Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, or The Royal
Slave
Genre: the work's genre is still debatable,
but it claims to be a memoir and travel narrative (of Behn's years in the colony of
"Surinam," later called Dutch Guiana), as well as the biography of Oroonoko,
whom his captors called "Caesar."
Form: prose.
Characters: "I," a character in some sense modeled on the real-life
Aphra Behn; Oroonoko, an African prince and later a slave to the English who called
him "Caesar"; Imoinda, his lover, also enslaved and sometimes called
"Clemene"; Jamoan, an opposing warrior chief who, conquered by Oroonoko,
becomes his vassal; the King of Coramantien, whom Oroonoko serves and later
betrays, and who betrays him; the slave-running English ship captain; and various
English colonists, especially the supposedly sympathetic plantation overseer named Trefrey,
the colony's deputy governor named William Byam, the gallant Colonel Martin,
and "Bannister, a wild Irishman" (1910).
Summary: The prince, who has gotten to know Behn while he is a slave in Guiana
and she is a sympathetic listener, tells her his story. Successful in battle, he
falls in love with a young woman who also catches the eye of the king. Having
pursued their love surreptitiously, the couple is discovered and Imoinda is sold into
slavery. Oroonoko, a slave-owner himself, despairs and nearly is
defeated in battle by Jamoan's army, but he is roused to martial prowess by the pleas of
his own troops. Lured upon an English ship by a captain with whom he previously had
bought and sold slaves, Oroonoko and all his men are betrayed and taken as slaves to
Guiana. There he is reunited with Imoinda, and his noble bearing attracts the praise
of all who know him. However, circumstances force him to rebel against his masters
and to lead an army of ex-slaves to seek their freedom. His capture, his murder of
his own wife, and his torture and execution by the English slave-owners end Behn's
narrative.
Issues and Research Sources:
- Among other sources, Behn's invention of Orooonoko draws upon
many previous genres
of narrative fiction which predate the modern novel, which has not yet been
invented. Among the important precursors of the modern novel is the
medieval romance. We have encountered, in the "Wife of Bath's Tale," an
example of the
medieval chivalric romance. It's a parody, and it's in verse, as many
romances were written, but it has many of the major elements: a knight on a
quest leaves the court and encounters adventures in the forest; a lady's
plight requires justice; a mystery must be resolved; the aristocratic values
which define courtly life (e.g., "gentilesse") are tested and questioned.
In that case, however, the female teller reverses many of the medieval
romance's conventional roles so that the knight is rescued by the lady, his "gentilesse"
is tainted by the rape, and her ugliness is mere illusion (like her later
beauty?--what DOES the "loathely lady" really look like?). Romance is
one of the models for how to write prose fiction which were available to Behn,
but as is typical for early women writers, she cannot simply pick up the genre
given her by men and adopt its conventions without changing them.
Nevertheless, she does adopt many of the romance's typical features.
- How does Oroonoko's life also resemble romance, especially considered in the light of
classical literature?
- How does this shape Behn's characterization of the Prince and his beloved, their
enemies, and the various trials they endure?
- Behn's series of references to the execution of Charles I punctuate
the text with linkages to Oroonoko's condition as a prince first unjustly
imprisoned and then executed by men far inferior in character. This
nostalgic imprint of the old regime's passing might show us a profound
split in English culture caused by the civil war's aftermath, but it also
demonstrates some crucial social characteristics of
minds we
might call "modern" in their attitude toward novelty, fashion, and other
forms of change. What is Behn's attitude toward these concepts?
For instance, both romance and epic heroes sometimes face foes described as monstrous
(Beowulf and Grendel, Byrtnoth and the Viking "feondes," Odysseus and
Polyphemus).
- How does that shape Behn's description of the narrative's "villains"?
- Aphra Behn's Oroonoko poses some unique challenges for interpreters of
English literature. Ordinary readers can allow themselves to be carried
along by the narrative and fall under the spell of Behn's unusually
candid-seeming narrator's persona. The English majors, suspicious as they
are of literary effects until they understand how they are produced, will
relentlessly "look at the man behind the curtain" and seek the strategies by
which Behn constructs her "we" and "us" and "them" (and even "'em"--she
writes informally as a sign of her intimacy with us, her "we"). Who the heck
are "we" for Behn? Hint: we don't live in or near Towson, Maryland, and that
matters a great deal to Behn and to "us" because where "we" live is the
center of the "world." One way to analytically challenge the
narrator's power over us involves noting the degree to which "we" are the
secret subjects of this narrative. Behn's view of "our" culture
often sounds like More's "Hythloday" in his view of the decadent behavior of
Christian Europeans when compared with the nobility of the African or
Amerindian peoples.
- For another angle on her construction of the Amerindians, consider the
publication date of Orronoko and compare it with the publication
dates of Milton's Paradise Lost. Do you see points of
comparison, especially in Book IV? How else would Behn and her readers
know what life in Eden was like unless Milton had told them? Genesis
is singularly uncommunicative about matters beyond Adam and Eve's relations
with God and the serpent (not even identified with Satan in the biblical
text!).
- Oroonoko's captors name him Caesar.
- What does that name signify to the English in Behn's time or before?
- For instance, how does Shakespeare's Julius Caesar depict that Roman general and
first emperor, and how does the play treat his killers?
- What kind of a drama have his captors created by naming their victim in this way?
- Oroonoko gives his fellow slaves an impassioned speech comparing tolerable and
intolerable forms of slavery (2205-6).
- Upon what grounds does he object to their current condition, and what does this suggest
about Behn's intentions in writing the book? The last few sentences in the Norton
introduction may give you some help [2167`].)
- Oroonoko's prolonged suffering near the end of the narrative can take some
modern readers by surprise. To English readers of Behn's era, however,
almost everyone had witnessed or knew someone who had witnessed the public
torture and execution of those accused of crimes against the state. The
typical punishment was "hanging, drawing, and quartering" (hanging until
nearly dead, drawing the body to a block where it would be cut into quarters,
often after the heart or entrails or other body parts had been cut off and
burned before the still-alive victim). The harshness of the penalty has
been explored in MIchel Foucault's study of state torture of criminals,
Discipline and Punish (Surveiller et punir, tran. and pub. 1979).
However, Behn's probable Catholic upbringing would have exposed her to another
narrative form that described such tortures as evidence of the highest moral
character, the saint's life. The pagan
Roman stoic tradition, which also influenced the Christian ideology of
martyr-saints, similarly praised the willingness to undergo bodily torture to
preserve one's honor or to protest one's innocence. How might that shape
Behn's crafting of the narrative's end, beyond what she might have
accomplished if she wrote merely that "they captured and executed him"?
If we accept Oroonoko's idea of honor as Behn has depicted it, what options
were left to him at that point, even if Trefry had been able to transport him
back to Africa? How could he live in the "New World" he had discovered
he was a part of?