Oroonoko Lecture Outline, p. 1

Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (1688)

I. What is “American” Literature?

A. Defined by the author’s place of birth and/or residence in the Americas

B. Defined by setting, i.e., in the Americas

C. Defined formally by topics, themes, and genres

1. hybridity

2. wonder

3. combination of Romance and Realism, myth and history = Oroonoko (and Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, etc.). O sometimes called the “first American novel” (William Spengeman).

D. Romance

a. Medieval verse narratives about marvelous adventures of a chivalric hero (e.g., King Arthur), often with moral or didactic ends.

b. Later prose narratives (17th-C. on) that emphasize strange and exotic characters and events, supernatural events (gothic novels, etc.)

c. Behn combines romance, heroic epic, revenge tragedy, all old-world European forms with particular formal characteristics and themes

  • omniscient narrator
  • generalized or abstract setting
  • heroic characters (Oroonoko’s hunting, pp. 50-54[44-47).
  • Petrachan love poetry (e.g., p. 17[20])
  • idealized moral paradigms
  • O. is a perfect Blend of Europe and Africa, all of the sophistication andmoral rectitude but with a native/savage innocence of the corruption thataccompanies it: 7-8[12-14]. He is the ideal solution that is brutally destroyed bythe reality of the new world. The very brutality of that account isindicative of the immense emotional and ideological weight his charactercarries.

"Having embodied her romantic hopes in the noble African Prince Oroonoko and then cast him upon the narrative tide of the Brief True Relation, it seems she could only sit and watch him perish" (spengeman 67).

E. Realism—the “True Relation”

  • repetitive insistence on eye-witness testimony, "the authority of personal experience," which we find "[o]nly in the narratives of New World travelers" (Spengeman 70).
  • This consideration for the particulars of time and place as they bear upon thenarrative plot is one of the early marks of the novel and "fiction" as agenre. (Earlier forms of myth and romance unfolded within ideationalparadigms that were free from influence by the world.}

description and detail for its own sake, without overt moral or other ends

  • and the "Brief True Relation" or “True Relations” characteristic of exploration literature,
  • the pressures oflocal geographical situations
  • contact motifs, including wonder, go-betweens (46, 54, 56), etc.
  • Because this latter genre valued the personalexperience of the author as the source of authority, she could overcome thelimitations faced by a woman writing and her less than exhalted social status.

The "true" relation also appealed to the emerging middle classaudience, hungry for practical facts about the new world and contemputous ofthe elite world of high culture associated with the romance genre.

F. Combining Romance and Realism produces an early Novel

  • The combination "generates a sequence of events and a level of discourse somewhere between fiction and history, whose import can only be called novelistic" (Spengeman 58);first step toward the novelistic narrator and its "realism.” (Blake liked Behn's novel.)
  • The evolution of the narrator's pov, esp. her increasing sympathy with Oroonoko. vs. the Whites who kill him, again looks forward to the notion ofcharacter development and thematic contradiction as parts of narrativeconflict.
  • Cf. 46 (with the whites); 63, still white, but distanced from the clownish army pursuing Oroonoko;
  • Utterly contemptuous of the powerful men in the colony chasing Oroonoko, but that is focused on the abuse of their authority more than their being white/English.
  • The blend of Old and New World genres takes place uneasily.
  • The narrativebegins as a True Relation based on the personal experience of a specificnarrator, but then it abruptly shifts to third-person omniscient to tell thestory of the Court of Coramatien, Oroonoko, Imoinda, and O's grandfather, theKing. The organization is mythic/narrative rather thangeographical/epistemological.
  • With the shift to Surinam, it becomes clear that the conflicts associated withold world romance are to be repaired in the arcadia of the new world. Trefry,his new owner, recognizes O's superiority, etc. The problem is not with thenatives, but with the rulers of that area, who are savage Englishmen: Byam andBanister, uncultivated renegades (56). This is a chaotic new world, posedbetween moments in history.
  • Oroonoko’s heroic, tragic death blends new world, Indian customs of self-mutulation (from p. 58[50]) to his heroic scorn of his tomentors: 75[62-63].
  • The “wonder” typical of European contact with the new world is turned on the English themselves as the novel suprisingly takes on the perspective of the Indians encountering white people for the first time (though later we find this is a wholly-staged contact for the amusement of the Europeans): 55-56[47-51].

