Troping Oroonoko from Behn to Bandele

Susan B. Iwanisziw

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351143981
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

This volume of essays invites the reader to assess literary texts from within the frame of the texts' cultural history, which includes issues of authorship and literary or stage convention as well as the social and political institutions that shaped and marketed that literature. The collection initiates just such an in-depth and focused analysis of the complex literary and social history of the royal slave Oroonoko. All eight essays address elements in the evolution of Oroonoko, from Behn's 1688 novella to Southerne's 1696 dramatic adaptation, and thence to the adaptations by Hawkesworth (1759), Gentleman (1760), Anonymous (1760), Ferriar (1788), Bellamy (1789) and Bandele (1999), who serially expropriated the play as a platform to debate responsibility in matters of slavery and colonialism. Perhaps unique among literary creations, Oroonoko and his entourage, with their distinctive race, class and gender attributes, came into popular consciousness as tropes gauging important shifts in English values during the course of the transatlantic slave trade. Accordingly, this study aims to provide a specific exemplum of rigorous, focused research on a single, complex and controversial topic but also to complicate some of our received notions about Oroonoko, slavery and abolition with a view to encouraging a more rigorous analysis of the cultural history underpinning literary texts..

Chapter 1
Oroonoko: Birth of a Paradigm

Moira Ferguson

Introduction

Though chronologically not the first text by an Englishwoman to address colonial slavery, Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave (1688) by Aphra Behn made the splashiest and most influential contemporary statement that ultimately generated a paradigm for British colonialist discourse.¹ Elements of the paradigm inevitably shifted as historical events unfolded, but the contradictory hermeneutics of Oroonoko bear directly on the paradigm that emerged.

For three centuries critics have tried to batten down the thematics of Oroonoko. It is interpreted variously as autobiography-cum-travelogue, the 'first abolitionist [text] ... on record in the history of fiction'; a political allegory about 'James, Mary, and the unborn . . . prince' that argues for the 'absolute power of legitimate kings'; a model of 'colonial realism'; 'pure romanticism'; the 'source of the English novel'; and a debate about the concept of honor.² Sympathetic to all of these readings, this essay further suggests that the text's protean nature relates to Behn's politically ambivalent views about royalty and colonial supremacy, and about the multiple relationships among the author-narrator, Oroonoko, and the colonists.

First, the difference in age between Behn and the narrator, a projection that determines their different perspectives on events, is worth noting. Entranced by romantic love, the youthful narrator admires Oroonoko's heroic stand against his enslavement and deplores his punishment when he is captured. At this level the text functions as a eulogy. Behn fuses this perspective with an assault on the usurpation of royal authority and even sabotages her own youthful views with her later ones in a form of self-conflict.³ Meanwhile, as a consistent advocate of slavery (evident elsewhere in her writings), she twice has her narrator abandon her hero-friend at critical junctures. Additionally, she constructs West African reality Eurocentrically in a discourse I shall call Anglo-African. By that, I mean a colonialist discourse about slavery that unwittingly intensified negative attitudes toward Africans in general and slaves in particular. In Winthrop Jordan's words, 'to be Christian was to be civilized rather than barbarous, English rather than African, white rather than black' (94). Of course, Behn complicates this discourse by exposing the cruelty endemic to sugar plantations in the 1660s. Secondly, although the romantic tale of Oroonoko and Imoinda absorbs the 15-year old narrator, the worldly Behn of 1688 in three subtle textual epiphanies chafes at misogynous sway and its wounding effect on tenacious females denied lawful authority. Thirdly, in exposing the barbarous colonial administrators wantonly exceeding the limits of their power, Behn obliquely indicts the 'upstarts' who overthrew Charles I and, at that moment, threatened James II. More to a personal point, these same usurpers disempowered Behn herself in Surinam. ( Thus, as a multilayered, semiautobiographical tale, Oroonoko affirms Behn's consistent royalist politics at the same time that it reveals her evolving perspective on women. Certainly, her readership decoded the tale as an act of revenge against specific contemporaries in Caribbean government whom she portrays as calculating sadists.

The Debate About Slavery

Baldly stated, the plot of Oroonoko centers on a royal prince in West Africa, Oroonoko, who is in love with and betrothed to Imoinda, the daughter of a slain general. Angered by Imoinda's love for Oroonoko and not himself, his grandfather sells her into slavery. A slaver captain and former friend who has routinely dealt in slaves with Oroonoko then kidnaps the prince and sells him in Surinam. He is purchased on behalf of the Lord Governor by Mr. Trefry, overseer of a vast plantation. Once in the Caribbean, Oroonoko and Imoinda serendipitously meet, marry, and conceive a child. Fearing lifelong enslavement, Imoinda goads Oroonoko into orchestrating a slave rebellion that then fails disastrously. As part of a suicide pact, Oroonoko kills Imoinda, after which he is captured and tortured to death by command of the colonial officials.

