Oroonoko,
Aphra Behn
Reviewed
by Patrick McEvoy-Halston
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Aphra Behn’s “romance” with a prince, in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko
October
2001
Aphra Behn’s desire for intimacy and sex with an admiring (and admirable)
young man is the foremost inspiration for her creating “The Disappointment” and
Oroonoko. Claims that
either work is primarily concerned with other things testifies largely to
Behn’s success in misdirecting readers:
a goal as vital to her own self-protection as is her success in
misdirecting herself into thinking she is in fact writing about and attempting
to satisfy something other than her own “suspect” desires. That
her desire for sexual intimacy is so real and so pressing to be the reason why these works were written, as well as
the key factor in determining how,
exactly, Behn wrote them, will hopefully be demonstrated in this essay. That
admitting this desire to herself is so dangerous a thing to do because sexual
satisfaction is so suspect a desire for an older woman to admit, develop, and
enjoy in eighteenth-century society—even if only through her own writings—so as
to make this paper seem a work of scientific detection intent on uncovering her
base nature, will be demonstrated beginning with the uncovering of a lie, or a
lie-seeming misdirection, Behn tells us in “The Disappointment.”
In “The Disappointment,” Behn writes, “The nymph’s resentments none
but I / Can well imagine or condole.
But none can guess Lysander’s soul, / But those who swayed his destiny”
(131-34). This, I believe, is
authorial misdirection, for it is precisely Behn who “sways” poor Lysander’s
destiny: she is the writer, poor
Lysander but her hapless prop. Behn is the “env[ying] god [who] conspires / To snatch his power, yet
leave[s] him the desire!” (79-80).
She knows what it is to lack
“Nature’s support [. . .] / Itself now wants the art to live” (81-83). Like Lysander, she lacks “nature’s
support”: though she desires consummated
love, her age makes this desire ridiculous. It is therefore her
own “bewitching influence” (139) that dooms Lysander “to the hell of
impotence” (140). Why? Because she has discovered a stratagem
for bringing sexual intimacy into her life without thereby inviting upon
herself a “vast pleasure [. . .] which too much love destroys” (73-74): a “vast pleasure turned to pain”
(73).
Lysander’s “destiny” is no accident: he must suffer so the nymph doesn’t have to. The nymph, described as “Abandoned by
her pride and shame, / She does her softest joys dispense, / Offering her
virgin innocence / A victim to love’s sacred flame” (65-68), is the same nymph
who leaves Lysander “fainting on the gloomy bed” (120) with “No print upon the
grassy road [. . .] / to instruct
pursuing eyes” (124). The virgin
whose innocence would have been lost, changing her nature forever, leaves the
poetic world an eternal mythic Daphne, leaving the reader alone with Lysander,
with his grief swelling into storms, with him cursing his birth, fate, and
stars. He alone is left to
experience shame. Yet despite the
fact that his shame owes to his inability
to consummate his love/lust, and despite the likelihood we leave the poem
thinking its title well caught its gist, this testifies more to Behn’s art at
misdirection than to an absence of ambiguity in the poem; for the verses we
read of Cloris before and after his inability to perform are just as
appropriate for usage if he indeed actually
had done the deed. Imagine if after finally “Offering her
virgin innocence” (67), Lysander performed—wouldn’t having her return from a
trance, explore and find a disarmed snake be just as appropriate a development
if he had discharged as it would be if he hadn’t? In both cases her lover would have been left with no spark
for new desire: he would be more
shepherd than general. Is it
possible that Behn has imagined a way for a woman whose nature would be
adversely changed by a sexual act (a virgin’s mythic-like status, in this case)
to in fact experience a sexual encounter, with both the reader and the writer
prepared to convince themselves otherwise, and thereby avoid harsh
self-recriminations and a public’s scorn?
If the descriptions offered afford a close-enough facsimile to sex, and
if this sexual encounter, if it had occurred, of the sort to have the reader
and writer feel someone should probably be punished for it, then this
punishment falls on only one of the two involved: Lysander. That
is, neither the Nymph nor our narrator, Behn, is left anywhere in sight, with
the nymph “o’er the fatal plain,” and our narrator along with her, imagining
her resentments, ostensibly quite incapable of “guess[ing] Lysander’s” (133) own. We know, however, that as much as Behn professes no other
option than to focus on the nymph, her attendance mostly owes to a need to
detach herself from—so as to not too closely identity herself with—Lysander,
for in Oroonoko we find Behn very well informed as to what happens to
souls that rage desire with little hope for satisfaction.
My reader might be thinking that I want to link Lysander’s situation
to that of the King of Coramantien in Oroonoko. I do—but as a way of working my
way to a discussion of Onahal. The
King, indeed, like Lysander, has a passion for a young beauty—in his case,
Imoinda—that because of “nature,” the decrees of time, he is unable to
consummate: like Lysander, he has
been left embarrassingly impotent.
When Oroonoko considers “laying violent hands on himself,” reason
finally prevails when “[t]hey [i.e., his followers] urged all to him that might
oppose his rage,” with “nothing weigh[ing] so greatly with him as the king’s
old age, incapable of inuring him with Imoinda” (20). A reasonable Oroonoko begins to realize there may be a way
to claim Imoinda after all, and the “plot to rescue a princess” introduces us
to another antiquated would-be lover:
Onahal, a “cast mistress of the old king” (24).
