Aphra Behn and the Poetics of Lesbian Salience in the Seventeenth Century

 

Jane White

MA Dissertation

University of Brighton

2015

 

 

 

[1]Anne Finch, Friendship between Ephelia and Ardelia, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/180926(accessed  18 August 2015).

In her essay ‘The Present Future of Lesbian Historiography ’ Valerie Traub summarizes the post-Foulcauldian debate between what she describes as ‘alterity versus continuism.’[1] In other words between the Foucauldian view that it wasn’t until the latter part of the nineteenth century that the idea of sexual identity was born ;- : ‘[t]he sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species’[2] – versus the continuity of expressions of lesbian sexuality throughout history expressed by gender historians such as Lillian Faderman in Surpassing the Love of Men (1981) and Terry Castle in The Apparitional Lesbian (1993). While Faderman’s theories of romantic friendship appear to shy away from specifically sexualizing women’s relationships, Faderman was writing, like Adrienne Rich’[3], in the context of 1970s lesbian feminism, at a time when it was felt that obsessing about what women did in bed distracted from wider issues. Castle, despite her opposition to Faderman’s desexualized image of the ‘romantic friend’, still ‘reiterated her continuist premises by provocatively collapsing eighteenth-century representations with twentieth-century cultural formations.’[4] Similarly, Bernadette Brooten in Love Between Women (1996) presents female eroticism in the ancient Roman world within a 1970s lesbian context.[5] Traub believes that the debate between ‘acts’ and ‘identities’ has outlived its usefulness and argues for a new direction for lesbian history that she calls ‘cycles of salience.’ Traub suggests that forms of lesbian identity recur throughout history, continually emerging, disappearing, re-emerging and re-configuring over time and under different social conditions. In the past, historians have looked to classify female-to-female desire within types such as “tribade”, “invert” or “butch.”[6] Traub suggests we should now: ‘investigat[e] the cultural conditions that render such types culturally salient at particular moments’[7] rather than simply attempting to ‘join up the dots’ in order to attain historical continuity. ‘Analyzing recurring patterns in the identification, social statuses, behaviours, and meanings of women who erotically desired other women across large spans of time’, Traub suggests, ‘could result in a new methological paradigm for lesbian history.’[8] Following Traub, I use the word ‘lesbian’ in its widest sense to describe women desiring women, women loving women, intimate relationships between women and women’s political commitment to women.[9] I have not required evidence of genital contact as a definition of ‘lesbian’, believing, like Sheila Jeffreys, that ‘if we accept that proof of genital contact is required before we may include any relationship between two women in the history of lesbianism, then there is a serious possibility that we will end up with no lesbian history at all.’[10] Focusing primarily on the poetry of Aphra Behn (1640? – 1689) this dissertation considers how women writers negotiated a femocentric space and how they used the pastoral idiom to confront the language of desire and knowledge of self. Setting Behn’s work within the context of other seventeenth-century women writers this dissertation briefly explores the work of Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer, Mary Wroth, An Collins, Sarah Davy, Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips, Ephelia,[11] Anne Finch and Delarivier Manley. Following Traub’s suggestion to analyse ‘recurring patterns’, this dissertation finds four elements that recur throughout these women’s writing: the creation of feminized pastoral/utopian spaces away from men, the feminization of Christianity, triangles of desire that destabilize expectations of gender binary normativity and evidence of linguistic epistemological indeterminacy where women do not have the language to express their desires or are unable to do so through fear of censure.
The first element that this dissertation identifies as occurring throughout women’s writing of the seventeenth century is feminized pastoral spaces. In Women, Space and Utopia, 1600-1800 Nicole Pohl quotes from Lucy Irigaray:
I was your house. And, when you leave, abandoning this dwelling place, I do not know what to do with these walls of mine. Have I ever had a body other than the one which you constructed according to your idea of it? Have I ever experienced a skin other than the one which you wanted to dwell within?[12]

In this quote Irigary observes the ‘relationship between individual and social-political space, between the production of space and the production of knowledge.’[13] Women in the seventeenth century were almost entirely enclosed within a masculine world. Women writers, such as Lanyer created allegorical utopian spaces based on ‘Christian virtue, nobility and female collectivism’[14] where ‘women frequently retreat into the private, oneiric world of separation from men, into fantastic pastoral enclosures, or walled-off spaces in which they guard and protect a cluster of values as characteristically feminine.’[15] The spaces created by women include both physical, architectural, spaces such as a country house, a garden, a tower or a convent and paradisical imagined spaces created through the tropes of the ‘Golden Age’ and Arcadia. Some of these utopian spaces include openly erotic relationships between women, and others provide a politically ‘lesbian’ space for women without men.
The second element is the feminization of Christianity as expressed in the work of Aemilia Lanyer and An Collins. Throughout this dissertation reference will be made to ‘triangles of desire’. These triangles are found in the work of Lanyer, where the passion between women rivals their passion for Christ and in the secular passion between men and women in, for example, the work of Aphra Behn. It was through René Girard’s reading of major European fictions that he ‘traced a calculus of desire that was structured by the relation of rivalry between two active members of an erotic triangle.’[16] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in ‘Gender Asymmetry and Erotic Triangles’ explains how ‘in any erotic rivalry, the bond that links the two rivals is as intense and potent as the bond that links either of the rivals to a beloved: that the bonds of ‘rivalry’ and ‘love,’ differently as they are experienced are equally powerful and in many senses equivalent.’[17] Girard’s work stems from his reading, centred on the ‘male-centred novelistic tradition,’[18] and is therefore mainly concerned with discovering triangles between two male rivals for a woman. Girard’s work is not specifically tracing heterosexual/homosexual erotic relationships, rather he traces relationships of power. However, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick suggests that the: ‘hidden symmetries that Griard’s triangle helps us discover will always in turn discover hidden obliquities.’[19] Tracing ‘angles of deviation’ within triangles of desire between two women and a man expressed in the writing of seventeenth-century women can help us to unravel erotic attachments between women that would not, or indeed could not, be expressed by women during the seventeenth century.
The final element recurring through these women’s writing is evidence of linguistic epistemological indeterminacy. The seventeenth century was an age when women were primarily seen as existing only in relation to men. Therefore, for women to write about their desires, let alone their desires for other women, meant negotiating a space within the parameters of acceptability. For the women writers examined here this negotiation involved coding their language, for example within images of nature, or simply using ellipses to imply what could not be said.
In The Present Future of Lesbian Historiography Valerie Traub identifies the seventeenth-century poet Katherine Philips and her “Society of Friendship” as having similarities to the Boston marriage of the late nineteenth-century and offers this as an example of how similar lesbian typologies can occur, separated by a wide expanse of time. When referring to the seventeenth century in her paper I find it surprising that Traub does not single out Aphra Behn. Aphra Behn’s work is evidence of a moment of explosive lesbian salience not just through her poetic expressions of female-to-female eroticism but in challenging the prevailing ideas of heteronormativity and women’s place in the world, both in her work and as one of the first women to earn a living through writing at a time when most women were defined by the men they married.
In The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (2002) Traub argues that in Early Modern England there was ‘a renaissance of representations of female homoerotic desire.’[20] Traub claims that intellectual, social and economic changes from the middle of the sixteenth century, together with an increase in female literacy, enabled a range of discourses suggesting physical and emotional relationships between women. However, Sarah Toulalan argues that Traub places too much emphasis on medical and legal discourses emphasizing clitoral hypertrophy or male impersonation. Toulalan suggests that while knowledge about women who might have engaged in sexual acts with other women can be found in alternative sources such as pamphlets and popular ballads from where ‘we can unpick different interpretations of early modern knowledge and understanding of female sexuality.’[21] Toulalan also states that seventeenth century pornography, ‘read in the context of contemporary popular and medical literature, suggests early modern culture was not limited to interpreting sexual acts between women as the result solely of either a desire to live as a man, or of a physical abnormality that engenders ‘unnatural’ desire for intercourse with another woman.’ Toulalan’s views would appear to reinforce the idea of an underlying lesbian presence throughout the seventeenth century. George Haggerty in ‘The History of Homosexuality Reconsidered’ defines Traub’s “cycles of salience” as an ‘occasional conflation of forces [that produce] a different kind of visibility.’[22] The Restoration Period was renowned for radical representations of sexuality and gender, in literature, theatre, poetry and pornography.[23] I would argue that the Restoration Period produced a ‘conflation of forces’ that opened up a variety of discourses that allowed poetic and dramatic work to flourish celebrating love and friendship between women and written by women, despite the fact that libertinism has been considered an explicitly masculine ideology.[24]
From the last years of Elizabeth I’s reign, through the Civil war of 1642, the interregnum, the second Civil war of 1648 to the restoration of the Stuart monarchy the seventeenth century was a particularly turbulent time. There were irreversible changes in government, agriculture, manufacture, learning and religion.[25] Traub describes: ‘a significant break in the representation of female homoeroticism [that] occurred over the course of the seventeenth century, a shift in the terms of female embodiment, which led to a “cultural perversion” of female-female desire.’[26] The shift that Traub describes provided ‘some of the primary materials out of which modern identity categories were fashioned.’[27] Traub’s claims in terms of the expression of female-female desire can be difficult to envision given that it is easy to fall into the trap of believing that women in the seventeenth century had no identity of their own. Seventeenth-century women were meant to be chaste, modest and submissive ‘subsumed in the persons of first their fathers and then their husbands.’[28] However, all through the century women could be found petitioning parliament, ‘participating in bread and grain riots and tax revolts, protesting against enclosure and taking an active part in London’s mob.’[29]
Described by Elaine V. Beilin as ‘the first woman in this period who sought a clear literary vocation’[30] Mary Sidney (Herbert), Countess of Pembroke (1561 – 1621) marked a turning point in the development of women writers and is recognised as accredited with being the first woman to achieve a significant literary reputation.[31] Mary Sidney’s writing began an alternative tradition of women’s writing beyond the exclusively male canon and paved the way for women writers to follow in her footsteps. Historically Mary has been overshadowed by her brother Philip Sidney but ‘[d]uring the early period of feminist literary scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s, as part of a broad ‘recovery’ movement, scholars began to reinvestigate Pembroke’s life and to study her work on its own merits.’[32] Mary’s parents Henry Sidney and Mary Dudley were members of influential Protestant families as was her husband Henry Herbert. The circumstances of her birth allowed her a remarkable education for a woman and, rather than suffering the expectation that she be humble and quiet, her literary activities were encouraged. Mary Sidney was the first woman to achieve a significant literary reputation through her poetry, patronage and translations, including that of the Psalms.
Early in the seventeen century Aemilia Lanyer’s (1569 – 1645) collection of poems Salve Deus Rex Judæorum (1611) was unusual for her ‘explicitly revisionist feminine perspective, together with her defense of women’s virtue through her interpretive community.’[33] The poems are dedicated to a number of women and in her address to ‘To the Vertuous Reader’ Lanyer explains how she has written ‘this small volume, or little book, for the general use of all virtuous Ladies and Gentlemen’[34] warning them of ‘such points of folly, to be practiced by evill disposed men, who forgetting they were born of women, and that if it were not by the means of women, they would be quite extinguished out of the world.’[35] Lanyer’s writing places women at the heart of Christianity, she ‘wrote specifically to praise women, and more precisely, to redeem for them their pivotal importance as Christians.’[36] The main poem Salve Deus Rex Judæorum (Hail God King of the Jews) is a meditation on, and description of, the last days of Christ from a women’s viewpoint where, significantly, it is a women who understand ‘the significance of Christ’s presence in the world and the blasphemous implications of condemning him to death.’[37] In the section ‘Eves Apologie’ (lines 761 – 832) Lanyer vindicates Eve for the fall of man by passing culpability to the tempted male counterpart. While Eve was tempted it was Adam whose knowing acceptance of the apple ‘far outweighs Eve’s tragic misunderstanding.’[38] The final poem in the collection, ‘The Description of Cook-ham’ ‘celebrates the existence and at the same time, mourns the loss of a unique paradise.’[39] The poem imagines a paradisiacal female community where ‘….all delights did harbor in her breast’[40] and where ‘[t]he conventional coding of the female body as ‘natural’ and thus as an object of domination is rendered invalid.’[41] Written when Lanyer had fallen on hard times, it is likely to have been an attempt to obtain patronage from Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland.[42] It describes a late summer at the beginning of the seventeenth century when Lanyer spent some time at the country estate at Cookeham with Clifford and Clifford’s daughter Anne. The three women walked, read and talked together and it is thought that Lanyer may have written Salve Deus Rex Judæorum at Cookeham where ‘the muses gave their full consent’[43] and she was ‘under the influence of the Countess’s piety and encouragement.’[44] In ‘The Description of Cook-ham’ Lanyer uses the imagined reactions of the house, the grounds and the wildlife to praise Clifford by imbuing them with human feelings: ‘The House receiv’d all ornaments to grace it/And would no foulenesse to deface it’[45] while the trees were: ‘Turning themselves to beauteous Canopies/To shade the bright Sunne from your brighter eies.’[46] By imbuing inanimate objects with these feelings Lanyer explores ‘an eroticized power dynamic between women that is mediated by artificial devices’ and ‘constructs a vision of female homoerotic desire.’[47] When the women prepare to leave the house their femocentric paradise begins to disintegrate: ‘The house cast off each garden that might grace it/Putting on dust and cobwebs to deface it.’[48]. This was due to the unhappiness of Clifford’s marriage and her husband’s infidelity that originally made the relationship between the women and the creation of the paradisical space possible: ‘Margaret and her daughter Anne Clifford were given the estate temporarily while Margaret was finishing a legal battle against her estranged husband George Clifford and his brother to secure her daughter’s rights to the Clifford estates.’[49] As Pohl suggests: ‘The absence of Adam restores true paradise to women, and in the eyes of Lanyer, men are equally if not more responsible for the Fall of Man.’[50]
In the end however the women have to leave because, by not providing an heir, Margaret lost her right to the estate. Therefore Lanyer’s poem demonstrates the tenuous nature of a women’s private space and: ‘demonstrates that the destruction of this unique female paradise is caused by the adverse structures of contemporary society which deny women their own space.’[51] During the short period that Margaret was mistress of the Cookeham estate, the women inhabit a temporary and unique utopian space, exclusive to women, through which Lanyer highlights the correlation between gender and the construction of space.
Towards the end of the poem, the women say their farewells under an oak tree. As the women remember the pleasurable time they have had together Clifford takes Lanyer by the hand and we imagine that she is going to kiss her, but then we realize that Clifford has actually kissed the tree, and Lanyer returns later to the tree to ‘retrieve’ the kiss for herself:
To this faire tree, taking me by the hand,
You did repeat the pleasures which had past,
Seeming to Grieve they could not longer last.
And with a chaste, yet loving kisse I did it soone bereave:
Scorning a sencelesse creature should possess
So rare a favour, so great happinesse. [52]

