Mrs A. Behn and the Myth of Oroonoko-Imoinda

Abstract

Mrs A. Behn and the Myth of OrOOnoko-ImoindaRobert A. Erickson How long wilt thou go about, O thou backsliding daughter? for the Lord hath created a new thing in the earth, A woman shall compass a man. Jeremiah 31:22 All I ask is the Privilege for my masculine Part the Poet in me ... to tread in those successful Paths my Predecessors have so long thrived in.1 Aphra Behn If the act of writing is always in some sense an abbreviated form of walking, travelling/travailing, and exploring, then Aphra Behn's unconventional "Female Pen" reiterates the adventures of a highly unconventional female explorer and literary pioneer. Amid a resurgence of recent interest in her work, especially her short narratives, we are still in the process of discovering just how richly innovative Behn is as a narrative artist. Oroonoko, published in the explosive political atmosphere of 1688 (and a year before her death) is a thickly woven and delicately allusive verbal artifact. Behn was forty-eight at the time, poor, sick, suffering from a variety of diseases, and actively and intently rereading Scripture.2 1 Aphra Behn, Epistle Dedicatory to TAe Lucky Chance (1686). 2 For Behn's biographical record I rely chiefly on Angeline Goreau's Reconstructing Aphra: A Social Biography ofAphra Behn (New York: Dial Press, 1980). For Behn's intellectual encounter EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 5, Number 3, April 1993 202 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION She was exactly double the age of her free-spirited and socially privileged and powerful "Eyewitness," the younger self-as-character who participates in the crucial historical events of the narrative.3 Oroonoko is a vital text in the multifaceted birth of the novel. Behn prefigures Defoe's invention of the retrospective Moll Flanders looking back over an active and unconventional life, but her purpose is to inscribe the experience and significance of her "Slave" within her own closing life's circle. The narrator's role in Oroonoko calls attention to the elegiac power of a narrative redolent of paradisal and gospel overtones in which Behn preserves for "Posterity" her godlike heroic pair—literally the first African-American protagonists in English fiction. While she may in part alleviate her own sense of guilt in their demise, at the same time she provides a cautionary literary and political fable for her dedicatee, the young nobleman Richard Maitland (nephew of the Lauderdale of Charles's Cabal ) and his lady (another potentially important heroic pair), and for an England—and an English Catholic king—in crisis. The title page of the first edition tells us that the author is "Mrs. A. Behn." Although Aphra Behn almost always signs her name "A. Behn" in the epistles dedicatory to her works, the "Mrs." [Mistress] here—whether her own addition or, as is more likely, the bookseller's—conceals a wealth of meaning present to a late-seventeenth-century audience.4 "Mistress " was one ofthe few female words of power in this era, but of sharply with Scripture and French biblical criticism in her translation and publication in early 1688 of Fontenelle's Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (accompanied by her "Essay on Translated Prose"), see Maureen Duffy, The Passionate Shepherdess: Aphra Behn 1640-89 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977), pp. 270-74 and Robert Adams Day, "Aphra Behn and the Works of the Intellect ," in Fetter'dor Free: British Women Novelists, 1670-1815, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1989), pp. 374-80. Of recent criticism (besides that cited elsewhere), I would like to note the following as the most pertinent to my concerns in this essay: Katharine M. Rogers, "Fact and Fiction in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko," Studies in the Novel 20 (1988), 1-15; Robert L. Chibka, '"Oh! Do Not Fear a Woman's Invention ': Truth, Falsehood, and Fiction in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 30 (1988), 510-37; Beverie Houston, "Usurpation and Dismemberment: Oedipal Tyranny in Oroonoko," Literature and Psychology 32 (1985), 30-36; Martine Watson Brownley , "The Narrator in Oroonoko," in Essays in Literature 4 (1977), 174-81; and Jacqueline Pearson, "Gender and Narrative in the Fiction of Aphra Behn," Review of...