2.

A Roving Woman
The Rover, Part I and Hellena’s Self-Creation of Youth

Sarah Morris

Abstract
Hellena’s antics in Aphra Behn’s 1677 play, The Rover, are explored in
this essay through the lens of the grand tour. This lens allows for a more
focused investigation of the play’s preoccupation with youthfulness, and
also demonstrates how Hellena’s antics fit within the tradition of not
just carnival but also rogue literature. Facing life in a nunnery – a path
determined for her by her father and brother – Hellena uses rogue tactics
and the carnival season to carve out a space for youthful experiences for
herself; and, in doing so, she ultimately alters that patriarchal predeter-
mined path to fit her own desires, which include marriage to Willmore.

Keywords: Aphra Behn; The Rover; carnival; rogue; grand tour, female
youth

‘Have I not a world of youth?’ This question, posed by Hellena to her sister
Florinda in the opening scene of Aphra Behn’s The Rover, Part 1, highlights
a central but often overlooked theme of Behn’s text.1 The 1677 play, set in
Spanish-controlled Naples, certainly presents a youthful world of revelry,
masquerade, and love affairs. The play, like so many of Behn’s works, stands
as proto-feminist in that it features strong female characters who take action
in the face of opposing patriarchal forces. One of the central storylines
involves three young women – Hellena, Florinda, and their kinswoman,
Valeria – who use disguises to interact more freely with the English cavaliers
currently visiting Naples. This plan, spearheaded by Hellena, stands as only
one of several cunning plots that Hellena orchestrates throughout the play.

1 Behn, The Rover, Part I. Subsequent references to the play are cited parenthetically.

Cohen, E.S. and M. Reeves (eds.), The Youth of Early Modern Women, Amsterdam University
Press, 2018.
doi: 10.5117/9789462984325/ch02
60  Sar ah Morris

To escape the watchful eyes of her brother, Don Pedro, and her governess,
Callis, Hellena readily employs both clever disguises and cunning wit, not
unlike the female rogue figures often found in early seventeenth-century
works.
Hellena’s rogue-like antics throughout the play have traditionally been
read in terms of carnival, and rightfully so.2 Other productive lenses for
reading Hellena’s high jinks, and the play as a whole, include the maid/whore
juxtaposition3 and Behn’s apparent proto-feminist rewriting of her source
material, namely Thomas Killigrew’s Thomaso, or, the Wanderer (1664). 4
Behn purposefully sets her play during the festive season, as illustrated in
Don Pedro’s command in the first scene ordering Callis to ‘lock [Hellena] up
all this carnival’ (1.1.137). During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
carnival often served as an opportunity for social disorder, controlled chaos,
and sensual indulgence. The focus of scholars on the carnivalesque in The
Rover, Part 1 has certainly paved the way for investigations of topics such as
market culture, gender dynamics, and social disorder in Behn’s work. For
the purposes of this essay, though, I propose a different lens for interpreting
Hellena’s actions: the grand tour.
Reading Behn’s play through the lens of the grand tour allows for a more
focused exploration of the text’s preoccupation with youthfulness, and
such a reading also allows for a look at how Hellena’s antics fit within the
traditions of not just carnival but also rogue-literature. The grand tour, which
was emerging as a popular pastime during the period when the play was
written, primarily served as an opportunity for young English gentlemen
to experience the world before settling into the trials of adult life. Hellena’s
adventures throughout Behn’s text do more than just upset the status quo for
a short time; Hellena actually uses the carnival season to ‘go rogue’ against
patriarchal desires by carving out a space for youthful experience between
a sheltered childhood and a (future) cloistered adulthood.
Such a ‘carving out’ stands as particularly significant since the youth of
upper-class women in early modern drama is generally elided; girls from
aristocratic families often move straight from the parental household into
marriage, usually without ever experiencing the world outside of the home.
Those who do ‘go rogue’ – consider Shakespeare’s Portia or Rosalind, for
example – generally do so to follow or aid their beloved, or to flee danger. In
carving out a youthful experience for herself, and the worldly education that

2 See Beach, ‘Carnival Politics’; and Boebel, ‘Carnival World’.

3 See Pacheco, ‘Rape and the Female Subject’.
4 See DeRitter, ‘The Gypsy, The Rover, and the Wanderer’.
A Roving Woman 61

goes with it, Hellena ultimately changes the predetermined direction for her
life. In the play’s opening scene, Hellena appears as a young, inexperienced,
inquisitive woman who desires to experience love and other worldly sensa-
tions before resigning herself to life in a nunnery. By the play’s end, she
has recreated herself as an equal to Willmore – the Rover himself – and, in
doing so, has prepared herself for a different form of adulthood: married life.
Hellena’s rogue-like actions, then, serve as a levelling of the playing
field between the text’s young aristocratic men and women. She grants
herself a similar sensual education and youthful experience to that of the
play’s young English men. Hellena differs from her female counterparts in
the play in that she decides to disguise herself not to flee or to pursue her
beloved, but to forge her own path of worldly experiences and pleasures.
In creating Hellena as a rogue-like figure, Behn demonstrates the need
for young women, as well as their young male counterparts, to receive a
worldly education to be better prepared for adult life. Reading Behn’s text
through the lens of the grand tour, then, ultimately allows us to see how
Hellena, through her rogue-like tactics, creates a space for youth between
her cloistered girlhood and the equally cloistered adulthood designed for
her. Youth appears in Behn’s play as a space where Hellena’s natural curiosity
can flourish and where that curiosity can help shape her for the trials of
adulthood, albeit a different version of adulthood than the one envisioned
by her father and brother.

