Thinking activity : The Rover
Hello Beautiful People,
Today we discuss about 'The Rover’. This blog is also part of
my Thinking activity assigned by Prof. Dr. Dilip Barad sir, Head of the English
Department of Maharaja Krishnkumarsinhji Bhavsinhji Bhavangar University
(MKBU).
First, we discuss
about some story lines of ‘The Rover’. After we will see that What did Virginia Woolf say
about Aphra Behn? and also why I am agree with her & my point of view of
this concept.
Another one thing is
that some summary of articles carnival politics generous satire and nationalist
speckles in Behn’s ‘ The Rover’ by Adam R Beach, Duck university.
The Rover
🔰Introduction:
The Rover or The Banish'd Cavaliers is a play in two parts that is written by the English author Aphra Behn. It is a revision of Thomas Killigrew's play Thomaso, or The Wanderer (1664), and features multiple plot lines, dealing with the amorous adventures of a group of Englishmen and women in Naples at Carnival time.
According to Restoration poet John Dryden, it "lacks the
manly vitality of Killigrew's play, but shows greater refinement of
expression." The play stood for three centuries as "Behn's most
popular and most respected play."
Having famously worked as a spy for Charles II against the
Dutch, Behn lost her meagre income when the king refused to pay her expenses.
She turned to writing for an income. Behn was a Royalist, and her works
frequently portray Puritans negatively. The subtitle "Banish'd
Cavaliers" is a reference to the exile that the Cavalier forces
experienced during the English Interregnum.
🔰Characters:
In this novel there are many characters here so let brief
introduction about them.
· HELLENA: a young Woman design’d for a Nun, and Sister to Florinda. A confident, and brave woman like her sister, she questions religion and convinces Willmore to marry her.
· FLORINDA: Sister to Don Pedro, and Hellena. A very determined woman, Florinda refuses suitors due to her devoted love to Colonel Belvile.
· VALERIA: A Kinswoman to Florinda who helps Florinda scheme and hide from Pedro.
· ANGELLICA BIANCA: a famous Courtesan in Spain who returns to Naples to put herself up for sale. Don Pedro and Don Antonio attempt to pay the fee for Angellica, but she falls in love with Willmore, whom she attempts to kill later on in the play.
· MORETTA: the "lady in waiting," or personal assistant, of Angellica Bianca.
· CALLIS: Governess to Florinda and Hellena in charge of overseeing the girls and making sure they stay out of trouble.
· LUCETTA: a "jilting wench" who steals the clothes and belongings from Blunt.
· DON ANTONIO: the King's Son, The Viceroy's Son, who is good friends with Don Pedro.
· DON PEDRO: Florinda and Hellena's brother, a Noble Spaniard, Antonio's Friend.
· BELVILE: an English Colonel deeply in love with Florinda despite the disapproval of her brother, Pedro.
· FREDERICK: English Gentleman, Friend to Belvile and Blunt
· BLUNT: a foolish English Country Gentleman who gets duped out of all his possessions by Lucetta.
· STEPHANO: Servant to Don Pedro
· PHILLIPO: Lucetta's Gallant
· SANCHO: Pimp to Lucetta
🔰Summary:
The Rover follows the escapades of a band of banished English cavaliers as they enjoy themselves at a carnival in Naples. The story strings together multiple plotlines revolving around the amorous adventures of these Englishmen, who pursue a pair of noble Spanish sisters, as well as a mistress and common prostitute.
The titular character is a raffish naval captain, Willmore.
He falls in love with a wealthy noble Spanish woman named Hellena, who is
determined to experience love before her brother, Pedro, sends her to a
convent. Hellena falls in love with Willmore, but difficulties arise when a
famous courtesan, Angellica Bianca, also falls in love with Willmore.
“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, A Room of One's Own
Behn had a few female contemporaries but, unlike her, they were aristocratic and certainly not doing anything as vulgar as writing for money.
These hobbyist writers would also usually warn potential readers with a notice that the following work was written by a member of the "fair sex", as though apologising in advance. Aphra Behn made no such apologies. She did not ask for permission or acceptance - and it was because she did neither that she proved to be so popular among the ordinary playgoers whose opinion so often goes unrecorded. Operating with striking success outside gender conventions, it was she who paved the way for other women to do the same. What's more, she included as much wit and bawdiness as she could muster, along with a sharp insight into both sex and politics. She was the Restoration's very own combination of Dorothy Parker and Mae West.
In fact, Oroonoko is more than just a "novel". It was also the first novel of ideas. It was a call to abolish slavery more than 100 years before Letitia Barbauld's Epistle to William Wilberforce on the Rejection of the Bill for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.
