Utopian Negotiation: Aphra Behn and Margaret Cavendish

By Oddvar Holmesland

Aphra Behn (1640–1689) and Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) were two of the boldest women authors of seventeenth century England. They made gestures toward a utopian future involving female emancipation and gender agreement, but depicted a world too complex for simple answers.

In the first book-length exploration of the two authors together, Holmesland reevaluates the nature of utopianism in the writings of both, considering a wide range of their literary output. Both writers try to avoid fixed positions, exploring areas in between, seeking mediating solutions through "utopian negotiation." Requiring more equal gender relations, for instance, they challenge patriarchalism; however, while seeking to redefine the heroic code of honor, idealizing gentleness in men, they call for a femininity with heroic resources. Aspiring to such ideals of male-female mutuality, both authors extend this thinking to their view of the body politic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Jun 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9780815652083

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Quotations throughout the book are reprinted from Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 © 1987 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.

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ISBN: 978-0-8156-3312-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Holmesland, Oddvar.

Utopian negotiation : Aphra Behn and Margaret Cavendish / Oddvar Holmesland. —First edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8156-3312-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Behn, Aphra, 1640–1689—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of, 1624?–1674—Criticism and interpretation. 3. Women and literature—England—History—17th century. I. Title.

PR3317.Z5H65 2013

Manufactured in the United States of America

For JANNE

Oddvar Holmesland is professor of English literature, University of Agder, Norway. He earned his doctorate in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. His publications include A Critical Introduction to Henry Green’s Novels: The Living Vision and Form as Compensation for Life: Fictive Patterns in Virginia Woolf’s Novels.

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

1. Introduction Negotiating Utopia

2. Bell in Campo and The Female Academy (1662) Female Wit in the Theatre of Warr

3. The Blazing World (1666) "Nature tends to Unity"

4. The Convent of Pleasure (1668) Cross-gendering Negotiation

5. Transitions

6. A Voyage to the Isle of Love (1684) and Lycidus (1688) A Truce with Unhappy Eyes

7. The Golden Age (1684) Feminized Reciprocity as Social Model

8. The Emperor of the Moon (1687) Common Sense, Natural Vision, and Tempered Utopianism

9. Oroonoko (1688) The Crisis of Ideologies in Restoration England

10. The Widow Ranter (1689) and The Rover (1677) Honor in the New World

11. Conclusion

APPENDIX A

APPENDIX B

WORKS CITED

INDEX

Acknowledgments

Part of chapter 2 appeared in an earlier form in my article "Fighting the Kingdom of Faction in Bell in Campo," Early Modern Literary Studies Special Issue (2004): 5.1–25. Much of chapter 3 is based on material used in my article "Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World: Natural Art and the Body Politic," Studies in Philology 96, no. 4 (1999): 457–79. Chapter 9 is a revised version of "Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko: Cultural Dialectics and the Novel," ELH 68 (2001): 57–79. I thank the publishers for permission to use this material.

I am especially grateful to Peter Young for reading and commenting on my drafts at various stages, and for being so generous with his help and his time. My work has greatly benefited from his wide knowledge of the field, and no less from his gift for finding a better way of phrasing. I would also like to thank Margarete Rubik and Paul Salzman for their constructive and encouraging comments on sections of an early draft.

Attending conferences arranged by the Aphra Behn Europe Society and the Margaret Cavendish Society has given me much valuable feedback in working with the book.

My research was made possible by travel grants and a year’s research leave generously provided by the University of Agder.

1

Introduction

Negotiating Utopia

Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) and Aphra Behn (1640–1689) are now celebrated as two of the boldest, most prolific women authors of seventeenth-century England. Their writings—prose narratives, plays, poems—seek to widen the narrow room granted women by patriarchal tradition. However, the question of female emancipation is complicated by their broader concern: a post–Civil War England unsettled by religious and ideological strife. The problem of faction always underlies their thinking about the Restoration. There were prolonged conflicts about issues of royal and aristocratic status, the nature of honor, social mobility, freedom, and toleration, not to mention women’s power and self-fashioning. Behn and Cavendish realized how dedication to a cause tends to breed division and narrow perception of harmonious diversity. In their fiction they try to avoid one-sidedness, searching for more comprehensive answers. Their utopianism—a response to the times—involves agreement and equality between men and women, but also reflects the uncertainty of a new age looking for a direction. Natural philosophy provoked epistemological questions: is knowledge based in empirical observation, imaginative vision, or received authority?

