From Honour to Honesty: Desiring eyes in Aphra Behn’s Poetry and Sir Peter Lely's Portraiture

ABSTRACT This essay casts new light on Aphra Behn’s poetry and practice by exploring her preoccupation with human eyes. Behn repeatedly references eyes as objects in her verse, whilst also evoking the visual senses through the use of related verbs and metaphors. I argue that to better understand Behn’s fixation with eyes we need to look beyond her verse to visual culture of the period, especially to the portraiture of Sir Peter Lely. Behn’s verse and Lely’s portraits return repeatedly to the setting of the locus amoenus, an arcadian space populated by amorous swains and shepherdesses. By reading Behn’s and Lely’s work in dialogue we can better understand a wider philosophy about human desire at work across their œuvres. This approach provides new answers to key questions related to their artistic practice. It explains why Lely repeatedly depicted his sitters with the same “sleepy eyes”, an approach oft critiqued but, when understood alongside Behn’s poetry, becomes a deliberate move that indicates the conquest of sitter over viewer. The evidence assembled here also suggests that Behn’s poetry was directly influenced by portraiture, which had become far more accessible through the introduction of mezzotint engraving in the 1670s and 80s.

Behn's acknowledgement of these limitations was not novel, for here she echoed the sentiment expressed in an anonymously written epigraph attached to a 1673 engraving (Figure 1): "The Sculpters Part is done the features' hitt / of Madam Gwin, No Arte can shew her Witt".Set under Gerard Valck's engraving, after a portrait by Sir Peter Lely in which Gwyn poses as a shepherdess, the epigraph explores the impossibility that art can capture the most celebrated aspect of Gwyn's character: her wit.As with Behn's dedicatory text, Valck's image attempts to record a vision of Gwyn for posterity, whilst stressing its ultimate inability to convey a full sense of the real woman.Joseph Roach and Elaine McGirr have written about portraits of Gwyn, locating their importance as performative tools used to generate the "public intimacy" necessary to the successful construction of her celebrity. 2ithout doubt, Valck's engraving capitalized upon and enhanced Gwyn's publicly celebrated character by providing a form of visual access to it, and by suggesting the importance of her life as something special, something extraordinary: what Roach terms the "It" factor.In this essay, however, I wish to use Valck's engraving as an access point to a different space, understanding it not as an image generated from, and reproducing, celebrity culture, but as one indebted to a cultural landscape now largely the terrain of literary scholars.For Lely's portrait of Gwyn takes us into the locus amoenus, a space made tangible, I argue, through a reading of Behn's pastoral poetry.Where Behn followed in the footsteps of Abraham Cowley, Edmund Waller and the Cavalier Poets in foregrounding the role of eyes within amatory experience, she, like Lely, linked her exploration of the power of eyes to the locus amoenus with a newfound emphasis and vitality.Indeed, a comparative analysis of the poetry of one of the Restoration's leading writers alongside the portraiture of its principal painter reveals synergies key to unlocking new readings of the content of their work, whilst also providing novel insights into their creative practice.The human eye is at the heart of this reading, a sensory organ with a rich cultural history in both Classical and Biblical traditions.Eyes, as I will argue, are never just eyes in the work of Behn or Lely.They are the access point to a world of desire whose innocent pleasures are long since lost to humanity.It was a world of which the cultural arbiters of an England, reeling from the after-effects of the Civil Wars, were keenly aware, and wished, albeit impossibly, to recover.In the same decades in which John Milton sang of Paradise Lost, Behn and Lely also turned their focus on paradisical settings to reflect on the impossibility of free and equal desire.
Throughout this essay my emphasis is on Behn, but I explore connections between her poetry with Lely's portraiture in ways that cast new light on the latter's vast, and much denigrated, output. 3These connections show how deeply Behn was invested in reflecting and reconfiguring the court culture of Restoration England, one given pictorial expression on Lely's canvases.Centering my analysis on the relationship between eyes, desire and setting, my approach departs from critical explorations of eyes within welltrodden theories of the gaze (as I later show, Lely's and Behn's work complicates any simple application of gendered models).Rather, I offer an intermedial exploration of the promise offered by the locus amoenus as a vividly imagined space, and the power of eyes within this environment.I also wish to push beyond explorations centred on ekphrasis, conventionally the approach by which scholars interrogate the relationship between poetry and painting both during this, and other, historical periods. 4Artists and writers of the Restoration-period were all too aware of Horatian debates upon ut pictura poesis, but this offers one, and not the only, model through which we should understand this relationship; the Horatian approach centres on comparison and competition, whereas I focus on connection and continuity.
