Aphra Behn Wit Slavery and Empire GUIDING IDEA
Aphra Behn: Wit, Slavery, and Empire
GUIDING IDEA FOR TODAY Race, gender and class are not distinct realms of experience, existing in splendid isolation from each other; nor can they be simply yoked together retrospectively like armatures of Lego. Rather, they come into existence in and through relation to each other -- if in contradictory and conflictual ways. --Anne Mc. Clintock, Imperial Leather, 5
BIOGRAPHY • 1640 Some evidence suggests she was born in 1640 (same year as convening of the Short Parliament, the first step toward full scale Civil War between Royalists and Parliamentarians that would break out in 1642 and would end in 1649 with the trial of Charles 1, his execution, and the naming of Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector of the realm=> this provides some context for Oronooko’s preoccupation as a text with ideas of ROYALTY) in Kent to a yeoman farmer but her education which was that of a gentlewoman does not accord with the class status of her supposed parent. • 1663 -64 According to Oronooko, she traveled to Surinam when she was a young woman, Tradition has it that she marries a merchant named Behn shortly after her return to England. He may have died in the horrific plague of 1665.
• 1666 The earliest indisputable external evidence of her life is a series of letters documenting her employment as a spy for the English government and the Court of Charles II. She was sent to Antwerp, BELGIUM, to report on exiled Cromwellians (that is followers of the exiled and executed Oliver Cromwell and to relay Dutch military plans (note the presence of the Dutch in Oronooko as the imperials contestants for Surinam and the ones who eventually take over Surinam and outs the incompetent English governors there). She used Astreas as a code name and later as a literary name
• 1667 Sent to debtor’s prison as a thank you from the King for her service • 1668 Resorts to writing plays (16) for the London theatre and novels(14) for print in order to support herself • Noted among a wide circle of friends and writers for her beauty and several portraits exist. • She was also known for her wit, generosity, strong Tory sentiments, and personal loyalty to the royal family • 1682 Arrested for offending the King when she attacked the Duke of Monmouth in an epilogue to one of her plays, The City Heiress • 1688 Glorious Revolution. Behn’s political hopes are crushed and she suffers from poverty and a crippling disease
• Fended off personal and political attacks throughout her career. Also attacked as a woman who wrote with the same freedoms as a man. • Behn is significant not only as an artist but as the first professional woman writer in English and the first woman whose writing won her burial in Westminster Abbey
Punk and Poetess • "She was a mere harlot who danced through uncleanness and dared [the male dramatists] to follow. " - John Doran (19 th-century theatre historian) • The "Punk and Poetesse, " as she was soon dubbed ("punk" meaning "prostitute"), was the single most prolific and successful dramatist in Restoration England with the exception of John Dryden, the country's poet laureate. She, like Shakespeare before her, took existing bad plays with decent plots and turned them into very good plays -- unlike Shakespeare, this work of hers was likened to "the birthing of bastards. "
• Not only content with writing for theatre, she became one of the first novelists in the English language, writing a racy epistolary roman à clef about an affair between a nobleman and his sister-in-law. Other prose works dealt unflinchingly with issues of class, politics, gender and race in a way that was not attempted by many of her male colleagues. She was also well known for her poetry, much of which was quite erotic (but not without humor), her political tracts and propaganda for the Stuart monarchy, and her foreign-language translations. • Aphra Behn was an outsider and an observer from the beginning, and much of her work reflects that. She often played with the image of the prostitute which was from the beginning associated with her -- "selling" herself as a woman writer, but all the time insisted that the pen had no gender, that there was no topic that was not appropriate for a woman. Many of her writings explore the question of desire -- who wants what, and why, and what keeps them from it -and often from the female point of view. As a professional writer, she was the only woman of the time whose work was created and put out not only for her personal satisfaction but for the praise and criticism (and coin) of others.
Oronooko • What is it – Literarily? • • Is it a romance? Is it an ethnography? Is it a captivity tale? A metaphor female authorship as a form of “blackness, ” blankness, invisibility and magical powers of transformation? – Historically? • The first American Novel? • The first anti-slavery novel? – Ideologically? • What do we make of this cross-over book in which an early modern English woman writer engages an enslaved African prince in the startlingly New World?
