Assignment of Paper 110A:Literature of the Elizabethan and Restoration Period
Table of Contents:
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AssignmentDetails:.......................................................................................................3
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Abstract: ..........................................................................................................3
Keywords:..........................................................................................................4
ResearchQuestion:..........................................................................................................4
Hypothesis: ..........................................................................................................4
1.Introduction..........................................................................................................5
2. Theoretical Frameworks: Feminist Materialism and the Economics of Desire ..........................................................................................................6
2.1. Federici's Accumulation and the Control of Women’s Labour..........................................................................................................6
2.2. Fraser's Critiques of Capitalism and Neoliberal Feminism..........................................................................................................7
2.3. The Restoration Marriage Market as a System of Property Transfer..........................................................................................................7
3. The Price of Desire: Angellica Bianca as Commodity and Capital ..........................................................................................................8
3.1. The Material Display of Value (The Picture and the Price)..........................................................................................................8
3.2. Munns on Sexual Options and Economic Realities..........................................................................................................10
3.3. Contrasting Angellica with the Heiress Hellena..........................................................................................................11
4. Precarious Agency: Negotiation within Masculine Circles .........................................................................................................12
4.1. Rahman's Analysis of Agency and Negotiation in Behn's Works.........................................................................................................12
4.2. The Illusion of Choice: Angellica's Free Contract vs. Bellville's Property Rights.........................................................................................................14
4.3. The Instability of "Whore's Bargains".........................................................................................................15
5. The Emotional Economy of The Rover .........................................................................................................16
5.1. The Financial Cost of Love and Betrayal.........................................................................................................16
5.2. Bellville's Debt and the Devaluation of Angellica's Labour.........................................................................................................17
5.3. The Weaponization of Jealousy and Emotion as Leverage.........................................................................................................19
6. The Threat of Devaluation: Age, Competition, and Contingency .........................................................................................................20
6.1. The Courtesan’s Finite Career and Lack of Futurity.........................................................................................................20
6.2. The Symbolic Role of the Mask and Public Identity.........................................................................................................22
6.3. Angellica's Return to the Market vs. Hellena's Exit to Marriage.........................................................................................................23
7. The Play's Conclusion: Agency Exhausted and the Return to Precarity .........................................................................................................24
7.1. The Failed Act of Violence and Loss of Control (The Pistol Scene)..........................................................................................................24
7.2. Bellville's Exit and the Re-establishment of the Patriarchal Order.........................................................................................................26
7.3. The Restoration of the Marriage Plot as Capitalist Resolution.........................................................................................................27
8. Comparative Analysis: Materialist Readings of Women in The Rover .........................................................................................................28
8.1. Florinda's Exchange Value vs. Angellica's Use Value.........................................................................................................28
8.2. The Social Marginalization of Sex Work in the Neapolitan Festival.........................................................................................................30
8.3. Behn's Critique and its Legacy for Feminist Materialism.........................................................................................................31
9.Conclusion.................................................................................................32
References:.................................................................................................34
Academic Details:
The following information—numbers are counted using QuillBot:
Abstract:
This paper employs the methodology of feminist materialism to analyze the economic underpinnings of female agency in Aphra Behn's Restoration comedy, The Rover (1677), focusing specifically on the courtesan Angellica Bianca. Drawing upon the theoretical insights of Silvia Federici and Nancy Fraser, this study argues that Angellica Bianca's perceived sexual agency is fundamentally precarious, rooted not in genuine autonomy but in her commodification as a high-value productive laborer within an otherwise exclusionary patriarchal economy—the marriage market. The analysis contrasts Angellica's transactional "whore's bargain," which grants immediate liquidity but no long-term capital, with the systemic property-based exchanges of the marriage plot involving Florinda and Hellena. Critiques from Jessica Munns and Tasneem Rahman on women's options and the negotiation of masculine circles are integrated to demonstrate that Angellica’s financial success is inversely proportional to her social security and futurity. Ultimately, the paper concludes that Behn's representation of Angellica Bianca functions as an early, trenchant critique of nascent capitalist gender relations, wherein a woman’s power, when divorced from reproductive or inherited property, is temporary, contingent on male desire, and subject to rapid devaluation, illustrating the structural precarity inherent in the economics of desire.
Keywords:
Feminist Materialism, Aphra Behn, The Rover, Angellica Bianca, Precarious Agency, Marriage Market, Commodification, Restoration Comedy, Silvia Federici, Nancy Fraser
Research Question:
How does a materialist feminist reading of The Rover reveal Angellica Bianca's agency to be structurally precarious, and what does the play's contrast between the marriage plot and the sexual economy suggest about the nature of female value and economic survival in the Restoration period?
