Female characters in The Beggars Opera

As I could not present my role in class, I would like to comment the most interesting point of my presentation here, in my blog. My role was the character collector, but this time focusing only in female characters.

As the other day in class we talked about some female characters, I think it is not necesary to talk about them again, so now I am going to focus mainly in two topics that seems more useful, but always related to women in the play.

1) In The Beggars Opera it seems as if John Gay has weaved the text with a kind of parallelism that equates the male gender with the upper class and the female with the lower. Just as the lower class "rogues" are hanged for commiting crimes similar in nature to that of the ever-inocent lawyer, the women of the play act in the same manner as the men, yet are punished with titles such as "whore, hussy and slut".

2)Among the female characters, Polly Peachum is the most reresentative one. Gay uses her as a satirical element to show the hypocrisy of London society. It explains how Gay juxtaposes the aristocracy against thieving.

The great age of satire

As all of you already know, the literature appearing between 1660 and 1785, also known as the Restoration and the eighteenth century literature, can be divided in three lesser periods of about 40 years each.

The second period, from 1700 to 1744/45, is marked by the influence of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, indeed this period ends with their deaths in 1744 and 1745 respectively. Among others, these two take part of the new and brilliant group of writers that emerge in the early eighteenth century. Determined to preserve good sense and civilized values, they turn their wit against fanaticism and innovation. Therefore this is a great age of satire. Satires during this period aimed to point out the shortcomings of society through ridiculing accepted standards of thought, exposing Britain´s defects and punishing the hypocrisy of the time.

Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift are well known for their sharply perceptive works. Pope, in his The Rape of the Lock, in which he is Horatian[i] in tone, does not actively attack the self-important pomp of the British aristocracy, but rather presents it in such a way that gives the reader a new perspective from which to easily view the action in the story as foolish and ridiculous. Pope is able to illuminate the moral degradation of society to the public. However, Swift´s A Modest Proposal, is a Juvenalian[ii] satire, shockingly revealing and often overlooked dimension of British colonialism with regards to the Irish through savage ridicule and disdainful contempt. Swift´s satirical tone, relying on realism and harshness to carry its message, is much more acerbic from his counterpart, perfectly displaying Juvenalian satire´s ability to shock and ridicule.

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[i] Named for the Roman satirist, Horace. This kind of satire playfully criticizes some social vice through gentle, mild, and light-hearted humour. It directs with, exaggeration, and self-deprecating humour toward what it identifies as folly, rather than evil.

[ii] Named after the Roman satirist Juvenalian, this kind of satire is more contemptuous and abrasive than the Horatian. Juvenalian satire addresses social evil through scorn, outrage, and savage ridicule. This form is often pessimistic, characterized by irony, sarcasm, moral indignation and personal invective, with less emphasis on humour.

Aphra Behn and Slavery

Aphra Behn presents issues of slavery in Oroonoko as an interpretation of all that was happening around the world in the seventeenth century. She was one of the first writers introducing new elements of slavery in her novel.

According to Janet Todd, Aphra Behn did not oppose slavery at all. She accepted the idea of powerful groups enslaving the powerless, and it is said that during her childhood she used to hear many Eastern tales in which the Mongols enslaved entire European villas. Apart from that, her husband Johan Behn (although it has never been proven that Aphra was married) had been a Dutch slave trader who sailed on The King David. So if Aphra Behn had been opposed to slavery as an institution, how would she have married a slave trader? It is known with certainty that her marriage was not happy. Oroonoko was written twenty years after the death of her husband and, among its characters, there is no one more evil than the slave ship captain who tricks and captures Oroonoko leading him to slavery. Here, what Aphra Behn is doing is comparing her husband, a Dutch slave trader, with the captain of the ship in Oroonoko.

   Dutch slave trader.

    The ship captain.

PRESENTATION POST

Hello everybody!

First at all, I would like to apologize for my delay.

The aim of this post is to explain the reason why I have chosen "Aphran´s diary" as the name of my blog. At the beginning I thought that I had to write my name or my nickname "Aran" (as my friends call me) but then I realized that my name in the blog had to be related to the period we are studying in the English Literature course. So I thought about Aphra Behn and I mixed her name with mine, so the result was "Aphran". I thought about Aphra Behn not only because she is the first writer we have studied in this course, but because she is a writer that I have always been interested in when doing an essay or any research about any writer. I like her because of her initiative of writing at a time in which women were not considered as well as men and she had to fight against it until she got it.