Aphra Behn's Oroonoko: Blurring History and Romance

In today's chinwag, we'll explore a candidate for the first novel in English by the first professional female writer in English: Oroonoko by Aphra Behn (1688).  It's the story of an African prince and his beloved, who are betrayed into slavery and do not live happily ever after.  The novel seems a modest heroic romance, but I think Ms. Behn has a more complex project up her sleeve . . . .

Full text of Oroonoko: 

https://pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca/oroonoko/chapter/the-history-of-the-royal-slave/

Additional music:

"James Bond Theme Song" from The Internet Archive

https://archive.org/details/tvtunes_6995

"Jeopardy Theme Think Music" from The Internet Archive

https://archive.org/details/tvtunes_29826

Transcript

Hello and welcome, friends and neighbors, to the Classic English Literature Podcast, that little corner of the cyber-cloud where we take seriously great works that nobody reads anymore.  More fool them, I say.

Before we kick off today, I should acknowledge that this episode is rather late.  Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.  It’s been a busy few weeks in the Old Man’s life – wrapping up the school year.  I teach seniors, so I’ve been busy overseeing graduation speeches and presenting at awards ceremonies.  Additionally, I am changing jobs in the next academic year.  Same district, but a different position.  I’ve been teaching British literature as well as philosophy since Adam was a lad, but I’ve accepted a position at our alternative education program, teaching students for whom the conventional comprehensive high school model is not a great fit.  So I’ve been busy packing up my old room and moving it across town to take up my new post.  I’m rather looking forward to the change and the opportunity to teach kids who might otherwise fall through the cracks.  So that’s why this is late – I do hope you understand.

On another note, I recently received a Fan Mail message from a listener called Nieya/Fawn – hope I’ve pronounced the first name reasonably well.  They greet me with the salutation “Hello Darkness, my old friend” and go on to say that I have, and I quote, “that silver tongue quality.  Total Devil incubus vibe.”  Oh, my.  Your pretty words will turn my head!  I am flattered – or at least I choose to be.  Seldom is my swamp Yankee accent commented upon in what appears to be an approving manner.  I confess I’m at a loss to decode the “Devil incubus vibe.”  Is this a meme of which my middle-aged self is woefully unaware?  I ask only for clarification.  Furthermore, Nieya/Fawn swears they know me and asks if I’ve ever lived in Oregon, Africa, or Texas.  Sadly, friend listener, I’ve never even been to Oregon or Africa.  I did once have a layover in the Dallas airport twenty years ago – perhaps we met in the smoking lounge?  Anyway, thank you very much for listening and I do hope you’ll get back in touch – I’d love to have a greater understanding of your intriguing note. 

So, let’s crack on with the show.  What is it I’m supposing to be talking about today?  Ah, yes!  Aphra Behn’s novel Oroonoko.

Behn is quite an interesting and mysterious character.  We actually know little about her, biographically speaking.  She was probably born sometime in the 1640s to a rather obscure family, whose name could be Cooper, or Johnson, or Amies – who knows?  We do know that she spoke French rather well and adhered to the Catholic religion, so perhaps she was brought up in a convent abroad – or at home.  We reckon her marriage was not a happy one, given the attitudes toward “mercenary marriages” evident in her writing – perhaps her wedding to the shadowy “Mr. Behn” was arranged.  Or, indeed, nonexistent.  The possibility exists that Aphra presented herself as a widow to facilitate her professional life, which would be more difficult than as a spinster given the times.

In that professional life, it seems, Behn carefully curated her public persona.  Reports exist suggesting that during 1663 and 4, she conducted an amorous interlude in Surinam, a sugar plantation in South America, with an antimonarchist on the lam during the Restoration.  They took the code names “Celadon” and “Astraea” – smacking of the characters in pastoral romances – and turns out Astraea was the name under which she published throughout her career.

Um, speaking of names, this seems a good time to offer a pre-emptive apology.  I first read Aphra Behn as a doctoral student, and my professor pronounced her surname “Bain,” and that’s what I’ve become used to.  While refreshing my knowledge of her for this episode, I discovered that the proper pronunciation is “Ben.”  I only say this in case, over the course of our talk today, I inadvertently revert to what is sort of my own default pronunciation.  If I do, please excuse it.  I do know the right way, but when I’m in full flow, I may slip up.  Cheers.

