Fancy, Gender and Race in Aphra Behn's The Dumb Virgin and The Unfortunate Bride

Abstract

This paper studies the representation of physically defective characters, Belvideera, Maria, and Celesia in Aphra Behn's novellas: "The Dumb Virgin: Or, the Force of Imagination" and "The Unfortunate Bride: Or, the Blind Lady a Beauty". It aims to interpret the significance of the young heroines' physical disabilities in the context of Shaftesbury's Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. The essay first relates fancy in Behn's feminocentric stories to that in Shaftesbury's moral treatise, which biases and misconstrues the maternal imagination as defective and monstrous. It then argues that Behn, expanding this misogynist motif, constructs her young female protagonists as doubly deformed, as flawed motherhood gives birth to a second generation of flawed daughterhood, while the deformed femininity in the twin tales of defect is invariably intertwined with the exotic, racial implications of miscegenation and degeneration. Sexualized and racialized, Behn's tales of love are tragic, in which Shaftesbury's antithetical Others of gender and race are constructed upon the vice of monstrousness and aligned to commit monstrous acts. By monstrocizing female and racial others, as this paper proposes, Behn makes out a case for deploying a narrator as dialectical resolution to Shaftesbury's binary construct of oppositions in his moral instruction. Although Behn's female narrator gives in her authorial power and abases herself as a mere teller of tales, her female pen exercises her authority by doing justice to her characters and her literary fancy, and thus registers the female teller as an artist, and fiction-maker. As dialectical transcendence, the female narrator in the romantic fictions not only circumvents socio-sexual hierarchy and gender-racial dichotomy, but also tacitly points to a breakthrough amid the pervasive patriarchal discursive dominance.