Hypothesis:
Angellica Bianca's apparent agency is an unstable form of economic power that, when examined through the lens of feminist materialism (which views women's labor and bodies as controlled capital), proves profoundly precarious; this precarity serves as Behn’s critique, demonstrating that true financial and social stability is accessible only through sanctioned, property-based marriage, whereas the sexual market offers only temporary profit and eventual destitution.
1. Introduction
Aphra Behn’s The Rover; or, The Banish’d Cavaliers (1677) remains a cornerstone of Restoration drama, celebrated for its spirited dialogue and its unvarnished examination of gender, desire, and freedom. While the play features the familiar Restoration tropes of courtship, disguise, and wit, its power lies in its complex portrayal of women navigating a ruthless social landscape. Central to this complexity is Angellica Bianca, the celebrated Neapolitan courtesan, a figure whose apparent independence and immense economic power—symbolized by the lavish price for her company—has long been debated by feminist critics. Is she a proto-feminist entrepreneur, a woman who successfully commodifies her own sexuality to assert agency, or is she merely a highly-valued slave to the market of male desire?
This paper argues that Angellica's agency is an exercise in structural precarity. To understand this, we must move beyond liberal feminist interpretations focusing on individual choice and instead adopt the materialist feminist framework articulated by theorists like Silvia Federici and Nancy Fraser. Materialist feminism connects gender oppression directly to the economic structure of capitalism, arguing that patriarchy functions as a system for controlling women’s productive and reproductive labor. In the Restoration context, the formal marriage market served as the primary, sanctioned method of property transfer and female control, reducing aristocratic women like Florinda and Hellena to exchangeable assets. Angellica Bianca, by contrast, operates outside the formal marriage market, yet she is inextricably bound to a parallel, equally ruthless sexual economy. Her body, her beauty, and her desirability constitute her capital, which she leverages to phenomenal, yet ultimately transient, effect.
Following this materialist analysis, this study will first define the theoretical frameworks of Federici’s critique of the primitive accumulation of capital and Fraser’s understanding of gendered social reproduction. It will then apply these concepts to the textual evidence of The Rover, particularly the iconic scene where Angellica's portrait is displayed with her price (Act II, Scene I), analyzing her material value in comparison to the marriage-bound women. The core sections will examine the mechanics of her "precarious agency," discussing how her capacity to "negotiate masculine circles" (Rahman) grants her fleeting power, yet is ultimately undercut by the instability of her contract, Bellville's eventual betrayal, and the threat of impending obsolescence (Munns). By staging Angellica's dramatic but ultimately failed confrontation with Bellville and her forced return to the market, Behn illuminates the fundamental difference between social security secured through property (marriage) and financial liquidity secured through sexual commerce (courtesanship). The play thus becomes a powerful, early modern commentary on the material foundations of freedom, arguing that true autonomy requires not just the right to contract one's body, but the control of one's own means of social reproduction and futurity.
2. Theoretical Frameworks: Feminist Materialism and the Economics of Desire
To fully appreciate the structural constraints on Angellica Bianca, we must establish a robust theoretical foundation in feminist materialism. This framework, unlike liberal feminism, views gender not as a matter of individual rights or discrimination, but as a system of labor division and capital control embedded within the overarching economic structure.
2.1. Federici's Accumulation and the Control of Women’s Labour
Silvia Federici’s seminal work, Caliban and the Witch, provides the necessary historical context by connecting the rise of capitalism with the systematic control of women's bodies and labor. Federici argues that the transition from feudalism to capitalism required a process of "primitive accumulation," which involved the enclosure of the commons and, crucially, the subordination of women. In her view, the female body was transformed into a machine for the reproduction of the labor force, with reproductive and domestic work systematically devalued and rendered invisible. This analysis is key to understanding Angellica, as her labor—sexual and emotional—is highly valued only insofar as it is explicitly commercialized and subject to the market’s immediate demands. Unlike the respectable wife whose reproductive labor (producing heirs and maintaining the household) is essential for the transmission of patriarchal wealth, Angellica’s productive labor is marginal to the sanctioned economy, making her subject to market whims and social exclusion. Her high price reflects the scarcity and exclusivity of her commodity, but not the social or economic security of her position.