To add to Lanyer’s unhappiness we know that the tree is male: ‘That Oake that did in height his fellowes passe.’ [53] Apart from Christ, the tree is the only thing in the poem that Lanyer genders as male and as such it is the only phallic image to intrude on this female paradise. Lanyer therefore, is not just being passed over for a ‘sencelesse creature’ but passed over for a man, and by the woman she was counting on for patronage. Critics have speculated upon the importance of this kiss. Amy Greenstadt argues that the fact that Lanyer feels it necessary to describe her patron’s “sweet kisse” as “chaste” suggests the possibility that this kiss could be unchaste.’[54] Jonathan Golberg suggests that ‘just as male friendships in the period often cross over into a terrain that involves sexual relations, such too, must have been the case among women.’[55] However, while the religious tenor of Lanyer’s writing allows her to adopt an eroticized language,[56] I believe that Lanyer problematizes the kiss because the idea of kissing a woman is a step too far for Clifford. Clifford cannot kiss Lanyer so she kisses the ‘male’ tree instead. Earlier, in Salve Deus Rex Judæorum, Lanyer describes Clifford as Christ’s spiritual spouse: ‘This that Bridegroom that appears so faire/So sweet, so lovely in his Spouses sight.’[57] There is therefore a ‘triangle of desire’[58] between Lanyer, Clifford and Christ. Both Lanyer and Clifford’s love of Christ is expressed throughout the poem: ‘His beauty, wisdom, grace, love majestie’[59] but the language that Lanyer uses to praise Margaret, ‘In whose faire breast true virtue then was hous’d, [60] suggests a bond to Clifford,: ‘While reverend Love presented my true heart’[61] as strong as it is to Christ. Lanyer’s writing includes both the feminization of Christianity and the creation of utopian feminized spaces.
Mary Wroth (1587 – 1651/3) was the first English woman to write a sonnet sequence in English, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621), one of the first plays, Love’s Victory and the first English woman to have a work of fiction published, The Countess of Montgomeries Urania (1621). [62] The Countess of Montgomeries Urania is deliberately reminiscent of The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia but while Sidney’s Arcadia is about the ‘alienation of men from the idyllic world to which they have retreated,’[63] Wroth writes about the alienation of women through primogeniture and patriarchal dominance, which leads to domestic and sexual violence. The castle and royal palace in Urania ‘are spaces of incarceration and domestic abuse, prefiguring the Gothic inversion of the domestic into a space of terror, and the negative utopia.’[64] Opening with Urania discovering that the shepherds who brought her up were not her parents: ‘Of any miserie that can befall woman, is not this the most and greatest which thou are falne into? Can there be any neare the unhappiness of being ignorant, and that in the highest kind, not being certaine of my owne estate of birth?’[65] Urania’s quest to find her family origins symbolizes the quest for feminine identity: ‘[w]ithout the patriarchal parameters of “estate or birth” to define her identity, Urania must locate a separate position both from which to speak and from which to identify her kindred.’[66] By setting the adventures of the male knights alongside the spiritual quests of women, Wroth emphasizes how seventeenth-century women, however talented, were devalued and subordinate to men. While the women in Urania follow the traditions of earlier romances by relying on men, Wroth ‘redefines the traditional female figure of romance.’[67] Wroth has respect for women’s capabilities and her characters are not chaste, passive or obedient. Indeed, some of the women characters are talented hunters and fighters. Additionally: ‘Wroth changes the subject of Renaissance representations of desire through her treatment of women’s approaches to questions of identity and sexual difference, emphasizing bonds between women.’[68] Wroth is brave enough to write about women loving other women. Pamphilia and Antisia have an intense romantic relationship spanning two generations and Celina and Lady Rossalea have an amorous relationship. Also, Veralinda loves Loenius when he is cross-dressed as a woman, although in the end their love is validated because Loenius is actually a man. The characters Pamphilia and Urania articulate female desire as they: ‘forge developing conceptions of their identities based increasingly on affinities with other women rather than on social conventions of female sexuality.’[69] While Wroth paints her male characters as inconstant and unreasonable, Pamphilia, who possibly is appears to be based on Elizabeth I, is described as constant, selfless and virtuous. Moreover, like Elizabeth I, Pamphilia never officially marries,[70] but devotes herself to her people. Urania criticizes Pamphilia’s constant devotion to Amphilanthus suggesting that ‘the virtue of constancy is not absolute, but rather culturally constructed.’[71] While accepting that most women in the seventeenth century were dependent upon men, Wroth clearly considered that marriage was more for the benefit of family and politics than women. In the work of both Wroth and Lanyer the female communities they write about ‘promote a naturally feminocentric (and courtly) society based on virtue, constancy, female friendship and companionate marriages.’[72]
Little is known of the poet An Collins except that she is accredited with writing a volume of poems entitled Divine Songs and Meditacions, published in 1653. In a note to the reader Collins describes an ill-health or disability that confines her to her home: ‘I have been restrained from bodily employments, suting with my disposicion, which enforce me to a retired Course of life.’[73] However, it would appear from her writing that Collins: ‘figures disablement less as an encumbrance than as an opportunity to rethink grounds of identity.’[74] Collins describes writing about divine truth as empowering, offering her tranquillity and contentment and by discussing ‘her various physical discomforts from frailty to weakness to chronic pain, … represent[s] for readers evidence of the poet’s attempts to discover the condition of her soul.’[75] The main theme of the poem is the suffering of Christian women with whichshe challenges attitudes ‘toward the body, womanhood and religious conviction.’[76] The following passage describes how withdrawing into the ‘garden’ of her mind allows Collins to write and how fruitfulness comes from writing rather than bearing children as she: ‘makes a bid for rethinking womanhood against conventional expectations’[77]:
Yet as a garden is my mind enclosed fast
Being to safety so confind from storm and blast
Apt to produce a fruit most rare,
That is not common with every woman
That fruitful are.[78]

Unable or unwilling to fulfil the social expectations of her time by marrying and bearing children Collins’s work enables her to redefine and rethink what it is to be a woman. The subversion in Collins’s work comes from the fact that she finds complete satisfaction by withdrawing from the world through her writing, and in her relationship with Christ, rather than advocating that women should be obedient to their fathers or lost within the identity of their husbands:
For in our Vnkon [union] with the Lord alone,
Consists our happinesse.
Certainly such who are with Christ at one
He leave not comfortlesse.[79]
Through her journey of physical and emotional sickness towards salvation, .An Collin’s work describes both a feminised space within the ‘garden of her mind’ and the feminization of Christianity as she appropriates religion to empower Christianity for the empowerment of women and ‘writes herself into a disability identity that challenges predominant attitudes towards the body. Womanhood, and religious conviction.’[80] At a time when the nation was torn apart by the Civil War, Collins argues that the state and politics are unimportant and that withdrawing from the word allows greater freedom.
The Civil War (1642 – 1651) did in fact give women a degree of freedom; the State had lost control of the press and this allowed women as well as men access to print.[81] Women preached, prophesied, wrote and published. They travelled the country testifying to their faith and published autobiographical and religious texts. Conversion narratives became particularly popular giving accounts to the public about how they found their religious faith. One such narrative Heaven Realised by Sarah Davy, printed in 1670, is described in Her Own Life, Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen as not simply describing Davy’s religious peace and salvation but also expressing rage at her mother, guilt over her brother’s death and falling in love with a woman:
One day the Lord was pleased by a strange providence to cast me into the company of one that I never saw before, but of a sweet and free disposition…………. It pleased the Lord to carry our hearts much towards one another at that time……[82]

Davy was not the only seventeenth-century woman to admit love for another woman; in France authors such as Mme. De La Fayette and Mlle. De Scudéry have been depicted by historians as having female lovers.[83] Moreover, female to female desire in all-women communities appear in a plays by both James Shirley, The Bird in a Cage (1632 – 1633) and Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle’s The Convent of Pleasure 1668. In The Bird in a Cage an over-protective father is planning to marry his daughter to the Duke of Mantua. The father confines his daughter, princess Eugenia, and her ladies to a tower where the women decide to stage a play to pass the time. The play depicts Jupiter’s seduction of Danae and while playing the part of Jupiter, one of Eugenia’s ladies, Donella, admits to an erotic desire for Eugenia. Annoyed by the interruption of a bell, Donella speaks the lines ‘[i]f you had not wak’d as you did Madam, I should ha’ forgotten my selfe and play’d Jupiter indeed with you, my imaginations were strong upon me; and you lay so sweetly…..’[84]
Margaret Cavendish, first Duchess of Newcastle (1623- 1673) ‘flouted the stereotypes of women’s fashions and accomplishment, particularly by writing and publishing.’[85] Cavendish’s play The Convent of Pleasure ‘explicitly explores the attractions of homoeroticism among women.’[86] Like The Bird in a Cage, it is set in a cloistered environment. The main character, Lady Happy, inherits her father’s estate and, in an effort to avoid potential suitors and the enslavement of marriage, sets up a ‘convent of pleasure.’ In the ‘convent’ she lives with a number of female companions. The play consists of a number of vignettes where the women act out their discontent by describing the abuse they have suffered from men including: ‘physical abuse at the hands of alcoholic husbands, poverty caused by male gambling and whoring, and the horrors of repeated childbirth and infant mortality.’[87] The community that Cavendish depicts is dedicated to female pleasure and eroticism. During the course of the play a foreign princess arrives at the convent and seduces Lady Happy. Lady Happy and the princess kiss each other, embrace, eventually marry and celebrate their marriage by dancing around a maypole. Cavendish’s audience tolerates the female-to-female eroticism in the play because it is revealed at the end that the princess who marries Lady Happy is actually a cross-dressed prince. Also, by enclosing the women within a ‘pastoral’ space, away from the ‘real’ world the story does not challenge cultural anxieties of patriarchy, property laws, marriage or children. The New Historicist orthodoxy however, would suggest that ‘literature of the Renaissance period, particularly literature meant for the public theatre, deliberately produces subversion in order to contain it.’[88] By the inclusion of these subversive acts in her play Cavendish is ‘domesticating and incorporating alien elements which thereby lose their subversive power.’[89] However, I believe this approach to be too simplistic and to suggest that authors such as Cavendish included these subversive acts within their work specifically in order for them to ‘lose their subversive power’ is ‘in large measure a function of the angle from which one looks and the assumptions that enable the investigation’ and ‘the historically-minded critic must increasingly be willing to acknowledge the non-objectivity of his or her own stance and the inevitably political nature of interpretive and even descriptive acts.’[90]
Women of the upper and middle classes spent much of their time separate from men and were encouraged to devote their time to their female friends. Intimate friendships, sharing beds and passionate avowals of love caused little or no anxiety or disapprobation as long as they did not threaten patriarchal alliance or marital reproduction.[91] While these often intensely emotional and affectionate relationships were not generally thought to be of a sexual nature, ‘awareness of women-to-women sexual practices circulated in a subterranean way.’[92] However, women dressing or behaving like men or women with too much power fell under suspicion. While this suspicion can be attributed to a fear of women assuming inappropriate masculine power it does also suggest that ‘absolute ignorance of sexual possibilities between women cannot be assumed.’[93] Educated seventeenth-century women ‘learned from Renaissance writers the ideas of Platonism, in which perfect friendship was seen as superior to sexual love.’[94] The most well known poet writing in this tradition is Katherine Philips (1632 – 1664) whose life and writing Harriette Andreadis describes as: ‘emblematic of the ways in which seventeenth-century women self-consciously appropriated the ancient, enduring forms and rituals of friendship.’[95] Despite being born into the Puritan ruling class and marrying a Puritan, Katherine Philips was a Royalist. Left in Wales while her husband was in Parliament in London, Philips’s ‘emotional focus was primarily on other women and [her] passionate involvement with them guided much of her life and inspired her most esteemed poems.’[96] In Philips’s early work she appropriated male homoerotic, platonic conventions to describe her relationships with women and while this poetic form was unremarkable for men, it ‘is the earliest printed example of a woman’s poetic expression of intense same-sex love between women.’[97] Embracing the courtly fashion of the time Philips called herself ‘The Matchless Orinda’ and gave the members of her ‘society of friendship’ pastoral nicknames. As mentioned earlier, Traub describes Philips’s “society of friendship” as looking:
a lot like an avatar of the late nineteenth-century Boston marriage; both social forms spiritualize female emotional bonds; both derive sustenance from women’s intellectual capacities; both arise from within the confines of feminine domesticity; both defer to class decorum in matters of the desiring body.’[98]

However, Traub also admits that there is a profound gulf between Katherine Philips and a ‘Boston marriage’ in regard to ‘the freedom to advocate for female intimacy as a political alternative to patriarchal marriage.’[99]
Elaine Hobby suggests that in order ‘[t]o understand how lesbian desire is concealed/revealed in Philips’s poetry [……] it helps to start by examining the encoding of her royalism.’[100] In ‘Orinda to Lucasia’ a royalist reader of the 1650s would understand that this poem was about desiring the return of the monarchy, the sun representing the King and the birds representing the monarch’s loyal subjects:
Observe the weary birds ere night be done,
How they would fain call up the tardy sun,
With feather hung with dew,
And trembling voices too.
They court their glorious planet to appear,
That they may find recruits of spirits there.[101]

For Philips to express her physical love for women would be as dangerous as expressing her love for a king. Just as she encodes her love for a king within images drawn from nature, so too does Philips encodes her physical love for women with images of nature and ‘borrows heavily from the early seduction poems of John Donne.’[102] Faderman believes that Philips’s use of nature is not sexual. However, Valerie Traub’s ‘strategy is to read Philips’s thematizations of Nature from a lesbian-affirmative perspective.’[103]
Many of Philips’s poems are dedicated to “Rosania” (her school friend Mary Aubrey) and, after Mary Aubrey was married, she wrote poems to “Lucasia” (Anne Owen) who she describes as ‘dear object of my Love’s excess.’[104] In an example of ‘the ventriloquized male voice and the verbal cross-dressing with which she courts the female objects of her passion’[105] Philips’ describes the intense pain of parting from a loved one:
I have examin’d and do find,
Of all that favour me.
There’s non I grieve to leave behind
But only thee.
To part with thee I needs must die,
Could parting sep’rate thee and I.[106]

In a poem to Lucasia she describes the frustration of being near to a woman who cannot return her love, where Philips’s love is ‘hot’ and Lucasia’s is ‘cold’:
Else the Just world must needs deny
Our friendship an Eternity:
This love will ne’er that title hold;
For mine’s too hot, and thine too cold.[107]

In several of her passionate poems to women Philip’s uses the word “union” and this is an indication of how Philips appropriated masculine tropes. ‘The discourse of same-sex “ union” in the sense of “marriage”, pervades the language of (male) friendship in early modern England and provides its rhetorical fulcrum, the hinge on which soul fusion turns; this discourse underlines the erotic significance of the ideology of friendship for women as well as men.’[108] The stanza in which Philips’s use of the word “union” most clearly represents the most sensual “fusing of souls” is to be found in To Mrs. M.A. at Parting:
Our Chang’d and mingled souls are grown
To such acquaintance now,
That if each would resume their own,
Alas! We know not how.
We have each other so engrost,
That each is in the union lost.[109]

Lillian Faderman suggests that: [h]ad she written in the twentieth-century, Philips’s poetry would undoubtedly have been identified as “lesbian”.’[110] While Philips’s poems may have been considered a direct line from Sappho, Dorothy Mermin describes them as: ‘asexual, respectable and despite their quasi-Sapphic themes did not give rise to scandal.’[111] In the seventeenth century readers were aware of the requirement to de-code poems in order to reveal the writer’s political views. Philips uses these codes to both reveal her politics and her desire for women to the point where she is at the cusp of revealing physical love for women.
Other women poets of the period include the accomplished Ephelia (c.1679) whose Female Poems on Several Occasions (1679) includes several verses on the value of female friendship and addresses female sexual desire. Like Katherine Philips, Ephelia uses pseudo-pastoral names and addresses her poems to a circle of women friends where she ‘explores and reveals the more general implications for women of the whole courtly love motif.’[112] Writing from a woman’s viewpoint the characteristics that Ephelia’s poems attribute to women are those more usually associated with men writing during the period:
I felt my Blood run swiftly to my heart,
And a chill Trembling seize each outward part:
My breath grew short, my pulse did quicker beat,
My Heart did heave, as it wou’d change its Seat:[113]

