Class on Oroonoko

Readings from EEBO (you don’t need to know these well—you might just glance at them before class in order to enhance our discussion).

(Possible sources that Aphra Behn might have had access to.  What do you think?)

1.      Warren, George, An impartial description of Surinam upon the continent of Guiana in America with a history of several strange beasts, birds, fishes, serpents, insects and customs of that colony, etc. / worthy the perusal of all, from experience of George Warren ... , London : Printed by William Godbid for Nathaniel Brooke ..., 1667.

2.     Rochefort, Charles-César, comte de., The history of the Caribby-islands, viz, Barbados, St Christophers, St Vincents, Martinico, Dominico, Barbouthos, Monserrat, Mevis, Antego, &c in all XXVIII in two books : the first containing the natural, the second, the moral history of those islands : illustrated with several pieces of sculpture representing the most considerable rarities therein described : with a Caribbian vocabulary / rendred into English by John Davies ... , London : Printed by J.M. for Thomas Dring and John Starkey, and are to be sold at their shops ..., 1666.  [I used the second entry under search terms “Davies, John” and “Caribby-Islands” in author and title.  Then go to image 171 or pages 314-15 for a description of the Indian chiefs and mutilation.

3.      Behn, Aphra, Abdelazer, or, The Moor's revenge a tragedy, as it is acted at His Royal Highness the Duke's Theatre / written by Mrs. A. Behn. , London : Printed for J. Magnes and R. Bentley ..., 1677.

Suggested ideas for searching in EEBO and ECCO if you are interested in this topic: What else can you find about English settlements in South America in the seventeenth-century and their presentation of the native peoples there?  This will complement our work on The Indian Emperor as well.

Mallipeddi, Ramesh, "Spectacle, Spectatorship, and Sympathy in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko," Eighteenth-Century Studies 45.4 (2012): 475-496.  Here is a link through Project Muse in our library database:
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/eighteenth-century_studies/toc/ecs.45.4.html

Article Review

“’Tis There eternal spring:” Mapping the Exotic in Aphra Behn’s  Oroonoko by Andrew Hisock

[Hisock, Andrew. “Tis there eternal spring: Mapping the Exotic in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko”.  Journal of the Short Story in English. 29 (Autumn 1997).  (Online).]

Hisock in his article posits to analyze Behn’s Oroonooko as an early novella which experimented both with genre and narration as well as Behn’s  (possible) ability to “generate her other self” in narratorial terms (2).  Furthermore, Hisock highlights ways in which even as a female writer, Behn produces an “exotic other” in her representations of blackness

The first half of the article is dedicated to outlining Behn’s history as a rarity in Restoration England: a woman able to sustain herself independently as a successful playwright.  However, Hisock argues that her real innovation and strength was not her plays (albeit successful) but her venture into prose writing because of the eventual decay of the theaters amidst the “Popish Plot”.Oroonooko was Behn’s attempt at reaching a mass market and expanding her income via prose narrative.

Hisock’s main argument, however, is that Behn’s positions woman and black people as “other” and important yet holds to conventional frameworks of patriarchy.  To quote Hiscock: “Behn does not conduct the whole narrative in accordance with the expectations of such writing: the reader will not find the familiar romance vision with the pressures of cultural restrains are challenged by a female value-system focusing on love…there is no possibility that the heroine (narrator or Imoinda) may be allowed to break out of identities imposed upon her by an inhibiting patriarchy” (Hisock 3).  With regards to her portrayal of black people as the “exotic other, Hisock argues that Behn fantasizes a world unknown to much of seventeenth-century England but was “popular of the orientalist narrative of contemporary French writers” (3).  Therefore, Orronokoo presents a romantic view of blacks and Hisock takes great pains to highlight the ways in which critics have dismissed her views of blacks and instead call Behn a “seductress”—using titillation and emotion to exploit her audience’s ignorance of cultures beyond their own (4).

            Hisock further maps the “othering” of women and blacks in his assessment of Behn’s treatment of Oroonooko’s sexual power dynamics and his relationship with Imoinda.  Hisock argues that the political entanglements of Oroonooko are based solely on the “erotic ambitions of the ruling classes” (6).  Hisock positions the character of Oroonoko as both a “Restoration rake-hero” as well as brutal yet noble patriarchal savage. Imoinda becomes sexual commodity and Behn is aware of the European notions of an exotic world as savage, sexual and uninhibited in its ability to negotiate patriarchy even during slavery.   Behn, as Hisock points out, in the midst of these Eurocentric views treads lightly as to not “challenge enslavement as a malignant cultural practice” (6). Thus, she maintains and does not interrogate practices via her narrative in Oroonoko.

          

Finally, Hisock returns to his initial argument regarding the narrator and her “othered” selves as she others the natives of Surinam as well as her own position of “other” within the exotic world of the text.  The bodies of Surinam Indians become “othered specimens” (7) in her new world narrative.  Hisock also argues that it within this framework of “new world narrative” that our hero, Oronooko, also becomes a “circus attraction” (10) in this new world while the narrator’s otherness providers her with a sort of omniscient presence although it is an unstable one “riddled with contradictions and discontinuities and these frequently result in her furthering the interest of a very colonial society which repressing her cultural status” (11).

Hisock’s article does a great job of engaging the reader with the ways in which the text of Ornookoo, although written by a woman, deliberately engages in notions of patriarchy, colonial thought and exotic otherness and does very little to interrogate those ideas. Hisock praises Behn’s ability to make creative strides in narrative genre writing as a woman but also highlights her inability to divorce her writing from traditions of the period and this becomes “a disappointingly conservative prose writer” (12).