Oroonoko in the Form

      Revisiting Oronooko at this point in my graduate career is fascinating because of the insight I have accumulated through the course of my studies. Aspects I had overlooked before are the very items that elucidate attention as I try to sort through the short but heavily dense tale. Here, I shall pay particular attention to the form of the tale and what it elucidates.

     Behn opens up the tale by insisting that everything that follows in the tale is an account of events she was an eye witness to. She says, “I do not pretend, in giving you the History of this Royal Slave, to entertain my Reader with the Adventures of a feign’d Hero, … there being enough of Reality to support it,…without the Addition of Invention” and continues, “I was my self an Eye-Witness to a great part, of what will find here set down” (8). While I have previously explored the credibility she establishes for herself as a female writer in these lines, especially during a time predominated by male play writers and poets, something new strikes me through this introduction. It employs much of the same rhetoric later used in the openings of countless travel narratives generated during the Transatlantic literary boom, when Western writers traveled to Eastern areas and recollected their experiences for English audiences. Here, I am thinking about the works of, for example, Jonathon Lloyd Stevens in Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land (1837). In a way, Oronooko contains many features of early travel narratives in that Behn (or the narrator, are they the same person?) travels to Surinam and does give details on how its natives live. Of course, it digresses from a travel narrative in its fictitious tale and plot that aren’t typical to that kind of writing. In any case, I wonder what the influence and relationship between Oronooko’s opening and travel narratives were. Was Behn mimicking even earlier travel writings (which were extremely few and far in between) that came before her, or was her introduction so influential that later travelers employed her rhetoric of credibility to tell their own tales?

     The question on the influence of Oronooko and travel narratives becomes complicated when examining the genre of the tale itself. Is it a novel? I would be cautious when using that term to label it under a genre. It is written and paragraphed in prose, but as the opening illustrates, it contains other types of writing structured into one piece of literature. As the narrator indicates that it is her personal account, it also flows as a recollection—almost as if it was a formal diary entry (of course without the formal greetings and signatures found in epistolary forms), which was also a very popular type of writing at the time. Another interesting thing to note is the narrator’s consciousness of her reader to read between the lines of her tale. For example when talking about the Captain’s initial fooling of the Royal slave with good treatment she says, “Some have commended this Act, as brave, in the Captain; but I will spare my sense of it, and it leave it to my Reader, to judge as he pleases” (31) using third person to address the reader formally. In other instances she uses first person, saying for example, “I ought to tell you” (36) to address her reader. While both ways she is conscious of an audience to whom which she writes for, the shift in narrative point is interesting.

     Although I am sad to miss class discussion which may further highlight these points, I have asked a friend to take notes which I will catch up with, and I look forward to reconvening with the class next week.