Critic: Arlene Stiebel

Source: Renaissance Discourses of Desire, edited by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, pp. 223-36. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993.

[(essay date 1993) In the following essay, Stiebel argues that Philips and Aphra Behn employed conventions of the day to protect their respectability while professing their homosexuality.]

Although in recent discourses of desire there has been polite acknowledgment of the importance of relationships among women, much contemporary literary theory and criticism ignores the existence of lesbians.¹ Critics tell us that there are women who were "autonomous," or unmarried; women who chose a "professional" or career mode rather than a familial allegiance; women who, because they were married, automatically qualify as heterosexual despite their primary emotional and erotic bonds with other women; and some anomalous women who had a hard time fitting in with societal expectations of their time and so remained celibate. Only in a very few cases, and usually famous ones, such as that of Gertrude Stein, is it openly stated that literary women had sexual relations with other women and wrote about them. Most literary critics, even some who themselves are lesbians, collude in the polite fiction of obscurity that clouds lesbian literary lives. Bonnie Zimmerman confirms Marilyn Frye's analysis that "we are considered to be both naturally and logically impossible."²

The tradition of denial extends even to such distinguished works as Lillian Faderman's ground-breaking study and the most recent articles dealing with literature by lesbians. Through various critical representations, emotionally intense relationships between women are asserted to be nonsexual. Faderman insists not only that we do or can not know whether these women had "genital sex," but that even if they did, it is unimportant because historically there was no such thing as a "lesbian." Although it is now fashionable to exploit this notion of the social construction of sexual identity, such semantic hairsplitting seems to beg important questions of sexuality in literature.³

Adrienne Rich's theoretical observations in "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" lead to the position that choice for women was so restricted by patriarchal coercion that true sexual preference may often have been obscured or invisible, requiring conformity to a social norm in which even the acknowledgment of a sexual preference for a woman was a radical act.⁴ Given these circumstances, the marriages of women known to have their primary emotional and sexual attachments to other women effectively provided them with the protection necessary to maintain respectability. Recognizing the historical circumstances of lesbian identity ought not to deprive it of sexuality.

Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar also relegate lesbians to the sexual sidelines. In their anthology of women's literature, they use every opportunity in footnotes, biographies, and glosses to explain away, where possible, evident same-sex choices in the lives and texts of lesbian authors. An example of how this bias works is evident in the way they distort Katherine Philips's clearly erotic poems. In their analysis, the eroticism is diffused through disembodied generalization into a sterile intellectual bonding. Their approach robs Philips's work of its emotional intensity. Surprisingly, their refusal to acknowledge the erotic in Philips's poems comes more than fifty years after Philip Webster Souers's standard biography, which carefully and clearly presents the succession of women to whom Philips was attached.⁵

Harriette Andreadis, in an article in Signs, obscures the issue even further. She describes Philips's poetry as "desexualized--though passionate and eroticized." In Andreadis's argument, eroticism is not sexual, so she can claim for Philips a type of lesbianism that maintains the social respectability she sees as an important aspect of Philips's reputation and life. Andreadis rehearses in detail some recent arguments dealing with gay and lesbian sexuality to attempt a definition of what is "lesbian." According to her definition, Philips had "a lesbian experience," wrote "lesbian texts," but may not have "expressed her homoerotic feelings genitally." Andreadis's definition does not include women's experiences of physical desire as a component of lesbianism. By writing sensuality out of lesbian literature, Andreadis maintains the tradition of denial, which is perpetuated in Dorothy Mermin's more recent article. Refusing to acknowledge a lesbian sexuality, Mermin picks up Andreadis's assertion that Philips's poems "did not give rise to scandal" and were therefore "asexual, respectable." Mermin's characterization of "female homosexuality" as "unseemly" clearly indicates her approach to this literature.⁶

How can contemporary critics continue to overlook, if not deny outright, the lesbian content of poems so clearly erotically charged with the love of women for women? The fact is that they can if they want to, for just as figurative language has the power to reveal more than it states, it can also conceal. When Muriel Rukeyser publicly wrote of her lesbianism, she noted in the content and title of her 1971 autobiographical poem "The Poem as Mask," a technique that lesbian writers have used for centuries to express their love for women:

When I wrote of the women in their dances and wildness,
it was a mask,
on their mountain, god-hunting, singing in orgy,
it was a mask; when I wrote of the god,
fragmented, exiled from himself, his life, the love
gone down with song,
it was myself, split open, unable to speak, in exile
from myself.