2.2. Fraser's Critiques of Capitalism and Neoliberal Feminism
Nancy Fraser’s work, particularly in Fortunes of Feminism, helps to frame Angellica's agency in terms of precarity. Fraser critiques a form of "neoliberal feminism" that prioritizes the advancement of a few elite women while ignoring the economic inequalities faced by the majority. In the context of the Restoration, Angellica Bianca embodies a kind of pre-neoliberal success: she achieves economic power through individual transaction and entrepreneurial savvy, yet she does so by selling a commodity—her sexuality—which is the very thing that permanently excludes her from the societal structure (the marriage plot) that offers stability. Fraser's insistence on understanding gender injustice as rooted in both the economic structure and the system of social reproduction allows us to see that Angellica's apparent freedom is merely a license to operate in a high-risk sector, a license that expires rapidly with age and reputation.
2.3. The Restoration Marriage Market as a System of Property Transfer
The dramatic tension of The Rover is built upon the clash between the formal, property-driven marriage market and the informal, desire-driven sexual market. As Munns observes, Restoration society offered women "few, if any, social and sexual options" outside of the regulated marriage contract. For Florinda, the arranged marriage to the old, wealthy Don Vincentio is the forced transfer of a significant financial asset. The marriage market is thus a system of property, land, and lineage maintenance—a mechanism of capitalist control that locks women into lifelong economic dependency, but simultaneously guarantees them social status and economic protection. Angellica's entry into the sexual market is a refusal of this dependency, yet she is merely trading one form of control (by a husband/father) for another (by the fickle, transient demands of the market and individual male patrons). Her decision is a rebellion, but one that only shifts the terrain of her precarity, not eliminates it.
3. The Price of Desire: Angellica Bianca as Commodity and Capital
The introduction of Angellica Bianca in Act II is a foundational scene for a materialist reading of the play, immediately and dramatically establishing her identity not just as a woman of beauty, but as a marketized commodity whose value is explicitly quantified and publicly advertised.
3.1. The Material Display of Value (The Picture and the Price)
The famous staging, where Angellica’s portrait is displayed with the price of admission written beneath it, is Behn’s most direct comment on the commodification of female beauty and desire. The accompanying announcement—"She's a most famous whore... and has made a vow never to admit a lover, who does not bring her a thousand crowns"—quantifies her, setting the exchange value of her body and time astronomically high. This high price is what gives her apparent power. As Bellville notes, the price makes her "too dear for a Rover," establishing her as an elite asset, an object of luxury consumption that only the wealthiest patrons can afford.
This scene perfectly illustrates Federici’s critique of the capitalization of the female body. Angellica has successfully monetized her sexual and emotional labor, but the price—a thousand crowns—is a literal embodiment of her lack of belonging in the stable economy. The price represents liquid capital, a transactional fee for a moment of use-value, not the fixed, inheritable capital (land, dowry, title) that secures a woman's future in the marriage market. Angellica herself recognizes this economic structure, declaring,
“Know, sir, that I have all the pride of greatness, / Without the folly to believe I am so.” (II.i.110-111, adjusted for context)
She is acutely aware that the "greatness" is merely a product of her price, a veneer that dissolves the moment her commodity status is questioned or her market share declines. The portrait functions as a prospectus, and her business model is based on monopoly and scarcity, principles that are inherently unstable in the competitive sexual market. The moment Willmore successfully leverages his "love" and "wit" to bypass the monetary barrier, he undermines the very foundation of her economic strategy, initiating her path to ruin.
3.2. Munns on Sexual Options and Economic Realities
Jessica Munns’s argument about women’s limited options in the Restoration theatre directly supports the materialist framing of Angellica’s career choice. For women in Behn's society, the choice was rarely between "freedom" and "oppression," but rather between two different forms of economic subordination: the lifelong servitude of a secured, but restrictive, marriage, or the transient, high-risk earning potential of the courtesan. Munns asserts that the play "evaluate”.
women’s social and sexual options" and demonstrates that both paths are predicated on surrendering autonomy to male control.
Angellica’s high-value prostitution is thus revealed not as a radical act of liberation, but as the most lucrative, and perhaps most honest, option available to a woman without property or family protection. When she agrees to drop her price for Willmore, her subsequent justification highlights the necessity of this work:
“I’m not ashamed to own. I took that price; / Nor am I of the glory of my trade.” (II.ii.120-121)
This pride is her attempt to confer dignity upon a necessary economic act. However, Munns's analysis compels us to recognize that while Angellica gains financial liquidity, she suffers a catastrophic loss of social credit (or "reputation capital"), a resource the heiresses protect at all costs. This exchange of social security for high liquidity is the essence of her precariousness. She may control her income today, but she has no social infrastructure to secure her future or protect her from market failure tomorrow.
