- Hellena and carnival
For Hellena, the carnival has already begun: she is indulging in vigorous colloquial outspokenness—her free expression of oaths (‘Now hang me if...’) and her skills of witty mockery make her a natural sparring partner for the outspoken Willmore. Hellena looks to the carnival to provide her with experience of love and life and, as Elin Diamond aptly expresses it, ‘She exercises her will only by pursuing and winning Willmore, for as it turns out he has the “more” she “would fain know’”. Unlike Lent, carnival is characterised by abundance and easy gratification. Willmore steps ashore in search of ‘Love and mirth’ in a ‘warm climate’ after having been deprived of women and good living on board ship. He may stink ‘of tar and ropes’ ends like a dock or pesthouse’ but he has an abundance of persuasive rhetoric as well as desire: ‘I have a world of love in store. Would you would... take some on’t off my hands.’ While he has been confined to male company at sea, Hellena has been pent up in a nunnery and, like him, she is eager to start making up for lost time: ‘for when I begin, I fancy I shall love like anything; I never tried yet.’ She has no intention of dying ‘a maid, and in a captain’s hands too’, but the liberality of carnival does not mean that she has forgotten the realities of everyday life. Hellena’s gipsy disguise is only a disguise: she does not really want a life of hardship and ‘A cradle full of noise and mischief, with a pack of repentance at my back’. Her plain speaking and scorn of Willmore’s attempts to win her persuade him into a marriage ‘bargain’ which, although both enter defensively, she has engineered. Perhaps marriage is as unattractive to her as it is to Willmore but, without it, the freedom to explore her sexual desires could take her back to the convent as an abandoned, unmarriageable young woman, with or without a child. Marriage may have its faults but a nunnery has few pleasures for a woman of her nature.
- Double standards in characters :-
The Rover’s carnival setting highlights the double standards normally practised by both men and women. A society in which rich old men take young wives they cannot satisfy encourages the latter to ‘ramble to supply the defects of some grave impotent husband’ and allows women like Lucetta to use this as a cover for deception and robbery. When, as Belvile insists, there are wealthy ‘whores’ who do not fit the traditional stereotype, and wealthy wives doing much the same but without the fee, how is a man like Blunt to discern whether he is predator or prey?
Why yes, sir, they are whores, though they’ll neither entertain you with drinking, swearing, or bawdry; are whores in all those gay clothes and right jewels... with those great houses richly furnished... are whores, and arrant ones.
The men perpetuate a situation where the honour of their own women is valued and fiercely defended, but a woman without an effective protector is seen as fair game or, as Willmore puts it, ‘another prize’. When circumstances temporarily remove a woman from family or marital protection, the men become victims of each other’s prejudices and lusts. For all his boasting, Frederick has little experience of women; he acts according to the primitive distinctions that governed much male behaviour at the time, ‘I begin to suspect something; and ‘twould anger us vilely to be trussed up for a rape upon a maid of quality, when we only believe we ruffle a harlot.’ The ‘harlot’ is, of course, Florinda: Frederick’s description of her earlier as ‘that damned virtuous woman’ is almost realised.
The farce, which provokes both laughter and unease as the masked Florinda is physically threatened by one male after another, reaches its climax when her own brother, who has been the fiercest defender of her honour, draws the longest sword in the contest to take possession of her body. Belvile is helpless, and only the timely intervention of Valeria saves the day. The ridiculous situation was brought about by Don Pedro’s insistence that Florinda should marry the man of his choosing rather than her own, and that Hellena should be denied marriage altogether. Finally, Florinda’s match is a fait accompli, and the strain of making a stand against that of Willmore and Hellena is too great. Don Pedro consents in the face of mass resistance, relieved to ‘be free from fears of her honour’. ‘Guard it you now, if you can’, he tells Willmore, ‘I have been a slave to’t long enough.’ Willmore’s advice that ‘a woman’s honour is not worth guarding when she has a mind to part with it’ could be said to be the message of the play.
