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These are focussing on women's rights And their portrayal in indian society.
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Topic: Angelica – A Prostitute as the Unsung Heroine in Aphra Behn’s The Rover Submitted to: Dr. Paromita Mukherjee Submitted by: Aaliya Hasan Khan M.A. English Semester 2 Enrollment Number: A
Aphra Behn’s play ‘The Rover’ is a potent commentary on gender, power, and sexuality. Set in seventeenth century Naples during the carnival season, the play explores the lives of four English expatriates – Willmore, Blunt, Belvile, and Frederick – and their romantic entanglements with local women. One of these women, Anjelica is a prostitute, and while she is often dismissed as a minor character, she is in fact the unsung heroine of the play. Behn uses Anjelica to challenge the traditional gender roles and to critique the double standards of male sexuality. In Restoration theatre, the prostitute was a well-known character. On addition to being frequently shown on stage, prostitutes were a common sight on London’s streets and provided audiences with titillation and comic relief. However, Behn takes a more nuanced approach to this figure in ‘The Rover’, presenting a prostitute as a fully developed character with agency and nuanced motivations rather than just an object of desire. Anjelica is a marginalized character in the play. She is viewed as an object of desire rather as a person with agency since she is a prostitute. In particular, Anjelica is portrayed as a classic femme fatale who lures men into her web of seduction with her beauty and wit. However, Behn’s interpretation of Anjelica is much more nuanced than this stereotype suggests. Even though she is undoubtedly shrewd and cunning, she is also a victim of her environment. As a woman without a male protector, she is vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. Angelica fills the staple role of the discarded lover when she falls for the rakish rover Willmore, who moves on to marry the brave, daring, and outspoken Hellena, whose coarse wit is a perfect match for Willmore. The dramatic conversation between Willmore and Angelica after she realises she has been betrayed stands out not only because it contrasts sharply with the flirtatious banter between Willmore and Hellena but also because Angelica uses iambic pentameter verse, albeit with some variations, to highlight the gravity of her speech and her emotional anguish. Behn gives Angelica a rare combination of eloquence, persuasiveness, and moral integrity—qualities that are unheard of in Restoration comedy characters, let alone those who play prostitutes. In a patriarchal culture where she has no agency or control over her own life, Anjelica is a captive woman. Instead of pursuing her own interests and goals, she is expected to get married in order to secure her financial future and have kids. By choosing to sell her body for money, Anjelica gains a degree of independence and autonomy that is denied to her as a woman in seventeenth-century England. Without a husband or male guardian, she can sustain herself by working and earning money. In light of the little options that women had at the time, this is a tremendous accomplishment. Even though she advertises her availability by hanging a picture of herself in the street to draw in customers as part of her line of work, Angelica maintains the purity of her character. She mourns the loss of her integrity and innocence after Willmore breaks her heart, which are once more oddly chosen virtues to be connected with a prostitute: “Had I remained in innocent security, I should have thought all men were born my slaves….but when love held the mirror, the undeceiving glass reflected all the weakness of my soul, and made me know my richest treasure being lost, my honour”. Here and elsewhere, Angelica not only challenges conventional
prostitution as a mode of achieving equality with men”, critically engaging with Willmore’s objections and exposing them as biased and unfounded. The intriguing character of Angelica, who is on a quest to rediscover her own humanity, is juxtaposed with the other, primarily self-serving, characters in the play. When Angelica feels love for the first time, she abandons her previous rule of staying away from attachment and gives Willmore a trusting embrace. Even when she starts to suspect that Willmore has been lying to her, she does not give up on him easily and instead pursues him in the hopes of still being loved in return. As Cynthia Lowenthal suggests, Angelica’s actions “[place] her less in line with the desiring, freedom-seeking Restoration heroines Behn has penned….and more in line with new sentimentalized heroines, who seek not financial independence but love”. When Angelica knows beyond doubt that she is undone, she confronts Willmore, holding him at gunpoint, wielding “the pistol as both a desperate and a temporary assertion of a woman’s power against a man: thus it works as a visual stage prop in two ways simultaneously. It represents both an expression of phallic power appropriated by woman, and a visual reminder of the very limits of that power”. Being not of a faint but of a good heart, instead of shooting her inconstant lover, Angelica casts a curse on him, which might as well be a blessing; that is, she wishes him the love of a constant woman: “I give thee life, which if thou wouldst preserve, live where my eyes may never see thee more; Live to undo someone whose soul may prove so bravely constant to revenge my love”. The Rover delivers scathing condemnation of what Is inhumane in society, including the portrayal of marriage as a type of church-approved prostitution, while also including the obligatory sexual adventures of dissipated rakes as requested by the audience. The play’s main male characters operate as spokespersons for traditional society’s moral beliefs, but the more independent and inquisitive female characters highlight the contradictions and injustices present throughout traditional societal conventions. The men may brag about their wealth and status, military prowess or amorous conquests, but the unsung heroine is the lone woman who asserts her right to do the same. This kind of unrecognised bravery mostly pertains to the author herself, who ought to be honoured by history for essentially imposing the notion of the woman author on the backward society of the day in spite of widespread opposition. Along these lines, two and a half centuries later, no less a writer than Virginia Wolf evaluates Behn’s legacy as: “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”. Speaking their minds is exactly what the female characters of ‘The Rover’ do, including the author. Be it Hellena’s brutally honest description of marriage as a socially sanctioned form of prostitution or Angelica’s eloquent defence of becoming a courtesan as a respectable career choice. Both Hellena and Angelica are unsung heroines because they refuse to accept and quietly endure the fate that has been predetermined for them and because they are prepared to bear with the consequences as long as they get to choose their own path. The play also suggests that Angelica’s cerebral rejection of love in favour of sex as a business and Hellena’s blatant pursuit of sexual experience are not their initial choices but rather reactionary methods resulting from their
extremely constrained possibilities. In the end, much like much of her other work, ‘The Rover’ provides evidence that Behn’s “constant theme is the power of love and the need for it to exist between people for its own sake and not to be transformed into a commodity, an item to be exchanged for money, influence or selfish gratification”.
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