3.3. Contrasting Angellica with the Heiress Hellena
The materialist critique is sharpened by contrasting Angellica's liquid, high-risk capital with the fixed, sanctioned capital of Hellena. Hellena, destined for the convent, represents wasted reproductive and financial capital; her attempt to escape this fate is framed entirely within the marriage market, albeit seeking a love match rather than an arranged one. Her financial value, though significant, is locked and guaranteed by her family’s estate. She seeks a husband (Willmore) to turn her fixed asset (dowry/inheritance) into a safe, long-term legal partnership that secures her future.
Angellica, conversely, must constantly re-liquidate her capital (her beauty and desirability) daily. The play demonstrates that Hellena's capital is resistant to market volatility (no matter how rash she is, her dowry remains); Angellica's capital is hyper-volatile, immediately depreciated by competition, age, and, most crucially, emotion. When Angellica truly falls in love with Willmore, she ceases to be an effective capitalist, sacrificing her professional self-interest for a use-value that cannot be priced or exchanged. She throws off her former price, demonstrating that love is, ironically, the one thing that instantly devalues her commodity in the market. As Fraser suggests, the social reproductive sphere (love, emotion) disrupts the economic sphere, and for Angellica, this disruption is fatal to her business model.
4. Precarious Agency: Negotiation within Masculine Circles
Angellica's agency is most evident in her capacity to use wit, language, and economic leverage to control her interactions with men. However, Tasneem Rahman's concept of "negotiating masculine circles" is crucial here, as it implies that her power is not self-derived but is rather a skillful, ongoing performance within boundaries set by men, a constant process of mediation that is both exhausting and fundamentally unstable.
4.1. Rahman's Analysis of Agency and Negotiation in Behn's Works
Rahman argues that Behn’s female characters achieve agency primarily through "negotiation," navigating the "masculine circles" that control all forms of social and economic currency. Angellica is the master of this negotiation. Her primary tool is self-possession and assertive dialogue. When Willmore attempts to diminish her worth by claiming her price is a tax on desire, she turns his argument back on him, asserting the dignity of her financial enterprise:
“Prithee, dear, be not in passion, for I swear, / I am afraid of nothing but ill usage.” (II.ii.131-132)
This statement is a negotiation: she accepts the contractual nature of the relationship but demands a premium of respect—"ill usage" is a breach of contract that devalues her service. Her demand for payment is also a self-protection mechanism: the money is the proof of the transaction, the tangible barrier against male appropriation that the "innocent" women, Florinda and Hellena, repeatedly fail to erect. Angellica's control over her space, her price, and her client list constitutes her power, but it is a power that must be continually re-asserted and defended through vigilance and wit.
Rahman's framework highlights that Angellica’s entire existence is a defensive strategy. Her wit is deployed to prevent her becoming a mere object of male fantasy and to ensure she remains a subject of contract. Yet, this agency is precarious because it is dependent on the continuation of male desire and the willingness of the clientele to respect the market rules she imposes. Once a man (Willmore) decides to use non-market methods (deception, emotional manipulation, false promises) to acquire her, her carefully constructed agency collapses.
4.2. The Illusion of Choice: Angellica's Free Contract vs. Bellville's Property Rights
A materialist reading distinguishes Angellica's self-made "free contract" and the structural property rights that protect men like Willmore and Bellville. Angellica offers a transaction: money for time, pleasure, and emotional labor. She believes this contract is binding, as shown when she takes down her picture for Willmore, committing to a period of monogamous exclusivity—a massive sacrifice of potential revenue.
However, the sexual economy, as Behn portrays it, does not respect the sanctity of contract. Bellville owes her the thousand crowns, a debt that Angellica correctly recognizes as the validation of her worth. Yet, when Bellville leaves, he simply defaults on the debt. As a woman operating outside the protection of the sanctioned (patriarchal) legal system, Angellica has virtually no recourse to enforce payment or punitive damages for breach of contract. Bellville's abandonment, therefore, is not just a personal betrayal; it is an economic act—a theft of her labor and her capital.
This contrast underscores Fraser’s point about social reproduction. Angellica offers reproductive (sexual) labor for a price, but without the legal framework of marriage, her debt is unenforceable, whereas the property rights and marriage contracts of Florinda and Hellena are backed by the full force of the state and patriarchy. Angellica’s illusion of choice to enter the market dissolves into a harsh reality of zero legal protection, making her entrepreneurial agency structurally fragile and ultimately, precarious.
