Domesticity, Patriarchy, and Rebellion: Female Characters in The Rover Adiptya Mukherjee College

Charles-II’s restoration to England’s throne in 1660, marked the theatres’ reopening, earlier closed by the Puritan Government. The middle-class and the poor stopped visiting theatres, owing to its immorality and unaffordability, respectively. The aristocracy, being not inclined towards realistic theatres of socio-political injustice, emerged the “Restoration Comedy of Manners”, based on the aristocracy’s manners and follies. Known as “the incomparable Astrea”, Aphra Behn (1640-89), with seventeen plays, comprising The Forced Marriage (1670), Abdelazer (1676), among others, was one of the most productive playwrights of the Restoration Era. Her literature portrays the bold depictions of women’s sexual desires, surpassing the Restoration theatre’s eroticism, leading to her “poetic talent”, as Jane Spencer states, being “masculine”, suggesting the crude inclination towards the “bawdy”, associated with her male contemporaries like, Wycherley and Etherege, a probable “weapon”, challenging patriarchy, but also her imagination’s “negative trait”, in uncritically assimilating the market trend.

Based on Thomas Killigrew’s Thomaso, or the Wanderer, Behn’s The Rover, or, the Banish’d Cavaliers, premiering in Duke’s Theatre, Dorset...