Though literary
convention is sometimes dismissed as a device favored by writers lacking
originality, in fact, the use of conventions in literature (as in language in
general), enables an increased density of signification and subtlety. [1] Conventions create reader expectations, which
may then be fulfilled, frustrated, altered, inverted, or twisted. Often conventions foreground important
thematic elements, by reinforcing preconceptions in some cases and by
challenging them in others. At the same
time, just as in music, a certain idea, like a melodic phrase, may be part of a
formal design as it is repeated or varied.
Folk stories and myths are highly conventionalized, indeed to the extent
that scholars such as Propp and Levi-Strauss have sought to reduce their
patterns to formulae. [2] The
entertaining short narratives of Aphra Behn illustrate this principle of
economic variations on a theme and shed light on the uses and pleasures of
story-telling by the creation of
patterns that highlight the central concerns of the literate public of her
day.
Aphra Behn stands
at the wellsprings of the English novel.
Though many of us learned from Ian Watt’s The Rise of the English
Novel to call Robinson Crusoe (1719) the first novel, Behn had
published the extraordinary Oroonoko in 1688 and she was quite likely
the author of Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister (1684) even
earlier. While that work foreshadows the
epistolary form that dominated the eighteenth century in works by Richardson,
Cleland, Fielding, Goldsmith, Burney, and others, Behn wrote a number of
shorter narratives with a different sort of voice. “The Adventure of the Black Lady,” “The Court
of the King of Bantam,” “The Unfortunate Happy Lady,” and “The Fair Jilt” are
written with colloquial liveliness as if they were transcriptions of spoken
story-telling, including hesitations and revisions. Like folk tales, most romances, medieval fabliaux
and tales like those in Poggio’s Facetiae, the stories have very little
characterization or description. Action
is what matters. While more subtle retellings are available in collections
such as Boccaccio’s Decameron or Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the
barer narratives remained popular in collections like Painter’s The Palace
of Pleasure and the hagiographies of the Aurea Legenda.
Long neglected,
then studied from the narrow perspective of social implications, Behn’s
fictions also illustrate the pleasures of a largely formal elaboration
beautiful after the manner of a fugue or an abstract painting. The sequence of stories in the Grove Press
anthology indicates increasingly sophisticated patterns of play between
oppositions which, though arising from experience and rooted in the day’s
received expectations, take flight and assume independent aesthetic value.
“The Adventure
of the Black Lady” provides the basis for her formula. As the protagonist’s name suggest, Bellamora
seeks a satisfying love relationship. She
has conceived a child with a man of her choice who, though he had persuaded her
to bed with “violence” and “accursed success,” is nonetheless sincere in his
affection, as indicated by his name Mr. Fondlove. Consumed by shame and escaping an unwanted
marriage to another gentleman “of much better estate,” the “fair innocent”
moves from her home in Hampshire to London, feeling “ashamed, ruined, and
damned . . .for ever lost” (24) and hoping to stay with a city cousin. Though Mr. Fondlove had importunately urged
his attentions upon her, she is convinced that, by yielding to his advances,
she has lost his respect, and he will surely no longer care to marry her. A country girl lost in the big city, she
loses her luggage and cannot locate her relative. In the sort of unlikely coincidence common in
romances, she is charitably given shelter in a home which, as it happens,
belongs to Mr. Fondlove’s sister.
Hearing then of her distress, and faithful still in spite of her fears,
he arrives to marry her and resolve the plot’s tensions in a happy
denouement.
Behn has set in
play a number of oppositions each of which is resolved in this brief
narrative. The most significant are the
tension of the requirement (for women only) of virginity for a respectable
marriage and the suspense of placing an unsophisticated young woman from the country
at risk in an urban environment. The
damsel in distress is, of course, a universally popular theme [3], pervasive in
early English novels such as those by Richardson and the later Gothic
novels.
As an author of
works that aimed for a large purchasing audience, Behn implicitly endorsed the
norms of her era. The imbalance in male
and female power in sexual relationships is evident in Fondlove’s impetuous
seduction and in her fear that, having had his way, he will no longer wish to
be with her. The move from country to
city emphasizes the myriad dangers that might threaten the poor and naïve woman
in the city, though Bellamora, through incredible luck, not only escapes all
hazards, but also regains her beloved.