Creating a ‘[W]orld of [Y]outh’

Behn depicts Naples in her play as a space where young men and, nota-
bly, women can experience life and love before settling into adulthood
responsibilities. For the play’s men, life in Naples consists of one fleeting
engagement after another, with little interest in pursuing long-term invest-
ments. Frederick, for example, acts mainly as a companion to Willmore’s and
Belvile’s exploits in love; Willmore has come ashore ‘only to enjoy [himself]
a little this carnival’ (1.2.66), since ‘love and mirth are [his] business in
Naples’ (1.2.73); Blunt is a ‘raw traveller’ who gets caught in Lucetta’s bed-trick
scam and thus learns about greed and avarice the hard way (1.2.67); and
Don Antonio and Don Pedro, the play’s two Spanish lords, both vie for the
attention of the courtesan Angellica throughout the play, with both willing
to pay the excessive price of 1000 crowns for such a ‘sweet’ (if fleeting) affair.
Only Belvile, the English colonel who has travelled to Paris, Pamplona,
and other places before arriving in Naples, appears interested in pursuing
62  Sar ah Morris

something substantial and long term. He is caught in the throes of love,

enraptured by the Spanish Florinda. The play’s young women also take
advantage of the youthful atmosphere around them. Hellena, Florinda, and
Valeria enjoy the freedom of carnival, aided in their exploits by the use of
various guises and a desire to experience love. Angellica, for her own part,
enjoys the attentions of ‘all the youth in Naples’ (1.2.308). In short, Behn
creates in The Rover, Part 1 a world ruled by youthful ambitions and desires.
In most early modern texts, such a world of youthful vigour would
normally be tempered by the wisdom (or, conversely, avarice) of an elder
generation. Behn’s text, however, remarkably lacks an elder’s presence.
While several patriarchal figures are mentioned in the play – including the
viceroy, Don Pedro’s father, Don Pedro’s uncle, Don Vincentio, and the exiled
son of Charles I – none of these characters actually appears in the play, nor
do their wills or desires play any central role. The desire of Florinda’s father
for her to marry the old Don Vincentio is soon supplanted by the desires of
the son, Don Pedro, for her to marry the young Don Antonio instead. The
play’s oldest figures would be Callis, the young women’s governess, and
Philippo, Lucetta’s co-conspirator in the bed-trick against Blunt. Callis, while
ordered by Don Pedro to keep a watchful eye over Hellena, is soon infected
with a ‘youthful itch’ and decides to accompany the young women on their
exploits (1.1.181). Later, she is easily misdirected by one of Hellena’s schemes.
Philippo, as a rogue figure himself, stands as more of a social outcast than
as a patriarchal figure within the text.
The play’s conflict between ‘old’ and ‘young’, therefore, appears largely
biased in favour of youth. The play as a whole demonstrates a preoccupation
with youthfulness. The words ‘youth’, ‘young’, or ‘youthfulness’ appear over
40 times in the text, and over ten times in the first scene alone. These terms
are applied most often to the play’s young women. Hellena is described in
the dramatis personae as ‘a gay young woman design’d for a Nun’, and is later
called both a ‘young devil’ (1.2.126–27) and a ‘young saint’ (1.2.167–68) by
Willmore. Hellena’s sister, Florinda, is termed ‘the young wife’ (1.1.106–07)
and ‘a young lady’ (1.1.118), while Callis, the governess, has a ‘youthful itch’
to participate in carnival with her charges (1.1.181). The women’s youth
often appears as a valuable commodity throughout the play, although the
men value female youthfulness for different reasons than the women. For
the men, women’s youth is valuable for its connection to beauty. When
Hellena questions whether Willmore ‘would impose no severe penance’ on
a woman who decided to ‘console herself’ before resigning to nunnery life
(1.2.171–72), Willmore indicates he is willing, ‘if she be young and handsome’
(1.2.173). Blunt, a fellow Englishman, demonstrates a similar preoccupation
A Roving Woman 63