With Onahal, we have Behn offering for both her and our contemplation,
a woman, who, like Behn at the time of writing Oroonoko, is
subject to the “despites and decays of time” (24). Being robbed by nature draws Onahal to react as Lysander did
upon learning of how nature pilfered him:
she does not spare her fury:
she “treated the triumphing happy ones with all the severity, as to
liberty and freedom, that was possible, in revenge of those honors they rob
[her] off” (24). Like Lysander,
Onahal has been left with desire; she hopes she might yet again be seen as
desirable by youth of the very best quality. In reference to Aboan—just such a youth—we are told:
This young man was not only one of the best quality, but a man extremely well made and beautiful; and coming often to attend the king to the otan, he had subdued the heart of the antiquated Onahal, which had not forgot how pleasant it was to be in love. And though she had some decays in her face, she had none in her sense and wit; she was there agreeable still, even to Aboan’s youth, so that he took pleasure in entertaining her with discourses of love. (25)
Oroonoko
and Aboan take advantage of Onahal’s self-delusion to secure a re-union between
Oroonoko and Imoinda. But at a
cost: Aboan must “suffer [. . .]
himself to be caressed in bed by Onahal” (28). Onahal might be unaware of her failure to charm Aboan, but
those who would identify themselves with her, would live vicariously through her, understand that to a young
lover her caresses are but to be suffered. The only way a young man and an older woman can relate with
one another where both can be imagined enjoying the experience, is through
conversation. However, to a clever
and imaginative writer, who might, like Onahal, still hope “she [could] make
some impressions [on a young man’s] heart” (25), this is a discovery to be used in her own battle between her
still enabled wit and her whittling age.
Behn has learned—or perhaps rather, confirmed beyond any foolish
hopeful countenancing—two important things from her writings of Onahal and
Aboan: first, as mentioned, that
there is a way in which a young man could be imagined as being charmed by an
older woman which allows for intimacy and reciprocal exchanges; second, that
there is a fictional role—namely, as a gatekeeper—based on real advantages of
the aged, that can introduce and perhaps even necessitate the introduction of
an older woman into a story purportedly all about young lovers. Onahal, as a past mistress, is a
“guardian or governant [. . .] to the new and young ones [i.e., Imoinda]”
(24). Aboan must “compl[y] [. . .]
with her desires” (25). “For then,
[. . .] her life lying at [his] [. . .] mercy, she must grant [him] [. . .] the
request [he] make[s] in [. . .] [Oroonoko’s] behalf” (25). Oroonoko uses what he has at his
disposal—a beautiful proxy in Aboan—to realize his desire to be with Imoinda,
just as Behn uses the advantages she has as a writer—the ability to create the
proxy Onahal—to explore the consequences of a sexual encounter between an older
woman and a younger man, allowed the extenuation and stretch that imagination
enables. What Behn learns from
this exploration, combined with what she learned from “The Disappointment,”
will be put to use in the second part of Oroonoko, beginning with
Oroonoko’s arrival in Surinam, where Behn, the
writer, brings herself as close as possible to imagining herself “having
subdued the finest of all the King’s subjects to her desires” (26-27).
In the second part of Oroonoko Behn does what Onahal wanted to
do but could not manage for herself—namely, to subdue “the finest of all the
King’s subjects to her desires,” without
in “victory” actually becoming more
the fool. She captures the
attention and compliance of Oroonoko in the same way Onahal did with
Aboan: by making clear that the
means to what he wants (freedom in this case) lies with her. Much as Onahal and Aboan accomplished
for one another, she engages Oroonoko in a reciprocal manner, where each
soothes down one-another’s concerns.
She sets the scene for a sexual encounter in much the same way she did
with Onahal and Aboan as well, but handles the consummation in a fashion inspired,
instead, by Cloris and Lysander—where, that is, overtly no sex occurs, but
where passions are aroused as if it had.
Behn is, in her being unaffected by the encounter, therefore much like
Cloris; and Oroonoko, with his immediately experiencing a change for the worse,
more like Onahal and Lysander. I
will expand on each of these machinations in turn.
Oroonoko calls Behn a “Great Mistress” (49), a title in nature akin to
the labels—a past mistress, a guardian, a governant—attached to Onahal, a woman
Oroonoko knew that “to [. . .] court [. . .] was the way to be great [. . .]
[,] [for her] being [of those] persons that do all affairs and business at
court” (25). Behn understands she
possesses a similar power over Oroonoko, saying, should he make her doubt him,
“[i]t would but give us a fear of him, and possibly compel us to treat him so
as I should be very loath to behold:
that is, it might occasion his confinement” (49). However, although Behn as a character
does not do so, Behn as a writer makes the same claim upon
Oroonoko that Onahal made upon Aboan:
To acquire Imoinda, he must first service her own sexual needs.
Between Behn’s first meeting of Oroonoko and her (i.e., Behn’s)
completion of her sporting with him, Imoinda is but twice referred to in the
text. The first reference to her
within these time-posts is when Behn refers to her in third person, saying she
entertained her “with teaching her all the pretty works that I was mistress of,
and telling her stories of nuns, and endeavoring to bring her to the knowledge
of the true God” (49). Behn, like
Onahal, treats the young beauty with “all the severity, as to liberty and
freedom, that was possible in revenge of those honors they rob them of” (24). In telling her stories of nuns, she
temporarily renders Imoinda a celibate, denying her the sexuality owed a young
nymph. The second reference occurs
when Oroonoko explains to Behn he fears she might prevent them from returning
to his kingdom. He is wise to
suspect her, for Behn indeed “holds Imoinda hostage,” just as the envious
governess Onahal did, releasing her only after she finishes her
sports. (We are then told, in a
clear after-thought, that despite her invisibility in the text Imoinda “was
[also] a sharer in all our adventures” [60].)
As a prelude to romance, Behn interacts with Oroonoko in the same
socially acceptable way Onahal had before with Aboan—they converse. This allows for the same kind of
back-and-forth involvement with one another, with each taking turns reassuring,
tending to the other, we saw between Onahal and Aboan. Keep in mind when reading a description
of this foreplay in Oroonoko,
so to not misconstrue the true nature of the conversational exchanges between
the “lovers” therein, the back-and-forth sequence of tension and easing of
tension in the passage of overt foreplay between Cloris and Lysander in “The
Disappointment”:
Her
bright eyes sweet, and yet severe,
Where love and shame confusedly strive,
Fresh vigor to Lysander give;
And breathing faintly in his ear,
She cried, “Cease, cease your vain desire,
Or I’ll call out—what would you do?
