The Rover: Act 1, Scene 2 Summary & Analysis

Immediately, the male attitude towards love is depicted as very different than the female one: women seek love out, while men fear and mock it. The men seek to satisfy their lust without creating emotional attachments.

In the minds of Frederick and Blunt, caring for a noblewoman is foolish because she will expect marriage (and lock you into the responsibilities of marriage) before engaging in sexual relations. This passage also brings up the fact of Belvile’s poverty, the main obstacle that keeps him from Florinda.

The exchange of love letters and longing looks is a common way for couples to communicate in this type of comedy, especially when they are separated by fortune (as is the case for Belvile and Florinda).

Blunt and Frederick’s mockery is ironic because, by the end of the play, both will have fallen in love (with very different degrees of success). Blunt shows himself as particularly vulgar and low class, bragging that his wealth can buy him all the women that he needs, and in this way asserting that all a woman is worth is the sex she offers.

Even the lusty Frederick and Blunt cannot hold a candle to Willmore, a mischievous and immoral cavalier whose only goal in life is to seduce as many women as possible. Restoration audiences would have recognized him as a character typed called a “rake.”

Carnival is the perfect environment for Willmore, as citizens throw morality to the winds in favor of debauchery and disguise. The confusion about whether the women are prostitutes foreshadows the events later in the play when the men believe that Florinda is a courtesan (a kind of high-class prostitute).

During this passage Willmore begins to show off his wit, mixing lewd jokes with quips; Restoration audiences would have expected and enjoyed this type of dialogue, and Willmore as a character is both morally deplorable and exceedingly charming.

Willmore uses the word “love” to mean “lust” because doing so allows him to fool many partners into sleeping with him. Throughout the play he will constantly seek out new women to seduce.

Throughout the play, all of the Englishmen will take advantage of the mad and antic atmosphere of Carnival in their own ways.

The masks conceal the female character’s identities, but also their nobility. This makes them more able to move freely through the streets, but less safe from molestation and even assault.

The meeting of Willmore and the disguised Hellena is a major event; they will spend the rest of the play struggling with their feelings for each other. Here Hellena decides to tell Willmore his fortune, his fate, but in a way they each are each other’s fate.

Although other moments in the play are witty and amusing, no dialogue matches the quips and innuendos that Willmore and Hellena share. Although she is a noblewoman, she is able to match his vulgarity with sexual jokes of her own, even as she refuses to sleep with him. It is this mixture of wit and chastity that both intrigues and frustrates him, as does her unknown identity.

Although both Hellena and Willmore use sexual language to speak to each other, and take on the traditional roles of male seducer and seduced female, both have already begun to feel genuine emotion for each other, in addition to their great attraction. They are each other’s intellectual matches, as signaled by their back-and-forth banter. This won’t be the only time in the play that “swords” are used as sexual metaphors.

Even the fact that Hellena is becoming a nun does not deter Willmore, and he actually turns this fact into a seduction technique by arguing that only those who have experienced sex before giving it up can be considered truly honorable. Hellena, meanwhile, introduces the word “love,” although it is unclear whether she means that deep emotion, or only lust.

The pair begins to use the language of money to talk about love, and Willmore uses hyperbole (extreme exaggeration) in order to seduce Hellena. This type of seduction is another expected cliché of Restoration comedies. And the point of such comedies was not to avoid such clichés, but rather to fulfill and revel in them with as much gusto as possible. Behn seems to push that fulfillment to such extremes that she can sometimes even seem to cause the clichés to explode from the inside—in other words her characters fulfill the cliché so powerfully that it reveals the complication and even awfulness of the cliché in the first place.

Hellena turns the cliché on its head, accusing Willmore of exaggerating. She then brings up the play’s central question: the difference between love and lust. Willmore’s answer—that the two are the same—reveals a great deal about his worldview.

This passage begins the comic (but disturbing) subplot in which Blunt is swindled by Lucetta and then swears revenge on all women.

Although Belvile is talking to his beloved Florinda, he is unable to recognize her. This confusion of Florinda’s identity will continue as the play goes on, and Belvile will speak to her many times, only to realize later who she actually is. This running joke also pokes fun at the idea that love conquers all, that loving someone allows a person to penetrate all obstacles to understanding them. Belvile loves Florinda, but can’t recognize her at all.

Just as the lovers are about to reunite for a moment, circumstance interferes, in the form of Don Pedro. Florinda, however, does manage to tell Belvile where and when to meet her—a significant feat for the modest noblewoman.

Each arc represents a different kind of love/lust relationship: Belvile and Florinda’s relationship is pure and innocent, Blunt and Lucetta’s is completely sexual and deceitful, while Willmore and Hellena’s appears to be somewhere between the two (and to thrive on the tension between the two).

Willmore and Belvile’s relationship will become increasingly strained throughout the play because of Willmore’s attitude towards women and his habit of getting himself (and his friends) into scrapes. This moment also introduces Frederick’s role as the peacemaker.

Restoration comedies like this play often included a stupid male character being fooled and manipulated by a clever, seductive woman. Blunt clearly fills this role. Even his friends do not truly like him, taking advantage of him for his wealth even as they mock his idiocy.

Even through Hellena’s disguise, Willmore was able to discern that she was a noblewoman. This fact does not please him, however, because it means that she is less likely to sleep with him. Note how quickly his thoughts turn from Hellena as soon as she is gone—this is a frequent pattern for the immoral Willmore, who wants sex and adventure above all.

Angelica represents a very different kind of woman from Florinda and Hellena: she is powerful, independent, and wealthy, and she is all those things because she is overtly sexual, able to exert power over men using her beauty a tool of commerce. At the same time, however, she will never be respected as the noblewomen are because of her status as a prostitute. Willmore’s poverty, meanwhile, is at war with his interest in Angelica’s beauty.