Problematizing the Pastoral
Although pastoral poetry frequently sees a man pursing his passionate and often licentious love for a woman, that love tends to be singularly aimed. What happens to the genre of the pastoral lyric when the poet obfuscates the speaker’s gender and introduces two lovers? Aphra Behn’s “On Her Loving Two Equally” suggests that the answer is layered with confusion. In some ways, Behn plays with the pastoral genre through narrative, sowing uncertainty in both the speaker and the reader. Because she expects her Renaissance readers to recognize that her poetry stems from the pastoral tradition, Behn sets the readerly expectations that her poem will be about love, pursuit, and passion from a man to a woman. These expectations are shattered though as she immediately departs from generic expectations.
By introducing two lovers at the start of the poem, Behn’s speaker immediately carves out a new space in which the pastoral genre might operate. With just the title, conventions are flipped; the speaker is a woman and not a man, and what’s more, she loves two men, not just one. Now operating in what was once a conventionally masculine space, “On Her Loving Two Equally” becomes a question of genre itself. How does the pastoral genre work if the speaker is no longer a man bent on the conquest of a single woman, but rather a woman attempting to give her love, equally, to more than one man? Instead of writing about love, pursuit, passion, and gain, Behn answers by writing of uncertainty, difference, and indecisiveness in the face of a love not inscribed within generic or cultural norms.
Celebrating Feminine Desire
A common through line in Aphra Behn’s corpus is the open recognition, acknowledgement, and celebration of feminine sexual desire. Although women were often pursued as the objects of sexual desire by so-called “cavalier men,” the Renaissance was still fully a time of double-standards: women could be pursued but not themselves pursue, and to yield to the desire of a man was often marked as immoral or scandalous. Behn, however, found herself in a unique position. She stands as the first woman in history to have made a career off of her writing, and doing so, found herself within a decidedly masculine career space, a literary marketplace that was rank with misogyny and double standards against women. Remarkably then, Aphra Behn stands out as an empowered woman who positioned herself at the forefront of a certain feminist literature, namely one that celebrates a feminine sexual desire that does not always find itself confined by the borders of heteronormativity.
As a woman speaking in the conventionally masculine lyric tradition, “On Loving Her Two Equally” might be read as a navigation of desire in the face of conquest. Since men were conventionally the pursuers, and women the pursued, it would not common for one woman to have multiple suitors, even if culture dictated that she only chose one. Thus, Behn’s poem ingeniously imagines a woman who wishes to reconcile with her position of being pursued by multiple men with the pressure of choosing just one. She desires both, and attempts to love both equally, and in doing so, provides a model for feminine desire that does not fall strictly within the purview of monogamous heterosexuality.
Doubling/Splitting
In first reading “On Her Loving Two Equally,” one might become inundated by Behn’s clever play with doubling and splitting. In many ways, this is a poem about divisibility and reproduction: Can something as metaphysical and abstract as human love be divided, or is “love,” something that can be reproduced equally? Although the title of the poem wants to answer “both,” the text seems to suggest otherwise. The title wants to double the speaker’s love and then split that double product into two “equally,” but the text shows that the split occurs without a doubling, instead creating a love “divided equally ‘twixt two.” And here enters Behn’s clever double entendre, where “On Loving Her Two Equally,” becomes read as, “On Loving Her TooEqually.” By having two lovers and an inability to double one’s own love, the speaker discovers that she has been spread too thin, torn apart by desire for the other and an inability to decide which lover is best.
