A
CRITICAL EDITION
of

"To the Fair Clarinda"
by
Aphra Behn
 

Submitted by
T. Lynn Dickman
English 655

Dr. R. Kent-Drury

Poem

To the Fair Clarinda

Who made love to me
Imagin'd more than woman

 
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.
This last will justifie my soft complaint,1
While that may serve to lessen my constraint;
And without Blushes I the Youth persue,
When so much beauteous Woman is in view,
Against thy Charmes we struggle but in vain
With thy deluding Form thou giv'st pain,
While the bright Nymph2 betrays us to the Swain.
In pity to our Sex sure thou wer't sent,
That we might Love and yet be Innocent:
For sure no crime with thee we can commit;
Or if we should--thy Form excuses it.
For who that gathers fairest Flowers believes
A snake lies hid beneath the Fragrant Leaves.3

Though beauteous Wonder of a different kind,
Soft Cloris with the dear Alexis4 join'd;
When e'er the Manly part of thee would plead
Though tempts us with the Image of the Maid,
While we the noblest Passions do extend
The Love to Hermes, Aphrodite the Friend.5

--Aphra Behn


Notes:
1The word complaint in this 17th/18th century context refers to a poem about unhappy love; a lament.
2Nymph--in Greek mythology, any of a group of minor nature goddesses, represented as beautiful maidens living in rivers, trees, etc.
3Swain--a young, rustic, country lover; usually male.
4The snake is often an allusion to a penis in Behn's erotic poetry (Todd).
5Hermaphroditus--The name given to all people with both masculine and feminine qualities (physical organs) and more particularly applied to a son of Aphrodite and Hermes. "Hermaphroditus was raised by nymphs in Phrygia. He was remarkably handsome. One day he was walking by a lake when the nymph of the lake fell in love with him. She made advances which the young man rebuffed. Hermaphroditus was attracted to the clear water and so undressed himself and jumped into the lake. Salmacis prayed to the gods that they should never be separated. The gods granted that wish and fused them into one body" (Tuccinardi).


Biographical Background

The relative mystery that surrounds Aphra Behn's life begins with the circumstances of her birth:
Her most recent biographer, Angeline Goreau, convincingly speculates (using circumstantial evidence) that most likely she was born Aphra Johnson and was the (so called) 'illegitimate daughter of Lady Willoughby, the wife of Lord Willoughby, founder and Governor of the colony of Surinam in South America" (Ferguson 143).
Literary critic Sara Mendelson offers a slightly altered version of this assertion, suggesting that Behn's father was offered a post in Surinam because of his relationship with Lord Willoughby (118). Other chronologies of her life assert that she was the second daughter of Bartholomew Johnson and Elizabeth Denham, born and baptized at Harbledown outside of Canterbury. While biographers even leave a question mark in the space of her birth or death dates, most identify the year of her birth as 1640 and the year of her death as 1689.

Other aspects of her biography, on which most biographers agree, are that she acquired an education in her childhood, and that, sometime in her early 20's, she "accompanied her family to the English colony of Surinam, which provided the setting for her novel Oroonoko, which she set down a quarter of a century later" (Mendelson 118). She returned to England around 1660 and married a merchant named Behn (about whom little is known), but was widowed in a mere three years after her marriage. In the meantime she had entered the court circles and was employed as a spy at Antwerp for King Charles II in the war against the Dutch. She provided political and naval information to the English government, but was paid very little or not at all, and on her return to England was imprisoned briefly for debt:

When she got out she began to write at first "for bread," but soon made it clear that she was writing not only for money but for fame and also to fulfille what she called 'my masculine part, the poet in me,' clearly asserting her rights as an artist despite her gender (website, Sign of Angelica).
She insisted that the pen had no gender, that there was no topic that was not appropriate for a woman.

