SOURCE: "That Which I Dare Not Name': Aphra Behn's 'The Willing Mistress,'" in ELH, Vol. 58, No. 1, Spring, 1991, pp. 63-82.

In the following excerpt, Duyfhuizen explicates the poem "The Willing Mistress" through comparisons to other verse by Behn and to her drama The Dutch Lover, finding that the poem is a metaphor for a woman trying to retain her identity and control in a male-dominated world.

In reclaiming ["The Willing Mistress"] for their landmark Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar suggest the interpretive significance of "The Willing Mistress" when they comment that "although the Restoration circles in which she traveled permitted extraordinary licence to male artists like Behn's libertine friend and patron John Wilmont, earl of Rochester, the same circles expected women to remain decently silent about their own desires…. [H]owever, Behn did not maintain such silence." In an era when...