After choosing to go about this British Literature course in an unconventional, in all actuality, a random way, starting with Jane Austen and the Victorians and moving to Hardy and then back to Chaucer, Aphra Behn and finally Defoe, I am surprised at how little the order mattered. Usually when reading in chronological order there is a desire to find some sort of progression of ideas, but this crazy circle actually showed me the falsity of this assumption. I was especially surprised at how views of women’s freedom and sexuality seemed to regress with time instead of progress from the 14th century to the 19th century. Of course I knew the Victorians had a big hand in forcing women into the domestic sphere, making them ornamental in nature, forbidding them their sexuality, and making them completely helpless without a husband, but the arrangement of these texts reminded me that there were those before the Victorians and in spite of the Victorians, who envisioned a world where women had more power than that of simply a household ornament. In fact if I look at these texts in chronological order—Chaucer’s Wife of Bath (1386?), Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), Austen’s Persuasion (1817), and Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), life for women seems to get progressively worse.
In “The Wife of Bath,” Chaucer portrays a woman who has been married five times and is confident in her sexuality and boasts of her control over men. Chaucer describes her in the general prologue:
“Gat-tooth’d (gap-toothed) was she, smoothly (truly) for to say.
Upon an ambler (slow horse ) easily she sat
Y-wimpled well, and on her head a hat
As broad as is a buckler or a targe (kinds of shield)
A foot mantle about her hippes large” (lines 468-472)
The gapped tooth, the large hat, and the large hips all suggest a sexual appetite that she describes later in her own prologue in statements like: “And many a saint, since that this world began,/Yet lived they ever in perfect chastity./ I n’ill envy no virginity./ Let them be bread of pur’d wheat’ seed,/ And let us wiv’s hot’n barley bread” (140-44); and “In wifehood will I use mine instrument/ As freely as my Maker has it sent” (149-50). A few lines later she boasts of her power over her husbands: “Upon his flesh while that I am his wife./I have the power during all my life/Upon his proper body, and not he” (157-9). She even describes one husband who is an anti-feminist and likes to read a book about “wicked wives” (684) with examples from Roman stories and the Bible. However, she even takes on this husband. She tears up his book; he hits her; she makes him feel bad; he feels bad; he gives her control of the household and stops reading the book. After this long prologue about all of her husbands, she finally launches into her story about a knight and his punishment for rape, which consists of searching for the answer to the question, “what women most desire.” The answer he discovers is that “Women desiren to have sovereignty/ As well over their husband as their love” (1038-9). So, the story supports the Wife of Bath’s real life story in her prologue, and reinforces her belief that women should have mastery over their own lives and their husbands.
Next in Oroonoko, although Behn does not portray a woman with the degree of dominance that “The Wife of Bath” has, she still portrays a woman in Imoinda who has a romantic power over the hero, Oroonoko. Although Imoinda’s qualities consist of beauty, gentleness, modesty, and sweetness—qualities that seem to undermine feminine power, Behn does not allow these qualities to totally diminish Imoinda’s power because Oroonoko, the male “hero,” values these qualities to the extent that his love for her drives the action of the story. However, despite this power over Oroonoko, Imoinda is more a type—a romantic heroine—as opposed to a woman who’s power can be translated to real life. Even as a powerful romantic heroine who fights bravely by Oroonoko in the slave rebellion, her power is ultimately limited to the romantic and the erotic. Her body is her only power, and she relinquishes this power by giving her body to Oroonoko to kill rather than risk living without him and having someone else take control of her body. So, in Oroonoko, the female protagonist loses some of the power over her own body that the “Wife of Bath” seems to have had 300 years earlier.
However, Imoinda is not the only important female character in Oroonoko. The story is told in first person from the point of view of Aphra Behn herself. Behn’s real life is in many ways much more heroic than her idealized romantic Imoinda. Behn is the first professional female author—that is she provided for herself through her writing, not through her husband. While the name Behn came from her husband, his death provided the desperate circumstances which led her to writing. Little is known about her life besides this marriage and death to a man named Behn, a short stint as a government secret agent, a near brush with debtors’ prison, a relationship with a libertine lawyer named John Hayle, and, of course, her success as a playwright and author. Although short, this biography suggests that Behn had more control and independence than her romantic character Imoinda. As narrator of Oroonoko, she brings to light the question of the female narrative voice and a woman’s role as writer. As the narrator, Behn even questions her own authority as a writer in a male dominated profession. She says that it is Oroonoko’s “misfortune to fall into an obscure world that afforded only a female pen to celebrate his fame” (940). However, she goes on to mention men that could have written about him, but failed to do so, indicating that the view of those that believe a male pen could have done better is futile because her voice is the only authority here. At the end of Oroonoko, she mentions her role as writer again with a similar humility but with more confidence that she is as equal to the task as any man:
“Thus died the great man, worthy of a better fate, and a more sublime wit than mine to write his praise; yet, I hope, the reputation of my pen is considerable enough to make his glorious name to survive to all ages, with that of the brave, the beautiful, and the constant Imoinda” (962).
