A minor detail...

I noticed something when Behn was telling the story of how Oroonoko/Caesar killed the supposedly difficult to kill tiger (pg 125). Behn starts by referring to the tiger as "she" and "her," and then refers to the tiger as "he" and "him." This change actually takes place mid-sentence: "When [Caesar] going softly to one side of her... made her caper... he fell dead upon the prey." In the next sentence, Behn continues to refer to the tiger as male: "Caesar cut him open with a knife...." Behn later on the same page switches back to calling the tiger female: "...she lived with the bullets a great while...."

Now, the first gender change "...he fell dead upon the prey," can be read another way, where "he" in this case refers to Oroonoko, and "prey" refers to the tiger, but I read that "he" refers to the tiger and "prey" refers to the sheep it had killed.

Maybe it's just the grammar nazi in me that finds this odd, but I figured it was a valid point of discussion. Anyone have any idea of why she may have done this? It could be that this bit of the story never actually happened, and was pieced together from other stories where the genders of the tigers killed were different. Maybe it's Behn's way of giving us another wink about this being a factual story.

Claims of authenticity

For anyone who is fascinated by Aphra Behn's resort to the convention of truth-claims -- that is, her claims about the authenticity of her text -- here is another example of such a claim from the later fictionalized travel narrative "Persian Letters" (1721) by the great Enlightenment philosophe Montesquieu. See especially the fourth paragraph. In this narrative, it is the Persians who visit Europe (Paris), and not the other way around. (A "seraglio," by the way, is a harem.) --Lincoln

For those who are new to this....

Hi, folks,

For those who are new to this, what I'd like you to do is to post to the main blog itself (i.e, just like this posting), and not as much to the "comments" section (which is reserved for responding to another person's original blog posting).

Once you've responded to your invitation, you can post to Gras by signing in at Blogger.com and then clicking on "Gras." Now click on the tab called "Posting" and then on "Create." You should now see a form where you can enter a subject line and a post message.

For someone who asked, my intention is that you'll write about anything related to the course -- keeping in mind the importance of respectfulness towards other posters, of course. I named our blog "Gras" just to have a hint of local Mobile culture.

Let me know if you have any difficulty.

Greetings.

This is the blog for EH236-102. Post away.