"To the Fair Clarinda" is important in its representation of her writings as

"they often explore the question of desire--who wants what and why and what keeps them from it--and often from the female point of view....She was not interested in modesty or timidity and during her career tackled several genres with equal ease" (website, Sign of Angelica).
As Jane Spencer writes,
One aspect of Behn that attracts a good deal of attention is the sheer scale of her professional success. Her eighteen plus plays, performed throughout the 1670's and 1680's, make her one of the most prolific Restoration dramatists. Her longest novel, the three part Love-Letters, inaugurated the scandal-novel in England. Her shorter stories became extremely popular after her death. She published a variety of poems and translations and attempted the role of court poet, producing Stuart panegyrics. Her third-night payments, book-sellers fees and   patronage obtained through dedications did not bring her a good living, but they seem to have been her main support for a number of years (Spencer 4).
Aphra Behn was not the first woman writer; neither was she the only woman writer of her day, but she holds the distinction of being the first professional woman writer in the English language, "the first female dramatist to forge a niche in the theater and one of the first to violate traditional expectations about women's secondary status and sexual inactivity or reticence" (Ferguson 144). Behn "earned a permanent place in the feminist pantheon" (Ferguson 144), and she "died as she had lived--a new woman, longing for an imaginary past golden age where to be a public woman was not to be a whore, but to be a hero and a poet" (Gardiner 296). Aphra Behn died on 16 April 1689 and was buried in Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Social Context

Legitimate critique of any work of literature requires some recognition of the historical and social context in which it was written. Aphra Behn's "To the Fair Clarinda" is a poem that originates in and points to an unique time in British history, a time when attitudes and ideas about everything from politics to human sexuality were being stretched, explored and questioned by bold thinkers of the age. "To the Fair Clarinda" takes as its subject a woman's passion for another woman and, by alluding tot he hermaphroditic nature of Clarinda, stretches customary notions about gender identity, making Behn's poem a daring and important one in eighteenth-century literature.

In "To the Fair Clarinda," the female speaker speaks to another woman extolling the virtues of her beauty and form. The speaker admits to "struggling in vain" against the "charms" of another woman and admits to being tempted "with the Image of the Maid." Donoghue points out that today "passionate love between women is seen by some as a minority lifestyle, by others as a stigma, and still others as a crime (xxv); consequently, it is important to put Behn's poem in the social, sexual context of its own day. In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, "upper and middle class women lived fairly separate lives from their men and were encouraged to devote much of their time and energy to loving--and celebrating in letters and poems--their female friends. Such love was generally assumed to be a serious emotional partnership, sincere, unselfish, loyal, physically affectionate but not sexual, and conducive to piety and good works ...Many historians use the phrase 'romantic friendships' to imply that these extremely common pairings were non-sexual affections that had nothing at all in common with the contemporary concept of lesbianism" (Donoghue xxv-xxvi). While Behn's poem may seem, to the contemporary reader, a risque portrayal of love between two women, in this historical context Behn's poem is, to a great degree, in its element and may have raised fewer eyebrows amongst 18th-century readers than it would today.

On the other hand,

"awareness of woman to woman sexual practices circulated (the era) in a subterranean way. Working class women, women who dressed or behaved like men, actresses, prostitutes, artists, writers, aristocrats, royalty or any woman with too much power could fall under the suspicion of indulging in what a 1736 poem by William King called 'Lesbian loves' " (Donoghue xxv).
And while, according to Donoghue, female writers of this day were not anxious to jeopardize their respectability by risking discussion of such subjects, Aphra Behn was clearly aware of the sexual possibilities between women (xxviii). In this context it is clearly not legitimate to assume that Behn's "To the Fair Clarinda" is a purely innocent poem about a platonic female 'romantic friendship.'

A second important context in which to consider "To the Fair Clarinda" is that of 18th-century notions about gender roles and identity. Behn's poem, which clearly suggests either a figurative or literal hermaphrodite as the object of the speaker's affections, makes it necessary to consider the 18th-century mindset about what defined a man and what defined a woman:

Social roles were clearly distinguished by gender: women's jobs included child care, cooking, dressmaking, brewing beer, making butter, housekeeping and bartending; men's jobs included politics, military service, priesthood, secretarial work, fishing and hunting, and other forms of hard labor" (website General Assumptions).
Perhaps less important than this established hierarchy of gender in the 18th-century mind is what appears to be the rigid notions of distinction between the sexes. In this context, the allusion to "hermaphrodite" in Behn's poem is an apparent pushing of the boundaries, a bold venture outside the lines of what most readers could appreciate, tolerate, or even recognize. The "Cloris with the dear Alexis joined," "the Beauteous Wonder of a different kind" of which Behn speaks would seemingly be well beyond what her 18th-century reader could comprehend.

