'Exit through a sewer'
Aphra Behn, The Rover
It's 1677, and a group of lusty young Englishmen is visiting the carnival in Naples in search of wine and women. One of the group, Ned Blunt, is tricked out of his clothes and valuables by a courtesan named Lucetta and her henchmen, using a bed that dumps Ned through a trap door and straight into the sewer. Emerging from the 'common shore' covered in filth, Ned bitterly curses the swindlers, his own gullibility, and the entire female sex.
Now read on:
Blunt. Oh Lord!
I am got out at last, and (which is a Miracle) without a Clue—and now to Damning and Cursing,—but if that would ease me, where shall I begin? with my Fortune, my self, or the Quean that cozen’d me—What a dog was I to believe in Women! Oh Coxcomb—ignorant conceited Coxcomb! to fancy she cou’d be enamour’d with my Person, at the first sight enamour’d—Oh, I’m a cursed Puppy,’tis plain, Fool was writ upon my Forehead, she perceiv’d it,—saw the Essex Calf there—for what Allurements could there be in this Countenance? which I can indure, because I’m acquainted with it—Oh, dull silly Dog! to be thus sooth’d into a Cozening! Had I been drunk, I might fondly have credited the young Quean! but as I was in my right Wits, to be thus cheated, confirms I am a dull believing English Country Fop.—But my Comrades! Death and the Devil, there’s the worst of all—then a Ballad will be sung to Morrow on the Prado, to a lousy Tune of the enchanted Squire, and the annihilated Damsel—But Fred, that Rogue, and the Colonel, will abuse me beyond all Christian patience—had she left me my Clothes, I have a Bill of Exchange at home wou’d have sav’d my Credit—but now all hope is taken from me—Well, I’ll home (if I can find the way) with this Consolation, that I am not the first kind believing Coxcomb; but there are, Gallants, many such good Natures amongst ye.
What we love about this passage...
Exit through a sewer: what could be more shocking and revolting? This moment shows vividly how 'blunt', racy, and candid Restoration theatre could be. And it makes for great theatre, as the thoroughly humiliated, half-clothed Ned Blunt crawls out of the 'common shore' filthy and spluttering with rage at his mistreatment. Yet this scene delivers some moral justice, because earlier in the play Ned had almost compromised the honour of a young woman who only just managed to evade his grasp in the nick of time.
We also love how this passage speaks across the centuries to the scene in Slumdog Millionaire when some mischievous boys lock the young Jamal in the outhouse he is cleaning on the outskirts of Mumbai, just as a famous actor is passing on the road outside. Desperate to see his idol, Jamal takes the only way out available...through the unspeakably filthy latrines.
About the author
Aphra Behn (1640-1689) was a prolific author of plays, fiction, translations, and poetry and was the first English woman to earn her living by writing. In her short but colorful life she enjoyed the success of her hit play The Rover, published what many have seen as an early form of the novel (Oroonoko), served as a spy for Charles II, spent time in debtors' prison, and hung out with leading literary and artistic figures such as the scandalous Earl of Rochester (John Wilmot).
To read alongside...
Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own pays homage to Aphra Behn: 'All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.'
In the Swedish writer August Strindberg's play Miss Julie (1888), the servant Jean tells the master's daughter, Julie, how he used to watch her from afar when they were growing up on her family's estate. One day, he noticed a lovely little Turkish pavilion people would go in and out of throughout the day, and he sneaked in to find out what it was for. While he was in there, 'I heard somebody coming. There was only one way out for fine people, but for me there was another, and I could do nothing else but choose it.' Exit through the sewer. Covered in filth, he dashes from the scene, and nearly runs into the beautiful, pristine Julie on her terrace--so he hides in the bushes, sinking into the muddy earth.
And this final recommendation from Dr Daniel Abdalla, one of the LitHits curators: In the twentieth century, toilets and bathrooms became new frontiers for the rebellious modernist writers set on upsetting what they saw as an older, tighter-lipped order. Who can forget James Joyce’s description in Ulysses (1922) of Leopold Bloom enjoying the “fine tang of faintly scented urine” in his kidneys? Ditto Bloom’s choice of reading material before his trip to the outhouse. In a different vein, toilets and plumbing take on a heavier symbolic dimension in Mulk Raj Anand’s groundbreaking book of Anglo-Indian fiction, Untouchable (1935), which focuses on a single, harrowing day in the life of Bakha, a toilet cleaner. Although EM Forster’s preface to that novel’s first edition concludes optimistically that the answer to Bakha’s difficult life is to ‘introduce water closets and main-drainage throughout India,’ Anand’s novel suggests that modern technology can not — in itself — solve issues of inequality.
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