World Lit II Aphra Behn, Oroonoko

Imoinda: Selected Scenes

Aphra Behn (In Our Time)

Aphra Behn (1650-1689)

From English Literature 1640-1789: An Anthology, ed. Robert DeMaria, Jr.

Poet, playwright, novelist, and translator, Aphra Behn was among the most versatile writers of her time. She is probably the first woman ever to make a living as a writer, and she was the first woman to be memorialized as a writer in Westminster Abbey. In surveying the history of English literature from her vantage point as a woman in the early twentieth century, Virginia Woolf would find in Behn a most important early advocate for the place of women in the world of letters.

Although the facts of Behn's early life are uncertain, she seems to have been born Aphra Johnson, and it is likely that as a young woman whe travelled to Surinam or British Guiana. She places herself ther amidst the scene of much of the action of her most famous novel, Oroonoko. On her return to England she probably married a merchant named Behn, whose family was Dutch. Shortly thereafter, from 1666-7, Behn was in Antwerp as a spy for the English government under the code name "Astrea," which she later used as her literary name. At some point early on her husband died or abandoned her, for she was briefly in debtor's prison in 1667. Not long after this, Behn began writing for a living: remarkably, she published over thirty separate volumes or pamphlets between 1676 and 1689, including an enormous epistolary novel that presents a recent scandal in a thinly veiled fiction [Love Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister]. Her work as a playwright began before this period of massive publication and continued deep into it. Behn wrote at least nineteen plays, the first of which to be published was The Forced Marriage (1670). The Rover, perhaps Behn's best play, was popular enough to support a sequel. The Rover is a romantic comedy about temporarily disenfranchised English Cavaliers and their escapades in the masquerad world of Venice at Carnival time. Like some of Behn's poetry, The Rover displays a mastery of sexual innuendo and bawdiness that is much more common in male writers and conventionally thought to be inappropriate in women. Contemporary satirical writings, like that of Thomas Brown, and later accounts, including the article in the Dictionary of National Biography, express dismay about Behn's morals. Happily, interest has lately returned to her diverse literary output, and perhaps most of all to her novel Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave. 

There is an obvious temptation to read Oroonoko as a manifesto of anti-slavery, anti-colonialist, egalitarian, and perhaps even proto-feminist values, but the novel also has qualities that should appeal to those who are not interested in its usefulness to a political agenda. Although Behn draws on her knowledge of some historical incidents and persons, in genre the work is a romance, a popular fictional form designed to appeal to women and to members of the recently educated middle class. Oroonoko was certainly meant to be popular; but in a startling reversal of stereotypes, Behn substitutes Africans for the European nobles that traditionally take the lead roles in seventeenth-century romances. Yet, in many respects, Prince Oroonoko and his bride are nobler and more traditional than their European counterparts, and the work can be read as profoundly conservative, even though it is concerned with the injustices of the colonial system. Behn's politics always revolved around her extremely loyal royalism, which was not in conflict, for her, with her observations on the inequality of women, her obvious hatred of slavery, or her tacit campaign for the empowerment of women in the public as well as the private sphere. In short, when one tries to interpret Oroonoko, it resists easy solutions and displays some of the complexity and difficulty that many conservative critics think of as one of the defining qualities of art. Such complexity is not always evident in the language or the plot of the novel, but the book has all kinds of value for students of literature. In addition to its other virtues, Oroonoko shows the old, largely upper-class genre of the romance, in the process of transforming itself into a work with a broader social horizon and less parochial interests.


The text of Oroonoko is based on the first edition (1688). Most of the poems presented here come from Poems upon Several Occasions (1684). However, the text of "To the Fair Clorinda" is based on the version that appeared in Lycidus: or the Lover in Fashion (London, 1688), and both "Epitaph on the Tombstone of a Child" and "Ovid to Julia" come from Miscellany, Being a Collection of Poems by Several Hands (1685). The Works are being edited by Janet  Todd (Ohio State University Press, 1992- ). I am indebted to Dod's notes on the poetry and on Oroonoko. There is a fairly recent critical biography by Angeline Goreau, Reconstructing Aphra (1980).

Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave

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Aphra Behn

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble:

BEHN, Mrs Afra or Aphra, probably née Johnson (1650-89). She was born in Kent and visited Surinam, then a British colony, in 1663 with members of her family. On her return to England the following year she married Behn, a city merchant probably of Dutch descent, who died within two years. She was employed  in 1666 by Charles II as a spy in Antwerp in the Dutch war. Her first play, The Forced Marriage (1670), was followed by some 14 others, including her most popular, The Rover (in two parts, 1677-81), dealing with the adventures in Naples and Madrid of a band of English Cavaliers during the exile of Charles II; its hero, the libertine Willmore, was said to be based on *Rochester, though another model may have been her lover, John Hoyle, lawyer and son of the regicide Thomas Hoyle. The City Heiress (1682) is a characteristic satiric comedy of London life and, like Otway's *Venice Preserv'd, contains a caricature of *Shaftesbury. The Lucky Chance (1686) explores one of her favourite themes, the ill consequences of arranged and ill matched marriages. Her friends included *Buckingham, *Etherege, *Dryden and *Otway, and she was a staunch defender of the Stuart cause. She also wrote poems and novels and edited a Miscellany (1685). Her best-remembered work is *Oroonoko, or The History of the Royal Slave, based on her visit to Surinam. Perhaps the earliest English philosophical novel, it deplores the slave trade and Christian hypocrisy, holding up for admiration the nobility and honour of its African hero. Despite her success she had even in her time to contend with accusations of plagiarism and lewdness, attracted in her view by her sex, and as late as 1905, in an edition of her novels, Ernest Baker described her work as 'false, lurid and depraved'. V. Woolf in *A Room of One's Own (1928) acclaims her as the first English woman to earn her living byh writing, 'with all the plebeian virtues of humour, vitality and courage', and comments that she was buried 'scandalously but rather appropriately' in Westminster Abbey. See M. *Duffy, The Passionate Shepherdess (1977). (See RESTORATION.)



Oroonoko, or The History of the Royal Slave, a novel by Afra Behn, published c.1688, adapted for the stage by *Southerne,  1695.

Oroonoko, grandson and heir of an African king, loves and wins Imoinda, daughter of the king's general. The king, who also loves her, is enraged and orders her to be sold as a slave. Oroonoko himself is trapped by the captain of an English slave-trading ship and carried off to Surinam, then an English colony, where he is reunited with Imoinda and renamed Caesar by his owners. He rouses his fellow slaves to revolt, is deceived into surrender by deputy governor Byam (a historical figure), and brutally whipped. Oroonoko, determined on revenge but not hoping for victory, kills Imoinda, who dies willingly. He is discovered by her dead body and cruelly executed.

The novel is remarkable as an early protest against the slave trade, and as a description of primitive people in 'the first state of innocence, before men knew how to sin': the author comments on the superior simplicity and morality of both African slaves and the indigenous Indians, whose Christian oppressors are shown as treacherous and hypocritical. Afra Behn's memories of her own visit to Surinam in 1663 provide a vivid background, and much of the story is narrated as by a personal witness. Southerne's tragedy follows the broad lines in the novel, but the deputy governor's passion for Imoinda is made a chief motif of action, Imoinda herself is presented as the daughter of a white European, and Oroonoko dies by his own hand, alterations which decrease the violence of the story and increase its intended pathos.

Orinoco de Aphra Behn

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Abdelazer

Henry Purcell's incidental music for Aphra Behn's play Abdelazer, or The Moor's Revenge:

Purcell and Dryden - King Arthur

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Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave

Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave

Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave is a novel by Aphra Behn (1640-1689). Aphra Behn was the first woman writer in England to make a living by her pen, and her novel Oroonoko was the first work published in English to express sympathy for African slaves. Perhaps based partly on Behn's own experiences living in Surinam, the novel tells the tragic story of a noble slave, Oroonoko, and his love Imoinda. The work was an instant success and was adapted for the stage in 1695 (and more recently by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1999). Behn's work paved the way for women writers who came after her, as Virginia Woolf noted in A Room of One's Own (1928): "All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, ... for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds." (Summary by Elizabeth Klett)

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Orinoco de Aphra Behn

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