The Feminist Inheritance
This blog is submitted to Prof. Megha Ma’am, Department of English, MKBU, as part of the M.A. English coursework. It discusses Aphra Behn’s The Rover and Virginia Woolf’s appreciation of Behn as a foundational voice in women’s writing.
1) Angellica considers the financial negotiations that one makes before marrying a prospective bride the same as prostitution. Do you agree?
Introduction :
In the history of English literature, few figures are as boldly transgressive and persistently misunderstood as Aphra Behn. Writing during the Restoration period, a time when female voices in print were met with suspicion and moral censure, Behn’s work challenged social conventions surrounding gender, sexuality, and authorship. Her most celebrated play, The Rover (1677), set against the festive backdrop of Naples during Carnival, operates as more than a Restoration comedy of manners—it is a subversive critique of patriarchal economics and an assertion of female agency in a world that commodifies women’s bodies and silences their voices.
1. Angellica Bianca and the Economics of Desire :
At the heart of The Rover lies a question that scandalized its first audiences and continues to challenge modern readers: Is there a moral difference between marriage and prostitution? Angellica Bianca, the courtesan who commands both reverence and contempt, answers in the negative. Her view collapses the apparent moral distinction between the two institutions, arguing that both are governed by the same logic of exchange—a woman’s beauty and chastity traded for a man’s wealth or protection.
Angellica’s position emerges most strikingly in her confrontation with Willmore, the play’s titular “rover,” whose libertine desires mirror the larger masculine world of conquest and consumption. When he mocks her profession and questions her virtue, Angellica defends herself passionately, revealing a moral economy of sexuality that implicates all women in the same system:
“Why must we be the only creatures made to suffer by being faithful, and you the only ones that can be false with glory?” (The Rover 2.1).
Her words articulate the double standard of moral judgment that excuses male promiscuity while condemning female agency. For Angellica, the act of selling sexual pleasure is no different in essence from the act of selling one’s hand in marriage. Both involve an economic transaction—an exchange of body or virtue for security.
In the society Behn depicts, marriage is rarely romantic. It is contractual and financial, an arrangement negotiated between men over dowries, inheritances, and alliances. As Florinda’s forced marriage plot demonstrates, women’s consent is secondary to family interests. In contrast, Angellica openly acknowledges and controls her economic dependence on men. Her profession, while socially stigmatized, gives her a degree of autonomy that married women lack. She sets her own price, chooses her clients, and speaks her mind.
Thus, Angellica’s comparison between marriage and prostitution does not glorify her trade—it exposes the hypocrisy of a patriarchal order that disguises its own forms of exploitation under the moral veneer of marriage. In this sense, she becomes the play’s most intellectually honest character. Her self-awareness contrasts sharply with the male characters’ self-deception.
2. Prostitution and Marriage as Economic Parallels
Aphra Behn constructs Angellica’s argument not as a cynical rejection of love, but as a realist acknowledgment of women’s economic condition. In the Restoration context, women were denied legal and financial independence. As critics such as Janet Todd observe, “women’s chastity was a form of capital, and their social survival depended upon guarding or selling it” (Todd 42). Behn dramatizes this truth through the figure of Angellica, who transforms her sexuality into a marketable commodity.
The parallel between marriage and prostitution becomes especially clear when Behn juxtaposes Angellica’s commodified body with Florinda’s marriage negotiations. Florinda’s brother, Don Pedro, treats her as a tradable asset, seeking to marry her to a wealthy suitor, Don Antonio, rather than allowing her to follow her heart and marry Belvile. Pedro’s words are telling:
“I’ll not be fooled out of my fortune. You shall marry as I command.” (The Rover 1.1).
Florinda’s body, like Angellica’s, is a site of economic exchange. The only difference is transparency—Angellica acknowledges the transaction; Florinda is forced into it under the guise of family honor. Behn’s satire lies in the moral inversion: society condemns Angellica for selling herself openly but blesses Florinda’s coerced marriage as virtuous.
By linking these two women’s fates, Behn implies that the institution of marriage functions as a socially sanctioned form of prostitution, legitimized through law and religion. Angellica’s critique of this moral economy aligns her with Behn’s own feminist insight—that women’s value is determined not by virtue but by their marketability within a patriarchal structure.