with youth and beauty when asked about the name of the prostitute with
whom he has become enamoured and believes to be a ‘person of quality’.
He exclaims, ‘What care I for names? She’s fair, young, brisk and kind, even
to ravishment!’ (2.1.46–47).
Blunt’s preoccupation with youth and beauty, coupled with Willmore’s
candour, demonstrates the lustful and lascivious appetite with which this
group of young English visitors view the Spanish women. Only Belvile,
who appears throughout the text as Florinda’s chaste beloved, questions
this lustful pursuit of youth and beauty. When Willmore demonstrates
his amazement over Blunt’s luck, Belvile remains suspicious: ‘Dost thou
perceive any such tempting things about him that should make a f ine
woman, and of quality, pick him out from all mankind to throw away her
youth and beauty upon; nay, and her dear heart, too?’ (2.1.88–91). Belvile’s
addition of ‘her dear heart’ to youth and beauty demonstrates his ability
not only to find value in something other than the women’s looks, but also
to recognize and sympathize with their perspective. This ability aligns him
with his pure and innocent beloved, Florinda.
The play’s female characters also frequently connect youth to beauty
and, like Belvile, they view youth as something that can be wasted. In their
initial discussion with their brother, Don Pedro, both Florinda and Hellena
bemoan Florinda’s impending betrothal to Don Vincentio. When told that
she must consider the older man’s fortune, Florinda posits her own youth
as more valuable: ‘Let him consider my youth, beauty, and fortune; which
ought not to be thrown away on his age and jointure’ (1.1.77–78). Hellena
starkly supports her sister, claiming that she would ‘rather see her in the
Hostel de Dieu, to waste her youth there in vows and be a handmaid to lazars
and cripples, than to lose it in such a marriage’ (1.1.126–29). The fact that
Florinda foregrounds youth in her statement and Hellena makes it the focus
of hers indicates the value of youth for these women, and that value, Behn
suggests, lies in the potential of youth for creating alternative opportunities
for self-fulfilment and advancement. Hellena highlights this idea in her
questioning of her sister about her fitness for love in the opening scene:

Have I not a world of youth? a humour gay? a beauty passable? A vigour

desirable? Well shaped? Clean limbed? Sweet breathed? And sense enough
to know how all these ought to be employed to the best advantage?
(1.1.41–44)

Hellena acknowledges here the close connection between her youth and
beauty, and while her assertion that she knows how to use them to ‘the best
64  Sar ah Morris

advantage’ suggests her fitness for the world of love (and love-making), she
employs her youthful vigour, beauty, and wit throughout the play to navigate
various social positions and alter her predetermined path for adulthood.

The Grand Tour

For noble English families of the late early modern period, the grand tour
served as the crowning jewel in a young (male) aristocrat’s formal education.
Including extended visits to major cities on the Continent – and generally
occurring in the years between attending university and starting a career
– the grand tour provided young men with an educational experience
that both supplemented and reinforced their classical training. The terms
‘educational’ and ‘experience’ should both be emphasized here, since the
tour allowed its participants not only to come face to face with the various
monuments, landscapes, and works of art featured in traditional classical
studies, but also to experience a manifold sensual palette derived from both
interaction with other cultures and freedom from strict parental control.
James T. Boulton and T.O. McLoughlin point to this sensual experience in
News From Abroad, claiming that while serious students would have taken
advantage of the educational opportunities the tour offered, ‘others saw the
Tour as simply an opportunity to enjoy a different culture, particularly a
more liberal, even sophisticated lifestyle, with fashion, manners and women
the focus, rather than monuments’.5 Lynne Withey further emphasizes this
point in Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours, commenting that the grand tour
‘provided a socially acceptable form of escape, a way of sowing wild oats,
in the parlance of a later time’.6 The grand tour, then, provided young men
with a way of experiencing all the sensual pleasures of the world before
settling down into marriage, career, and model citizenship, even if the
cultural rite itself was touted as purely educational.
This ‘Grand Tour’ has traditionally been treated by literary and historical
scholars as an eighteenth-century phenomenon. Certainly, the tradition
came into its own as a cultural rite during this period, aided by large-scale
improvements in roads across the Continent and by the flourishing of
the English mercantile class.7 As Withey points out, ‘by the middle of the
eighteenth century the continental tour […] had expanded to become a

5 Boulton and McLoughlin, News from Abroad, 6.

6 Withey, Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours, 3.
7 Boulton and McLoughlin, News from Abroad, 5.
A Roving Woman 65

common experience among the sons of wealthy professional and mercantile

families’ (5). And the end of the eighteenth century, in particular, has widely
been considered by scholars as the ‘apogee of the age of the grand tour’, as
Brian Dolan phrases it in Ladies of the Grand Tour.8 By the late eighteenth
century, then, we can see the various ways in which the grand tour had
become an established part of English aristocratic culture, particularly in
the narrow definition of the tour’s characteristics that appears during that
period. The ‘tour’ itself has become well defined in terms of typical tourists
and their destinations. The typical tourist was male and British, even into the
late eighteenth century,9 and grand tourists ‘confined themselves mainly to
France and Italy, concentrating on a handful of cities: Paris, Geneva, Rome,
Florence, Venice, and Naples’.10
As several scholars have pointed out, though, the origin of this tradition
actually derives from at least a century earlier, when it arose in the wake of
the English Civil War, if not from the general travelling practices of the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries. Withey traces the origins of the grand tour
to the ‘British aristocracy in the sixteenth century’ (5), while Jeremy Black
comments in his introduction to Italy and the Grand Tour that ‘protracted
travel for pleasure […] developed greatly in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and
eighteenth centuries, becoming part of an ideal education and image of the
social elite’.11 He continues: ‘such travel [for pleasure] became more common
in the seventeenth century, although it was affected by the religious (and
political) tensions that followed the Protestant Reformation of the previous
century’ (1–2). Italy, in particular, proved a potentially dangerous destination
for English travellers in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries due to
these religious and political tensions,12 although these tensions had largely
given way to hostilities with other countries by the English Restoration. By
all accounts, the travelling practices of the English elite in the sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries helped shape the continental tour that
emerged in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.13 Notably, the
term ‘Grand Tour’ itself was first introduced into English popular culture
by Richard Lassels, a Catholic priest who published the term in 1670, not
long before the appearance of Behn’s The Rover, Part 1.14

