Do Not Go Gently: Oroonoko, Race, and the Problem of Violence

“Caesar [Oroonoko] made an harangue to ‘em [the slaves] of the miseries and ignominies of slavery, counting up all their toils and sufferings, under such loads, burdens, and drudgeries as were fitter for beasts than men...”

“…they [the white men] all concluded that…Caesar [Oroonoko] ought to be made an example to all the Negroes, to fright ‘em from daring to threaten their betters, their lords and masters; and at this rate no man was safe from his own slaves…”

Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (1688)

Three hundred and twenty-seven years after the publication of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, we are still debating race, racially-motivated violence, and the question of how much suffering any person or people can put up with until they reach a breaking point. All over the United States, in the last year, we have been seeing the breaking point reached and the social order breached. Many shake their heads in anger, frustration, or dismay, that the peaceful protests against police brutality of African Americans have turned to violence, riot, and looting. And yet, no doubt many of the same people would agree that slave revolts in the New World were justified reactions to slavery.

            I do not wish to oversimplify the case, however, or to somehow overstate Behn’s prescience

Riot fires burn in Baltimore.

or her novella’s ability to comment on our situation today, all over the US and most especially, lately, in Baltimore, in my home state of Maryland. And yet, it seems that the old adage holds true: all roads lead to Rome. I had planned to write about Oroonoko this month because I was teaching it again, after a couple years’ break. It just happens that the night I sit down to write, the riot fires are lit, and Behn’s words seem more applicable than ever: white heteropatriarchy still insists that we must make examples of rebellious black men, lest the slave owners be threatened by their own slaves.

            What struck me the most, re-reading Oroonoko;, or, The Royal Slave, this time around (my fourth time, at least, possibly my fifth) was the violence that permeates the text. From the gruesome arrow-in-eyeball that puts Oroonoko next in the line of succession, to Oroonoko’s final, brutal burning and dismemberment, Oroonoko is a violent text. The violence is not limited to any one kind of person or people—the Africans, the Europeans, and even some of the Indian groups described by Behn’s narrator all perpetrate horrific acts of violence. And the recipients of violence are not just men and women: the victims of violence include the animals of the jungle as well.

            Behn’s text served an important role in the early abolitionist cause, and in the past, I read her depictions of violence as shock tactics applied for the purposes of garnering sympathy for Oroonoko, Imoinda, and the other slaves who “toi[l] on all the tedious week till Black Friday; and then, whether they worked or not, whether they were faulty or meriting, they promiscuously, the innocent with the guilty, suffered the infamous whip, the sordid stripes, from their fellow slaves, till their blood trickled from all parts of their body.” The body is a fragile, permeable, extremely vulnerable entity in Oroonoko, subject to both physical and mental anguish. Even when Oroonoko takes matters into his own hands and kills his precious Imoinda, his body then fails him: he cannot get up and wreak his planned revenge on the whites. Instead, he languishes by her body, unable to move or leave.

            The natives of Surinam, however, are not all gentle and sweet, either. There are those who are described as taking part in brutal, gruesome self-mutilation for the purposes of displaying their grit and courage. Upon seeing these mutilated men, these “hobgoblins,” the narrator, Oroonoko and the others learn that these men have competed in the past for the glory of leading armies into battle: “they are asked what they dare do to show they are worthy to lead an army. When he who is first asked, making no reply, cuts off his nose and throws it contemptibly on the ground; and the other does something to himself that he thinks surpasses him, and perhaps deprives himself of lips and an eye; so they slash on till one gives out, and many have died in this debate.”

            Later, Oroonoko himself shows his contempt for the white men by “cut[ting] a piece of flesh

Behn's gruesome descriptions were
no exaggeration.

from his own throat, and thr[owing] it at ‘em…At that, he ripped up his own belly, and took his bowels and pulled ‘em out.” Incredibly, Oroonoko survives this self-harm, is taken back to the plantation, is healed, only to be burnt alive while simultaneously being dismembered by the evil whites of the plantation. The metaphorical resonances of this brutality—that white men would patch up self-destructive, rebellious black men just so they can kill them even more brutally at their own leisure—suggest the inequalities built into our own system of socioeconomic oppression and injustice.

            Oroonoko asks us to consider some weighty questions, including those relating to class as well as race. Do we empathize more strongly with Oroonoko because he is a “royal” slave, a beautiful, noble prince, while his jailers are former convicts, sent to the colonies for lack of a better place to put them? Similarly, do we castigate looters and rioters merely for their actions, or for the race and/or class they appear to represent?

            Beyond questions of race, though, Oroonoko seems to suggest or possibly even critique the inevitability and the brutality of violence. The only persons who do not perpetrate violence actively are the women of the text: Imoinda saves herself from the King’s rage by claiming that Oroonoko took her by violence and in the end he kills her (though she does help convince him to do it) while the narrator and the other women of the colony are routinely pushed out of the scene of action so that violence between men can take place. Is violence, then, a masculine trait? Do the women participate in the violence if they only do it passively?

