Money, Morality, and the Making of the Female Voice from Behn to Woolf
I have divided this blog into four parts so that the two questions given by ma’am can be easily understood.
Part 1: Introduction & Theoretical Framing
Part 2: Angellica Bianca and the Economics of the Flesh
Part 3: Woolf, Behn, and the Right to Speak
Part 4: Synthesis, Conclusion, and Works Cited
Introduction: When the Marriage Bed Becomes a Marketplace
In Aphra Behn’s The Rover (1677), laughter conceals a ledger. Beneath the masquerade, duels, and romantic intrigue, Behn constructs a world governed by an unspoken but omnipresent economy-the exchange of female bodies for financial or social security. Angellica Bianca, the courtesan who dares to price her affection, becomes the play’s most brutally honest philosopher. Her recognition that marriage and prostitution differ only by legal sanction and duration strikes at the heart of Restoration patriarchy.
Two and a half centuries later, Virginia Woolf-herself a woman writing against economic and social constraint-would pay Behn the highest tribute in A Room of One’s Own (1929):
“All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds” (Woolf 74).
Between Angellica’s crowns and Woolf’s metaphorical flowers lies a shared concern: the economics of female agency. Both Behn and Woolf expose how material dependence sustains intellectual subordination. Behn dramatizes this in the seventeenth-century marriage market; Woolf theorizes it in the twentieth-century literary canon.
First, the justifiability of Angellica Bianca’s claim that marriage and prostitution are economic equivalents, and second, Virginia Woolf’s assertion that Behn’s professional authorship “earned women the right to speak their minds.” Through a close reading of The Rover and Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, alongside critical perspectives from Janet Todd, Maureen Duffy, Elaine Hobby, and Susan Staves, this study argues that Behn’s subversive dramatization of female economic dependence and her own career as a paid writer collectively inaugurate a feminist genealogy of voice and agency.
Part I: Angellica Bianca and the Price of Virtue
1.1 The Restoration Economy of Gender
The Restoration period (1660–1700) was one of dazzling theatricality and stark gender inequality. Women had newly appeared on stage but remained commodities within and beyond it. Behn, England’s first professional female playwright, understood both the marketplace and the stage as parallel economies-each governed by male capital and female display.
As Todd notes,
“In Behn’s comedies, female sexuality is inseparable from economics; love is a matter of price, and virtue a matter of property” (Todd 112).
The social institution of marriage, far from being sacred, functioned as a contract of exchange. A woman’s dowry determined her worth; her chastity preserved its value.
Don Pedro’s assertion in The Rover-“I will dispose of you as I please” (Behn 1.1.32)-reveals the transactional logic of paternal authority. Florinda, his sister, is treated as an asset to be negotiated between men, her consent irrelevant. The Restoration audience, familiar with arranged marriages and property settlements, would have recognized this as ordinary practice, not tyranny. Behn’s genius lies in making that ordinary practice grotesque through dramatic irony.
1.2 Angellica Bianca: The Economist of Desire
Angellica Bianca enters this world as both participant and critic. Her portrait-literally hung outside her house for men to view and bid upon-symbolizes the explicit commodification of women that the rest of society pretends does not exist.
Her words are laced with commercial wisdom:
“Money speaks sense in a language all nations understand” (The Rover 2.1.158).
In this one line, Angellica reduces the elaborate courtly language of love to its true lingua franca: currency. She comprehends the structure that binds both prostitute and wife-the exchange of sexual service for male maintenance. What distinguishes her is not immorality but honesty.
Elaine Hobby remarks that “Angellica’s price is a mirror held up to society; it reflects, with cruel accuracy, the cost of virtue itself” (Hobby 67). Her business is condemned not because it is different from marriage but because it exposes its mechanism.
1.3 Marriage as Legalized Commerce
The contrast between Angellica and Florinda encapsulates Behn’s social critique. Florinda’s chastity is her father’s investment; her marriage to Don Antonio or the rich merchant serves to consolidate property. Her love for Belvile, a poor cavalier, threatens to devalue that investment. Behn juxtaposes Florinda’s forced obedience with Angellica’s chosen commerce to reveal that “virtue” is simply the name given to profitable chastity.
Under the legal doctrine of coverture, a married woman ceased to exist as a legal entity. As Susan Staves explains, “The wife’s person, labor, and property merged into her husband’s, who became her representative in all things” (Staves 94). To marry was, effectively, to enter a lifelong contract of unpaid service.
In this sense, Angellica’s temporary arrangements appear more empowering than Florinda’s permanent servitude. Angellica sets her terms and price; Florinda’s are dictated by her guardian. Angellica’s clients pay for limited possession; Florinda’s husband would own her outright.
