Free, Live Free (original)

Aphra Behn’s desire for intimacy, and sex, with an admiring (and admirable) young man, is the foremost inspiration for her creating the poetic world in her poem “The Disappointment,” and “novelistic” world in her “novel” Oroonoko. Claims that either work is primarily concerned with other things, e.g., a witty reply to John Wilmot’s “The Imperfect Enjoyment” in Behn’s “The Disappointment,” or an argument in favor of the aristocracy in Oroonoko, or against slavery, or with the mental world of colonized people, e.g., slaves, or natives, and their plights--testify to Behn’s success in misdirecting readers: a goal as vital to her own self-protection as is the degree of success in misdirecting herself into thinking that she is in fact writing about, and attempting to satisfy, something other than her own “suspect desires.” That her desire for sexual intimacy is so real, and so pressing to be the reason these works were written, and the inspiration for their characteristic form, will hopefully be demonstrated (scientific essay, Dr. Miller?) in this essay. That admitting this desire to herself, (as well as being--as well shall see-dangerous for us to admit) is so dangerous because sexual satisfaction is so suspect a desire for an older woman to admit, develop, and enjoy, even if only through her own writings, so as to make this paper seem a work of scientific detection work to uncover her “base” nature, will be “demonstrated” beginning with the uncovering of a lie--or a lie seeming misdirection--Behn tells us in “The Disappointment.” In “The Disappointment,” Behn writes, “The nymph’s resentments none but I / Can well imagine or condole. But none can guess Lysander’s Soul, / But those who swayed his destiny” (2133). This, I believe, is an authorial misdirection, because it is precisely

Behn who “sways” poor Lysander’s destiny: she is the writer; poor Lysander merely her prop.

Behn is the “envying god [who] conspires / To snatch his power, yet leave[s]

him the desire!” (2132) Behn knows what it is like to lack “Nature’s support . . . / Itself now wants the art to live” (2132). She, like Lysander, lacks “nature’s support”: she desires consummated love, but her age makes this a ridiculous desire. It is therefore Behn’s “bewitching influence” (2133) which dooms Lysander “to the hell of impotence” (2133). Why?--because Behn has discovered a stratagem for bringing sexual intimacy to her imagination, without inviting upon herself a “vast pleasure . . . which too much love destroys” (2132): a “vast pleasure turned to pain” (2132). Lysander’s “destiny” is no accident: Lysander must suffer so that the nymph does not. The nymph who is “Abandoned by her pride and shame, / She does her softest joys dispense, / Offering her virgin innocence / A victim to love’s sacred flame” (21312132) is the same nymph who leaves Lysander “fainting on the gloomy bed” (2133), with “No print upon the grassy road . . . / to instruct pursuing eyes” (2133). The virgin whose innocence would have been lost, changing her nature (to shame?) forever, leaves the poetic world an eternal mythic Daphne, leaving the reader alone with Lysander and his griefs swelling into storms, cursing his [Lysander’s] birth, fate and stars. He, and he alone, is left to feel shame. Yet, despite his shame being due to his inability to consummate his love (lust), and despite the likelihood that we leave the poem thinking “disappointment” a precise, and exact word to summarize what we read, this testifies more to Behn’s art at misdirection, than to a lack of ambiguous description: The verses

we read of Cloris before and after his inability to perform, are just, or nearly, as appropriate for usage if he had been able to do so. Imagine after finally “Offering her virgin innocence” (2132), Lysander performed, wouldn’t having her return from a trance, explore and finding a disarmed “snake,” be just as appropriate if he had discharged as if he had not? In both cases her lover would have been left with no spark for new desire: he would be more a “shepherd” than a “general.” Is it possible that Behn has imagined a way for a woman whose nature would be adversely changed by a sexual act (a virgin’s mythic-like status, in this case) to “experience” a sexual encounter with both the reader, and the writer, thinking otherwise, and therefore consequently without incurring a loss of status or, more importantly, harsh self-judgment? If the descriptions offered are close enough to actual sex, and if this sexual encounter, if it had occurred, is of the sort to bring to the reader or the writer a feeling that someone should be “punished,” then this punishment “falls” on only one of the two involved--in this case, our poor Lysander. Neither the Nymph nor our narrator Behn is left “anywhere in sight”: the nymph “o’er the fatal plain” (2133), our narrator with our nymph imagining her resentments, (supposedly) unable to “guess Lysander’s soul” (2133). We know though, that as much as Behn wishes to identify with the nymph, that this is largely because she wants to detach herself--so as to not too closely identity herself with--from Lysander, and not because she is truly incapable of imagining his “soul.” We discover in Oroonoko that Behn was revealingly contemplative of the nature of souls who nature has abandoned, leaving a desire that cannot be satisfied.

My reader might be thinking that I want to link Lysander’s situation with that of the King of Coramantien in Oroonoko. I do--but only as a way of working to my way to a discussion of Onahal. The King, indeed, like Lysander, has a passion for a young beauty--Imoinda--that because of “nature,” the decrees of time, he is unable to consummate: he is left, like Lysander, embarrassingly impotent. When Oroonoko considers “laying violent hands on himself” (2158), reason finally prevails when “They [his followers] urged all to him that might oppose his rage; but nothing weighed so greatly with him as the King’s old age, incapable of inuring him with Imoinda” (2158). A reasonable Oroonoko begins to realize that there may be a way for him to claim Imoinda after all, and the “plot to rescue a princess” introduces us to another antiquated would-be lover, Onahal, “a past mistress . . . of the old king” (2161). With Onahal, we have Behn offering us, for both her and our contemplation, a woman who like Behn at the time of writing Oroonoko, is subject to the “despites and decays of time” (2161). For Onahal, being robbed by nature, reacts much like Lysander: she does not spare her fury: “[She] treated the triumphing happy ones with all the severity, as to liberty and freedom, that was possible, in revenge of those honors they rob [her] off” (2161). Onahal, like Lysander, has been left the desire, and a hope that she too might again be seen as desirable by a young man of the best quality (Aboan): This young man was not only one of the best quality, but a man extremely well made and beautiful; and coming often to attend the King to the otan, he had subdued the heart of the antiquated Onahal, which had not forgot how pleasant it was to be in love. And though she had some decays in her face, she had none in her sense and wit; she was