            Finally, there is the question of brutality and civilization. There appears to be no difference in the level of savagery perpetrated by the different groups—African, European, South American—though there are some allusions to noble or honorable violence. The differences between honorable and dishonorable violence are elusive at best in Oroonoko. Instead, we are confronted with the long history of human brutality—the brutality that Oroonoko accuses his fellow slaves of falling into by refusing to rebel against the iniquities perpetrated against them. Oroonoko calls his fellow-slaves “insensible asses” who have “lost the divine quality of men.” The line between civilization and savagery, the rational and the irrational, and the orderly and the brutal is hazy and uncertain, subject to interpretation.

            At one point, Oroonoko manages to kill a tiger that had killed many “lambs and pigs.” Oroonoko manages to shoot the tiger in the eye, “but when the heart of this courageous animal was taken out, there were seven bullets of lead in it, and the wounds seamed up with great scars.” The tiger (a cougar or puma) is brutal, yet it kills for food; others had attempted to kill it, and it had survived. Eventually, though, it’s too much: Oroonoko’s arrow finally does her in. Is it mere irony that Oroonoko is the one to kill this vicious yet noble beast of the forest?  Or are they both to be understood as noble victims of forces larger and more powerful than any individual? Despite the narrator’s suggestion that many in the area believed the tiger to be a “devil” rather than a “mortal thing,” the tiger’s violence cannot be understood as purposefully malicious. It kills to survive.

            And perhaps that is the crux of the whole thing: when is violence justified? When it is the only means left by which to survive.

To the Fair Clarinda: Imagining Aphra Behn

We don’t know much about our friend Aphra and her life (1640-1689), and what we do know is often contested. Unlike some authors who left us copious diaries or whose lives were documented by contemporary historians, Behn and her life are shrouded in mystery. She may have gone to Surinam; we’re really not sure. She was probably a spy for Charles II, Behn was probably her married name, and she was probably the first woman in England—or one of the very first—to make a living with her writing. We know she was a Royalist and a Catholic devoted to the house of Stuart, and the connection between her plays and political views are discernible in her works—although even that line of inquiry is often contentious.

            Even more uncertain, however, are her personal views on a variety of topics that she addresses in her works, which span several genres, from plays to poetry to novels and novellas. What did she think of the native peoples of the Americas? Of black slaves and slavery in general? Was she a feminist? A realist? An imperialist?

            Feminist scholars have held up Behn as an early promoter of women’s rights, a writer for whom the plight of women in the second half of the 17^th century was of utmost importance and critique. Her poem “To the Fair Clarinda” suggests that she may have been sexually fluid (I prefer that term to saying she was bisexual), and in this poem she seems to be writing about loving a hermaphrodite or someone who embodies the traits of both men and women. Her short fictions “The Fair Jilt” and “The Fair Vow-Breaker” and the poem “The Disappointment” each appear to clearly critique the stifling social expectations of women in Restoration England.

Charles II after his
1660 Restoration to the throne

On the other hand, Behn was also at the court of Charles II, a notorious libertine who enjoyed drinking, philandering, and generally having fun. As John Wilmot, 2^nd Early of Rochester and another famous libertine once put it in his satire against Charles II, “thy prick, like thy buffoons at Court,/ Will govern thee because it makes thee sport.” Thus, some of the more problematic depictions of women in her plays, such as in The Rover, are often chalked up to the playwright’s need to appease her patron. 

By far her most famous work, the novella Oroonoko, which takes place in Africa and Surinam and contains both New World Indians as well as African Slaves, is often interpreted as an allegory about the fall of Charles I. It is also often faulted for portraying a romanticized view of the tragic African slaves, especially those who were supposedly of "royal" descent in their native Africa, as Oroonoko and his wife Imoinda are. The white female narrator of Oroonoko is usually read as Behn's problematic alter-ego, an Imperialist Englishwoman who at once sympathizes with but also Orientalizes the New World and its non-white inhabitants.

The Widow Ranter, her play which takes place in colonial Virginia, was by all accounts a failure when it was produced (which did not happen after her death). It is also considered by many scholars to be a metaphor for the fall of the house of Stuart in the wake of the Exclusion Crisis. Others see the play as further proof that she really did live in the Americas at some point during her lifetime and that the play’s failure was less about royalist politics and more about the fact that the English just didn’t like or respect Americans, which Behn portrays in both positive and negative lights in the play. The Widow Ranter may be interpreted as having problematic portrayals of Indians while taking the presence of black slaves for granted as merely set-pieces of the English colonies. Conversely, we might interpret the play as critiquing precisely the issues that some scholars believe her to be complacent about.

Was she truly a "feminist," an abolitionist, an adamant critic of imperialism and slavery? Or was she making use of timely topics to make good drama? As a feminist scholar myself, I like to think the former, and I believe that the bigger picture of her works confirms a deep-running vein of critique of the treatment of women and slaves in her works, even if, at times, her depictions of non-white peoples are somewhat romanticized. In the end, however, I think that what makes her works so intriguing is that they seem to epitomize what Barthes would call a writerly text: we as readers construct the text as we read it, and the text and its meaning are constantly eluding us. It is precisely the contradictory elements of Behn’s oeuvre that make her so fascinating to read and return to.

What did she even look like?
This portrait looks quite different than some of the others.

“A poet is a painter in his way, he draws to the life, but in another kind; we draw the nobler part, the soul and the mind; the pictures of the pen shall outlast those of the pencil, and even worlds themselves” 

–Aphra Behn, Oroonoko