My dearer honor even to you
I cannot, must not give—retire,
Or take this life, whose chiefest part
I gave you with the conquest of my heart. (21-30)
When
Aboan (after “The whole affair being agreed upon between the prince” [26] and
himself) engages with Onahal, she sighs, cries, and asks when he “will [. . .]
be sensible of my passion” (26).
She is fearful her eyes had already given her away, and wonders if she
possesses beauty-enough to sway him.
Aboan calms her, assuring her that her beauty “can still conquer,” and
of how “he longs for more certain
proofs of love than speaking and sighing” (26). We are told she speaks again, but with
a different tone (one as if “she hope it true, and could not forbear believing
it” [26]), and offers him a gift of pearls—symbols of beauty that never
wane—which prompt Aboan to reassure her he is interested in no other but her
(charmed in part, he hopes to have convinced her, by her still extant physical beauty). She forces the pearls into his hands
anyway, linking the gift to a setting for her later reception of him. All this naughtiness justifies why they
take care “that no notice might be taken of their speaking together” (27),
because “speaking together” is clearly simple verbal cover for their
flirting. This “speaking,”
presumably, is pleasurable for both parties, for Behn makes clear that as
Onahal has lost “none in her sense and wit,” Aboan would take “pleasure in
entertaining her with discourses of love” (25).
Behn and Oroonoko share a similar interaction which also clears way
for an intimate relationship to develop.
But Behn, the writer, precedes it by first linking the two together,
telling us that Oroonoko “was impatient to come down to Parham House [. . .] to
give me an account of what had happened.
I [i.e., Behn] was as impatient to make these lovers a visit” (47). That is, Behn cheats—they seem paired before they’ve even met. Again we are told “this new accident
made him more impatient of liberty” (48), an upset they follow by soothing each
other. Behn entertains him and
“charm[s] him to my company” (49).
He admits “these conversations failed not altogether so well to divert
him,” and that “he liked the company of us women much above men” (49). This is where we hear him call Behn a
“Great Mistress,” of how her word goes “a great way with him” (49). Later he confesses he fears his
behavior would provoke her into breaking her word to him. She tries to ease his anxiety, but errs
in mentioning “confinement,” an error she “strove to soften again in vain”
(49). But he assures her he would
do no harm [to the white people], and that as for herself, “he would sooner
forfeit his eternal liberty, and life itself, than lift his hand against his
greatest enemy on that place” (49).
After their mutual reassurances, Behn tells us he is again impatient,
“full of a spirit all rough and fierce [. . .] that could not be tamed to lazy
rest,” and that he is eager to exercise himself in [. . .] actions and sports”
(50). They then part, meeting
again to sport—but not before Behn
has had a chance to tell us about her aromatic garden at St. John’s Hill.
Before comparing the similarity of this garden to the meeting place
for Onahal’s and Aboan’s embrace, we should note that Behn and Oroonoko have a
nervousness-allaying, sex-ensuring
conversation similar to their own.
Oroonoko, like Onahal, admits he suspects his over-eager behavior has
ruined any chance of realizing his desires. Behn, like Aboan previously, is then offered a chance to
reassure her partner. But Behn, in
expressing her own fears, opens herself up to ruin, a concern Oroonoko can
abate by assuring her he would do her no harm. We are further told, as we had been before with Aboan, that
they are impatient for activity beyond conversation. With Aboan:
“those few minutes we have are forced to be snatched for more certain
proof of love than speaking and sighing; and such I languish for” (26;
emphasis added). With
Oroonoko: suddenly he is all-“impatient” for sports and vigorous
activity. While “languish” is the
adjective most overtly linked to sex in Oroonoko, we remember reading in
“The Disappointment” of “One day the amorous Lysander, / By an impatient
passion swayed” (1-2; emphasis added).
We should note, too, the marked similarity between how Lysander
concludes his wooing of Cloris and Oroonoko’s final reassurance to Behn. Lysander claims sex with, “Or take this
life, whose chiefest part I gave you with the conquest of my heart” (29-30)—that
is, with his offering up his life and his reference to his lover as a vigorous
conqueror. Oroonoko finishes by
offering to “forfeit” “life itself,” on behalf of an empowered defender: Full submission is offered, and a
lover’s physical needs are supplanted in place of courtliness, concern, and shy
retreat.
We know the activity Aboan will be up to is sex, and we know this
about the setting for the initial setting for his re-union with Onahal: it will occur at a “grove of the otan,
which was all of oranges and citrons.”
Oroonoko and Aboan are instructed to wait there, to be taken away to
(the bedchambers of) Imoinda and Onahal, respectively. Before Oroonoko and Behn engage in
their sports, Behn tells us about her house on St. John’s Hill, which has a “grove
of orange and lemon trees” (52).
Through successive paragraphs we are immersed within fragrant imagery;
Behn is preparing for herself as she once prepared for Clovis, “ a lone thicket
made for love” (21). We are told
of an “eternal Spring” of “trees, bearing at once all degrees of leaves and
fruit from blooming buds to ripe autumn, groves of oranges, lemons, citrons,
figs nutmegs, and noble aromatics, continually bearing their fragrancies”
(51). Of this grove we are told
she is sure “the whole globe of the world cannot show so delightful a place as
this grove was” (52). And once
delineated, she is now herself anxious for action, telling us, “But to our
sports” (52). Appropriate to a
scene I believe sexual in nature, the sports have about them the feel of a racy
bedroom encounter. Behn has moved
from mention of an “eternal Spring” to speaking of “the hot countries” (57),
from sexual priming to lustful satiation.
With the climactic encounter between Onahal and Aboan, Behn “spares us
the details,” so to speak, but it is better in any case for us to have “The
Disappointment” in mind when encountering/experiencing Behn’s accounting of all
her hot sporting action.
In “The Disappointment,” Behn uses a telling metaphor when describing
Lysander’s penis—it is a “snake” (110).