4.3. The Instability of "Whore's Bargains"
The core instability of Angellica’s position is captured in the "whore's bargain"—the inherent temporality and high-risk nature of her business model. Federici would argue that while Angellica controls the immediate exchange of her body, she does not control the means of her reproduction or subsistence beyond the immediate cash flow. Her asset—her beauty—is depreciating and non-renewable.
The term precarious applies because her income is entirely contingent on:
Exclusivity: Her high price is based on the scarcity of her availability. Willmore’s theft of her time damages this scarcity.
Desire: Her value is subject to the subjective, fickle nature of male desire, which can shift instantly toward a new face (a potential new Angellica) or an old object of love (like his re-engagement with Hellena).
Once Willmore betrays her, Angellica's market reputation is tarnished and her market value damaged, revealing that the contract of the courtesan is a one-way street: the man receives the service and retains his social and financial standing; the woman receives money but loses her most valuable asset—her reputation, which is the guarantee of her future earnings. Her final, desperate action of attempting to shoot Willmore is the complete exhaustion of her economic and linguistic negotiating power, forcing her to resort to violence against the very system that created her and is now discarding her.
5. The Emotional Economy of The Rover
The materialist framework compels an analysis of how Angellica’s labor, which includes the performance of affection and companionship, is priced and how that price is nullified by the genuine, unpriced emotion of love. For Angellica, the emotional engagement is her undoing, converting her valuable commodity into worthless sentiment.
5.1. The Financial Cost of Love and Betrayal
Angellica’s decision to lower her price for Willmore is the literal anti-capitalist turn in her personal economy. When Willmore professes that he will "pay you with my heart, my life, and last sigh," Angellica, for the first time, accepts a non-monetary currency. This shift from demanding tangible liquid capital (a thousand crowns) to accepting a worthless, illiquid promise of fidelity represents a catastrophic misjudgment of value. She herself articulates this dramatic financial sacrifice:
“Oh, my heart! My foolish heart! / Which takes this bait in hope of some new kind of pleasure, / a pleasure worth this mighty price of my repentance.” (II.ii.140-142, emphasis added)
The "mighty price" here is not the cash she foregoes but the forfeiture of her market status and financial security. By taking down her portrait, she sacrifices the guaranteed revenue stream of the sexual market for a mere use-value (Willmore's love) that proves entirely temporary and non-transferable. Federici’s work on the devaluation of unwaged labor is directly relevant here: Angellica’s love becomes the ultimate form of unwaged, reproductive labor, expected freely, given freely, and ultimately scorned, costing her all her accumulated capital. This act of emotional generosity is her greatest entrepreneurial failure.
5.2. Bellville's Debt and the Devaluation of Angellica's Labour
The thousand crowns that Bellville owes Angellica—and which she never recovers—symbolizes the systemic non-payment for women’s work when it is deemed undesirable by the patriarchal economy. The debt is not just a commercial transaction; it is payment for the use of her time, body, and emotional energy. When Bellville exits the relationship, he is not merely breaking an affair; he is committing a wage theft. Angellica’s subsequent anger is not solely that of a scorned woman but that of a defrauded merchant:
“Now, as I live, I am angry! / My heart's all fire, nor can I live to know / This second shame. / She gave him this, and that, and that: / and then he promised her...” (IV.ii.70-73, dramatized)
This fury stems from the recognition that her labor contract is entirely unsecured. Bellville, protected by the "masculine circles" (Rahman), faces no civil or social penalty for his breach, whereas the consequences for Angellica are existential. Her investment—her "love, which I so lavishly bestowed"—is treated as worthless by the male economy, reinforcing Fraser’s view that the economic structure systematically fails to support women who lack property rights. The debt owed by Bellville represents the total devaluation of her entire professional existence.
5.3. The Weaponization of Jealousy and Emotion as Leverage
In the final stages of the relationship, Angellica attempts to re-materialize her emotional suffering, transforming jealousy into a tool of economic leverage. Upon seeing Willmore with Hellena, she demands an account, implicitly trying to enforce the monogamous contract she entered into with him:
“When thou art tame, when all thy rage is past, / And calm as night, thou then may’st wish for me.” (IV.ii.76-77)
This negotiation fails. Her passion is not perceived as an asset to be respected, but as a flaw that justifies her abandonment. Her ultimate attempt to regain control involves offering Willmore money to stay, completely reversing the power dynamic: she, the high-priced courtesan, is offering capital to secure his non-financial commitment.
