“Bought from the Ship”: Dangerous Naturalizations in Aphra Behn’s Widdow Ranter

This essay places Aphra Behn’s 1689 play The Widdow Ranter into conversation with early naturalization laws to train a lens on how the Widdow embodies the dangers that foreign women posed to England’s early American settlements. It explores the multiple historical vectors informing Behn's portrayal of the formerly unfree Widdow's rise to power in Jamestown, Virginia. She transforms herself from an unnamed purchase off a ship to the wife of the settlement’s governor by rejecting courtly and literary tropes of English romance while controlling the flow of the colonial commodities of tobacco and sugar. The Widdow’s fluid identity allows her to slip through the cracks of the stock colonial characters of Restoration satire to mock beliefs that an English character can survive in America by putting the lie to the integrity of Englishness itself.