Reading Behn again: A critical introduction to the writings of Aphra Behn

This dissertation explores how Aphra Behn's writings are implicated in the early-modern English endeavor of empire building. By examining the socio-political arrangements of the Restoration, I remap the colonial past as depicted in Behn's oeuvre so as to disclose its complexity, contradictions, and heterogeneity.;The crux of my work is that Behn's writings attempt to configure a new notion of womanhood that would remove high-ranking English women from categories of denigration, yet in so doing she identifies her new woman against low-ranking women and dark-skinned captives of the colonies. Reading against nation as a monolithic entity, I uncover how Behn's writings expose the mutuality of the unstable conceptual categories of gender, race/nation, and social rank. I adapt W. E. B. DuBois's understanding of "double consciousness"--"this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others"--in an effort to explore how Behn experienced her sense of subordination as a "twoness," whereby she remained divided between her own perceptions of a race- and class-specific female subjectivity and the culture's view of women as naturally inferior. While taking into account that DuBois's doubleness is a historically and racially specific concept grounded in the colonial and then later United States slave trade, there are undeniable links between how many early-modern Englishwomen experienced oppression and how this concept delineates racial oppression. Chapter 1 discusses how Behn, Katherine Philips, and Margaret Cavendish exhibited this "doubleness" in their paratextual writings by using arguments of their male counterparts to dismantle prescriptions for female behavior. By coopting conventional literary forms and inscribing them with female self-determination, women writers became tricksters, strategically using femininity or idealized notions of virtue to resist perceptions of their inferiority.;Chapter 2 examines how Behn depicts religion to prove monarchal support and solidify her privilege during the reigns of Charles II and James II. Once James assumes the throne, she portrays the convent in her prose fictions as the last stronghold against what she considers to be the threat to female subjectivity represented by emerging Puritan/bourgeois values. Chapter 3 addresses Behn's treatment of marriage as a mediator of her protagonists's "twoness"--a twoness presented as an often unresolvable conflict between social responsibility and female understandings of honor. Because Behn posits slavery as a shadowy complement to marriage, I suggest that later black women writers were forced to appropriate this marriage plot to explore its implications for racial identity, sexuality, and female subjectivity. Chapter 4 proposes that, for Behn, tropes of chattel slavery, especially blackness, helped solidify her understanding of white, British identity and superiority. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of how Behn's racialized images established a precedent that later writers of color repeated to displace.