The fact that she mentions “the reputation” of her pen suggests that she sees herself as a writer worthy of recognition, and the fact that she ends with Imoinda’s name suggests that the women are really the heroes of this story.
Another female character writing her own history is found in Defoe’s Moll Flanders. Moll’s unconventionality, her belief that a gentlewoman means providing for oneself, her “bawdiness,” and her independence seem to echo the life of the real Aphra Behn. However, unlike Behn, Moll’s voice is not truly her own, it is Defoe’s voice. Defoe makes sure to point this out in the author’s preface where he even mentions “that the original of this story is put into new words…particularly she is made to tell her own tale in modester words than she told it at first.” In this statement, Defoe suggests that Moll is different from the ideal woman who is modest, submissive to her husband, and dependent. She is immodest, assertive, and independent, yet her life warrants telling despite these undesirable feminine qualities. Defoe tries to pretend that this story is didactic, but the fact that Moll doesn’t die tragically or suffer permanent damnation means that this story doesn’t exactly strike fear into all of those immodest women out there. In fact, since the story is told from Moll’s point of view, the reader is sympathetic to Moll’s reasoning and sees her troubles as a result of problems with society not her own morality. The novel ultimately seems to be a critique on the economy rather than morality—specifically the lack of economic means for women to make money. Moll, like the Wife of Bath, seems to make finding husbands her profession, but, unlike the Wife of Bath, she is not as successful at it and turns to theft to support herself. Also, the Wife of Bath doesn’t have to go through censorship to tell her story like Defoe claims Moll has to go through, which suggests that a woman like Moll is not capable of telling a her story in her own voice without the help of a man like Defoe. This loss of a true female voice to the censorship enforced by a patriarchal society seems to regress from the openness of the Wife of Bath’s voice and the authority of Aphra Behn’s voice.
Just as Aphra Behn was concerned about her authority and reputation as a female writer in a male world, 95 years later Jane Austen struggles with the same concern. In Persuasion, through her female protagonist, Anne, Austen grapples with how to express herself in a persuasive manner as a writer and as a woman in a world dominated by masculine views of mind and character. While Persuasion is not necessarily a regression from Oroonoko and Austen’s authorial voice is not a regression from Behn’s voice, the fact that the struggle for an equal female voice continues almost 100 years later is discouraging to the hope of progress for women.
This discouragement at what society has done to women’s freedom of voice and body culminates in Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Tess is doomed from the beginning as a poor woman in the 19th century. She has a tragic nobility about her similar to Imoinda in Oroonoko in her acceptance of her fate for the one she loves. She is just as much of a slave to the white man as Imoinda. Tess’s body is seen only as an object of desire, and the ownership of her body is taken from her by Alex near the beginning of the novel. From that point on her fate is not her own because she knows she lives in a world where women are valued only for their economic worth and their virginity. Tess could be like Moll and not worry about morality and choose to live by whatever means possible to support herself. She could boast about her sexuality like the Wife of Bath, or she could try harder than she already does to persuade Angel to value her despite her loss of virginity. However, she doesn’t seem to have Anne’s voice, Moll’s control, or the Wife of Bath’s confidence. She is closer to Imoinda in character than any of the other women in the novels I read, but she doesn’t even have the ability to drive Angel’s actions in the way that Imoinda is able to drive Oroonoko’s actions. She also does not even have control over her body in death. Imoinda chooses to die by her lover’s hand in order to save her body from future violation. Tess, on the other hand, sacrifices herself for Angel, not for her own body, which has already been violated and controlled by Alex. In her one act of control, Tess kills Alex to revenge herself for the life he took from her, but that control is short-lived because the laws of society soon condemn her to death.
It is interesting that whether it is the 14th century or the 19th century, the women who choose to live outside the moral construction of society seem to have the most control over their lives. However, even those women, like Moll and the Wife of Bath, are limited to control in the realm of marriage. All of the female protagonists mentioned are only seen as successful if they manage to marry or at least get the respect of a man. They are defined by how men view them, and the appearance of a regression in women’s freedom and control from Chaucer to Hardy could be attributed to a change in men’s view of women. Tess has to live in a world where men idealize women to the point that they have no room to be human. Imoinda is similarly idealized, but so is Oroonoko, which makes her idealization as a woman less profound. The only reason that Oroonoko seems more progressive than Tess is because of the knowledge of Aphra Behn’s life, which seems like one that characters like Tess could only dream of.
I guess the point of this discussion is the realization of how important sexual freedom and perceptions of morality are to the amount of control women have over their lives. The more“civilized” society seems to become, the more moral restrictions the leaders of that civilization (men) seem to place on those they wish to control. This is not to say that women are or should be immoral, but that morality is sometimes falsely and unequally constructed to benefit some and control others, which in the past has served to benefit men and control women. Hopefully since the 1950’s, we have finally begun a linear progression for women’s rights that will not return to the ideas about women established in the Victorian age that limited their worth to virginal bodies mounted on pedestals of false morality.
