Aphra Behn

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Peter Lely : Aphra Behn (around 1670)
George Scharf : Aphra Behn after a painting from 1673

Aphra Behn (born July 10, 1640 in Wye , Kent , Great Britain , † April 16, 1689 in London ; native Aphra Johnson ) was a writer , spy and feminist . She occupies a unique position in English literature because she was the first public professional writer in England and played an important role in the development of the modern novel . Very popular during his lifetime and afterwards, it was more and more rejected in the 19th century and only gained importance again in the early 20th century.

Life

Aphra Behn was neither rich nor did she come from the upper class ; she was the daughter of Bartholomew Johnson, a bath attendant , and Elizabeth Denham, a wet nurse . As a child, Behn probably spent some time with her family in the then English sugar colony of Suriname , where she collected the material that she later used in her best-known novel Oroonoko or The Royal Slave .

In 1658 she returned to England, and in 1664 she married Johan Behn, a Dutch or German merchant who died shortly afterwards and left her without financial support. Nothing more is known about the marriage. When her husband died, she chose to work. She refused to marry again because she - according to her own statements - considered marriage a "form of prostitution" for financial reasons. At first she tried herself as a spy for Charles II in Antwerp, in the Spanish Netherlands ; However, she was not paid for her espionage work and had to go to the debt tower in 1668 because of unpaid debts . From then on she wanted to be financially independent under all circumstances.

In 1670 her first play - The Forced Marriage - was successfully performed. Frivolous moral comedies were to the taste of the public who, after years of puritanically prescribed modesty , after the dance and theater ban under Cromwell , turned to sexuality, eroticism, music, literature and the theater. For the first time in the history of England women were allowed to practice the acting profession. Behn knew what she was writing about, widowed at an early age, she had a long affair with John Hoyle, a bisexual man and philanderer known in London. She loved men and women, wrote about them, and openly admitted to seeking fame and influence.

Behn was on the one hand a dedicated Tory and a supporter of the monarchy . She maintained - presumably driven by the great uncertainty of the Stuart Restoration - close social ties to the royal court and Charles II. On the other hand, she criticized the conditions in the formerly English colony of Suriname and was influenced by natural law and republican ideas.

Professional writer

Oroonoko stabs Imoinda - illustration for a production by Thomas Southerne in 1776

Aphra Behn became a celebrated author, she wrote plays, prose and poetry for 19 years and worked as a translator . Her plays were a significant part of the repertoire of the London stage of the Restoration period and the early 18th century. The Rover , her most popular piece, was performed almost every year between 1703 and 1750. Her works remained very popular until the middle of the 18th century, when they suddenly disappeared from the stage - partly because Behn's sharp analyzes of sexual double standards and “morality” were too revealing for the audience. In addition, her work was increasingly equated with her life. Public opinion was that one could no longer perform pieces by a woman who lived, worked and loved independently.

Her contemporaries envied her success. Behn was hostile from many sides. In particular, her erotic depictions and her sympathy for abolitionism were chalked up. In 1682 she was even arrested for "too much freedom" (in the texts of Like Father, Like Son ), but released again shortly afterwards. In the same year the King's Company and the Duke's Company, which performed Behn's pieces, merged to form the United Company.

Her main work, the novel Oroonoko about a black prince of the Gold Coast , today's Ghana , who is abducted as a slave to Suriname, was published in German as early as 1709 and influenced the anti-slavery movement. With this work, despite all the idealization of the noble savage (before Jean-Jacques Rousseau ), she broke through the barriers of the romantic-heroic storytelling tradition and paved the way for realistic storytelling - thirty years before Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe , with whom many relevant manuals still use the Let the story of the English novel begin. It is Oroonoko already a mature and successful early specimen of the species. The supposedly autobiographical passages in this work probably served to authenticate the narration, which in places embellished it romantically. The French literary historian Jean Jules Jusserand has described the novel as the only work of the period in which an original thought can be found.

Behn still exerted a direct influence on the subsequent generation of women writers, such as Delarivier Manley , Eliza Haywood and Charlotte Lennox and the well-known feminist Mary Astell , but when modesty became a prescribed virtue during the Victorian era , her life and work contrasted it became increasingly associated with promiscuity , that influence waned.

Only the English writers Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West were able to take them up again in the twentieth century. When Woolf plausibly demonstrated in her essay A Room of One's Own why a female Shakespeare was doomed to failure and called for research into female literary history, she wrote: All women should sprinkle flowers together on Aphra Behn's grave ... because she was it that first won them the right to say what they think.

