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Intro to Restoration Lit (ENGL 210)
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Topic 9: The Restoration and the Eighteenth CenturyNovember 14th - 18th, 2022
Changes in the Restoration
Women were now allowed to pursue professional actress positions – although they are still seen
as women of bad reputations, they are allowed to be on the stage.
● A period of neoclassicism – enormous and greater reverence for the classics and a greater
degree of imitation of classical forms, verses, character types, etc.
○ Romanticism stops this later…
The Disappointment
Cites the imperfect enjoyment (bad sex poetry, by her contemporaries)
● Begins with names, Cloris and Lisander, outside of the Pastoral.
● Literary conventions are being played with and maneuvered (and, to some point,
undermined) by Aphra Behn in this poem.
Stanza One – already, the poem is rapey from the beginning.
● That kind of gendered violence is played down (but certainly part of the literary tradition)
● We get a lot more about Lysander than of Cloris – his approach to her is… gross?
● There is a kind of mock-heroic or mock-epic to these phrases – they are overdone,
excessive, and over the top (in that capacity, they collapse over themselves)
○ The trope of the woman’s resistance of being performative – it isn’t an indication
of consent or desire but is simply part of the ‘game’
○ There are ways that the poem follows literary traditions, but also breaks from
them (the poem ends up mocking Lysander and the narrative)
● Lysander is in a poor situation, but this place certainly isn’t hell (he is externalizing all
blame… similar to how Trump said something after his party didn’t win the midterm
elections… wow! So funny!)
○ The poem begins with Lysander being described as the mobile one, rushing to
surprise her (she’s walking in the forest and the rapist jumps out…)
Cloris, as an allegorical figure – the poem is on the plane of allegorical figures.
● She’s not meant to be a real person (this isn’t realism!) – there are some things that are
constructed and artificial about her, to begin with, even if she’s staged to represent
something else.
○ The idea of Cloris representing women, in general, is that she can also feel
disappointed about the failed sexual encounter.
● The moment he can finally have sex, he can’t get it up (ironic!!)
○ Taking apart and dismantling the equation of his self with a part of his body.
○ He’s thwarted by his own body.
○ Does he want to actually have sex with her or the power?
November 16th, 2022
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