there agreeable still, even to Aboan’s youth, so that he took pleasure in entertaining her with discourses of love. (2161) Onahal’s desire is manipulated by Oroonoko and Aboan to bring Oroonoko to Imoinda. But this “comes at a price”: Aboan must “suffer . . . himself to be caressed in bed by Onahal” (2164). Onahal might be unaware of her failure to charm Aboan, but those who would identify themselves with her, living vicariously through her, understand that her caresses, to a young lover, are something to be suffered. The only way of relating between a young man and an older woman where both can take pleasure is through conversation. However, to a clever and imaginative writer, who might like Onahal, still hope that she [could] make some impressions [on a young man’s] heart” (2161), this is a discovery which adds to Behn’s fictional resources, in her own battle between her wits and her nature (age). Behn has learned two very important things from her writings of Onahal and Aboan: first, as mentioned, that there is an acceptable way in which a young man could be charmed by an older woman, which allows for imagining intimacy, reciprocal, “caressive” exchanges, which are not subject to self-punitive accusations; second, that there is a fictional role--as a “gatekeeper”-- based on real advantages of the aged, that can introduce, and perhaps necessitate, the introduction of an older woman into a story purportedly about young lovers. Onahal, as a past mistress, is a “guardian . . ., or governant . . . to the new and young ones [Imoinda]” (2161). Aboan must “compl[y]. . . with her desires” (2161). . . “For then, . . . her life lying at [his]. . . mercy, she must grant

[him] . . . the request [he] make[s] in . . . [Oroonoko’s] behalf” (2162). Oroonoko uses the advantages he has at his disposal--a beautiful proxy in Aboan--to realize his desire to be with Imoinda, just as Behn uses the advantages she has as a writer--the ability to create a proxy in Onahal--to explore the consequences of a sexual encounter between an older woman and a younger man. What Behn learns from this exploration, combined with what she learned from “The Disappointment,” will be put to use in the second part of Oroonoko (beginning with Oroonoko’s arrival in Surinam) where Behn, the writer, brings herself as close as is likely possible for her to imagine “having subdued the finest of all the King’s subjects to her desires” (2162) without self-reproof. Regrettably, the consequences for her “lover” Oroonoko, as we shall see, are as dire as for her other fictional prop, Lysander. In the second part of Oroonoko, Behn does what Onahal wanted but could not do: “[to subdue] the finest of all the King’s subjects to her desires” (2162) without becoming a fool. She captures the attention and compliance of Oroonoko, in the same way that Onahal does Aboan, by establishing that the key to his desires (freedom in this case) lies through her. She engages with Oroonoko in a back and forth manner in which each “caresses” each other’s concerns, much as Onahal and Aboan do. She sets the scene for a sexual encounter much as she does with Onahal and Aboan, but “handles” the consummation in a fashion inspired by Cloris and Lysander: explicitly, no sex occurs, but an encounter is described in such a way that it certainly evokes much of the same passions in the reader as if it had. Behn, unlike Onahal, is thus much like Cloris in being

unaffected by the encounter, and Oroonoko is much like Onahal in that he immediately encounters a change in status for the worse: Sharing the same fate as poor Lysander, he is “damned” to rage his way through the rest of her novel. I will expand on each of these clever narrative “steps” in turn. Similar in nature to Onahal’s relation to Aboan (and Oroonoko), Behn makes it clear to Oroonoko that to get what he desires he must satisfy her needs. Oroonoko calls Behn a “Great Mistress” (2177), a title akin to the labels--a past mistress, a guardian, a governant--attached to Onahal, a woman who Oroonoko knew “that to make his court to these she-favorites was the way to be great; these being the persons that do all affairs and business at court” (2161). Behn spells out her own power over Oroonoko saying, “[should he make her doubt him] It would but give us a fear of him, and possibly compel us to treat him so as I should be very loath to behold: that is, it might occasion his confinement” (2176). However, although Behn, as a character does not do so, Behn as a writer makes the same claim on Oroonoko that Onahal did with Aboan: To re-unite with Imoinda, she must herself receive sexual satisfaction. Imoinda is only twice referred to after Behn meets with Oroonoko until she has completed her “sports” with him. The first reference to her is when Behn refers to her in third person saying that she entertained her “with teaching her all the pretty works that I was mistress of and telling her stories of nuns, and endeavoring to bring her to the knowledge of the true God” (2177). Behn, like Onahal, treats the young beauty with “all the severity, as to liberty and freedom, that was possible in revenge of those honors they rob them of” (2161). Behn, in telling her stories

of nuns, temporarily has the reader think of Imoinda as celibate, stripping her of the sexual aura she is due as a young “nymph” and thereafter removes her from the story until her own desires are satisfied. The second reference to Imoinda is when Oroonoko complains to Behn that he fears Behn may play a part in preventing him, along with Imoinda, from returning to his own kingdom. He is wise to suspect her, for Behn indeed “holds Imoinda hostage,” just like the envious governess Onahal does, releasing her only after Behn finishes her sports with Oroonoko. (We are then told as a revealing afterthought--as if the young bride was the furthest thing from her mind--that her despite her invisibility in the text Imoinda “was [also] a sharer in all our adventures” (2183). As a prelude to romance, Behn interacts with Oroonoko in the same “socially accepted” way in which Onahal does with Aboan: they converse. This allows for the same kind of back and forth sequence of each partner reassuring each other that we saw with Onahal and Aboan which Aboan intended as a way of courting Onahal: through a gradual soothing of anxieties we see in lovers engaged in “foreplay.” Keep in mind when reading a description of this foreplay in Oroonoko--so as to not misconstrue this true nature of the conversational exchanges between “lovers” therein--the back and forth sequence of tension, and easing of tension in the passage of overt foreplay between Cloris and Lysander that Behn offers in “The Disappointment”: Her bright eyes sweet, and yet severe, Where love and shame confusedly strive, Fresh vigor to Lysander give; And breathing faintly in his ear, She cried, “Cease, cease your vain desire,

