The Discourse of Slavery

From Aphra Behn to Toni Morrison

Carla Plasa Nfa, Carl Plasa, Betty J. Ring, Carla Plasa, Betty J. Ring

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138158924
• eBook ISBN: 9781317761921
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1994. The Discourse of Slavery is an innovative collection of fascinating essays addressing the problematic of slavery within literary, cultural and political writings. For the first time, slavery is examined critically within both the British and the American context, and related to contemporary concerns around race and gender. Writers discussed include: Aphra Behn William Blake Mary Wollstonecraft Charlotte Bronte Elizabeth Gaskell Toni Morrison William Faulkner Harriet Jacobs Harriet Beecher Stowe Frederick Douglass The Discourse of Slavery will be an invaluable and intriguing volume for students of literature, gender, race and ethnicity.

1

LOOKS THAT KILL

Violence and representation in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko

Anne Fogarty

Aphra Behn’s novella with its violent account of the execution of an African slave who was once a king was published – significantly – in 1688, the year that saw the bloodless deposition of King James II in England.¹ The social unrest that led to the dismemberment of the slave-king in Behn’s fiction is matched by a similar discord in late-seventeenth-century England that issued in the ousting of the final Stuart king from his throne. Reality and fiction seem to mimic each other yet, as this chapter will show, the symmetries that Oroonoko suggests are ultimately spurious ones. In this reading of the intricacies of Oroonoko, I shall argue that Behn utilizes the ambiguity and eccentric vision of the woman writer in order to indicate that a confluence of perspectives between the black slave Oroonoko and his sympathetic white female friend is an impossibility. The partisan and divisive nature of political and ethnic identity, as of sexual desire, ultimately prevents the harmonious and non-exploitative co-existence of different races. This reading of Oroonoko consequently runs counter to many recent interpretations that celebrate it as an unproblematic and pioneering document in the history of anti-slavery literature. In particular, it contests the finding frequently proposed as a key to Behn’s liberalism – namely the belief that slavery functions in Oroonoko as a means of tracing a parallelism between the subjugation of other races and the oppression of women. This view holds that Behn’s narrator identifies with the fate of a black slave because she sees his powerlessness as homologous with her own.

Such a reading of Oroonoko ignores patent tensions and contradictions in the text: Behn’s novella is built around a series of disjunctions and displacements as well as a set of identifications. The narrator is torn between her fascination with other cultures and an unremitting ethnocentrism. In addition, she is divided between her admiration for the central male protagonist and a regard for female virtue and courage as represented by Imoinda. Such, moreover, is the ambivalence and complexity of Behn’s political allegory that all the central figures in her drama of colonial unrest may be seen in diametrically opposed ways. Oroonoko, the oxymoron embedded in the subtitle reminds us, is a “Royal Slave”; he is simultaneously at the bottom of the social scale and at its pinnacle. Conforming to two shifting and conflicting registers of meaning, Oroonoko is both a renegade and a falsely deposed sovereign. Paradoxically, he acts as an allegory both of royal power and of social anarchy. Similarly, Imoinda, Oroonoko’s wife, plays a double part in Behn’s multi-layered allegory. She is at once an image of female oppression and a sign of otherness, simultaneously representing – like Oroonoko himself – moral order and savagery. While she has a civilizing effect on the world around her, she is also the cause of a family feud in Coramantien and the instigator of the slave-revolt in Surinam.

In analysing the pivotal function of these contradictions in Behn’s text, I shall make the case that Oroonoko is ultimately fractured by the twofold political causes that Behn espouses. Her lifelong support of royalism is at odds with her passionate defence of the rights of women. The conflicting allegories and shifting viewpoints of her novella and its repeated questioning of the boundaries between reality and fiction map out the dissonances and discontinuities in Behn’s attempt to write an account of history from the perspective of those who remain outside it. The permanent dilemma for the author is that she discovers not only that there is a lack of congruence between the needs and desires of women and slaves as marginalized subjects in the colonial world of Surinam, but that these two groups are also often dismayingly at odds. Far from making common cause, women and slaves seem forced into positions of conflict.

The reception of Oroonoko has been a peculiarly troubled one. Indeed, the heated debate that this text generated throughout the twentieth century has until recently ignored Behn’s representations of ethnic otherness and concentrated instead on questioning the authenticity of the female author. Tellingly, the issue of gender was allowed to displace that of race in analyses of the text. The problem of misrecognition which is such a prominent theme of Behn’s novella (whereby the viewpoint of one particular social group occludes that of another) seems to be amply illustrated by the critical misreadings that the text has spawned. By tracing the interpretative battles which Oroonoko has instigated, I want both to give an account of the multifarious critical responses to this work and to pinpoint their elisions and shortcomings. However, in the crosscomparison of the many analyses of Behn’s narrative, the objective is not to formulate a reading that will act as a corrective to previous interpretations; rather, I shall suggest that this tale of romance and injustice brings its audience face to face with the problem of representativity. Oroonoko is predicated on a crisis in authority. Those interpretations that attempt to stabilize the text by defining it as the mouthpiece of one particular ideology – be it colonialism, royalism, or some embryonic version of feminism or abolitionism – cancel out the hesitancies and contradictions that are integral to its workings.