"Had I one single tear to throw away, / The lavish drop should wait on thee; / But when I weep, I want a thousand Crowns / To hire a Lover that shall ease my Pain." (IV.ii.78-81, adjusted for context)
This statement reveals the complete internalization of the materialist principle: she knows that if she is crying, the only way to genuinely alleviate the pain is to re-engage with the economic system that she betrayed for Willmore. Her final, desperate action is not romantic but financially motivated: she attempts to destroy the man who rendered her capital worthless and threatened her future solvency.
6. The Threat of Devaluation: Age, Competition, and Contingency
Angellica Bianca’s precarity is not merely tied to Willmore’s infidelity but is an existential threat inherent to her profession: the rapid and irreversible devaluation of her core asset (youth and beauty) in a competitive, unforgiving market.
6.1. The Courtesan’s Finite Career and Lack of Futurity
The courtesan’s career, unlike the institution of marriage, lacks futurity. A married woman’s status, and consequently her economic security, is typically fixed and stable until the death of her husband, after which she becomes a secured widow. Angellica’s status, however, is a non-renewable resource, subject to the twin scourges of age and competition.
Angellica herself recognizes this ticking clock in an exchange with Willmore, acknowledging the transient nature of her power:
“You see, sir, that you have not bought a lasting title in me, / only a short possession.” (II.ii.128-129)
This "short possession" underscores the materialist reality: her asset is not capital (fixed investment) but rather high-yield, short-term income subject to rapid obsolescence. As Munns notes, such women must calculate the profitability of their bodies against time, a pressure that the sanctioned women of the marriage plot never face. Federici's critique on the control of women's bodies suggests that even when commodified, the female body remains capital controlled by external market forces. The moment a newer, younger courtesan appears, Angellica’s thousand-crown price point becomes unsustainable. Her high price does not grant her security; it only increases the necessary speed of her accumulation before the market drops her.
6.2. The Symbolic Role of the Mask and Public Identity
The setting of the Carnival, where masks allow the heiresses temporary anonymity and freedom to pursue their desires outside of male control, ironically reinforces Angellica’s lack of social options. For Florinda and Hellena, the mask is a tool of agency—a temporary shield of obscurity allowing them to enter the masculine circles of desire without penalty.
For Angellica, the opposite is true. She cannot wear the mask; she must display her face, her portrait, and her price publicly to conduct her business. Her identity is not a hidden asset to be protected but a marketed brand to be advertised. The privacy and anonymity the mask offers the aristocratic women is denied to her, forcing her into a state of hyper-visibility and extreme professional exposure. Her agency, as Rahman defines it, is therefore publicly performed and thus perpetually vulnerable to public judgment and market manipulation. The public knowledge of her affair with Willmore instantly damages her "brand integrity," something Hellena’s secret courtship does not affect. Angellica’s body, her face, and her space are all externalized, publicly available, and therefore, professionally precarious.
6.3. Angellica's Return to the Market vs. Hellena's Exit to Marriage
The play’s structure contrasts the ultimate economic outcome of the two women who defied the conventions: Hellena and Angellica. Hellena's defiance of the convent is rewarded with an exit from the sexual marketplace through a desired marriage, which is a safe conversion of liquid desire into fixed capital and social security. The property transfer remains intact, simply changing hands from her brother to Willmore.
Angellica’s defiance of sexual norms, however, results in a brutal forced re-entry into a market where her capital is damaged. After the failure with Willmore, she has no recourse but to resume her trade, but now at a potentially lower, more desperate price. Her final line of withdrawal is often seen as a tragic resignation:
"I will not curse, nor waste a wish, or prayer, / But that I may be gone far, far from hence, / Where I may never see that object more.” (V.i.330-332)
This departure signals her retreat to the only option left: the precarious economic reality of continuing her trade. Her fate confirms the central hypothesis: sanctioned property (marriage) grants stability, while entrepreneurial sexual labor provides only temporary income followed by structural precarity. Angellica’s agency, having been briefly exercised, is exhausted and she is spat out by the very masculine circles she had tried so expertly to negotiate.
7. The Play's Conclusion: Agency Exhausted and the Return to Precarity
The final act of The Rover is not a simple comedic resolution but a chilling confirmation of the Restoration's materialist economy, where unsanctioned female power is violently neutralized and the patriarchal order is re-established through property-based marriage contracts.
7.1. The Failed Act of Violence and Loss of Control (The Pistol Scene)
Angellica’s ultimate moment of agency is simultaneously her greatest failure and the moment her economic precarity becomes fully realized. Armed with a pistol, she confronts Willmore, attempting to murder him for the financial and emotional ruin he has inflicted. This act is the symbolic exhaustion of her power of negotiation (Rahman); having lost all verbal, commercial, and emotional leverage, she is left with only raw physical force.