Anyway, she gets even more interesting.  By 1666, Behn had switched loyalties and become a committed monarchist, eventually becoming a spy for Charles II.  Yeah!  She’s sent to Antwerp, in Belgium, to hook up with her old flame Celadon and woo him into betraying his Republican comrades, thus apprising the king of any nefarious schemes against his reign.  But, like any good government job, Behn was seldom paid for her espionage, and eventually turned to writing plays to keep body and soul together.  She fully admitted that she was “forced to write for bread . . . [and am] not ashamed to own it.”  Thus, and here’s a good bit of trivia for any of you “Jeopardy!” aspirants out there in the cloud, she is the first professional female writer in English.  Glass ceiling cracked.  Up the sisters!  In the 20th century, no less a figure than Virginia Woolf proposed Behn as the great pioneer of women’s writing, declaring that “All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn . . . for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.”  A grand statement, and one with which I almost completely agree, but I do have some reservations.  One: we’ve already seen in this podcast the very frank and candid contributions of female writers: Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, Elizabeth I, Amelia Lanyer, Margaret Cavendish.  Maybe even the Anglo-Saxon poet of “The Wife’s Lament.”  I do agree that Behn aimed at a more popular audience, so it seems right that her influence would be greater than these predecessors.  Two: I wonder if Behn’s conscious disguising of her actual self – the absence of biography, the nom de plume – while simultaneously courting fame problematizes the authenticity implied by Woolf.  I’ll not push the point – she’s Virginia freakin’ Woolf, and I’m a babbling pedagogue.

The work I’d like to focus on today is Behn’s 1688 novel entitled Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave: A True History.  I’ll talk more about this curious title in a moment, but first I feel I must address generic issues.  I just called Oroonoko a novel, and I will continue to do so, but there are many scholars and critics who would object.  There’s nothing scholars and critics like better than a good squabble over miniscule distinctions.  To paraphrase Wallace Sayre and Henry Kissinger, the reason literary arguments are so vicious is that the stakes are so low.  The particular bone these dogs fight over is the definition of a novel.  Here’s what most of us out in the real world think of as a novel: a long, coherent, fictional narrative in prose.  Seems simple enough: like obscenity, we know it when we see it.  There are those who argue that Behn’s Oroonoko is the very first novel in English – they say it hits all the requisite marks.  But here’s where things get tedious.  Others argue that, at some 36,000 words, it’s not long enough (many who argue such are men, who have a notoriously cavalier relationship with measurements of length).  Others say that since the book claims to relate actual events, it is not fiction.  Others point to its rather romancical elements, and with a scalpel’s cut sunder the romance from the novel.  These are the types of distinctions academics draw in order to justify tenure, and one of several reasons I abandoned doctoral work.  Other candidates for English’s first novel include “Beware the Cat” by satirist William Baldwin from 1553, John Lyly’s Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit from 1578, and Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, which we covered in our episode on early science-fiction, from 1666.  I should note the dark horse candidate – Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur of 1485.  Pick your horse, ladies and gentlemen, but the winner doesn’t matter.  Such claims for the first anything are usually spurious and, while entertaining enough for wine-and-cheese party banter, don’t really contribute a great deal to our understanding of literature’s place in the lives of readers.  What can be said is that in the early modern period, the fictional prose narrative developed and that from this period, would grow to become the primary mode of storytelling in the West until, arguably, the advent of motion pictures.  

“Sir, sir!”

Yes, a question there at the back?

“Yes, sir.  I’m sure that’s all very interesting, sir, but will you be saying anything at all about the actual book?”

Of course, young Thinknottle, I was just coming to that.  Whether we call Oroonoko a novel, or a novella, or a proto-novel, or a romance, it is nevertheless a text which is as complex and paradoxical as its author.  Regard the full title: it announces a tale about an African prince named Oroonoko who is a “royal slave” – a paradox, if not an outright oxymoron.  Then, it stakes a claim to being a “true history.” It’s a curious assertion: one naturally assumes a history to be true, so why the insistent modifier?  I disregard, for the moment, the complications of historiography as an ideological apparatus as well as the paranoid suspicions of our own “post-truth” era of “alternative facts.”  No, what intrigues me is Behn’s asseveration that the story she will tell, despite its highly romantic elements, is true, as she avers at the end of her first paragraph “without the addition of invention.”  It always makes me wonder when someone insists so adamantly on their authenticity.  Once, at the grocery store to pick up some milk, I saw in the cooler a brand calling itself “Dairy Pure.”  I did not buy it.  I have long assumed that the FDA and farmers have not entered into a conspiracy to deceive me with impure nondairy milk substitute, so I became wary at this company’s suspicious nomenclature.