3.Angellica’s Tragic Awakening: Love as Loss of Power :
Angellica’s tragedy lies in her attempt to escape the economic logic that defines her existence. When she falls in love with Willmore, she momentarily abandons her self-control and ceases to think in terms of commerce. This emotional surrender, ironically, marks her downfall. Willmore’s betrayal is not merely personal—it symbolizes patriarchal society’s exploitation of female vulnerability.
In the famous scene where she confronts Willmore with a pistol, Angellica embodies both the rage and helplessness of a woman betrayed by a system that denies her emotional legitimacy. Her love, once commodified, becomes worthless in a society that views female desire as dangerous. As she laments:
“Love me! Thou canst not; thou art false.” (The Rover 4.2).
Angellica’s outburst is not the irrational jealousy of a courtesan, as some critics have argued, but the existential cry of a woman awakening to the futility of love in a market-driven world. Behn refuses to sentimentalize Angellica’s pain; instead, she uses it to expose how even love, the supposed antithesis of commerce, becomes another form of transaction when filtered through patriarchal power.
Angellica’s tragic recognition—that emotional sincerity cannot survive in a world governed by profit—turns her into one of the earliest feminist figures in English drama. She exposes the moral and economic contradictions of her society, a society that demands chastity from women but commodifies them nonetheless.
4. Aphra Behn’s Subversion of the Libertine Ideal :
Willmore, as the “rover,” personifies the Restoration libertine—a man of wit, appetite, and mobility. Yet Behn undermines this archetype through her portrayal of Angellica’s suffering. The libertine ideal, celebrated in male-authored comedies, is here turned inward and interrogated from a woman’s perspective. Behn’s gendered reversal reveals that what men call “freedom” is often another word for female dispossession.
By giving Angellica eloquent and impassioned speeches, Behn transforms her from an object of desire into a subject of moral reflection. She speaks not only for herself but for all women caught in systems of exchange and deception. In doing so, she appropriates the language of rational argument and moral philosophy, domains traditionally reserved for men.
Behn thus stages a radical act of female authorship within the play itself. Angellica’s words mirror Behn’s own defiance as a professional woman writer who must negotiate between art, commerce, and morality. Both women occupy liminal spaces—Behn between art and prostitution, Angellica between love and transaction—yet both speak their truths despite condemnation.
5. Critical Context and Feminist Reappraisal :
Modern critics such as Feminist scholars Janet Todd, Elaine Hobby, and Jacqueline Pearson have re-evaluated The Rover as a text that simultaneously reflects and critiques the gender politics of its time. Todd argues that Behn’s treatment of Angellica “anticipates later feminist discussions of sexual economics” (Todd 51), while Hobby notes that Behn “constructs her heroines not as victims but as agents negotiating within a male market” (Hobby 103).
Angellica Bianca, therefore, functions as a double symbol—both a victim of and a commentator on the patriarchal order. Through her, Behn articulates an early feminist consciousness: the recognition that economic structures shape moral discourse, and that women’s supposed virtue is often a function of male control.
Her speech acts are performative in the Butlerian sense: they constitute identity through language. By speaking openly about desire, money, and betrayal, Angellica enacts the very “right to speak” that Virginia Woolf would later celebrate. She becomes the theatrical embodiment of Woolf’s argument that female expression is itself a political act.
this video is generated from Notebooklm2) “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.” Virginia Woolf said so in ‘A Room of One’s Own’. Do you agree with this statement? Justify your answer with reference to your reading of the play ‘The Rover’.
Aphra Behn’s Legacy and Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Inheritance
1.Virginia Woolf and the Rediscovery of Aphra Behn :
When Virginia Woolf published A Room of One’s Own in 1929, the name Aphra Behn had largely vanished from canonical literary history. Restoration comedy was dismissed as frivolous, and women playwrights were marginalized in academic syllabi. Woolf’s declaration that “all women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn” (Woolf 74) thus functions as both elegy and manifesto: an insistence that women writers must remember their intellectual ancestress. For Woolf, Behn symbolizes not simply the first professional woman writer but the moment when the female voice entered the public sphere of print and commerce.