Ephelia’s poems to women are full of passion and her poem To the Honoured Eugenia, commanding me to Write to her even suggests a frisson of sadomasochism[114] as the author struggles to obey Eugenia: ‘Fair Excellence! Such strange Commands you lay/I neither dare Dispute, nor can Obey[115] and experiences a mixture of terror and delight: ‘Like to some awful Deity you sit/At once the Terror and Delight of wit.’[116] Ephelia’s poem To the most Excellent Princess Mary, Duchess of Richmond and Lenox is an example of a passionate poem to a woman where she also praises the Duchess above men: ‘More Fortitude’s in your Heroik mind/Than can be shown again by woman-kind.’[117] While many of Ephelia’s poems were written to flatter a particular woman, her poem Song has no dedication but is written about longing for an unnamed female character/persona? a woman, beginning with ‘Ah Phillis had you never lov’d/Your hate I could have born’[118] and ending with a description of the sadness she feels at her loss: ‘So have I seen a Rising Sun/Promise a Glorious Day/But soon o’re cast, its Brightness gone/Did to rough storms give way.’[119] In To Phylocles, inviting him to a friendship we find Ephelia desiring friendship with a man ‘We will forget the Difference of sex/Nor shall the World’s rude censure us Perplex/Think Me all man: my soul is Masculine, And Capable of as great things as thine.’[120] Ephelia, as we will see later in Behn’s work, appears to believe that gender is a role to be played and that rather than being simply defined as one sex, she believes she has a masculine part within her.
Ephelia was a contemporary of Aphra Behn, clearly an admirer of her work and wrote a poem expressing her admiration, ‘At once it Wonder and Amazement bred/To see such things flow from a Womans Pen/As might be Envy’d by the wittiest Men.’[121] Clearly in awe of Behn, Ephelia describes Behn’s poetic and erotic reputation as “A rare connexion of Strong and Sweet.” Andreadis suggests that Ephelia ‘characterizes Behn’s transgressiveness as both complexly configured and attractive. Yet this moment of fascination with Behn’s transgression is neatly coterminous with Ephelia’s unwillingness to incorporate any similarly overt transgressiveness into her own work and her preference for the virtues of silence and ellipsis.’[122] In relation to epistemological indeterminacy Andreadis alerts us to the fact that ‘we need to be attentive to the possibilities of erotic ellipsis in order to understand the nuances of meaning that inhere in a powerfully charged poetry of friendship by “respectable” women writers of the mid- to late seventeenth century.[123] For example in her poem To the most Excellent Princess Mary, Duchess of Richmond and Lenox where Ephelia uses ellipsis to indicate the emotion that she is unwilling or unable to express:
Your Soul appears in such a charmin Dress
As I admire, but never can express:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Pardon, dear Madam, these unturned Lays,
That have Prophan’d what I design’d to Praise.
Nor is’t possible, but so I must do,
All I can thin Fall so much short of you…..[124]

In many ways Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn polarise the difference between the women writers of the late seventeenth century. While Philips’s work was chaste, modest and built around her spiritual love for a coterie of women friends Behn’s poetry was openly sexual, transgressive and challenged notions of fixed biological sex and constructions of gender. Following the Restoration there was an ‘emergence of the explicit idea of female same sex relations in the writings of women willing to appear publically transgressive and not loath to name or play at transgression.’[125] Unlike Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn made no attempt at respectability by hiding the eroticism or sexual orientation of her poetry. Following the re-instatement of the monarchy, it is not hard to imagine how the sudden reversal of Puritan morality must have caught the mood of the public during the Restoration period. Theatres that had been closed for eighteen years re-opened. Women not only acted on stage for the first time, they acted in “breeches roles”, cross-dressing while embracing a freedom, albeit on stage, previously reserved only for men. While Aphra Behn was ‘drawn to the libertine critique of religion and morality’[126] she was concerned about the consequences for women of an ideology that ‘typically figured women as provided by nature for men’s pleasure.’[127] As Susan Staves points out: ‘[t]he treatment of female sexuality in libertine writings of the Restoration period is highly ambivalent. Even those works by male authors which consciously subvert stereotypes of male power and female passivity….. frequently present women as servants of the divine phallus.’ [128] Typical examples of poems where women exist only for men’s enjoyment are found in the work of the infamous poet John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647 – 1680). Behn considered herself a disciple of John Wilmot: ‘The Great, the God-like Rochester/His Softness all, his Sweetness everywhere.’[129] Wilmot admits to female sexuality in his poems and even wrote from a women’s point of view. However, although women in Wilmot’s poems are idealised, they are still there purely for the pleasure of men as in his poem A Song of a Young Lady. To her Ancient Lover:
All a lover’s wish can reach
For thy job my love shall teach
And for thy Pleasure shall improve
All that Art can add to love.’[130]

Libertinism inherited the idea of ‘courtly love’, the belief that passion only flourished outside of marriage and glorifying sexual pleasure in the present above marriage or the protection of children.[131] Therefore Libertinism, in a world where ‘male violence towards women was endemic,’[132] and where women could not easily support themselves, was much more problematic for women than it was for men. In her plays Behn’s female characters attack the attitudes of male libertines and: [e]ven in works that appear to condone male rakes’ sometimes vicious treatment of women, strong female challengers emerge to defy their assumptions of power.’[133] While Behn’s poetry was openly sexual her poetry frequently expresses concern for the inequality of power between men and women. Male Restoration poets on the other hand tended to view women in terms of their usefulness for sex, as for example in this poem from Charles Sedley (1639 – 1701) where what the man wants from the maid beneath the “Myrtle-shade” is clearly sex:
My humble Love has learnt to live,
On what the nicest Maid,
Without a conscious Blush, may give
Beneath the Myrtle-shade[134]

Male poets of the period were also keen to avoid of the responsibilities of marriage as demonstrated in an extract from a poem by Charles Cotton (1630 – 1687) where the man is far more interested in sex than marriage:

Which done, forsooth, she talks of wedding,
But what will that avail her?
I do delights to vary,
And love not one Hulk to tarry,
But only Trim and Launch her.[135]

In Alexander Brome’s (1620 – 1666) poem A Wife the speaker doesn’t want a wife to live too long and in fact would rather not have a wife at all :

But above all things, let her be
Short liv’d and rich, no strong-dok’d Jone,
That dates to live till 53,
Fine this wife, if thou must have one;
But there’s no wife so good as none.[136]

William Wycherley (1641 – 1715) would clearly prefer a ‘one night stand’ to the commitment of marriage:

If all prove not right,
Without an Act, Process, or Warning,
From Wife for a night,
You may be divorc’d in the morning.[137]

The Libertine man’s desire for sex at any cost and without consequences is aptly demonstrated, by The Earl of Rochester who, if he can’t get a woman suggests: ‘There is a sweet soft Page of mine, Does the trick worth Forty Wenches.’[138] For Rochester sex is sex and the gender binary divide is clearly irrelevant.
Behn made use of the pastoral form of poetry that was popular at the time, often taking on the guise of a male libertine poet writing to a woman and, occasionally, as a woman writing to another woman as in To the Fair Clarinda Who Made Love to me, Imagin’d More Than Woman. She frequently writes as a woman lover to a man but there are also times when the gender is unclear. While Behn’s poetry reflects both heterosexual and homosexual love, she also transcends the simple binary definition of male and female. Dorothy Mermin suggests that Behn , in many of her poems, poems ‘blur[s] the traditional distinction between male subject and female object of desire’.[139]
Of all Aphra Behn’s poems, To the Fair Clarinda experiments most openly with sexuality. In this poem lesbian desire is imbued with a passion equal to, if not surpassing, heterosexual desire. Behn makes use of the image of the hermaphroditic trope to describe the intensity of the union between the two lovers, so close that they become one person:
Fair lovely maid, or if that title be
Too weak, too feminine for nobler thee,
Permit a name that more approaches truth,
And let me call thee, lovely charming youth.[140]

Behn’s poems are classical and rely ‘on the heritage of sixteenth-century ornate lyricism as practiced by Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare’.[141] The foremost Renaissance poet Edmund Spenser (1551 – 1599), used the pastoral form to reflect his religious and humanist ideals. His poems are instantly appealing on the surface but both require and deserve deep ‘decoding.’ As the greatest and most influential poet of the Elizabethan age, Spenser clearly influenced Behn. At the end of the original (1590) Book III of The Faerie Queene Spenser uses the image of the hermaphrodite to describe the reunion of Amoret and Scudamour. Scudamour embraces Amoret:‘[l]ightly he clipt her twixt his armes twaine/And streightly did embrace her body bright’ until they were so close that:
No word they spake, nor earthly thing they felt,
But like two senceles stock in long embracement dwelt
Had ye them seene, he would haue surely thought,
That they had beene that faire Hermaphrodite[142]

While Spenser uses the hermaphroditic form to describe the sexual union of Amoret and Scudamour, he is also describing ‘a golden mean between masculine and feminine forms of dominance and the consummation of an ideal Christian marriage.’[143] The idea of the hermaphrodite representing equality between men and women is something that would have undoubtedly appealed to Behn.
Roberta Martin argues that Behn ‘uses the sexually ambiguous figure of the hermaphrodite to undermine accepted notions of gender and sexuality.[144] Despite the fact that the one-sex Galenic model of anatomy had been superseded by this time and men and women were now generally identified as distinctly different sexes[145] Jennifer Frangos suggests that: ‘Clarinda’s sexual ambiguity or doubleness, also resonates deeply with early-modern and Restoration discourses about the nature of the human body, particularly its sexual anatomy’.[146] However, Traub argues that: ‘it is less that the binary sex/gender/sexuality system is subverted by Behn’s use of indeterminacy than it has yet to be concretely formed.’[147] Read together with Behn’s use of ungendered pronouns I believe her use of the hermaphrodite is both a device to describe the strength of the union between the lovers and to deliberately problematize binary definitions of gender. Behn’s reading of Spenser inspired her use of the hermaphrodite image. However, it is also an excellent trope to describe her ambivalence towards prevailing gender binary assumptions. Moreover, in this poem, as in other poems, Behn avoids gendered pronouns when referring to Clarinda thus extending the possibilities of Clarinda’s sexuality. In the preface to her play The Lucky Chance Behn asks her readers: ‘All I ask, is the Privilege for my Masculine Part the Poet in me.’[148] This comment by Behn is made in the preface because she wants to be taken seriously as a woman but knows this is almost impossible. Behn appeals ‘to all unbyast Judges of Sense, if they had not said that Person has made as many good Comedies, as any one Man that has writ in our Age; but a Devil on’t the Woman dams the Poet.’[149] However, as David Roberts suggests, Behn:
is not afraid to play the vulnerability card, but the paradoxical effect of doing so is to suggest that it is precisely because she is a woman – literally without a ‘masculine part’ – that she should be allowed to write, since it is always ungallant to attack a defenseless woman.[150]

Behn ‘talks about her self in bi-sexual terms. She has a “masculine Part” (her professional writing), linked to her desire to be a “hero” but the “I” who writes is clearly and self-consciously a woman. She thus suggests a radical split between her work and her private self.’[151] ‘My Masculine Part’ is a very specific point and, in the light of the way Behn disrupts assumptions about gender throughout her work, the comment is extremely revealing. Behn knows that she has to ‘play the part of a man’ to be recognized as a writer and this foreshadows Judith Butler’s argument that gender is performative and that our ‘performance’ as male or female is imposed on us by ‘normal’ heterosexuality. Butler believes that people are not divided into two clear- cut groups of male and female. Rather, gender should be fluid and variable, with the ability to change in response to different times and different contexts. In other words your gender is what you do, not what you are:
Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being. A political genealogy of gender ontologies, if it is successful, will deconstruct the substantive appearance of gender into its constitutive acts and locate and account for those acts with in the compulsory frames set by the various forces that police the social appearance of gender.[152]

The sixth and seventh lines of To the Fair Clarinda begin by suggesting that the speaker, despite her passion, has to imagine the woman as a youth in order to make love to her: ‘While that may serve to lessen my constraint;/And without blushes I the youth pursue.’[153] Then Behn playfully changes from the first person singular to the first person plural suggesting that she speaks for all women, or perhaps multiple genders, and that they too would struggle when a ‘beauteous woman’ comes into view: ‘When so much beauteous woman is in view/Against thy charms we struggle but in vain.’ [154] Through her use of ungendered pronouns and switching from “I” to “we”, Behn calls upon us to consider her use of language carefully as she employs? uses semantics to disrupt homosocial expectations. Behn disrupts our expectations of binary gender definitions and forces us to consider whether she is talking about herself, two women, bi-sexuality or gender as fluid and or performative. Traub states that, in the past, historians have attempted looked to classify female-to-female desire[155] but Behn’s poetry defies simple classification of sexuality or gender. Roberta Martin has also argued that Behn established a series of radical subject position in her poetry that defy the restrictive and oversimplifying categories of “male”, “female”, and “bisexual”.[156]
While the Restoration period gave a degree of sexual freedom for heterosexual love and male libertine sexuality,[157] female sexual desire, let alone same-sex female desire, was problematic. Within the discourse of male libertinism, James Grantham Turner describes a ‘binary system’ that allowed ‘only two categories of women, polarized and exclusive: the chaste and the whore’.[158] The work of women historians suggests a more nuanced modeling of gender that allows for a much greater variety of categories of women.[159] However, the hermaphroditic trope did allow Behn to write with a considerable amount of freedom. Sex between women was not a crime in England because it was consideredlacking of ? not to involve penetration (unlike many European nationsstates where the definition of penetration had a wider interpretation and where, by the sixteenth century, women could be convicted of sodomy and, like men, condemned to death).[160] ‘England stands out among the European nation-states not only for its lack of any prosecution of female sodomy but also for the absence of any references to female homosexuality in its legal code.’[161] Indeed ‘the over-whelming tendency of lexicographic, legal and theological texts from the mid-sixteenth to early eighteenth century was to remain silent on the matter of female to female sex’.[162] In the fourteenth line of this stanza Behn describes the ‘crime’ as ‘innocent, because ‘thy Form excuses it.’ The use of these particular words gives us a clue to the fact that the lovers are two women. There could be no ‘crime’ because two women could not be convicted for having sex together within ‘the phallocentric society that Behn mocks’[163] and their ‘Form excuses it’ because they have no phallus. However, the use of using the word ‘crime’ also suggests that if people knew what the women were doing they would consider it a crime due to the mentality of the period?within the world they live in. The word ‘crime’ is also used by Katherine Philips: ‘When I could say without a crime’[164] in her poem To My Excellent Lucasia, on Our Friendship:
I Did not live until this time
Crown’d my felicity,
When I could say without a crime,
I am not thine, but Thee.[165]

Both Behn and Philips’s use of the word ‘crime’ suggest they were both on the cusp of openly acknowledging female-to-female physical love. “Crime” is a strong word, a word that could not escape the reader’s notice. Indeed Henrietta Andreadis suggests that Philips’s use of the word “crime” inserts a sense of uneasiness about the dangers of a ‘same-sex intimacy that was: ‘always threatening to become transgressive, was conscious and available for notice’.[166]
Behn’s clever use of semantics suggests that she has the expectation that her readers will read her poems closely enough to decode them and understand their true meaning:
That we might love, and yet be innocent:
For sure no Crime with thee we can commit;
Or if we shou’d – thy Form excuses it.
For who, that gathers fairest flowers believes
A snake lies hid beneath the fragrant leaves [167]

We can surmise from her poems that Behn was passionately in love with John Hoyle, who was bisexual[168]. (Hoyle appears in Behn’s poems under different names such as Amyntas, Lysander and Lysidas.). Her love for Hoyle and the uneasiness of their relationship was, as we will see, expressed in many of her poems together with her knowledge of his homosexual relationships. Hoyle was eventually arrested for repeated buggery at his Temple chambers but escaped prosecution when the young man in question withdrew the charges.[169] Therefore the word “crime” would have resonated with meaning for Behn, she would have been acutely aware of what the crime entailed, the illegality of the act and the consequences of being caught out.
In the fifteenth line of the first stanza of To the Fair Clarinda: ‘Or if we shou’d – thy Form excuses’[170] the enigmatic dash between ‘shou’d’ and ‘thy’ makes it clear to the reader that sex will take place and invites the reader to add their own description of the physical manifestation of the women’s love-making. The reference to a ‘snake’ is clearly a metaphor for a phallus. Indeed in her poem The Disappointment Behn uses a similar metaphor where there is no doubt from the context of the poem that she is referring to Lysander’s manhood: ‘More nimbly draw her fingers back/Finding beneath the verdant leaves, a snake.’[171] Whether the snake is read as a representation of a male phallus or phallocentric role-play it would appear, at first sight, that Behn is unable to write erotically about two women making love to each other without reference to heteronormative practices. As Elizabeth Wahl suggests: ‘Behn cannot escape the cultural distinctions that made it so difficult for a woman to lay claim to sexual desire.’[172] In the line ‘[f]or who, that gathers fairest flowers believes’ the important word is ‘believe’. The reader may ‘believe’ that the lover will find a ‘snake’ but in fact, as we discover later, she finds ‘the image of the maid.’ In other words where Cloris and Alexis are joined, rather than finding a phallus, both are found to have female genitalia. The phrase: ‘Thou tempts us with the image of the maid’,[173] suggests that Behn is watching herself. However, if what she sees is an image we are left wondering what the image is a reflection of and what therefore is the original? I suggest that Behn’s reference to a ‘mirror image’ foreshadows Lucy Irigaray’s theory that women are only seen and only exist in discourse in relation to men.[174] Irigaray’s goal is to create femininity as self-referential rather than binary-identified. Lucy Irigaray’s argument is that ‘women constitute a paradox, if not a contradiction within the discourse of identity itself’ and that women, within a phallocentric language, ‘constitute the un-representable’. In other words, ‘woman represents the sex that cannot be thought, a linguistic absence and opacity.’[175] Irigaray was originally a student of Jacques Lacan, however in Speculum of the Other Woman and other texts she critiques the exclusion of women in structural linguistics, philosophy and psychoanalytic theory claiming that a separate subject position for women only exists if they assimilate to male subjectivity. Irigaray critiques masculine language as having been set up to support male interests where man projects his ego into the world which in turn is reflected back to him with his own image. While it is the mother who is the primary support for this male imagery she is also the mirror and cannot be represented. Therefore woman is at the same time erased within the specular economy whilst being (as mothers) an integral part upon which it is founded.[176]
Behn describes a ‘beauteous wonder of a different kind’[177] (my emphasis). The “difference” is that the “wonder” it is not heterosexual and Behn’s reference to a “different kind” along with the word “crime” is on the cusp of an open admission of homosexuality which was a dangerous admission for a woman who needed to make a living from her work and is evidence of how women had to use indeterminate language to make their point but equally avoid censure.
Thou beauteous wonder of a different kind,
Soft Cloris with the dear Alexis joined;
When e’re the manly parts of thee, would plead
Thou temps us with the image of the maid,[178]