My essay opens with an examination of the rapid growth of print portraiture during the 1670s and 1680s, outlining the popularity of arcadian poses.Behn and Lely operated in a specific cultural moment, one in which sylvan settings and desiring eyes carried a particular valence, and the essay goes on to analyse their link to particular ideas about honour and honesty.There is, we might argue, more at stake in their work than in that of their poetic and painterly precursorsa pressing recognition, even resignation, to loss.The essay concludes by arguing that in this approach we find compelling explanations for seeming paradoxes in their work.In Lely's case, an answer to the issue of why, to borrow Catherine MacLeod's words, "there is in iconographical terms no real difference between the depiction of virtuous and notorious women in most portraits of this period". 5In Behn's case, why she is so invested in reconstructing a world of human desire which she, as a writer and woman, can never fully enjoy.

Portrait Prints & Sylvan Settings
In light of the apparent dialogue between Behn's dedication to Gwyn and the epigraph to Valck's print we might question the extent to which she actively engaged with visual media as a springboard for her own creative ideas; she certainly acknowledges the existence of such images through her reference to "all the Pictures, pens or pencills can draw".Behn's career coincided with the transformation of the market for print engravings, made possible due to technological developments and innovations, including the introduction of mezzotint, a form of engraving highly suited to the reproduction of portraiture.As Anthony Griffiths summarizes, The [printmaking] business gradually picked up from the 1660s onwards, with a huge jump in scale between 1675 and 1685.By the end of the 1680s the scene had changed out of all recognition.Output had vastly increased, the new technique of mezzotint had created a new industry. 6upled with a growing market for painted portraiture, an increased investment in luxury goods and material culture, and a public fascination with the lives of prominent individuals, this was also the period in which the celebrity image was born, circulated in large part through the medium of print.
There was no dearth of printed material available to enable those, with the means and inclination, to gaze on the body of the king, his acknowledged lovers, or countless other members of the court elite.During these years, dozens of portrait prints were produced of royal mistresses alone, with the majority, roughly twenty in each case, depicting Louise Keroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth (1649-1734), Barbara Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine (1640-1709), and Nell Gwyn (1650-1687).The portraits of Gwyn were, generally, more sexually risqué than those of Keroualle and Castlemaine, in part because there was no need to emphasize a, here non-existent, aristocratic status.It is hard to imagine that Behn would not have been aware of these portraits, nor made a point of viewing them herself. 7On a practical level, she lived and worked in the district of London inhabited by these artists and engravers, also the area in which prints were displayed and sold.Moreover, Behn sat for portraits by Lely and John Riley, and possibly for portraits by Sir Godfrey Kneller and John Closterman.She was also a friend of Lely's pupil, the painter John Greenhill, for whom she wrote an elegy. 8Her dedication to Gwyn, and later dedication of The History of the Nun (1689) to the Duchess of Mazarin (also, for a period, Charles II's mistress), demonstrates her attentiveness to these women.Indeed, Behn's dedication to Gwyn makes clear that she experienced, first-hand, the opportunity of being able "to Gaze and Listen" to her.