Woolf’s central argument—that a woman needs “money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (Woolf 6)—directly echoes the economic struggle dramatized in The Rover. Behn had no inherited wealth or institutional support; like Angellica Bianca, she converted her talent into a means of survival. In the act of selling her writing, she risked the same moral condemnation that society attached to women who sold their bodies. Yet, as Woolf recognizes, Behn’s decision to earn through authorship transformed necessity into independence.
2.Authorship as a Feminist Act :
Behn’s position as a paid playwright was revolutionary. In Restoration London, the theatre was a site of both entertainment and moral anxiety. Women could appear as actresses and courtesans, but authorship required entry into the marketplace of ideas, a domain reserved for men. Behn’s ability to navigate this world made her, in Woolf’s terms, the woman who “earned [others] the right to speak.”
By publishing under her own name, Behn challenged two intertwined taboos: the prohibition against female sexuality and the prohibition against female speech. The early modern ideology of “modesty” equated silence with virtue. To speak in public was to court shame; to sell one’s words was to risk being equated with a prostitute. Behn confronted this stigma head-on, transforming writing itself into a metaphorical form of female self-possession.
In The Rover, this authorship is mirrored by Angellica’s verbal assertiveness. When she delivers her long speeches defending her profession, she effectively authors her own narrative, rewriting herself from object to subject. Her linguistic fluency is Behn’s assertion that women not only can but must control the discourses that define them.
Woolf’s admiration of Behn, therefore, rests less on literary perfection than on political precedent. “It was she who earned them the right to speak,” Woolf insists, because Behn’s entry into the literary economy shattered the conceptual link between female virtue and silence. Every later woman who wrote—Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot—stood upon the commercial and moral ground Behn had cleared.
3. Continuities of Economic Feminism :
Both Behn and Woolf understand that creative freedom depends upon economic independence. For Angellica, financial control initially grants dignity; for Behn, the sale of her plays secures survival; for Woolf, income from an inheritance ensures artistic autonomy. The triad reveals a historical continuum: from survival to profession to freedom.
Behn’s Restoration world denied women the legal ownership of property; a wife’s goods became her husband’s upon marriage. Consequently, women’s bodies and fortunes were subject to the same patriarchal exchange. By dramatizing this in The Rover, Behn lays bare the intersection of gender and capital that later feminist theory—particularly Marxist and materialist feminism—would articulate.
Woolf inherits this critique but relocates it to the intellectual sphere. In her essay, the “five hundred a year” that allows a woman to think and write is not merely money; it is symbolic capital ensuring autonomy from male patronage. Behn’s struggle to live by her pen exemplifies Woolf’s thesis decades before its articulation.
Thus, Behn’s The Rover becomes the dramatic analogue to Woolf’s prose argument: both texts expose the way economic dependence silences women, and both envision speech and authorship as acts of liberation.
4.The Language of Female Desire :
A further link between Behn and Woolf lies in their treatment of desire as discourse. Angellica Bianca’s speeches reframe female sexuality from shame to self-definition. Her eloquence transforms erotic desire into language, challenging the patriarchal dichotomy between “chaste silence” and “promiscuous speech.” Similarly, Woolf urges women to write the “truth of their own experience” (Woolf 76), including the bodily and emotional realities censored by male literary tradition.
In both writers, voice becomes synonymous with existence. Angellica’s tragedy arises when her love for Willmore silences her; she exchanges the economic language of negotiation for the sentimental language of affection, and the result is betrayal. Behn thus warns that women’s speech must be grounded in autonomy rather than dependency. Woolf, centuries later, makes the same argument: the woman writer must possess both space and sustenance to prevent her voice from being co-opted.
5.From Stage to Page: The Feminist Genealogy :
By situating Behn at the beginning of women’s literary history, Woolf constructs a genealogy of feminist authorship. The line runs from Behn’s theatrical heroines to the novelistic interiority of Austen and beyond. Behn’s insistence on women’s wit and intelligence paved the way for representations of complex female consciousness.
Moreover, Woolf’s modernist aesthetics—her concern with multiplicity, voice, and subjectivity—can be traced back to Behn’s polyphonic stage, where female characters speak from diverse social positions: the nun-in-disguise (Hellena), the virtuous gentlewoman (Florinda), and the courtesan (Angellica). Each negotiates the structures of desire and commerce differently, forming an early chorus of women’s perspectives.
