Faith & Spirit Quote by Aphra Behn

Pleasure, Behn insists, isn`t a cathedral built for one true feeling; it`s a marketplace, loud with options, where desire stays alive by moving. "Variety is the soul of pleasure" sounds like a polished epigram, but it`s also a strategic defense of appetite in an era that wanted women`s appetite tightly policed. As a Restoration dramatist - and one of the first English women to make a living by her pen - Behn knew how quickly "pleasure" could become a moral accusation. So she reframes it: not a shameful excess, but a principle of human psychology. What animates pleasure isn`t purity or permanence; it`s change.

The line works because it smuggles something daring into something orderly. "Soul" gives variety a kind of legitimacy, almost a theology, turning what prudish critics would call fickleness into an essential animating force. There`s wit in the economy: four words that tug against the period`s ideal of constancy (especially demanded of wives) while winking at the audience who understood the libertine code of the Restoration stage. Variety can mean novelty in art, shifting moods, different lovers, different selves - and Behn leaves the door open on purpose.

Context matters: Restoration culture was hungry, theatrical, newly unbuttoned after Puritan rule, yet still eager to punish women for the very freedoms it celebrated in men. Behn`s subtext lands like a quiet provocation: if variety makes pleasure possible, then insisting on sameness isn`t virtue - it`s control.