The most important inconsistency in narrative pov is, however, theincreasing identification with O. vs. the English who torture him. He goesnative, dying finally with in Indian Pipe in his mouth (he picked up the habit in Surinam). This shift in perspective and sympathy to the New World isalways there as the "Americanness" of early texts like this one, and is mostdramatically thematized in the captivity narratives.

II. The World of Oroonoko

A. Correcting our focus

Historical correction: In the 17th C., people would not have understood us spending so much of our time talking about New England. The Puritans were often dismissed as a bunch of religous fanatics roaming around in the snow. The real action was in the West Indies and, as Behn show us, in Surinam.

B. Surinam and Coramantien [map]

Coramantien was a slave trading post. It is on the Gold Coast of Africa (modern Ghana). Surinam is on the northern coast of South America. Behn’s novel is the first effort to depict African life below the Sahara, but highly romanticized.

C. Slavery in the New World

England a bit slow, but first licence for slave-transporting passed by Charles I in 1630. 1672: Royal African Company established for slaving, fought off the Dutch as rival slavers. Slavery was not a major moral issue at the time.

That accounts for the strange instability of the moral perspective on slavery in O, and Behn’s ambivalence. She simply does not see slavery per se as so evil; it is the enslavement of a noble soul like O that apalls her; the rest of the slaves deserve it in some ways.

Selling slaves in Surinam: Penguin 41

negroes recognize O’s nobility as King: Penguin 44

Caesar/O actually trades slaves himself, offering slaves to Trefry to let him and Imoinda/Clemene go: penguin 48

Caesar’s rousing speech to the slaves to foster a slave revolt: Penguin 61-62.

Tuscan asks him what to do, and Caesar responds with the dream of a free slave state: 63. (Liberia would be founded by freed slaves from America in 1812.

The revolt is quashed by trickery when Trefry adn Baym talk them into surrendering, which Caesar does out of consideration for Imoinda. The slaves turn against Caesar and whip him (Penguin 67).

D. Aphra Behn

B. 1640? in Kent, England? D. 1689.

Prolific playwright, often sexually risqué plays. The most prolific dramatist 1670-90.

Erotic poetry

Prose narratives near the end of her life (1680s on)

Hated the Puritans, who ruled England during the Interregnum (1650s). Spied for the Royalists in the Low Countries and then for Charles II (restored to throne in 1660) in Surinam. Behn not very good as a spy, returned to England penniless and turned to writing plays in 1670.

1685: Charles II dies, his brother James II ascends to throne (both Stuarts, James was a Catholic). Behn thought of James II as a naive but heroic king—like Oroonoko. O can be read as a Royalist allegory defending the ideal of the Monarchy against those (Puritans) who would replace it with a mercantile middleclass Parliment. If the nobility had protected James, he might have made it, like O was not protected.

III. How That World Was Represented

A. Narratives of Exploration and Discovery (Columbus, Vespucci)

B. Chronicles and Conquistador Narratives (Diaz, Garcilaso de la Vega)

C. Typological narrative (sacred or "providential" histories) (Bradford)

D. "Romance" and myth (The Tempest [1610/11], based partly on the shipwreck in the Bermudas and other American shipwrecks)

E. Captivity Narratives begin to combine romance and realism, myth and adventure, conversion and captivity

F. The Novel

These categories are seldom pure, and they often blend into one another when you apply them to a specific work, but they represent generally recognized genres.

