Gestus and Signature in Aphra Behn's the Rover

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GESTUS AND SIGNATURE IN APHRA BEHN'S THE ROVER BY ELIN DIAMOND Where the dream is at its most exalted, the commodity is closest to hand. -Theodor Adorno, In Search of Wagner Near the end of act 2 of The Rover, after the wealthy virgins and hungry gallants have been introduced, and the reader-spectator is made aware that comic symmetry is pressing toward chase and final reward, mention is made of a beautiful courtesan whom the gallants, including the affianced ones, are trying to impress. Angellica Bianca would seem to be a supplement to the intrigue plot-a supplement since one need not intrigue to visit a whore. Yet before the virgins are rewarded with the husbands they desire, they will traverse this whore's marketplace. In "scenes" and "discoveries," they will market themselves as she does, compete for the same male affection, suffer similar abuse. The courtesan herself enters the play not in the way the audience might expect, behind an exotic vizard, or "discovered" in her bedchamber after the parting of the scenes, but as a portrait, as three portraits, a large one hung from the balcony and two smaller ones posted on either side of the proscenium door designating her lodging. Willmore, the play's titular rover, arrives at her door, and in the absence of the courtesan he cannot afford, he appropriates her in representation-he reaches up and steals a portrait. Willmore's gesture, I will suggest, contains information beyond the local revelation of one character's behavior. We might read Willmore's gesture as a Brechtian Gestus or "gest," a moment in performance that makes visible the contradictory interactions of text, theater apparatus, and contemporary social struggle.' In the unraveling of its intrigue plot, Aphra Behn's The Rover not only thematizes the marketing of women in marriage and prostitution, it "demonstrates," in its gestic moments, the ideological contradictions of the apparatus Behn inherited and the society for which she wrote. Brecht's account of the Gestus is useful for alerting us to the vectors of historical change written into dramatic texts, but he This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.82.209 on Sun, 18 Nov 2012 16:18:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 519
makes no provision for gender-an unavoidable issue in Aphra Behn's own history. Educated but constantly in need of money, with court connections but no supporting family, Aphra Behn wrote plays when female authorship was a monstrous violation of the "woman's sphere." Since the reopening of the theaters in 1660, Frances Boothby and the Duchess of Newcastle each had had a play produced, but no woman had challenged the Restoration theater with Behn's success and consistency.2 Indeed, that she could earn a living writing for the theater was precisely what condemned her. The muckraking satirist Robert Gould wrote typical slander in a short piece addressed to Behn that concluded with this couplet: "For Punk and Poetess agree so Pat, / You cannot be This and not be That."3 In her suggestive "Arachnologies: The Woman, The Text, and the Critic," Nancy Miller implicitly proposes a feminist version of the Gestus; texts by women writers, says Miller, encode the signs or "emblems of a female signature" by which the "culture of gender [and] the inscriptions of its political structures" might be read.4 In a woman-authored text, then, the gestic moment would mark both a convergence of social actions and attitudes, and the gendered history of that convergence. Robert Gould's verse, with its violent, unequivocal equation of "poetess" and "punk," provides some evidence of the culture of gender in Restoration London. Like her male colleagues, Behn hawked her intrigue comedies and political satires in the literary and theatrical marketplace, and like them, she suffered the attacks of "fop-corner" and the sometimes paltry remuneration of third-day receipts. In her case, however, the status of professional writer indicated immodesty: the author, like her texts, became a commodity. Deciphering Behn's authorial "signature" obliges us to read the theatrical, social, and sexual discourses that complicate and obscure its inscription. I am aiming here to open the text to what Brecht calls its "fields of force" (30)-those contradictory relations and ideas that signify in Behn's culture and are, as this reading will indicate, symptomatic of our own. Like Brecht, in his discussion of Shakespeare's Coriolanus (252-65), I am interested less in interpretative truth than in exploring a complex textual system in which author, apparatus, history, and reader-spectator each plays a signifying role. The following section will consider Behn's authorial contexts, the Restoration theater apparatus, with its proto-fetishist positioning of "scenes" and actresses; the next two sections focus 520 Gestus and Signature in The Rover This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.82.209 on Sun, 18 Nov 2012 16:18:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
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Page 5 and 6: most grateful deceptions of the sig
Page 7 and 8: Given this cultural legacy, and the
Page 9 and 10: connection between virgin and prost
Page 11 and 12: cannot change their plot. Ultimatel
Page 13 and 14: stage; and sometimes more particula
Page 15 and 16: In souls whom impotence and age had
Page 17 and 18: matists, situated lovers' trysts an
Page 19 and 20: them and, it would seem, the woman
Page 21 and 22: (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
Page 23 and 24: 24 Cited in Smith, 63. 25 According

Gestus and Signature in Aphra Behn's the Rover

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