But this is when she is writing in mock-pastoral mode, when he is a
shepherd. It is perhaps, though,
not too bold a conjecture that had the penis been featured when writing
mock-epic it would have been referred to as a sword. Oroonoko, like Lysander, is a mighty warrior—he is Caesar!,
and thus no shepherd. “[H]e took
Mr. Martin’s sword [desiring] [. . .] him to stand aside, or follow the
ladies,” and “he met this monstrous beast [i.e., a tiger they are hunting] of
might, size and vast limbs, who came with open jaws upon him, and fixing his
awful stern eyes full upon those of the beast, and putting himself into a very
steady and good aiming posture of defense, ran his sword quite through his
breast down to his very heart, home to the hilt of the sword” (53). Once he has slain the tiger, Behn
rejoins him (she had previously run away), sees him “lug out the sword from the
bosom of the tiger, who was laid in her blood on the ground” (53), and is
surprised by his gifting of a tiger cub at her feet.
I believe this passage arouses us in much the same way as if we had
just witnessed a sexual encounter between Oroonoko and Behn. As with Lysander, who was “Ready to
taste a thousand joys” (71), Oroonoko “meets this monstrous beast” (53). As with Cloris, Behn is elsewhere. When Cloris returns (from her trance),
and when Behn returns to the scene, both witness an item similar in nature to a
penis that has lost its potency, that has gone flaccid. Lysander’s penis is a “flower,” owing
to his inability to bring “fleeting vigor back” (87); Oroonoko lugs his sword, suggesting, considering
how previously his running the tiger on through to the hilt suggested the deep
penetration of an erect penis, the labor in the withdrawal of a discharged
one. The cute cub is akin to the
mentioning of flowers after a sexual encounter: it suits the relaxed mood and play of consummated love. Further, if we take Oroonoko laying the
cub at her feet as his presenting her with a gift, he mimics here Onahal’s gift
of pearls to Aboan, something we know was closely linked to an anticipated
sexual encounter between them. In
fact, to provide and receive gifts is the primary impetus behind further
sports. He asks, “What trophies
and garlands, ladies, will you make, if I bring you the heart of this ravenous
beast?” (53-54). Behn tells us,
“We all promised he should be rewarded at all our hands” (54). The hunting of tigers is explicitly linked
here to rewards by women; and Behn, as the writer of “The Disappointment,” as
having written, “All her unguarded beauties lie / The spoils and trophies of
the enemy” (39-40), clearly shows an inclination to link trophies to sexual
consummation.
If we are not convinced Behn thinks a sword a penis in this context, what of a snake—or a near-snake—that
appears while they sport? There is
a “numb eel” (55), an eel Behn had eaten.
And if not the eel, what of fishing rods or flutes, which are also
present? Or what about each and/or all in conjunction with the jungle natives,
when they:
By degrees [. . .] grew more bold, and from gazing upon us round, they
touched us, laying their hands upon all the features of our faces, feeling our
breasts and arms, taking up one petticoat, then wondering to see another,
admiring our shoes and stockings, but more our garters, which we gave them, and
they tied about their legs [.] [. . .] In fine, we suffered them to survey us
as they pleased, and we thought they would never have done admiring us. (57)
Or in
conjunction with how similar these natives’ “surveying” seems to how Behn
described Lysander’s lustful advancement upon Cloris? Lysander didn’t “[b]y degrees [. . .] grow more bold,” but
he did “without respect or fear [. . .] seek the object of his vows” (41-42),
which is not as incremental, but toward the same end. Lysander didn’t “touch [her] [. . .], laying [his] hands
upon all the features of [her] face, feeling our breasts and arms,” but he did
“Kiss her mouth” (34), “press / Upon her swelling snowy breast” (37), and “By
swift degrees advance where / his daring hand that altar seized” (44-45), which
amounts to much the same, if more artfully guided. Lysander didn’t take advantage of an “offer” “to survey as
[he] pleased,” nor can we be sure he “never stopped admiring” her, but he did
try to take full advantage of Cloris being “Abandoned by her pride and shame /
[so] She does her softest joys dispense / Offering her virgin innocence” (67),
which is more urgent and total but no less the enthused partaking of pleasures
before him. And it is actually
possible that to Behn—the writer—Lysander would in some sense actually have
been there if Oroonoko hadn’t been.
But despite all to the contrary—he
was.
Just
as Behn was absent from Oronooko’s encounter with a predator, Oroonoko is
absent from the one present here, and we should consider these absences
equivalent and suggestive—implicating.
Behn uses a technique here she develops in “The Disappointment” where a
sexual encounter/experience is communicated but where no such thing is overtly shown to take place. Both Oroonoko and Behn have sexual and intense encounters where, in each case, one of them is absent from the
scene. Yet once consummation occurs—with
the lugging out of the sword, with the natives finishing their surveying—the
absent partner suddenly reappears.
There is a sense, though, that the ostensibly absent partner was
actually present throughout. That
is, assuming we accept Onahal as a version of Behn, a proxy in the nature and
intensity of her desires, can we hear of a ravenous beast that fixes “her long
nails in his flesh” and not think of predatory Onahal, who “took her dear Aboan
[. . .] where he suffered himself to be caressed in bed” (28)? And can we encounter the natives and
not also have in mind the princely but still native Oroonoko; a link we first
make but start setting when subsequently told of how as “[G]eneral” Caesar he
“had in mind to see and talk with their war captains,” of how, though he
considered their “courage too brutal to be applauded,” he still “expressed his
esteem of them” (59), and when we come to know all of them not just as warriors
but as trophy hunters?