• According to Catherine Gallagher, Oronooko, is the first literary narrative in English about an American colony and is one of the first, if not THE first, anti-slavery novels written in English
Sex and Race: Imperial Markers Henry Louis Gates teaches us that the defining marker of imperial culture is “an ordering of the world based on … a strict barrier of difference. ”
What is Oronooko about? • 1. When Aphra Behn describes Oroonoko’s physical appearance she justifies her praise of his beauty in significant ways. For example, she is quick to point out that Oroonoko’s nose was “rising and Roman instead of African and flat. [And] his mouth, the finest shaped that could be seen, [was] far from those greated turned lips which are so natural to the rest of the Negroes” (15). In addition, Behn seems comitted to convincing her audience of Oroonoko’s beauty despite the hero’s black skin when she writes, “[except for] his colour, there could be nothing in nature more beautiful, agreeable and handsome” (15). In his physical features (to say nothing of the intellectual and cultural education Behn ascribes to him), Oroonoko is presented as a highly “Europeanized” African. What might be the implications of Behn’s decision to depict Oroonoko in this way?
Some Questions: • What can we infer about the narrator (not necessarily the historical Aphra Behn’s) stance on slavery and the slave trade? • What is “black” or “African” or “Indian” or non-European meant to mean in this text? • What is Woman made to mean in this text?
European Colonialism
17 th & 18 th C. Sugar/Blood Trade • Richard Hakluyt in 1582: “Master John Haukins having made divers voyages to the Iles of Canaries [realized] that Negros were very good merchandize in Hispaniola and that the store or Negros might easily bee had upon the coast of Guinea” (Lee 17) • Around 12 million Africans entered the Atlantic slave trade between 1500 and 1867. • 1640 -1680: Large-scale introduction of African slave labor in the British Caribbean for sugar production. • Between 1662 -1807, the British Empire carried 3. 5 millions slaves from Africa • 1680 -1786: 2, 130, 000 slaves imported for the English colonies in America (Jamaica alone absorbed 610, 000)
British Empire 1600 -1815 • By mid 1700 s, represented a diversified network of colonies, factories, and outposts all devoted to establishing trade routes and avenues for commerce • Writing in 1777 Edmund Burke termed it “vast, ” “diversified, ” and “disconnected” • Embodied extremes: – Plantations of America and West Indies required settlement and displacement of indigenous populations as well as the importation of African slave labor – The East India Company involved no such colonization though the Company was rebuked as a “trading and fighting Company” revealing the contradictions of of a commercial entity with a private army – Control over the Mediterranean, primarily Minorca and Gibraltar focused more on rooting out French ambitions than establishing British ones – Explorations of the Pacific by Capt John Cook carried out in name of scientific discovery but he was told to annex any promising territory in the name of Britain
Imperialism • “The extension and expansion of trade and commerce under the protection of political, legal, and military controls” (Peter Childs and Patrick Williams, An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory, 1997, p. 227)
Important terms and concepts • • Biological Determinism Gender Ideology Representation Male Gaze: See image of Olympia. Naturalization Mystification Self-surveillance or split consciousness
Definitions • EMPIRE. n. f. [empire, French; imperium, Latin] – Imperial Power; supreme dominion; soverign command – Region over which dominion is extended • IDENTITY. n. f. [identité, French; identitas, school Latin. ] – Sameness; not diversity
3 Axioms of Imperial Culture • • • Heterosexual, reproductive order based on patriarchal monogamy The emergence and governance of a new global order of knowledge based on male European experience Unconditional Imperial political command of the economic capital produced by colonized labor (women, the colonized, and that of the working classes)
“Discourse of the Cape” This paradigm championed a notion of human similitude across the boundaries of gender, class, and skin-color, and posited Christian European males as the ideal against which all “others” were compared. Although the discussions of the Cape often employed familiar metaphors and associations from Renaissance and early modern Europe, this discourse developed within the context of South Africa itself and came to represent the conceptual framework through which the West understood this region. (Toby Freund, par. 1)
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