That is by the by.  Let’s get to the quick and dirty:

Oroonoko is an African prince from what Behn calls “Coramantien”—a fictionalized version of the West African Gold Coast, modern day Ghana. This guy is impossibly noble: handsome, articulate, classically educated, and a brilliant military commander – like an African version of the ideal classical Roman.  He falls in love with Imoinda, whose beauty and virtue match his own nobility. They marry in secret – which is always a great idea in heroic romances.  Oroonoko’s grandfather—the king—also thinks Imoinda is bangin’. Apparently, droit du seigneur is a thing in Coramantien, too, because he demands her for his harem.

When Oroonoko tries to rescue her, he’s told she’s been executed for dishonor – that is, not being a virgin. But really, she’s been sold into slavery. And not long after, Oroonoko himself is betrayed and kidnapped by an English slave trader during a moment of supposed diplomacy and shipped to Governor Byam’s plantation in the British colony of Surinam, South America.

Once there, Oroonoko is renamed "Caesar" – yep, ironically on the nose – and treated with a sort of deference. He’s not put to work in the fields and carries himself like an aristocrat among savages, as Behn would have it. Imoinda, who also, in a totally unforeseen coincidence, has been enslaved there reunites with him: their love rekindles, all is bliss, and they live happily ever after.  The end.

Not even a little bit. Trefry, Governor Byam’s manager, has promised on his employer’s behalf Oroonoko’s freedom, but this turns out to be another betrayal.  Oroonoko leads a slave revolt, not for revenge but dignity. The rebellion fails.  He kills Imoinda, with her consent, to spare her a worse fate, and then decides revenge is as good a motive as any.  But his strength has left him.  Captured, he submits to a horrific execution: whipped, mutilated, and dismembered while still alive.

Attentive listeners will have noticed a couple of things in that summary.  The events take place in Surinam, a colony the English will soon trade to the Dutch for Manhattan, and Behn makes several references to the incompetence and brutality of the Dutch masters during the tale.  But while an English outpost, you will recall that Aphra Behn herself spent some time there two decades before publishing this novel.  Evidently, during that interval, she told the story of an enslaved African prince often as an anecdote of her months in the colony.  Not a great leap, then, to imagine the novel’s narrator as another of the author’s personas, personae – take your pick.  That a true story should conform so closely with the love-won/love-lost plot of a tragic romance defies credulity, of course.

Nonetheless, as I mentioned before, Behn presents a sentimental tragedy as a genuine memory of her time in a colonial plantation, expanding both the heroic romance and the first-person memoir as genres, allowing them to overlap in a complex, almost postmodern way.  We could argue, I suppose, that this expansion becomes itself a comment on the colonial narrative itself.  Now, I’m going to take quite the long way round to this point, so keep your head about you.

To begin, the narrator asserts herself as an eyewitness “to a great part of what you will find here set down and what I could not be witness of, I received from the mouth of the chief actor in this history, the hero himself.”  At first, this seems simply to be of a piece with the “true history” claim discussed earlier, but look at the metaphors Behn employs.  She is an “eyewitness” – which implies to the reader a journalistic detachment, the story as reportage, as judicial testimony.  But she refers to her one “outside” source, Oroonoko himself, as the “hero” and “chief actor.”  These are narrative and dramatic terms – from fiction and the stage.  We have the actual and the artificial blended here, the one inflecting the other: the fiction of history and the truth of fiction.

Then, Behn provides a brief discourse on the indigenous people of Surinam – whom she calls Indians – with whom the English live “in perfect amity . . . with all the brotherly and friendly affection in the world.”  Hmmm . . . well, maybe she thought so.  She talks of trade and curious knick-knacks, of their modesty and bashfulness, despite their nakedness.  It’s a version of the “noble savage” trope that would come to dominate many European texts about contact with peoples in what we are now pleased to call the Global South.  Behn provides a clear example of that trope: 

And these people represented to me an absolute idea of the first state of innocence, before man knew how to sin. And ’tis most evident and plain that simple Nature is the most harmless, inoffensive, and virtuous mistress. ’Tis she alone, if she were permitted, that better instructs the world than all the inventions of man. Religion would here but destroy that tranquillity they possess by ignorance; and laws would but teach ’em to know offense, of which now they have no notion.

