The Carnival Setting

The Rover is set in Naples during carnival time, a period characterized by the inversion of
normal identities and the official order. The carnival setting was used by earlier by
playwrights to build a contrast between the world of exuberance and festivity and, the
oppressive laws and customs. The conversation between Florinda, Hellena and Callis,
centers on the licence and opportunities provided by the Carnival. The young women
including their cousin Valeria decide to join the carnival celebrations, in disguise, dressed
as gypsies. Participation in the carnival, with its masks and anonymity, is not only
celebratory but also provides women with opportunities to escape from patriarchal
authority that continuously imposes its designs on them. Florinda wants to marry her
lover Belvile, as opposed to marrying Don Vincentio or Don Antonio (both marriages
arranged for her by her father and brother, respectively) and Hellena, wants to avoid the
confinement of a nunnery. The disguise gives them opportunities to meet the men they
will marry at the end of the play. Their discourse is also coloured in the language of the
rake heroes as Hellena proclaims, “let’s ramble” (Act 1.i). She is aware that carnival will
also provide her with opportunities of sexual discovery.

The Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) developed the idea of the carnival or the
‘carnivalesque’ in his study of the seventeenth-century prose satirist, Francois Rabelais.
The concept is derived from the practice of medieval carnival when the people would
enjoy a holiday from their labours and in the process ridicule the authorities of church
and state. Carnival was also considered a period of indulgence focusing on the pleasures
of the body vis-à-vis eating, drinking and promiscuous sexual activity. However, it is
debatable as to how far The Rover operates within the carnivalesque mode in the
Bakhtininan sense, since the liberating potential of the carnival for women is repeatedly
thwarted by the attempts made by men to reinstate patriarchal domination and social
authority.

Although the carnival provides women with the freedom to venture outside domestic
captivity, yet in doing so they enter a different system of domination. The city spaces
often manifest the darker side of male license. Willmore describes himself as “a rampant
lion of the forest” (Act 1.ii), and any woman out on the streets during the carnival is
assumed by him to be undoubtedly available for sex. Florinda is raped almost thrice in the
play: the drunken Willmore comes across Florinda when she is waiting for Belvile in the
garden at night and argues that since her garden gate was open, she must have meant to
lure him in (Act 3.v). At this point she is rescued by Belvile and Frederick. Later, in a bid
to escape from her brother she runs into a house where only Blunt is present. He is
bitterly angry at his betrayal by Lucetta, and is determined to beat and rape the next
woman he sees (Act 4.v). Frederick too decides to join Blunt in “matters of revenge that
has double pleasure in it” (84). Florinda tries to prove her identity as a respectable woman
by offering him a diamond ring (a marker of her social status), which makes Frederick
pause, since he does not want to be arrested for raping “a maid of quality” when they only
meant to “ruffle a harlot”. The threat turns into that of a gang-rape in Act 5.i when nearly
all the male characters including Florinda’s brother, Don Pedro, gather in the house and
“draw cuts” to decide who may have her.

What becomes increasingly clear through these “failed” rape attempts on Florida is that
the carnival is not an innocuous escape from the strictures of law, but can transform into a
dark and violent space, as the boundaries between “woman of quality” and “prostitutes”
become blurred. It exposes the sexual double standards by which women are judged by
men. Once the signs which define a woman’s social identity are obliterated, she becomes
an object of male aggression – the prostitute. Interestingly, it is Angellica Bianca, the
famous courtesan who explicitly draws attention to the parallels between the economic

position of the wife and the prostitute. In Act 2.ii, Willmore admonishes her for being
complicit in a system that commodifies love and beauty (37). Angellica retorts by
reminding Willmore that he too is “guilty of the same mercenary crime” and that “when a
lady is proposed to you for a wife, you never ask, how fair, discreet, or virtuous she is, but
what’s her fortune” (38). According to Elin Diamond, The Rover “thematizes the marketing
of women in marriage and prostitution” (519).

Angellica is first mentioned in the play by the cavaliers as the former mistress of the dead
Spanish general who is open for sale (Act 1.ii 24). In Act 2.i her actual appearance is
preceded by her signs, the pictures that advertise her as a commodity. She is looking for a
man rich enough to pay her a thousand crowns a month. Through this representation
Behn highlights the mercenary nature of both – the relationship between courtesan and
protector and that between husband and wife. Angellica’s position allows her a certain
level of agency in choosing her purchaser, unlike the young women in the play who are
denied any voice in their destinies.

Surprisingly, the song heard from Angellica’s chamber before she makes her first
appearance is about a shepherdess Caelia who was “taught” by “kind force… how to yield”
to Damon, an allusion to feminine submission to masculine control (Act 2.i 31). The song
is significant because it shows that any attempt on Angellica’s part to escape from the
economics of prostitution is going to be futile. Her attraction to Willmore is evident when
she recognizes that he has “a power too strong to be resisted” (Act 2.ii 40) and it
encourages her to sidestep the usual exchange of money for sex in favour of free
(romantic) love which Moretta labels the “disease of our sex,” (Act 2.i 29).

