Precis Critique of Aphra Behn's "The Rover"

Abstract or Introduction

Anita Pacheco’s 1998 article “Rape and the Female Subject in Aphra Behn’s The Rover” uses “the central role which rape plays in… struggles to escape patriarchal devaluation” by female characters in The Rover as its thesis. (Pacheco 323)Pacheco holds that rape psychology was endemic in the dramatic conventions of the Restoration, and the objectified status of women made rape acutely likely absent the protection of a male protector. (323) Though during this period in history the legal definition of rape was in transition from a property crime against men to a personal crime against a woman, studies show that prosecutions were infrequent and usually against lower class men who violated young upper class girls. (Pacheco 324)
The biggest weakness in Pacheco’s supporting argument is that there was no actual rape in The Rover. A more precise thesis would have been that the nebulous, but ever-present threat of rape buttressed patriarchal dominance: it was from this threat that fathers and brothers achieved the authority to protect, and gallants achieved the authority to protect upper class women from violations from members of the lower class. Of course, the actual possibility of rape was a necessary component of this power, and, as we see in The Rover when Don Pedro is willing to participate in a gang rape of masked Florinda, patriarchal society meant that a man could be both protector and predator. (This is one reason Hellena is not concerned by Willmore’s attempted rape of her sister on multiple occasions.) Class lines and possession by a suitably high-ranking male is what afforded a woman protection from this threat, though, as Pacheco pointedly observes, “none of the male characters, Belvile included, can invariably tell ladies from whores.” (Pacheco 333) To this writer, most of the characters in the play are cartoonishly infantile, something that Pacheco doesn’t mention in her analysis.