Abstract
The cover of The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn, edited by Derek Hughes and Janet Todd, features the portrait of a luxuriously dressed European woman being offered pearls and coral by a young African slave/servant (Figure 10). The portrait splits the words of the book’s title so that ‘The Cambridge Companion to’ appears above the portrait and ‘Aphra Behn’ below it, suggesting that the European woman is Behn and allowing the young African to conjure up images of the slaves that populate Behn’s Oroonoko. It would be an elegant conceit, one that accords ‘Behn’ beauty, power, and the riches that come from involvement in a colonialist enterprise. But the conceit does not work, for the woman in the portrait is not Behn. She is Louise Renée de Kéroualle, maid of honor to the Queen of England and later Charles Il’s mistress. She bore him a son, was given many titles including duchess of Portsmouth, and remained a close friend and advisor until the monarch’s death. But why does her portrait serve as an image of Aphra Behn? There was no confusion in the choice, for the book’s back cover identifies Pierre Mignard’s portrait as that of de Kéroualle.
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Notes
See Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), chapter 5, for more on this portrait and others of white Europeans and black Africans and how they comment on colonialism and the slave trade.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 115. For further discussion on the early modern marriage economy, see Theodora A. Jankowski, Women in Power in the Early Modern Drama (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), chapter 2, and ‘Hymeneal Blood, Interchangeable Women, and the Early Modern Marriage Economy in Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well’, in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works. Volume IV: The Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 89–105.
See Theodora A. Jankowski, Pure Resistance: Queer Virginity in Early Modern English Drama (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), chapters 4–6, for an extended discussion of the power of virginity and how the drama of the period reflected it.
See Kay Stanton, ‘“Made to Write ‘Whore’ Upon?” Male and Female Use of the Word “Whore” in Shakespeare’s Canon’, in A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Dympna Callaghan (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 80–102.
Interestingly, despite Lady Coy’s reference to the fact that she must change her name to ‘Amorous’ (an ominous change) now that she is married, Cavendish refers to Coy and Lady Vertue continuously by their ‘maiden’ names. Cavendish also clearly indicates what her husband has contributed to this play, notably an Epithalamion. He is also identified as the author of the ‘recuperative’ section of The Convent of Pleasure; it is significant that the achievement of heteronormative marriages in both plays is attributed to him. See also Mihoko Suzuki, ‘Margaret Cavendish and the Female Satirist’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 37.3 (1997): 483–500 on how Cavendish critiques marriage in other plays.
Margaret Cavendish, The Bridals, The Convent of Pleasure and Other Plays, ed. Anne Shaver (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). Further citations to Cavendish’s plays will be by act, scene, and page number.
Louise de Kéroualle’s income, from various sources, became astronomical. In 1681 she reputedly received more than £136,000 from the secret service alone. Nancy Klein Maguire, ‘The Duchess of Portsmith: English Royal Consort and French Politician, 1670–1685’, in The Stuart Court and Europe, ed. R. Malcolm Smuts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 247–73.
Aphra Behn, The Feign’d Curtezans, The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992), 5: 86–87. Further references are cited parenthetically in the text.
Among the many scholars who have called attention to Behn’s focus on the mercantile aspects of marriage are Susan J. Owen, ‘“Suspect my loyalty when I lose my virtue”: Sexual Politics and Party in Aphra Behn’s Plays of the Exclusion Crisis’ and Elin Diamond, ‘Gestus and Signature in Aphra Behn’s The Rover’, both in Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 57–72; 32–56; and Robert Markley, ‘Behn and the Unstable Traditions of Social Comedy’, in The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn, ed. Derek Hughes and Janet Todd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 98–117.
Margaret Cavendish, ‘To the Reader’, The Description of a New World Called The Blazing World (1666; 1668), in Kate Lilley, ed., The Description of a New World Called The Blazing World And Other Writings (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 124.
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© 2011 Theodora A. Jankowski
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Jankowski, T.A. (2011). Critiquing the Sexual Economies of Marriage. In: Suzuki, M. (eds) The History of British Women’s Writing, 1610–1690. The History of British Women’s Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230305502_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230305502_13
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