Just as Imoinda was available to Oroonoko once Onahal had “tasted a
thousand joys” from Aboan, with the sporting now complete, the pair is
reunited: evidence, I think,
toward understanding the reading experience of the sports as satisfying anyone
who could identify with Onahal’s need to believe herself still “of beauty
enough engaging [. . .] to be desirable,” who hopes she “can have [young]
lovers still” (26), and who would similarly be inclined to first take advantage
of the young before granting them access to their own joys. I believe this Behn’s desire as
much as it is Onahal’s, but because Onahal’s desire, once realized, leads to a shameful
situation where her audience (the reader) understands her physical charms were
in fact non-existing, that they had actually had no effect other than to amuse
or—more likely—horrify, that her rapture in sex was for him simply a suffering,
even with Behn’s better disguised affair (so that “no notice might be taken”
[27]), some shame would come from having contrived it. Fortunately for Behn she has learned
this shame can be dispersed through the same art that brought it into existence
in the first place. Through her
plotting, that is, she can arrange for all the consequences arising from
shameful behavior to fall on but one of the two actually involved.
After Cloris flees him, Lysander’s “silent griefs swell up to storms,
/ And not one god his fury spares; / He cursed his birth, his fate, his stars”
(147). Shortly after the sports,
Oroonoko’s griefs also swell up to storms, as he exempts little of their daily
life from his curses:
Caesar [Oroonoko] [. . .] made a harangue to them of the miseries and
ignominies of slavery; counting up all their toils and sufferings, under such
loads, burdens, and drudgeries as were fitter for beasts than men, senseless
brutes than human souls. He told
them it was not for days, months, or years, but for eternity; there was no end
to be of their misfortunes. They suffered not like men who might find a glory
and fortitude in oppression, but like dogs that loved the whip and bell, and
fawned the more they were beaten.
That they had lost the divine quality of men, and were become insensible
asses, fit only to bear, Nay worse, an ass, or dog, or horse having done his
duty, could lie down in retreat, and rise to work again, and while he did his
duty endured no stripes; but men, villainous, senseless men such as they, toiled
on all the tedious week till black Friday, and then, whether they worked or
not, whether they were faulty or meriting, they promiscuously, the innocent
with the guilty, suffered the infamous whip, the sorded stripes, from their
fellow slaves till their blood trickled from all parts of their body, blood
whose every drop ought to be revenged with a life of some of those tyrants that
impose it. “And why,” said he, “my
dear friends and fellow sufferers, should we be slaves to an unknown
people? Have they vanquished us
nobly in fight? Have they won us
in honorable battle? And are we,
by the chance of war, become their slaves? This would not anger a noble heart, this would not animate a
soldier’s soul. No, but we are
bought and sold like apes, or monkeys, to be the sport of women, fools, and
cowards, and the support of rogues, runagades, that have abandoned their own
countries, for raping, murders, thefts, and villainies. Do you not hear every day how they
upbraid each other with infamy of life below the wildest salvages, and shall we
render obedience to such a degenerate race, who have no one human virtue left
to distinguish them from the vilest creatures? Will you, I say, suffer the lash from such hands? (61-62)
As with
Lysander, who, after cursing his birth, his fate, and the stars,
finishes by cursing the “soft bewitching influence” of a woman (149), Oroonoko
concludes his own diatribe by saying:
“But if there were a woman among them so degenerate from love and virtue
to chose slavery before the pursuit of her husband, and with the hazard of her
life to share with him in his fortunes, that such a one ought to be abandoned,
and left as a prey to the common enemy” (63). Quite a change in Oroonoko here from the one who asked of
Behn, “What trophies and garlands, ladies, will you make me, if I bring you
home the heart of this ravenous beast” (53-54), and who “made it his business
to search out and provide for our entertainment” (59). But the effect of reading this very
lengthy diatribe is, simply with its pronounced aggressivity, to have the
sports which immediately preceded it become much less our chief interest. And so, too, the understanding of Behn
and Oroonoko as a couple.
Oroonoko is made into a “monster of the wood” (72) just after Behn
begins to manifest herself in the text more as the writer of Oroonoko
than as a character within it, a writer who increasingly associates herself
with qualities notably different from transmogrified Oroonoko’s: “We met on the river with Colonel
Martin, a man of great gallantry, wit, and goodness, and, whom I have
celebrated in a character of my new comedy, by his own name, in memory of so
brave a man. He was wise and
eloquent” (68). Meanwhile,
Oroonoko exists a world apart:
“his grief swelled up to rage; he tore, he raved, he roared, like some
monster of the wood” (72). Behn
actually distances herself from him in several ways. First, she attempts to convince us that the sporting was of
no particular import; she describes it ostensibly because it was her near duty
to record all instances of his activity she partook in or was aware of—but
right due a noble personage. Then
from a chronicler whose relationship with her subject implies a respectable
distance between them, she becomes a writer of comedies, making Oroonoko but
one subject of interest of a varied many.
Second, as Behn distances herself further and further from Oroonoko—forward
to her writing of him in the present rather than the past, and away northward
up to England—Oroonoko, despite his rage and capacity for effective action, is
doomed to be trapped and killed on remote southern Surinam. Third, and as we have seen, Oroonoko
becomes of a kind that it no longer seems likely that Behn actually could well “guess
[the nature of] his soul” (134).
Why, one might well ask, is all this connivance necessary, since the
Behn that is a character in the novel is a much, much younger Behn than the one
writing it, was in fact of an age and status where it might seem not so
inappropriate if, while still being primarily fixed upon Imoinda, always
devoted to her, Oroonoko acknowledged some interest in casual flirtations with
an evidently genteel hostess? An
obvious explanation would lie in her having chosen to account for the rise and
fall of a near singularly great and noble prince, and such rarities were
understood to act only in very specific ways, to hold to a tight script, as it
were, involving much more lordly forbearance than courtly sweets. Possibly—but I don’t buy it. Instead, the masking owes to the character Behn being, in a very real
sense, the very same age as
the writer Behn while
writing/experiencing Oroonoko, so as to help intensify, make more real, the feeling that the sports are happening to the writer during the here
and now of the time of writing rather than some time amidst the less stark long
ago. Note that Behn plays
the role of a great governess, a role we have been instructed to associate with
the aged, not the youthful. Note
that Behn primarily emphasizes, draws attention to, her skill in conversation—a
skill, along with wit, we have been told so prominent in the aged that it can
substitute for such charms no longer available. And note most especially that the setting for the sporting
is a near mirror-image the one imagined for the aged Onahal, when Oroonoko and
Aboan paid her call in their excited sport to rescue a princess.