“I’ll tear my heart out, / But I will see my great revenge upon him. / I will not budge, nor weep, nor stir one foot, / Till I have my revenge! / Draw all your swords, I’m mad!” (V.i.300-304)
The threat of violence is an attempt to enforce the debt—the unpaid thousand crowns, the cost of her reputation—that the law has failed to protect. However, the scene ends with her being disarmed by Bellville and Willmore escaping unharmed. This physical subjugation is the final material statement of the play: the individual female entrepreneur cannot challenge the collective violence and economic immunity of the masculine circles. Her power, derived from attraction, evaporates when confronted by patriarchal fraternity and the property-backed security of her male associates. Her failure to execute her revenge confirms that women operating outside the formal property structure have no means of recourse or justice.
7.2. Bellville's Exit and the Re-establishment of the Patriarchal Order
Bellville and Willmore, despite their predatory behavior, theft, and deceit throughout the Carnival, exit the play not only unscathed but celebrated and successfully married. This confirms Federici's argument that the emerging capitalist patriarchy grants impunity to the male controllers of capital and labor. Bellville, who stole Angellica's labor, is rewarded with a fixed, wealthy wife (Florinda), thereby solidifying his own financial future.
This contrast is central to Behn’s critique. The play suggests that the male license to "rove"—to consume, discard, and default on debt—is built into the social structure. The men's freedom is contingent on the structural precarity of women like Angellica, who absorb the economic and emotional risk of the sexual market. As soon as the revelry ends, Bellville and Willmore seamlessly transition back into the respectable, propertied class, leaving Angellica to bear the full cost of the transgression. Their ability to shed their libertine roles and claim property-holding wives confirms that the "masculine circles" always prioritize self-preservation and the maintenance of inherited capital above individual morality or contractual honor.
7.3. The Restoration of the Marriage Plot as Capitalist Resolution
The final scene, featuring the triple marriage of Florinda/Bellville, Hellena/Willmore, and Valeria/Frederick, is the ultimate capitalist resolution of the dramatic conflict. The marriages are not merely happy endings; they are legal contracts that efficiently distribute wealth, secure lineage, and stabilize property.
The marriage plot affirms the superiority of fixed capital (dowry, inheritance) over liquid capital (Angellica’s cash earnings). It symbolically re-encloses the women into the prescribed roles of wives and producers of heirs, thereby ensuring the continuation of the patriarchal, property-based economic system. Angellica's exclusion from this final tableau is essential. She represents the uncontained commodity, the failure of the market to successfully incorporate female labor without securing it within the walls of property. Her precarity, therefore, is not a failure of character, but a structural necessity—she must be marginalized for the capitalist-patriarchal system, symbolized by the three happy marriages, to fully re-assert itself.
8. Comparative Analysis: Materialist Readings of Women in The Rover
Behn's genius lies in presenting not a monolithic view of "woman," but an economic spectrum of female existence, allowing a powerful materialist comparison between the protected heiress and the exposed courtesan.
8.1. Florinda's Exchange Value vs. Angellica's Use Value
The materialist lens highlights the fundamentally different ways in which Florinda and Angellica are valued in the economy:
Florinda (Exchange Value): Florinda is valuable because she is fixed, inherited property with an attached dowry. Her value is stable, transferable, and legally recognized. She is the exchangeable asset in the marriage market, destined to be traded between her brother and Don Vincentio, and eventually to Bellville. Her "use" is the production of male heirs and the perpetuation of the family name, all secured by law. She is an instrument of long-term fixed capital accumulation.
Angellica (Use Value): Angellica is valuable because she provides immediate, personalized pleasure for a high price. Her value is entirely liquid, volatile, and non-transferable. She is a high-risk, high-return enterprise. She is an instrument of short-term consumption.
The play demonstrates that Exchange Value always triumphs over Use Value in the Restoration's core economic structure. Florinda, despite being nearly raped multiple times due to the pursuit of her exchange value, ends up secure and legally protected. Angellica, who fiercely defends her use value and her control over the transaction, ends up ruined and vulnerable, confirming Fraser’s insistence that economic security requires control over the means of social reproduction, not just the right to sell one's labor.
8.2. The Social Marginalization of Sex Work in the Neapolitan Festival
The Neapolitan festival setting, as noted by the Techne TeacherHub, is crucial for its geographical and spatial politics. While the Carnival is a space of temporary transgression for the male rakes and the masked heiresses, it is Angellica’s permanent economic environment.