Behn and Cavendish seek to overcome their skepticism and restore some form of unity. Their realism vies with their idealism. They engage with competing and contradictory ways of understanding the problems of status, honor, power, love, and self-fashioning. Their approach is in important respects dialectical—which will be the focus here. They may, for example, be angry about the constraints on female roles, yet their preference is to fulfill their capacities through fellowship with men. This might, of course, indicate their basic subservience to the patriarchal, yet they also present mutuality that depends on both men and women liberating themselves from accepted gender roles. Such utopian images typically contain incongruities.

Behn’s and Cavendish’s idealization of a male-female common cause involves a patriarchal critique, yet, while seeking to redefine the heroic code of romance, they call for a femininity with heroic resources. Their image of gender in this way draws creatively on literary genre and ideology. To elucidate the intricate implications of their dilemma, this study provides a broader literary context for Behn and Cavendish than is usually given. The dialectical process involves what may be called utopian negotiation.

Trying to place Behn and Cavendish within a utopian literary tradition is important for understanding them. Different levels of utopianism need to be taken into account in tracing their notions of female fulfillment. This will define the scope of their idealism, but also the discrepancies in their utopian negotiation.¹ Frank E. and Fritzie P. Manuel’s definition of utopia, for example, contains a typical overlapping of the earthly and divine domains. Unification appears to rely on a trust in technological progress, improved organization and human enlightenment, but no less on personal virtues inspired by belief in a spiritual power and the image of a heaven on earth. And so the Manuels find it problematic that this vision presupposes a measure of confidence in human capacity to fashion on earth what is recognized as a transient mortal state into a simulacrum of the transcendental.² Behn’s and Cavendish’s earthliness variously has transcendental overtones, which suggests that unity, for them, does not easily come about through political partisanship. Reform will only partially meet their desires. Ideal agreement involves a transformed state of mind in addition—a spiritual orientation as much as a social ordering. Behn and Cavendish approach this gap, trying to devise strategies and images of reintegration.

It is therefore difficult to view their attitudes to the gender issue as feminist in the modern sense. They do not assert their convictions about steps to be taken. There is rather a tentative quest for connections, shared by seventeenth-century utopian convention. Uncertainty seems inevitably endemic in utopian writing, combined with an inquiring interest.³ Behn and Cavendish share this exploratory impulse, searching beyond traditional concepts for genuine relations. One question is how far true unity, of the self and between the sexes, requires individual resistance to standard codes—individuals with the power to pursue their free imaginations. This question is intricate, but highly relevant for understanding Behn’s and Cavendish’s ideas of female liberation and its importance for male-female agreement. Moreover, is female growth to come about through reform, or through intuitively regained insight into a prelapsarian communion?

The Manuels ascribe utopia to the latter, postulating a human propensity that may be part of a collective unconscious, with its origins in the great historical visions of the golden age, of paradise, and of the fire-bringer Prometheus (Manuel and Manuel 1979, 5, 14, 801). Behn and Cavendish sometimes capture such consonance in pastoral visions, traceable to Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579), Christopher Marlowe’s The Passionate Shepherd to His Love (1599, 1600), and John Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess (1608). All draw on the Idylls of Theocritus, in which shepherds lead an uncorrupted existence of love and song; Virgil’s Eclogues evoking the Golden Age; and Longus’s pastoral romance Daphnis and Chloe (3rd–5th c. AD). Behn and Cavendish show traits of the pastoral nostalgia for some state of love and harmony that has been lost. There is a yearning to escape the opportunism and hypocrisy of court and town, a search for the simple life away from strife, war, and the love of gain. From the Middle Ages, Christ, the shepherd tending his human flock, added to the pastoral function. His example enhanced the idea of a life of innocence, tranquility, and caring love. Hence Hesiod’s, Virgil’s, and Ovid’s idealized primitivism of the Golden Age was translated into a metaphor for the Garden of Eden in Dante and Chaucer, and the Arcadian world of the Renaissance.

