What kind of fiction was Behn writing?

Romance

•Fictional story in verse or prose.•Relates improbable adventures of idealized characters in some remote or enchanted setting.•An important genre of writing in the medieval period, e.g. the tales of King Arthur's knights written in the late Middle Ages by Chrétien de Troyes (in verse), Sir Thomas Malory (in prose).•Other examples: Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590–96), and Sir Philip Sidney's prose romance Arcadia (1590).

What kind of fiction was Behn writing?

Amatory Fiction

•Popular in the late 17th and early to mid 18th centuries.•Main practitioners: Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Delarivier Manley – the ‘Fair Triumvirate of Wit’•Plot-line: innocent, trusting woman deceived by a rapacious man. Few happy endings.•Often considered to predate the novel, as a precursor to it. But scholars now increasingly think of such amatory fiction as novels.•Explores gender relationships, emotions and desires, the tribulations of romantic situations. •Commentary on human passions, power of women (and men).

What kind of fiction was Behn writing?

Amatory Fiction

•Popular in the late 17th and early to mid 18th centuries.•Main practitioners: Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Delarivier Manley – the ‘Fair Triumvirate of Wit’•Plot-line: innocent, trusting woman deceived by a rapacious man. Few happy endings.•Often considered to predate the novel, as a precursor to it. But scholars now increasingly think of such amatory fiction as novels.•Explores gender relationships, emotions and desires, the tribulations of romantic situations. •Commentary on human passions, power of women (and men).

Behn’s fiction

14 tales attributed to Aphra Behn.

5 of these were published separately, under Behn’s name. These are: •Oroonoko (1688)•The Fair Jilt: or, the History of Prince Tarquin and Miranda (1688)*•Agnes de Castro: or, the Force of Generous Love (1688)•The Lucky Mistake (1689)•The History of the Nun: or, the Fair Vow-Breaker (1689)

All the others, including ‘Memoirs of the Court of the King of Bantam’, ‘The Adventures of the Black Lady’* and ‘The Unfortunate Bride’ were published posthumously between 1698 and 1700.

He was pretty tall, but of a shape the most exact that can be fancied; the most famous statuary could not form the figure of a man more admirably turned from head to foot. His face was not of that brown, rusty black which most of that nation are, but a perfect ebony, or polished jet. His eyes were the most awful that could be seen, and very piercing; the white of them being like snow, as were his teeth. His nose was rising and Roman, instead of African and flat. His mouth, the finest shaped that could be seen; far from those great turned lips, which are so natural to the rest of the Negroes. The whole proportion and air of his face was so noble, and exactly formed, that, bating his colour, there could be nothing in nature more beautiful, agreeable and handsome. There was no one grace wanting, that bears the standard of true beauty. His hair came down to his shoulders, by the aids of art; which was, by pulling it out with a quill, and keeping it combed, of which he took particular care.

p. 12

I have often seen and conversed with this great man, and been a witness to many of his mighty actions; and do assure my reader, the most illustrious courts could not have produced a braver man, both for greatness of courage and mind, a judgment more solid, a wit more quick, and a conversation more sweet and diverting. He knew almost as much as if he had read much: he had heard of, and admired the Romans; he had heard of the late Civil Wars in England, and the deplorable death of our great monarch, and would discourse of it with all the sense, and abhorrence of the injustice imaginable. He had an extreme good and graceful mien, and all the civility of a well-bred great man. He had nothing of barbarity in his nature, but in all points addressed himself as if his education had been in some European court.

p. 11

Key Dates

1685 Charles II dies, converting to Catholicism on his deathbed. His Catholic brother, James II, becomes king.

The Duke of Monmouth (Charles II's illegitimate but Protestant son) leads an unsuccessful rebellion to seize the throne.

1688 (Nov-Dec.) The ‘Glorious Revolution’: Parliament invite the Protestant William of Orange (the Dutch prince or ‘stadtholder’ and the husband of James II’s daughter Mary), invades England. James II flees the country. William and Mary become King and Queen.