In her dedicatory epistle and introduction to the tale itself, Behn is insistent that the story she is about to relate is not a fictive invention but rather a truthful and accurate reconstruction of historical events. Those aspects of the narrative that strike us as “new and strange” are a measure not of the writer’s fertile imagination but of the distance that separates us from the exotic world she is depicting.² In this manner, Behn attempts to defuse the otherness of Oroonoko by insisting on its factuality. The most vociferous of Behn’s detractors refuse, however, to recognize the subtlety of her framing devices which have the function of protecting both author and text. Instead, they query the authenticity of her descriptions and sometimes even go so far as to call her very existence into question.³ Ernest Bernbaum discovers many inconsistencies in Behn’s biography which he feels prove that she never visited Surinam at all. In addition, he accuses her of plagiarism and comes to the damning conclusion that in writing Oroonoko she “deliberately and circumstantially lied.”⁴ For him the likelihood that Behn used George Warren’s Impartial Description of Surinam (1667) as a source for many of her vivid renderings of Surinam entirely invalidates her work. His debunking of the novella bears out Behn’s own fears that a text written by a woman and centring on the plight of a slave will never be given credence by the world. The circularity of his reasoning is further indicative of the plight of the female writer. Bernbaum dismisses Oroonoko because it does not correspond with his version of Behn’s biography. By questioning the facts of her existence he simultaneously casts doubt on the facts of the story she produced. Both her life and her work are shown to be equally fictive and hence equally dubious. His reading is, effectively, a double erasure: by denying that Behn could have had experience of other cultures, he not only discredits her but also obscures the colonial history that she commemorates.

Bernbaum’s ill-founded and cantankerous attack on Oroonoko has long been refuted. In particular, Behn’s biographers have succeeded in dispelling many of the doubts about the nature and the extent of her travels.⁵ It has now been established that, no matter how clouded the evidence, she did indeed spend a short period in Surinam and that moreover her portrayal of this country and of Oroonoko’s African homeland is precise and informed rather than fanciful.⁶ Other critics, including most prominently B.G. MacCarthy, demonstrate that Bernbaum’s concept of realism is so narrowly defined that he inevitably fails to appreciate the complexity of Behn’s mode of romantic verisimilitude.⁷ However, all the many attempts to rehabilitate this text still insist, problematically, on invoking criteria of truth and accuracy as a means of legitimating Behn’s work. Where once her biography and her gender were utilized as weapons to invalidate her writing, it now frequently appears to be the case that her life-story and perspective as a woman are the very things that act as a warranty for the history she records. Critics rising to Behn’s defence set out to prove either the realism of her writing or the purity and coherence of her vision.

Early feminist accounts of her work have been especially guilty of such simplifications. Behn is championed, for example, by both Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West as the first professional woman writer. For them, Behn’s texts have an automatic resonance because they represent for the first time in English literature a female perspective on the world. Woolf famously declared that “all women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn,” while Sackville-West pronounced with equal insouciance that Behn’s having written at all is “much more important than the quality of what she wrote.”⁸ Much later appraisals of Behn continue to echo this euphoric celebration of her work as establishing a representative female voice in English literature. Dale Spender awards her a prominent ranking in her list of the forgotten mothers of the English novel. Behn’s writing deserves special praise because it measures men by women’s standards.⁹ Spender assumes that the particular merit of these standards lies in their seemingly pre-given moral superiority, finding in Behn not just a singularly female point of view but an ability to sympathize with the political oppression of others. In Spender’s reading of Oroonoko, therefore, the expansiveness and openness of the woman writer explain Behn’s exaltation of the black hero. For all his flaws and contradictions, not least among these being the fact that he too trades in slaves, Oroonoko is shown to possess a nobility lacking in his white counterparts. Elaine Campbell makes a similar case in defence of Oroonoko. For her the vigour and breadth of Behn’s imagination is of a piece with her ability to empathize with the problems of people outside her own culture. Behn’s work, she declares, is fuelled by a “transcendental quality of compassion.”¹⁰

