by Steven Moore
Oroonoko understands faith as a bond between honest people, and learns “there was no faith in the white men or the gods they adored who instructed them in principles so false that honest men could not live amongst them” (66), and this is what Oroonoko is ultimately about: the challenge of being “a model of absolute virtue isolated in a politically and socially corrupt environment,” as Ros Ballaster writes, a “dramatization of the destructive confrontation between a concept of absolute moral justice . . . and the contingencies of political and social survival.”71 Oroonoko’s self-martyrdom convinces the narrator that religion is not a solution but a contribution to that corrupt environment.
By the end, it’s clear that Oroonoko is as much about the narrator’s moral growth as it is about the title character’s destruction. The narrator is essentially Behn herself, who evidently spent a few years spying in Surinam in the 1660s (when the novel is set) and who refers at one point to a play she had just written. Although she claims in the first paragraph to be telling a true story, she created the fantasy figure of Oroonoko as a beard behind whom she could express doubts about many of the verities she grew up with: the superiority of whites over blacks, of Western values over pagan, of Christian practices over heathen, and so on. She uses the African as a ventriloquist’s dummy to express subversive ideas that would have drawn fire if uttered in her own voice, such as her criticism of Charles II’s colonial policies, and sometimes acts embarrassed at what her “dummy” says: During one of his diatribes against Christianity, she cuts him off in the middle of “a thousand things of this nature, not fit here to be recited” (66). Nonetheless, she admires both Oroonoko and Imoinda and boasts of the role she played in finishing their Western education: “I entertained him with the lives of the Romans and great men, which charmed him to my company, and her with teaching her all the pretty works that I was mistress of, and telling her stories of nuns. . . .” (49).72 Sometimes she takes center stage, daringly so when she describes her female party’s first encounter with Surinam Indians as Oroonoko watches from the bushes: “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, being laced with silver lace at the ends, for they much esteem any shining things. In fine, we suffered [allowed] them to survey us as they pleased, and we thought they would never have done admiring us” (57). This extraordinary spectacle is intended for the reader as much as it is for Oroonoko, a demonstration that she is as brave and unabashed as men are (just as in her plays Behn showed she could be as bawdy as any man).
This demonstration of female bravery and freedom from sexual stereotypes makes the narrator’s subsequent display of stereotypical female cowardice all the more shocking. After Oroonoko is captured and tortured, she makes a stunning confession: “You must know, that when the news was brought on Monday morning that [Oroonoko] 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 secure himself till night, and then 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, [the English colonists] acted this cruelty. For I suppose I had authority and interest enough there, had I suspected any such thing, to have prevented it . . .” (68). This is a devastating admission of bad faith and betrayal, a reversion to the worst racial fears, and a rejection of individuality as she blends in with “all the females.” Writing this novella 20 years after the alleged events is an attempt to redeem herself, to man up and show as much courage as Oroonoko did in denouncing debased Western ways. Her courage failed her then, and she apologizes halfway through that Oroonoko has “only a female pen to celebrate his fame” (43), but she concludes her tale on a more confident note: “I hope the reputation of my pen is considerable enough to make his glorious name to survive to all the ages, with that of the brave, the beautiful, and the constant Imoinda” (76–77).
To do so, Behn had to clean up her black heathen to make him an acceptable tragic hero for English readers. Despite its African and South American settings, Oroonoko is essentially a European romance in blackface. Rather than make Oroonoko authentically African, Behn makes him as European as possible in looks and education (he had a French tutor and speaks English); one of her first references to him is as a “gallant Moor,” which evokes Shakespeare’s Othello, as does his murder of his wife at the end. The only difference between Imoinda and the “constant” maidens of romantic fiction is that she’s covered in tattoos. There’s considerable novelty in the settings, of course, which has led one critic to call Oroonoko “the earliest American novel,” but the exotica is mostly window-dressing for what is at heart a heroic romance.73 What’s new is the graphic violence, the “noble savage” character type that would attract Voltaire and Rousseau in the next century, and especially the complex narrative stance, where the first-person narrator is not the protagonist (as in most first-person novels) but a combination of spectator, co-protagonist, and authorial persona. In one sense Oroonoko is the story how Behn found her voice as a confident, sophisticated, heterodox novelist, and if true she dashed this off at one sitting, that’s one more reason readers “will never have done admiring” her.
The 450-page Love Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister is an anomaly; with few exceptions, most English novels published during the last two decades of the 17th century are Oroonoko-size novellas that expanded the novel’s palette, as that exotic romance did. Like Behn, Alexander Oldys (1636–1708) was a playwright who turned to fiction, adapting stage techniques for two short and innovative comic novels. The Fair Extravagant (1682) consists mostly of dialogue and soliloquies; indeed, “what we have here is a stage comedy in narrative form,” as Mish observes.74 It begins like a takeoff on Don Quixote: a rich teenage heiress named Ariadne lives in London in a house she has decorated with paintings of “Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, which hung just over against Amadis de Gaul, and directly opposite to Oroondates and Cæsario in combat when they had mistaken one another, with many more fantasticks” (3). Her library, like Alonso Quijana’s, is an incongruous mix of the good and bad, updated to reflect a Restoration lady’s indiscriminate reading habits:
Nor were her books better matched. Here you might see Frances Quarles bound up with George Withers, Sir John Suckling and Sir John Denham, Randolph and Broom, Shakespeare and Jonson (though they could hardly ever agree before), Beaumont and Fletcher (you know) always were together; many other modern poets were piled in a heap: my Lord Rochester was laid aside, only Mr. Cowley stood alone; but what was most pleasant of all, this satirical pretty lady bound Rabelais with Dod upon Cleaver.75 In short, here lay a play, there a sermon; here an academy [academic treatise], there a prayer-book; here a romance, and there a Bible: not but that she was a good Christian for all this I dare say. Now be pleased to take notice, when she was weary of singing and dancing, she did often read in one or other of these books, especially romances, for she was a great lover of knight errantry, and was a little that way addicted. . . . (3–4)
On the edge of 17 and “weary of that oppressing weight of a maidenhead, which I have labored under these five long years” (5), Ariadne decides to sally forth caparisoned as a man in search of a suitable husband. Along with her cousin Miranda (who looks cute in pants), they visit Richard’s Coffeehouse, where Ariadne pertly holds her own in discussions of current events, and then attend a performance of Thomas Otway’s domestic tragedy The Orphan, where they meet a man-about-town named Polydor who strikes Ariadne as suitable husband material, especially after they go for drinks afterwards at Locket’s. (Like The London Jilt but few other novels of the time, The Fair Extravagant is realistically site-specific.) Ariadne makes a deal with the cash-strapped Polydor to marry her “cousin” (hers
elf) sight unseen—“I am playing the knight errant to serve this lady” (21)—which he reluctantly agrees to do the following morning. (He forgot to buy a ring, but offers one “which a French mistress of mine gave me at Paris,” to which the unflappable heroine reacts not with outrage but a shrug: “it must and shall do” [43].) Repenting her hasty marriage later that day, Ariadne decides to test Polydor’s worthiness over the next week by convincing her cousin Dorothea to pose as her, and other shenanigans. Our female Quixote submits Polydor to ludicrous tests taken from romance literature, but Polydor is also a Quixotic figure, her “enchanted squire” as Ariadne calls him near the end (167), and the butt of the same kinds of pranks played on the Knight of the Sorrowful Face and Sancho Panza. Predictably, he passes the tests and the novel ends with additional marriages between the secondary characters.
The Fair Extravagant looks back to Don Quixote, obviously, but more significantly looks forward to Tristram Shandy. Unlike novelists like Behn, who insisted their fictions were true, Oldys’s narrator flaunts the fictitiousness of his novel, apparently making it up as he goes along. There are lines like “she lodged—let me see!—somewhere about St. James’s” (3), and forgetful mistakes, such as when the wedding party “made all reasonable haste to the Bowling Green that could be expected. Cry your mercy, I mean to the church. But I had been oftener at the first, which made it come sooner into my thoughts” (43). He chafes under the rules of fiction: when he grows a little too warm in his description of Miranda’s looks, he breaks off and reluctantly acknowledges that the heroine must be the most beautiful woman in a novel. During a conversation between Ariadne and Polydor, he perfunctorily inserts some filler and then loses his train of thought: “I see then (said Miranda) you are both in a fair way to be happy.—You know I must make her speak something, and not let her sit there like a mute all the while, much contrary to the humour of her sex. Well―But―now or about this time they got within sight of the steeple . . .” (44). Like Furetière (a likely influence), and as Marivaux and Sterne would do later, he sometimes grows testy with nitpicky readers (not that he has earned their confidence): “But (perchance) you will ask me why she did not take her own coach and horses to perform that journey? for certainly that was easier, and looked greater! But did ever I tell you she kept a coach? yes, now you shall know she did. However, she foresaw the inconvenience if she had met Polydor in her own coach; and besides her servants would have been witnesses of what she intended to conceal had she returned to town with them about her. And again, I believe she was willing to spare her own horses. Now are you satisfied?” [63–64].76 Throughout, Oldys interrupts the narrative with irrelevant asides, condescends to the conventions of the novel, and mocks the ridiculous, literature-inspired ideas of readers like Ariadne, resulting in a novel that is highly artificial but quite realistic (natural dialogue, sharply observed city life, characters with names like Tom and Harry, etc.). When Polydor tries to summarize his crazy adventure, he says, “’Tis pure knight errantry” (138), and Oldys leaves us with the egg-on-the-face feeling that novel-reading and -writing is just a foolish game played between silly people—readers and novelists—perhaps even a scam played by indigent authors on gullible female readers. Oldys admits to his male dedicatee that he wrote this “trifle” only because he needed the money, but asks his friend not to let the ladies know that.
The Female Gallant, or The Wife’s the Cuckold (1692), published by Samuel Briscoe “over against Will’s Coffeehouse, in Russell St., in Covent Garden”—now a Starbucks—is likewise dialogue-heavy, site-specific, and gender-fluid by way of crossdressing disguises. It too is a comedy, but a vicious one: set during the short reign of James II (1665–68), it is a snooty, royalist, Catholic satire of tacky, Whig, Protestant nouveau-riche types, contemptuous of their gauche attempts to claw their way into aristocratic circles, as evident from its opening paragraph:
Sir Beetlehead Gripely lived in a great, ugly, old-fashioned house, somewhere in the City,77 in a place almost as obscure as that of his birth, and as dark as his deeds; and was a money scrivener, which (as I am told) is a devilish good occupation. In this he got, within the space of seven years, an estate of near £12,000 and purchased him a wife of his own household, worth twice as much for her incomparable qualities had she been exposed to sale at a more convenient market. Her unmarried names (I won’t say her maiden names, though she was his chambermaid) were Winny Wagtail, of the great and notorious Wagtails in Castle Street, near Long Acre, not far from the Square where, at present, I have an apartment. But upon her marriage to Sir Beetlehead, she was dignified and distinguished by the name and quality of the Lady Gripely, by whom the knight had issue only Philandra, a lady of most prodigious and various qualifications. (1–2)
I’ll let Paul Salzman summarize the intricate plot:
In this novel we are introduced to Philandra, an amorous, beautiful, and deceitful young lady, who is courted by Sir Blunder Slouch, a wealthy “Norwich Factor” (p. 7), and two gallant gentlemen, Bellamant and Worthygrace. In courting her, Worthygrace in particular shows his honesty. Although he and Bellamant admire each other, they duel for her hand. When each fancies he has killed the other, the plot speeds up: they go into hiding, and Philandra is informed of their deaths. Bellamant disguised himself as his twin sister Arabella, while Worthygrace, taking refuge in Paris, sends his sister Henrietta, disguised as their brother Horatio, to see Philandra. Worthygrace falls in love with the real Arabella in Paris; Philandra, on being told by Henrietta of her disguise, persuades her to marry the false Arabella as a joke. She in turn dresses as a man to “seduce” Arabella—whereupon Bellamant reveals himself, and reverses the seduction. When the disguises, after a suitable amount of titillation, are all shed, Bellamant marries Henrietta in earnest and Worthygrace marries Arabella; while the scheming Philandra, her reputation still intact (for Bellamant cleverly pretends to have been disguised as Arabella in Paris all the time, and therefore Philandra is thought to have innocently shared Arabella’s bed) marries Sir Blunder. (322–23).
It’s not as fun as it sounds. There are very few paragraph breaks, giving the novel an oppressive, claustrophobic feel, as though you are locked in a room with all these scheming people. Furetière’s sardonic influence is acknowledged when we remember that his novel was mistakenly published in English as Scarron’s City Romance: the author flippantly tells us that Philandra looks “extremely like our late famous duchess now in France, as nearly resembling her as the knight of Tunbridge,” adding modesty, “or myself resemble the figure of the late incomparable Scarron” (7). As in The Fair Extravagant there are some authorial asides, as when Philandra’s mother gives her some bad news “in a doleful key (perhaps in gam-ut or C-fa-ut. In which most of our famous farewells are set)” (96). If Oldys’s first novel anticipates Sterne, The Female Gallant anticipates Fielding, that “old enemy to the arriviste mentality allegedly promoted by Richardson’s Pamela,” as Nicholas Hudson calls him, “a man proud of his own claims to tradition gentility, [who] saw no greater social danger in England than the breakdown of traditional social hierarchy and the masquerade of social ambition” (588). Less enjoyable than Oldys’s first novel, The Female Gallant is just as significant in the development of the English novel, and both deserve to be better known.