At the beginning of the poem Behn uses the image of the hermaphrodite to combine the sexes, by the end of the poems she appears to dismantle Ovid’s mythical union: ‘While we the noblest passions do extend/The love to Hermes, Aphrodite the friend.’[179] By splitting Ovid’s Hermaphroditis into Hermes and Aphrodite Behn appears to encode the characters in this love poem as distinctly male and female. However, I suggest that Behn is actually teasing her audience and their preconceptions about gender. Here again we find Behn challenging her readers to read closely to find theher true meaning. Interestingly and in possibly another ‘semantic tease’ from Behn, Jennifer Frangos point out that: ‘Aphrodite literally means “lover of Aphra.’[180] In the light of Frangos’ statement perhaps can we assume that Behn is writing herself into this poem.? According to Maureen Duffy, in her biography of Aphra Behn, The Passionate Shepherdess, ‘it was the last time a woman was to write publicly and with witty eroticism about such a subject in English for two hundred years.’[181]
While the name Clarinda may suggest clarity[182] there is nothing clear about the poem To the Fair Clarinda. From Clarinda’s sexual identity to Behn’s use of the image of the hermaphrodite; from Behn’s avoidance of gendered pronouns to her classical references and the mock innocence that she uses to describe the pleasures of female to female desire, Behn ‘challeng[es] the validity of libertine beliefs about female (homo)sexuality’[183] and, most importantly, celebrates the fact that anatomy need not determine sexuality. Whether or not Behn’s poems is specifically lesbian may be debatable, however, there can be no doubt that Behn delights in Clarinda’s awareness that sexual pleasure can be found without a phallus. Whether hermaphrodite, androgynous or lesbian the poem challenges paradigms of gender and posits a sense of completeness above beyond gender binary assumptions.
It is exciting to find an erotic poem where the speaker is a woman writing about her desire for another woman. However, more daring and directly erotic are the poems where Behn takes the role of the male libertine poet. In these poems Behn has no need for the trope of the hermaphrodite to negotiate same-sex desires, and although the poems appear heterosexual she writes persistently with a ‘male gaze on women.’[184] Moreover, it is in these poems that where we see Behn reflecting Judith Butler’s ‘performative’ position. When Behn takes on the persona of a man she articulates the instability of gender and as such argues against a heterosexist culture that assumes she should conform and identify herself as woman. Poems Upon Several Occasions with a Voyage to the Island of Love (1684) is a large collection of some forty-five pastoral poems, prefaced by nine poems by men, that Stapleton suggests: ‘provide Behn with a masculine escort if not an apology.’[185] In addition to Poems Upon Several Occasions Behn used the pastoral form in Miscellany Poems (1685), Lycidus or, The Lover in Fashion (1688) as well as in other collections and in her plays. Representative of an idyllic country lifestyle, some critics have suggested that Behn feminizes the pastoral form; for example, Heidi Laudien suggests that Behn used ‘a subversive form of the pastoral ….. “pastorelle” for its femocentrism.’[186] However, Jessica Munns argues that the pastoral: ‘was already a strongly feminized form’ and ‘for Behn as for other practitioners of the mode, its charm and utility lay in its traditions of gender ambiguity.’[187] The Golden Age that Behn, like others, calls upon in her pastoral poetry is a belief, shared by both classical and Christian cultures, of a time of human perfection when man lived a physically and morally perfect existence, in harmony with nature.[188] It was a TIME WHEN place where the land was fertile, crops were lavish, there was eternal peace and stability, people were perpetually young and life was simple. Additionally, as Judith Kegan Gardiner states: ‘[o]ne advantage of the pastoral is that it reformulates social class. Supposedly set in the lowest class of rural society [………] the pastoral masks the real class imbalances of the contemporary urban scene.’[189] For Behn working in the London theatre the opportunity to reformulate social class would have been important. The trade off for a woman like Behn entering the privileged London theatre scene was sexual respectability.
During the Restoration Period pastoral verse became ‘a libertine expression of the delights of sexual variety to be found in nature untrammelled by man-made laws and the customs of society.’[190] By harking back to the Golden Age in her pastoral poetry, Behn juxtaposes a conceptual utopian space, where there was no masculine power and no shame in female sexuality, towith the real world. In the real world women were enclosed in a masculine space as daughters or wives in a gendered ‘geography of exclusion.’[191] In the ‘real’ world ‘[f]eminist and queer theory has identified the active construction of space and place as masculinist and heterosexist and thus as exclusionary to women and dissident sexual identities.’[192] Behn’s poetry challenges these exclusive masculine and heterosexual spaces by creating a separate space. It is a space where women can freely express their sexuality: ‘Not kept in fear of Gods, no fond Religious cause/Nor in Obedience to the duller Laws.’[193] However, this space is not just for women as it offers her readers a wider definition of sexuality and freedom. In Behn’s conceptual space there is no religion or laws to censor sexuality: ‘the Lovers thus, thus uncontroul’d did meet.’[194]
The versespoems in Poems Upon Several Occasions (1697) are set in a particular order as they relate to each other and poems with similar themes are clustered together. The poems also link to each other as: ‘[t]he end of one poem foretells the next.’[195] They are also inter-related across the whole collection in what Stapleton describes as ‘auto-intertextuality, or even intratextuality.’[196] Loosely based on the prologue to Torquato Tasso’s pastoral drama Aminta (1573), the first of Behn’s poems in the collection is The Golden Age. In this poem Behn shows how gender has been constructed to reinforce the concept of masculine power while failing to satisfy the needs and desires of women. Typically of the pastoral poems, the first three stanzas of The Golden Age invoke an idyllic past when ‘issues of power, authority and wealth were unknown and when sexuality implied only pleasure.’[197]
Blest Age! When ev’ry Purlin Stream
Ran undisturb’d and clear,
When no scorn’d Shepherds on your Banks were seen,
Tortured by Love, by Jealousie, or Fear;[198]
In the third stanza Behn’s idyll becomes specifically a feminized one, where Behn characterizes the earth as woman un-penetrated by man: ‘The stubborn Plough had then/Made no rude Rapes upon the Virgin Earth,’[199] where women are able to reproduce without men: ‘Who yielded of her own accord her plenteous Birth, Without the Aids of men’[200] and where the phallus: ‘Beneath who’s boughs the Snakes securely dwelt,’[201] is unthreatening, flaccid and unable to ejaculate: ‘With whom the Nymphs did innocently play/No spiteful Venom in the wantons lay.’[202] As in To the Fair Clarinda Who Made Love to me, Imagin’d More Than Woman, Behn ‘proposes dismantling the concept of gender as a power base in order to create the ideal, but variable world where people can thrive with all of nature.’[203] The fourth and fifth stanzas continue to dismantle the phallocentric world and offer an alternative world with no war: ‘Then no rough sound of Wars Alarms,’[204]; no rulers: ‘Monarchs were uncreated then/Those Arbitrary Rulers over men,’[205]; no religion: ‘By teaching us Religion first/first set the World at Odds’ and where food and good things are plenteous, before ‘Pride and Avarice become a Trade.’[206] In tThe last stanza, the poem calls for the reinstatement of the Golden Age: ‘Be gone! And let the Golden Age again/Assume its Glorious Reign.’[207] Then the authorial voice calls for the young woman to speak out and reveal all the evils concealed by the church and the state and turn their ‘the false Artillery’ on men; ‘the Cunning Foe’:
Let the young wishing Maid confess,
What all your Arts would keep conceal’d:
The Mystery will be reveal’d,
And she in vain denies, whilst we can guess,
She only shows the Jilt to teach man how,
To turn the false Artillery on the Cunning Foe.[208]

The poem sets up three points of a triangle: Sylvia, the young maid, the authorial voice, an older woman, and men. Behn then satirizes the carpe diem poems so beloved by?of male poets writing that : “The swift pac’d hours of life soon steal away’ and:
But Sylvia when your beauties fade
When the fresh Roses on your Cheeks shall die
Like flowers that wither in the Shade,
Eternally they will forgotten lye,’[209]

Behn describes these carpe diem poems as ‘pointless Darts’ aimed at women and as, in their stupidity, they boast about their many loves, their victory will be short-lived while Sylvia will be wise:
But shoot their pointless Darts in vain.
What will your duller honour signifie?
Go boast it then! and see what numerous Store
Of lovers, will your Ruin’d Shrine Adore
The Let Sylvia yet be wise,
And the Gay hasty minutes prize:
The Sun and Spring receive but our short Light,
Once sett, a sleep brings and Eternal Night.

Continuing with the pastoral in On a Juniper-Tree, cut down to make Busks, the persona of the poem is a tree which allowsallowing Behn a degree of detachment in her examination of social identity. The tree is proud: ‘The Pride and Glory of the Wood,’;[210] wealthy: ‘My Wealth, like bashful Virgins,’[211] ,where the tree is describing thus his wealth rather than claiming ownership of the virgins, and does not even rely on the sun: “nor need any tribute pay/for bounties from the God of Day.’[212] through this description of By describing the tree, like this Behn would appear to be representinggendering the tree as male although typically for Behn she does not gender itthe tree through the use of grammar or female/male gendered pronouns. As the lovers Philocles and Cloris shelter under itthe tree, the lovers and the tree become interdependent and the planttree even participates in their love making: ‘And every aiding Bough I bent/So low, as sometimes had the bliss/To rob the shepherd of his kiss.’[213] Behn combines the pastoral setting, in the form of the tree, with human sexuality: ‘blurring the issues of the tree’s individual gender identity into its larger social identity.’[214] The planttree enjoys the voyeuristic thrill of watching the lovers: ‘I saw ‘em kindle to desire/Whilst with soft sights they blew the fire.’[215] Then the tree in effect it becomes part of a ménage á trois[216] as it joins in with the Philocles and Cloris’s love making: ‘The Shepherdess my Bark carest/Whilst he my Root, Love’s pillow, kist.’[217] At this point the tree becomes both male and female, both ‘Bark’ and ‘Root.’ A close reading of this line suggests that Behn disrupts traditional ideas of binary oppositions. Cloris (female) is caressing the female part of the tree while Phiocles (male) is kissing the male part of the tree, assuming that ‘root’ is a phallic image. At the end of the poem, when the tree grieves that it will no longer be part of the lovers, it decides it may as well die: ‘When all abandon’d I shall be/Doom’d to a silent Destine.[218] However, Cloris cuts down the tree and has it made into busks: ‘My body into Busks was turn’d’[219] so the tree ends up as the wooden front piece of Cloris’s corset that covered the centre of her torso down to her genitalia. The new role that the tree is given is to literally guard Cloris’s ‘Love Temple’ or sexuality: ‘Where I still guard the Sacred Store/And of Loves Temple keep the Door.’[220] Through the relationship between the lovers and the tree Behn ‘opens and expands the possibilities of love and its connections with the natural world moving it beyond a relationship of opposition to one of community.’[221] Within this poem we find Behn’s use of the tree to articulate what could not otherwise be said and a triangle of desire between the tree and the two lovers.
While the lovers in On a Juniper-Tree appear to find mutual enjoyment in their pastoral paradise, Behn does suggest that Cloris hasn’t give her full consent to their lovemaking: ‘Nor would the shepherd be deny’d/Impatient he waits no consent’[222] and she refers to being ‘conquered’ by the shepherd: ‘Yeilds to the Conqueror all her Charmes.’[223] Moreover, Cloris has to subdue her shame ‘With love and Shame her Soul Subdu’d.’[224] Similarly in the poem The Willing Mistress, despite the poem’s title, and the seemingly mutual lovemaking, the use of the words ‘betray’d’ and ‘fear’ appear in the first stanza.
Amyntas led me to a Grove,
Where all the Trees did shade us;
The Sun It self, though it had strove,
It could not have betray’d us:
The place secur’d from humane Eyes,
No other fear allows…..
But when the Winds that gently rise,
Doe Kiss the yielding Boughs.

Down there we satt upon the Moss
And did begin to play
A Thousand Amorous Tricks to pass
The heat of all the day.
A many Kisses did he give:
And I returned the same
Which made me willing to receive
That which I dare not name.

His Charming Eyes no Aid requir’d
To tell their softening Tale;
On her that was already fir’d,
‘Twas Easy to prevaile.
He did but Kiss and Clasp me round.
Whilst those his thoughts Exprest:
And lay’d me gently on the Ground;
Ah who can guess the rest?[225]

Additionally, in The Willing Mistress the fact that the speaker cannot name what is happening to her at the end of the second stanza,: ‘That which I dare not name’[226], suggests an element of fearfulness. In both the poems the women appear to inhabit parallel worlds, one is the pastoral world where nature is protecting them -: ‘Where all the Trees did shade us’[227] – and the second is the real world where men have seduced them into making love and where, in order to be socially acceptable, the speaker in The Willing Mistress cannot even name what they do: ‘Ah who can guess the rest?’[228]
The interpretation of The Willing Mistress is further complicated by its inclusion in Behn’s play The Dutch Lover. In the play Francisca, a maidservant, sings the poem to her mistress Cleonte. In the context of the play the song is about Silvio’s obsessive love for Cleonte. Silvio is Cleonte’s (presumed) half brother so the love is both transgressive in terms of incest and an expression of triangular desire as, within this immensely complex plot, we ponder the relationship between Cleonte and Clarinda (who is also ignorant of her brother’s identity). The fear of betrayal and the inability to ‘name’ what she is ‘going to receive’ in this context becomes related to the taboo of incest. Prior to inclusion in Poems Upon Several Occasions, ‘The Willing Mistress’ is thought to have undergone several changes. While we might assume that the lovers in the play’s version of the poem are heterosexual, a year earlier in 1672 ‘The Willing Mistress’ was included in The Covent Garden Drolery entitled “Song”. This earlier version of the poem begins ‘I led my Silvia to a Grove’ and the first line of the third stanza reads ‘My greedy eyes’ rather than ‘His charming Eyes’.:

I led my Silvia to a Grove,
Where all the Boughs did shade us,
The Sun it self, though it had strove,
It could not have betray’d us.
The place secur’d from humane eyes,
No other fear allows,
But when the Winds do ently rise,
And kiss the yielding [sic] Boughs.

Down there we sate upon the Moss,
And did begin to play
A thousand wanton tricks, to pass
The heat of all the day.
A many kisses I did give,
And she return’d the same,
Which made her willing to receive
That which I dare not name.

