Being a Woman… Possessing Herself

In the English Restoration, the female body was a sexual object for male consumption. As De Lauretis (1987, p. 5) argued, the construction of gender is the product of its representation so that the construction of woman’s body followed those canons which encouraged patriarchal binary thought, where the feminine pole has always been regarded as the negative one. In The Rover Part I (1677) and II (1681), Aphra Behn stressed the ideological construction of “docile bodies” (Foucault, 1979, p. 137), forcing man to recognize the lady cavalier as a thinking agent. In these plays, woman rejects male’s stereotypes, turning over the man’s discursive constructions. The author’s analysis has not the pretension to solve the many contradictions of a contradictory era but it will inspect female figures in The Rover Part I (1677) and II (1681), in which emerges a “woman irreducible to the masculine subject” (Irigaray, 2000, p. 125).