Behn was not just determined to stick two fingers up at convention, she was very clever at managing to turn the tables entirely. Oroonoko didn't simply suggest that slavery was vile and immoral but that, far from being savages, slaves were the ones with the grace, tradition and morals. It was, she makes clear, the colonists who were the barbarous savages steeped in hypocrisy, and it was they who should be learning a thing or two from the people they held captive. At the same time she also managed to include a powerful statement on the political powerlessness of women.
Incandescence, the narrator reiterates, is a state of mind that simply would have been impossible for a woman in the sixteenth century. She continues her history by tracing the gradual emergence of women writers out of that blank past. The first would have been aristocrats, women of "comparative freedom and comfort" who had the resources not only to spend their time writing, but also to brave public disapproval. This is how the narrator accounts for the poetry of Lady Winchilsea around the turn of the eighteenth century. Her work, however, is far from incandescent: "one has only to open her poetry to find her bursting out in indignation against the position of women." She then turns to the writings of Margaret of Newcastle, who might have been a poet or a scientist but instead "frittered her time away scribbling nonsense." Like Lady Winchilsea, she was an aristocrat, had no children, and was married to the right kind of man.
The letters of Dorothy Osborne, next off the shelf, indicate a disdain for women who write, and at the same time betray a remarkable verbal gift in their own right. With Aphra Behn, the narrator identifies a turning point: a middle class woman making a living by her writing, in defiance of conventions of chastity. The later eighteenth century saw droves of women following her example, and these paved the way for the likes of Jane Austen and George Eliot. "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." one most applicable to the novel. Emily Bronte might have made a better dramatic poet; Eliot was by disposition a historian or biographer. Yet these women wrote novels (though Bronte also wrote lyric poems), and the novels were good ones. Jane Austen was known to hide her work when someone entered the room, yet her novels are written "without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching." Like Shakespeare, the narrator thinks, Austen wrote in such a way that her art "consumed all impediments." Charlotte Bronte does not write with that same incandescence; Bronte may have had more genius than Austen, but her writing bears the scars of her personal wounds.
The form of Woolf's essay enacts the changes it describes. The narrative details with which the first chapters were littered begin to fall away as the speaker enters into full engagement with her ideas. The daily comings and goings of the fictional narrator recede into the background, and the argument—the ideas themselves—comes to the fore. It took some uphill work to get to this point however. Even though that lead-up and preparation may not be evident in the flush of the argument, they are its invisible foundation. Like the five hundred pounds, or those first, bad novels by women, these foundations disappear in the bright light of what they enable. It is this bedrock which Woolf, for the purposes of this essay, has wanted us to see; yet it is precisely what a work of art ought not to exhibit
The statement that there is a uniquely female way of
writing—a woman's sentence—is one of Woolf's most provocative claims. She argues
that women see and feel and value differently than men, and that because of
this they must also write differently if they are to be true to themselves and
their experience. She praises Jane Austen, who had "devised a perfectly
natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use and never departed from it.
✓"CARNIVAL,
LIBERTINISM, SEXUALITY, AND THE REPRESENTATION OF THE RESTORED KING IN APHRA
BEHN’S THE ROVER”
AphraBehn’s The Rover or the Banished Cavaliers, one of the prominent plays of the Restoration comedy, deals with male-female relationships, libertinism and the carvinalesque. After the puritan rule in Britain was overthrown, the restrictive laws imposed on social life by the Puritan views were also dismissed. Quite contrary to the conservative values of puritanism, the restored period was marked by its pleasure-seeking ruler. The king reopened theaters and abolished the strict laws that Cromwell had enacted to restrict the way people lived. Bringing freedom to the society, Charles II freely enjoyed mistresses and pleasure – hence his nickname “The Merry Monarch.” In the play, the parallels between the male characters and hedonistic court of the restored king are quite evident as the libertine lifestyle adopted by male characters is exposed and even criticized.
The play, also centres the
themes of marriage, ideal love and vitality of female subjectivity in a
patriarchal society in which females are seen as the objects or the other
rather than being the subjects or parts of any social life. Further, Behn
focuses on the concept of de-masculinisation of sexual desires by men as she
thinks that women should also have equality and freedom to express their
desires and do what they want. This paper aims to discuss the ways in which the
play mirrors the seventeenth century's displeased approach to female
subjectivity in social life after the collapse of Puritan Protectorate and
Behn’s harsh criticism of this approach by creating female characters that are
witty, mentally strong and confident of their desires.