Toward the middle 1600s, we begin seeing a new kind of writing, one that spans this range to combine romance and chronicle and begins to integrate the genres to some deliberate end: Bradford's "History," Rowlandson's captivity narrative, Behn's Oroonoko. (A counter example is Columbus's reports, as facts, about strange monsters living on remote islands: we read that as a combination of fact and myth( the islands were there, the monsters not), but it was all reported as fact by him. Also see Morton, who moves blithely from very concrete details about the Indians' lives to speaking of them as if they were characters in a romance-fantasy with nymphs, etc. The two kinds of writing are not integrated, just juxtaposed.)

This combination of romance and realism characterizes the early stages of the novel, which emerges at the same time that writing about the New World was becoming popular (i.e., late 1500s through the 1600s).

IV. Oroonoko: from Explorer to Tourist

A. Narrator as eyewitness

To develop her ethos, the narrator claims the authority of the eyewitness, either that of her own observations or via reports of other eye-witnesses (principally Oroonoko himself or her mother and sister: p. 7, 8a (nb her reference to the "curious" about his life). She calls her work a "history" and insists that it is the Truth: Penguin 9-10.

(Note that the figure of the eyewitness emerges more importantly through travel writing about the New World, because it was principally in that writing that the eyewitness began to challenge "authority" based on intellectual traditions, myth, and blind faith.)

B. The New World as Eden: marvelous, strange, and innocent

From that perspective of eyewitness, the narrator reports what she sees in the new world in terms that are very familiar to us by now: wonderful and strange animals, "marvels," etc. (8 Penguin 9-10).

She represents the world as Edenic, and the Indians are compared to Adam and Eve living in a state of natural innocence: 8/Penguin 10x, 11x. The point here is that she is reporting this as fact, just like the other travel writers before her.

NB: Columbus thought that the earthly paradise lay at the mouth of the OrinokoRiver. Defoe located Robinson Crusoe's island there, too.

After invoking her authority as an eyewitness to the events she recounts, and before launching into the story itself, the narrator regales us with a typical list of wonders encountered in this strange new world. Some of the marvels can now even be viewed by readers close to home, she says, as the skins of snakes: 2[8-9].

Here the new world has literally been lifted from its geographical context and turned into an object of curiosity and delight, either as an object in a museum or incorporated into art as the costume for an actor on a stage. But as the narrator's account of the native's own use of the feathers suggests, even in their original context these items served a decorative, artistic end at least one remove from their origin in nature.

C. God and Gold

But something is very strange about this account if read from the perspective of this quarter: it is not motivated by the usual motives that drove earlier explorers: conversion and gold. In fact, Behn goes out of her way to invoke both of those motifs only to reject them as of any interest to her:

Conversion: Oroonoko thinks the story of the trinity is ridiculous, and he has earlier dismissed English notions of God as the source of the English Captain's hypocrisy. (41)

Gold: some maybe-Incas? Show up at one point with a bag of gold (51) and tell stories about Mountains of Gold in the interior. This is a direct allusion to all of the stories about gold inSouth America, but now the pursuit of gold is just another possible "Adventure," no more or less important than the hunting and fishing, and anyway the Dutch now have the land. In one paragraph she tells the gold story and reduces it to just another adventure.

This notion of adventure is what dominates this particular travel narrative, turning the explorer and conquistador, the missionary and the colonist, into a tourist, titilated and save in the aesthetic distance from the world in which she or he lives.

D. The New World as Museum and Stage-Set. [Indian Queen]

But notice how her description tends to emphasize the curiousity toward this scene as an aesthetic spectacle: the butterflies and other things can be viewed now in England in the King's museum, and when she receives a native costume as a gift, she gives it to a theatrical group to use as a costume in a play: 9a/Penguin 10a.

My point here is that the New World appears in this novel as a spectacle, an object of curiousity. Her account is based on facts and actual things she saw, to be sure, but she portrays the scene more as a scene in a play, or a display in a museum, rather than as a place to go live. In short, there is a kind of aesthetic distance being set up from which the new world is viewed as a spectacle.

1. Beauty and Use

2. Sports

3. Curiosity and an Experiment

4. Diversions and Entertainment

These two poles, fantasy and fact, romance and realism, are constantly worked vs. one another in the novel, but they are connected consistently via a new kind of attitude: curiousity.