The old argument that Oroonoko marks the first antislavery fiction in the English language turns on Oroonoko's fiery exhortation to the slaves. The passage begins when 'Imoinda began to show she was with child, and did nothing but sigh and weep for the captivity of her lord, herself, and the infant yet unborn, and believed, if it were so hard to gain the liberty of two it would be more difficult to get that for three' (55). Oroonoko, by this time renamed Caesar, reacts to Imoinda's promptings with a stirring speech to the slaves:

And why, 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? . . . No, but we are bought and sold like apes or monkeys, to be the sport of women, fools and cowards ...

(56)

In inveighing so categorically against slavery, this passage connects to and intertextualizes an earlier assault on slaves' treatment in Surinam, launched in the London press in 1667 by one George Warren who hisses that slaves 'are sold like dogs, and no better esteem'd but for their Work sake, which they perform all the Week with the severest usages for the slightest fault' (qtd. from Sey xxx). Oroonoko's speech also raises an abiding concern of the Royal African Company, which at that time held the English slave trade monopoly, that independent traders desist from kidnapping princes and 'other important personages' (Davies 477). Walter Rodney comments that the counterproductive turmoil generated in slave communities by the captivity of elevated persons taught Europeans to leave African nobility alone 'so long as that noble had not been voluntarily given up by his fellows' (9). Behn's text graphically illustrates an example of Royal African Company fears. Moreover, since the royal monopoly on trading was persistently challenged during these years, her text also emphasizes the economic value of the monopoly and castigates the instability caused by such 'interlopers' as the captain who kidnapped Oroonoko (see Davies ch. 3).

But despite the obvious reasons for revolt, the construction of Oroonoko's speech raises questions both about his motives and the narrator's. In her own words, the 'told-to' narrator reports more than half the speech. In the process, she upholds Christian values and invalidates African beliefs about joining ancestors as free beings after death when she has Oroonoko claim that slavery will last 'for eternity' (56). Voicing (and voiced) in the first person - a rare occurrence in Anglo-Saxon texts - West African Prince Oroonoko addresses 'underlings' in tones of a superior, deplores his own enslavement, and (in ominous prophecy) adopts a role as 'sport of women, fools and cowards.' His conscious self-exclusion from the majority of slaves which emerges in his use of the second-person when he mentions the lash and his temporary identification with slaves whom he may have originally sold into slavery lend lavish irony to his exhortations. After all, he profited from and perpetuated slavery in his own country, and has just tried to bribe Trefry 'with gold or a vast quantity of slaves' into freeing himself and Imoinda (42). Nor is it likely that Oroonoko could be talking English to African men, even if we suppose that they were all from Coramantien. Behn assumes authorial license here in collectivizing the slaves' ethnicity, or conjures up the scene in its entirety because the scenario she presents is fantasy. Specifically, Behn exemplifies what President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana termed much later 'the Balkanization of Africa.' The division of kingdoms made it 'easy for slavers to set one group against another' (Mannix 12-13). The people from that region (today's Ghana) would have spoken Ashanti, Fanti, and possibly Twi and Ga.⁴ Additionally, there might well have been captives present from other regions, some of whom Oroonoko was apparently hoping to resell. Or, he could have been negotiating an exchange with Trefry that depended on Oroonoko's returning to Africa and shipping gold and slaves to Trefry. The unrealities build on one another. So, the narrator's reconstruction (allowing for the existence of an original rousing speech) alerts us to a certain unreality in Oroonoko's expostulations and the slaves' dramatic, univocal response. Yet again, a skeptical onlooker might wonder at the ready acquiescence of slaves to a noble prince who enjoys an unencumbered existence in Surinam where the rest of the slaves endure, by Oroonoko's own account, a ravaged quotidian reality.