Nonetheless, pastoral idealism often had difficulty ignoring the mutable world of imperfection. Ralegh’s reply (1600) to Marlowe’s Passionate Shepherd raises such awareness, Sidney’s Arcadia (1590, 1593) is not free from animal passion, nor are the woods in Milton’s pastoral masque Comus (1634). The mythopoetic attractions of pastoral felicity were subject to much questioning in the seventeenth century, along with a growing awareness of the split between the ideal and the real. It was still an age of prolific utopian projects in literature. Pastoral images flourished, but increasingly with an underlying doubt about the perfectibility of human nature,⁴ and even with a suspicion that utopia depended on a social organization to suppress subversive tendencies.

Such ambivalence about freedom and control is also evident in Behn and Cavendish. Their utopianism may refer to a universal propensity, but this is still more complex. They idealize naturalness, but do not seem to quite trust it outside the pastoral setting. Cavendish’s Empress of the Blazing World suppresses what she regards as unnatural desires, and Behn takes care to educate her African hero Oroonoko with qualities of a European nobleman, while praising his natural superiority. There is much to suggest that their conceptions of nature are ideologically biased. Culture appears to them secondary to nature, but may be intrinsically embedded in it.⁵ In Foucauldian terms, it implies that order presented as natural be treated as a site of power struggle. For example, Lewis Mumford proposes that Plato’s ideal community begins at the point where the early Golden Age comes to an end, and concerned to ensure the continuity of its values in a more complex world, he establishes a city-state according to the utopian ideal of total control from above, absolute obedience below (Mumford 1973, 5, 19).⁶ It amounts to a paradox: ideology confines nature, while presenting itself as custodian of the natural order of things.

Most utopias idealize the naturally free, good life, but also the need for a controlling regime to achieve it. The socially constructed emphasis is implicitly on order in a world of disorder. Northrop Frye traces its analogy in the predominantly rational mind. By a paradox, the disciplined individual is the only free individual . . . because his chaotic and lustful desires are hunted down and exterminated, or else compelled to express themselves in ways prescribed by the dictatorship of his reason (Frye 1973, 33).⁷ The state, in short, contains the individual. Utopian works of this type—Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), Samuel Hartlib’s A Description of the Famous Kingdom of Macaria (1641), or James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656)—draw a line from the communistic states of Plato’s Republic (4th c. BC) and More’s Utopia (1516).⁸

The preceding discussion locates a dilemma in utopian writing. Most critics define utopia as emphasizing organization in a world of disorder, based on a general distrust of human nature and variety.⁹ But there is also a different strain: some critics discern a more wondering and questioning process, though easily quenchable. Behn and Cavendish do not quite fit the former definition. They do idealize unity, but not as conformity to a system. Their concerns are more with freedom and self-fulfillment, and how an order can nourish human growth. It is therefore convenient that Ruth Levitas offers more flexible utopian criteria. Taking account of the indeterminacy of the utopian goal, she shifts the focus to a more process-related desire—desire for a better way of being and living. Such desire need not always require the transformation of external conditions, but may mean the pursuance of spiritual or psychological states and a withdrawal of utopia from the social to the personal. This will provide a space for reflecting on the experience of living under any set of conditions and the desires which those conditions generate and yet leave unfulfilled. Rather than attempt to describe utopia’s static form, it is a definition intended to be analytic (Levitas 1990, 7–8, 192). This looks like a useful perspective for examining Behn’s and Cavendish’s inquiring visions.

Levitas’s definition implies an awareness of a tension between human development and social systems. Though she does not, unlike the Manuels, presume an essentialist utopian propensity, she does identify a spirit prone to be alienated, suppressed, or dehumanized by society. Behn’s and Cavendish’s outlooks are similar and equally susceptible to argument. Stephen Greenblatt holds the view that there is no presocial self later to be governed by a repressive or dominating authority, for the self is the ideological product of power. Self-fashioning thus becomes a process of constructing one’s identity according to a set of publicly accepted standards (Greenblatt 1984, 1–3, 256). Greenblatt, like Levitas, nonetheless seeks to escape sufficiently from ideology so as to divulge its containment of alternative visions. Greenblatt terms the critical unfolding of the conflicts and exchanges between discourses negotiations (Greenblatt 1990, 7, 38, 65). To Louis Marin, utopian fiction has a negotiating advantage over other genres: a capacity to displace familiar structures and expose the ideological contradictions so far obscured, though the critique, which is ideologically biased, would never be total (Marin 1984, 195–97).

