Jacqueline Aramboles
Professor Michael Rumore
ENG 302- British Literature II- Restoration Through Revolutions
May 17, 2020
Throughout the semester we studied works from the years of 1660 – 1815. These years saw several drastic changes to our world. Slavery was in full effect with the Transatlantic slave trade, revolutions in America, Haiti, and France and the consolidating power of the British Empire in the Indian Ocean. In literature, the writings reflected what was going on in Britain and around the world. Women made an impact on how literature was written during this period. Women such as Aphra Behn, Charlotte Smith, and Phillis Wheatley wrote novels and poetry discussing how the period impacted their lives. Topics that these women touched upon were slavery, child kidnapping and women rights. These women all brought different writing experiences to the eighteenth century. Aphra Behn, Charlotte Smith, and Phillis Wheatley all brought different and similar impacts to English literature during the long eighteenth century.
Aphra Behn is the author of the novel, Oroonoko, or the Royal slave it was first published in 1688. In this novel, she tells the love story and struggles that the main characters Oroonoko and Imoinda go through. Aphra Behn is a white woman writing a novel about slavery. Behn frequently inserts her own thoughts and opinions into the novel: “I was myself an eye-witness to a great part of what you will find set down” (Behn 9). Here she speaks in first person letting the reader know that she was present in most of what happens throughout the story. As a narrator, Behn contradicts herself several times when it comes to her opinion of slavery. She describes Oroonoko in such a way that one would think that she was against the way he was taken for Coramantien and brought to Surinam as a slave. However, when Oroonoko plans a revolt and escapes with the slaves from the sugar plantation, our narrator (Behn) first thought is to run away because they are afraid that the enslaved will hurt them: “ You must know, that when the news was brought on Monday morning, caeser had betaken himself to the woods and carried with him all the Negroes, we were possessed with extreme fear, which no persuasions could dissipate, that he would come down and cut all our throats” (Behn 68). Behn spoke very highly of Oroonoko in various parts of the novel, she speaks to his intelligence and his physical appearance in a positive light. But when Oroonoko wants to escape the sugar plantation, she only thinks of him as an angry slave who will kill the whites the first chance he gets. While our narrator was an unreliable narrator, she was able to give the readers actual gruesome details stemming from slavery.
Another woman writer was Charlotte Smith, she wrote poetry during early romanticism. Charlotte Smith was a woman writing sonnets about several topics such as mental illness and the lack of women rights. In her sonnet, “On Being Cautioned Against Walking on an Headland Overlooking the Sea, Because It Was Frequented by a lunatic” written in 1797, she writes about envying the freedom that a lunatic has: “I see him more with envy than with fear” (Smith line 10). She is jealous of the lunatic for several reasons. First, she wants to be able to have freedom/rights that he was able to have. She also envies that the lunatic can come and go as he pleases but she cannot because she is a woman and was not allowed to enjoy those kinds liberties.
Lastly, Phillis Wheatley was the first African American woman to be a published poet. Wheatley brings in a different take to what women experienced in the eighteenth century. She was kidnapped from Africa at the age of 8 years old and sold into slavery. She was brought to Boston, Massachusetts to be a servant for John and Susanna Wheatley. Phillis Wheatley was taught how to read and write by her enslaver, Susanna Wheatley who saw that Phillis was very intelligent. Due to her being educated, Wheatley began writing poetry. Her poem, “On Being Brought From Africa To America” she writes about how she unknowingly was taken from her home: “’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land, Taught my benighted soul to understand” (Wheatley lines 1-2). In this line she is telling us about her experience of being kidnapped as a child and taken from her home in Africa. She was a child of 8 years old and she was ignorant in knowing what was happening to her. Phillis Wheatley experiences writing as a woman was much different from those of Behn and Smith.
To conclude, Aphra Behn, Charlotte Smith, and Phillis Wheatley were women who during the eighteenth century wrote about what the world looked like at that time. These women wrote about hard topics like slavery, kidnapping, and women freedom/rights. Today we read these pieces of literature to get an idea of what the world was like during the years of 1660- 1815. We use them as a historical context to get a better understanding of how English Literature has evolved throughout the years.