Some readers might object to the claim that Oroonoko’s fate was
largely determined by the current psychological/sexual needs of the author,
since his fate—or at least, his execution—is a match for that suffered upon
Charles I, but I would argue for seeing this objection as but a consequence of
successful authorial misdirection.
Behn needs for both herself and her readers to think the novel primarily a faithful, pious, recording of a great man’s
life. Why? Because she must disarm herself (and
us, her imagined and real readers and critics) of her considerable poetic
awareness while reading the piece.
Incurring upon herself and her readers the upright, serious, intolerant
reading posture—this containment—is crucial, because if we turn to the work
alert to poetic technique and contemplative of courtier’ motive and cunning,
the real intentions for writing the piece become more open to view, and to critique.
Through Onahal, Behn has shown us there exists in her time a notable
distinction and a loaded difference between speaking/writing and real
action. Harold Weber writes that
“speaking and thinking venery [sexual desires] define the limits of a woman’s
sexual prerogatives: to indulge
those thoughts, to turn speech into action, confronts female characters [. . .]
with the vast gulf between the maid or wife and the whore” (The Restoration
Rake-Hero 133). Yet women are
in a bind because “[e]ven though libertine attitudes depended on assumptions
that would seem to promise acceptance of female sexuality, women remained
unable to enjoy the sexual liberties taken for granted by men. Women after the Restoration, even among
the most debauched section of the population, occupy a world of strict sexual
limitations” (148). There was a
“severe morality directed against women when what all knew to go on in private
suddenly became public [. . .] [:] all the prudery of the Court was let loose
[. . .] [,] vociferous in demanding justice” (148). Yet we cannot understand the distinction between writing
about sexual desires and acting upon them, whatever the importance in the
distinction, as being well articulated or understood at this time. Owing to her being a successful
playwright, Behn was well aware that writing for a public amounted to,
especially for a woman, likely indecent self-exposure to the world. There was great risk, as Weber explains:
Yet the public ridicule she suffered reveals the very high price she
had to pay for her success. [. . .]
In attempting to move outside of the restricted roles ordinarily
occupied by women, Behn became a convenient target for those who refused to
accept the participation of women in the larger social world: To publish one’s work, then, was to
make oneself ‘public’: to expose oneself to ‘the world.’ Women who did so violated their
feminine modesty both by egressing from the private sphere which was their
proper domain and by permitting foreign eyes access to what ought to remain
hidden and anonymous. (151)
Weber
tells us that Behn simply refused to remain anonymous, and reminds us that “in
doing so [. . .] she placed herself in a position where both her morality and
her femininity could be questioned” (151). So we have a situation where women possess circumscribed
possibilities for acceptable sexual gratification, in a libertine world where
sexual desires constitute the context in which everyone participates and can be
expected to be judged within: Is
it not then appropriate to assume that in the one area where sexual desire
might be expressed—in writing—that these written words become so powerfully
imagined to actually become lived experience, that they become, in a sense,
real life? And if
any slip from privately kept to public evidencing of the desire should be
expected to be eagerly used to fuel the popular courtier sport of winnowing a
lady down into a whore, is it not likely that Behn would need to disguise from
her readers, from herself, the
satisfaction of her sexual desires through her writing? The best way to dissuade both herself
and her readers from considering other possible but less legitimate purposes
for the novel is to bring into the story an execution that couldn’t help but
remind contemporaries of Charles I’s own execution. She presents us, she presents herself, with quite the
challenge: You couldn’t possibly
be thinking sex, anything at all lurid, while I document my umbrage at the execution
of our past king, could you?
However we would answer, we might at least to some extent back off and
disarm ourselves of the conceptual tools necessary for an alert poetic reading
of her work, so that we are not in some way culpable of disregard for hierarchy
and right-place, prove ourselves in sympathy with evident barbarians. She wants pious readers, not wits ready-primed to note the methods of their kind.
But if we are ready to spot
contrivance, we must acknowledge that the structuring of Oroonoko is
similar to that of “The Disappointment.” Specifically, that the number of words, compared as a
proportion to the whole of the work, chronicling Oroonoko’s fate after the
sports, is not dissimilar to
the number of lines detailing Lysander’s fate after Cloris departs him in “The
Disappointment.” I believe this to
be space to ensure a comfortable, an assured, distancing of the narrator from
her male protagonist. This
distancing, required so we do not associate the passions aroused in Oroonoko with the writer of the work in
“The Disappointment,” is not as crucial for Behn in that work because the
passions at work there are explored using familiar mock-epic and mock-pastoral
imagery, which naturally work to help keep the writer in mind as a wit, as a
removed observer of the scene, but it is crucial
in Oroonoko, where to close
the distance between herself and her fictional lover she tells us over and over
again that what she writes is a true
account of all that happened. By
telling us immediately after the sports that she is offering a chronicle of
real happenings, she helps substantiate them as such: she is reminding herself that she is describing the sports,
not simply narrating them. The
distinction she would have understood between description and narration is
crucial to understand here, because therein lies an explanation as to why Behn
chose to write a chronicle of Oroonoko rather than a more overtly
fictional Oroonoko.
According to Howard Marchitello, “[d]escription [. . .] resists the
appropriative nature of possession that comes to characterize narrationality in
which the other always exists secondarily—after the fact, as it were, of the narrator’s
own primary and privileged existence” (94; emphasis added). By telling herself she is offering a
faithful record and description of
events, in the sense Marchitello describes, Behn manages them so they
seem exterior to herself, so they accumulate and become more something of the
real world than simply of her own making.