In the case of Behn’s and Cavendish’s utopianism, this would invite us to a world in which discourses wrestle and negotiate, seeking a stable solution. It would, moreover, make us aware how ideology tends to confine perception, for example in terms of aristocratic ideas of worth based on birth, or patriarchal assumptions about gender roles and women’s capacities. The critique of ideology could help us envisage a more comprehensive world.¹⁰

Behn and Cavendish share some of Greenblatt’s and Marin’s negotiating awareness, and they do see society as to some extent made up of conflicts between dominants and subversives, yet this is far from consistent. Nor do Behn’s and Cavendish’s inquiring and experimenting easily fit Marin’s definition of utopian fiction as a critique of dominant ideology. Marin more specifically treats the relationship between discourses as a struggle for dominance, notably between bourgeois and feudal discourse (Marin 1984, 195–98). But discourses often meet in more subtle ways in Behn’s and Cavendish’s fiction.¹¹ This concerns Cavendish’s young heroines on the rise, with ideas of female emancipation, as much as Behn’s heroes, aristocratic as well as less privileged, who need to prove their capacity by merit. It is not just a matter of discourses struggling for dominance, or of a dominant discourse marginalizing others. There is a more open, explorative level: Behn and Cavendish project their unresolved positions onto their protagonists, seeking stabilizing, even dialectical, images of worth.

In so doing, they have a sense that the sheer preoccupation with power clogs the mind, being a hindrance to a larger life. Fronting patriarchalism, for example, may incur regimentation at the expense of human growth and unity. Behn and Cavendish try to open their minds to more natural relations, though the alert reader may note how ideologically unpolluted visions are hard to come by. They thus resist dominant culture as a closed, static form, and they become ambivalent champions of alternative constructs for the same reason. As Mumford points out, All ideal models have this same life-arresting, if not life-denying, property. The problem of many utopias, he remarks, corresponds with the tendency of the mind . . . noted by Bergson, to fix and geometrize all forms of motion and organic change: to arrest life in order to understand it, to kill the organism in order to control it, to combat that ceaseless process of self-transformation which lies at the very origin of species (Mumford 1973, 7). Here lies the seed of totalitarianism.

Considering Chris Ferns’s claim that pre-twentieth-century literary utopians idealize organization (see note 9), Behn and Cavendish are mavericks. They value life’s complexity, and distrust attempts to impose a fixed form or interpretation on it, including partisan interest. The ideal for them is life as harmonious motions. This makes them aspire to more mutually complementary gender roles. Their protagonists are not without fractures, strains, and ideological inconsistencies—a reflection of the authors and their age. Yet Behn and Cavendish seek compromises and mediating solutions in pursuance of a better way of being. This is what is meant by utopian negotiation in this work; it is in response to utopian desire, and is to nourish self-fashioning—another term of Greenblatt’s that is used on somewhat wider premises here.¹² Behn and Cavendish are aware of the difficulty of restoring the world to wholeness. Their mediation is often less complete than partial. Still, instability is precisely what enables them to experiment with more natural, potentially liberating and unifying relations. The complexity and variety of such utopian negotiation is what this study will explore.

Cavendish had to resort to literary creation to resolve what she perceived to be gender conflicts in contemporary society. Her mediative concern indicates that she was hardly a seditious feminist. However, she was ambitious for fame as a writer and philosopher and had to assert herself against a wall of male prejudice. Her feminism still did not seek to undermine the aristocratic rank to which she belonged. In a precarious political situation, she was careful not to jeopardize her husband’s name by excessive reformism. She always presents herself as the devoted wife of William and as a loyal supporter of his rights. This has made her look like a royalist figure, but with radical, emancipative streaks. Being independently wealthy, she did not have to lower her literary style to the tastes of a growing consumer audience. And so, unlike Behn, though she tantalizes the readers, or viewers, with same-sex female dancing and exposes her beautiful women characters to the male gaze, her bid for female freedom avoids the erotic charge that marks some of Behn’s works. She rather tends toward the more elevated forms of love, as most famously idealized by Milton, just as she reveals a preference for withdrawing from the pressures of society into an inner or imaginary space. Here, gender conflicts emerge as psychodramas that her main characters encounter. Without necessarily posing a resolution, she writes as a way of charting a more liberating scope for female identity, as well as for male-female relations.

