellica wields control over her sexuality — but only within the limited framework of a market that values her beauty as a product.

When Angellica declares that the negotiations made before marriage are no different from prostitution, she articulates one of the play’s boldest insights: that both institutions are grounded in patriarchal economics. A marriage contract, like a transaction with a courtesan, involves a financial arrangement where a woman’s body and virtue become instruments of exchange. The difference, Behn implies, lies not in moral virtue but in social labeling.

2. The Parallel Economies of Marriage and Prostitution

Behn lived in a time when women’s survival often depended on financial alliances with men. A dowry was the price attached to a woman’s virtue, while inheritance laws ensured that property and autonomy passed through male hands. Angellica’s profession as a courtesan merely exposes this transactional truth.

When she demands a thousand crowns for her company, it shocks the libertine Willmore, who sees love as a conquest rather than a contract. But Angellica’s price mirrors the dowries exchanged in respectable marriages. The difference is that in marriage, the transaction is disguised by ceremony, religion, and social approval. Behn’s irony here is striking: the so-called virtuous wife is bound to a man economically just as surely as a courtesan is bound by contract.

Angellica herself voices this parallel when she confronts Willmore:

“For money, you say? Be’t so. For the same reason you marry, the same reason your fathers got your mothers, and your mothers bore you.”

Through this line, Behn destabilizes moral hierarchies and exposes hypocrisy. In both marriage and prostitution, women are deprived of agency; their value lies in how much they can bring — either in beauty, virtue, or wealth.

3. Angellica’s Fall and the Illusion of Autonomy

Though Angellica initially appears powerful — a woman who sets her own price and commands desire — Behn complicates this image by showing how emotional vulnerability reclaims her humanity but also undermines her economic independence. When she falls in love with Willmore, she transitions from a seller to a lover, abandoning the control she once held.

This transformation underscores Behn’s tragic insight: in a patriarchal world, female desire often leads to ruin, for love erodes the thin barrier that protects a woman from exploitation. Willmore, emblematic of the libertine male, treats her love as weakness, ultimately rejecting her for new conquests. Angellica’s rage — “I am not fit to be despised” — encapsulates the betrayal of both personal and social systems.

Behn, however, does not portray Angellica as a mere victim. Instead, she gives her voice, passion, and agency to confront injustice. Angellica’s anger is not madness but clarity — a recognition that the moral economy condemns women for acts it celebrates in men.

4. Florinda, Hellena, and the Respectable Market

Contrasting Angellica with Florinda and Hellena reveals the structural similarity of all women’s conditions. Florinda’s “virtue” is safeguarded through her father’s control over her marriage. She is treated as property to be bestowed on Don Antonio, a match advantageous to her family’s social status. Her struggle to marry Belvile out of love becomes a rebellion against this commodification.

Hellena, on the other hand, refuses to become a nun — rejecting the enforced chastity that erases individuality. Her witty exchanges with Willmore assert her autonomy, though the play ends with her marriage, symbolizing a partial victory. While Hellena wins her chosen partner, the institution of marriage remains the only socially sanctioned end for a woman, even one as clever as her.

Thus, Behn uses these parallel narratives to emphasize Angellica’s argument: all women, whether courtesans or gentlewomen, navigate systems of financial and sexual exchange. Marriage and prostitution are two faces of the same coin, both reflecting the economic dependency of women in a patriarchal world.

5. Behn’s Radical Realism: Money, Morality, and Market Logic

Behn’s Restoration audience was unaccustomed to hearing women discuss money, desire, and sex so candidly. By giving Angellica the language of economic critique, Behn anticipated later feminist thinkers such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Simone de Beauvoir.

In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Wollstonecraft denounces the idea that women are educated to become “alluring objects,” dependent on men’s approval. Behn had dramatized this very truth a century earlier. Her Restoration wit masks a proto-feminist realism that insists the moral degradation attributed to courtesans merely mirrors the structural corruption of a society that commodifies all female virtue.

Part II – “The Right to Speak Their Minds”: Aphra Behn’s Legacy and Woolf’s Tribute

1. Virginia Woolf’s Homage and Historical Context

In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf famously wrote:

“All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.”

Woolf’s statement encapsulates Behn’s importance not merely as a playwright but as a pioneer of female authorship. In the seventeenth century, for a woman to write professionally — especially for the public theatre — was an act of defiance. Behn’s career as a dramatist and spy (under Charles II) reflected her audacity to live and write as an independent woman.

By earning money from her pen, Behn shattered the ideological boundary separating the domestic from the public sphere. She transformed writing — long seen as a masculine domain — into a means of female self-expression and survival.

2. Behn’s Pen and the Politics of Female Speech

In The Rover, Behn’s female characters are eloquent, bold, and unafraid to argue, flirt, and reason with men. Hellena, in particular, embodies this verbal freedom. Her dialogues with Willmore are charged with wit and equality — a rarity in Restoration comedy, where women were often silent or subdued.

Hellena’s insistence that she will choose her own husband and enjoy “as much pleasure as [she] can find” signals Behn’s belief in intellectual and sexual liberty. She refuses to be confined by convent walls or male authority.

Similarly, Angellica’s eloquence in expressing anger, betrayal, and desire demonstrates Behn’s refusal to silence women’s emotional intensity. These women are thinkers, not mere ornaments. They negotiate, reason, and question — actions that represent the very “right to speak” Woolf celebrates.

