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3 - The Prose of Love

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Laura L. Runge
Affiliation:
University of South Florida
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Summary

The Rhetorick of Love is half-breath’d, interrupted

words, languishing Eyes, flattering Speeches, broken

Sighs, pressing the hand, and falling Tears.

That Love, the great Instructor of the Mind,

That forms anew, and fashions every Soul,

Refines the gross Defects of Humane kind;

Humbles the Proud and Vain, inspires the Dull:

Gives Cowards noble Heat in Fight,

And teaches feeble Woman how to write.

That doth the Universe command;

Does from my Iris Heart direct her Hand.

I’ll prove to you the strong Effects of Love in

some unguarded and ungovern’d Hearts; where

it rages beyond the Inspirations of a God all

soft and gentle, and reigns more like a Fury from Hell.

Aphra Behn opens her fiction, The Fair Jilt, with an aphoristic rule about the passion of love: “AS Love is the most noble and divine Passion of the Soul, so is it that to which we may justly, attribute all the real Satisfactions of Life; and without it, Man is unfinish’d, and unhappy.” In this study of Behn's language, it has become abundantly clear that her terms, “Passion of the Soul” and “love,” have specific meanings within the cross-section of seventeenth-century philosophical and spiritual thought, and that the words differ from modern usage. Like Descartes and Hobbes and other seventeenth-century thinkers, Behn is interested in the manifestation of passion in different characters, no more so than in her prose fictions. Passion is what R. S. White labels an early modern “meta-term” “to describe the internal processes and mental/bodily apparatus by which feelings were conceptualized.” It differs from emotions, which are particularized feeling states associated with the mind, and a concept that doesn't fully come into use until the nineteenth century. Behn's MFW in prose, love, is one possible manifestation of a passion of the soul in a feeling state, and in Behn's quotation from The Fair Jilt it is a positive and valued experience. Behn maintains “there are a thousand things to be said of this generous Passion” for those “whose hearts are capable of receiving its soft Impressions,” but “not everyone […] can be sensible of its tender touches.” The words “impressions” and “touches” point to the physical, bodily impact of love, which is consistent with an early modern understanding of the hydraulic system of humors and the perceived force of passion.

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Publisher: Anthem Press
Print publication year: 2023

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