The unexpected pregnancy, which had seemed disastrous, becomes an occasion
for joy, and the reader may assume that the happy couple will assume their
place back in Hampshire as a respected couple.
In this tale the knots of difficulty all vanish in a rapid and
satisfying rush, making way for the story to conclude with a tension-releasing joke.
This final humor
is at the expense of the “Overseers of the Poor” whom Behn calls “the vermin of
the parish,” well-named, she notes, because they overlook the needy they are
supposed to serve. This satirical touch
is surprising because the story itself has little to do with social justice of
any kind and includes no lower-class character, though the heroine finds
herself in need after leaving her home and losing her possessions. Though unrelated to the main thread of Behn’s
narrative, this social comment adds a sassy note to the speaker’s voice.
In “The Court of
the King of Bantam” which Behn claimed she wrote “upon a wager,” [4] the same
story is retold with greater complexity and a different tone. Again, the plot concerns an upright woman who
has a bad suitor and a good one. She
evades the first and marries the second.
Yet in the “King of Bantam” the tone is humorous whereas it had been
anxious in “The Black Lady.” Additional
characters ornament the plot line like decorative motifs. The lady and her good lover are symmetrically
supplied with a relative, Sir Philip Friendly assisting and Sir George Goodland
retarding the relationship. Lucy is the
less respectable (but still worthy) doublet of Philibella. While the lady of quality must have a
corresponding mate, the reader assumes that Lucy, already compromised by her
willingness to take a lover for money, is likely well-pleased at accepting the
King after Sir Philip has decided to cast her off.
The satirical
element plays a greater role here. The
Would-be King, the King of Bantam [5] is ridiculous because he is a parvenu, an
arriviste who lacks refinement. Though
genuinely rich from his real estate investments, he is a figure of fun to the
others due to his lack of taste.
Associated throughout her life with the party of the court, Behn would
not have grudged the greedy accumulation of those of aristocratic birth, but this
capitalist King is an absurd pretender.
With its
paradoxical title, “The Unfortunate Happy Lady” once more tells a tale of a virtuous
woman, this time in the most melodramatic terms. The undesirable marriage option here appears
in the extreme form of prostitution and the “barbarous” (50) and profligate brother
Sir William Wilding is a heightened version of the pushy families of the first
two stories. Just as Bellamora had
happened to lodge at the home of her fiancé’s sister, Philadelphia’s
first customer in the brothel turns out to be not only compassionate, but takes
up her cause and, in the end, marries her as well. She is indeed “happy” in his arrival, as her
escape depends entirely on his aid while she remains largely passive, contrary
to the assertions of contemporary critics who would like to imagine Behn’s
anticipating modern ideas of feminism. [6]
The heroine sounds very like countless other demoiselles en détresse
when she cries, “’O heaven! . . . thou asserter and guardian of innocence! Protect me from the impious practices
intended against me!’” (57) She appeals
to Gracelove, who thought he had purchased her sexual favors, “”for heaven’s
sake, hear and help me!’” Her virtue
is so great that he is instantly reformed and says “’By all things sacred, I
find my error; I pity you and I fear I shall love you.’” (58) Indeed, the beneficent effect of her aura is
sufficient even for the rehabilitation of her positively wicked brother.
Here the story is
elongated and embellished in unlikely ways that do not alter the familiar basic
pattern. Before her happy marriage, the
heroine acquiesces in a (presumably unconsummated) brief marriage to Counsellor
Fairlaw which places her in comfortable circumstances. In an exotic nod to adventure tales, the good
lover, Mr. Gracelove, who had been abducted by pirates and detained abroad, has
the good fortune to be spotted by Philadelphia in a carriage as he trudges down
the road. These additions contribute
suspense and pathos while preserving the standard plot.
“The Fair Jilt” (1688)
employs a more radical transformation of the narrative by making a manipulative
woman the central figure. (Novel though
it is, Behn may have been influenced by the popularity of The London Jilt;
Or, the Politick Whore [1683].) The
story opens with a rhetorical paean to love as “the most noble and divine passion
of the soul” which becomes the occasion for another of Behn’s adventitious
satires, here ridiculing the self-love of fatuous coxcombs. (72) The leading lady Miranda is universally
admired for her beauty and her accomplishments (as her name implies), yet she
is a cynical Beguine, a femme fatale who enjoys her power over men and
who “loves nothing so much as to behold sighing slaves at her feet.” (76)
Capable of even
greater villainy than Sir William Wilding, Philadelphia’s brother, this
sinister Miranda first contrives to punish the noble Henrick (who has entered
holy orders in reaction to his selfish brother’s having usurped his beloved and
then intrigued to have him killed) by a false accusation of rape. Having married Prince Tarquin [7] and squandered
their funds, she seeks to kill her sister Alcidiana for her money at first at
the hands of a servant and then through the agency of Tarquin himself. In one
of Behn’s improbable turns which strain her readers’ ability to accept her
claims that the story is factual, Tarquin’s execution is botched, whereupon he
is pardoned. Following a life of
iniquity, matters are now settled.
Father Francisco, born Henrick, is freed; Alcidiana survives; both
Tarquin and Miranda are morally regenerated; and all live subsequently happy
lives. So even this plot bends around in
the end to the same conclusion of all the others.
The innocent
heroine has become a cruel and arrogant villain (a good role perhaps for Joan
Crawford [8]) whose iniquities preying upon men match those of the immoral
seducers in some of the other stories.
The subsidiary stories of Henrick and Alcidiana grow naturally out of
the basic reversed framework; both are virtuous individuals traduced by the
wicked Miranda. Retributive justice takes
the life of the servant Van Brune but Tarquin is miraculously spared in a botched
execution so that he may provide a match for Miranda to make the required happy
ending, leaving Miranda in fact in “as perfect a state of happiness, as this troublesome
world can afford.” (116)
The
transformation of convention in these narratives serves several purposes. These stories foreground certain thematic
implications: gender stereotypes such as the lusty man, the weaker woman, and
the importance of a good marriage for the female’s survival, as well as the
more general hazards of erotic desire.
Apart from these issues, meant to evoke the reader’s unhesitating
assent, the use of convention allows the author to manipulate reader
expectations. What the convention may
lead one to anticipate may be delivered, heightened, softened, multiplied,
twisted, or inverted. When the writer
fulfils the reader’s assumptions, she or he is gratified at a correct
presumption, both about the text and about the world to which it refers. When the convention is altered, there is
instead the pleasure of surprise and the possibility for the development of
novel ideas, themselves perhaps to be overturned in another generation.
1. See my essay
“Transformation of Convention” on this site.
Among the analyses which use this concept are “Transformation of
Convention in Early Minnesang” and “The Early English Carol.”
2. See Propp’s Morphology
of the Tale (1928) and Levi-Strauss’s “The structural study of myth,” The
Journal of American Folklore 68, (1955) 428–444. The latter’s so-callled “canonical formula”
is fx(a) : fy(b) ≃ fx(b) : fa-1(y).
3. Among the countless
works using this motif are stories of the Odyssey and the Ramayana, St.
Barbara, the Yuan Dynasty play The Injustice Done to Dou E, and the
early film serial The Perils of Pauline.
The more immediate context of Behn’s work includes the so-called
“amatory fiction” of Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood as well as Defoe’s Roxana
and Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Other related fictions
include picaresque novels in translation, stories by Paul Scarron, and Richard
Head’s The English Rogue (1665) whose later editions were cowritten with
Francis Kirkman.
4. See Behn’s “An
Advertisement to the Reader,” prefixed to the text. She goes on to say she was simply trying to
imitate the style of the French writer Paul Scarron.
5. The name derives
from the location on Java where in 1605 the British established a trading post
which apparently seemed so exotic as to be somewhat absurd. The association of the word with diminutive
stature (bantam fowl) made the term appropriate for her mocking use here.
6. See, for instance,
Juan de Dios Torralbo Caballero, “’I drink to thee’: Female agency and female
authority as gender reversal in ‘The Unfortunate Happy Lady,’” Études
anglaises Volume 69, Issue 4, 2016, 410-426 and Violetta Trofimova,
“Liberated Women in Aphra Behn’s and Jane Barker’s Prose Fiction,” Litinfo:
Georgian Electronic Journal of Literature vol. V, no. 1, 2011, available
at https://www.litinfo.ge/vol.5-iss-1/trofimova.htm.
7. Prince Tarquin
claimed a descent from Sextus Tarquinius, son of the last king of Rome, known
principally for his rape of Lucretia.
This seems as outlandish a title as King of Bantam.
8. One might also
think of Bette Davis in Of Human Bondage or Marlene Dietrich in Der
Blaue Engel.
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