Her veiled sexual exchange with Oroonoko becomes, not passions created
through her imagination, a product of her own mind, her own writing, but
passions generated in her as the
consequence of actions of someone else towards her. Behn, in writing in a way which comes
close to crossing the private/public divide, with all of its associated
perilous consequences, is precariously involved in the passions of this text in
a way she is not in “The Disappointment.”
It is because the passions are made to feel so real that Oroonoko
must, like Lysander, experience all sorts of compromising emotional states,
making him a monster: Because
Oroonoko is elevated to a status where he is more than a narrative construct,
is more than words, is more nearly real, Behn is able to, and does, dump the
equally real agitating emotions she experiences in creating and immersing
herself in a near sexual encounter into
him. Thereby, the terrible
change of status normally due a woman who compromises her virtues is—as was
true with Cloris—entirely left for her male partner to experience: a no doubt brutal but still ingenious solution.
More attending to poetics, we would note in Oroonoko the
doubleness of the sequence involving the rescue of a princess in Coramantien
and the sporting sequence in Surinam.
We would then understand the sequence in Coramantien, precisely because it
leads to the re-union of Oroonoko and Imoinda, as no mere diversion but rather
as the climax of the first part of Oroonoko: the part arousing the highest degree of
interest owing to it satisfying a desire we had been bated into anticipating
since the beginning of the work.
Together, both of these scenes form the center of the work, with
everything else either leading up to and away from them, a chiasmus (AB / BA),
where “A” is Oroonoko distant from Behn; the movement from “A” to “B” a closing
of this distance in the first half (“’tis fit I tell you the manner of bringing
them to these new colonies” [9]); with “B” Oroonoko united to a representative
of the writer—Onahal in part one, and Behn in part two; and “B” to “A” the plot
of the second half of the work, the movement from Oroonoko and Behn as a couple
to him once again removed and remote from her.
This is why criticism of Oroonoko that focuses on anything
other than Behn’s use of the text to satisfy her own sexual desires, testifies
so well to Behn’s skill as a writer.
Her expertise in poetics is such she can subdue what ought really to
command our attendance: the
structuring of the scenes and the
words we would attend to less narrowly if we thought of the work
as a contrivance, as not so much a work of sober-accounting as an act of play
or mischief. In “The
Disappointment” Behn shows that words like “snake” are to be primarily
understood as metaphors for penis, and words like “trophy,” metaphors or similes
for sexual satisfaction, yet as I have shown the sporting sequence is full of
penis-seeming objects, contains several references to trophies, and she still
claims (surprisingly convincingly, considering how many critics consider the
sequence odd for a reason Behn would hardly object to, namely, for it amounting
to a unnecessary intrusion in a work mostly concerned with greater things) the
sequence testifies to Oroonoko’s character!” (69).
Some critics have pointed out how Behn creates protagonists flawed so
to make them readily exploitable.
Robert Chibka, for one, writes that Oroonoko is made to be “the perfect
fool for the knaves who surround him” (“Oh! Do Not Fear a Woman’s Invention”
515), which he believes Oroonoko’s tragic flaw. But Chibka does not implicate Behn, the writer, as akin in
mischief intent to these untrustworthy knaves, even though she, being the one
inclined to make him into a perfect fool in the first place, was certainly
empowered to make use of him herself.
But according to Chibka, if she is using him in any way at his expense,
it is only to better please and serve her audience, which still leaves her
actually mostly self-denying:
“disdain[ing] the arrangement of a narrative ‘at the Poet’s pleasure,’
[. . .] [Behn] admits to editing and arranging her story so that what was ‘pleasant
to us’ need not ‘prove tedious and heavy to [her] [. . .] Reader’”; “Pleasure (the reader’s not the poet’s) will
indeed dictate the management of her story” (514). Chibka is no fool; he for example recognizes that “[a]t
times Oroonoko seems to resemble the Surinamese numb eel, making critics
on contact lose their feel for narrative texture” (511). But he is yet still naïve enough to not ask if
Oroonoko is made to seem so susceptible for use, not just to suit knaves’
alteriors, or to suit audience’ expectations, but to better satisfy the
depriver herself, Behn.
In her Aphra Behn’s Afterlife, Jane Spencer implicates the writer Behn in a way Chibka fails
to. She believes Behn uses Imoinda
as a proxy, but shares Chibka’s understanding of Behn as virtuous. She writes: “Imoinda here is a fantasy substitute for the heroic action
the narrator cannot take. The
split between the two women expresses anxieties about narrative position: to take on a narrator’s authority, it
seems, is also to accept a position on the fringes of the action, unable to
intervene” (232). In suggesting
that the writing of the text was so vivid and powerful for Behn that she would
want to be in on the sports, Spenser’s argument is similar to mine, but in
suggesting that Behn’s position on “the fringes of action” was somehow forced
on her, and by arguing that Behn has well-meaning intentions for Oroonoko at
this point of the text, also so very different. I will
quote from Spencer once again as I believe the following passage offers the
most familiar and most preferred conception of Oroonoko and Behn for
contemporary critics:
Behn’s Oroonoko, then, is a troubled and opaque text, full of
anxious claims and obscure quarrels.
It is not a clear attack on the institution and practices of slavery,
but the sympathetic treatment of Oroonoko and Imoinda, the descriptions of
white cruelty, and even the narrator’s very inconsistencies and divided
position, have the effect of presenting a disturbing picture of colonial life,
and provide the germ for the later, abolitionist development of Oroonoko’s
story. (232)
Spencer
does note that, beginning especially with “the 1696 ‘Memoirs’ of Behn, whether
composed, compiled, or merely commissioned by [her friend Charles] Gildon”
(34), eighteenth-century readers were drawn “to the titillating idea of a
sexual relationship between Oroonoko and [Behn]” (35). Spencer says that it was through a
repetition of rumors and denials “that eighteenth-century readers approached
Oroonoko alerted to the idea of intimacy between the writer and a hero who was
understood to be authentic” (35).