1689 The Bill of Rights is passed. Monarchs can no longer rule without Parliament, and needs parliamentary consent to levy taxes and raise an army.

Whigs & Tories

Not formal political parties but rather loose groups that share broadly the same political values. ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ are contested terms.

WHIGS•Assert the power and privileges of parliament.•Want to limit the power of monarchy.•Want to limit the link between Church and state.•Sympathetic towards dissenters (those Protestants who don’t worship as the Church of England prescribes).•The architects of the Glorious Revolution.

TORIES•Support the monarchy – believe in a strong monarchy.•Support close ties between Church and state, and strong Church of England.•Mostly support the succession of the Stuart royal line.

For the future therefore, I must call Oroonoko, Caesar, since by that name only he was known in our western world, and by that name he was received on shore at Parham-House, where he was destined a slave.

p. 40

Though, in a word, I must say thus much of it, that certainly had his late Majesty, of sacred memory, but seen and known what a vast and charming world he had been master of in that continent, he would never have parted so easily with it to the Dutch.

p. 47

Virginia

London

Coramentien

Surinam

The Atlantic Slave Trade in Numbers

In the first half of the 18th century, British slavers delivered some 20,000 Africans each year to the British colonies; by the second half the figure was 40,000 annually.

Between 1698 and the abolition of the British trade in 1807, some 11,000 ships were dispatched from Britain to trade in African slaves.

Approximately 11 million enslaved Africans were transported to the Americas between the 15th and 19th centuries.

This figure doesn’t include the 10–20% of slaves who died during the Middle Passage, nor the even higher number of slaves who died in the slave raids in Africa.

Approximate death toll for four centuries of the Atlantic slave trade: 10 million

With these people, as I said, we live in perfect tranquillity, and good understanding, as it behoves us to do; they knowing all the places where to seek the best food of the country, and the means of getting it … So that they being, on all occasions, very useful to us, we find it absolutely necessary to caress them as friends, and not to treat them as slaves; nor dare we do other, their numbers so far surpassing ours in that continent. Those then whom we make use of to work in our plantations of sugar are negroes, black slaves altogether, which are transported thither in this manner.

p. 9

William Blake, The Execution of Breaking on the Rack (1793)

An abolitionist novel?

Some have commended this act, as brave in the captain; but I will spare my sense of it, and leave it to my reader to judge as he pleases.

p. 34

An abolitionist novel?

... he liked the company of us women much above the men, for he could not drink, and he is but an ill companion in that country that cannot. So that obliging him to love us very well, we had all the liberty of speech with him, especially myself, whom he called his great mistress; and indeed my word would go a great way with him.

p. 45

… or a work complicit in the cruelty of slavery?

... he assured me that, 'whatsoever resolutions he should take, he would act nothing upon the white people; and as for myself, and those upon that plantation where he was, he would sooner forfeit his eternal liberty, and life itself, than lift his hand against his greatest enemy on that place.'

p. 46

… or a work complicit in the cruelty of slavery?

They fed him from day to day with promises, and delayed him till the Lord-Governor should come; so that he began to suspect them of falsehood, and that they would delay him till the time of his wife's delivery, and make a slave of that too: for all the breed is theirs to whom the parents belong. This thought made him very uneasy, and his sullenness gave them some jealousies of him; so that I was obliged, by some persons who feared a mutiny (which is very fatal sometimes in those colonies that abound so with slaves, that they exceed the whites in vast numbers), to discourse with Caesar, and to give him all the satisfaction I possibly could. They knew he and Clemene were scarce an hour in a day from my lodgings; that they eat with me, and that I obliged 'em in all things I was capable of. I entertained them with the loves of the Romans, and great men, which charmed him to my company

p. 45

You must know, that when the news was brought on Monday morning, that Caesar had betaken himself to the woods, and carried with him all the Negroes, we were possessed with extreme fear, which no persuasions could dissipate, that he would come down and cut all our throats. This apprehension made all the females of us fly down the river, to be secured, and while we were away, they acted this cruelty.

p. 64

A 1776 performance of Thomas Southerne’s Oronooko (1695),

showing the white Imoinda