My greedy eyes no ayds requr’d
To tell their amorous Tale:
On her that was already fir’d,
Twas easie to prevail.
I did but kiss and claspe her round
Whilst they my thoughts expressed,
And laid her gently on the ground:
Oh! Who can guess the rest?[229]

These amendments, together with the ambiguous pronouns in earlier versions of the poems and the lines: ‘Which made me willing to receive/That which I dare not name’, suggest that the poem could be about the physical love between two women as we are not sure whether the speaker is male or female. Behn’s suggestion that the love is ‘un-nameable’ appears to foreshadow the line ‘I am the Love that dare not speak its name’[230] from Lord Alfred Douglas’s 1894 poem “Two Loves”. As Duyfhuizen suggests, Behn: “may be referring to sexual practices that extend beyond what her society would term “normal” or “natural”.’[231] The fear of betrayal and the need for secrecy revealed in the first stanza become particularly poignant if the poem is more complex than a heterosexual love poem. Even if ‘The Willing Mistress’ Where this poem appears as a heterosexual love poem it would still have been problematic. Although Amyntas has to seduced his lover the fact that she ‘return’d the same’ and was ‘willing to receive’[232] directly acknowledges women as sexual and as Angeline Goreau states: ‘Not only was such direct acknowledgement of her own desire considered unfeminine in a woman, but her equal activity in sexual advance – ‘and I returned the same’ – must have been disconcerting even to the rakehell fops and seducers who pretended to disregard honour.’[233] A woman freely admitting to their sexuality was problematic for men, as Duyfhuizen suggests: ‘To proclaim autonomy threatens the foundations of patriarchal culture built on female submission to male dominance and control of all facets of life.’[234]
A Ballard on Mr. J.H. to Amoret, asking why I was so sad is possibly addressed to Elizabeth Barry (Amoret) about Behn’s love for John Hoyle. It begins by acknowledging that Amoret must be able to see the grief in her eyes: ‘My Amoret, since you must know/The Grief you say my eyes do show’[235] and asks Amoret to look into Behn’s heart where she will find that her passion John Hoyle rivals even her passion for Amoret:
Survey my Heart, where you shall find,
More love then for your self confin’d.
And though you chide, you’l Pity too
A passion which even Rivals you.[236]

The relationship between Behn, Barry and Hoyle constitutes a ‘triangle of desire’ where Behn’s love for Hoyle is challenged by her love for Barry,: ‘A passion which even Rivals you’. In Janet Todd’s biography of Aphra Behn she suggests that Behn’s hold on Hoyle was tenuous and although ‘Hoyle dominated her thoughts…. she did not dominate his.’[237] The poem depicts tells how she imagines J.H. adorned with flowers from women: ‘His Hook a Wreath of Flowers did Braid/The Present of some Love-sick Maid’[238] and explains how she tries to hide her infatuation with him: ‘I strove in vain to guard my Heart.’[239] While we assume that J.H. is John Hoyle, the use of using his initials opens up the possibility of a more general promblematization of gender binaries as J.H becomes a “man” rather than one specific man. This poem prioritises relationships between women and paints men as enemies in the battle of the sexes. Throughout the poem Behn describes Amyntas’s charm and his pride in his appearance: ‘His Cassock was of green’[240] and his ‘Sleeves a many Ribbons ties’[241] but by the end Behn is advising Amoret to avoid the trap that Amyntas has set because she is more beautiful than him in every way and therefore suggests that Amoret should be open to the love between women rather than simply assuming that she requires the love of a man:
Let me advise thee, Amoret,
Fly from the Baits that he has set
In every grace; which will betray
All beauties that but look that way:
But thou hast Charms that will secure
A Captive in this Conquerour.

Although Behn talks about how women are infatuated with John Hoyle she also makes clear in Our Cabal that she is aware of his homosexual relationships.
Our Cabal is a long poem that describes a picnic on a sunny day celebrating the newly reinstated May Day holiday.[242] Using the pastoral form: ‘Aphra Behn manipulates her own poetic persona to achieve the freedom to write poetry at all, and then to critique her society’[243]. Each stanza describes a member of Behn’s social circle disguised under pseudonyms. The poems include My dear Amoret, Mris. B., in which Behn expresses her passion for Elizabeth Barry ‘the true Delight/Of all that do approach her sight’[244] and how both Behn and Barry have loved unfaithful men: ‘But soon the Amorous Head was laid/He soon forgot the Vows he’d made.’[245] A clue to Amoret’s identity can be found in the title of Behn’s poem My dear Amoret, Mris. B. Behn cast Elizabeth Barry a number of times in her plays and Behn’s relationship with Barry: ‘Survey my Heart, where you shall find/More Love then for your self confin’d’[246] iswas, Maureen Duffy considers in her biography of Behn: ‘intense enough, to border on the erotic.’[247]
Through the poems in Our Cabal we learn that Behn was completely aware about same-sex relationships. Mr. J.H. is almost certainly about Behn’s lover John Hoyle who Janet Todd describes as: ‘a pitiless and violent man who, when still a student at Grey’s Inn in August 1663, had been on a capital charge for stabbing an unarmed watch-maker in the street’[248] and then leaving the man to die. In the poem John Hoyl’s pastoral name is Lysidas, who rejects the advances of a number of women: ‘Poor Doris, and Lucinda too/And many more who thou dost know’[249] andwhile he ‘Barely returns Civility.’[250] The next poem, Mr. Ed. Bed, continues the theme with the first line informing us that Mr Ed. is also disinterested in women: ‘….who nere paid /A sigh or Tear to any Maid.’ Behn makes clear the homosexual relationship between John Hoyle and Mr. Ed. Bed. Mr Ed. Bed ‘bestows’ his love on Lycidas who Behn describes as being as beautiful as a woman despite being a man:
But all the Love he ever knew,
On Lycidas he does bestow:
Who pays his Tenderness again,
Too amorous for Swaine to a Swaine.
A softer Youth was never seen,
His Beauty Maid; but Man, his Mein.[251]

Here we find another triangle of desire between Behn, Hoyle and Mr Ed and although Behn must have acknowledged that Mr Ed. stood in the way of Hoyle’s love for her, she showshas total acceptance of the beauty of homosexual love, describing the passion between the men as strong as the heat of the sun as Philander’s eyes turn to Lycidas ‘As sympathizing Flowers to the sun’[252] and to the extent of asking who would not be able to see how the love between the two men improves their beauty: ‘Who would not under two such Suns as those?’:

His Eyes towards Lycidas still turn,
As sympathizing Flowers to the sun:
While Lycidas who Eyes dispense
No less a grateful influence,
Improves his Beauty, which still fresher grows:
Who would not under two such Suns as those?[253]

While originally sung by the Queen of Spain to her lover in the opening of Behn’s play Abdelazar or The Moor’s Revenge 1676, the poem Love Arm’d suggests that however a powerful a person is they can still be undone by love. Described by Janet Todd as Behn’s ‘most ferocious depiction of desire’[254], Love Arm’d ist a typical example of Warren Chernaik’s view that, ‘[t]hough men and women are shown in Behn’s writing to have ‘equal desires’, the libertine ideology, in which the sex act is an assertion of power, entails a fundamental inequality, with one partner reducing the other to a ‘convenience’ or ‘slave.’’[255] Even though in some respects the Queen is clearly the mostmore powerful character, when it comes to love the slave has the power because he is a man: ‘And strange Tyranick power he show’d/From they Bright Eyes he took his fire.’[256] However, I believe that by reading the poem out of the context of the play the gender identity of the lovers becomes less clear. Judith Kegan Gardiner states: [t]he miniature world of Love Arm’d is a cruel but meaningful one, potentially sex-egalitarian but confusing about the conventional alignments of gender.’[257]
Love in Fantastique Triumph satt,
Whilst Bleeding Hearts a round him flow’d;
For whom Fresh paines he did Create,
And strange Tyranick power he show’d;
From thy Bright Eyes he took his fire,
Which round about, in sport he hurl’d;
But ‘twas from mine he took desire,
Enough to undo the Amorous World.[258]

Within the poem Behn highlights the different roles played by men and women. The man ‘not only feeds love’s power with his bright eyes, pride, and cruelty but himself gains just these offerings in return’[259], but the woman loses. The woman has lost her ‘Sighs and Tears’ and only her heart is ‘harm’d’ while he is ‘sett up a Deity’. The fact that Behn writes: ‘Thus thou and I’ have set man up as a god, suggests that she considers women in some part complicit in their own fate. Behn describes how love has taken away the woman’s ‘desire’ and leaves her nothing. The repetitive use of the word ‘from’ emphasizes how much has been taken from the woman, her “sighs and tears” and even her “pride”:
From me he took his Sighs and tears,
From thee his Pride and Crueltie;
From me his Languishments and Feares,
And every Killing Dart from thee;
Thus thou and I, the God have arm’d
And sett him up a Deity;
But my poor Heart alone is harm’d,
Whilst thine the Victor is, and free.[260]

This poem is informing us that love is a game where only men get to play leaving women impotent and even taking away their desire.
If Love Arm’d is about a woman suffering because of a man’s imposition, from a man’s power over her then The Disappointment is the opposite, a woman suffering from ‘one form of powerlessness specific to men, sexual impotence.’[261] Rather than a male lover contemplating the loss of his sexual capacity, Behn’s poem, like the Willing Mistress, is about how sex will always be a disappointment within a society where power is disproportionately in the hands of men. Behn begins by describing Lysander’s lack of control, his ‘impatient passion swayed.’[262] sheBehn does not make it clear whether Cloris ‘Who could defend herself no longer’[263] is defenseless because she is overpowered by passion or physically overpowered by Lysander. However, Behn’s description of her as: ‘that loved maid’ would suggest that she has a degree of sexual experience. Cloris’s experience, together with the last two lines of the stanza: ‘And left no light to guide the world/But what from Cloris’ brighter eyes was hurled’, suggest that Cloris could have power? Could be powerful? the power could be with Cloris as she has the ‘light to guide’. In the second stanza, Cloris would appear to be in control, as her hands ‘draw him on’[264] but her dominance control is tempered by social convention as she ‘permits his force’[265] and she ‘wants’ but doesn’t have the power: ‘She wants the power to say – ‘Ah! What d’ye do?’[266] It would appear that Cloris is an experienced woman who has the ability to control the situation, while Lysander lies ‘trembling at her feet’[267] but social convention restricts her from taking the lead.
In a lone thicket made for love,
Silent as yielding maid’s consent,
She with charming languishment,
Permits his force, yet gently strove;
Her hands his bosom softly meet,
But not to put him back designed,
Rather to draw him on inclined:
While he lay trembling at her feet,
Resistance ‘tis in vain to show:
She wants the power to say – ‘Ah! What d’ye do?’[268]

In the third stanza Cloris is confused, she wants to encourage Lysander but thinks she shouldn’t: ‘Where love and shame confusedly strive.’[269] In the following three lines the dashes suggest panting and excitement but also a continuation of Cloris’ confusion:
She cried – ‘Cease, cease – your vain desire,
My dearer honour even to you
I cannot, must not give – retire,[270]

In the fourth to six stanzas Lysander begins to make love to Cloris in earnest and there are moments of equality and reciprocity: ‘Their bodies, as their souls, are joined/Where both in transports unconfirmed.’[271] By the seventh stanza Cloris is offering herself as a sacrifice to him: ‘A victim to love’s sacred flame’[272], but Lysander is ‘Unable to perform the sacrifice.’[273] Lysander is paralyzed because he is not completely in control:, although Cloris abandons herself to him it is too late, she has already revealed her own erotic desires and this is not what social conventions suggest she should do. Despite his desperate passion, there is nothing he can do: ‘In vain he toils, in vain commands’[274], his body doesn’t respond and as Cloris sees this,: ‘Finding that god of her desires/Disarmed of all his awful fires’[275], she runs asway leaving Lysander ‘fainting on the gloomy bed.’[276] By leaving Lysander behind Behn reverses conventional gender expectations, Cloris is not sympathetic or understanding, rather she is actively angry while he is passive. Male ‘imperfect enjoyment’ poems were generally focused on the man whereas Behn’s ‘centre of attention shifts from male to female, and from penis to vagina’.[277] In her poetry Behn seeks equality and reciprocity between her lovers. H however, she: ‘frequently depicts relationship of equality that degenerate, perhaps because it is so hard for her to imagine reciprocity and equality in a society devoid of it.’[278] At a time when male poets were writing ‘imperfect enjoyment poems’[279] about masculine identity where women were marginalized and usually at least partly to blame for their impotence, Behn wrote The Disappointment[280] about power. When Cloris says ‘She wants the power to say – ‘Ah! What d’ye do?’ Behn highlights the inability of women to articulate their desire, not simply because they do not have the linguistic ability, but rather for fear of censure in a society that found women’s admission of desire problematic.
In her poem On Desire Behn articulates the difficulty for women of suppressing desire ‘Oh tell me, how you do remain discreet/How you suppress the rising sighs/And the soft yielding soul that wishes in your eyes?’[281] At the beginning of the poem the speaker is impervious to desire:
Not beauty could invite thee then
Nor all the arts of lavish men!
Not all the powerful rhetoric of the tongue
Not sacred wit could charm thee on;
No the soft play than lovers make,
Nor sigh could fan thee to a fire,
Not pleading tears, nor vows could thee awake,
Or warm the unformed something – to desire.[282]

In the same way that Behn uses repetition in Love Arm’d, Behn uses the repetition of ‘not’ and ‘nor’ to emphasise how impervious she is to desire. Moreover, the speaker soon delights in the physicality of desire,: ‘I faint, I die with pleasing pain’, [283] and is exhilarated by her the new understanding that desire brings and the willingness she has to risk everything to attain pleasuredesire. Although at the end of the poem the speaker expresses the ‘weakness of my sex’, the poem expresses frankness about female desire that she extends beyond the poet/ speaker/ authorial persona herself to include all women: ‘Deceive the foolish world – deceive it on/And veil your passions in your pride.’[284] The fact that the woman in this poem insists on denying her desire before she can admit to it and then once she has admitted to it refers to the ‘weakness of my sex’ indicates the problematic nature of the recognition? admission of desire for women in the seventeenth century.
Like Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn, Anne Finch (1661 – 1720) was a poet who enjoyed the ‘sexual freedom and gender ambiguities brought about by the Restoration period, which allowed women to speak as erotic subjects; and above all the artful artlessness and sociable tone valorized in Caroline, Restoration and Augustan poetry.’[285] Finch achieved substantial recognition during her lifetime and like Katherine Philips, inhabited a ‘small social world that could be transformed into a fictional society that provided both context and material for verse.’[286] While many of Finch’s early poems are dedicated to her husband or express her loyalty for the Stuart Court, her poems also describe ‘her intense commitments to and enjoyment of intimacies with female friends and community.’[287] Her poem Friendship between Ephelia and Ardelia is a both passionate and erotic poem spoken between two women. The poem begins by Ephelia asking about the nature of friendship with Ardelia answering that it is to love. Ardelia continues to describe a desperately passionate relationship including the erotic lines: ‘’Tis to lend all due relief/From the tongue, the heart, the hand.’ The end of the poem highlights the inadequacy of language when expressing the passionate and erotic emotion between women: ‘Can Ardelia say no more? Ard. Words indeed no more can show.’ Finch suggests that love is more than words, that love cannot be expressed by mere language and, more importantly, demonstrates how the love between women is something that cannot be spoken. As Andreadis states: ‘The phrase ‘words indeed no more can show’ ‘delineates the inadequacies of language ….. and the inexpressibility of erotic emotion between women, which can only be spoken as a self-explanatory “But tis to love, as I love you.”’[288] The closing line ‘But tis to love, as I love you’ ‘states clearly the nature of erotic ellipsis and the unspeakability of certain affective attachments.’ [289] Moreover, by repeating the line, ‘Tis to love, as I love you Finch reiterates the linguistic epistemological indeterminacy of expressions of love between women. In Friendship between Ephelia and Ardelia ‘Finch gives us at once a witty comment on the limits of what can be spoken and an intense expression of passion between women for which the form of the pastoral dialogue is a convenient and deeply conventional vehicle.’[290]
Eph. What Friendship is, Ardelia show.
Ard. ’Tis to love, as I love you.
Eph. This account, so short (tho’ kind)
Suits not my inquiring mind.
Therefore farther now repeat:
What is Friendship when complete?
Ard. ’Tis to share all joy and grief;
’Tis to lend all due relief
From the tongue, the heart, the hand;
’Tis to mortgage house and land;
For a friend be sold a slave;
’Tis to die upon a grave,
If a friend therein do lie.
Eph. This indeed, tho’ carried high,
This, tho’ more than e’er was done
Underneath the rolling sun,
This has all been said before.
Can Ardelia say no more?
Ard. Words indeed no more can show:
But ’tis to love, as I love you.[291]