I am arguing that we should be alert for the same—and as well to the
poetic toolkit for writing of sexual passion she had created for herself by the
time of her writing Oroonoko. I have argued that Behn herself would
have been pleased by the reaction of contemporary critics to her writings
because they have largely exonerated her of any wrongdoing, choosing instead to
focus their hostility on other targets.
Like Behn, who dumped disturbing passions into Lysander and Oroonoko so
to find herself prettily emptied of them herself, critics have targeted men
/patriarchy and left us with a near pristine Behn. Thereby, Behn has achieved the wished-for effect upon us she
could not hope to have procured in her contemporaries. Still, even amongst her own
contemporaries, Behn could be heralded as one who “did at once a Masculine wit
express / And all the softness of a Femal tenderness” (266). She could be compared to Eve, who,
although associated with the fall, was also “[their] first mother” (266). Spencer tells us that the “idea of
[Behn] as a female champion for other women to emulate proved a potent one in
the following decade [after her death],” even though present too were early
anticipations of the “worries of many later women writers [her failure in
virtue]” (31).
Spenser, like so many critics, believes that emerging understandings
of Behn as primarily a writer of sexual fantasies is necessarily linked to a disparaging culture-wide reevaluation of
women. Spencer writes how a “link
made between [. . .] Behn and Milton’s Eve illuminates the formation and
masculinization of the English literary canon during the eighteenth century. It is only one example of the recurrent
definition of her in terms of the sinful and sexual body as opposed to the
heaven-seeking and spiritual mind of the male genius” (267). Milton is conceived in a way Behn wished she could be (at least in Oroonoko):
“His choice of heavenly subject made the poet himself appear a spiritual
figure, rising heavenwards” (267).
Behn, by contrast, with “her familiar, wordly-wise poetic persona and
fictional narrator, her discussion of sex, political intrigue, and other
mundane matters, and her choice of comedy and irony” (267), could hardly be
more opposite. Behn, and female
poets in general, began to be conceived in such a way that “made so much more
of her [and their] femininity and sexuality than of her creativity” (268). There arose the growth of a “myth about
Behn, which both drew on received notions of the relationship between a female
writer and her work, and set the tone for the reception of later women
writers. The myth is that Behn’s
writing reflects a life pre-eminently concerned with sexual love” (20).
And Spencer tells us that “[t]o discuss an author’s life in this
way—as the story of her writing career—always risks leaving the impression that this is the way she herself
thought about it” (21), something, as I have shown, Spencer attempts to
exonerate Behn from. I am well
aware that an estimation of Behn as a female poet of over-flowing passions can
be used to sustain social-sphere appropriations by sex, of calcified thorough
suppression and cruelty, and I think it very likely that a good portion of the
eighteenth-century interpretation of Behn’s works as really just imaginative
dalliances between a writer and her fantasy lovers was moved, not in any way to fairly assess her, but simply to
mudden her. But, still, this is what she was up to. It would have been much more accurate
and fair an assessment had it showed more appreciation for the intelligence,
creativity, and bravado required to create a space wherein an author could
plausibly be imagined enjoying sexual pleasures with her literary creations,
but to my mind it is still a vastly more accurate reading of her work than ones
which have Behn spinning lively tales, but principally for sober intent. The
real problem for us moderns is our difficulty in understanding that this need
not be a put-down. It can and
should be understood as a tribute, a call for her revival as a writer to be
celebrated, especially for her not
being in the mold of the eighteenth-century man of reason. How immensely dull this conception
was! To my mind, to have
denigrated passions, have them principally embodied in women, denied men
greater acquaintance with the kinds of feelings and passions that make life
most worth living. Behn lived at a
time where the sexual appetite wasn’t “for mature audiences only,” always
something of a no-no, that is, but where women still faced being seen as whores
if caught indiscreetly acting upon their sexual desires. Further, a younger woman was the only
appropriate target for sexual amours:
the desires in older women were to be suffered, fit only for judgment
and ridicule. For Behn to create a
simulacrum, an artificial world in a historical account/novel that allowed for
satisfaction of this desire, is a remarkable accomplishment to be celebrated. As for the idea that what women require
most is full recognition of their unlimited intellectual
capacities, I have two responses:
first, the millennium (plus) long “elevation of the cognitive over the
emotional aspect of our mind” (Greenspan 2) which has so profoundly influenced
Western thought, needs to be exorcised so to stop its haunting of our present;
second, if we create or need such a world, you can be sure that I for one will
start turning to romance novels to find myself living in a more humanly
satisfying world. And to those who
would frown upon me, not share with me my departure, risk inuring themselves to
my fate: I’m with Amazon
princesses in a grove of ripening citrus—and you? Yes, the bitter, in the form of anacondas, has arrived, but
I’ve learned clever means are at hand to make them actually add to all our fun!
Works
Cited
Behn,
Aphra. Oroonoko. Ed. Janet Todd.
Toronto: Penguin, 2003.
---.
“The Disappointment,” Oroonoko, the
Rover, and Other Works. Ed. Janet Todd. Toronto: Penguin, 1992. 331-34.
Print.
Chibka,
Robert. “Oh! Do Not Fear a Woman’s Invention”: Truth, Falsehood, and Fiction in
Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko. Texas Studies in
Language and Literature, Vol. 30, No. 4, Winter 1998, 510-35. Print.
Greenspan, Stanley. The Growth of the Mind: And the Endangered Origins of Intelligence. New York: Addison-Wesley,
1997. Print.
Marchitell0,
Howard. Narrative and Meaning in
Early-Modern England: Browne’s
Skull and Other Histories. Cambridge UP, 1997. Print.
Spencer, Jane. Afra
Behn’s Afterlife. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. Print.
Weber, Harold. The
Restoration Rake-Hero: Transformation in Sexual Understanding in Seventeenth-Century England. Madison: The U of Wisconsin P, 1986. Print.
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