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Women In Aphra Behn's 'The Rover'

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Aphra Behn’s play “The Rover”, was performed in 1677, it talks of double standard treatment which disadvantaged her female colleagues’ sexual desires towards the realm of the convent, home or brothel. Her characters express a complicated, active game needed out of women to secure personal happiness. In the play, the writer suggests the manner in which women should either astray or not astray to the masculine tasks of the wooer and possessor. Behn seems to cry over the Late Stuart society, for not giving women an opportunity to be libertine or sexually free.
Behn points out the way the Commonwealth did little to suspend the religious and political tensions that impacted the conception of womanhood in modern Britain. Women were subjected to the obedience to their husband by many Biblical verses [Hughes 295]. From the biblical accounts, the act of God assigning the woman light job …show more content…

The three women presented in ‘The Rover’ are proactive and capable of daring to challenge the oppressors, over the play each one of them presented to be in a position of an active wooer. Hellena on her vows in the open that she will not take the same course of submitting to men while they are not giving back the same treatment to him, she says that she want to love but at the same time to be loved by her husband. The other two women [Angellica Bianca and the virginal sister to Hellena] set the similar goals to those of Hellena, and to pursue them with a lot of passion. Through the way these women portray their aggressiveness to do what men can do; Behn expresses the notion that women have a lot of potential that can be exploited if only they can be given an opportunity. Women can act confidently on sexuality feelings, thus indicating that they can be subverting construct and DE masculinizing desire of women as passive and self-policing

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