3. Writing as Resistance: Behn’s Self-Representation

Aphra Behn’s authorship itself was a political act. Unlike her male contemporaries, she faced moral condemnation for earning a living through art. Critics accused her of indecency simply because she wrote openly about sexuality. Yet this “indecency” was a mask for patriarchal discomfort with a woman who could profit intellectually.

Behn’s prefaces to her plays often defend women’s wit and artistic capacity. In the preface to The Lucky Chance (1686), she protests the double standard that allows men to write bawdy comedies while branding women as immoral for doing the same. She asserts:

“All I ask, is the privilege for my masculine part — the poet in me — to tread in those successful paths my predecessors have so long thrived in.”

This self-assertion echoes through The Rover, where women metaphorically demand the same liberty of speech, pleasure, and economic autonomy as men.

4. The Rover as Proto-Feminist Theatre

Behn’s play was revolutionary not only for its content but also for its theatrical politics. The Restoration stage featured actresses for the first time, making women’s physical presence a new site of social tension. By crafting witty, complex female roles, Behn empowered actresses to embody intelligence and sexuality simultaneously — challenging the moral discomfort of audiences.

Hellena’s dialogue is a case in point:

“I’ll see if my wit and beauty can keep me from being a nun.”

This line, at once humorous and rebellious, captures Behn’s theatrical genius — transforming female speech into an act of defiance.

Furthermore, Behn’s use of masquerade and Carnival settings symbolizes a world where hierarchies blur and voices once silenced can speak. During Carnival, servants dress as nobles, women as men, courtesans as ladies — a perfect metaphor for Behn’s literary project: the temporary subversion of patriarchal order through art.

5. Linking Woolf and Behn: The Continuum of Feminist Expression

Virginia Woolf, writing over two centuries later, saw in Behn the foundation of her own literary freedom. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf argues that creative independence requires both “a room of one’s own” and “five hundred a year” — material and intellectual freedom. Behn’s life dramatized this truth. She wrote not as a hobbyist but as a professional who earned her livelihood through her intellect.

Behn’s example legitimized the idea that a woman could write for profit and pleasure, not merely for moral instruction. Without Behn, Woolf suggests, the lineage of women writers — from Fanny Burney to Jane Austen to the Brontës — might have been delayed or silenced.

In The Rover, this spirit of defiant expression manifests through Hellena’s wit and Angellica’s eloquence. Both women articulate the complexities of love, economics, and morality in a voice unmistakably their own. Thus, The Rover stands as both a feminist manifesto and a dramatization of the very rights Woolf celebrates.

Part III – Interweaving Themes: Love, Power, and the Voice of Resistance

1. Carnival as Metaphor for Freedom and Constraint

The play’s Carnival setting symbolizes temporary liberation from societal norms — a liminal space where women can flirt, disguise themselves, and explore forbidden desires. Yet Behn’s irony is that Carnival’s freedom is fleeting. Once the masks come off, patriarchy resumes control.

This cyclical tension mirrors the historical experience of women’s liberation: brief moments of expression often followed by reassertions of control. Angellica’s love, Hellena’s marriage, and Florinda’s near-assaults all end with reminders that women’s freedom remains conditional.

2. The Language of Power: Wit as Survival

Behn’s female characters weaponize language as their means of survival. Deprived of legal and financial authority, they claim rhetorical power instead. Their wit allows them to negotiate, seduce, and resist.

In this sense, speech itself becomes a feminist act. Behn anticipates the later feminist argument — echoed by Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir — that women must reclaim language from patriarchal definitions. Behn’s stage women do precisely that.

3. Beyond Morality: Behn’s Humanism

While Behn critiques patriarchal hypocrisy, she also humanizes all her characters, including the libertines. Willmore, though reckless, is capable of affection; Angellica, though a courtesan, possesses dignity and feeling. Behn’s realism refuses moral absolutism. She portrays desire as a universal human impulse — natural, not shameful — thereby challenging the Puritan moralism that sought to suppress it.

This humanistic balance gives her work enduring relevance. By presenting women as complex moral and emotional beings, Behn laid the groundwork for modern psychological realism.

Conclusion – Aphra Behn’s Enduring Revolution

Aphra Behn’s The Rover remains one of the most daring explorations of gender, power, and economics in early modern drama. Through Angellica Bianca, Behn dismantles the false distinction between marriage and prostitution, revealing both as systems of female commodification within patriarchal capitalism. Her insight anticipates later feminist critiques of the “marriage market” and questions the moral binaries that govern women’s lives.

At the same time, through Hellena and other articulate women, Behn asserts the intellectual and emotional equality of women. Her play is not only a story of love and masquerade but a coded declaration of artistic and sexual independence.

Virginia Woolf’s homage thus rings profoundly true. Behn’s courage to write, to speak, and to live as an autonomous woman inaugurated a lineage of female authorship that made Woolf’s own writing possible. Behn gave women not only a literary voice but also the courage to claim it publicly.

In the Restoration world of commerce and pleasure, Aphra Behn forged a new kind of authorship — one that recognized the body and the pen as sites of both vulnerability and power. Her legacy continues to challenge and inspire, reminding us that the struggle for the right to speak one’s mind — and to define one’s own worth — remains central to the human condition.