8 Dolan, Ladies of the Grand Tour, 9.

9 Withey, Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours, 6.
10 Withey, Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours, 7.
11 Black, Italy and the Grand Tour, 1.
12 Withey, Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours, 7.
13 Warneke, Images of the Educational Traveler, 1.
14 Black, Italy and the Grand Tour, 2; and Boulton and McLoughlin, News from Abroad, 4.
66  Sar ah Morris

Behn’s play represents the themes and motifs of the grand tour in several
ways that, if only coincidental, appear to foreshadow the century ahead.
The play demonstrates a certain preoccupation with learning and education
through its dialogue, although the lessons its characters learn are centred
on worldly experience rather than formal scholarship. These references
to learning, knowledge, and ‘lessons’ throughout the play underscore the
worldly education that several characters, particularly Hellena and Blunt,
receive about the nature of love and lust. The play also features several
women’s portraits that are admired by the men. Angellica’s decision to
advertise herself through three portraits serves as a marketing scheme,
but the men – especially Willmore – treat the portraits more like works of
art than advertisements. Angellica’s portrait functions in Behn’s play not
unlike the various monuments, sculptures, and paintings that young men
would often encounter on the grand tour.
The setting of the play itself also speaks back to the grand tour. Naples
often served as the final major stop on the tour, although the city did not
emerge as a truly popular destination until the second half of the eighteenth
century. Withey claims that ‘Naples was a popular destination among grand
tourists, one devoted almost exclusively to the pleasures of the senses’
(28). Naples’ (and Italy’s) reputation is reflected in the spirit of Behn’s play,
which devotes the majority of scenes to pursuits of both love and lust.
This setting in the Spanish-controlled Italian city of Naples also allows
for a meshing of cultures, specifically English, Spanish, and Italian, with
references to the French and the Dutch (all, notably, cultures that would
have been experienced on the grand tour).
Finally, the play boasts a focus on travel and mobility. As the play’s title
indicates, its characters rove freely. Most of the English visitors, for example,
have made multiple stops on the Continent before arriving in Naples. Belvile,
it is noted, has been to Paris (usually the first stop on the grand tour) and
Pamplona, while Willmore – a seasoned traveller – literally wanders into
Naples in search of sexual gratification and general entertainment. Blunt,
in contrast to Willmore, is a ‘raw traveller’ whose naivety about the world
causes his gullibility. The play’s women also rove freely, although in a much
more circumscribed space. Hellena, Florinda, and Valeria are not allowed
the same freedom to ‘roam’ as their male counterparts, and so must use
their wit and cunning, via disguise, to wander through the play’s various
social circles.
A Roving Woman 67

Hellena as a Female Rogue Figure

This disguised roving by the play’s main female characters speaks back
to the dramatic tradition of female roguery in late sixteenth- and early
seventeenth-century texts. In Rogues and Early Modern English Culture,
Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz define the rogue figure as ‘a cultural trope
for mobility, change, and social adaptation’.15 Of the various characteristics
that generally define rogues – wit, cunning, and guile (including the use of
disguises) – mobility was generally seen as the most threatening in the early
modern era. Mobility, whether geographical or social, disrupted the estab-
lished order. Female mobility proved particularly threatening, especially
since women were closely connected with the (immobile) household. The
female rogue first appeared in the rogue pamphlets of Thomas Harman and
John Awdeley of the 1560s, but did not emerge as a strong dramatic figure
until the 1590s and early 1600s, when vast political, cultural, and social
changes (along with hardships such as disease and famine) allowed her to
take centre stage. In dramatic texts, the female rogue generally appears as a
cunning and sharp-tongued member of the lower orders who either wanders
geographically or moves up and down the social ladder via disguise and wit.
Such movements often proved threatening to the established social order.
In Thomas Middleton’s Trick to Catch the Old One (1608), for instance, the
lowly Jane presents herself as a rich widow, and ultimately advances her
personal station by becoming Hoard’s wife. In a similar manner, Doll works
with her two co-conspirators, Subtle and Face, throughout Ben Jonson’s
The Alchemist (1610) to swindle unsuspecting visitors. Other female rogue
figures include Long Meg of Westminster, who wanders from place to place
and often adopts the guise of a man in The Life of Long Meg of Westminster
(1635); Bess Bridges, a tapster turned pirate to save her beloved in Thomas
Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West, Part 1 (1631); and Lucetta, the jilting wench
who pulls a bed-trick on Blount in The Rover, Part 1.
Hellena’s antics throughout Behn’s play – her disguises, sharp wit, and
clever scheming – all paint her as a rogue figure. While the term ‘rogue’
generally carried a negative connotation, it is important to note that this
was not always the case with female rogues. Take, for example, the case
of Moll Cutpurse, the cross-dressing heroine of Middleton and Thomas
Dekker’s The Roaring Girl (1611). More so than the other women above, Moll
has proven a particularly complex figure for scholars to tackle, generally
because she often appears as both the epitome and the antithesis of a female