(1-5)⁷

Stein encoded her work, Amy Lowell sometimes changed pronouns to disguise her speaker's sex, and Willa Cather changed her protagonists' gender. Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn also used masking techniques based in the literary conventions of their time, but although they used the same conventions as their male counterparts did, the effects of their verses were radically different.

Evident in the poems of Philips and Behn is the use of literary conventions we take almost for granted--the courtly love address to the beloved and her response, the idealized pattern of Platonic same-sex friendship, and the hermaphroditic perfection of the beloved who incorporates the best qualities of both sexes. The difference in the use of these conventions by the women poets lies in the significant fact that the voice of the lover is nowhere disguised nor intended to be understood as that of a male. Rather, Philips and Behn exploit the conventions to proclaim to all who would read their poems that the desire of a woman for a woman lover falls well within acceptable literary norms. The very transparency of their masking techniques is what makes them so fascinating.

Their contemporaries recognized the homosexual bias of the two authors. Both women were praised by other, male, poets as "sapphists," that is, women writers in the tradition of Sappho of Lesbos, whose verse fragments clearly celebrate the erotic attachments of women, lament their separation and loss, and generally become the first acknowledged model for female-identified love poems.

Katherine Philips (1632-1664) was known as "The Matchless Orinda" and "The English Sappho" of her day. Privately circulated in manuscript during her lifetime, her Poems were first published post-humously in 1664. That incomplete edition was superseded by the Poems in 1667, which became the basis for the subsequent edition of 1678. Of the collected poems, more than half deal with Orinda's love for other women. In addition to poems addressed to her beloved "Lucasia" (Anne Owen), there are poems by Philips to "Rosania" (Mary Aubrey), who preceded Lucasia in her affections, and to "Pastora," whose relationship with "Phillis" is celebrated by Lucasia after her own female lover has gone. In addition to these poems using the names Philips bestowed on members of her "Society of Friendship," which was "limited ... to persons of the same sex," Philips writes in her own historical voice openly to Anne Owen as well as "To the Lady E. Boyl" with declarations of love.⁸

Central to Philips's short life--she died of smallpox at thirty-one--was the romance with Anne Owen, and central to her poetry is the conventional representation of their involvement through the images of classical friendship and courtly love. "Orinda to Lucasia," in a traditional pastoral mode, illustrates the importance of the presence of the female beloved. Lucasia is the sun who will restore the light and energy of day (life) to Orinda, who cries for her "friend" to appear as the birds, flowers, and brooks call for their own renewal at a delayed sunrise. The "sun" is "tardy," so that the "weary birds" must "court their glorious planet to appear." The "drooping flowers ... languish down into their beds: / While brooks ... Openly murmer and demand" that the sun come (8-12). But Lucasia means more to Orinda than the sun to the world, and if Lucasia delays too long, she will come in time not to save Orinda, but to see her die.

Thou my Lucasia are far more to me,
Than he to all the under-world can be;
From thee I've heat and light,
Thy absence makes my night.

.....

if too long I wait,
Ev'n thou may'st come too late,
And not restore my life, but close my eyes.

Conventional oxymoronic terminology permeates the verse--light versus dark, day versus night, presence and absence, life and death--while the elements of nature that reflect the lover's state of being are, in a reversal of the magnitude of traditional signification, portrayed microcosmically in relation to the macrocosm of Orinda's feelings. The true relationship between the lovers is clear, if we allow ourselves to read the text explicitly. But through the lens of customary literary metaphors, the relationship of the two women can be explained away as being only figuratively erotic--a clever reworking of the spiritualized romance tradition combined with idealized classical friendship to de-emphasize the sexual reality inherent in the concrete, physical terminology of the poem. That is, the familiar literary conventions of the poem may mask and diffuse its pervasive eroticism. But to recognize the use of conventions as an elaborate mask is to acknowledge the reality of sexual desire that the poem simultaneously reveals and cloaks.

The relationship between Lucasia and Orinda is further developed and clarified in "To My Excellent Lucasia, on Our Friendship," for which the traditional soul-body dichotomy is the metaphorical basis. In this poem, Orinda's soul is not only given life by Lucasia, but Lucasia's soul actually becomes the animating force of her lover's body:

the world believ'd
There was a soul the motions kept;
But they all were deceiv'd.

.....

never had Orinda found
A soul till she found thine.

The lovers are united in one immortal soul, and their relationship grants to the speaker attributes similar to those of a "bridegroom" or "crown-conquerer." But here too, Philips presents the metaphor in hyperbole that extends the more orthodox presentation, "They have but pieces of the earth, / I've all the world in thee" (19-20). The echo of Donne's lines from "The Sun Rising," "She's all states, and all princes I / Nothing else is" (21-22), forces the reader to regard the lovers' relationship as one of traditional courtly desire transformed into the sacramental union with a soul mate through whose agency one participates in the heavenly. Further, their love also remains "innocent" because they are both women. Given their mutually female design, the speaker can "say without a crime, / I am not thine, but thee" (3-4) and encourage their "flames" to "light and shine" without "false fear," since they are "innocent as our design, / Immortal as our soul" (23-24).

The speaker is careful to invoke both spirituality and innocent design as justifications for such language of excess, even though convention would allow her the license to claim another's soul as her own because of their affection alone. But, as female lovers, they need more than a mere statement rejecting what Donne characterizes in "A Valediction: forbidding Mourning" as "Dull, sublunary lovers' love" (13), to make their union acceptable. So Orinda's argument is that she and Lucasia are "innocent."

We may read this assertion as a refutation of the guilt surrounding accusations of unnatural love between women, as an outspoken declaration that lesbianism is not to be maligned. But I read it another way, in the time-honored tradition of irony that finds answers to bigotry in terms of the ignorance of prejudice itself. Orinda can maintain that love between women is "innocent" because, as Queen Victoria much later asked, what could women do? In a phallocentric culture that defines sexual behavior according to penile instrumentality, sex exclusive of men is not merely unthinkable, it is impossible. Which of us is unfamiliar with the characterization of "sex" as "going all the way," and what woman has not at one time or another been reassured that if it did not go in "nothing happened"? In England, although male homosexuality was outlawed, women together could not commit a sexual crime. If the norm is androcentric, eroticism among women is illusionary, female "friendships" are merely spiritual bonds, and lesbians are nonexistent.

As long as the definition of the sex act is inextricably linked to male anatomy and behavior, the question of what can women do is moot. So in order to address the question of sexuality in these poems, we must reexamine what we mean by erotic attraction and sexual activity. If we confuse ejaculation with orgasm, and both of these with sexual satisfaction, and deny the realities of varied sexual responses that are not centered actually or metaphorically in male anatomy, the true nature of lesbian relationships will remain masked. And to the extent that the bias of heterosexual denial and ignorance maintains that intercourse is the sexual norm, then, by definition, activity from which a penis is absent provides women with a love that is "innocent."⁹

In "To My Lucasia, in defence of declared Friendship," Orinda openly argues, "O My Lucasia, let us speak our Love, / And think not that impertinent can be" (1-2). Unlike Donne's male speaker in "The Flea," who asserts that "use make you apt to kill me" (16), as women, Orinda and Lucasia "cannot spend our stock by use." Their "spotless passion never tires, / But does increase by repetition still" (27-28). So female "friends" may enact their sexuality on quite different terms than their male counterparts. Sometimes the terminology of Philips's poems, so frequently reminiscent of Donne's, presents a lesbian sexuality only slightly masked, as in her wholesale borrowing of what may be Donne's most celebrated metaphor, that of the "stiff twin compasses" (26) from "A Valediction: forbidding Mourning" in "Friendship in Embleme, or the Seal. To my dearest Lucasia":

6.

The Compasses that stand above
Express this great immortal love;
For Friends, like them, can prove this true,
They are, and yet they are not, two.

7.

And in their posture is exprest
Friendship's exalted Interest:
Each follows where the other leans,
And what each does, this other means.