Although many of the original paintings are now lost, surviving prints demonstrate the range of guises in which Gwyn posed: as a courtier and mother for Lely and Henri Gascar; as Venus for Gascar and Peter Cross; and as a court beauty for Lely, Samuel Cooper and Simon Verelst.The shepherdess pose seems to have proven especially popular, reproduced throughout the Restoration by Lely and his key competitors.Although the original work is lost, Valck's line engraving of Lely's portrait of Gwyn survives in multiple versions.Made in 1673, it was copied as a mezzotint during the Restoration years, and then by John Ogborne in 1779, although here the print's stated source was "the Original Picture in the Possession of Mr. Thane".Perhaps Valck added the image's epigraph to distinguish Gwyn as a true original, distancing his engraving from the many similar portraits of contemporaneous women.For this was not a unique pose, nor did it first emanate,in the Restoration context, from Lely's studio.Around 1662-64 Jacob Huysmans produced a portrait of the queen, Catherine of Braganza, posing as a shepherdess. 9In 1670 William Sherwin copied this work to produce an engraving in which he substituted Catherine's visage with that of Castlemaine (Figure 2), the head possibly copied from Faithorne's earlier engraving of Castlemaine as the Magdalen, thereby, as Julia Marciari Alexander notes, merging "mistress and Queen". 10Sherwin might have sought to capitalize upon knowledge of John Michael Wright's commission to paint Castlemaine posing as a shepherdess around 1670, and it is possible he saw this work in development, copying several details from Wright's image. 11Lely went on to paint Castlemaine again in this guise, as well as Portsmouth in a portrait reproduced through at least three distinct mezzotints. 12Lely adopted the pose for female sitters in a range of other paintings, some of them lost (but surviving as engravings), and others where the sitter is unknown. 13In a further reflection of the popularity of this pose, the artist Mary Beale used it for her portrait of Jane Fox, Lady Leigh (c.1676). 14hy, we should ask, was the shepherdess pose so popular, and how was it understood by contemporaries?Was this purely a vehicle for offering up an erotic female body for male viewers?Marciari Alexander has traced the critical reception of Lely's Beauties portraits, noting how this has tended to conflate aesthetic and moral judgments; the portraits have been "cast as both damning evidence and illustrations of the supposed vice or virtue of the women they depict", and in the process "meanings [have been imposed] onto the paintings instead of teasing them out of the works themselves". 15This mirrors, of course, the critical reception of Behn's own poetry, which as the eighteenth century progressed was increasingly taken as evidence of her assumed status as an unvirtuous woman.Yet twentiethcentury scholarship overturned such simplistic assessments of Behn's writing, undertaking far more nuanced readings of her work.Perhaps Lely's shepherdesses also functioned as something beyond the simplistic figures of debauchery advocated in Alexander Pope's influential reframing: Lely on animated canvas stole The sleepy eye, that spoke the melting soul.No wonder then, when all was love and sport, The willing Muses were debauch'd at court. 16

Desire, Honour & The Golden Age
Since the publication of Michael L. Stapleton's study of Behn's single-author volume Poems Upon Several Occasions (1684) scholars have continued to posit its underacknowledged status within her wider oeuvre. 17Stapleton argues that Behn carefully designed the structure of the volume and, whilst noting the possible influence of Dryden's and Roscommon's comments on proper ordering, suggests that "groups of poems tend to form clusters on related theme and with similar forms.At times, poems answer each other, not just those in proximity but across the collection, what one might call auto-intertexuality, or even intratextuality". 18I wish to go further and argue that Behn conceived of the volume as a vehicle for an authorial mission statement and took pains in it to craft a philosophical position on human relationships which underpins all her writings.One way of unlocking this position lies in her evident investment in ideas about the human eye, one of the most recurrent motifs of the volume.It was a preoccupation Behn shared with Lely.Like Lely's shepherdess portraits, Behn's pastoral poetry looks back to an Arcadian idyll, with her poetic speakers and subjects occupying the same silvan landscape.Behn shared Lely's appreciation for the ways in which women like Gwyn and Portsmouth served as living role models for a golden pastoral age in which love and desire trumped the socially imposed limitations of "Honour".Literature provides us with a more complex understanding of this painted landscape as more than a mere backdrop and as one that was immediately recognizable to the cultured sitters, patrons and viewers who commissioned such work.For this setting was surely the locus amoenus, the idealized and paradisical gardens in which desires and actions were unlicensed.Derived from classical antiquity, the locus amoenus was deployed in a range of works and, as Jessica Munns has argued, constituted a form, not a genre, operating across dramas, novellas and lyrics. 19Here, I argue that it also operated across portraiture and that Lely did not seek to objectify his sitters as mere erotic objects, but to frame them as the sensual heroines of this arcadian world.
It is the same world we experience in reading so many of the pastoral poems of the period, and its grip on the Restoration cultural imagination is clear.Behn writes repeatedly of the amorous encounters of swains and shepherdesses that take place on verdant banks and under shady groves.Furthermore, she wrote these lyrics to be performed at Court by the very women who sat for Lely's portraits and who, for Behn, epitomized this spirit.Printed within her edited Miscellany of 1685, we find a short entertainment, "Selinda and Chloris", written for the Court.Its opening lines take us straight to the setting of Lely's shepherdess portraits, insisting on the power of the beautiful Selinda's eyes: As young Selinda led her Flock, Beneath the Shelter of a shaded Rock, The Melancholy Chloris by, Thus to the Lovely Maid did sighing cry.