15 Dionne and Mentz, Rogues and Early Modern English Culture, 1.

68  Sar ah Morris

rogue. Moll’s cross-dressing and her ability to move through various social
circles paints her as a potential threat to the social order, but she appears
to do so out of preference for that particular style of dress rather than for
an ulterior motive. Unlike Middleton’s Jane or Jonson’s Doll, Moll has no
desire to marry or to swindle others out of their money. In fact, Dekker
and Middleton continually work to present Moll in their text as a figure
who is in touch with the English underworld, yet displaced from it. In Act
5, for instance, Moll demonstrates an intrinsic knowledge of rogue culture,
including a mastery of cant (rogue ‘language’), but when questioned about
that knowledge, presents herself as a mere observer:

I must confess, in younger days, when I was apt to stray, I have sat amongst
such adders, seen their stings – as any here might – and in full playhouses
watched their quick-diving hands, to bring to shame such rogues, and in
that stream met an ill name. (5.1.298–303)

Moll’s use of phrases such as ‘sat amongst’, ‘seen’, and ‘watched’, as well
as her assertion of ‘as any here might’, distances her from the actions of
dangerous rogue figures, while at the same time highlighting her familiarity
with their culture.
Moll, and her real-life inspiration, Mary Frith, both proved to be popular
with early modern audiences, and such popularity was not fleeting. The
English Restoration, which saw the rise of female actors, women playwrights,
and more diverse audiences for the London stage, demonstrated a renewed
interest in female rogue figures. Real-life figures such as Elizabeth Cellier,
Mary Carleton, and even Mary Frith herself (whose biography, The Life and
Death of Mrs. Mary Frith, was published in 1662, shortly after her death) fas-
cinated the public, and often served as inspiration for Restoration literature.
Rogue-like women appear throughout Restoration drama, especially that
of Behn, who, as a female playwright, had a vested interest in portraying
strong women who pushed back against social conventions. Roguish female
characters litter her works, from the playful ‘feigned courtesans’ in The
Feign’d Curtizans (1679) to the vehement Widdow Ranter in The Widdow
Ranter or, the History of Bacon in Virginia (1690).
The emergence of the female rogue figure in dramatic English literature,
however, also coincided with rising portrayals of roguish upper-class women
– a category to which Behn’s Hellena more readily belongs. Examples of
such women include figures like Shakespeare’s cross-dressing heroines
(particularly Julia from The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Rosalind from
As You Like It), Jonson’s Grace from Bartholomew Fayre (1631), and Rachel
A Roving Woman 69

and Meriel from Richard Brome’s A Jovial Crew, or the Merry Beggars (1652).
These women often adopt rogue-like tactics to escape danger, pursue their
beloveds, or free themselves from patriarchal restraints. In Two Gentlemen of
Verona, for instance, Julia guises herself in male attire and takes on a lower
social position in order to pursue her beloved, the false Proteus. Jonson’s
Grace does the opposite; she flees into the company of rogues in order to
escape an unwanted suitor. Rosalind and Imogen (from Shakespeare’s As
You Like it and Cymbeline, respectively) each use disguises and wit to flee
from danger. Brome’s heroines, frustrated with the patriarchal restraints
placed upon them by their father and by society in general, seek the comfort
of simple beggarly life. All of these women go ‘rogue’ in the sense that they
use disguises, wit, and silver tongues to move unfettered through various
social situations and to achieve their own ends.
Behn’s Hellena fits nicely into this mould of the upper-class roguish
woman. Throughout the play, Hellena adopts various disguises, includ-
ing both male garb and a ‘gipsie’ costume, in order to move unhindered
through the carnival festivities. Her choice of disguise in and of itself marks
her rogue-like intentions, since the term ‘gypsy’ was widely used in the
vagabond literature of the period to refer – often pejoratively – to itiner-
ant people, especially Roma, in early modern Europe. Her scheming and
roaming throughout the play match her well with the ‘roving’ Willmore,
who follows his own lustful designs in pursuing Angellica, Naples’ most
desirable courtesan. In her initial discussions with Willmore, Hellena uses
both wit and wordplay to enrapture him, and her rogue garb in this instance
serves to make her a more mysterious, more desirable ‘other’; after this first
meeting, Willmore continually refers to Hellena as his ‘little gipsie’. Like Julia
in Two Gentlemen of Verona and Brome’s heroines, Hellena desires both love
and freedom from the harsh patriarchal constraints placed upon her, and
she adopts rogue-like tactics as a means to her end. She differs from these
other female rogues, however, in that her primary motives align with the
principal goals of the grand tour: to experience the world before settling
into the responsibilities of adulthood.

Hellena and the Grand Tour

In the opening scene of The Rover, Part 1, Hellena finds herself in a pre-
dicament. Growing up as the younger daughter of a Spanish lord, Hellena
has lived a particularly sheltered life, as demonstrated by her persistent
questioning of her older sister, Florinda, in the play’s opening lines. Florinda
70  Sar ah Morris

complains: ‘What an impertinent thing is a young girl bred in a nunnery!