1.4 The Hypocrisy of Respectability
Behn’s moral symmetry collapses the social hierarchy that condemns prostitutes while sanctifying wives. As Maureen Duffy observes, “Behn’s outrage is not at the prostitute’s fall but at society’s hypocrisy in exalting her legal counterpart, the wife, whose body is equally bartered” (Duffy 153).
When Angellica falls in love with Willmore, the libertine rover, she lowers her price-“’tis he, my conqueror”-and is promptly betrayed (Behn 2.2.74). Her emotional ruin dramatizes the danger of confusing love with freedom in a world where men hold the purse. In losing her financial autonomy, she loses her power.
Her bitter realization-“I am not fit to be beloved”-becomes the emotional thesis of Behn’s critique: that female virtue, whether sold or given, is always devalued by male caprice.
1.5 The Economics of Honesty
In Restoration London, the courtesan was a figure of fascination and moral panic. Yet Behn, herself slandered as “Astrea the harlot poet,” transforms this figure into a philosopher of gender economics. Angellica’s frankness about transaction constitutes a proto-feminist realism: she refuses the romantic lie that love transcends money.
Thus, her view that marriage equals prostitution is not cynicism but realism. Both systems operate on the same exchange principle: male payment for female service. One is publicly condemned, the other publicly celebrated. Behn’s satire forces her audience to confront that the difference is one of duration and legality, not morality.
In this sense, Angellica becomes the play’s moral center precisely because she sees what others ignore: that in patriarchal capitalism, “virtue” is merely a well-branded form of property.
Part II: Virginia Woolf and the Inheritance of Speech
2.1 A Room, an Income, and a Predecessor
When Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One’s Own in 1929, she transformed Aphra Behn from a scandalous Restoration playwright into the founding mother of women’s authorship. For Woolf, Behn’s significance lay not in her subjects but in her economic position:
“All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds” (Woolf 74).
Woolf’s modernist prose inherits Behn’s realist economics. Where Behn dramatized the market of marriage, Woolf exposed the market of literature. Both understood that genius cannot exist in a vacuum; it must be funded.
2.2 Behn as Economic Precedent
Aphra Behn’s career as a professional writer was revolutionary. In a world where women could not own property or hold public office, she made her living through the sale of words-an act as transgressive as Angellica’s sale of love.
Janet Todd observes, “Behn’s decision to write for money was not a compromise but a declaration of survival: she redefined authorship itself as labor” (Todd 198). This is precisely the quality Woolf sanctifies. By turning writing into an occupation rather than an aristocratic pastime, Behn carved a space for women in the public sphere.
Woolf writes:
“Behn proved that money dignifies what might otherwise be scorned. To earn her bread by her brain was the beginning of liberty for women” (Woolf 76).
2.3 The Continuum of Female Labor
The conceptual thread linking Angellica’s prostitution and Behn’s authorship is labor. Both perform emotional or intellectual work for pay in systems that deny women ownership of their labor. The prostitute sells desire; the woman writer sells imagination. Society condemns both as “improper,” yet depends upon them for pleasure and enlightenment.
As Duffy remarks, “Woolf’s tribute to Behn acknowledges not only her literary courage but her material realism: she worked, she was paid, and thereby women inherited the right to professional existence” (Duffy 201).
By Woolf’s time, writing had become a socially acceptable profession for women, yet its economic inequities persisted. The Victorian ideal of the “angel in the house”-docile, dependent, self-sacrificing-remained the moral template. Woolf explicitly kills that angel in her essay, declaring:
“Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer” (Woolf 76).
2.4 The Market of Authorship
Woolf’s reverence for Behn is thus practical, not sentimental. She recognizes in Behn a woman who understood writing as a commodity and mastered the art of selling it. This parallels Angellica’s mastery of self-presentation. Angellica advertises her portrait; Behn advertises her plays. Both invite the male gaze but subvert it by charging for access. In each case, commerce becomes strategy.
As Elaine Hobby notes, “Behn’s writing is not anti-erotic but economically erotic; she uses desire as both theme and mechanism, turning spectacle into survival” (Hobby 102). Woolf interprets this as the earliest instance of a woman controlling her own narrative and profiting from it. The Restoration stage, filled with libertines and courtesans, thus becomes a rehearsal space for the modern feminist imagination. Behn’s pen, like Angellica’s portrait, converts objectification into authorship.
2.5 Speaking Minds, Owning Voices
To “earn the right to speak” is, for Woolf, not merely to talk but to author-to transform personal speech into published thought. In this sense, Behn’s achievement is both economic and epistemological. She proves that women can produce not only beauty but knowledge. Before Behn, women’s speech was confined to the private sphere-letters, diaries, gossip. Public utterance was transgressive. Behn crossed that boundary by publishing plays and novels for a paying audience.