In the wake of the failed rebellion, Oroonoko compounds his barely veiled sense of class supremacy by scorning slaves who followed their wives' advice to choose pardon and self-preservation over recapture and possible death. African marriage within the slave community, frequently forbidden as a formal institution by Europeans, is unrealistically taken for granted. Oroonoko seems insensitive to the plight of his fellow slaves, a plight so drastically different from his own. Once the rebels are overcome, the prince tells Byam (Lieutenant Governor from 1662-67) that 'he had rather die than live upon the same earth with such dogs.' Thus, the slaves are divided among themselves, with the difference attributed to the majority highlighted and disparaged. A Europeanized Oroonoko contrasts with the fetishization of native cowardice and vacillation.⁵ Oroonoko's contentions about the slaves press home an old Eurocentric stereotype about the 'savagery' of Africans. Certainly, the slaves reneged on a verbal contract to fight to the death, but their reasons were as good as Oroonoko's when, in a later episode, he breaks his pact with Imoinda to kill her and then himself. By positioning slaves and not the 'degenerate (European) race' as the 'others,' as individuals apart from an articulate individual like himself, Oroonoko reasserts royal power and his class identification with English colonial rule. He affirms the propriety of a ruler's outlook that coincides with Behn's royalist perspective.

None of these reservations denies the emotional impact of Oroonoko's speech, nor his hyperbolically magnificent personal heroism (Goreau 289). A critical presence in the text, the actualization of a resistance the reader has long awaited, that speech unfurls the flag on the atrocities of slavery. We do welcome it as an 'antislavery' tribute, but another keenly developed dimension of the text, as Kofi A. Sey has pointed out, fundamentally undermines that impact: 'the slave trade is not evil in itself, provided the dealers are "gentlemen" or true Christians' (vii). As long as humane traffickers (not seen as an oxymoron) and philanthropic plantation overseers (ditto) run the institution and felicitously convert pagan Africans to Christianity and hence to 'civilized' values, then slavery and the slave trade can blend harmoniously with the aristocratic ethic.

Class relationships determine Behn's outlook, for many aristocrats benefited from slavery. The king himself granted the Royal African Company's monopoly; James II was a director. But slave traders on the whole were seen as arrogant and avaricious entrepreneurs who did not represent the social and moral values cherished by aristocrats (see Jordan 42).

Behn's views about the legitimacy of slavery and the benevolence of plantation owners dovetailed with ideals expressed elsewhere in her writings. Her poem 'To the Most Illustrious Prince Christopher, Duke of Albemarle, on His Voyage to His Government of Jamaica: A Pindarick' (1687) provides a telling example. The occasion of the poem is the Duke's departure from London to assume his appointment as Governor of Jamaica. The sadness that departure caused is paralleled, according to the narrator (surely an undisguised Behn), by the good fortune of the island's slaves of African descent. By stressing the Jamaicans' good fortune, the narrator accentuates the Duke's distance from barbarous (nonaristocratic) rulers, managers, and slaveowners. His class defeated in the Civil War, the Duke of Albemarle as governor (technically a feudal overlord) promises to revive a culture in deep decline from feudal structures. Behn appropriately draws on the language of Roman imperialism to set forth the advent of the usurping colonist:

Prepare, ye Sun-scorch'd Natives of the Shore,
Prepare another Rising Sun t'adore,
Such as has never blest your Horizon before.
And you the Brave inhabitants of the Place,
Who have by Conquest made it all your own,
Whose Generous and Industrious Race
Has paid such Useful Tribute to the Crown:
See what your Grateful King for you has done.

(7)

Despite assumptions about the unilateral happy response the Duke can anticipate, Behn also signals her awareness of potential peril when she describes his doting parents 'trembling' with doubts and fears.

Her conspicuous omission of an explicit reference to slavery in this apostrophe spotlights contemporary ideology. Aside from predictable assumptions about Britain's right to economic 'benefit' and 'expansionism,' she glosses over conditions that she presumably had witnessed. More decisively, intertextually, she reinscribes loathing for the ongoing threat of North African pirates kidnapping and enslaving Europeans, an activity continually deplored in the public presses (see Davies; Clissold).⁶

In its cavalier dismissal (or evasion) of the reality of island lif...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations and Tables
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Oroonoko: Birth of a Paradigm
• 2 Juggling the Categories of Race, Class and Gender: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko
• 3 'The Fair Imoinda': Domestic Ideology and Anti-Slavery on the Eighteenth-Century Stage
• 4 Cast-Mistresses: The Widow Figure in Oroonoko
• 5 Owning Oroonoko: Behn, Southerne, and the Contingencies of Property
• 6 Reproducing Oroonoko: A Case Study in Plagiarism, Textual Parallelism, and Creative Borrowing
• 7 The Eighteenth-Century Marketing of Oroonoko: Contending Constructions of Maecenas, the Author and the Slave
• 8 Reviving Oroonoko 'in the scene': From Thomas Southerne to 'Biyi Bandele
• Index