How full of questions!’ (1.1.1–2). The fact that Hellena has been ‘bred in a
nunnery’ while Florinda was present at ‘the siege of Pamplona’ (1.1.48) –
where she met the young English captain Belvile – further illustrates how
little experience this ‘young girl’ actually has with the world. Hellena’s
predicament becomes more fleshed out with Florinda’s assertion that she
has not only been ‘bred’ in a nunnery, but that she is also ‘a maid designed
for a nun’ (1.1.29), which implies that Hellena will spend the remainder of her
life cloistered away from the world behind a convent’s walls. The appearance
of the young women’s brother, Don Pedro, further emphasizes this idea;
Don Pedro insists that ‘at Lent she shall begin her everlasting penance in
a monastery’ (1.1.137–38). When Hellena remarks that she would rather be
a nun than forced to marry according to her brother’s choice, Don Pedro
continues to emphasize her predetermined path for adulthood: ‘Do not
fear the blessing of that choice. You shall be a nun’ (1.1.141). Hellena’s fate,
according to the dictates of her father and brother, then, has already been
decided, and her predicament resides in the fact that this predetermined
path runs contrary to her personal desires.
It is at this moment, when she is caught between her sheltered past and her
equally cloistered future, that Hellena decides to take her education about
the world into her own hands. Her conversation with Callis, the governess,
after Don Pedro’s departure clarifies her plans to go in masquerade during
carnival. Callis asks Hellena whether she has considered the life set out
for her by her brother and father, and Hellena responds: ‘Yes […] that of a
nun: and till then I’ll be indebted a world of prayers to you if you’ll let me
now see what I never did, the divertissements of a carnival’ (1.1.169–71).
The use of ‘divertissements’ here not only suggests the amusements of
carnival, but also highlights the wandering nature of Hellena’s ambitions,
since to ‘divert’ is to ‘turn aside from [a] (proper) direction or course’.16
Hellena shirks her proper course for the diversions of the world around her,
to ‘see what [she] never did’, with carnival and her rogue disguise serving
as the means to her end. It is no coincidence that her first interaction with
Willmore reintroduces the idea of diverting. When Willmore comments
on her path to the nunnery, Hellena redirects his thoughts, claiming ‘you
design only to make me fit for Heaven’ (1.2.179–80) and informing him that
he should ‘quite divert [her] from it’ (1.2.180–81). He is the diversion she has
been seeking, and the diversion for which she has set her plans in motion.
The fact that the ‘gypsy’ outfits have already been laid out – as implied by

16 ‘Divert’, OED Online.

A Roving Woman 71

Hellena’s command to Florinda in the first scene to ‘assume [a humour] as

gay, and as fantastic as the dress my cousin Valeria and I have provided’
(1.1.178–79) – suggests that Hellena has been planning this ‘divertissement’
for some time, and that her wit and cunning will help carry out that plan.
At first glance, though, Hellena’s actions do not seem that different from
those of her sister and kinswoman. Willmore’s ‘little gipsie’ serves as the
ring-leader, certainly, but Florinda and Valeria also dress in disguise, and
they also participate in carnival. I would argue that Hellena differs from
the text’s other female characters in intent rather than in kind. Florinda
dons a mask like her sister, but her goals follow more traditional lines: she
does so to pursue her beloved, Belvile. Hellena’s elder sister remains a stock
image of passive femininity throughout most of the play, falling into the
role of damsel in distress at least twice (when she must be saved from being
raped). Valeria’s aims are perhaps the most closely aligned with Hellena’s
in the play (that is, she wants to have fun), and yet the young kinswoman
almost appears like an afterthought in the text – as if she exists purely to be
paired with Frederick or to serve as ‘wing-woman’ to her female companions,
to turn a modern phrase. And while Callis also participates in carnival,
she does so with a watchful eye. Of her female companions, Hellena alone
remains centre stage as an active rogue-like figure.
At least one other central female figure in the play, though, rivals Hel-
lena’s rogueries: Angellica Bianca. Arguably, Angellica is the most roguish
woman in the play (except, perhaps, for Lucetta, the jilting wench) due to
her independent nature, her ability to turn her looks and wit for profit, and
her occupation. At the play’s end, the jilted courtesan even takes up arms
and threatens to shoot Willmore. Once again, I will argue that Hellena
differs from Angellica in intent rather than in kind. If both are arguably
rogue-like, and both use their roguery as a means to an end, the ends they
seek differ. Hellena adopts rogue-like tactics to experience the world and
all its pleasures (especially love). Angellica is already a woman of the world,
and she uses her charms – and her ability to sell love and lust – to turn a
profit. The courtesan’s rash decision to admit the penniless Willmore and
her subsequent fall for him probably say more about her own youthfulness
than her business acumen. Both young women adopt roguish tactics, but
only Hellena embarks on her own grand tour.
In truth, Hellena’s grand tour is a microcosm of the ‘Grand Tour’ experi-
ence of many young English gentlemen. Her travels are limited to Naples, not
the various cities on the Continent. She does not visit famous monuments,
landscapes, and works of art that she studied in her formal education. She
is not male (although she does take on the guise of one), and she is certainly
72  Sar ah Morris

