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Exclusion and Desecration: Aphra Behn, Liberalism, and the Politics of the Pindaric Ode

Sometime after William of Orange’s landing in Britain, the Tory writer Aphra Behn seems to have been solicited by Gilbert Burnet—counselor and propagandist for William and Mary—to write a coronation ode on behalf of the new sovereign. In response, Behn crafted an ode of refusal, addressed not to the king or to the public but directly to Burnet himself. In this poem, “A Pindaric Poem to the Reverend Dr. Burnet” (1689), Behn strikes a tone quite different from that found in her earlier political verse: the characteristic amplification and hyperbole of the conventional panegyric is replaced with sarcasm and understated wit. Her refusal is consistent with her steadfast support for the House of Stuart and with her hostility to parliamentary and popular power. But in its emphasis on private political feeling, it is also surprisingly consistent with certain tenets of liberal thought. Rather than speaking in the odd mixture of the vatic and the abject called for by ceremonial verse, it bases its claims on an elegiac voice of dissidence, a right of refusal, and a rhetoric of isolation and individual exceptionality that is closely aligned with our understanding of liberalism as a practice based on the sacred natural rights of the individual, and with acts of conscience. The poem is thus not only an expression of a conscience-driven refusal of the revolution’s outcome: it is, more precisely, an assertion of a sacred individual right to that dissent, as well as an affective and elegiac embrace of the virtual exile and loneliness that results. The sacral qualities of divine-right kingship are in this poem transferred to the individual conscience. Though Aphra Behn was a devoted supporter of the Stuart monarchy, seeing her merely as a Tory writer obstructs us from seeing other implications of her thinking, particularly the way her proto-Jacobitism is genealogically linked to liberalism. In this essay, I call attention to a less-visible facet of her politics by reading her ode to Burnet not simply as a refusal of political modernity but also, more specifically, as a desecration of