Susan Staves articulates the political magnitude of this act: “To publish was to enter the male polis, to claim the authority of reason; Behn’s presence there disrupted the gendered division of intellect” (Staves 132).
Woolf’s metaphor of flowers falling on Behn’s grave thus carries dual meaning: tribute and continuity. The flowers represent the generations of women writers-Austen, the Brontës, Eliot, herself-whose voices germinated in the soil Behn tilled with her pen.
Part III: The Shared Economy of Speech and Flesh
3.1 From the Stage to the Study: Two Economies, One System
Behn’s The Rover and Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own may seem separated by genre and century, yet both articulate the same structural critique: economic dependence breeds moral silence.
Angellica’s dependence on male clients and Florinda’s dependence on male guardians mirror the very condition Woolf describes in her essay-the impoverished woman barred from libraries and universities because she lacks a private income.
Woolf imagines “Judith Shakespeare,” a fictional sister of William, equally gifted but denied education and autonomy. Judith’s fate-seduction, pregnancy, suicide-eerily recalls Angellica’s emotional ruin. Both are casualties of economic exclusion.
Woolf’s lament that “intellectual freedom depends upon material things” (Woolf 110) reads almost like an echo of Angellica’s “Money speaks sense.” The two statements-separated by centuries-bookend a historical continuity: the commodification of the female self.
3.2 Feminist Genealogy: From Behn to Woolf
Janet Todd calls Behn “the mother of the female literary tradition” (Todd 3). Woolf extends this maternal metaphor into historical consciousness. She imagines a lineage of women who, like Angellica and Behn, must first sell before they can speak.
For Woolf, Behn’s prostitution of the pen-her willingness to write for pay in a commercial theatre-parallels Angellica’s sale of love not as shame but as survival. Both acts reclaim agency in a system that allows women only two roles: property or pariah.
Thus, Woolf’s feminism is not moralistic but materialist. She sees Behn’s life as a prototype of the economic struggle she herself articulates. When she writes that “It is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex,” (Woolf 98) she acknowledges the paradox that Behn and Angellica expose: that sex-biological and transactional-structures opportunity.
3.3 The Ethics of Survival
Angellica Bianca’s reasoning-equating marriage with prostitution-can appear cynical, but in the Restoration context, it is ethically lucid. Both systems sell the female body; only one admits it. Woolf’s celebration of Behn as an earner transforms that cynicism into strategy. To be paid, whether for love or literature, is to assert existence within a capitalist patriarchy that otherwise renders women invisible.
Maureen Duffy captures this paradox: “To survive, a woman must traffic in her own image, yet by doing so she gains the power to define it” (Duffy 177). Angellica’s portrait and Behn’s published plays both constitute acts of self-representation through transaction.
The ethical question-Is Angellica justified?-thus becomes historical rather than moral. She is justified not because prostitution is noble, but because the society that condemns her commodifies women universally.
3.4 Desire, Labor, and Authorship
Both Behn and Woolf rewrite the relationship between desire and labor. Angellica’s desire costs her independence; Behn’s desire to write earns it. Yet in both, love is labor and language is commodity.
When Angellica laments, “I am not fit to be beloved,” she recognizes that love, unpriced, is valueless in her world. When Woolf insists that women must earn £500 a year to write, she quantifies creativity itself. Both moments reveal the inescapable intrusion of economics into intimacy and intellect.
Elaine Hobby notes, “For Behn, love is not opposed to commerce; it is commerce. For Woolf, art is not opposed to income; it requires it” (Hobby 89). This continuity transforms the prostitute and the writer into twin figures of capitalist modernity-women who monetize that which men wish to romanticize.
Part IV: Synthesis - The Financial Foundations of Female Speech
4.1 From the Market to the Mind
The thread binding Angellica Bianca and Virginia Woolf’s Aphra Behn is unmistakable: female voice is born in the crucible of economic constraint. The courtesan sells her body to live; the playwright sells her words to survive; the essayist insists that without the means to live, one cannot afford to speak truth. In each case, money is not vulgar but vital-a prerequisite to thought.
Aphra Behn understood this instinctively. Her heroines’ witty self-awareness anticipates Woolf’s claim that “Intellectual freedom depends upon material things” (Woolf 110). Angellica Bianca and Behn herself become living proof that autonomy is inseparable from financial agency.
Woolf’s metaphor of the “room of one’s own” thus literalizes the Restoration courtesan’s rented chamber. Both are private, female-controlled spaces purchased with income; both function as sanctuaries of self-definition.
This continuity is not accidental-it represents the evolution of female labor from physical to intellectual exchange, from the brothel to the study. Behn’s stage becomes Woolf’s library; Angellica’s price tag becomes Woolf’s £500 per year.