Cloris.Selinda you too lightly prize, The powerful Glorys of your Eyes; To suffer young Alexis to adore, Alexis, whom Love made my slave before. 20e contest of the two nymphs plays out within the performed spectacle of the masque, perhaps the most intermedial of forms, subsuming both portraiture and poetry.
This type of intermediality is similarly apparent in one of Behn's earliest published poems, "Song", which functions as a poetic portrait of a single scene. 21Here, three succinct stanzas conjure up an image and narrative about the enactment of sexual desire: My greedy eyes no ayds requir'd, To tell their amorous Tale, On her that was already fir'd: 'Twas easy to prevail.I did but kiss and claspe her round, [Whilst] they my thoughts exprest, And laid her gently on the ground: Oh! who can guess the rest. 22e landscape provides an enclosed, protected world away from human eyes.It is a space of intimacy and secrecy created by nature, and in which nature's own actions mirror those of the human lovers.Behn eschews the very need for words ("That which I dare not name"; "Oh!Who can guess the rest"), privileging instead the power of the gaze.Behn's speaker notes that it only takes a look to seduce Silvia: their eyes "tell their amorous Tale" and express the speaker's thoughts.The buildup to sexual consummation is registered not solely through actions (kissing and clasping) but in large part through a description of setting ("a Grove", "The Sun", "The place secur'd", "the Moss", "the ground").For Behn, it is clearly important that we can picture the scene accurately and understand the license that such a setting allows.Heidi Laudien has recently argued for Behn's "sustained preoccupation with greenery", arguing that her writing moves beyond the "stylized and artificial backdrops of most pastoral poetry". 23Behn, Laudien argues, "is deeply concerned with nature's capacities to represent, on the one hand, and to obfuscate, on the other, and creates complicated spaces that function as more than backdrops", breaking "with convention to write a pastoral space that is layered and various […] a place in flux". 24rt historians have focused little on the landscape settings of Lely's portraits, seeing them as a convention inherited from Van Dyck and of little importance compared to strategically placed symbolic objects that promote ideas about the individual sitter's identity.But to what extent might these landscapes too be more than "stylized and artificial backdrops"? 25 As early as 1833, the Art Historian and critic Anna Jameson distanced herself from Horace Walpole's dismissive view of Lely's abilities, pointing to the landscapes that his Beauties inhabit as worthy of distinct praise: "What true judge or real lover of painting, could wish away those charming snatches of woodland landscape, those magical glimpses of sky and masses of foliage, with which he has so beautifullyso poetically relieved his female figures". 26Jameson's appreciation of Lely's landscapes is revealing, connecting these visual sources to the pastoral mode, and suggesting their ability to situate the viewer in a tangible woodland that evokes specific registers of poetic feeling.In Lely's portraits, nature provides more than a setting; it is alive and part of the action.We might think here of Valck's engraving of Gwyn (Figure 1), and the sheep nestling under her right arm, across which she drapes a garland.The creature's relaxed gaze resembles Gwyn's own, and by looking out towards her breasts it encourages our own gaze to follow.Gwyn strokes the sheep's fleecy head in a gesture that speaks to the co-mingling of their desires, and to the idea that humans and nature coalesce in this shared space.The sentiment, then, mirrors the ethos of "Song", a poem that demonstrates how even in her earliest writing Behn thought carefully about the setting of her poems, exploring how landscapes could actively shape and enable the free reign of desire.
Markedly, "Song" is the only work in Poems 1684 that appears to take place in the temporal setting of "The Golden Age".The latter title was given to the opening poem in the volume, one which establishes an interpretative framework for the publication as a whole and, as I argue, is key to understanding the meaning of Behn's, and possibly Lely's, landscapes.The poem's opening stanzas take us into the landscape of the Golden Age, describing its verdant topography in detail before moving on to outline the amorous activities this enables.It is an age in which eyes speak truthfully of mutually consensual desire, and bodies enact it freely.As Jessica Munns notes in her extensive discussion of the poem, it is "an impossible and improbable world where women and men meet without inequality, fear or guilt". 27But the poem is one of contrast and, as we soon learn, the Golden Age preceded the current age of "Honour".The latter is defined by Behn as a restrictive social construct: Oh cursed Honour!thou who first didst damn, A Woman to the Sin of shame; Honour! that rob'st us of our Gust, Honour! that hindred mankind first, At Loves Eternal Spring to squench his amorous thirst.