A similarly intensely passionate poem is The White Mouses Petition to Lamira the Right Hon:ble The Lady Ann Tufton now Countess of Salisbury where Finch writes to Anne Tufton, a much younger woman in a ‘conventional amatory vein while doubling the female roles, presenting both speaker and addressee as beautiful objects, and playing on themes of similarity and difference and erotic identity.’[292] The poem has a ‘richly sensual feeling through the persona of a white mouse and provides a striking example of the shadowed language of female erotics.’[293]
I sue to wear Larmira’s fetters
And live the envy of my betters
When I receive her soft caresses
And creeping near her lovely tresses
Their glossy brown from my reflection
Shall fain more lustre and perfection
And to her bosom if admitted
My colour there will be so fitted[294]
By speaking as a white mouse Finch is able to safely eroticize the appreciation of the female form and her passion for another woman. The mouse:, which ‘creeping through her lovely tresses’, who is able to ‘receive her soft caresses’[295], offers an intensely tactile and erotic description of the female body that is safely ‘hidden’ through the vehicle of the mouse allowing Finch to express her erotic attachment to Ann Tufton without fear of censure. The White Mouses Petition to Lamira the Right Hon:ble The Lady Ann Tufton now Countess of Salisbury is a perfect example of how women had to use strategies, in this case taking the persona of a mouse, in order to express desire that could not be named for fear of censure.
While Finch’s poems to women are suggestive and playful, two of her poems in particular deal with women’s entrapment and frustration: the Unequal Fetters and The Bird and the Arras. The Bird and the Arras is a chilling tale where Finch uses the
iImage of a trapped bird as a symbol of women trapped within the patriarchal structure of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Finch uses the pastoral form that enables enabling her to give voice to the plight of women. The bird tries to escape by flying into the scene of a wood painted on a tapestry, but then, failing to escape, trying to fly out of the window only to be stunned by the glass:
Till the dash’d Cealing strikes her to the ground
No intercepting shrub to break the fall is found
Recovering breath the window next she gaines
Nor fears a stop from the transparent Panes. [296]

The bird continues desperately to escape until it is offered death, the only escape:

Fluttering in endless cercles of dismal
Till some kind hand directs the certain way
Which though the casement an escape affords
And leads to ample space the only Heav’n of Birds[297]

The passion between women in Finch’s poetry not only pays tribute to Katherine Philips but also uses different voices and takes the portrayal of eroticism between women to a new level of intensity.
Following Aphra Behn’s death in 1689, Delarivier Manley’s (c. 1663 – 1724) work came to prominence in the 1690s. Like Behn, Manley’s work ‘marked a break with the past and a movement into new forms of erotic and sexual understanding.’[298] Both Behn and Manley ‘suffered from being seen as immoral women and from assaults on their reputations, along with their literary reputations.’[299] In 1696 Manley’s play The Royal Mischief, with its erotic Eastern setting, violence, eroticism and transgressive desire, required Manley’s ‘actress to feign an orgasm: as Homais subsides into an erotic swoon after she and Levan kiss’[300] Even though Manley’s work is beginning to acknowledge sexual desire in a way that was inconceivable earlier in the century, she too uses ellipses to suggest that which would be dangerous to fully articulate:
Tis ecstacy and more. What have I done?
Her heart beats at her lips, and mine flies up
To meet it. See the roses fade, her swimming
Eyes give lessening light, and now they dart no more
She faints!…..[301]

Manley’s greatest success came with her 1709 novel The New Atalantis about which D.M. Robinson states: ‘no non-pornographic English or French writer in the hundred or so years previous had had as much to say about lesbians and lesbianism as Manley.’[302] The novel describes a variety of differing lesbian narratives: ‘that demonstrate that far from being unimaginable or imaginable only in a single, dominant form (“the hermaphrodite”, “the tribade”, “the passing woman”) lesbianism was imagined and depicted quite boldly and in an astounding variety of forms in the early eighteenth century.’[303] However, jJust as Louis Montrose suggests that ‘Pastorals that celebrate the ideal content function to articulate and thereby, perhaps to assuage – discontent’[304] Adreadis states:
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, imputations of female same-sex relations were coming to be used as instruments of social control, to silence female erotic expression, and to enforce a sexual imperative that was gradually moving towards the notion of the exclusivity of sexual orientations and binary, heteronormative identities.[305]

This dissertation has sought to analyse Valerie Traub’s ‘recurring patterns’[306] within seventeenth-century women’s writing in order to show that there was an underlying lesbian presence throughout the century. In The Apparitional Lesbian Terry Castle asks: ‘Why is it so difficult to see the lesbian – even when she is there, quite plainly, in front of us? In part because she has been “ghosted” – or made to seem invisible – by culture it self.’ [307] Like Andreadis, I am:
deeply aware of how difficult it is to rely on texts from the period to provide a vocabulary to describe relations of intimacy between women, partly because women rarely refer to their own sexual experiences in explicit terms and partly because many of them were struggling to find a language with which to define their love for one another in opposition to the strongly hierarchical and phallocentric model of heterosexual relations.[308]

The women represented in this dissertation range from respectable women writing within the safe confines of marriage, who developed a coded language of erotically charged female same-sex friendship, like Katherine Phillips, to other more radical writers, for example Aphra Behn, who wrote more explicitly. Acknowledging Mary Sidney as beginning a tradition of women’s writing, I have discovered four recurring themes in the writing of the women I have chosen to examine infor this dissertation. The first theme is the creation of feminized pastoral and /or utopian spaces away from men as for example in Aemilia Lanyer’s poem Description of Cooke-ham, An Collins’s poem Divine Songs and Meditacions and Margaret Cavendish’s play The Convent of Pleasure. The second is the feminization of Christianity as expressed in both Lanyer’s poem Salve Deus Rex Judæorum and An Collins’s Divine Songs and Meditacions. The third recurring theme is triangles of desire that destabilize expectation of gender binary normativity, evidenced in the work of Lanyer and Behn. The final theme that occurs in all the writing from these women is evidence of linguistic epistemological indeterminacy, from Ephelia’s erotic ellipses to Aphra Behn’s dashes and Katherine Phillips’s use of nature to encode her physical love for women. While identifying these elements across women’s writing of the seventeenth century, I have found, unsurprisingly, that it was the Restoration Period in particular that produced a ‘conflation of forces’[309] allowing poetic and dramatic works to flourish, celebrating love and friendship between women, written by women. As Henrietta Andreadis states:
a change in discourse about female same-sex eroticism in England in the mid-seventeenth century took place in rough coincidence with and following the Restoration. The language of literature and respectable society becomes more evasive as the existence of female same-sex transgressive behaviours is increasingly acknowledge by other dimensions of public discourse.[310]

The work of Aphra Behn in particular transcends the binary definition of male and female through theher image of the sexually ambiguous hermaphrodite, non-gendered pronouns in her poetry and triangles of desire. ‘Behn used the conventions of libertine discourse to interrogate its underlying misogyny and rigid gender hierarchies’[311] while also offering ‘a provocative challenge to the underlying principles of libertine discourse even as she continued to speak its language.’[312] Behn’s work incorporates most of the elements I have identified as recurring throughout women’s writing examined in this dissertation from the creation of pastoral, edenic spaces, to triangles of desire and linguistic epistemological indeterminacy evidenced through her erotic ellipses, or in Behn’s case dashes: ‘Or if we shou’d – thy Form excuses it.[313] Moreover, critical examination of her poetry leads me to suggest that Behn would have had sympathy with the pro-sexuality movement within feminist theory’s view that: ‘sexuality is always constructed within the discourse of power, where power is partially understood in terms of heterosexual and phallic cultural conventions.’[314] Behn’s take on gender sits well with the work of Simone de Beauviour. Simone de Beauvoir’s suggests in The Second Sex that ‘one is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one,’[315] in other words that gender is constructed and that women are compulsively drawn by society to become such? to behave like society wants them to?women. I believe that the ideas put forward by modern feminist theorists resonate deeply in Behn’s work and that she was quite unbelievably ahead of her time in terms of how she both interpreted and represented gender, gender fluidity and constructions of gender. In conclusion I take issue with the absence of Aphra Behn from Traub’s paper The Present Future of Lesbian Historiography. I believe that Behn’s work constitutes the most salient cycle of lesbian poetics in the seventeenth-century. In the words of Terry Castle in her search for a lesbian history: ‘once we begin to look, we may find her looking back at us: making eye contact, delighted to be seen at last.’

 