Here, we are presented with the state of nature, not as Hobbes and Locke would have it – as a state of competition and war of all against all – but as the later Rousseau would.  In the French philosopher’s “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality” from 1755, he states: “the state of nature takes the place of laws, morals and virtues, with the added advantage that no one there is tempted to disobey its gentle voice.”  So, the noble savage exists in an Edenic state of innocence that civilization can only mar.  And while Behn may intend generosity of spirit in her invocation of Rousseau’s later postulate, there is surely in both a sense of patronization and a naive nostalgia.  Perhaps Behn had in mind another Frenchman’s appraisal of indigenous people: essayist and philosopher Michel de Montaigne, who wrote of the Tupinamba tribe in present day Brazil:

There is no manner of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no name of magistrate or political superiority; no use of service, riches or poverty, no contracts, no successions, no dividends, no properties, no employments, but those of leisure, no respect of kindred, but common, no clothing, no agriculture, no metal, no use of corn or wine; the very words that signify lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy, detraction, pardon, never heard of.

That is from his famous essay “Of Cannibals,” printed around 1580.  But such “generous condescension,” if I may coin a phrase, can become rather dangerous, because the inverse implied by the “noble savage” is the brutal savage, and that, of course, became justification for the more destructive paternalism of the high period of European imperialism.

The brutal savage, as a counter-trope, Oroonoko offers in the form of the African – or as Behn calls them – the Negro slave.  We are instructed in the slave trade and the narrator tells us that slaves were contracted by trading with African nations, which are

very warlike and brave: and having a continual campaign, being always in hostility with one neighboring prince or other, they had the fortune to take a great many captives: for all they took in battle were sold as slaves; at least those common men who could not ransom themselves. 

There is a hint here of the novel’s rather peculiar (at least to modern readers) understanding of slavery.  Nowhere is the legitimacy of the slave trade itself impugned – Oroonoko’s own nation is a primary purveyor of captives for enslavement, and Oroonoko himself seems to see slavery as an appropriate state for people of inferior quality.  Note in this passage that only those who could not be ransomed – the plebeians rather than the patricians – were destined for forced servitude.  And that, as far as all the characters are concerned, is just as it should be.  Here’s a rather startling passage after Oroonoko’s failed slave revolt, in which he admits that

he was ashamed of what he had done, in endeavoring to make those free who were by nature slaves, poor wretched rogues, fit to be used as Christian's tools; dogs, treacherous and cowardly, fit for such masters, and they wanted only but to be whipped into the knowledge of the Christian gods, to be the vilest of all creeping things; to learn to worship such deities as had not power to make them just, brave, or honest.

Damn.  It’s not that he rebelled because he saw slavery as a moral evil.  It’s not that the rebellion failed because of overwhelming English power.  The shame comes from trying to elevate people who are, by nature, brutal savages, who deserve, by their rank and character, slavery.  And this is Oroonoko speaking.  

Right, we should, of course, remember that Oroonoko is the creation of a white English woman (or, I think more accurately, the creation of a white woman who is the creation of a white woman, if we are scrupulous about the distinction between author and narrator), one of the colonial class, and we cannot assume that such sentiments are universal at the time.  It is, of course, true that African societies were instrumental in the slave trade with Europe, based on a belief that captives had forfeited their right to moral dignity by the very fact of their captivity.  If they were not “other” and “less than” they would not have been defeated.  But such passages do complicate our understanding of Behn’s project here.  She clearly admires Oroonoko and praises him as a paragon of men:

the most illustrious courts could not have produced a braver man, both for greatness of courage and mind, a judgment more solid, a wit more quick, and a conversation more sweet and diverting. He knew almost as much as if he had read much: he had heard of and admired the Romans: he had heard of the late Civil Wars in England, and the deplorable death of our great monarch; and would discourse of it with all the sense and abhorrence of the injustice imaginable. He had an extreme good and graceful mien, and all the civility of a well-bred great man. He had nothing of barbarity in his nature, but in all points addressed himself as if his education had been in some European court.