Honour! who first taught lovely Eyes the art, To wound, and not to cure the heart: With Love to invite, but to forbid with Awe, And to themselves prescribe a Cruel Law; To Veil 'em from the Lookers on, When they are sure the slave's undone, And all the Charmingst part of Beauty hid; Soft Looks, consenting Wishes, all deny'd.(33, lines 117-129)   Here, and across all her writings, Behn conceives of honour in an entirely negative way, as a category that has created a shaming culture for women who act out on their sexual desires.This culture is one enabled through a silent ocular language, in which eyes have become combative weapons that wound and defend against the very desires they also invite.Behn frames this as "a Cruel Law" in which women are complicit in denying themselves the natural pleasures of their bodies and desires, in turn preventing their lovers from mutual and equal enjoyment.As Carol Barash notes, Behn invests heavily in a discussion of Honour across her poems, drawing "the reader's attention to the legal codes and generic conventions that make Honour such a threatening figure, one that confines desire and women at once". 28y contrast, when Behn returns us to the Golden Age at the poem's conclusion, we are told that eyes were not weapons but offered a transparent and honest means of communication.Behn closes her poem with a stanza that calls for a return to this time: For some readers, the poem's closing carpe diem argument undermines the speaker's true commitment to the Golden Age.Ros Ballaster reads the lines in this way, seeing in them Behn's revelation that the Golden Age is purely the "creation" of the poem's male speaker, which he conjures as a tool for seduction. 29Ballaster reads Behn's investment in Lucretian libertine philosophy as evidence of her atheism and scepticism, and understands her pastoral poetry as one indebted overwhelmingly to Classical and mythological sources.However, I argue that for Behn the Golden Age is also Eden, with the poem establishing a Christian framework that underpins the entire volume.Whenever Behn writes of Honour she silently invokes Eve's fall, which damned "A Woman to the Sin of Shame" and "hindred mankind first".Behn's evident distaste for the double standards of her present society, and the poem's relationship to those which follow in the volume, make this far more than a false plea to aid seduction.Behn's Golden Age provides the frame, or entry point, into a philosophical reflection on the inevitable failure of human relationships, brought about by the fall.Indeed, Poems 1684 documents Behn's own Paradise Lost, contrasting a pre-and postlapsarian world, and is evidence of her commitment to a Christian worldview.When contemporaries read or looked at pastoral landscapes, they were invited to imagine the self in Eden, and sense (and mourn) all the prelapsarian freedom it entailed.

Sleepy Eyes and Killing Darts
We find further evidence of Behn's engagement with a Christian framework in her repeated references to eyes across Poems 1684.In these poems, lovers do not speak primarily through words but through eyes, which offer the most direct form of communication.Here, Behn is surely engaging with Matthew 6, 22-23, and the idea that eyes are the window to the soul: The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light./ But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness.If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness! 30hn plays with this idea throughout Poems 1684, exploring how the Age of Honour has created a darker world; how it has "first taught lovely Eyes the art, / To wound, and not to cure the heart".In Behn's postlapsarian landscape, eyes have become a dangerous weapon, obscuring true sentiment: in "On a Copy of Verses made in a Dream" Behn reflects how "My Heart with an Impatient Zeal, / Without my Eyes, would needs reveal / Its Bus'ness and Intent" (60, lines 23-25).