- Freedom of carnival
One freedom of carnival is the opportunity to act foolishly without regard to social position. In not opposing his sisters’ marriages, Don Pedro bows to the prevailing pressures of festivity. It is a huge relief for him to relinquish the burden of patriarchal responsibility. Wickedly, Behn allows him to relish his liberation. When we first meet Pedro he is about to put on his masked costume and participate in revels he has forbidden to his sisters. By the end, in forgiving everyone, he has entered into the spirit of equality which characterises carnival life. One by one, male and female alike, the characters venture out: Florinda and Belvile to find each other, Hellena and Valeria to woo husbands, Pedro and Antonio to win Angellica, Blunt to seek an inexpensive woman, and Willmore to take any woman. Those who achieve their desires do so by complicated routes, often involving potential humiliation and risk: others are exposed to ridicule, danger, and defeat. Antonio is wounded, and Belvile, a victim of mistaken identity, is driven to participate in the equivalent of a carnivalesque mock duel. All are free to play the fool for a time, but if any person could be considered to have been elected King of Fools by his companions, that person must be Blunt.
- Blunt and victimize
He is victimised by Lucetta, Philippo, and Sancho in additional ways to those found in Killigrew’s text, where his counterpart, Edwardo, is merely turned out of doors in his drawers in the night and is lost in the city streets by the equivalent of Sancho. Bakhtin notes that carnival hell included, amongst other things, a trap to catch fools, and Behn adds a Rabelaisian touch to Blunt’s debasement by dropping him literally into excrement. On one level the foolish country fop becomes a hero of folk humour when he falls down the trapdoor into the sewer and undergoes a mock journey to the underworld, returning in the tradition of such folk heroes, to tell of the horrors he found there. At another level Blunt’s fate can be seen as a veiled political comment. It is wished on him in I.ii by Frederick when, having noticed Blunt’s disappearance in pursuit of Lucetta, he declares.
- Costume and carnival
In carnival time costume is crucial, and from the first scene of The Rover characters are changing their clothes and exchanging identities for a variety of purposes. When characters lose control of their state of dress, as in the case of Blunt and, later, of Florinda, who escapes to the garden ‘in an undress’, their vulnerability is apparent. Hellena, however, always appears to have the situation in hand and makes successful transitions from novice’s garb to gipsy costume, and finally to the boy’s clothes she is wearing when Willmore agrees to marry her. Female cross-dressing was popular on the Restoration stage as a means of allowing the audience to view more of the woman playing the part, so Behn may have merely been catering to audience expectations here, but Willmore’s possible associations with the Earl of Rochester and John Hoyle, both of whom pursued men as well as women, probably gave her choice an additional frisson. Historically, there is also a link between women who adopted male attire and certain prostitutes who used such dress to signal their profession. There is no indication that Hellena’s appearance would have been viewed in this way, but the ambiguous natures of costume and masquerade in the play reveal the dangers of judging by appearances.
- In I.ii Belvile explains to Blunt that the ‘fine pretty creatures’ he is admiring ‘are, or would have you think they’re courtesans, who... are to be hired by the month’. By drawing attention in the drama to a confusion that extended from carnival into life beyond the play, Behn makes her audience question notions of respectability and notoriety in relation to women’s sexuality. Nancy Copeland sees Behn’s juxtapositioning of Hellena and Angellica resulting ‘in a narrowing of the distance between virgin and whore that complicates the final rejection of the courtesan and her ultimate exclusion from the play’s comic conclusion’. In many ways these characters are two sides of the same coin: both advertise their attractions to Willmore and pursue him in different fashions; both are willing to subsidise his poverty with money from the same source (Hellena’s fortune comes from her uncle who was Angellica’s ‘Spanish general’); and both offer themselves to him for love. They differ mainly in the way they view that concept in relationships between men and women. Ironically, the worldly courtesan is less astute than the convent girl in assessing the nature of a rover like Willmore. In depriving Angellica of her man, Behn is not taking a moral stand: Angellica, the romantic, must give way to Hellena, the realist, who will provide her revenge. Angellica’s future is left undetermined. The opportunity Behn gives her to express herself so eloquently and the sympathy this provokes on her behalf are apt reminders that love, like carnival madness, has its darker side—and that, in carnival, everyone has a voice.
Work Citation
The Rover. (2020, April 23). Retrieved from https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/rover
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