Aphra Behn (1640-1689)
Much about Aphra Behn’s life has been lost to history. However, her work—in particular her plays—were quite famous during her lifetime. After her death, however, her works mostly fell out of print, dismissed by later critics as vulgar and risqué. Virginia Woolf was one exception to this critical dismissal, as she wrote in A Room of One’s Own (1928) that “All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their mind.” More recently there has been much greater critical interest in Behn’s work: in particular Oroonoko, for its depiction of early modern notions of gender, race, and empire in flux.
As the biographical notes in the Norton Anthology of English Literature argues, Behn “drew on a range of worldly experience that would be closed to women in the more genteel ages to come. . . . She scorned hypocrisy and calculation in her society and commented freely on religion, science, and philosophy. Moreover, she spoke as a woman. Denied the classical education of most male authors, she dismissed ‘musty rules’ and relished the immediate human appeals of popular forms” (2178-2179). Though Behn was known predominantly as a playwright, prose fiction was one of the popular forms she experimented with and Oroonoko is considered an early example of the English novel. Like many early novels, Behn presents the narrative as a “true history” told through the observations of a first-person narrator. Though it’s hard to know for sure, her depictions of Surinam in Oroonoko likely drew from first-hand experience. Her depictions of West Africa likely didn’t though, as the royal intrigue of these sections of the novel bear little resemblance to actual West African societies and instead draw from popular European courtly romances. Scholars also tend to regard the character of Oroonoko as an imaginative invention.
Behn held royalist views, but this doesn’t necessarily reflect a “conservative” disposition, as she appears to have been motivated by her dislike of what she took to be the rigid morality of the Puritans and Non-conformists (who held power during the Interregnum). She even spent some time as a spy for Charles II. These views influenced the depiction of Oroonoko as a “royal slave.” Thus, we might ask: what are the intersections between the novel’s depictions of transatlantic colonialism and Behn’s royalism?
Transatlantic Enslavement
Oroonoko, of course, depicts the transatlantic slave trade and the labor of enslaved Africans in the sugar plantations in Surinam (which, by the time of the publication of Oroonoko had become a Dutch colony). While, of course, transatlantic enslavement began long before the period we’re studying, the long eighteenth century saw the growth of British imperial wealth and power that largely depended on the uncompensated labor of enslaved Africans on the sugar, tobacco, and cotton plantations of the Caribbean and colonial America. The War of Spanish Succession (1701-1714), which has a legitimate claim to being the first modern “world” war, concluded with Britain gaining commercial rights to supply enslaved African laborers to the Spanish American colonies (known as the asiento) and supplanting the Dutch as the most powerful imperial force in the Indian Ocean region. By the end of the Restoration period, we can begin speaking of Britain as the dominant imperial power in the world. Oroonoko, taking place while this history was very much in motion, is an ambivalent text in regards to colonial questions. While Behn clearly critiques aspects of transatlantic slavery, nowhere does she disavow the colonial project. Additionally, her depiction of Oroonoko, even when sympathetic, often relies on racist caricatures. How should we understand this ambivalence in the novel?