The volume's Christian framework sits alongside a libertine and Lucretian philosophy which is also at play in Behn's pastoral poetry.As Ballaster notes: Desire, in Lucretius, is a combination of the rising of seed in the body (in both men and women) and visual stimulation at the sight of the object.This interaction of inner compulsion and external stimulus is found repeatedly in Behn's inventive love poetry. 31derstood as the portal connecting seed and stimulation, eyes are the seat of desire, an idea Behn makes clear in "Song.Love Arm'd": Love in Fantastique Triumph satt, Whilst Bleeding Hearts a round him flow'd, For whom Fresh paines he did Create, And strange Tyranick power he show'd; From thy Bright Eyes he took his fire, Which round about, in sport he hurl'd; But 'twas from mine, he took desire, Enough to undo the Amorous World.(53, lines 1-8) Behn's poetic world is one where love is a form of combat, and desire its chief weapon, fired from the eyes.In "To the Author of the New Utopia", Behn uses this conceit as a metaphor for Edward Howard's revenge on previous doubters: "Then like thy Mistress eyes who have the skill/ Both to preserve and kill; / So thou at once must be reveng'd" (5, lines 95-97).Similarly, "A Dialogue for an Entertainment at Court, between Damon and Sylvia" opens with a reflection on the power of Sylvia's eyes: "What wonders might your Eies not do: / If they would dress themselves in Love".(87, 3-4) Behn's poems, I argue, provide useful insight into why Lely may have chosen to depict his female sitters with the same sleepy eyes.It would have been a fallacy to paint them as pastoral shepherdesses with eyes that reflected the reality of the woman who sat before him; rather, Lely's job was to produce an idealized image, a meeting of fantasy and reality.Promoting the image of his sitter as a silvan shepherdess was to arm her with eyes that could act as weapons; eyes that could pierce the heart of all who gazed on her, whilst revealing nothing of her inner thoughts and desires.Castlemaine was Lely's chief muse, and in a contemporaneous letter Dorothy Osborne noted that Castlemaine's eyes became the model for all the "sleepy" eyes to emerge from Lely's brush: Sir Peter Lilly when he had painted the Duchess of Cleveland's picture, he put something of Clevelands face as her Languishing Eyes into every one Picture, so that all his pictures had an Air one of another, all the Eyes were Sleepy alike.So that Mr Walker Ye.Painter swore Lilly's Pictures was all Brothers & Sisters. 32therine MacLeod has noted that some of Lely's portraits pre-dating his first encounter with Castlemaine have these same eyes. 33Indeed, it seems more likely that the sleepy eyes belonged not to a particular woman, but to an idea.Was this, perhaps, the same idea to which Behn repeatedly returned in her own work?
In her writing, Behn enables us to trace the catalytic effect of eyes and understand their place in narratives of desire.On Lely's canvas, we can experience only one moment of what, in a poet's hands, could be shaped into a more sustained episode.These portraits all seem to present a moment of seduction; the sitter's gaze speaks of the battle in play, and confidently suggests their victorious role over the viewer who looks up at them.Key to that victory is the idea that we cannot see behind these eyes and into the character and desires of the woman herself; in the Age of Honour, eyes are not windows, but shutters, to the soul.This idea is projected through Behn's poems, reminding readers that in the postlapsarian world people do not deal honestly; if they reveal their hidden desires, they stand to lose too much.Ultimately, Poems 1684 does not offer much hope that Behn might see the Golden Age again.The poetic sequence explores the dynamics of desire again and again, each time offering a pessimistic reflection on the realities of a postlapsarian world.Here, desire has become a battleground, in which men and women compete against each other for pyrrhic victories.In the Age of Honour, everyone loses out, especially women.
Indeed, in Behn's poetic world, it is not only women who use eyes as weapons.Men prove just as powerful in this form of combat, as evident in "The Return": Behn evokes a performed male body mirroring those of the women in Lely's Beauties portraits.This raises questions, in turn, as to Lely's conventions for painting the eyes of male sitters, many of whom were depicted in sylvan landscapes.Diana Dethloff has noted that Lely was criticized, even by contemporaries, for "making all his sitters too like each other" and cites Dorothy Osborne's above quoted letter noting this. 34Dethloff is concerned with female beauty and does not follow through the implication in Osborne's words that Lely's male sitters share these eyes ("So that Mr Walker Ye.Painter swore Lilly's Pictures was all Brothers & Sisters").Perhaps Lely's shepherdesses were not so different from their brother shepherds?
Similarly, scholars have paid less attention to the male subjects of Behn's pastoral poems, largely understanding them as the victors in a libertine world.But men do lose out in the Age of Honour also, and they too fall victim to killing darts.
Behn's poetry has long been understood as a site inviting queer readings that destabilise conventional ideas of heterosexual normativity, and Kirsten T. Saxton's recent methodological experiment in queering Behn's prose fiction convincingly evidences the latent potential for such readings across her wider work. 35In turn, reading Behn's poetry alongside Lely's portraits of swains and shepherdesses invites us to query the extent to which artistic concepts of beauty and desire were gendered in the conventional ways through which they are predominantly read, assessed and valued?Did Lely's portraits of women aim to objectify them as sexualized fantasies of the male gaze?Or were works like these, as with portraits of their male contemporaries, ultimately celebrating the victory of the sitter?

