Conflicting Definitions, The Lovely Oxford English Dictionary And Aphra Behn’s ‘The Willing Mistress’

I’ve been saying in previous posts that the first thing to do when reading a poem is to work out the speech situation, but I realize now I am an idiot. What is the first thing you do when you read something? Read the title of course. Please accept my apologies for being so dense.

Anyway, the title. Clearly ‘The Willing Mistress’ overtly states from the start the theme of the poem; female sexuality was not a myth in the 17th century but truly did exist. However, what I want to focus on is the word ‘mistress’ – this word has a lot of different and sometimes conflicting definitions.

If you open a dictionary you have lying around, you will get one, maybe two, meanings of the word. That is because the little dictionary sitting on your shelf (or even the very big dictionary you have sitting on your shelf) can in no way hold all of the millions of words and all of the many definitions of each word that make up the English language. It just can’t happen.

Thankfully, we have the privilege to live in the 21st century and have access to the beautiful invention that is the internet (I am assuming you have access to the internet, what with this being an internet blog…). So, go to Google and type in OED and ta-da! you will find you suddenly have too many definitions of a word to even comprehend, around 75% of which will not be applicable to the text you are reading. So what the hell do you do now?

Let’s use ‘The Willing Mistress’ as our example, specifically that word ‘Mistress’. Type it into the OED now. Already we have two options to chose from; in the context of the sentence ‘the willing mistress’, ‘mistress’ is clearly a noun and so we want the first option.

Now we’ve got that far, we obviously have a lot of entries. The simplest way to narrow this down is to see which definitions can fit in the context of our sentence and the poem in general (while ‘the willing childminder’ fits the sentence, I don’t really think it works in the context of the whole poem…). What you will notice, however, is that below each definition, the OED online includes a brief history of the usage of the word (with the appropriate definition) in literature. The main benefit of this, of course, is that we can see which meanings were around when the poem was written; it is no use trying to claim that Ahpra Behn meant ‘a woman who plays the dominant role in sadomasochistic sexual activity’ even if you could find a way to apply it to the text because that meaning of the word ‘mistress’ was not used until 1921, long after Behn wrote ‘The Willing Mistress’.

So what definitions fit the context and the date of the poem? ‘A woman having control or authority’, certainly, along with ‘a woman who has the power to control, use, or dispose of something at will’, ‘a female possessor or owner of something’ (her body, sexuality, virginity etc.), ‘a woman loved and courted by a man; a female sweetheart’ and of course ‘a woman other than his wife with whom a man has a long-lasting sexual relationship’.

As we can see some of these definitions (specifically the final two) may slightly contradict each other and so we would have to carefully analyze the rest of the poem in order to find which one (or ones) are most applicable. However, I hope this makes it clear that checking definitions for poems (especially those written a long time ago) is extremely important in revealing the meaning behind the poem.