Or I’ll call out--what would you do? My dearer honor even to you I cannot, must not give--retire, Or take this life, whose chiefest part I gave you with the conquest of my heart.” When Aboan (after “The whole affair being agreed upon between the Prince” (2162) and himself) is engaged by Onahal, she sighs and cries and asks when he “will . . . be sensible of my passion” (2162). She is fearful that her eyes had already given her away, and wonders if her beauty is enough to sway him. Aboan sooths her fears telling her that her beauty “can still conquer” (2162), and that “he longs for more certain proofs of love than speaking and sighing” (2162; emphasis mine). We are told she speaks again, but with a different tone (one as if “she hope it true, and could not forbear believing it” (2162)) and offers him gifts of pearls--symbols of beauty that never wane with time--which prompts Aboan to reassure her that he is interested only in her (charmed, presumably, by her still extant beauty). She forces the pearls into his hands anyway, and links this act to a proposed setting where she will receive him. All of this justifies why they take care “that no notice might be taken of their speaking together” (2162), because “speaking,” “talking,” are mere cover for more accurate verbs to summarize the action they partake in like flirting and courting. This “talking,” presumably, is pleasurable for both parties, for Behn makes it clear to us that as Onahal has lost “none in her sense and wit” (2161), Aboan would take “pleasure in entertaining her with discourses of love” (2161). Behn has a similar exchange which leads to the same sense of “clearing the way” for an intimate relationship with Oroonoko. But Behn, the writer, precedes their talking, by

first linking the two of them in our imagination telling us that Oroonoko “was impatient to come down to Parham House. . . to give me an account of what had happened. I [Behn] was as impatient to make these lovers a visit” (2175). Behn “cheats”--they seem appropriate “companions” before ever meeting. Again, we are told that “this new accident made him more impatient of liberty” (2176), which offers the two, like with Onahal and Aboan, (and as with Cloris and Lysander) opportunities to soothe each others anxieties, while slowly reaching a mood where both partners are ready for sex. Behn entertains him and “charms him to my company” (2176). He admits that “these conversations failed not altogether so well to divert him” and that “ he liked the company of us women much above men” (2176). This is where we hear he calls Behn a “Great Mistress,” and how her word goes “a great way with him” (2176). Later he confesses that he fears his overt behavior might make her break her word with him. She responds, and in doing so makes a mistake in mentioning the word “confinement” which she “strove to soften again in vain” (2176). But he assures her that he would not do harm [to the white people] and that, as for herself, “he would sooner forfeit his eternal liberty, and life itself , than lift his hand against his greatest enemy on the place” (2176). After their mutual reassurances, Behn tells us that he is again impatient, “full of a spirit all rough and fierce . . . that could not be tamed to lazy rest” (2177) and is eager to exercise himself in . . . actions and sports” (2177). They then part, and meet again to “sport” after Behn describes the her garden at St. John’s Hill. Before comparing the description of this garden and its similarity of the setting for

sexual gratification for Onahal and Aboan, note that Behn and Oroonoko share a conversational exchange which is very similar to that we saw between Onahal and Aboan. Oroonoko, like Onahal, admit that they feel their own “undisguised,” over eager behavior has ruined a realization of their desires. Behn, like Aboan, is then offered a chance to reassure her “partner.” But Behn is then put in the position of Onahal in expressing her own fears, which Oroonoko can quell with an extended declaration of the seriousness of his promise not to harm her. We are further told by Oroonoko, as we were with Aboan, that they are impatient for activity other than conversation: for Aboan “those few minutes we have are forced to be snatched for more certain proof of love than speaking and sighing; and such I languish for” (2162; emphasis mine), while Oroonoko is suddenly impatient for sports and vigorous activity. While “languish” is the adjective directly linked to sex in Oroonoko, we may remember reading in “The Disappointment” of “One day the amorous Lysander, / By an impatient passion swayed” (2130; emphasis mine) . . . . We know that that the activity that Aboan will be up to is sex, and we know this about the setting for the initial setting for his re-uniting with Onahal: it will be at a “grove of the otan, which was all of oranges and citrons.” Aboan and Oroonoko are instructed to wait there, where subsequently Oroonoko will be lead to the bed of Imoinda, and Aboan to the bedroom of Onahal. Before Oroonoko and Behn engage in their sports, Behn tells us about her house on St. John’s Hill, which has a “grove of orange and lemon trees” (2178). In fact, over a few succeeding paragraphs we are saturated with romantic imagery: Behn

