Wikipedia article...
The Wikipedia article on Aphra Behn is interesting. It mentions Oroonoko, and it mentions that her descriptions of Surinam are accurate. It also says that the tale she tells about Oroonoko does not seem to exaggerate his life.
The last point I find interesting because it seemed to me that we as a class decided that Oroonoko was probably not an account of actual occurrences.
The last point I find interesting because it seemed to me that we as a class decided that Oroonoko was probably not an account of actual occurrences.
posted by Trey at 2:39 AM
1 Comments:
Thanks, Trey, for pointing people to this brief article. I think it's important to acknowledge that we just don't know whether there was a historical figure like Oroonoko. The Wikipedia article seems to assume that he was a real person, but many scholars wouldn't go that far (for example, there's no known evidence of the slave revolt that Behn describes -- yet, of course, this is merely circumstantial reason to question the account's veracity). Or again, you mentioned the incident with the tiger in your previous post -- in fact, as far as I know, there are no tigers in South America (perhaps Behn was referring to jaguars...?). Oroonoko himself, as she portrays him, conveniently speaks French and English and has had the "benefit" of a European education; he knows the history of Rome (and of Hanibal). Are all of these factual or invented details about his character? I think the important point here is to remember that whether or not Behn was referring to a real person whom she had met in Surinam, "Oroonoko" is a work of art, and she is creating a verbal tapestry of ideas, feelings, and indeed a whole world view. It's a complicated world view at that, for Behn herself is complexly positioned as a woman writer, a royalist, a white European in a colonial setting, and an artist who is taking aesthetic liberties with established literary genres and social norms for the sake of her own vision of truth.
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