Abstract

Recent literary and cultural histories have refined our understandings of the categories that created identity in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries---the period leading up to the solidification of the modern concept of the self. Drawing on this scholarship, my thesis investigates the ways that Aphra Behn explores the categories of gender and status (both in transition during the Restoration period) as they relate to the physical body. Through readings of two pieces of short fiction, a play, and a three-part novel, I trace the ways in which Behn creates different situations to explore the complex interactions between gender, status, and the body in order to expose the often dramatic ways that these categories inflect one another. Ultimately, I argue that the potential for the disembodiment of female identity as it is portrayed in Behn's works (as opposed to the fully embodied identity of the male) allows for a radical re-imagining of female identity that is bound by neither traditional concepts of gender nor status.