not English. Hellena’s grand tour, instead, aligns more closely with the
young men’s education and experience in the ‘sensual palette’; her ‘roving’
throughout carnival allows her to experience not only other cultures, but
also freedom from parental control (particularly after she has shaken off
Callis) and a taste of the sensual pleasures of interacting with the opposite
sex. Her ‘gipsie’ disguise and subsequent male disguise allow her to interact
with both the English visitors and the (presumably) native Angellica Bianca,
and these various encounters teach her valuable lessons about the perils of
lust and the risk of inconstancy in love.
Hellena’s desire to receive a ‘sensual’ education appears throughout the
play – she often emphasizes the idea of the world or worldliness in her speech.
When questioned about her plans for carnival, for instance, Hellena responds
that she wants to do ‘that which all the world does […] be as mad as the rest
and take all innocent freedoms’ (1.1.174–75). While this comment certainly
can be taken as a description of the mad world of carnival, it also rings true
with the spirit of the grand tour, in which young people took advantage of
the (supposedly) innocent freedoms offered to them by escaping watchful
parental eyes. Despite her assertion to her sister that she ‘came thence not, as
[her] wise brother imagines, to take an eternal farewell of the world, but to
love and to be beloved’ (3.1.39–41), Hellena’s discussions of love and courtship
always return to the idea of earthly, carnal pleasures and knowledge. After
all, she follows that statement with the bold assertion: ‘and I will be beloved,
or I’ll get one of your men, so I will’ (3.1.41–42). When questioned further by
her sister and Valeria, Hellena proclaims that she does not want to be the
‘considering lover’ like her sister – the one who writes ‘little soft nonsensical
billets’ (3.1.55) and follows all the proper rules of courtship. She doesn’t have
time! She is bound for the nunnery, where she ‘shall not be suspected to
have any such earthly thoughts about [her]’ (3.1.60–61). And yet, even her
conversation with her brother in the play’s initial scene reveals her focus
on such ‘earthly thoughts’ throughout the play, when she displays a keen
interest in the happenings of the marriage bed. She presents Florinda’s
pending marriage to the old Don Vincentio as a bleak affair:

That honour being past, the giant stretches himself, yawns and sighs a
belch or two, loud as a musket – throws himself into bed, and expects you
in his foul sheets, and e’er you can get yourself undressed, calls you with a
snore or two – and are not these fine blessings to a young lady. (1.1.114–18)

Her preoccupation with worldly pleasures, however, appears most fruitfully

in her discussions with Willmore. Hellena flirts freely with Willmore in the
A Roving Woman 73

palm-reading scene, an action that notably would not have been allowed
of a Spanish female youth, particularly one so guarded by her father and
brother. When Willmore tells her in this initial conversation that it ‘’tis
more meritorious to leave the world when thou hast tasted and proved the
pleasure on’t’ (1.2.176–77), she responds by asking him to take her off her
pre-appointed path and ‘bring [her] back to the world again’ (1.2.181). In a
later conversation, after discussing marriage with Willmore, she comments
that ‘a handsome woman has a great deal to do whilst her face is good’
(3.1.170–71), asserting that ‘should I, in these days of my youth, catch a fit
of foolish constancy, I were undone: ’tis loitering by daylight in our great
journey’ (3.1.172–74).
Constancy and inconstancy serve as major sticking points in the play
for Hellena and Willmore’s relationship, and Hellena in her comments
here demonstrates not only her interest in worldly pleasures, but also how
much she has already learned both about the world and about Willmore
in particular, since in presenting herself as inconstant she mirrors his own
inconstant behaviour towards her. She presents herself as rogue-like as she
perceives him to be, exclaiming ‘Well, I see our business as well as humours
are alike: yours to cozen as many maids as will trust you, and I as many
men as have faith’ (3.1.181–83). Acquiring such keen knowledge and insight
into Willmore’s character is significant, if only because such knowledge
about a particular suitor would generally have been denied to a sheltered
young woman in this period. Through her roving, Hellena grants herself
a similar education about the constancy and inconstancy of the opposite
sex that the young English gentleman, Blunt, receives in the play when he
encounters Lucetta.
Hellena’s general aptitude and willingness to learn throughout the play
also links her to the grand tour, which was, above all else, supposed to be an
educational experience. Talk of learning pervades several of her discussions,
such as when she asserts to Valeria that ‘if you are not a lover, ’tis an art
soon learnt’ (3.1.47–48), a comment that soon has Florinda exclaiming ‘I
wonder how you learned to love so easily’ (3.1.49). Hellena’s desire to know
more about love, and about the world in general, appears in the first lines
she speaks in the play. In response to Florinda’s complaint that she has ‘told
thee more than thou understand’st already’ (1.1.2–3), Hellena exclaims: ‘The
more’s my grief. I would fain know as much as you, which makes me so
inquisitive’ (1.1.4–5). This inquisitive nature appears throughout the play in
her questioning of Florinda about love, in her questioning of her brother’s
plans for Florinda’s marriage, in the curiosity displayed in her exchanges
with Willmore, and in her tendency to remain in the shadows in order to
74  Sar ah Morris

