Aphra Behn – The Rover

• Theme: Sexual politics, female agency, libertinism, disguise, desire.

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

Aphra Behn’s The Rover is a carnivalesque explosion of masks, mistaken identities, and transgressive passions. Set during Carnival in Naples, it centers on women navigating a libertine world dominated by male seducers, while seizing control of their own desires and destinies. Within Foucault’s philosophical architecture, The Rover becomes a text of embodied insurrection—against the moral codification of female sexuality, and against the silencing of women’s authorship.

Foucault, particularly in The Use of Pleasure, argued that the ethical self is not merely obedient to law but constructed through a relationship to truth—a truth one cultivates in relation to desire. The characters in The Rover (especially Hellena and Florinda) exemplify a radical aesthetics of existence: they shape their lives as ethical artworks by negotiating the dangerous interplay between freedom, pleasure, and social constraint.

Hellena, for example, is no passive ingénue. She is a philosophical agent who plays with gendered codes. She masks, unmasks, tests, and inverts. She does not merely “resist” patriarchy—she performs a new erotic subjectivity within it. This is the Foucauldian technē tou biou—the care of the self—not as withdrawal, but as strategic play within power.

Behn, through her authorship, enacts another Foucauldian dynamic: the archaeology of the female voice. She uncovers, through satire and wit, the constructed nature of masculine sovereignty. The libertines, led by Willmore, imagine themselves free—but they are ironically trapped by their own rituals of conquest. The women, on the other hand, navigate multiplicities, operating with duplicity not as deceit but as survival—an echo of Foucault’s knowledge-power nexus, in which knowledge of the self and its performance becomes a tool of autonomy.

Furthermore, the Carnival setting itself becomes a heterotopia in Foucault’s spatial theory—a space of suspended norms, inversion, and transformation. Here, social identities are reimagined, tested, and blurred. Within this theatrical heterotopia, Behn stages not only romantic intrigue, but also epistemological critique—of who gets to speak, who gets to write, and who gets to desire.

By the play’s end, no single morality reigns. Instead, Behn posits a vibrant field of plural ethical practices, where desire is not repressed but negotiated, and women’s subjectivities are no longer marginal. The Rover is not just a libertine—he is a symbol of an older world giving way to the proliferation of other ethical forms.

In sum, The Rover becomes a Foucauldian threshold: a dramatization of how power and pleasure entwine, how truth is played, and how the body, the mask, and the voice together become vectors of resistance.