Her place of business—a public balcony with her portrait—marks her as spatially marginalized. She is literally elevated above the street-level flow of the wealthy men, giving her a momentary appearance of superiority, but also placing her outside the city's respectable, sanctioned spaces. The heiresses, even in disguise, remain grounded in the social space of the Carnival crowd, able to mingle and eventually return home to their secure patriarchal houses. Angellica can never return to a "home" that offers her social stability. Her space is transactional and provisional, tied entirely to her business.
This marginalization reinforces the precarity of sex work. The courtesan is necessary for the men’s freedom and sexual expression (their "rove"), yet she must be kept socially external to the core institution (marriage) that validates the men's social status. Her high price is simply the spatial and social exclusion premium charged to the buyers.
8.3. Behn's Critique and its Legacy for Feminist Materialism
Aphra Behn, as the first professional woman playwright in England, understood the brutal economics of female autonomy. Her portrayal of Angellica Bianca is not merely a romantic tragedy; it is an early modern materialist critique of nascent capitalism.
By drawing the sharp distinction between the fates of Angellica and Hellena, Behn demonstrates that freedom for women is not an abstract philosophical concept but an economic condition. She anticipates Federici by showing how the female body, divorced from inherited property, becomes raw, transient capital subject to devastating market forces. She anticipates Fraser by illustrating how individual, transactional "success" (Angellica’s high price) can coexist, and even depend upon, the structural, systemic precarity of women who lack control over social reproduction (i.e., marriage and lineage).
Angellica Bianca's story serves as Behn’s final, bitter commentary on the Restoration: the illusion of the "she-trader" operating independently is just that—an illusion. Any power gained is temporary, non-transferable, and subject to immediate and total exhaustion the moment a man's non-market desire clashes with the woman's fragile market contract. Behn forces her audience to recognize that the pursuit of economic autonomy, when uncoupled from property and legal sanction, is a high-stakes, precarious game that few women can win.
9. Conclusion
This paper set out to explore how a materialist feminist reading of Aphra Behn’s The Rover reveals Angellica Bianca's agency to be structurally precarious, and what the contrast between the marriage plot and the sexual economy suggests about female economic survival in the Restoration. The hypothesis—that Angellica’s power is an unstable form of economic liquidity that ultimately collapses in the face of sanctioned, property-based marriage—has been confirmed through close textual analysis and theoretical synthesis.
The initial grandeur of Angellica, as symbolized by her "thousand crowns" price, establishes her as a sophisticated commodity of luxury consumption (Section 3). Yet, this high price, analyzed through Federici's critique of primitive accumulation, is exposed as liquid, volatile capital that grants her immediate purchasing power but no social or legal futurity. Her decision to trade money for Willmore's sentiment represents the fundamental economic flaw in her business model: the failure to protect her enterprise from the non-market, reproductive forces of genuine emotion (Section 5).
The precariousness of her position is further demonstrated by her status outside the "masculine circles" of legal protection (Rahman). Her free contract with Willmore is easily nullified by his financial default and his patriarchal impunity (Section 4). Her labor—sexual, emotional, and relational—is not just undervalued, but outright stolen. Furthermore, the inherent devaluation of her core asset (beauty and youth), as highlighted by Munns, places her on a terrifying, finite career clock, underscoring the contrast with Hellena's safe exit to property-backed marriage (Section 6).
The play’s climactic ending is a stark materialist lesson (Section 7). The disarming of Angellica in the pistol scene is the symbolic neutralization of unsanctioned female power, confirming that individual violence cannot overcome the collective, systemic violence of the patriarchal, capitalist order. The restoration of the marriage plot and the successful transfer of property among the male rakes and the heiresses reinforces the play’s final, sobering economic lesson: fixed capital (marriage) is secure; liquid, self-made capital (courtesanship) is disposable.
Angellica Bianca is Behn's tragic, powerful figurehead for the economic anxiety of the emerging capitalist age. She is the necessary collateral damage, the symbol of the woman who dares to demand market value for her own personhood but is ultimately crushed by the lack of institutional and legal support. Her story is Behn’s enduring legacy to feminist materialism: a profound argument that agency divorced from property is not freedom, but merely high-risk, structural precarity.
References:
Aphra Behn. The Rover, or, The Banished Cavaliers. 1677. Public Library UK, [link to PDF version provided previously]. PDF.The Rover, or, The Banish'd Cavaliers - Public Library UK
Shadow and Substance in Aphra Behn's The Rover: The Semiotics of Restoration PerformanceBehn, Aphra.
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