observe the interactions of those around her. For example, in the third act,
right before Belvile and Moretta enter discussing Willmore, the disguised
Hellena turns to Florinda and Valeria, remarking: ‘Let’s step aside and we
may learn something’ (3.1.70–71). And learn something she does in this
scene, particularly about Willmore’s roving eye.
One moment in the play that perhaps highlights these various ideas as-
sociated with the grand tour most vividly – learning, roving, and sensual
desire – would be when Hellena and Willmore finally learn each other’s names.
This revelation, which would normally occur upon an initial meeting, comes
at the play’s end, after both of them have already learned everything else
they need to know about each other. Such a late revelation calls into question
which character the play’s title – The Rover – actually refers to, especially since
Hellena carefully paints herself as Willmore’s equal throughout the text. Her
ability to match him remains further underscored by the actual names each of
them gives. When Willmore asserts ‘I am called Robert the constant’ (5.1.472),
Hellena echoes him a few lines later: ‘I am called Hellena the inconstant’
(5.1.477). Her switch from ‘constant’ to ‘inconstant’ reveals her deep knowledge
of his character, since she labels herself to match his own inconsistency
throughout the play. Such knowledge would not have been possible without
her youthful (and educational) adventures during carnival. Such knowledge
is powerful too, since it ultimately alters her course for adulthood.

Implications

In establishing Hellena as a rogue-like young woman who actively seeks

worldly experience, Behn makes a powerful statement about the importance
of such experience for young women, as well as young men. In allowing
Hellena to create her own youthful space in between childhood and adult-
hood, Behn establishes that the space outside of the home, and even beyond
the watchful parental (or patriarchal) eye, can prove fruitful for both sexes
since – according to the logic of the play – more experienced young women
can ultimately make better spouses. Much like the travels of the grand
tour served as a way for young men to experience the world before settling
into the responsibilities of adulthood, so Hellena’s roving throughout the
play actually prepares her to be a wife through allowing her to know her
future husband before committing to him. Both the play and the carnival
within end with order restored, and yet that ‘order’ has altered quite a bit
from when the play started. Hellena ends the play dressed not as a young
Spanish noblewoman, but as a young boy – a sign, perhaps, that she, like
A Roving Woman 75

Willmore, remains a bit rogue-like even in the restored order of the play.
Parental and patriarchal desires have been subverted, and will remain so,
since both Hellena and Florinda have chosen to follow their own paths.
Alternative futures have been carved out, especially for Willmore and
Hellena, neither of whom envisioned marriage at the play’s start. Behn’s
‘world of youth’ concludes with a new ‘venture’: adulthood.

Works Cited

Primary Sources

Behn, Aphra. The Rover, Part I, edited by Robyn Bolam. 3rd edn. London: Blooms-
bury-Methuen Drama, 2012.
Dekker, Thomas and Thomas Middleton. The Roaring Girl, edited by Jennifer Panek.
New York: Norton, 2011.

Secondary Sources

Beach, Adam R. ‘Carnival Politics, Generous Satire, and Nationalist Spectacle in

Behn’s The Rover’. Eighteenth-Century Life 28, no. 3 (2004): 1–19.
Black, Jeremy. Italy and the Grand Tour. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
Boebel, Dagny. ‘In the Carnival World of Adam’s Garden: Roving and Rape in Behn’s
Rover’. In Broken Boundaries: Women and Feminism in Restoration Drama, edited
by Katherine M. Quinsey, 54–70. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996.
Boulton, James, and T.O. McLoughlin, eds. News from Abroad: Letters Written by
British Travellers on the Grand Tour, 1728–71. Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 2012.
DeRitter, Jones. ‘The Gypsy, The Rover, and the Wanderer: Aphra Behn’s Revision
of Thomas Killigrew’. Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1700
10, no. 2 (1986): 82–92.
Dionne, Craig, and Steve Mentz, eds. Rogues and Early Modern English Culture.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006.
‘Divert, v’. OED Online. September 2016. Oxford University Press. www.oed.com.
proxy.lib.miamioh.edu/view/Entry/56070?redirectedFrom=divert (accessed
23 October 2016).
Dolan, Brian. Ladies of the Grand Tour: British Women in Pursuit of Enlightenment
and Adventure in Eighteenth-Century Europe. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.
Pacheco, Anita. ‘Rape and the Female Subject in Aphra Behn’s The Rover’. English
Literary History 65, no. 2 (1998): 323–45.
76  Sar ah Morris

Warneke, Sara. Images of the Educational Traveller in Early Modern England. New
York: Brill, 1995.
Withey, Lynne. Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours: A History of Leisure Travel, 1750 to
1915. New York: Morrow, 1997.

About the author

Sarah Morris is a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature at Miami University

(Oxford, Ohio), where she is finishing her dissertation on female rogues in
early modern English literature. She received her B.A. in English Literature
from the University of Alabama in 2010, and her M.A. in English Literature
(with special concentration in Shakespeare and the Renaissance) through the
Hudson Strode Program at the University of Alabama in 2012. Her scholarly
interests centre on questions of agency, anxiety, and social order in relation
to early modern female rogues or roguish figures.