Bibliography

[1] Valerie Traub, ‘The Present Future of Lesbian Historioraphy’ in George, E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry,Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Studies, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), p. 124.
[2] Michael Foucault, The History of Sexuality:1 (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1998), P. 43.
[3] Adrienne Rich, ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’, Signs, 5:4 (1980).
[4] Valerie Traub, ‘The Present Future of Lesbian Historioraphy’ in George, E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry, Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Studies, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), p.125.
[5] Brooten argues against lesbian invisibility in the Roman period offering a wide range of representations of female eroticism and, while homosexuality was tolerated, she suggests there was an increased awareness, anxiety and condemnation of female eroticism.
[6] Representations of Early Modern women’s erotic relationships have nearly always featured the chaste romantic friend or the masculine woman while the feminine half of these relationships seem to have been rendered invisible. See Valerie Traub, ‘Perversions of ‘Lesbian’ Desire’ in History Workshop Journal, 41 (1996) pp. 23-49.
[7] Valerie Traub, ‘The Present future of Lesbian Historioraphy’ in George, E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry, Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Studies, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), p. 127.
[8] Valerie Traub, ‘The Present future of Lesbian Historioraphy’ in George, E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry, Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Studies, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), p. 131.
[9] Adrienne Rich, ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’, Signs, 5:4 (1980).
[10] Sheila Jeffreys ‘Does it Matter If They Did?’ in Lesbian History Group, Not a Passing Phase: Reclaiming Lesbians in History 1840 – 1985 (London: The Women’s Press, 1989), p. 22.
[11] There has been some debate as to whether or not Ephelia is a woman in the light of the tradition of 17th century poets writing as women. However, for the purposes of this dissertation I am taking the view that she is a woman and if not there is still value in analyzing the work of somebody who is writing as a woman.
[12] Lucy Irigaray quoted in Nicole Pohl, Women, Space and Utopia, 16000 – 18000, (Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 1988), p. 1.
[13] Nicole Pohl, Women, Space and Utopia, 1600 – 1800, (Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 1988), p. 1.
[14] Ibid p. 1.
[15] Jan Relf, ‘Utopia the Good Breast: Coming Home to Mother’, Utopia and the Millennium, ed. Krishan Kumar and Stephen Bann, (London: Reaktion Press, 1999), p. 107 – 29.
[16] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men, (Colombia: Columbia University Press, 1985). p. 21
[17] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Gender Asymmetry and Erotic Triangles’ in Between Men, (Colombia: Columbia University Press, 1985). p. 21.
[18] Ibid p. 21.
[19] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Gender Asymmetry and Erotic Triangles’ in Between Men, (Colombia: Columbia University Press, 1985). p. 22.
[20] Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 7.
[21] Sarah Toulalan, ‘Extraordinary Satisfactions: Lesbian Visibility in Seventeenth-Century Pornography in England’, Gender and History,15:1, 2003, p. 50.
[22] George E. Haggerty in ‘The History of Homosexuality Reconsidered’ in Chris Mounsey, ed. Developments in the Histories of Sexualities: In Search of the Normal, (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2013), p. 3.
[23] Grantham Turner, Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) Warren, Chernaik, Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
[24] Susan Staves, ‘Women and Society’ in Derek Hughes and Janet Todd, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p.21.
[25] Marshall Grossman, The Seventeenth Century Literature Handbook, (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).
[26] Valerie Traub, ‘The Present future of Lesbian Historioraphy’ in George, E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry, Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Studies, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), p. 128.
[27] Ibid p. 128.
[28] Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby and Helen Wilcox, eds Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen, (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 7.
[29] Ibid p. 10.
[30] Elaine, V. Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 121.
[31] Debra K. Rienstra, ‘Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, Psalmes’ in Anita Pacheco, ed. A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2002).
[32] Ibid p. 110.
[33] Bronwen Price, ‘Women’s Poetry 1550-1700: ‘Not Unfit to be Read’, in Anita Pacheco, ed. A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2002), p. 292.
[34] Aemilia Lanyer ‘To the Vertuous Reader’ in Susanne, Woods, ed., The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer, Salve Deus Rex Judæorum, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 48.
[35] Ibid p. 48.
[36] Elaine, V. Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 179.
[37] Bronwen Price, ‘Women’s Poetry 1550-1700: ‘Not Unfit to be Read’, in Anita Pacheco, ed. A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2002), p. 292.
[38] Salve Deus Rex Judæorum, ed. Susanne Woods, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. xxxvii.
[39] Nicole Pohl, Women, Space and Utopia, 16000 – 18000, (Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 1988), p. 29.
[40] Aemilia Lanyer ‘The Description of Cook-ham’ in Susanne, Woods, ed., The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer, Salve Deus Rex Judæorum, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 8 (p. 130).
[41] Nicole Pohl, Women, Space and Utopia, 16000 – 18000, (Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 1988), p. 18.
[42] Amy Greenstadt, ‘Aemilia Layer’s Pathetic Phallacy’ in The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 8:1, (2008).
[43] Aemilia Lanyer ‘The Description of Cook-ham’ in Susanne, Woods, ed., The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer, Salve Deus Rex Judæorum, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 3 (p. 130).
[44] Susanne Woods, ‘ Aemilia Lanyer, Salve Deus Rex Judæorum’ in Anita Pacheco, ed. A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), p. 133.
[45] Aemilia Lanyer, ‘The Description of Cooke-ham’ in Salve Deus Rex Judæorum, ed. Susanne Woods, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 19-20, (p. 131).
[46] Ibid 25-26, (p. 131).
[47] Amy Greenstadt ‘Aemilia Lanyer’s Pathetic Phallacy’ in The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 8:1 (2008), p. 68.
[48] Aemilia Lanyer, ‘The Description of Cooke-ham’ in Salve Deus Rex Judæorum, ed. Susanne Woods, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 201-202, (p. 138).
[49] Nicole Pohl, Women, Space and Utopia, 16000 – 18000, (Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 1988), p.29.
[50] Ibid p.31.
[51] Ibid p. 30.
[52] Aemilia Lanyer, ‘The Description of Cooke-ham’ in Salve Deus Rex Judæorum, ed. Susanne Woods, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 162-168, (p. 136-7).
[53] Ibid 55, (p. 132).
[54] Amy Greenstadt, ‘Aemilia Layer’s Pathetic Phallacy’ in The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 8:1, (2008), p. 71.
[55] Johnathan Goldberg, Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples, (California: Stamford University Press, 1977), p.37.
[56] Greenstat describes Lanyer’s writing as adopting an‘eroticized language of spiritual devotion that was becoming increasingly common in religious verse of the period. Amy Greenstadt, ‘Aemilia Layer’s Pathetic Phallacy’ in The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 8:1, (2008), pp. 72-72.
[57] Amelia Lanyer, Salve Deus Rex Judæorum, ed. Susanne Woods, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 1305, (p. 107).
[58] ‘The bond that links the two rivals is as intense and potent as the bond that links either of the rivals to the beloved.’ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men, (Colombia: Columbia University Press, 1985). p. 21.
[59] Aemilia Lanyer, ‘The Description of Cooke-ham’ in Salve Deus Rex Judæorum, ed. Susanne Woods, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 80, (p. 133).
[60] Ibid 96, (p. 134).
[61] Ibid 122, (p. 135).
[62] Naomi J. Miller, ‘Mary Wroth, The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania; in Anita Pacheco, ed. A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2002), p,150.
[63] Carolyn Ruth Swift, ‘Feminine Identity in Lady Wroth’s Romance Urania’, English Literary Renaissance, 14:3 (1984) pp. 328-329.
[64] Nicole Pohl, Women, Space and Utopia, 1600 – 1800, (Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 1988), p. 18.
[65] Wroth, Mary, ‘The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania’ quoted in Naomi J. Miller, ‘Mary Wroth, The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania; in Anita Pacheco, ed. A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2002), p,154.
[66] Naomi J. Miller, ‘Mary Wroth, The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania; in Anita Pacheco, ed. A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2002), p,154.
[67] Nicole Pohl, Women, Space and Utopia, 1600 – 1800, (Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 1988), p. 22.
[68] Naomi J. Miller, ‘Mary Wroth, The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania; in Anita Pacheco, ed. A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2002), p,152.
[69] Ibid l. 7 (p. 13).
[70] Pamphilia and Amphilanthus have a secret marriage but this is void when Amphilanthus later publically marries the Queen of Candia believeing Pamphilia has been unfaithful.
[71] Naomi J. Miller, ‘Mary Wroth, The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania; in Anita Pacheco, ed. A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2002), p,156.
[72] Nicole Pohl, Women, Space and Utopia, 1600 – 1800, (Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 1988), p. 18.
[73] An Collins, Divine Songs and Meditacions, <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/37867/37867-h/37867-h.htm> (accessed 28th July 2015).
[74] Susannah B, Mintz ‘An Collins and the Disabled Self’ in Scott W. Howard ed. An Collins and the Historical Imagination (Surrey & Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2014), p. 68.
[75] Ibid p. 53.
[76] Ibid p. 65.
[77] Ibid p. 69.
[78] An Collins, Divine Songs and Meditacions,< http://www.gutenberg.org/files/37867/37867-h/37867-h.htm> (accessed 28th July 2015).
[79] Ibid
[80] Susannah B, Mintz ‘An Collins and the Disabled Self’ in Scott W. Howard ed. An Collins and the Historical Imagination (Surrey & Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2014), p. 69.
[81] Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby and Helen Wilcox, eds Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen, (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 2.
[82] Ibid p. 185
[83] Lillian Faderman, Surpassing The Love of Men (London: The Women’s Press, 1981), p. 68.
[84] Frances Frazier Sensescu, ed. James Shirley’s ‘The Bird in a Cage’: A Critical Edition (New York and London: Garland, 1980) cited in Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 176.
[85] Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby, and Helen Wilcox, Her Own Life: Autobiographical writings by seventeenth century Englishwomen, (London and New York, Routledge, 1998), p. 88.
[86] Valerie Traub, ‘The (in)significance of Lesbian Desire’ in The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 177.
[87] Ibid p. 178.
[88] Jane E. Howard, ‘the New Historicism in Renaissance Studies, English Literary Renaissance, 16:1 (1986), p. 39.
[89] Ibid p. 40.
[90]Jane E. Howard, ‘the New Historicism in Renaissance Studies, English Literary Renaissance, 16:1 (1986), p. 43.
[91] Valerie Traub, ‘The (In)Significance of Lesbian Desire’ in Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
[92] Emma Donoghue, Poems Between Women’, (New York, Columbia University Press, 1977), p. xxv.
[93] Ibid p. xxv.
[94] Lillian Faderman, Surpassing The Love of Men (London: The Women’s Press, 1981), p. 68.
[95] Harriett, Andreadis, ‘Re-Configuring Early Modern Friendship: Katherine Philips and Homoerotic Desire’, Studies in English Literature, 1500 – 1900, 46:3 (2006), p. 526.
[96] Harriette Andreadis, ‘The Sapphic-Platonics of Katherine Philips, 1632-1664, Signs, 15:1 (1989), p. 37.
[97] Ibid p. 37.
[98] Valerie Traub, ‘The Present Future of Lesbian Historioraphy’ in George, E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry, Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Studies, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), p. 130.
[99] Ibid p. 130.
[100] Elaine Hobby and Chirs White, eds., What Lesbians do in Books, (London: The Women’s Press, 1991), p. 191.
[101] Katherine Philips, Orinda to Lucasia,< http://www.bartleby.com/291/15.html> (accessed15 June 2015) 1-6
[102] Lillian Faderman, Surpassing The Love of Men (London: The Women’s Press, 1981), p. 70.
[103] Traub, Valerie, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 300.
[104] Katherine Philips, Orinda to Lucasia Parting, October 1661, at London, <http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/philips/lucasia3.htm> (accessed 6 June 2015), 1.
[105] Harriett, Andreadis, ‘Re-Configuring Early Modern Friendship: Katherine Philips and Homoerotic Desire’, Studies in English Literature, 1500 – 1900, 46:3 (2006), p. 526.
[106] Katherine Philips, To Mrs. M.A. at Parting,< http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/philips/parting.htm> (accessed 12 June 2015), 1-6.
[107] Katherine Philips, ‘To Rosania (now Mrs Mountague) being with her, 25th September 1652’ in Emma Donahue, Poems Between Women’, (New York, Columbia University Press, 1977), 1-4, p. 1.
[108] Harriett, Andreadis, ‘Re-Configuring Early Modern Friendship: Katherine Philips and Homoerotic Desire’, Studies in English Literature, 1500 – 1900, 46:3 (2006), p. 524.
[109] Katherine Philips, To Mrs M.A. at Parting, < http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/philips/parting.htm> (accessed 17 August 2015).
[110] Lillian Faderman, Surpassing The Love of Men (London: The Women’s Press, 1981), p. 68.
[111] Dorothy Mermin, ‘Women Becoming Poets: Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, Anne Fitch’ EHL, 57:2 (1990), p. 343.
[112] Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing 1649 – 88, (London: Virago Books, 1988), p. 148.
[113] Ephelia, Love’s First Approach, <http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/search/fulltext?SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000123616060000&WARN=N&SIZE=103&FILE=../session/1438162724_10078&SEARCHSCREEN=CITATIONS&DISPLAY=AUTHOR&ECCO=N> (accessed 29th July 2015).
[114] Harriette, Andreadis, Sappho in Early Modern England, Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics 1550 -1714, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 107.
[115] Ephelia, To the Honoured Eugenia, commanding me to Write to her, <http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/search/fulltext?SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000123616060000&WARN=N&SIZE=103&FILE=../session/1438162724_10078&SEARCHSCREEN=CITATIONS&DISPLAY=AUTHOR&ECCO=N > (accessed 29th July 2015).
[116] Ephelia, To the Honoured Eugenia, commanding me to Write to her, <http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/search/fulltext?SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000123616060000&WARN=N&SIZE=103&FILE=../session/1438162724_10078&SEARCHSCREEN=CITATIONS&DISPLAY=AUTHOR&ECCO=N> (accessed 29th July 2015).
[117] Ephelia, To the most Excellent Princess Mary, Duchess of Richmond and Lenox, http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/search/fulltext?SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000123616060000&WARN=N&SIZE=103&FILE=../session/1440251078_6780&SEARCHSCREEN=CITATIONS&DISPLAY=AUTHOR&ECCO=N (accessed 21 August 2014).
[118] Ephelia, Song, http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/search/fulltext?SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000123616060000&WARN=N&SIZE=103&FILE=../session/1440251078_6780&SEARCHSCREEN=CITATIONS&DISPLAY=AUTHOR&ECCO=N (accessed 21 August 2014).
[119] Ibid.
[120] Ephelia, To Phylocles, inviting him to a Friendship, <http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/search/fulltext?SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000123616060000&WARN=N&SIZE=103&FILE=../session/1440251078_6780&SEARCHSCREEN=CITATIONS&DISPLAY=AUTHOR&ECCO=N> (accessed 21 August 2014).
[121] Ephelia, to Madam Behn, <http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/search/fulltext?SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000123616060000&WARN=N&SIZE=103&FILE=../session/1438162724_10078&SEARCHSCREEN=CITATIONS&DISPLAY=AUTHOR&ECCO=N> (accessed 29th July 2015).
[122] Harriette, Andreadis, Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics 1550 -1714, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 108.
[123] Ibid p. 104.
[124] Ephelia, ‘To the most Excellent Princess Mary, Duchess of Richmond and Lenox’, quoted in Harriette, Andreadis, Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics 1550 -1714, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 108.
[125] Harriette, Andreadis, Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics 1550 -1714, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 16.
[126] Susan Staves, ‘Women and Society’ in Derek Hughes and Janet Todd, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p.12
[127] Ibid p.21.
[128] Warren, Chernaik, Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p, 6.
[129] Aphra Behn, ‘ To Mrs W. On her Excellent Verses (Writ in Praise of some I had made on the Earl of Rochester) Written in a Fit of Sickness’’ in Poems upon Several Occasions, <http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/search/fulltext?ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000112710530000&SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&WARN=N&FILE=../session/1436451680_14774> (accessed 10 August 2015).
[130] Wilmot, John, A Song to a Young Lady. To her Ancient Lover, www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/180802 (accessed 10 August 2015)
[131] Susan Staves, ‘Women and Society’ in Derek Hughes and Janet Todd, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p.21.
[132] Ibid p.21.
[133] Laura Linker, Dangerous Women, Libertine Epicures, and the Rise of Sensibility, 1670 – 1730, (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2011), p. 3.
[134] Sir Charles Sedley, ‘Song’ in Harold Love, ed. The Penguin Book of Restoration Verse, (London: Penguin Books, 1997) p. 123.
[135] Charles Cotton, ‘Ode’ in Harold Love, ed. The Penguin Book of Restoration Verse, (London: Penguin Books, 1997) p. 145.
[136] Alexander Brome, ‘A Wife’ in Harold Love, ed. The Penguin Book of Restoration Verse, (London: Penguin Books, 1997) p. 162. John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ‘Song’ in Harold Love, ed. The Penguin Book of Restoration Verse, (London: Penguin Books, 1997) p. 155.
[137] William Wycherley, ‘Song from Love in a Wood’ in Harold Love, ed. The Penguin Book of Restoration Verse, (London: Penguin Books, 1997) p. 168.
[138] John Wilmot, ‘Song’ in Harold Love, ed. The Penguin Book of Restoration Verse, (London: Penguin Books, 1997) p. 155
[139] Dorothy Mermin, ‘Women Becoming Poets: Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, Anne Finch’, ELH 57:2 (1990), p. 345.
[140] Aphra Behn, ‘To the fair Clarinda who made love to me, imagin’d more than Woman’, in Aphra Behn: Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 1-4 (p. 343).
[141] Poetry Foundation, Aphra Behn, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/aphra-behn (accessed 11November 2014).
[142] Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, (London: Penguin Books, 1978), III. 46a-47a (p.562).
[143] http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/edmund-spenser
[144] Roberta C. Martin, ‘“Beauteous Wonder of a Different Kind”: Apra Behn’s Destabilization of Sexual Categories’, College English 61:2 (1998), p. 194.
[145] Kate Aughterson, ‘Introduction to Physiology’ in Kate Aughterson, ed. Renaissance Women: Constructions of Femininity in England (London and New York: Routledge, 1995)
[146] Jennifer Frangos, ‘Aphra Behn’s Cunning Stunts: “To the fair Clarinda”, The Eighteenth Century, 45:1 (2004), p.31.
[147] Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 318.
[148] Aphra Behn, The Lucky Chance, <http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/search/fulltext?SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000078693900000&WARN=N&SIZE=226&FILE=../session/1438354005_22549&SEARCHSCREEN=CITATIONS&DISPLAY=AUTHOR&ECCO=N> (accessed 30 July 2015).
[149] Ibid.
[150] David Roberts, Restoration Plays and Players, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 83.
[151] Kate Aughterson, Aphra Behn: The Comedies, https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=KvYnBQAAQBAJ&pg=PT132&lpg=PT132&dq=what+does+Aphra+Behn+mean+by+the+masculine+part+of+me?&source=bl&ots=mQsEzuoJsa&sig=lrIGCDNwYduhKOcrRefEi9NCWFo&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CEYQ6AEwBmoVChMIlMOh68fGxwIVCgrbCh3wjwlW#v=onepage&q=what%20does%20Aphra%20Behn%20mean%20by%20the%20masculine%20part%20of%20me%3F&f=false (accessed 26 August 2015).
[152] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), p.13.
[153] Aphra Behn, ‘To the fair Clarinda who made love to me, imagin’d more than Woman’, in Aphra Behn: Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works (London: Penguin Books, 1992), l. 7-8 (p. 343).
[154] Ibid l. 8 – 10 (p. 343).
[155] Valerie Traub, ‘The Present future of Lesbian Historioraphy’ in George, E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry, Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Studies, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), p. 127.
[156] Roberta Martin, ‘Beauteous Wonder of a Different Kind: Aphra Behn’s Destabilization of Sexual Categories’, College English 61:2 (1998), p. 199.
[157] James Grantham Turner, Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England’ (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1996), Chernaik, Warren, Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
[158] James Grantham Turner, Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p.5.