I had been looking forward to reading a 1684 novella entitled Erotopolis: The Present State of Bettyland, attributed to Montaigne’s translator Charles Cotton (1630–87), but this learned piece of misogyny is nearly void of narrative. It is merely a geographical description of a country based on the female anatomy, with predictable schoolboy snickering over mounds and swamps, hot and cold weather (moods), and so forth. This is the sort of thing Swift would condemn a dozen years later in A Tale of a Tub: “that highly celebrated talent among the modern wits of deducing similitudes, allusions, and applications, very surprising, agreeable, and apposite, from the pudenda of either sex, together with their proper uses” (section 7). About halfway through, a few characters borr
owed from Petronius’s Satyricon appear and recoil in horror from their tour of the brothel district of a large city, obviously based on London, and then it’s back to more extended metaphors about the unforgiving geography of Bettyland. It’s ostentatiously learned, turgid with quotations in Greek and Latin, a male text set in opposition to the female tastes of shepherdesses of Bettyland: “they are always reading Cassandra, Ibrahim Bassa, Grand Cyrus, Amadis de Gaule, Hero and Leander, The School of Venus, and the rest of these classic authors, by which they are mightily improved both in practice and discourse” (59–60). But the extended metaphor is hoary, the fictional elements are negligible, the insults cheap, so we’ll leave Bettyland for more fertile pastures.
I had not been looking forward to reading The Martyrdom of Theodora, and of Didymus (1687) by the chemist Robert Boyle (1627–91), younger brother of the author of Parthenissa. Sure enough, it’s a stupefyingly dull, overwritten attempt to convert hagiography to romance. It retells the legend of an early-4th-century Christian woman who was consigned to a brothel for refusing to worship the Roman gods, allegedly rescued by her admirer Didymus, who showed up disguised as a customer and then changed clothes with her so that she could escape. She has a long conversation with her friend Irene about why she loves being a virgin, and after hearing that Didymus has been discovered and sentenced to death, she tries to rescue him. (No word on whether he had to service anyone before he was exposed.) Both argue at length before the Roman authorities over who should die for whom until the impatient judges execute them both.
Boyle wrote an early version around 1648, which is very much in the spirit of the French heroic romances of the time, with additional plot elements evidently taken from Corneille’s first flop, Théodore, vierge et martyr (1646).78 Forty years later, disgusted at the loose morals of Restoration jilts and fops like those in Oldys’s novels, Boyle decided to revive his youthful effort; he couldn’t find the first half of his original manuscript, so he summarized it in his preface and rewrote the second half, publishing it as “book 2” and beginning in the middle of the story just as Didymus visits Theodora in the brothel for the first time.79 It is stilted, religiose, and peopled with cardboard characters; Samuel Johnson called it the first “attempt to employ the ornaments of romance in the decoration of religion,” but even he didn’t like the style.80 The only interesting thing about the novel is the preface, in which Boyle wrestles with the challenges of using the profane romance genre to tell a sacred story: the heroine must be beautiful, but not sensuously so; the love expressed between the leads must be spiritual, not carnal; historical details must be supplied (especially when few exist, as with Theodora’s martyrdom) but not so fancifully that they violate history; the story must be romantic enough to attract and to hold novel-readers, but religious enough to convert them to Christian principles; and so on. It’s interesting to see him struggle with all this at a time when French literary theorists were arguing over the same issues, and which are faced by most “writers of disguised histories,” as he calls them, compounded in his case by the difficulty of “rendering virtue amiable and recommending piety to a sort of readers that are much more affected by shining examples and pathetic expressions than by dry precepts and grave discourses” (8). Consequently, “I was induced to allow myself a more fashionable style than would perhaps be suitable to a mere sermon or book of divinity, because I feared that the youthful persons of quality of both sexes, that I was chiefly to regard, would scarce be sufficiently affected by unfortunate virtue if the interweaving of passages relating to beauty and love did not help to make the tragical story delightful, and the excellent sufferers’ piety amiable” (9). But as usual when a serious man in his sixties tries to write something hip that will appeal to kids, it falls flat. Had Boyle published the original 1640s version back when there was a taste for such things, it might have worked—it reads much better than the verbose later version—but compared to the sophisticated novels that were appearing in the ’80s, The Martyrdom of Theodora comes across like a leisure-suited geriatric dancing the Hustle.