Theatre Topics

Imagining Aphra: Reinventing a Female Subject Nancy Copeland Aphra Behn (c.1640-1689), the first professional woman playwright in England, has emerged in recent decades from two hundred years of neglect and obscurity to join the canon of Restoration playwrights. A number of her plays have been revived; and The Rover (1677), at least, is frequently taught. Behn's entry into contemporary culture has been taken a further step with two 1991 plays devoted to her life: Aphra, by Nancy Cullen, Alexandria Patience, and Rose Scollard; and A Woman's Comedy, by Beth Herst. These transformations of Behn into a dramatic character offer an opportunity to examine two different approaches to the representation of a seventeenth-century woman within a late twentieth-century context. Indeed, the two plays represent different types of feminist drama. Aphra is a product of a feminist collective, Maenad productions of Calgary, Alberta, whose "mandate" is "vto promote the feminine vision'" (Cullen, et al. "Maenadic Rites" 28). A Woman's Comedy, on the other hand, is, up to a point, an example of what Jill Dolan calls "liberal feminism," which resembles liberal humanism in being ""radically individualistic'" and asserting universal human values, and which seeks equal treatment for women and men (Dolan 3). The presentations of the central character that emerge in these plays are, despite a number of similarities, essentially opposed to one another and raise the important question of whether there is a "right"way to portray Aphra Behn. Although several accounts of Behn have been written, biographers have found her a fairly unsuitable subject for extended treatment. She produced a large number of plays, poems, and innovative prose fictions, but meagre documentary evidence for the details of her life survives. For example, it is not known precisely when or where she was born, what her maiden name was, or to whom she was married, if, indeed, she married at all (see Doody 3). In lieu of extensive evidence of other kinds, important sources of information about her attitudes and personality are her prefaces and dedications, in which she defends herself from her critics and argues for her right to write in the face of misogynist opposition. It is, however, as Margaret Anne Doody observes, "very difficult not to mythologise Aphra while reconstructing her life-story" (3). Her recent biographers, Angeline Goreau and Maureen Duffy, do so, in part, by 135 136 Nancy Copeland relying on Behn's fictional works to fill out their pictures of her. The authors of Aphra and A Woman's Comedy have similarly, and more appropriately, turned to Behn's works in constructing their imaginary Aphras, as well, it would seem, as referring to the biographies. Both plays are primarily fictionalized versions of Behn, rather than histories. "Aphra is an interpretive picture, not a definitive one," note the Maenad authors (S2), while Herst, the author of A Woman's Comedy, emphasizes that she "felt quite free to invent" in retelling Behn's story ("Aphra's World" F3) and, indeed, chose to focus on those aspects of Behn's life "about which least was known" ("Male Plots" 77). Selection is, of course, essential in the dramatization of the life of any historical figure, and the authors of Aphra and A Woman's Comedy have made many similar choices. Both plays stress Behn's profession by creating stage imagery that emphasizes her desk, sheets of manuscript, and the physical act of writing. Both emphasize Behn's poverty and the fact that she wrote out of dire need: Virginia Woolf's observation that the importance of the fact that Behn "made, by working very hard, enough to live on . . . outweighs anything that she actually wrote" (64) seems to have influenced the authors of both plays. Both plays also present their protagonist as an emblem of female victimization by oppressive—indeed, evil—social convention, an approach that reflects Behn's presentation of herself in her prefaces. Both plays also represent Behn as a completed subject through the expedient of dramatizing her life from a posthumous perspective. Both introduce Behn's doggerel epitaph—"Here lies a proof that wit can never be/ Defence enough against mortality"—near the beginning of the play, and in...