GENDER AND NARRATIVE IN THE FICTION OF APHRA BEHN .sx By Jacqueline Pearson .sx Aphra Behn is still a neglected writer , and even among those critics who have given her work more than a passing acknowledgement there is a striking lack of consensus about the nature and extent of her achievement , especially in her fiction .sx She has been praised as innovative and original :sx Robert Adams Day thus finds Oroonoko " entirely original " in its narrative methods and praises its " astonishing innovations " .sx On the other hand , many accounts of the rise of the novel ignore or understate her contribution :sx Ian Watt's classic study , The Rise of the Novel , makes only two brief references , and even in a full-length study of Behn's work , F. M. Link finds her fiction unoriginal and concludes that she " made no significant contribution to the development of the [novel] form " .sx And if there is little agreement on questions of originality and influence , there is no more on the themes of the novels .sx Oroonoko , for instance , has been seen as expressing " republican prejudices " , or as demonstrating a strongly royalist viewpoint , or both .sx There is especially a lack of consensus on Behn's treatment of gender :sx some critics find her a vigorous feminist , making 'suffragette' claims for women , while others argue that she compromised with a male-dominated literary establishment and that her work consequently displays a " masculine set of values " .sx A high proportion of recent criticism of Behn's fiction adopts a na i-trema vely literalist reading , taking Oroonoko and even The Fair Jilt and other tales quite simply as self-revelation , as direct autobiography .sx As a result of , and a reaction against , this kind of reading , the most promising recent reassessments have focused on the role of the narrators .sx The narrator has been seen to provide circumstantial detail , local colour , a vivid immediacy , and a " breezy colloquial quality " , to offer " a viable standard of judgement for the readers " , to unify the novel and involve the reader emotionally in the narrative , and also " to attest the truth of the whole story " .sx I shall argue , however , that the situation is still more complex , and that the narrator , who is not coterminous with 'Aphra Behn' , is a complex and subtle part of Behn's treatment , both open and implied , of issues of gender and power .sx In order to do this , I shall briefly examine the strategies with the narrator in a range of Behn's fiction , before going on to a fuller analysis of the role of the narrator in Oroonoko .sx I In Behn's fourteen fictions , the narrator is never definitely male :sx six give no clue to gender , though she sometimes seems to be female by implication , and in eight , 'The Unfortunate Happy Lady' , Oroonoko , The History of the Nun , 'The Nun' , 'The Lucky Mistake' , 'The Unfortunate Bride' , 'The Wandering Beauty' , and 'The Unhappy Mistake' , she is definitely female .sx In the simplest cases the female sex of the narrator lends an authority to her accounts of women's lives and natures , and reflects the empowering of women , or the mockery of men , within the narratives .sx In more complex tales , the female narrator is depicted , like the female characters , as embedded within patriarchy and limited by it .sx These women are torn by contradictions , powerful and governing within their fictions , powerless outside them , and their narratives are deeply coloured , even undermined , by these contradictions .sx What they present as simple narratives , entertaining stories or moral tales , turn out to encode quite different meanings , more sinister , revealing , and subversive , over which the narrators have less perfect control .sx Narrators are given to Freudian slips , unnoticed and unacknowledged self-contradiction , uncomfortable ambivalences , not fully articulated , about the tales they tell .sx It is these complex , uncomfortable , flawed , or even duplicitous narrators who are Behn's most effective tool in her analysis of patriarchy .sx The most obvious of the contradictions imported by the narrators is their misogyny , paradoxically most apparent in the case of specifically female narrators .sx Tales may condemn female weakness , like 'The Nun' , or celebrate female strength , like 'The Unfortunate Happy Lady' , yet in both the female narrator displays an oddly masculine misogyny :sx " our Sex seldom wants matter of Tattle " , " how wretched are our Sex , in being the unhappy Occasion of so many fatal Mischiefs " , " 'tis the humour of our Sex , to deny most eagerly those Grants to Lovers , for which most tenderly we sigh , so contradictory are we to our selves " .sx The authority of the female narrator is thus used , paradoxically , to give an authoritative insider's view of female weakness , as the female narrator seeks male approval by attacking her own sex or by modest self-deprecation .sx Such ambiguities are perhaps best understood as the result of the self-divisions - " so contradictory are we to our selves " - experienced by the female narrator , anxious to succeed within a male-dominated literary establishment and consequently obliged to accept its standards , and yet also , sometimes admittedly , sometimes not , highly critical of that male world and its male inhabitants .sx The language of the narrators is important in establishing these contradictions .sx It is typically marked by apparent humility or self-deprecation , though this is often actually " a means of self-assertion and a means of commenting upon the limited roles that women are expected to play " .sx This can be seen especially in the use of apparently or mockingly humble adverbs , like 'perhaps' or 'possibly' .sx These adverbs appear to create an allegedly female tentativeness , though one very often suspects irony in this apparent self-deprecation , since it actually creates a playful knowingness , often exploited for erotic effect .sx In 'The Unfortunate Happy Lady' the assumed na i-trema vety of the female narrator's voice touchingly and humorously dramatizes the real innocence of her heroine Philadelphia , and we hear simultaneously the two polarized female voices of the tale , the innocent and the experienced :sx " She apprehended , that ( possibly ) her Brother had a Mistress .sx .. " ( p. 45) .sx A similar device can be seen in 'The Court of the King of Bantam' , where the narrator assumes an apparent coy and tentative tone which