is preparing for herself, as she once prepared for Clovis, “ a lone thicket made for love” (2130): We are told of an “eternal spring” (2179), of “trees, bearing at once all degrees of leaves and fruit from blooming buds to ripe autumn, groves of oranges, lemons, citrons, figs nutmegs, and noble aromatics, continually bearing heir fragrancies” (2178). Of this grove we are told she is sure that “the whole globe of the world cannot show so delightful a place as this grove was” (2178). And then, once described, she is now herself anxious for action telling us: “But to our sports” (2178). Appropriate to a scene I believe to be sexual in nature, the sports have about them the feel of a hot “bedroom” encounter which Aboan and Onahal actually have and which follows the spring like, courting mood, evoked by an image of orange groves. Certainly Behn has moved from a mention of an “eternal spring” (2178) to a mention of “the hot countries” (2181). Behn spares us “the details” with Onahal and Aboan, but it is better in any case for us to have “The Disappointment” in mind when we read Behn’s detailing of her sports with Oroonoko. In “The Disappointment,” Behn uses a telling metaphor when describing Lysander’s penis: it is a “snake.” But this is when she is writing in mock-pastoral mode--when he is a “shepherd.” It is perhaps, though, not too bold a conjecture that had the penis been featured when she is writing in mock-epic mode that the penis might have been referred to as a “sword.” Oroonoko is, like Lysander, a mighty warrior: he is Caesar!--and thus no shepherd: “he took Mr. Martin’s sword [desiring] him to stand aside, of follow the ladies” (2179) and “he met this monstrous beast [a tiger they are hunting]of might, size

and vast limbs, who came with open jaws upon him, and fixing his awful stern eyes full upon those of the beast, and putting himself into a very steady and good aiming posture of defense, ran his sword quite through his breast down to his very heart, home to the hilt of the sword” (2179). Once he has killed the tiger, Behn rejoins him ( she had previously run away) and sees him lug “out the sword from the bosom of the tiger who was laid in her blood on the ground” (2179) and turns and hands a cub at the feet of Behn. I believe that this passage arouses our passions in much the same way as if we had witnessed a sexual encounter between Behn and Oroonoko. Like Lysander who was “Ready to taste a thousand joys” (2132), Oroonoko “meets this monstrous beast” (2178). Like Cloris, who leaves the scene in the sense of entering into a trance which she must awaken from, Behn has fled. When Cloris returns from her trance, and when Behn returns to the scene, both encounter an “item” similar in nature to a penis which has lost its potency, i.e., a flaccid penis. Lysander’s penis is a “flower” and is soft from an inability to bring “fleeting vigor back” (2132), while Oroonoko lugs his sword-suggesting a slow, withdrawal of a discharged penis since previously when he “ran his sword through” (2179) suggested the quick penetration of an alert penis. Mentioning the cub, with her terrifying parent no longer alive, has the same effect of mentioning flowers after a sexual encounter: it mimics the relaxed mood of consummated love. Further, if we take Oroonoko laying the cub at her feet as a presentation of a gift, this action mimics the giving of pearls from Onahal to Aboan, which we know was closely linked to an

anticipated sexual encounter between the two of them. In fact, to provide and receive gifts is the primary motivation for further sports. He asks, “What trophies and garlands, ladies, will you make, if I bring you the heart of this ravenous beast . . .?” (2179). Behn tells us, “We all promised he should be rewarded at all our hands” (2179). The hunting of tigers is explicitly linked here to rewards by women, including Behn, and Behn, as the writer of “The Disappointment,” has clearly shown herself capable of making a link between trophies and sexual consummation, writing: “All her unguarded beauties lie / The spoils and trophies of the enemy” (2131). If we are not convinced that Behn might imagine at some level a sword as a metaphor for a penis, we must still note that a snake--or a near-snake-- makes its appearance in the passages describing the sports. There is a “numb eel” (2180)--an eel which Behn had eaten. If not satisfied with a mere near-snake, we might note, anticipating the sports, Behn tells us the Oroonoko is eager to both “kill tigers of a monstrous size, and wonderful snakes such as Alexander is reported to have encountered at the river of Amazons” (2177). But if we are in the mood to allow some latitude with possible metaphoric linkages for a penis, we might allow that along with swords, snakes, and eels, that fishing rods and flutes--also featured in these passages--are also obvious metaphors a poet might, at least at some level, substitute for and to imply a penis; especially if we consider the effect some of the imagery Behn offers of the natives behavior to her in creating the “surround” in which we consciously, or subliminally, “take” these ambiguous nouns to mean:

By degrees they grew more bold, and from gazing upon us round, they touched us, laying their hands upon all the features of our faces, feeling our breasts and arms, taking up one petticoat, then wondering to see another, admiring our shoes and stockings, but more our garters, which we gave them, and they tied about their legs . . . . In fine, we suffered them to survey us as they pleased, and we thought they would never have done admiring us. (2181) We should note that Oroonoko is absent here, just as Behn had been absent from Oroonoko’s encounter (but with both encounters described as wondrous), but this very absence is suggestive as I will now hope to prove. Behn uses a technique she develops in “The Disappointment” where a reading experience of having at some level witnessed a consummated sexual encounter occurs, but where explicitly at least, no such action took place. Both Oroonoko and Behn have strongly sexualized encounters where in each case one of them is absent from the scene, yet once consummated--with the lugging out of the sword, or with the natives finally finishing their surveying--the absent partner suddenly reappears. Yet there is a sense where the absent partner is present all along-- is a ravenous beast, for example who fixes “her long nails in his flesh” (2166), so different an image from the horny Onahal who actively “took her dear Aboan . . . where he suffered himself to be caressed in bed?” (2166). And if we accept, as I am in the process of arguing, that Onahal must be seen as a version of Behn, a proxy for her in the nature and intensity of her desires, then perhaps Behn is partially present, as the partner, as the tiger, in Oroonoko’s encounter. And are the natives so different from Oroonoko, when as “general” Caesar, he “had in mind to see and talk with their war captains” who, although he considered their “courage too brutal”

(2182), “he [nevertheless] expressed his esteem of them?” (2183). They are all linked together as men of war, but while Oroonoko dismembers beasts as trophies of his bravery, the natives dismember themselves. (Note, too, that shortly after the sports, Behn writes: “Caesar [Oroonoko] spoke like a great captain.) After the sports, Imoinda re-enters the book and is linked again with Oroonoko--just as earlier, after we learn of what befalls Aboan in the bedroom with Onahal, we finally read of a sexual union between the two of them. I think this is evidence that the reading experience of the sports would be satisfying for anyone who could identify with Onahal’s desire to believe that she still has a “rest of beauty enough engaging . . . enough to be desirable” (2162) hoping [she] “can have lovers still” (2162) and who would not themselves allow a young pair to re-unite until her own passions were satisfied. I believe this is Behn’s wish as much as Onahal’s; but because Onahal’s confession of her passion, once linked to its realization, leads to a shameful situation where her audience (the reader) knows that her physical charms were false--they had no effect on Aboan (other than perhaps to repulse him)--and her rapture in sex was for him a suffering, even with Behn’s better disguised affair (so that “no notice might be taken” (2162)), some shame would arise from contriving this affair. Fortunately, for Behn, she has learned this shame can be dissipated by the same art that brought it about: she can “assign” all of the consequences of shameful behavior to only one of those involved. Therefore it is no surprise Oroonoko ends up sharing Lysander’s miserable fate. Lysander, after Cloris flees him, has “His silent griefs swell up to storms, / And not

one god his fury spares; / He cursed his birth, his fate, his stars” (2133). Shortly after the sports, Oroonoko’s griefs also swell up to storms--and he seems to exempt little of their daily life exempt from his curses, especially not their own acquiescence to their situation: Caesar [Oroonoko] . . . made a harangue to them 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, senseless brutes than human souls. He told them it was not for days, months, or years, but for eternity; there was no end to be of their misfortunes They suffered not like men who might find a glory and fortitude in oppression, but like dogs that loved the whip and bell, and fawned the more they were beaten. That they had lost the divine quality of men, and were become insensible asses, fit only to bear, Nay worse, an ass, or dog, or horse having done his duty, could lie down in retreat, and rise to work again, and while he did his duty endured no stripes; but men, villainous, senseless men such as they, toiled 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 sorded stripes, from their fellow slaves till their blood trickled from all parts of their body, blood whose every drop ought to be revenged with a life of some of those tyrants that impose it. “And why,” said he, “my dear friends and fellow sufferers, should we be slaves to an unknown people? Have they vanquished us nobly in fight? Have they won us in honorable battle? And are we, by the chance of war, become their slaves? This would not anger a noble heart, this would not animate a soldier’s soul. No, but we are bought and sold like apes, or monkeys, to be the sport of women, fools, and cowards, and the support of rogues, runagades, that have abandoned their own countries, for raping, murders, thefts, and villainies. Do you not hear every day how they upbraid each other with infamy of life below the wildest salvages, and shall we render obedience to such a degenerate race, who have no one human virtue left to distinguish them from the vilest creatures? Will you, I say, suffer the lash from such hands?” (2184)

He, like Lysander, who after cursing his birth, his fate, and his stars, concludes by cursing the “soft bewitching influence” of a woman (2133), concludes his own diatribe [at the end of which the slaves all agree and bow] by saying: “But if there were a woman among them so degenerate from love and virtue to chose slavery before the pursuit of her husband, and with the hazard of her life to share with him in his fortunes, that such a one ought to be abandoned, and left as a prey to the common enemy” (2185). Quite a change in Oroonoko here from the one who asked of Behn, “What trophies and garlands, ladies, will you make me, if I bring you home the heart of this ravenous beast” (2181), and who “made it his business to search out and provide for our entertainment” (2183). But the effect of reading this very lengthy “heated” diatribe is, purely by its enormous, intimidating, aggressive emotional force, to have the sports which immediately preceded it “cower” into our subconscious memory--and so, too, our coupling of Behn and Oroonoko who never again interact so closely with each other. Oroonoko is made into a “monster of the wood” (2190) just after Behn begins to manifest herself more as a writer of the work Oroonoko than as a character within--and a writer who increasingly associates herself with qualities more and more distant from those of our “changed” Oroonoko: “We met on the river with Colonel Martin, a man of great gallantry, wit, and goodness, and, whom I have celebrated in a character of my new comedy, by his own name, in memory of so brave a man. he was wise and eloquent . . .” (2189). Meanwhile, on several levels, Oroonoko exists a world apart: “his grief swelled

up to rage; he tore, he raved, he roared, like some monster of the wood” (2190). Behn actually distances herself from Oroonoko in several ways. First, she attempts to convince us that her sports were a mere digression, and exist in the text only so that she omits nothing of her character, i.e., had she omitted the sports she would have been guilty of not chronicling the daring of a great man, thus hoping to convince her readers and herself that the sole purpose of the novel is to faithfully chronicle the life of a great man, who, because he is great, must have his chronicles recorded. Then, from a chronicler, whose relationship with her subject implies a respectable distance between them, she moves to being a writer of comedies and thus a writer interested in many other kinds of subjects--thereby defusing her attachment to Oroonoko as only subject of interest amongst many. Second, as Behn “flies” existentially further and further from her text Oroonoko--forward to the “present” time of writing, forward to England--Oroonoko, despite his rage, and action, is doomed to be trapped, and killed on the remote island Surinam. Third, as we have seen, Oroonoko becomes of a nature where it might seem less and less plausible that Behn “might guess his soul” (2133). Why, one might ask, is all this necessary since the Behn who is a character in the novel is a much younger Behn (adolescent?) and, presumably, considering the norms of the time, should not feel guilty presenting an Oroonoko who found her attractive, though not as desirable as his Imoinda, and spent time flirting with her? Obviously the explanation is in part because Oroonoko must play to a stereotype in order to be a great Prince (he must only have eyes for his true love) (though this too demands the question