Woolf transforms this multiplicity into a metaphorical call for collective remembrance. The “flowers” on Behn’s tomb are not mere homage; they are the continuation of dialogue. Every act of female writing becomes an offering, an acknowledgment of shared struggle against erasure.
6. Critical Reassessments :
Twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship has validated Woolf’s intuition. Critics such as Elaine Hobby, Janet Todd, and Jacqueline Pearson have demonstrated that Behn’s plays encode sophisticated reflections on gendered economics and social mobility. Todd remarks that The Rover “subverts the libertine comedy by forcing the audience to see the female cost of male pleasure” (Todd 58). Hobby emphasizes Behn’s “radical manipulation of genre conventions to express female experience” (Hobby 115).
Feminist critics influenced by Woolf read Behn not as an anomaly but as the origin of a continuous feminist discourse. The rediscovery of Behn in the 1970s and 1980s coincided with the rise of feminist literary criticism, confirming Woolf’s prediction that acknowledgment of foremothers was essential for women’s cultural identity.
7. The Dialectic of Respectability and Shame :
A central thread connecting Angellica’s story and Behn’s career is the dialectic between respectability and shame. Society’s willingness to brand economically active women as immoral forced both characters—fictional and historical—to navigate the liminal space between virtue and survival.
Behn’s male contemporaries, including Dryden and Wycherley, celebrated libertine excess without personal risk. Behn, however, was attacked for indecency simply for writing about the same themes. This double standard mirrors the treatment of Angellica, who is condemned for acting upon the same sexual freedom men enjoy.
Woolf identifies this double bind as the major obstacle to women’s creativity: the fear of social censure. Her call to “kill the Angel in the House” (Woolf 102) echoes Behn’s destruction of the angelic ideal in The Rover. Angellica’s fall from idealized beauty to wounded subject dramatizes the necessity of rejecting imposed virtue in order to claim authentic selfhood.
8.The Ethics of Speech :
If silence is virtue in patriarchal ideology, speech is rebellion. Behn’s play is structured around acts of female utterance—Florinda’s protests against forced marriage, Hellena’s witty banter, Angellica’s passionate monologues. Each moment of female speech is an ethical assertion of being.
Behn’s decision to grant women rhetorical mastery destabilizes the genre of comedy itself. Instead of serving as comic relief, her heroines produce serious moral insight. Their eloquence transforms the stage into a forum for social critique.
Woolf, inheriting this insight, builds her essay around a similar conviction: that speech—particularly truthful speech—is the foundation of women’s freedom. When she praises Behn, she celebrates not merely the content of her plays but the audacity of having spoken at all.
Conclusion: Flowers for Aphra Behn
Aphra Behn’s The Rover exposes the economic structures that reduce women to commodities, yet it also dramatizes their capacity for resistance through wit, intellect, and voice. Angellica Bianca’s comparison of marriage and prostitution unmasks the moral hypocrisy of a patriarchal society that sanctifies one form of exchange while condemning another. Behn herself, through the professional act of writing, lived out the same paradox—transforming what society deemed shameful commerce into artistic independence.
References :
Behn, Aphra. The Rover; or, The Banished Cavaliers. 1677. Edited by Janet Todd, Penguin Classics, 1996.
Burgum, Edwin Berry. “The Neoclassical Period in English Literature: A Psychological Definition.” The Sewanee Review, vol. 52, no. 2, 1944, pp. 247–65. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27537507
Hobby, Elaine. Aphra Behn’s The Rover and Other Plays. Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Peters, M. A. “Satire, Swift and the Deconstruction of the Public Intellectual.” Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol. 51, no. 13, 2019, pp. 1299–1307.
Pearson, Jacqueline. The Daughters of Pandora: Women Writers and the Literary Marketplace in the 17th Century. Harvester Press, 1986.
Todd, Janet. The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660–1800. Columbia University Press, 1989.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. Edited by Susan Gubar, Harcourt Brace, 2005.
Spencer, Jane. The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen. Blackwell, 1986.
Backscheider, Paula R. Aphra Behn: Biography. Ohio University Press, 2000.
Gallagher, Catherine. “Who Was That Masked Woman? The Prostitute and the Playwright in the Comedies of Aphra Behn.” Women’s Studies, vol. 15, no. 1–3, 1988, pp. 23–41.
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