This Cavendish has in common with Behn. Yet considering their backgrounds, it takes some justification to treat the two together in this book. Though both engaged in women’s issues, critics tend to see them in sharply different worlds—a view that may be exaggerated.¹³ Not only their social positions set them apart; they belonged to different generations: Cavendish was born two years before James I died, and Behn was born into the period of the Interregnum and Restoration. As writers, however, they overlapped at a watershed in English history. It is hoped that pairing them will reveal their similar concerns as champions for a fuller life for women. Nonetheless, their common label as female or feminist writers is in some respects limiting, for they also present challenging ideas of a better society at large. Moreover, it is important to show that neither can be fully appreciated unless in connection with a broader literary tradition. This tends to be obscured by their reputation for provocativeness. For example, it is not surprising that critics often see Behn as a writer who is not so inclined to the higher forms of love, unlike, say, Milton or Dryden, but who uses an erotic charge to probe the politics of gender.¹⁴ Behn was one of the first professional writers of either sex in England. She wrote for her livelihood, and she encountered bigoted opinions that equated female authors with whores.¹⁵ Accordingly, she has been regarded as a freethinking liberal challenging established standards.

To complicate the picture, Behn was a royalist, and she also sought the company of aristocrats and courtiers. This, however, gave her the reputation of being a libertine and a courtesan. There are many such indications that Behn was drawn in different directions. To some extent, she depended on the growing consumer market based on print culture and booksellers, and she demanded the same freedom that men had to write bawdily to suit the tastes of the public.¹⁶ Yet, Jane Spencer suggests, this is only one side of the story, for Behn, like Milton and Dryden, lived in a transitional period when the old, court-based culture of patronage still played a role (Spencer 2000, 21–22).¹⁷ Dustin Griffin sketches two possible paths for a literary career at this time: either the Virgilian career of aiming toward artistic perfection and greatness, or the newer, commercially motivated one of the professional man of letters who would write for varying audiences, according to occasion (in Spencer 2000, 22). Behn was a prolific professional, but commercial success was not worthy enough for her; she increasingly aspired to a higher literary status.¹⁸ In her preface to Sir Patient Fancy, she declares that writing for money is something even I despise as much below me (Behn 1996a, 6:5). And later, in one of her prefaces to The Luckey Chance, she remarks that she is not content to write for a Third day only (Behn 1996b, 7:217). This can be seen in the way Behn adopted Pindarics for many of her most ambitious poems, such as The Golden Age (1684).

In aspiring to more elevated art, Behn, like Cavendish when posing as the masculinized Authoress of a whole world in The Blazing World (1666; Cavendish 1994, 224),¹⁹ envisages the combining of genders in a widened sphere. As Spencer notes, if Behn’s commercial position was the feminized one of whore, she regards the more elevated concept of literary fame as masculine (Spencer 2000, 5). She dreams of a feminine share in the timeless glory of great male poets. In the poem Of Plants (1689), for example, she inserts five lines invoking the myth of Apollo and Daphne:

I by a double right thy Bounties claim,

Both from my Sex, and in Apollo’s Name:

Let me with Sappho and Orinda be

Oh ever sacred Nymph, adorn’d by thee;

And give my verses Immortality. (Behn 1992, 325, lines 590–94)²⁰

In the myth, Apollo asserts his seductive power over Daphne, but the nymph escapes by turning into a laurel tree. Notably, Behn’s version does not maintain any gender distinction; she appeals for masculine as well as feminine poetic power, from Apollo as well as from Sappho and the chaste Orinda.²¹ Behn associates the elevated poet’s role with a fellowship comprising both masculinity and femininity. For Behn, as for Cavendish, the poetic imagination transcends restrictive gender roles; it liberates as well as unifies. On this plane, Behn, like Cavendish, engages in utopian negotiation.

Behn, then, has more than one string to her bow. She seeks to combine commercial expediency with more elevated qualities, just as she sometimes couches her deliberately titillating lyrics, her erotic charge, and her radical feminist and ideological critiques within safe, conservative plots—a gesture to her patrons, perhaps. There is a sense in which she often seeks to arbitrate between unreconciled parts. From the utopian perspective, it involves trying to transcend fragmented vision in quest of a reintegrated one. This side of Behn’s art is largely neglected.