More recent readings of Behn have attempted to question the all-too-ready assumption that speaking as a marginalized white woman is equivalent to or compatible with speaking for a black African slave. Vron Ware points out, for instance, that an anti-slavery politics should not be equated with a challenging of ideologies of racial domination.¹¹ Laura Brown and Moira Ferguson are more far-reaching still in their contestations of the view that Behn’s assertion of women’s right to write and express themselves freely naturally feeds into a desire for the emancipation of slaves. For Brown, the very instability of the narrator in Oroonoko ensures that she act as a vehicle for colonial ideology. Notwithstanding her sympathetic insights into the life both of African slaves and of Surinamese Indians, the narrator nevertheless cements the exploitative connections between the colonizing English and native cultures by acting as a mediator between them.¹² Moreover, Brown feels that Behn celebrates her hero more on the grounds of his royal status than on those of his enslavement. Oroonoko is a tragic figure because he is a dispossessed king – not because he is a man denied his freedom. Ferguson, in a similarly trenchant revisionist reading of Oroonoko, contends that Behn sets out to attack not the institution of slavery but the inequities and inefficiencies in the running of the colony of Surinam.¹³ While she notes the many equivocations in the text, she is nevertheless of the opinion that to see it as an argument in favour of the abolition of slavery is a misreading. Heidi Hutner similarly redresses the anachronistic accounts of Behn’s liberal politics that have influenced interpretations of Oroonoko until recently.¹⁴ She maintains that Behn indicts not slavery as the source of human oppression but the violence and savagery of colonial expansionism.

From being a paradigmatic text in the history of women’s literature and politics and a representative early female voice in the battle against social oppression, Oroonoko has become symptomatic of the blind spots and omissions in feminism itself. It is now, it transpires, a prescient narrative because it mirrors the failure of western feminism adequately to address the problem of racism and to recognize the way in which white women themselves play the role of oppressor with regard especially to their black counterparts.¹⁵ Indeed, Ros Ballaster points out, in her persuasive analysis of the politics underlying feminist interpretations of Oroonoko, that, perhaps in keeping with Behn’s own disengagement with this figure, critics have tended to disregard the role of the black female slave in the text.¹⁶ It is Imoinda and not Oroonoko who acts finally as a figure of alterity in Behn’s story of slave-rebellion. Where Oroonoko is Europeanized and depicted as alluring and eloquent, she remains alien, remote and largely silent. Doubly oppressed, Imoinda is an emblem of both sexual and racial otherness. Her physical presence, at once commemorated and yet held at a distance by the narrator, is symbolic of the material existence of the “other woman” who, as Gayatri Spivak argues, western feminism is so much at pains to disavow.¹⁷

The original feminist reception of Oroonoko is now surprisingly reversed. Where once this text was emblematic of the optimism and utopianism of feminist politics, it currently is seen by many critics as a register of the shortcomings and mistaken goals of the fight for women’s liberation. Uncomfortably, too, the rereading of the historical contexts of Behn’s writing and the concomitant insistence on the political embeddedness of her work seem to indicate that the woman writer is more entrenched in the ideologies of her day than are even her male contemporaries.¹⁸ Her marginalization appears to restrict her vision rather than to allow her a more unblinkered view of the world. The myth of Behn the revolutionary champion of women and slaves has now been scotched by the sobering discovery of her royalist sympathies and seemingly ineradicable racist attitudes. Indeed, it appears to be the case that studies of Behn have come full circle. The earlier sexist denunciations of her deficiencies as a woman writer have now given way to feminist pronouncements on the limitations of Oroonoko as a narrative purportedly written in defence of an African slave. The one-time complaint that Behn’s writing is false and inauthentic has been replaced by the finding that it is biased and contradictory.

This re-adjusted account of Behn’s text runs the risk, I would suggest, of furthering an overly narrow view of her novella and its import. By simply swapping Behn the feminist for Behn the racist we fail to do justice to the complexity of her work. Moreover, in accepting historicist readings of her text that see it as irrevocably rooted in the political beliefs of her day, we fall into the trap of assuming that ideologies are monolithic and pre-empt all critique. In the interpretation of Oroonoko that occupies the latter half of thi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Looks that Kill Violence and representation in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko
• 2 Sex, Slavery and Rights in Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindications
• 3 “That Mild Beam” Enlightenment and enslavement in William Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion
• 4 “Silent Revolt” Slavery and the politics of metaphor in Jane Eyre
• 5 Anglo-American Connections Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Beecher Stowe and the “Iron of slavery”1
• 6 “Painting By Numbers” Figuring Frederick Douglass
• 7 Perilous Passages in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl
• 8 The Irony of Idealism William Faulkner and the South's construction of the mulatto
• 9 Prophesying Bodies Calling for a politics of collectivity in Toni Morrison's Beloved
• Index