Conclusion
In "The Invitation" Amyntas beckons Phyllis to passion in the shady grove once more, claiming that "All that your Swain desires there, / Is by those Eyes a new to swear/ How much he does adore ye." (Poems 1684, 94) Here, the poem's title and text had been adapted from its original 1672 publication in The Covent Garden Drolery, where "Swain" had read "Slave", and the reference to "Eyes" had been one to spoken words ("what you love to hear"). 36Hence Poems 1684 sees Behn editing earlier work to stress pastoral settings and privilege a visual language of desire.Amyntas answers Phyllis's ensuing cries and blushes, her virtuous "Nicety", by claiming that their eyes will reveal the truth of their situation: In light of the sequential unity of Poems 1684, we are wise to read individual works within the wider context of the volume.Here, in a single-author volume, published by the elite literary firm of the day, Behn sought to provide a philosophy to inform all her writings.Read in sequence, her poems grieve for the lost glories of a prelapsarian Edenic world in which desire was shared and enacted with honesty; simultaneously, she shows how Honour, framed as a social construct to maintain women's virtue, has eroded the human ability to embrace and enjoy desire.This loss drives and informs Behn's poetic output, revealing at once a Christian outlook entirely compatible with the untrammeled pursuit of desire.In this schema eyes speak more powerfully than words in managing human interactions.It is, we might argue, the same language that Lely attempts to convey in his portraiture; his sleepy eyes encourage desire just as they deny access to the true character, the "soul", of their subject.His sitters are portrayed in a way designed to flatter, because they are always presented as victors in the contest of desire.Behn chooses, instead, to privilege the perspective of the losers in this same contest.If Poems 1684 tells us anything concrete at all about Behn herself, then it shows us that she did not believe that human love was equal or honest.13-34 (18-21).3. Julia Marciari Alexander has traced the two models by which portrait painting was assessed historically: first, the physiognomic model, in which the image tries to convey the true likeness of the sitter (based on the idea that eyes were the windows to the soul); and the transactional model, in which sitter and artist agreed that the sitter should be presented in an idealized way, that fit the image they sought to project for any given purpose.Marciari Alexander suggests that the tendency to prioritize the former model "has almost universally condemned Lely's oeuvre as one of dubious illustration and questionable artistic merit and has defined its sitters as women of ill-repute."See Julia Marciari Alexander, for Cambridge University Press, "Behn's Two Bodies: A Cultural History of Aphra Behn's Grave".Claudine has an ongoing research interest in better connecting the scholarly recovery of women writers with the wider public and led on the 2023 unveiling of a commemorative plaque for Mary Astell (1666-1731) in Newcastleupon-Tyne.

I
led my Silvia to a Grove, Where all the Boughs did shade us.The Sun it self, though it had strove.It could not have betray'd us.The place secur'd from humane eyes.No other fear alows, But when the Winds do gently rise; And kiss the yeilding Boughs.Down there we sate upon the Moss, And did begin to play, A thousand wonton tricks to pass, The heat of all the day.As many kisses I did give, And she return'd the same, Which made her willing to receive; That which I dare not name.
Amyntas whilst youHave an Art to subdue, And can conquer a Heart with a Look or a Smile,[…] When thou hast done, by Pan I swear, Thou wilt unto my Eyes appear A thousand times more Charming and Fair, Then thou wert to my first Desire: But oh! those tender hours are fled and lost, And I no more of Fame, or Thee can boast!'Twas thou wert Honour, Glory, all to me: Till Swains had learn'd the Vice of Perjury, No yielding Maids were charg'd with Infamy.'Tis false and broken Vows make Love a Sin, Hadst thou been true, We innocent had been.(19,lines 277-283) When Snow shall on those lovely Tresses lye And your fair Eyes no more shall give us pain, But shoot their pointless Darts in vain.What will your duller honour signifie?Go boast it then!and see what numerous Store Of Lovers, will your Ruin'd Shrine Adore.(34, lines 166-169; 35, 189-194) 1. Aphra Behn, "The Feign'd Curtizans", The Works of Aphra Behn.Volume 6: The Plays, ed.Janet Todd (1679; London: Pickering, 1996), p. 86. 2. Joseph Roach, "Celebrity Erotics: Pepys, Performance and Painted Ladies", The Yale Journal of Criticism, 16:1 (2003): 211-30 (214-8); Joseph Roach, It (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2007), p. 4; Elaine McGirr, "Nell Gwyn's Breasts and Colley Cibber's Shorts: Celebrity Actors and Their Famous 'Parts'", Intimacy and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Literary Culture: Public Interiors, ed.Emrys D. Jones and Victoria Joule (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp.