Wastrel’s Reviews > The Secret Life of Aphra Behn > Status Update

(the constant frustration of Todd making claims as though they were well-grounded, but concealing which ones are pure fantasy and which are actually supported by evidence)

Todd consistently tries to paint Aphra as peripheral, disadvantaged, little more than a nobody in her time - to make her more of a victim (even if she doesn't use that word for her); and that's not without some justification (she was a woman in a man's world, and lowborn).

But there's also a lot of hints here and there that she may have been closer to power than Todd lets on. For instance, Todd is happy to say (and I think it's not just her?) that Behn's "beloved Amoret" is Elizabeth Barry, the actress. Barry was the long-term girlfriends of Rochester, and gave birth to his daughter. Several of Behn's poems were originally published as Rochester's, and Todd allows that Behn was on the edge of Rochester's circle, attending parties where they wrote lurid poems as a parlour game.

...but we're also told that when Rochester avoided Barry's childbirth (he claimed to be too sick with an STD to attend, and so was in the country for his health; later, he tried to have the baby removed from Barry's care, but Todd doesn't tell us whether he succeeded), he was lambasted for this by none other than Nell Gwyn, the king's mistress. Gwyn presumably felt some solidarity with Barry, given that both she and Barry were famous actresses, and both she and Barry were mistresses to powerful men. Add in Barry's fame - she was considered the greatest actress in the world - and it's hard to avoid thinking that Gwyn and Barry probably knew each other directly. Indeed, given that Barry, Rochester and the King all were legendarily, scandalously, libertine in their personal lives (while Gwyn was happy to call herself a whore), and that the king and Rochester were close, and Gwyn was close enough to Barry to upbraid the king's friend on her behalf, one can't but wonder whether the king and Gwyn knew Rochester and Barry VERY well, so to speak...

...at which point, if Behn is Barry's best friend, and a regular dinner guest of Rochester, and clearly already a minor celebrity in her own right, is Behn really as remote from power as Todd wants to make out? Reading Todd, it seems as though the monarchy is a thousand leagues above the petty demimonde that Behn struggles by in. Yet if you're friends with one of the king's best friends, and your own best friend (lover?) is a friend of the king's girlfriend... you're not really on different planes of existence, are you?

[and that's before factoring in the fact that Behn is known to have spied for the king, and the valid speculation as to whether she was also part of his network before his restoration...]


The weird thing here from a modern point of view is that it feels natural to divide the grubby, salacious demimonde of playwrights, poets, actresses and whores that Aphra lived in from the brightly-lit world of monarchs, plutocrats and politicians. But in the Restoration... the demimonde WAS the monde!

Todd gives us a great example of this. At one point, Rochester becomes so weary from incessant anal sex with one of his boyfriends, a musician, that he "gives" the young man as a "present" to his friend, Henry Savile. Aphra is drawn into this sordid world by writing lyrics for one of the musician's songs. But at the same time, that musician was also King Charles' favourite musician, to whose songs he would listen "with great delight". Savile himself was a Groom of the Bedchamber, and his brother was a senior diplomat and politician who was about to join the privy council, and who, a decade later, would end up running the country. The scandalous artists and the high politicians were, at most, tightly-overlapping circles, if not indeed the same circle. And since Aphra was clearly already well-known in the former circle, was she really that remote from the latter?

Another difficulty we have with this era is that all the women in it are simultaneously spoken of (generally in prose) respectfully as chaste and noble ladies, and also (often in poetry) as scandalous sluts and whores. It's hard to know to what extent the former is just the polite convention of the time, or the latter is scurrilous gossip or outright (misogynist) slander.

In particular, it's very hard, without a lot more context, to tell whether a description of a woman's promiscuity is: an honest truth; exaggerated ribbing from a friend (in a subculture in which promiscuity was often boasted of by both men and women); or vicious lampoon by a misogynist or progressive.

Todd largely wants to keep her Aphra a wide-eyed naif; so, while she's willing to accept the possibility of her being discretely 'kept' at times, she doesn't want to take at face value accounts like those of Robert Gould, describing both Aphra and Ephelia:
when their verse did fail
To get 'em brandy, bread and cheese, and ale,
Their wants by prostitution were supplied:
Show but a Tester, you might up and ride

Similarly, she doesn't outright dismiss a comment like Tom Brown's on Elizabeth Barry: "should you lie with her all night, she would not know you the next morning, unless you had another five pound at her service".

This makes sense, both because Todd is in a way adopting a neutral position on something we can't know, and because the 'attacks' on the virtue of female celebrities may obviously be motivated by misogyny.

On the other hand, Todd sort of glosses over the extent to which the circle these women lived in probably really WERE genuinely libertine. Barry was Rochester's girlfriend. As I think I've mentioned before, Rochester once wrote a nostalgic love-poem to a girlfriend (I don't know if it was Barry) remembering how the two of them would bet on which of them could have sex with a hot young male stranger first. When we're talking about Behn going to Rochester's parties, that's the sort of party we're talking about, even if we've no direct evidence that Behn joined in the competition. About Barry/Rochester's daughter, it was joked that if Rochester had lived until his daughter's adulthood, he'd surely have been father to his own granddaughter - it's an exaggeration, but that was the public image of the guy Aphra's spending her time hanging out with. Given the combination of pecuniary need (actresses and poetesses didn't have a lot of money, or independent sources of it) and subcultural values that actively boasted of promiscuity (one of Aphra's friends wrote a friendly poem about how she used to show her genitals in the street for small change), it's hard not to imagine that at least in many cases the association of 'theatre world' women with prostitution and libertinism may not have been pure slander...