"Come, The Longest Sword Carries Her”: Constructions of Masculinity in Aphra Behn’s The Rover
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The plays of Aphra Behn have become the focus of a great deal of contemporary feminist criticism on account of Behn’s status as English literature’s first professional female writer and the complexity of the gender politics expressed in her plays. While Behn’s The Rover (1677) has been celebrated as a popular libertine play of the Restoration – along with William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) and George Etherege’s The Man of Mode (1676) – it has simultaneously been praised by feminist critics for circumventing patriarchal social structures. This essay will consider the ways in which Behn manages to write a successful Restoration comedy, complete with the conventions of the time, while concurrently critiquing the libertine masculinity that was highly celebrated in the Restoration period. First, Behn places her male characters in notably compromised states of authority and strips them of many conventional sources of power. Secondly, Male sexual aggression, specifically rape, is heavily ironized throughout the play. Thirdly, Behn’s male protagonists are often hypocritical regarding the libertine code of values to which they are supposed to adhere. Thus, in The Rover , Behn carefully exposes libertine masculinity in such a way as to criticize, not libertinism as an aesthetic, but the contradictions and flaws of the libertine ethos that promotes male superiority and dominance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".