why Behn must write about a great Prince), but I will argue that the primary reason is because Behn--the character Behn that sports with Oroonoko--is, in a sense, the same age as the writer is when writing the work so as to help intensify the feeling that the sports are happening to the writer Behn during the here-and-now of the time of writing! Note that Behn plays the role of a great governess, a role we have been instructed to associate with the aged. Note that Behn emphasizes her skill in conversation, a skill along with wit, we have been told is a skill so prominent in the aged that it can substitute for charms no longer available. And note, especially, that the scene of the sports is a near mirror image of the scene involving the aged Onahal: Oroonoko and Aboan’s sport “to rescue a princess.” Someone might also object to the idea that the fate of Oroonoko must fit the psychological needs of the author, since his fate--at least his execution--is a match for the real historical Charles I, implying that the really relevant part of the novel for the royalist Behn must be the end of the piece. I would argue that this supposition arises as a consequence of being fooled by an authorial misdirection. Behn needs for both herself and her readers to think that the novel is primarily a faithful, pious, recording of a great man’s life. Why?--because she must disarm in herself (and in us, her imagined and real readers and critics) her poetic imagination when reading the piece. This is crucial, because if we turn to the work alert for poetic structures, and word usage, Behn’s intentions for writing the piece are clear--no longer hidden from view. Behn has told us, through Onahal, that there is a distinction between “words” and

“action.” Harold Weber writes that “speaking and thinking venery [sexual desires] define the limits of a woman’s sexual prerogatives: to indulge those thoughts, to turn speech into action, confronts female characters . . . with the vast gulf between the maid or wife and the whore” (The Restoration Rake-Hero 133). Yet women are in a bind because “[e]ven though libertine attitudes depended on assumptions that would seem to promise acceptance of female sexuality, women remained unable to enjoy the sexual liberties taken for granted by men. Women after the Restoration, even among the most debauched section of the population, occupy a world of strict sexual limitations” (Weber 148). There was a “severe morality directed against women when what all knew to go on in private suddenly became public. . . [:] all the prudery of the Court was let loose . . . [,] vociferous in demanding justice” (Weber 148). Yet we cannot imagine that division between writing about sexual desires and acting upon them was anything other than tenuously defined at this time--just as it was not between private and public life. (Indeed, Jane Spencer writes in her Aphra Behn’s Afterlife of Behn’s awareness of her partial image as one of “author-whore” (Spencer 21).) Behn was well aware of the lack of solidity between divisions of private and public life as a consequence of being a successful playwright in the theatrical world: Yet the public ridicule she suffered reveals the very high price she had to pay for her success. . . . In attempting to move outside of the restricted roles ordinarily occupied by women, Behn became a convenient target for those who refused to accept the participation of women in the larger social world: “To publish one’s work, then, was to make oneself ‘public’: to expose oneself to ‘the world.’ Women who did so violated their feminine modesty both by egressing from the private sphere which was their

proper domain and by permitting foreign eyes access to what ought to remain hidden and anonymous. (Weber 151) Weber tells us that Behn simply refused to remain anonymous, he reminds us that “in doing so . . . she placed herself in a position where both her morality and her femininity could be questioned” (Weber 151). So we have a position where women have very restricted opportunities for sexual gratification, in a libertine world where sexual desires are omnipotent; is it not then both fair and appropriate to assume that in the one area where sexual desire might be expressed, in writing, that these written words become so powerfully imagined to become in a very real sense a kind of action?1 And if any slip from private desire to public demonstration of this desire would be seized upon and transform a woman instantly from “respectability” to a “whore,” is it not likely that Behn would need to disguise from her readers, and from herself, a satisfaction of her sexual desires through her writing? The best way to distract both herself and her readers (very successfully, most critics seem to want to talk about colonialism, or political commentary

1 Consider Dr. Eric Miller’s conclusion that “writing is abstract and concrete at the same time” (Sept. 15/01).

in her work) is to bring into the story an execution of Oroonoko that couldn’t help but remind her contemporaries of the execution of Charles I. She offers us a dare: you wouldn’t be thinking of sex when I introduce so horrific an act to such a noble personage into the story, would you? Whether or not we answer no, we might at least to some extent disarm ourselves of the conceptual tools necessary for an alert poetic reading of her work so that we (especially, and more importantly, her contemporaries) are not in some way culpable for a disrespect of a great historical personage. She wants pious readers--not wits full of poetic aliveness ready to recognize the machinations of their kind. But if our minds are full of poetic aliveness then we must acknowledge that part of the “poetic algebra” (and “poetic geometry”) of Oroonoko is similar to that of “The Disappointment”: The number of words chronicling Oroonoko’s fate after the sports is probably not dissimilar, compared as a relation to the whole of Oroonoko, as the number of lines of verse chronicling Lysander’s fate after Cloris departs in “The Disappointment.” I believe that this has the effect of producing in Oroonoko, as in “The Disappointment,” a distancing of the narrator from her male protagonist. This distancing, required so we do not associate the passions aroused with the writer of the work in “The Disappointment,” is not as crucial for Behn in that work, because the passions are explored using mock-epic, mock-pastoral imagery, which naturally helps keep the writer firmly in mind as a “wit,” as a clever observer of the scene, but it is crucial in Oroonoko, where to close the distance between herself and her fictional lover, she tells us over and