Much of the novel is taken up with what she calls a long "digression" (51) from the story of Oroonoko (43-51/Penguin 52-60), which is a tourist's account of the New world, a guidebook of the strange and "entertaining."

The American Continent is praised for both Beauty and Use (43b), but for the narrator it is mainly a source of delight and adventure (43a), and Caesar/Oroonoko they are safe from harm and able to enjoy it (43-44).

The scene on the river below the house St. John's Hill is explicitly presented as a blend of nature and art, a "prospect' that "fancy" creates: 44/Penguin 52.

She then turns to their "Sports," which include "Tiger" hunting (jaguars and cougars), "surprizing" these wild cats for amusement (Penguin 52-55. Oroonoko vanquishes one just like he did his enemies while a commader of an army in Africa, and brings its heart to them to satisfy their curiousity and tell tales about it: 46a/Penguin 54-55a.

O. is "curious," too, and it almost gets him killed when he decides to catch an electric eel to see if it is really as bad as he has heard: 46-47/Penguin 55-56.. He is saved by some Indians, which introduces this theme: 47-51/Penguin 55-60.

The visit to the Indians (Penguin 56-60) is the earliest manifestation I know of what will come to be known as the "ugly American" we saw in Madama Butterfly last quarter: utterly self-absorbed, "delighted" by the curious child-like natives he or here she encounters in the travels. What is in Columbus a momentus encounter with a strange new world is here represented as a trip to Disneyland or to a zoo. She does not speak the language, so they plan to settle for the "Diversion in Gazing" at the natives (48/Penguin 56), who are "Ingnorant" and "Simple." The nakedness of the Indians vs. the tourists' finery is presented as an observation about fashion, not a profound ideological shock (48/Penguin 57). NB: the references to the Indians' Wonder, which is now presented as a sign of their "Ignorance and simplicity" (49/Penguin 58a). That is the context for the familiar scene in which they take the tourists for Gods, though here that perception is the result of simple little trick with a magnifying glass. And rather than suggesting how easy it would be to colonize them or conquer them or convert them to Christianity, now it is just a sign that they would be susceptible to any "unknown or extravagant Religoin" and that that the English might "impose any notions of Fictions upon 'em," rather than a form of government.

(NB the "Indian trader" a go between [48-49/Penguin 56-]).

For all of the narrator's emphasis on eye-witness testimony, that point of view and the authority accorded to it by exploration writing is heavily ironic in the text and is presented as a deliberate construction to produce an aesthetic effect rather than unmediated contact with the reality of the New World. The visit to the Indian town, which is carefully staged for the effect of spectacle: 54-58[47-51]/Penguin 56-60, esp. 56a.

  • Unlike the accounts of Columbus, Vespucci, and the many other explorers who preceded her, however, Behn's narrator says that she imagined her encounter with the Indians merely as a "Diversion" that occupies some idle moments. She approaches it with all the titillation and amusement of a tourist standing in line for a ride at Disneyland
  • The "contact" with the natives is in fact a carefully constructed illusion. The ladies are willing to chance the encounter only if the noble Oroonoko (here referred to by his slave-name Caesar) accompanies them to protect them from real harm. In addition, in order to communicate with the Indians, the ladies arrange to take along a translator, a Fisherman, but he’s too Indian so they have to hide him. Penguin 56.
  • In other words, contact between European and Other, White and Indian, is possible only by hiding (literally in this case) the mediating forces that allow for its representation as an eye-witness account within an ideologically coherent framework: military superiority in the person of Oroonoko; the ideal of communication embodied in the translator; and the troublesome presence of hybridity, which complicates the simplistic binary of racial purity that structures the contact as ideological and theatrical spectacle. The result is an illusion constructed for the amusement and delight of tourists, rather than a direct encounter with some extra-textual reality of the New World, but the process of constructing that illusion is what makes the complexity of that world and our place in it visible to us

They are costumed: 55[48]/Penguin 57.