Putting the poem in a more fully accurate context, though, requires recognizing that 18th-century thinkers were perhaps not as frozen in the polarized notions of male and female as one would think. Fascinations in the day with "human oddities" such as Siamese twins, criminal behavior, and "monstrous births" may mark a time when the British reader had potential to imagine the "Fair lovely Maid," with the "Manly part" so much admired by the speaker in the poem. Surprisingly, many people in the day

"believed that spontaneous sex change was possible: stories floated around about women who had fallen off horses or suffered other sudden physical shocks, whose vaginas had turned inside out and become penises. They did, also believe, perhaps with a purely voyeuristic fascination, in the existence of hermaphrodites (website General Assumptions).
Behn's poems, which has, itself, been called "ambiguous" in terms of its sexual content, seems to emerge from an 18th-century sexual mentality that had its ambiguities as well.

Review of Criticism

In her critical article "Aphra Behn, Gender, and Pastoral," author Elizabeth Young calls "To the Fair Clarinda" a "wonderfully ambiguous poem" (539). Her assessment seems a fair one of a poem that can be considered from so many different vantage points. Critique of "To the Fair Clarinda" ranges through a variety of perspectives. Critical literature considers its nature as a semi-pastoral poem, recalling the virtuous past and longing for an ideal time gone by when beauty and innocence were untainted. A larger body of critical study focuses on the poem as "a longing for reciprocity in a world in which men and women hold unequal power (Gardiner 277). Often, these same scholars overlap their "reciprocity" criticism with scrutiny of Behn's own sexual orientation and view the poem as one that is evidence of her Lesbianism or bisexuality, or desire to acknowledge and have acknowledged the "masculine part" of herself. Still others employ the poem to place their main focus on this question of Behn's sexuality. Clearly, from whatever vantage point, Behn's "To the Fair Clarinda" is an artful poem which defies simple interpretation. For a woman and writer like Behn who clearly never appreciated oversimplifications of the world's complexities, the "defiant nature" of "To the Fair Clarinda" is not only not surprising, but also a perfect trademark.

The semi-pastoral nature of the poem is at first evident in its title. The name "Clarinda," a common shepherdess name, like the Lucasias, Ardelias, and Clorissas of pastoral poetry, establishes for the reader a sense of the earthy, rustic realm of pastoral poetry. Clarinda's "fairness" (also established in the title), which ultimately takes on many layers of meaning in the poem, initially reminds the reader of the fair, serene, ideal world of the "pastoral" past. Throughout the poem other images of the "fairest flowers," the "fragrant leaves," the "soft Cloris," and "dear Alexis" (other common shepherd/sheperdess names) draw the reader into a pastoral mood and setting, even as that setting does not become the central point or focus of the poem. Elizabeth Young suggests that while the poem is not purely pastoral, "it makes use of the pastoral setting to integrate Behn's vision of an ideal world with her realistic assessment of the world in which she lives" (539). Judith Kegan Gardiner tells us that pastoral settings (in Restoration literature) were important to women writers because they "reformulated social class" by setting the ideal world in the lowest class of rural society and masking the class imbalances of contemporary society (282). Behn's poem seems to borrow the pastoral scene for the setting of "To the Fair Clarinda" as a backdrop to her commentary on the gender inequality of her own contemporary scene.

Gardiner suggests that Behn's poetry fits well into this scenario, where female writers attempted to comment on "imbalance" by suggesting that "the central dynamic" of "To the Fair Clarinda" is a "longing for reciprocity." In a world where such a call for more equality could not easily or safely be made aloud, Behn's poem couches the call, to some degree, in ambiguity. The poem, which could be "by a man to a woman, a woman to a man, a woman to a woman, one of either sex to a transvestite, or, as the last line suggests, a hermaphrodite" (Todd 381), forges the whole notion of male/female identity and distinction. In this Behn lays the groundwork for a world where equality or "reciprocity" are more possible because they are not thwarted by a debilitating dualism:

At one minute seeming 'a beauteous Woman,' at another Clarinda hides the 'snake' so often the penis in Behn's erotic poetry. She is Cloris and Alexis, manly and maidenly....The final line of the poem, declaring that love is given to Hermes, the female, friendship to Aphrodite, the female, keeps her or him a divided Hermaphrodite (Todd 382).
This makes it impossible for readers to rely on their conventional notions of passive female, active male, who "relate" in one way and one way only. In her androgyny it is "Clarinda's capacity to destroy the binary opposition of gender that most appeals to Behn (Young 539). As Gardiner suggests,
Like male poets erotic and mystic, women writers (of the day) did seek ideal unions. They were much more likely, however, to dwell primarily on reciprocity within the union, perhaps otherwise fearing that in sex and religion as well as in marriage, the one flesh and the one spirit of the joined couple would always be his. For a sense of reciprocity and fluidity some religious women turned to a flexibly gendered God. Secular women writers like Behn and Katherine Phillips instead renamed themselves and other as a way of moving out of their defined social circumstances into new and ideal imaginary communities where they would be equal participants with other artists, lovers, and friends (287).
"To the Fair Clarinda" creates an almost surreal world where passion is passion, unhindered by gender limitation. Androgyny enables the lover and the loved to experience a purity of passion that could clearly reflect a world Behn longed for where that same purity carried over into all social/sexual human experience.

In her comprehensive work The Secret Life of Aphra Behn, Janet Todd asserts that Aphra Behn "had always found androgynous people especially seductive" (161), in a commentary that shifts a critical discussion of Behn's work into ways in which it reveals aspects of Behn's personal experience. In that context, "To the Fair Clarinda" is sometimes considered in terms of what it says about Behn's own personal experience and sense of herself. The 18th-century feminine ideals of modesty, chastity, obedience, and silence were deeply ingrained in Restoration culture. The various facets of Behn's life (her occupations, her writing, her relative independence from men) represent an inversion of these ideals. "Instead of modesty, she was known for confidence or impudence and her ambition for a 'masculine fame' " (Mendelson 182). In her 1686 preface to "The Luckey Chance," Behn wrote, "All I ask, is the privilege for the masculine part, the poet in me....If I must not, because of my sex, have this freedom....I lay down my quill and you shall hear no more of me." Janet Todd suggests that

Behn wanted 'Fame' in the masculine term of glory, not the feminine one of goodness, chastity and modesty, yet she also wanted to play at being a 'defenseless' woman. She both accepted the gender divide of the time that made wit and poetry mainly masculine in the context of what a man was and could do, and mocked it when she declared that she, a woman, wanted to be a man, a hero, and display her masculine part. Only with such "hermaphroditic maneuvers" (such as the one she employs in "To the Fair Clarinda") could Behn be treated fairly (362).
Only with the kind of ambiguity she achieves in the poem could Behn become simultaneously female, male, genderless, and cross-gendered.

Brief critical references here and there attempt to simplify this complexity by implying that the poem establishes Behn's lesbianism or bisexuality. Biographer and critic Maureen Duffy says that "To the Fair Clarinda," and other Behn poems such as "Lycidus," are clear evidence of strong homosexual interest at least in the last few years of her life" (Duffy 285). In the end, though, it seems that the ambiguity of the poem itself disables any critic from really using it to categorically label Aphra Behn with any of the social/sexual terminology we use today. Even the most cursory look into Behn's life would suggest that she would very much like that.

 


Works Cited

"The Incomparable Astraea: An Introduction to Aphra Behn." http://www.sukipot.com/angellica/.The Sign of Angelica. 2001. 8/02/01.

"Some General Assumptions British People Make About Gender Roles and Human Sexuality: 1660-1800, Compared to Our Own." http://www.stfx.ca/people/ndidche/sex.html. 2000. 8/02/01.

Donoghue, Emma. Poems Between Women. New York: Columbia UP, 1997.

Duffy, Maureen. The Passionate Shepherdess. London: Methuen, 1977.

Ferguson, Moira. First Feminists: British Women Writers, 1578-1799. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985.

Gardiner, Judith Kegan. "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Utopian Longings in Behn's Lyric Poetry." Rereading Aphra Behn: History, Theory, Criticism. Ed. Heidi Hutner. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1993. 273-300.

Mendelson, Sara Heller. The Mental World of Stuart Women: Three Studies. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1987.

Spencer, Jane. Aphra Behn's Afterlife. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.

Todd, Jane. The Secret Life of Aphra Behn. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1996.

Young, Elizabeth. "Aphra Behn, Gender, and Pastoral."