is actually playfully revealing and which asserts her authority over even the " unfeminine " explicitness of the tale :sx " .sx .. her Bed .sx Where I think fit to leave 'em for the present ; for ( perhaps ) they had some private Business " ( pp .sx 31-2) .sx Similarly , the narrator's claims to ignorance demonstrate not so much narrative failure as the cool and perfect control of the gentlewoman-amateur , an exasperating mockery of the reader for our need for detail , verisimilitude , and coherent narrative structure :sx " The rest I have forgot " , " I had forgot to tell you .sx .. " , " I had forgot to tell my Reader .sx .. " .sx In light tales like 'The Court of the King of Bantam' the narrator's apparent lack of authority and of certain knowledge on some details serves to comic effect .sx Here the narrator is not specifically female , and may possibly be , by implication , male ( " my Friend the Count " , p. 27 ; " In less Time than I could have drank a Bottle to my Share " , p. 30) .sx If this is so , the apparent imperfection of his narrative authority would serve to parallel the tale's mockery of Sir Would-be King and the travesty of patriarchal authority that he represents .sx In more serious tales , and where the narrator is more explicitly female , the effect can , as we shall see , be different .sx The narrator may , for instance , deliberately limit her field of expertise .sx Thus in The History of the Nun , the female narrator concentrates on her story of passion and moral paradox , for " it is not my business to relate the History of the War " ( p.304 ) which provides a background ; or a possibly female narrator will point out the imperfections and inconsistencies in presumably male authorities - " Some authors , in the relation of this battle , affirm , that Philander quitted his post as soon as the charge was given .sx .. " .sx Writing in a world where female authorship was the subject of a vigorous and largely hostile scrutiny by the representatives of the dominant culture , Behn has her female narrators humbly accede to the view that female creativity should be confined to certain fields , but this transparently ironic humility does not so much accept the conventional limitations as draw mocking attention to them .sx " History " may be the locus of a specifically male authority , but male " authors " are mocked by implication for the imperfectness of their authority .sx Behn's narrators also offer a critique of the inequalities encoded in the gendered language of society .sx Some words are revealed to have different meanings depending on whether applied to male or female subjects .sx Thus Sylvia would be " undone " by losing her virginity , while Philander is " undone " by failing to have sex and proving impotent at his first encounter with her .sx Love Letters , and many other Behn tales and plays , criticize society's language of gender not only by explicit statements of the equality of men and women - they respond to sexual passion with " equal fire , with equal " , with " equal ravishment " ( LL , pp .sx 53 , 243 ) - but also by allowing women to appropriate for their own uses a sexual vocabulary in which they have previously been the objects of male language .sx Thus men can be 'beautiful' and 'lovely' in the eyes of women as much as women can in the eyes of men , women are conventionally addressed by men as " charmer" , but the word can also , more unconventionally , be used by women of men , and while Behn does not explicitly reject the conventional belief that women are " the soft .sx .. Sex " , she also allows sympathetic males to display " softness" .sx Love Letters and other tales thus imply a biological equality between the sexes , but also allow their narrators to explore the socially constructed inequalities .sx II Behn's narrators , then , are often specifically female .sx The implied reader may also be female , as she is invited to enter closed female worlds of nunnery or brothel .sx A female reader is constructed within the text , by , for instance , Behn's use of the first person plural , which is not the authorial 'we' and contrasts sharply with the narrator's jauntily individualistic 'I' , but which implies a female reader and a sympathetic complicity between her and the author - " how wretched are our sex .sx .. " ( A similar device can be found in Behn's plays :sx in the prologue to her first performed play , The Forc'd Marriage ( 1670 ) , women in the audience are identified as " Spies " for the " Poetess" .sx ) Behn's dedication of work to individual women also suggests that she aimed for a female readership :sx the printed text of The Feign'd Curtezans ( 1679 ) is dedicated , for instance , to Nell Gwyn , and The History of the Nun to Hortense Mancini , Duchess of Mazarine .sx The historical evidence , fragmentary though it is , also suggests that many women read Behn's work .sx Almost all women writers between the 1670s and the middle of the eighteenth century are aware of Behn's example and had probably read some of her works :sx Anne Finch knew Behn's work as a poet , Catherine Trotter had read Agnes de Castro , which she adapted for the stage in 1695 , Jane Barker had by 1726 read at least The History of the Nun and 'The Wandering Beauty' , which she retells in The Lining of the Patchwork Screen , and many other women writers refer to Behn and her work .sx Mary Wortley Montagu , whose reading is better documented than that of most women , was acquainted with Behn's The Emperor of the Moon , knew her poems well enough to quote two of them , fifteen years apart , and had probably also read Oroonoko .sx In the mid-eighteenth century Oroonoko was adapted and included in one of the first women's magazines , thus reaching a still wider middle-class audience .sx And , to take a final , celebrated example , Mrs Keith of Ravelstone , as a young girl in London in about the 1760s , heard Behn's novels " read aloud for the amusement of large circles of the first and most creditable society " .sx The female reader is both constructed within the text and a historical reality outside it .sx However , while Behn expected and encouraged women to read her tales , her female narrators sometimes imply , image , or address specifically male readers , often for critical or ironic purposes .sx The tales are full of female authors , writers , narrators , actors , orators , and painters , producing works which are shown consumed by a specifically male public .sx