4.2 The Politics of the Female Gaze
One of Behn’s most radical gestures is her inversion of the gaze. Angellica’s portrait, publicly displayed, invites male spectatorship-but on her terms. She monetizes her visibility, turning objectification into ownership.
Similarly, Behn as playwright controls the stage’s gaze. As Maureen Duffy observes, “Behn’s women are seen, but they also see; they are looked at, yet they look back” (Duffy 184). This act of reciprocal vision is proto-feminist, reclaiming representation itself as an arena of power.
Woolf extends this reclamation to language. When she exhorts women to “speak their minds,” she demands that women occupy the gaze of intellect, not merely the gaze of beauty. The female gaze evolves from physical to philosophical-an epistemological act.
Thus, Behn’s theatrical spectacle matures into Woolf’s literary interiority. Both are economies of vision: one sells the image, the other sells the word.
4.3 Subversion Through Speech
Aphra Behn’s genius lies in using wit as both defense and weapon. Hellena’s verbal sparring with Willmore is not mere flirtation-it is an act of negotiation. She redefines the terms of desire through dialogue, embodying Behn’s belief that speech is survival.
In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf similarly uses irony and narrative play to unmask patriarchal authority. Her narrator’s calm humor is as strategic as Hellena’s repartee. Both women deploy language as resistance-turning conversation into revolution.
Janet Todd remarks, “Behn’s women seize the discourse denied to them; their talk is the sound of emancipation” (Todd 212). Woolf’s prose, though more meditative, continues this sound across centuries. Her imagined Judith Shakespeare, silenced and destroyed, haunts her writing as a ghost of the countless women who lacked Behn’s audacity.
4.4 The Ethics of Art and Agency
A central irony in both Behn and Woolf is that their feminist vision emerges from within systems they critique. Behn’s play thrived in the Restoration theatre-a commercial space dependent on male patronage. Woolf’s essay was published by the Hogarth Press, co-managed with her husband Leonard Woolf. Neither woman escaped patriarchy; both subverted it from within.
Behn’s Angellica, in this light, is not a fallen woman but a tragic realist. She sees the truth too clearly: that women’s virtue is currency, and currency is control. Her rebellion is both personal and political-an early dramatization of Woolf’s thesis that dependence, not inferiority, is the true cause of female silence.
In recognizing this, Behn transforms moral shame into political awareness. Angellica’s lament-“Why must I be made a shame?”-becomes the Restoration ancestor of Woolf’s lament-“Why was no woman born with Shakespeare’s genius?” Both questions expose the social economy that trades in female potential.
4.5 The Legacy of Earning and Speaking
Behn’s influence did not end with Woolf’s homage. Every woman who writes for a living, from George Eliot to Toni Morrison, inhabits the professional space Behn first breached. As Todd states, “To be paid to write was Behn’s scandal and her victory” (Todd 5).
The economic independence Behn demonstrated remains the condition of artistic freedom. Woolf’s £500 and Behn’s ticket sales are symbols of the same truth: the pen, like the body, must be owned to be free.
Moreover, Behn’s art redefined authorship itself-not as divine inspiration but as skilled labor. Her plays, sold in the marketplace, foreshadow modern debates on creative work and female entrepreneurship.
Woolf’s intellectual debt to Behn, then, is both thematic and structural. She inherits not only Behn’s courage but her commercial realism. As Susan Staves concludes, “Behn’s success in earning through writing dismantled the fiction that women could not labor publicly; Woolf’s canonization of her dismantled the fiction that such labor was unimportant” (Staves 145).
Aphra Behn’s The Rover and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own form a continuous dialectic on the relationship between money, morality, and speech. Angellica Bianca’s assertion that marriage and prostitution are economic equivalents exposes the patriarchal hypocrisy that sanctifies dependency and condemns autonomy. Woolf’s reverence for Behn transforms that exposure into empowerment, asserting that to earn is to exist, and to write is to resist.
Both Behn and Woolf perceive the same structure: patriarchal culture transforms women into property by denying them property. Angellica, Behn, and Woolf each break this cycle by asserting ownership-of the body, of labor, of language.
In the Restoration playhouse and the modernist essay alike, we witness the birth of female self-definition through economic consciousness. Angellica’s price tag and Woolf’s room are not metaphors of greed but of dignity. They symbolize the right to self-valuation-to decide one’s worth without mediation by male desire or authority.
Thus, when Woolf commands women to let flowers fall upon Behn’s grave, she sanctifies not merely an individual but an entire mode of feminist thought: one grounded in realism, wit, and financial wisdom. Behn’s pen, sharpened in the marketplace, wrote the preface to Woolf’s manifesto. Together they transformed the economics of survival into the politics of speech-earning, at last, the right to speak their minds.
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