Cosmic Blindness, Comic Blindness: The Lunar Imagination and Women’s Place in Aphra Behn’s Emperor of the Moon
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This essay situates Aphra Behn’s The Emperor of the Moon (1687) within a range of the early modern fantastic voyage narrative—a wildly popular literary genre that touches on interplanetary voyages particularly in seventeenth-century Europe—and Copernican cosmologies. In doing so, I contend that Behn’s farce is interwoven with lunar motifs as a meaningful attempt to bring our attention to the earth, and more specifically to a woman’s place circumscribed by patriarchal order. Inasmuch as the emergent seventeenth-century heliocentric concepts deprivileged longstanding human centrality in the universe, Behn’s lunar imagination manifested in this play calls into question the place of Dr. Baliardo. In telling contrast to the previous readings of Baliardo as a stock virtuoso character, I rather focus on him as a patriarch preoccupied with drawing physical and epistemological boundaries within his household. Charting Baliardo’s control over spaces and his ensuing failures when faced with visual tricks, this essay explores three disparate places: Baliardo’s house, an apothecary’s shop materialized temporarily by Scaramouch, and the lunar festival. In doing so, the ultimate goal of this essay is to contend that Behn’s envisioning of an alternate space in the form of the lunar festival is subversive and gendered as it enables audiences to glimpse a moment of women’s liberation.
Abstract
This essay situates Aphra Behn’s The Emperor of the Moon (1687) within a range of the early modern fantastic voyage narrative—a wildly popular literary genre that touches on interplanetary voyages particularly in seventeenth-century Europe—and Copernican cosmologies. In doing so, I contend that Behn’s farce is interwoven with lunar motifs as a meaningful attempt to bring our attention to the earth, and more specifically to a woman’s place circumscribed by patriarchal order. Inasmuch as the emergent seventeenth-century heliocentric concepts deprivileged longstanding human centrality in the universe, Behn’s lunar imagination manifested in this play calls into question the place of Dr. Baliardo. In telling contrast to the previous readings of Baliardo as a stock virtuoso character, I rather focus on him as a patriarch preoccupied with drawing physical and epistemological boundaries within his household. Charting Baliardo’s control over spaces and his ensuing failures when faced with visual tricks, this essay explores three disparate places: Baliardo’s house, an apothecary’s shop materialized temporarily by Scaramouch, and the lunar festival. In doing so, the ultimate goal of this essay is to contend that Behn’s envisioning of an alternate space in the form of the lunar festival is subversive and gendered as it enables audiences to glimpse a moment of women’s liberation.
참고문헌 (25)
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