Despite their different social backgrounds and leanings, Behn and Cavendish seem to aspire to common ideals of male-female alliance. For a more comprehensive picture, this should be examined as part of their idealizing views of the body politic at large. However, their mediating can also be seen to arise from the unsettled ideological situation in the seventeenth century. So can their penchant for experimenting with gender roles and relationships.

Their situation was indeed unstable, calling for reintegration with the past as well as for renewal. For all its traditionalism, the period between the Stuart succession in 1603 and the Stuart Restoration of 1660 was marked by dissent from the Church of England, denominational division, and political faction. By the time of the Restoration, there was no single, stable religious point of reference. Scientific speculation more generally contested religious explanation, involving a more empirical quest for truth and origins. As Douglas Bush notes, Astronomy crystallized the great question, ‘What do I know?’ challenging what had seemed a fairly small world created by God for the benefit of man. Instead, astronomy offered the idea of an infinite universe of universes moved by natural laws (Bush 1939, 90)—a mechanical system of motion. Michael McKeon dwells on what he calls the early modern division of knowledge, linked to the early modern secularization crisis: empiricism gradually became the normative mode of truth-telling, disrupting the truths handed down by traditional authority (such as aristocratic ideology, for example) (McKeon 2002, xxiv, xxii). The former conception of things as components of a larger, teleological whole met with skepticism—at a cost. Uncertainty surrounded the relation of the particular to an overarching connectedness. There was an increased sense that all understanding is limited.

Profound changes in the power structure were taking place in the seventeenth century, putting pressure on the traditional holders of truth. The Tudor monarchs had tried to strengthen their authority by weakening the medieval feudal nobility. These lords had achieved formidable local power in what Arnold Kettle calls a world based on static property-relationships, exalting an unchanging, God-ordained hierarchy in Church and State (Kettle 1967, 1:32). The new plan was to build up a class of rich gentry directly dependent on the monarch for advancement and privileges. Yet Lawrence Stone notes that in the long run . . . it meant the liberation of the gentry from the influence of either noble or Crown, so that by 1640 the gentry were neither faithful retainers of a local earl nor obedient servants of the political faction in control of power at Court. These independent men took positions at universities, the Inns of Court, the Bench of Justices, and the House of Commons. The rise of the professional classes and the merchant class accompanied the rise of the gentry. There was, in other words, a massive shift of relative wealth . . . towards the upper middle and middle classes (Stone 1986, 74–75). Not only that, the new rich wanted freedom to expand and to define reality on their terms. As Kettle puts it, the bourgeoisie craved freedom to trade, freedom to explore, freedom to investigate, freedom to invent, freedom to evolve an adequate philosophy (Kettle 1967, 1:32). Stone suggests that this changing socio-economic balance, coupled with the rise of Puritanism and the spread of education, meant that there was bound to be friction between the traditional wielders of power, the Crown, courtiers, higher clergy and aristocracy, and the growing but as yet far from homogeneous forces of gentry, lawyers, merchants, yeomen and small trades-men (Stone 1986, 76). The challenge for the state was how to balance diverse interests and orientations.

Social mobility caused uncertainty about the location of moral status. Feudal authority decreased, along with the increased dominance of mercantilism. Monopolies and regulations favoring domestic small-scale industries weakened, which opened up for expanding colonial companies. Their increasing demand for natural resources and foreign markets advanced a consumer economy based on plantations and the slave trade. England was enjoying a time of renewed power and prosperity. But the destabilizing effect of such progressiveness amounted to a crisis of status inconsistency, according to McKeon. The link between an individual’s social standing and internal moral state became blurred. This question of virtue McKeon considers a counterpart to the early modern division of knowledge discussed earlier. And so the English learned to question the tacit presumption that worth follows birth, separating out merit or virtue as independent variables. Social identity came to appear a complex amalgam of birth, education, and achievement.²² Parts seemed unreconciled with a whole.

Drawing on the work of McKeon, Nigel Smith sees literature as playing an active part in the fragmenting of religious and political authority. A radical decentered Puritan consciousness spread. Authors expressed a dynamic play of power relationships through combining or shifting between genres such as heroic epic, romance, elegy, lyric, and satire. It was a way for individuals to reinvent their identities, to define themselves in relation to the large-scale political action and search for alternatives to the public scene. This would at the same time provoke a more analytical read-erly role and be a help to self-understanding and the definition of new, reformed or revived institutions to solve their problems (Smith 1994, 5, 19). Behn’s and Cavendish’s utopian writing pursues this explorative need through dialectical experiment.