8.

And as when one foot does stand fast,
And t'other circles seeks to cast,
The steddy part does regulate
And make the wand'rer's motion straight.

Literary and cultural conventions of friendship here only partially mask the eroticism implicit in Donne's famous metaphor. The mask preserves Philips's respectability, while the sexual energy that infuses the women's friendship is highlighted by the use of the formerly heterosexual image.

As a representative of Sappho in the British Isles, Katherine Philips was praised for her poetic skills. Twenty years after her death and the first appearance of her poems in print, the Matchless Orinda was succeeded by the Incomparable Astrea, Aphra Behn (1640-1689), whose poetic reputation was enhanced by favorable comparisons with her well-known predecessor.¹⁰ Behn was known primarily as a scandalous playwright, although she also wrote incidental poems and what is perhaps the first real novel in English, Love Letters between A Nobleman and His Sister (1682-1685), which set the generic model (epistolary) and topic (courtship) for future lengthy prose works.¹¹

Behn was married and widowed early, and as a mature woman, her primary publicly acknowledged relationship was with a gay male, John Hoyle, himself the subject of much scandal. She celebrates gay male love between the allegorical Philander and Lycidas, as she describes her social circle in a poem called "Our Cabal." Her description of their "friendship" reflects the convention of androgyny, as it becomes the justification for "Tenderness ... / Too Amorous for a Swain to a Swain" (187-88). Behn was herself apostrophized by her admirers for her androgyny, which was seen as the desirable reconciliation of an arguably masculine mind with her apparently feminine physique. The conventional reconciliation of sexual opposites was expressed in dedicatory poems to her collection Poems upon Several Occasions: With A Voyage to the Island of Love.¹² The hermaphroditic paradigm is the basis for so many of these verses that the conventional encomiastic mode itself becomes a masking device to acknowledge the sexuality of her poems. "Such work so gently wrought, so strongly fine, / Cannot be wrought by hands all Masculine," writes J. C., who, along with J. Adams, praises her for "A Female Sweetness and a Manly Grace." J. Cooper uses the conventional marriage of "Venus her sweetness and the force of Mars ... Imbracing ... in thy due temper'd Verse" to characterize what J. C. terms "the Beauties of both Sexes join'd ... with a strange power to charm."

But the most complex presentation of the hermaphroditic ideal is Behn's own. "To the fair Clarinda, who made Love to me, imagin'd more than Woman" explicitly states in the title the true relationship between the two women, and the poem develops the concept of a love that is "Innocent" into a full exploration of the safety in loving an androgynous female.

FAIR, lovely Maid, or if that Title be
Too weak, too Feminine for Nobler thee,
Permit a Name that more Approaches Truth:
And let me call thee, Lovely Charming Youth.
This last will justifie my soft complaint,
While that may serve to lessen my constraint;
And without Blushes I the Youth persue,
When so much beauteous Woman is in view.
Against thy Charms we struggle but in vain
With thy deluding Form thou giv'st us pain,
While the bright Nymph betrays us to the Swain.
In pity to our Sex sure thou wer't sent,
That we might Love, and yet be Innocent:
For no sure Crime with thee we can commit;
Or if we shou'd--thy Form excuses it.
For who, that gathers the fairest Flowers believes
A Snake lies hid beneath the Fragrant Leaves.
Thou beauteous Wonder of a different kind,
Soft Cloris with the dear Alexis join'd;
When e'r the Manly part of thee, wou'd plead
Thou tempts us with the Image of the Maid,
While we the noblest Passions do extend
The love to Hermes, Aphrodite the friend.

If Clarinda's "weak" and "feminine" characteristics are insufficiently noble to evoke the superlatives of praise that are more appropriately addressed to a "Youth," then that very appellation lifts the constraints on a woman-loving female in pursuit of her courtship. The beloved's combination of masculine with female characteristics, the Maid and the Youth, the nymph and the swain, confers a sexual freedom on the lover, who can argue that friendship alone is addressed to the woman, while the erotic attraction is reserved for the masculine component of her beloved androgyne. This makes their love "innocent." Further, as we have seen, two women together can commit no "Crime," but if they can, Behn argues with sophistical Donnean wit, Clarinda's "Form excuses it." Katherine Philips relies on her lover's "design" as the basis for the love that can be "innocent." But Aphra Behn goes even further. Here Clarinda is not merely observably a female. As the Neoplatonic courtly beloved, her "Form" partakes of the ideal forms of the universe, desire for which refines the erotic to the highest plane of spiritual love, a morally acceptable transformation of mere physical attraction that might otherwise offend.