While the other characters engage with the licensed transgression of carnival, Angellica
remains outside its scope of action. She tries to achieve a reversal of authority when she
offers herself to Willmore, and also gives him money, believing that she can control the
marketplace. However, after gaining his prize, Willmore shifts his attention to the pursuit
of Hellena, whom he had met in her gypsy disguise, and eventually marries her (for her
wit, fortune and virginity) in spite of his disregard for the institution of marriage,
something he would not do for the prostitute Angellica. Therefore, she inhabits a tragic
space in the play, and her belief that “all men were born my slaves” (Act 5.i 96) is
discovered by her to be just an illusion or “fancied power”. The others are assimilated into
the social order, as the play ends with three marriages, but she remains an outsider and is
ultimately written out of the play before the questions she has raised can be fully
resolved.

Only two women characters manage to exploit the carnivalesque space without putting
themselves in serious danger. One of them is Lucetta, the other prostitute in the play who
robs and humiliates Blunt, and is the polar opposite of Angellica in the play. In fact,
Lucetta’s deception of Blunt corresponds to and is interwoven with Willmore’s subjugation
of Angellica. Blunt, unlike the other cavaliers Blunt is a curious combination of the would-
be gallant or fop, a staple of Restoration comedy and the country fool. He describes
himself as “a dull believing English country fop” (Act 3.iv 55). Fop characters appeared in
many Restoration comedies, including Sir Fopling Flutter in Etherege’s The Man of Mode
(1676) and Behn’s The Town Fopp (1676). As a stock character the fop was laughed at his
unsuccessful attempts to behave like the hero(es) of the play. Blunt being a country
gentleman lacks the urban sophistication and witticisms of his friends. He is easily
flattered and when Lucetta glances his way, he concludes that he must have beauties
which

his “false glass at home did not discover” (Act 1.ii 20). He mistakes Lucetta for a rich wife
who loves him.

The Rover repeatedly draws our attention to the ways in which men exercise control over
women. Women are subjected to various forms of confinement and oppression, whether
inside their houses or outside. However, the Lucetta-Blunt affair reverses the power
politics[i] (even if momentarily so) as she entraps Blunt in her room; he is stripped and
plummeted through a trapdoor into the main sewer. This humiliation enrages Blunt, who is
now ready to unleash his anger and hatred on all women, to be “revenged on one whore
for the sins of another” (Act 4.v 83).

The Restoration hero was lively and quick-witted in conversation and exhibited a certain
level of Hobbesian skepticism, even cynicism in his attitude towards himself and his
fellows. Dale Underwood in his book Etherege and the Seventeenth Century Comedy of
Manners draws a correlation between the ‘Machiavellian hero’ of Elizabethan and
Jacobean drama, and the rake or libertine of the Restoration comedies (76-79).While the
‘Machiavel’ is aware of an absolute, divinely sanctioned standard of morality (which he
vehemently rejects), the Restoration hero reacts against the rigid standards of Puritan
morality. The rake hero exists outside the structures and mores of organized society and
seeks liberty and pleasure. He often critiques the institution of marriage because it
restrains sexuality within its mercenary systems. However, in most comedies, including
The Rover, the heroine manages to convince him to marry her despite his distrust of
marriage as an institution. The political failures and libertine excesses of King Charles II
and the court altered perceptions about the Restoration hero and his representations
became increasingly ambivalent.

Thomaso is set in Madrid, and reflects the cultural milieu in which it had been written. A
sense of honour and brotherhood defines the exiled Cavaliers, and they are represented
as guardians of the political and religious order. Helen Burke[ii] states that the play
unfolds as “a royalist allegorization of the Restoration” wherein Thomaso “assumes his
long deferred leadership role as the husband of the ‘bright Serulina’, the virgin who stands
for the captive nation” (120). Behn is writing after a gap of several years and at a time
when the restored monarchy was being increasingly viewed with suspicion. On the one
hand, she evokes a bygone era with nostalgic distance, and the libertine cavaliers are
romanticized[iii]. But on the other hand she also reveals the injustices directed towards
women through patriarchal codes of male heroism, through an ambivalent portrayal of the
cavalier hero.

This ambivalence is captured through the perspective of the women characters in the play,
especially Hellena, the other woman in the play who manages to successfully negotiate
the dangers of the carnival space. She first appears as a gypsy but later dresses up in
men’s clothes, following the convention of comedies where the heroine adopts a male
disguise. She approaches Willmore and Angellica as a young man and when Angellica asks
her about her whereabouts, she fabricates a story about “a young English Gentleman”
who first seduced and then heartlessly abandoned a young woman” (Act 4.ii) (73). On
hearing the tale Angellica becomes certain that Willmore is the “false man” who has
“charms in every word”. During the course of the play, he does not assume any physical
disguise. His false and seductive language serves as a convincing mask or disguise in the
carnival.
[i] Although she played a leading role in the set-up, the loot is managed by her lover,
Phillipo.

[ii] See Helen M Burke’s essay “The Cavalier Myth” for a detailed comparison drawn
between Killigrew’ Thomaso and Behn’s The Rover

[iii] The central character Willmore became so popular with the audience that Behn wrote
a sequel, The Rover II, in 1681.