Devaluation, discrimination, oppression and marginalization of women prevented Behn's broader reception and thus also an appropriate canonicalization . Even an author like her, who became a bestselling author during her lifetime and who wrote far more and at least as good comedies at the end of the 17th century as her male contemporaries, found no entry into the memoria ; it was seldom taken into account by lexicographers and literary scholars and thus fell into oblivion. Behn research experienced a significant upswing from the 1980s with the publication of the biographies of Maureen Duffy and Angeline Goreau.

Works

  • 1670 - The Forced Marriage (play)
  • 1671 - The Amourous Prince (play)
  • 1672 - Covent Garden Drollery (Behn's authorship is disputed.)
  • 1673 - The Dutch Lover (play)
  • 1675 - Two plays, the authorship of which is not entirely clear: The Revenge: Or a Match in Newgate and The Woman Turned Bully
  • 1676 - Abdelazer (tragedy for which Henry Purcell wrote four-part theater music in 1695) and The Town Fop (play)
  • 1677 - The Rover - Behn's most successful play. For this play, Nell Gwyn returned on stage to play the role of prostitute Angelica Bianca.
  • 1677 - Two plays, which are probably also by Behn, but the authorship is not entirely clear: The Debauchee and The Counterfeit Bridegroom .
  • 1678 - Sir Patient Fancy
  • 1679 - The Feigned Courtesans (dedicated to Nell Gwyn) and The Young King in the fall (tragic comedy).
  • 1680 - The Disappointment (The disappointment), a poem in which she describes the emotional state of a woman, the one orgasm is denied
  • 1681 - The Rover (second part) , The False Count and The Roundheads
  • 1682 - The City Heiress (play) and Like Father, Like Son (play - a flop)
  • 1683 - Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (Roman)
  • 1684 - Various poetry publications
  • 1685 - Miscellany (collection of poems)
  • 1686 - The Lover's Watch or The Art of Making Love (poem) and The Lucky Chance (play)
  • 1687 - The Emperor of the Moon (play, farce)
  • 1688 - The Fair Jilt (prose), Agnes de Castro (prose) and Oroonoko, or, The Royal Slave , Will. (Iam) Canning, Temple Cloisters, London, England (German: Oroonoko , Insel-Verlag, Leipzig 1966) ( Novel).
  • 1689 - The Widow Ranter (play, premiered posthumously )
  • 1696 - The Younger Brother (play, premiered posthumously)
  • Complete edition
  • The plays, histories, and novels of the ingenious Mrs. Aphra Behn, 6 Volumes Vol.1 , Vol.2 , Vol.3 , Vol.4 , Vol.5 , Vol.6

reception

The composer and conductor Odaline de la Martinez was inspired by Oronooko for an opera trilogy that deals with slavery and the beginnings of Afro-Caribbean culture. The first part, the opera Imoinda , was composed between 2005 and 2008, the second, The Crossing , premiered in 2012. The Doctor Who radio play The Astrea Conspiracy (2019) by the British production company Big Finish takes up the story of Behn.

literature

  • Cathrin Brockhaus, Aphra Behn and their London Comedies: The Dramatist and Her Work in England at the end of the 17th century . Heidelberg, 1998.
  • Maureen Duffy: The Passionate Shepherdness. The Life of Aphra Behn. London 1977.
  • Angeline Goreau: Reconstructing Aphra: a social biography of Aphra Behn . Dial Press, New York 1980 ISBN 0-8037-7478-8
  • Ansgar Nünning : Aphra Benn . In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, pp. 41–42.
  • Günter Weise: Afterword . In: Oroonoko. Insel, Leipzig 1966.
  • Vita Sackville-West: Aphra Behn - The Incomparable Astrea . 1927
  • Alfred Behrmann : The emperor of the moon = The emperor of the moon (Aphra Behn); The tragedy of tragedies or the life and death of Tom Thumb the Great. The Tragedy of Tragedies or Life and Death Tom Thumb Thumb the Great (Henry Fielding); 2 English farces, translated, explained and each with an afterword, bilingual ed. by Alfred Behrmann. Athenäum-Verlag Frankfurt a. Main 1973.

Web links

Commons : Aphra Behn  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Aphra Behn  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ ivetteromero: The Crossing: Slavery Opera opens at the London Festival of American Music. In: repeatingislands.com. November 3, 2014, accessed July 21, 2017 .
  2. ↑ James Aggas: Doctor Who review: The Astrea Conspiracy is a fun little Twelfth Doctor story. In: Doctor Who Watch. March 2, 2019, accessed February 20, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Behn, Aphra
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English writer
DATE OF BIRTH July 10, 1640
PLACE OF BIRTH Wye (Kent) , Kent, United Kingdom
DATE OF DEATH April 16, 1689
Place of death London