The serpent among the flowers imagery is a standard allusion to the phallic, with Edenic associations of sin. But the "different kind" who is the beloved in this poem clearly mitigates against any aspects of sinfulness by allowing the speaker (in a multilayered and witty pun) to extend her love to Hermes, and her friendship to Aphrodite in a socially acceptable construction of their passionate attachment. Behn's argument here is reminiscent of Shakespeare's response to the "master mistress" of his "passion" in Sonnet 20, where the speaker distinguishes between the androgynous youth's physical attributes designed "for women's pleasure" and the kind of love that may be appropriately shared between men: "Mine be thy love, and thy love's use their treasure" (14). We can read Behn's poem as the speaker's justification of her own approach to a forbidden beloved. But Clarinda is no traditionally passive maiden fair. She is the one who, the title states, "made love" to the speaker, and, in the last quatrain, her "Manly part ... wou'd plead" while her "Image of the Maid" tempts. Clarinda, therefore, may also be seen as the initiator of their sexual activity, with the speaker justifying her own response in reaction to the public sexual mores of her time. This reciprocal construction of the poem may suggest the mutuality of a lesbian relationship that rejects the domination and subordination patterns of traditional heterosexual roles.

Behn's verse entertainment, "Selinda and Cloris," portrays a reciprocal relationship between women as unparalleled. It includes both physical and intellectual attraction, friendship and sexuality. Cloris "will sing, in every Grove, / The Greatness of your Mind," to which Selinda responds "And I your Love" (74-76). They trade verses and sing together in a presentation of the traditional pastoral speaker as poet, lover, singer, and shepherd:

And all the Day,
With Pride and Joy,
We'll let the Neighbr'ing Shepherds see,
That none like us,
Did e'er Express,
The heights of Love and Amity.

(77-82)

This celebration of the female lovers' mutual joy in a variant on the traditional masque of Hymen presents in song and dance a formal dramatic closure that emphasizes the eroticism of the women's relationship in a conventional representation that also may serve to disguise it.

Two other poems addressing women as lovers or potential lovers are also interesting. In each case, the combination of direct statement and literary convention highlights the erotic content of the verse. In "To My Lady Morland at Tunbridge," Behn employs the customary compliment to the beautiful woman, but expresses also a womanly concern for virginity. In a reversal of convention, the speaker's concern is for the chastity of the lover rather than that of the beloved, "A Virgin-Heart you merit, that ne'er found / It could receive, till from your Eyes, the Wound" (47-48). Behn was sufficiently interested in the unidentified woman whose eyes struck hers, or in the poem itself, to rewrite it as "To Mrs. Harsenet, on the Report of a Beauty, which she went to see at Church." Carola Harsnett Morland seems, in this case, to have been Behn's audience rather than the subject of the poem, and Behn writes to her openly of her physical attraction to another woman. In "Verses design'd by Mrs. A. Behn to be sent to a fair Lady, that desir'd she would absent herself to cure her Love. Left Unfinished," the audience is clearly the beloved, and the content of the poem as well as the title indicates that this love is unrequited, "The more I strugl'd to my Grief I found / My self in Cupid's Chains more surely bound" (18-19). Eros is clearly a factor in the lack of fulfillment this poem conveys.

The complexity of Behn's verse--its logical argument, pastoral and courtly conventions, biblical and classical allusions, and social comment--epitomizes the disguise that reveals meaning. Such eloquent masking allows the audience to go away satisfied that no breach of decorum has been made. It permits us to deny, dismiss, or marginalize that which we do not wish to acknowledge, and exempts the poet from social condemnation while bestowing critical acclaim for her ingenuity.¹³ Just as in society the conventional polite fiction disguises true feeling, in literature conventional representations of friendship, courtly romance, and female androgyny may mask true meaning. In a male-dominated society, with a male-oriented literature, women authors who chose to write honestly about important issues in women's lives (and sexual issues may be at the core of these) needed to convey their experiences in ways that express meaning on more than one level simultaneously. By using conventions as maskings, invoking all the connotations of masquing as play, Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn present alternative views of sexuality that are still considered taboo. It is time for us as readers at least to acknowledge the lesbian content in these works. The real question is not how innocent were they, but how innocent are we?

