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Monday, November 1, 2021

Transformation of Plot in Several Stories by Aphra Behn


I discuss here “The Adventure of the Black Lady,” “The Court of the King of Bantam,”The Unfortunate Happy Lady” and “The Fair Jilt,” the short fictions in the very early Grove Press volume Selected Writings Of The Ingenious Mrs. Aphra Behn, published before Barney Rosset had become editor.  Numbers in parentheses refer to pages in that edition, and my quotations follow it, including the editor’s unnecessary modernization of spelling, capitalization, and punctuation.  Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.

 

     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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