Restoration England, like Restoration literature, became the meeting place for contradictory sentiments and longings. It was a nation divided against itself, exhausted after the Civil War. But the return of Charles II in 1660 brought hope of peace and reconciliation. It was a political event with religious overtones. Providence again seemed to be active in England’s affairs, and many perceived Charles as a Christ-like savior come to take them into the millennium. Panegyrics of welcome were written: Dryden’s Astraea Redux (1660), Cowley’s Restoration Ode (1660). There was optimism about a future unified by tolerance and liberty. But after years of restraint under a Puritan code, freedom took on more than one meaning. Many English, influenced by the nobility and gentry back from exile, embarked on the full tide of pleasurable life. London became the center of all kinds of entertainment, eclipsing for a while the attractions of rural retirement. Some saw freedom as absence from sexual restraint, and some even envisaged a Golden Age given over to the senses.

A sybaritic court culture set an example for the rest of the nation.²³ The chief proponent of this lifestyle was Charles II himself. A dazzling group of young wits and writers gathered around the king, among whom the libertine John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, was the most conspicuous. A friend of Behn’s, Rochester advocated sexual freedom for both women and men (though in practice, this was a highly dangerous game for women to play).

Charles’s license made it ever harder to sustain the myth of the divinity of kings. After the euphoria had subsided, the split between the ideal and the real became evident. It was difficult to maintain a worshipful tone in the poetry of love when libertinism was the norm at court. Rochester jeered at the inglorious king in lines such as these: Nor are his high desires above his strength: / His scepter and his prick are of a length (Wilmot 1968, 60, lines 10–11). Country people, who were more set in their old ways of life, distanced themselves from the court and the city. Respectable London citizens were scandalized by aristocratic rakes who considered their wives and daughters fair game. The moral laxity of the court and the king strained the old ways of life.

So did the new market economy. The gulf between rich and poor widened; individual interests and claims for rights took the place of hierarchical values; new class conflicts turned people against one another. Although there was an eagerness for what had been gained—new, liberating ideas and pleasures, new chances to rise—this soon created a reaction: regret for what had been lost—the communities and beliefs that gave each person a place to belong to.

Much contemporary literature registers this sense of loss of concord with old virtues. Restoration writers, including Behn and Cavendish, often made an effort to maintain ties to an aristocratic heroic ideal. Behn and Cavendish also participated in the comedy of manners, and so Behn’s The Rover (1677) and Cavendish’s The Female Academy (1662) and The Convent of Pleasure (1668) expose the cynical struggles for power among the upper classes, who are armed with wit and manners. Human nature in these plays has a touch of Hobbesian pessimism, describing falsehearted, self-gratifying men out to conquer women for money and pleasure. The female object of the game is frequently a beautiful coquette who is no passive victim in the strategies of love. Hobbes’s emphasis on the predatory passions that drive both human nature and society provoked the church and was attacked on all sides. His ideas still influenced many who devoted their lives to a quest for pleasure and power. In Rochester’s poem A Satyr against Reason and Mankind, Huddled in dirt the reasoning engine lies, / Who was so proud, so witty, and so wise (Wilmot 1968, 95, lines 29–30). Rather than being guided by generous ideals and reasonable principles, man is a self-deluding beast.

Resistance to commercialism, capitalist progressiveness, and libertinism inspired dreams of innocent, stable retreats, free from power emulation. Utopian writings came to serve as a counterpoint to what many saw as social and cultural corruption (though utopia’s complex relation to the historical context must be taken into account). Many were influenced by experience of the New World. Thus explorations of the South Seas and Native American societies inspired primitivist dreams of communities living in unspoiled harmony. The narrator of Oroonoko (1688) discovers such an idyll among the Surinam Indians. Their natural fellowship is the reason why they had no king (Behn 1994, 8).²⁴ Behn, along with contemporary utopians, is conscious of the flaws of English royalty.