What a guy!  But, it’s pretty obvious that the narrator’s measuring stick for civilized nobility is the European aristocracy.  What makes Oroonoko remarkable to her is such whiteness in a black body.  And, he is evidently a Caroline Royalist to boot.  So, too, with Imoinda, Oroonoko’s beloved:

she was female to the noble male; the beautiful black Venus to our young Mars; as charming in her person as he, and of delicate virtues. I have seen a hundred white men sighing after her, and making a thousand vows at her feet, all in vain, and unsuccessful. And she was indeed too great for any but a prince of her own nation to adore.

Curious mix of exoticizing and elevating here.  We could go down the, by now, well worn path of critiquing texts from the past in terms of the way they reveal racial power hierarchies of the period.  We could talk about how Behn’s novel ostensibly seeks to imprecate colonialism and enslavement and hopes to reveal the essential nobility of all races, while at the same time participates in and promotes the racialized ideology of 17th century Europe, that Oroonoko is complicit in the very injustice it seeks to criticize.  

And that would all be true, as far as it goes.  But, and I think I’ve said this before on the show, such readings always end up in the same place: if you only read literature as a cultural artifact, if you only read it as a historical or political document, like you’d read a contract, a land lease, or a business letter, then the only insight you ever really gain is this: this book is a product of its time.  Oroonoko reflects the attitudes and beliefs of 17th century English people.  Big deal.  Many graduate students and professors have carved out respectable careers by basically making this argument over and over again.  And I just don’t find it fruitful.  Because I think it’s imperative that we consider the implications of genre – not the persnickety “is this a novel or a romance” stuff I belly-ached about before – but the fact that Aphra Behn took up the historical and political subject of colonialism not in a polemic, not in a letter, not in a speech, but in fiction.  Why did she do that?

The only honest answer is “I don’t know.”  But I have to consider the question.  I can’t just reduce all different kinds of writing into one melting pot of “text” as some poststructuralist and new historicist scholars would like.  Why does Behn create a narrator – a fictionalized version of herself – to record the romantic history of an African prince who dies a traitor’s death (that gruesome disembowelling thing) following a slave revolt?  Why insist that this fairy tale is history?  Why so heavy-handedly invoke white standards of beauty and nobility while at the same time promoting the innocence and purity of non-European cultures?  Why are the Europeans always treacherous villains in this story?  Why does she have the enslavers take away Oroonoko’s African name and replace it with that of a Roman hero who dies in betrayal?  Why am I asking so many rhetorical questions?  Geez, I could have talked about all the ways this book alludes to and then subverts many of the themes from Shakespeare’s Othello – the obsession with honor, the mendacity of Christian civilization, the deaths of the lovers for the sake of honor.  If Behn’s only project was to casually say “slavery is not ok,” then she needn’t have gone through all the trouble to create a complex piece of narrative art.  

Now, I told you I was taking the long way round to my point, but we’re finally here: this intricate weaving of literary genres, this fabrication of a narrative persona, this ambiguous engagement with intercultural exchange and practice – all of it, to my eyes anyway, seems to point to the paradox inherent in the novel’s title: the malleability of history, the ways by which we make meaning in the world through recasting that world as a story, as drama.  All the colonial narratives that floated about in early modern Europe: from the likes of Francis Drake and Walter Ralegh and John Smith.  The accounts that inspired Shakespeare’s The Tempest.  Perhaps Behn invites us to see them, too, as the products of literary personas, personae, imposing narratives tropes upon historical events to give them meaning.  Hmmm . . . maybe I was wrong earlier.  Maybe texts can stirred into a melting pot.  But not one that distills them down to mere artifact or object.  Maybe all texts are stories.  I’ll ponder that.

Well, Litterbugs, thanks for listening to the Classic English Literature Podcast.  I sure hope you enjoyed the show.  As always, I ask that, if you did, you help support it by taking a moment to post a 5 star review on your listening platform.  More good reviews means more listeners, and I’d like this poddie to be the premier literary venue on the interwebs.  Click follow or subscribe or like – that’d be nice.  If you want to help me with the show’s expenses, please click the “Support the Show” button.  I’ll be setting up a “Buy Me a Coffee” account soon for those of you who are more comfortable giving that way.  Full disclosure: you’ll probably be buying me a beer.  Thanks for all you support of all kinds – keep the comments and questions coming.  I love hearing from folks.  Be good, be well, and we’ll talk soon.