over again that what she writes is a true account of what happened. By telling us immediately after the sports that she is offering a recording of actual happenings, she helps substantiate them as such: she is reminding herself that she is “describing” the sports--and not “narrating” them. This distinction is crucial because within lies an explanation of why Behn choose to write a chronicle of Oroonoko rather than a fictional novel Oroonoko. According to Howard Marchitello, “Description . . . resists the appropriative nature of possession that comes to characterize narrationality in which the other always exists secondarily - after the fact, as it were, of the narrator’s own primary and privileged existence” ( Narrative and meaning in early modern England 94; emphasis mine). By telling herself that she is offering a faithful record and describing events in the sese Marchitello offers us, Behn transforms them so that they seem more “outside herself.” Her veiled sexual exchange with Oroonoko becomes not passions created via her imagination, a product of her own mind, her own writing (and therefore a poor substitute), but, instead, passions generated in her as the consequence of the reception of actions of someone else towards her. Behn, in generating a writing experience which comes close to crossing the private / public divide--with all of its associated perilous consequences--is precariously involved in the passions of this text in a way she is not in “The Disappointment.” It is because the passions are made to feel so real by Behn’s skillful narrative techniques, that Oroonoko must, like Lysander, experience all kinds of compromising emotional states, making him a monster: Because Oroonoko is elevated to

a status where he is more than a narrative construct--is more than words, and nearly real-Behn is able to, and does, “dump” the equally real agitating emotions she experiences in creating and immersing herself in a near sexual encounter with Oroonoko into him. Thereby the terrible change of status normally due to a woman who compromise their virtues, is, as with Cloris, entirely left with their male partner: an ingenious--though brutal--solution. Alert to poetic configurations we would surely note in Oroonoko the “doubleness” of the sequence to rescue a princess in Coramantien, and the sporting sequence in Surinam. We would then have to admit to ourselves that the sequence in Coramantien, precisely because this is the sequence which finally leads to a re-union of Oroonoko with Imoinda, is the climax of the first part of Oroonoko--the part arousing the highest degree of interest due to it involving the satisfaction of a desire we have been bated into eagerly anticipating since the beginning of the work--and thus not be fooled into conceiving of the scene’s mirror image in part two as a mere diversion. The opposite is true: together both of these scenes form the “center” of the work--with everything else either leading up to and away from them--having an “algebraic” form similar to a chiasmus in poetry: that of AB / BA, where “A” is Oroonoko distant from Behn; the movement from “A” to “B” being a closing of this distance in the first half (“’tis fit I tell you the manner of bringing them to these new colonies” (2152); and “B” being where Oroonoko unites with a representative of the writer, this being Onahal, in part one, and Behn in part two. From “B” to “A”--the plot of the second half of the work--involves a movement of Behn and

Oroonoko together to him being, as I hope I have convincingly argued, remote from Behn once again. This is why criticism of Oroonoko that concentrates on anything other Behn’s use of the text to satisfy her own sexual desires, testifies to Behn’s skill as a writer: her expertise in poetic manipulations is such that she can camouflage what should be obvious: the scenic structure and the words we might focus on if Oroonoko was conceived as a poem. In Behn’s poem “The Disappointment,” Behn clearly demonstrates that words like “snake” are apt metaphors for a penis, and words like “trophy,” are apt metaphors for the object of a sexual conquest, yet, as I have shown, the sporting sequence is full of “penis seeming” nouns, contains several references to trophies, and Behn still claims (surprisingly convincingly considering how many critics consider the sequence odd, but only in the sense Behn hopes we might find it odd: a strange intrusion in a plot of greater significance, i.e., that perhaps could have been left out)) the sequence “testifies to . . . [Oroonoko’s] character!” (2185). Some contemporary critics have noted that Behn has created characters in Oroonoko who are well suited for being the “objects” of manipulations. Robert Chibka notes that Oroonoko is made to be “the perfect fool for the knaves who surround him” (“Oh! Do Not Fear a Woman’s Invention” 515) which Chibka believes is Oroonoko’s tragic flaw. But Chibka does not implicate Behn, the writer, herself, as one of these knaves: Even while noting that while “disdain[ing] the arrangement of a narrative “at the Poet’s pleasure,” . . . [Behn] admits to editing and arranging her story so that what was “pleasant

to us” need not “prove tedious and heavy to my Reader”” (Chibka 514), Pleasure (the reader’s not the poet’s) will indeed dictate the management of her story” (Chibka 514; emphasis mine). Chibka is no fool--he sees that “At times Oroonoko seems to resemble the Surinamese numb eel, making critics on contact lose their feel for narrative texture” (Chibka 511)--but he is naive enough to cut off the potential implications of his analysis by excluding the key knave from his analysis--Behn herself--and thus does not explore for Behn, as he does for the other knaves, the desires that make Oroonoko an “ideal” (Chibka 515) fool, and tool, for their satiation. Jane Spencer in her Aphra Behn’s Afterlife does implicate the writer Behn in a way Chibka chooses not to, in reference to Imoinda: she believes Behn uses Imoinda as a kind of proxy--but she shares with Chibka, a desire to interpret Behn’s intentions as born of virtuous intent. She writes: “Imoinda here is a fantasy substitute for the heroic action the narrator cannot take. The split between the two women expresses anxieties about narrative position: to take on a narrator’s authority, it seems, is also to accept a position on the fringes of the action, unable to intervene” (Spencer 232). Spenser’s argument is similar to mine in suggesting the writing of the text was so vivid and powerful for Behn that she would want to be part “of the action,” but also so different, both by suggesting that Behn’s position on “the fringes of action” was somehow forced upon her, and by arguing that Behn has well meaning intentions for our poor Oroonoko at this point of Oroonoko. I will quote Spencer again here because I believe this passage offers a symptomatic conception of Oroonoko and of Behn for contemporary critics:

Behn’s Oroonoko, then, is a troubled and opaque text, full of anxious claims and obscure quarrels. It is not a clear attack on the institution and practices of slavery, but the sympathetic treatment of Oroonoko and Imoinda, the descriptions of white cruelty, and even the narrator’s very inconsistencies and divided position, have the effect of presenting a disturbing picture of colonial life, and provide the germ for the later, abolitionist development of Oroonoko’s story. (Spencer 232) Spencer does note that, beginning especially with “the 1696 “Memoirs” of Behn, whether composed, compiled, or merely commissioned by [her friend Charles] Gildon” (Spencer 34), that eighteenth-century readers were drawn “to the titillating idea of a sexual relationship between Oroonoko and [Behn]” (Spencer 35). Spencer says that it was through a repetition of rumours and denials “that eighteenth-century readers approached Oroonoko alerted to the idea of intimacy between the writer and a hero who was understood to be authentic” (Spencer 35). I am arguing that we should be equally alert-but not as the result of being recipients of the spread of falsehoods, but as the appropriate state of mind of anyone who has read Behn’s published works and is thus familiar with her “toolkit”: the structure, and terms she uses in poems explicitly about female desire like in, for example, Behn’s “The Disappointment.” I have written that Behn herself would have been pleased by the reaction of contemporary critics to her works, because they have largely exonerated her of any wrong doing i.e., sinning, and focused their hostility towards other targets. Like Behn, who “dumped” disturbing passions into Lysander and Oroonoko, so she would be emptied of her own, critics have targeted men (or “patriarchical” institutions) and thus leave with us a near pristine Behn. Thereby Behn has achieved the wished for effect upon us she could not hope to create in her own

contemporaries. Still, even amongst her own contemporaries, Behn could be heralded as one who “did at once a Masculine wit express / And all the softness of a Femal tenderness” (Spencer 266). She could be compared to Eve, who although associated with the fall, was also “[their] first mother” (Spencer 266). Spencer tells us that, at the time of Behn’s death, the “idea of [Behn] as a female champion for other women to emulate proved a potent one in the following decade” (Spencer 31) even though at this time there were early anticipations of the “worries of many later women writers [her failure in virtue]” (Spencer 31). Spenser, like so many critics, sees an interpretation of Behn’s intention as a writer of vivid sexual fantasies as a regressive step backward. Spencer writes how a “link made between . . . Behn and Milton’s Eve illuminates the formation and masculinization of the English literary canon during the eighteenth century. It is only one example of the recurrent definition of her in terms of the sinful and sexual body as opposed to the heaven-seeking and spiritual mind of the male genius” (Spencer 267). Milton is allowed to be conceived in a way that I believe Behn wished to be conceived (at least in her work Oroonoko): “His choice of heavenly subject made the poet himself appear a spiritual figure, rising heavenwards” (Spencer 267). Behn, by contrast, with “her familiar, wordly-wise poetic persona and fictional narrator, her discussion of sex, political intrigue, and other mundane matters, and her choice of comedy and irony,” (Spencer, 267) could hardly be more opposite. Behn, and female poets in general, began to be conceived in such a way that “made so much more of her [and their] femininity and sexuality than of

her creativity” (Spencer 268). There arose the growth of a “myth about Behn, which both drew on received notions of the relationship between a female writer and her work, and set the tone for the reception of later women writers. The myth is that Behn’s writing reflects a life pre-eminently concerned with sexual love” (Spencer 20). And Spencer tells us that “To discuss an author’s life in this way--as the story of her writing career--always risks leaving the impression that this is the way she herself thought about it” (Spencer 21; emphasis mine); something, as I have shown, Spencer attempts to exonerate Behn from. I am well aware that intentionally thinking of Behn as a woman of overflowing passions was once related to an establishment of separate spheres, where a woman’s natural passions suit her for domesticity and a man’s intellect, and reason suit him for public life. (Though I am equally aware that historians are increasingly arguing that the rhetoric of separate spheres either occurred during, and possibly or even probably facilitated, an increase in the involvement of women in the public sphere (see the works of Linda Colley, and, especially, the recent work by Anne Mellor).) I think it is likely that a good portion of an eighteenth-century interpretation of Behn’s works as involving a highly sexualized encounter between the writer and the characters was dishonest, in that this criticism was shaped by an unfortunate desire to restrict the place and status of the work of female poets. Still, the interpretation, was, never-the-less, a highly accurate one. It would have been much more accurate had the interpretation involved a firm recognition of the wit, and creativity required to create a space where a writer and reader’s passions might be indulged in; but to my mind, it is

infinitely more accurate a reading of her works than ones where Behn seems primarily motivated by, or is conceived in relation to, social reform. The real problem for us moderns is to recognize that such an appraisal need not be a put down! It is a tribute to Behn, and a call for her revival as a writer to be celebrated, made all the more convincing because she was not in the mold of the preferred eighteenth-century man of reason! How immensely dull this conception was--in my mind to have denigrated the sexual passions, and have them assigned to woman, neutered men to exploring exactly the kinds, and intensities, of feelings and passions that make life most worth living. Behn lived at a time where the sexual appetite could at least be recognized and praised by men (reader, please note I do not really mean to salute the kind of sexual pleasures recognized and acted upon in libertine culture, merely to tip my hat to a non-moralizing exploration of sexual desire), but where women still faced conception as a whore if they were known to act upon their sexual impulses. Further, a younger woman was the only appropriate target for sexual amours: the desires in older women were fit only for ridicule. For Behn to create a simulacrum world in a history / novel that allowed for a near satisfaction of this desire is an imaginative creation that should be celebrated. As for the idea that women must have their “base” passions removed so as to enlighten us to their own intellectual prowess, I have two responses: first, the millennium (plus)long “elevation of the cognitive over the emotional aspect of our mind” (Greenspan, The Growth of the Mind 2) which has so profoundly influenced Western thought, needs to be exorcised so as to stop haunting our present; second, if we create or need such a world, you can be sure

that I, for one, will start turning to “romance novels” in an attempt to live in a more humanly satisfying world. And to those who would frown upon me, rather than share my fate: I’m with “Cindy Crawford” at a remote island in the South Pacific--how ’bout you?