Notes

¹A version of some of the material in this essay appears in my article "Not Since Sappho: The Erotic in Poems of Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn," in Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England: Literary Representations in Historical Context, ed. Claude J. Summers (New York: The Haworth Press/Harrington Park Press, 1992), 153-71, also published as a special issue of the Journal of Homosexuality 23 (1992).

²Zimmerman, The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction 1969-1989 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), 62.

³Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow, 1981). For some early examples of this critical approach, see Ellen Moers, Literary Women (New York: Doubleday, 1976); and Louise Bernikow, Among Women (New York: Harper and Row, 1980). For a contrary and unique appreciation of lesbian writers and themes, see Jane Rule, Lesbian Images (New York: Crossing Press, 1982). For an example of how this current theory relates to the English Renaissance, see Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men's Press, 1982). For a more woman-centered treatment of some similar ideas, see Susan Cavin, Lesbian Origins (San Francisco: Ism Press, 1985). In their Introduction to Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (New York: New American Library, 1989) the editors, Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr., note that Faderman has been charged by other historians with denying the importance of sexual activity in lesbian women's lives (7).

⁴In Rich, Blood, Bread, and Poetry (New York: Norton, 1986), 23-75.

⁵Gilbert and Gubar, eds., The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (New York: Norton, 1985), 81; and Souers, The Matchless Orinda (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931).

⁶Andreadis, "The Sapphic-Platonics of Katherine Philips, 1632-1664," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 15, no. 1 (1989): 34-60 (quotations from 39, 59); Mermin, "Women Becoming Poets: Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, Anne Finch," ELH 57 (1990): 335-56 (quotations from 343). Mermin also derogates Philips's poems for their lack of a particular kind of energy usually associated with heterosexual desire and not part of Philips's clearly lesbian tone: "Her celebrations of love usually lack, however, the dramatic tension between flesh and spirit that imparts nervous urgency to Donne's amatory verse" (343).

⁷Quoted in Florence Howe & Ellen Bass, eds., No More Masks: An Anthology of Poems by Women (New York: Doubleday, 1973).

⁸The texts of Philips's Poems in the 1664, 1667, and 1678 editions are identical. See also Philips's Letters from Orinda (London, 1705); Souers, Matchless Orinda, 41; and Philips, Poems, 1664, 149.

⁹Much has been written recently by women about female sexuality. See, for example, Shere Hite, The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality (New York: Macmillan, 1976); as well as two books by Joann Loulan, Lesbian Sex (San Francisco: Spinsters, Ink, 1984) and Lesbian Passion (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987).

¹⁰"Greece in Sappho, in Orinda knew / Our Isle; though they were but low types to you." From "To the excellent Madam BEHN, on her Poems," J. Adams, in Aphra Behn, Poems Upon Several Occasions: With A Voyage To The Island Of Love (London, 1684).

¹¹Two recent biographies of Behn are Maureen Duffy's The Passionate Shepherdess (London: Cape, 1977); and Angeline Goreau's Reconstructing Aphra: A Social Biography of Aphra Behn (New York: Dial Press, 1980). Vita Sackville-West's brief life of Behn, The Incomparable Astrea (London: Russell & Russell, 1927), remains an interesting historical document. The standard edition of Behn's works is that edited by Montague Summers, The Works of Aphra Behn, 6 vols. (1915; repr. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1967).

¹²(London, 1684).

¹³For a discussion of how Behn employs this technique to create a double perspective on rape and seduction in her most famous poem, "The Disappointment," see my essay, "Not Since Sappho."

Source: Arlene Stiebel, "Subversive Sexuality: Masking the Erotic in Poems by Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn." In Renaissance Discourses of Desire, edited by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, pp. 223-36. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993.