[159] Harriette, Andreadis, Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics 1550 -1714, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001),Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), Elizabeth Susan Wahl, Invisible Relation: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
[160] Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 42.
[161] Elizabeth Susan Wahl, Invisible Relations: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 23.
[162] Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 168.
[163] Elizabeth V. Young, ‘Aphra Behn, Gender and Pastoral’ in Studies in English Literature, 1500 – 1900, 33:3 (1993), p. 540.
[164] Katherine Philips, To My Excellent Lucasia, on Our Friendship, < http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/180793> (accessed 17 August 2015).
[165] Ibid.
[166] Harriett, Andreadis, ‘Re-Configuring Early Modern Friendship: Katherine Philips and Homoerotic Desire’, Studies in English Literature, 1500 – 1900, 46:3 (2006), p. 527.
[167] Aphra Behn, ‘To the fair Clarinda who made love to me, imagin’d more than Woman’, in Aphra Behn: Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works (London: Penguin Books, 1992), l. 13 – 17 (p. 343).
[168] Both Behn’s biographers, Janet Todd and Maureen Duffy assume that Behn was in love with Hoyle.
[169] Janet Todd, The Secret Life Of Aphra Behn, (London: André Deutsch Limited, 1996), p. 342.
[170] Aphra Behn, ‘To the fair Clarinda who made love to me, imagin’d more than Woman’, in Aphra Behn: Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works (London: Penguin Books, 1992), l. 15 (p. 343).
[171] Aphra Behn, The Disappointment, in Aphra Behn: Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works (London: Penguin Books, 1992), xi, l. 9-10 (p. 334).
[172] Elizabeth Susan Wahl, Invisible Relations: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 60.
[173] Aphra Behn, ‘To the fair Clarinda who made love to me, imagin’d more than Woman’, in Aphra Behn: Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 21 (p. 343)
[174] Lucy Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1958) where Irigary critiques the exclusion of women from Philosophy and psychoanalytic theory and structural linguistics.
[175] Lucy Irigaray cited in Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), p.13.
[176] http://criticallegalthinking.com/2014/06/05/language-notes-thought-luce-irigaray/
[177] Aphra Behn, To the fair Clarinda who made love to me, imagin’d more than Woman, in Aphra Behn: Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 18 (p. 343).
[178] Aphra Behn, ‘To the fair Clarinda who made love to me, imagin’d more than Woman’, in Aphra Behn: Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 18 – 21 (p. 343)
[179] Ibid 20 – 24 (p. 343).
[180] Jennifer Frangos, ‘Aphra Behn’s Cunning Stunts: “To the fair Clarinda”, The Eighteenth Century, 45:1 (2004), p.31
[181] Duffy, Maureen, The Passionate Shepherdess, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977), p. 143.
[182] Elizabeth Susan Wahl, Invisible Relations: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 55.
[183] Ibid p. 56.
[184] Carol Barash, ‘Desire and the Uncoupling of Myth in Behn’s Erotic Poems’ in Janet Todd, ed. New Casebooks Aphra Behn, (Hampshire and London: Macmillan Press, 1999), p. 108.
[185] M.L. Stapleton, Admired and Understood, (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004) p. 20.
[186] Heidi Laudien ‘From Pastoral to “pastorelle”: A New Context for Reading Aphra Behn, in Apra Behn (1640-1689): Identity, Alterity, Ambiguity, ed. Mary Anne O’Donnel, Bernard Dhuicq, and Guyonne Leduc (Paris: L’Hartmattan, 2000), pp. 91-99.
[187] Jessica Munns, ‘Pastoral and Lyric’ in Derek Hughes and Janet Todd, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004) p. 207.
[188] Isabel Rivers, Classical and Christian Ideas in English Renaissance Poetry, (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1979).
[189] Judith Kegan Gardiner, ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Utopian Longings in Behn’s Lyric Poetry’ in Heidi Hunter, Rereading Aphra Behn, History, Theory and Criticism, (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1993), pp. 82.
[190] Jessica Munns, ‘Pastoral and Lyric’ in Derek Hughes and Janet Todd, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 205- 206.
[191] David Sibley, ed. Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Different in the West’ (London: Routledge, 1995)
[192] Nicole Pohl, Women, Space and Utopia, 1600 – 1800, (Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 1988), p. 2.
[193] Aphra Behn, ‘The Golden Age’ in Poems upon Several Occasions Age’<http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/search/fulltext?ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000112710530000&SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&WARN=N&FILE=../session/1436451680_14774> (accessed 9 July 2015), VII. 3-5.
[194] Ibid VII.1.
[195] M.L. Stapleton, Admired and Understood, (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004) p. 49.
[196] M.L. Stapleton, Admired and Understood, (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004)p. 49.
[197] Jessica Munns, ‘Pleasure, Power and Impotence’ in Derek Hughes and Janet Todd, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004) p. 92.
[198] Aphra Behn, ‘The Golden Age’ in Poems upon Several Occasions, <http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/search/fulltext?ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000112710530000&SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&WARN=N&FILE=../session/1436451680_14774> (accessed 9 July 2015), I. 1-4.
[199]Ibid III. 1-2.
[200] Ibid III. 3-4.
[201] Ibid III. 14.
[202] Ibid III. 16 – 17.
[203] Elizabeth V. Young, ‘Aphra Behn, Gender and Pastoral’ in Studies in English Literature, 1500 – 1900, 33:3 (1993), p. 540.
[204] Aphra Behn, ‘The Golden Age’ in Poems upon Several Occasions, <http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/search/fulltext?ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000112710530000&SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&WARN=N&FILE=../session/1436451680_14774> (accessed 9 July 2015), IV. 1.
[205] Ibid IV. 3.
[206] Aphra Behn, ‘The Golden Age’ in Poems upon Several Occasions, <http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/search/fulltext?ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000112710530000&SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&WARN=N&FILE=../session/1436451680_14774> (accessed 9 July 2015)V. 3.
[207] Ibid X. i-ii
[208] Aphra Behn, ‘The Golden Age’ in Poems upon Several Occasions, <http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/search/fulltext?ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000112710530000&SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&WARN=N&FILE=../session/1436451680_14774> (accessed 9 July 2015), X, iii – viii
[209]Ibid X.
[210] Aphra Behn, ‘ On a Juniper-Tree, cut down to make Busks’ in Poems upon Several Occasions, <http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/search/fulltext?ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000112710530000&SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&WARN=N&FILE=../session/1436451680_14774> (accessed 1 August 2015).
[211] Ibid
[212] Ibid
[213] Aphra Behn, ‘A Ballard on Mr. J.H. to Amoret, asking why I was so sad’ in Poems upon Several Occasions, <http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/search/fulltext?ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000112710530000&SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&WARN=N&FILE=../session/1436451680_14774> (accessed 1 August 2015)
[214] Elizabeth V. Young, ‘Aphra Behn, Gender and Pastoral’ in Studies in English Literature, 1500 – 1900, 33:3 (1993), p. 526.
[215] Aphra Behn, ‘ On a Juniper-Tree, cut down to make Busks’ in Poems upon Several Occasions, <http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/search/fulltext?ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000112710530000&SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&WARN=N&FILE=../session/1436451680_14774> (accessed 1 August 2015).
[216] Elizabeth V. Young, ‘Aphra Behn, Gender and Pastoral’ in Studies in English Literature, 1500 – 1900, 33:3 (1993), p. 527.
[217] Aphra Behn, ‘A Ballard on Mr. J.H. to Amoret, asking why I was so sad’ in Poems upon Several Occasions, <http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/search/fulltext?ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000112710530000&SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&WARN=N&FILE=../session/1436451680_14774> (accessed 1 August 2015)
[218] Ibid.
[219] Ibid.
[220] Aphra Behn, ‘ On a Juniper-Tree, cut down to make Busks’ in Poems upon Several Occasions, <http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/search/fulltext?ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000112710530000&SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&WARN=N&FILE=../session/1436451680_14774> (accessed 1 August 2015).
[221] Elizabeth V. Young, ‘Aphra Behn, Gender and Pastoral’ in Studies in English Literature, 1500 – 1900, 33:3 (1993), p. 526.
[222] Aphra Behn, ‘ On a Juniper-Tree, cut down to make Busks’ in Poems upon Several Occasions, <http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/search/fulltext?ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000112710530000&SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&WARN=N&FILE=../session/1436451680_14774> (accessed 1 August 2015).
[223] Ibid.
[224] Ibid.
[225] Aphra Behn, ‘ The Willing Mistriss’ in Poems upon Several Occasions, <http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/search/fulltext?ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000112710530000&SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&WARN=N&FILE=../session/1436451680_14774> (accessed 1 August 2015).
[226] Aphra Behn, ‘ On a Juniper-Tree, cut down to make Busks’ in Poems upon Several Occasions, <http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/search/fulltext?ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000112710530000&SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&WARN=N&FILE=../session/1436451680_14774> (accessed 1 August 2015).
[227] Ibid.
[228] Ibid.
[229] Aphra Behn ‘Song’ quoted in Bernard Duyfhuizen ‘“That Which I Dare not Name”: Aphra Behn’s “The Willing Mistress”’, ELD, 58:2, (1991), p. 73.
[230] Lord Alfred Douglas, Two Loves, [http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/two-loves](accessed 6 August 2015)
[231] Bernard Duyfhuizen ‘“That Which I Dare not Name”: Aphra Behn’s “The Willing Mistress”’, ELD, 58:2, (1991), p. 76.
[232] Aphra Behn, ‘The Willing Mistriss’ in Poems upon Several Occasions, <http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/search/fulltext?ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000112710530000&SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&WARN=N&FILE=../session/1436451680_14774> (accessed 1 August 2015)
[233] Angeline Goreau, ‘Aphra Behn: A Scandal to Modesty’, Feminist Theorists: Three Centuries of Key Women Thinkers, ed. Dale Spender, (New York: Pantheon, 1983), pp. 19-20.
[234] Bernard Duyfhuizen ‘“That Which I Dare not Name”: Aphra Behn’s “The Willing Mistress”’, ELD, 58:2, (1991), p. 64.
[235] Aphra Behn, ‘A Ballard on Mr. J.H. to Amoret, asking why I was so sad’ in Poems upon Several Occasions, <http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/search/fulltext?ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000112710530000&SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&WARN=N&FILE=../session/1436451680_14774> (accessed 1 August 2015), I.i.
[236] Ibid I, iii-iv.
[237] Janet, Dodd, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn, (London: Andre Deutsch Ltd, 1996)
[238] Aphra Behn, ‘A Ballard on Mr. J.H. to Amoret, asking why I was so sad’ in Poems upon Several Occasions, <http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/search/fulltext?ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000112710530000&SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&WARN=N&FILE=../session/1436451680_14774> (accessed 1 August 2015) IV, I-i.
[239] Aphra Behn, ‘A Ballard on Mr. J.H. to Amoret, asking why I was so sad’ in Poems upon Several Occasions, <http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/search/fulltext?ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000112710530000&SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&WARN=N&FILE=../session/1436451680_14774> (accessed 1 August 2015) IV, X-iv.
[240] Aphra Behn, ‘A Ballard on Mr. J.H. to Amoret, asking why I was so sad’ in Poems upon Several Occasions, <http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/search/fulltext?ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000112710530000&SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&WARN=N&FILE=../session/1436451680_14774> (accessed 1 August 2015) III, i.
[241] Ibid IV, i.
[242] Janet, Dodd, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn, (London: Andre Deutsch Ltd, 1996)
[243] Young, Elizabeth V., ‘Aphra Behn, Gender and Pastoral’ in Studies in English Literature, 1500 – 1900, 33:3 (1993), p. 541.
[244] Aphra Behn, ‘My dear Amoret, Mris. B.’ in Poems upon Several Occasions, <http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/search/fulltext?ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000112710530000&SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&WARN=N&FILE=../session/1436451680_14774> (accessed 6 August 2015), i.
[245] Ibid xvi.
[246] Aphra Behn, ‘My dear Amoret, Mris. B.’ in Poems upon Several Occasions, <http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/search/fulltext?ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000112710530000&SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&WARN=N&FILE=../session/1436451680_14774> (accessed 6 August 2015)
[247] Duffy, Maureen, The Passionate Shepherdess, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977), p. 125.
[248] Janet, Dodd, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn, (London: Andre Deutsch Ltd, 1996), p. 174.
[249] Aphra Behn, ‘ Mr. J.H.’ in Poems upon Several Occasions, <http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/search/fulltext?ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000112710530000&SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&WARN=N&FILE=../session/1436451680_14774> (accessed 6 August 2015), I.vii.
[250] Ibid I.iv.
[251] Aphra Behn, ‘Mr. Ed. Bed.’ in Poems upon Several Occasions, <http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/search/fulltext?ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000112710530000&SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&WARN=N&FILE=../session/1436451680_14774> (accessed 10 August 2015)
[252] Ibid
[253] Aphra Behn, ‘Mr. Ed. Bed.’ in Poems upon Several Occasions, <http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/search/fulltext?ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000112710530000&SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&WARN=N&FILE=../session/1436451680_14774> (accessed 10 August 2015)
[254] Janet, Dodd, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn, (London: Andre Deutsch Ltd, 1996), p. 184.
[255] Warren, Chernaik, Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 211.
[256] Aphra Behn, ‘Love Arm’d’ in Poems upon Several Occasions, <http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/search/fulltext?ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000112710530000&SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&WARN=N&FILE=../session/1436451680_14774> (accessed 10 August 2015)
[257] Judith Kegan Gardiner, ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Utopian Longings in Behn’s Lyric Poetry’ in Heidi Hunter, Rereading Aphra Behn, History, Theory and Criticism, (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1993), p. 277.
[258] Aphra Behn, ‘Love Arm’d.’ in Poems upon Several Occasions, <http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/search/fulltext?ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000112710530000&SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&WARN=N&FILE=../session/1436451680_14774> (accessed 10 August 2015)
[259] Ruth Salvaggio ‘Aphra Behn’s Love’, Heidi Hunter, Rereading Aphra Behn: History, Theory and Criticism, (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1993)
[260] Aphra Behn, ‘Love Arm’d.’ in Poems upon Several Occasions, <http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/search/fulltext?ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000112710530000&SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&WARN=N&FILE=../session/1436451680_14774> (accessed 10 August 2015)
[261] Judith Kegan Gardiner, ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Utopian Longings in Behn’s Lyric Poetry’ in Heidi Hunter, Rereading Aphra Behn, History, Theory and Criticism, (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1993), p. 277.
[262] Behn, Aphra, ‘The Disappointment’ in Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works (London: Penguin Books, 1992), I.ii, p. 331.
[263] Behn, Aphra, ‘The Disappointment’ in Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works (London: Penguin Books, 1992), I.iv, p. 331.
[264] Ibid p. 331.
[265] Ibid II.iv, p. 331.
[266] Ibid II.x, p. 331.
[267] Ibid II.viii, p. 331.
[268] Ibid II, p. 331.
[269] Ibid III.ii, p. 331.
[270] Ibid III.v – viii, p. 331.
[271]Behn, Aphra, ‘The Disappointment’ in Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works (London: Penguin Books, 1992), VI.ii – iii, p. 331.
[272] Ibid VII.vii, p. 331.
[273] Ibid p. 331.
[274] Ibid IX. ix, p. 331.
[275] Ibid XII.ii, p. 331.
[276] Ibid XII.x, p. 331.
[277] Jessica Munns, ‘Pastoral and Lyric’ in Derek Hughes and Janet Todd, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 214.
[278] Judith Kegan Gardiner, ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Utopian Longings in Behn’s Lyric Poetry’ in Heidi Hunter, Rereading Aphra Behn, History, Theory and Criticism, (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1993), pp. 275 – 276.
[279] For example The Imperfect Enjoyment by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester and The Lost Opportunity Recovered, anonymous.
[280] The Dissapointment was Behn’s re-writing of de Cantenac’s (1661) poem Sur un impuissance.
[281] Aphra Behn, ‘On Desire’, in Aphra Behn: Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works (London: Penguin Books, 1992), XII. x – xi (p. 346).
[282] Ibid XI. iii – xi (p. 346).
[283] Ibid X.vii (p. 346).
[284]Aphra Behn, ‘The Golden Age’ in Poems upon Several Occasions, <http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/search/fulltext?ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000112710530000&SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&WARN=N&FILE=../session/1436451680_14774> (accessed 9 July 2015), XIV. i – ii (p. 347).
[285] Dorothy Mermin, ‘Women Becoming Poets: Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, Anne Finch’, ELH 57:2 (1990), p. 335.
[286] Ibid p. 335.
[287] Harriette Andreadis,, Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics 1550 -1714, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 127.
[288] Ibid p. 127.
[289] Ibid p. 127.
[290] Ibid p. 127.
[291] Anne Finch, Friendship between Ephelia and Ardelia, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/180926 (accessed 18 August 2015).
[292] Dorothy Mermin, ‘Women Becoming Poets: Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, Anne Finch’, ELH 57:2 (1990), p. 346.
[293] Andreadis, Harriette, Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics 1550 -1714, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), p.128
[294] Anne Finch, The White Mouses Petition to Lamira the Right Hon:ble The Lady Ann Tufton now Countess of Salisbury,<https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=5t4FiyE0fQcC&pg=PA62&lpg=PA62&dq=The+white+mouses+petition&source=bl&ots=VJlX2sx6re&sig=ETAyd545EetJGLmUrAZONNTLHUc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CEYQ6AEwBWoVChMIp8v5ov_IxwIVxjTbCh3vYAza#v=onepage&q=The%20white%20mouses%20petition&f=false> (accessed 19 August 2015).
[295] Ibid.
[296] Anne Finch, The Bird and the Arras, <digital.library.upenn.edu/women/finch/1903/fa-arras.html> (accessed 19 August 2015).
[297] Ibid
[298] Andreadis, Harriette, Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics 1550 -1714, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), p.16.
[299] Paul Salzman, ‘Prose Fiction’ in Anita Pacheco, ed. A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), p. 315.
[300] Sophie Tomlinson, ‘Drama’ in Anita Pacheco, ed. A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), p. 333.
[301] Delarivier Manley, ‘The Royal Mischief’ in Sophie Tomlinson, ‘Drama’ quoted in Anita Pacheco, ed. A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), p. 333.
[302] David Michael Robinson ‘“For how can they be guilty?”: Lesbian and bisexual women in Manley’s New Atalantis’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 23:2 (2001) p. 188.
[303] Ibid p. 189.
[304] Louis Montrose quoted in Jane E.Howard, ‘the New Historicism in Renaissance Studies, English Literary Renaissance, 16:1 (1986), p. 32-33.
[305] Harriette Andeadis, Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics 1550 -1714, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), p127.
[306] Valerie Traub, ‘The Present future of Lesbian Historioraphy’ in George, E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry, Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Studies, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), p. 131.
[307] Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian (Colombia: Colombia University Press, 1993), p. 4.
[308] Elizabeth Susan Wahl, Invisible Relations: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 6.
[309] Susan Staves, ‘Women and Society’ in Derek Hughes and Janet Todd, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p.21.
[310] Harriette Andeadis, Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics 1550 -1714, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 127.Harriette, Harriet, Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics 1550 -1714, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 103.
[311] Elizabeth Susan Wahl, Invisible Relations: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 42.
[312] Ibid p. 44.
[313] Aphra Behn, ‘To the fair Clarinda who made love to me, imagin’d more than Woman’, in Aphra Behn: Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works (London: Penguin Books, 1992), l. 15 (p. 343).
[314] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), p.41.
[315] Simone de Beauvior, The Second Sex, trans. E.M. Parshley, (New York: Vintage, 1973), p.301.