Yet utopianism was often not clearly oppositional. Sentiments of New World idealism competed with imperialism. Many contradictions emerged about where depravity resided—whether among the colonizers or the colonized. The historian William Strachey sailing to Virginia in 1609 was shipwrecked in the Bermudas; in a letter, he wrote that what was commonly taken to be the devil’s island turned out to be their deliverance. The apprehensive men found a long-inhabited contenting place. Strachey discovered that the devil that Europeans thought haunted this place was rather inhibiting natural vision: men ought not to deny everything which is not subject to their own sense (Strachey 2000, 123).²⁵ Silvester Jourdan, on board the same ship, wrote that what came upon their opened senses was a place temperat . . . and meerely naturall (Jourdan 1971, sig. 2B 3). The concern of Behn’s and Cavendish’s utopianism is precisely to open the senses to a truer, natural order.

But primitivism also tends to be assimilated into the hierarchical discourse of tradition. This is discernible in early utopian accounts such as Sir Walter Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana (1596), recounting Ralegh’s explorations of a kingdom near the Orinoco, which seems to have been a specific influence on Oroonoko. His search for a more natural order becomes as much an adventure to conquer and possess. The native Other is given identity by European valuation. It is hard to say whether it happens in a mercantile or aristocratic spirit, for the imperialist expresses himself in the lofty and elaborate language of romance (no doubt pleasing to the royal ear): the shining glorie of this conquest will eclipse all those so farre extended beames of the Spanish nation. Chivalric honor and imperial glory come together: For whatsoeuer Prince shall possesse it, shall be greatest. Ultimately, possession of the colony is associated with a divinely ordained honor, reflecting an aristocratic hierarchical conception: I trust in God, this being true, will suffice, and that he which is king of al kings and Lorde of Lords, will put it into her hart which is Lady of Ladies to possesse it (Ralegh 2006, 207, 219, 221).²⁶ The narrator of Oroonoko seems to share this ideological attitude when she laments what his late Majesty of sacred memory had lost by losing that part of America to the Dutch (47, 57). At the same time, however, she is appalled by the colonists’ cruelty to the noble slave, implying that she, as more humane and a woman, might have saved him had she been present and empowered to influence the men’s behavior (64).

Behn’s position regarding traditional hierarchies looks ambivalent. So does Cavendish’s when making a young lady empress of the utopian Blazing World. The extent to which they advocate alternative worlds based on more female values is laden with contradictions. Many critics have noted the failure of literary utopias to accommodate women as subjects, as in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), or Henry Neville’s The Isle of Pines (1668). And so the attention of some of these critics has turned to tracing a female utopian countertradition. Most of the critics define female values as centering on generous sensitivity, sharing, and nurturing, on egalitarianism rather than domination, and at times on resistance to romantic love and repression of sexuality.²⁷ Moreover, women’s utopian writing is generally held to be separatist and antiestablishment, capable of liberating minds from social and gendered stereotypes.²⁸

It is interesting to ask in what ways Behn and Cavendish might be contributors to such a tradition. Do they rely on specific female resources in the encounter with male attitudes? To what extent do they detach themselves from masculine regimes? Do they envisage a dominant matriarchy instead, or are they more inclined to arbitrate among the diverse discourses of the age? In Cavendish’s Bell in Campo (1662), The Female Academy, and The Convent of Pleasure, the women establish a separate sphere of influence and prove themselves equal to the men outside; in The Convent of Pleasure, the women, inside the convent, even take over government and masculine official positions.

Both Behn and Cavendish display several traits attributable to female utopianism, but this does not make them obvious participants in a female utopian tradition. One reason is that they do not primarily conceive of their identity in terms of their sex, but rather as part of a larger social and natural whole still dominated by male ideology.²⁹ They are therefore more like authors in process, seekers of stable identity, trying to work out an idea of social reciprocity. But feminist utopianism, according to Kitch, generally lacks such searching openness. It is too indebted to traditional utopianism’s wish for a coherent, superior society separate from the old one, including the need for large-scale social change. Feminist utopianism thus flatters itself with women’s sexual, maternal, or peace-keeping qualities, creating unnecessary dichotomies in relation to men. Kitch suggests that a better society might be achieved if competing forces are perpetually balanced and negotiated (Kitch 2000, 58, 76, 50).³⁰ This more resembles Behn’s and Cavendish’s approaches.

Behn and Cavendish acknowledge life’s complexity, trying to avoid limiting solutions. They respond to the way in which English people tended to reconceive social identity "as a complex constellation of parts rather than as a