(Re)producing Words: Female Voice, Deformity, and Narrative Gestation in Aphra Behn’s The Dumb Virgin
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This article examines the deformed female bodies in Aphra Behn’s The Dumb Virgin: or, The Force of Imagination (1698) as discursive sites through which female authorship, linguistic performance, and reproduction are negotiated. While critical attention has largely focused on the gendered and defective bodies of the two female protagonists, few scholars have examined how the sisters’ linguistic authority, or their distance from normative speech, shapes the female narrator’s (re)production of words which in turn overwrites the male antagonist’s impotence in begetting his own story. The Dumb Virgin, I argue, rewrites the myth of narrative gestation that treats women’s bodies as transparent texts; impaired speech, gesture, and wordlessness challenge early modern social structures that codify women’s verbal, sexual, and textual bodies as anomalous. Female narrative agency is further complicated by the precariousness of women’s sexual and reproductive capacities. By ascribing the sisters’ congenital deformities to their mother’s desire for transgression, Behn collapses emotional, cognitive, and reproductive labor to interrogate the generative force of female imagination. Muteness, bodily irregularity, and deformity illuminate how culturally disenfranchised women “labor” to produce words— whether oral, literal, or signed— that interrupt phallogocentric sociosexual and linguistic control. By analyzing the intricate relationship between women’s productive and reproductive capacities, this article explores how the (re)production of words is contingent on women’s bodily performance as shaped by deformity, or the “force of imagination.”
Abstract
This article examines the deformed female bodies in Aphra Behn’s The Dumb Virgin: or, The Force of Imagination (1698) as discursive sites through which female authorship, linguistic performance, and reproduction are negotiated. While critical attention has largely focused on the gendered and defective bodies of the two female protagonists, few scholars have examined how the sisters’ linguistic authority, or their distance from normative speech, shapes the female narrator’s (re)production of words which in turn overwrites the male antagonist’s impotence in begetting his own story. The Dumb Virgin, I argue, rewrites the myth of narrative gestation that treats women’s bodies as transparent texts; impaired speech, gesture, and wordlessness challenge early modern social structures that codify women’s verbal, sexual, and textual bodies as anomalous. Female narrative agency is further complicated by the precariousness of women’s sexual and reproductive capacities. By ascribing the sisters’ congenital deformities to their mother’s desire for transgression, Behn collapses emotional, cognitive, and reproductive labor to interrogate the generative force of female imagination. Muteness, bodily irregularity, and deformity illuminate how culturally disenfranchised women “labor” to produce words— whether oral, literal, or signed— that interrupt phallogocentric sociosexual and linguistic control. By analyzing the intricate relationship between women’s productive and reproductive capacities, this article explores how the (re)production of words is contingent on women’s bodily performance as shaped by deformity, or the “force of imagination.”