A degenerate race: English barbarism in Aphra Rehn's Oroonoko and The Widow Ranter

ELH - English Literary History

Volumn 69, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 673-701

  Visconsi, Elliott ^a  

^a YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 60950592345     PISSN: 00138304     EISSN: 10806547     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/elh.2002.0029     Document Type: Review

References (67)

1. For an overview of party propaganda between the civil wars and the mid-eighteenth century, tracing respectively the polemical characterization of Cavalier and Roundhead, Whig and Tory, see T. N. Corns, W. A. Speck, and J. A. Downie, "Archetypal Mystification: Polemic and Reality in English Political Literature 1640-1750," Eighteenth-Century Life 7:3 (1982): 1-27.
2. James Clifford, "On Ethnographic Allegory," Writing Culture: The Politics and Poetics of Ethnography, ed. George Marcus and James Clifford (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986), 98-121.
3. Samuel Daniel, "Epistle: To Prince Hernie" (London, ca. 1609-1610), 86-90.
4. As Philip Harth rightly points out, the Tory propaganda machine was a project shared by a series of loyal authors rather than an organization run by court officials or functionaries. See his Pen For A Party: Dryden's Tory Propaganda In Its Contexts (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993).
5. Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), 130-55.
6. David Underdown, A Freeborn People: Politics and the Nation in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), 129.
7. See John Dryden, "Absalom and Achitophel" (London, 1681),
8. and Albion and Albanius (London, 1685).
9. See the "Preface" in Nathaniel Thompson, One Hundred and Eighty Loyal Songs (London, 1682).
10. Thompson, 2.
11. Thompson, 6-7.
12. Harris, 137.
13. See the preface to Roger L'Estrange's Fables of Aesop and Other Eminent Mythologists with Morals and Reflexions, 3rd ed. (London, 1669), 4-5, 7.
14. For a discussion of the links between barbarian ethnography and early modern English fears of a warrior aristocracy, see Debora Shuger, "Irishmen, Aristocrats, and Other White Barbarians," Renaissance Quarterly 50 (1997): 494-525.
15. Like every racial or national group, the English were recognized as synthetic. While commentators would point out the multiple incursions of other races or ethnic groups into the national character, each of these incursions was made by a "gothic" race; e.g. Saxons, Danes, Normans, Dutch, Irish, Welsh. It was a commonplace for early modern authors to refer to their countryfolk as a race - for a very helpful survey of the intellectual and historical contours of eighteenth-century race theory, see Nicholas Hudson, "From 'Nation' to 'Race': The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought," Eighteenth-Century Studies 29 (1996): 247-64.
16. For a discussion of race in the making of English identity see Aparna Dharwadker, "Nation, Race, and the Ideology of Commerce in Defoe," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 39 (1998): 63-84.
17. For a detailed and persuasive treatment of this idea, see Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992).
18. While Agricola is explicitly concerned with the British Isles, it has much less of the ethnographic speculation of Germania and is mostly concerned with the colonial government and life of Agricola. Thus Germania is a more suitable source for ethnography of the northern tribes, even though these tribes are not explicit residents of Britannia. The passage is quoted from Shuger, 499-500.
19. Tacitus, Agricola and Germania, ed. and trans. H. Mattingly and S. A. Handford (New York: Penguin, 1970), 104.
20. I am here indebted to Margaret Trabue Hodgen's discussion of Jean Bodin and early modern geographical determinism. See her Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1964), 254-94.
21. See also Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beatrice Reynolds (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1945).
22. David Hume's essay "Of National Characters" explicitly argues against such physical causes of national character and posits that the formation of national characteristics or habits of thought is the result of "moral" influences such as the form and stability of government and theology, the efficacy of trade or labor, and cultural representations. Although in "Of National Characters" Hume represents the English favorably as diverse and liberty loving, in his letters Hume frequently inveighs against the English as a race "sunk in Stupidity and Barbarism and Faction." The two are not mutually exclusive, however - the independence of the English is, as we will see, in part fashioned as a legacy of a gothic past. However, Hume's argument against geographic determinism is troublesome to notions of English exceptionalism - if it is not the climate of Britannia which elicits barbarism, then it must have been (and must still be) the moral institutions of England which do so. See Hume, "Of National Characters," in The Philosophical Works of David Hume, ed. Thomas Hill Greene and Thomas Hodge Grose (Darmstadt, Germany: Scientia Verlag, 1992);
23. and Donald Livingston, "Hume, English Barbarism, and American Independence," in Scotland and America in the Age of Enlightenment, ed. Jeffrey Smitten and Richard Sher (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1990), 133-47.
24. For more on the material and intellectual consequences of gentility and consensus, see Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996).
25. Helgerson, 22.
26. Helgerson, 299.
27. For a discussion of the circumstances surrounding the publication of Mr John Miltons Character, see Nicholas Von Maltzahn, Milton's History of Britain: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991).
28. See Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1978). In A Freeborn People, Underdown argues that along with such a cultural rift a political one developed, in which the common people and the gentry grew to hold newly polar ideological positions, dissolving an ancient alliance.
29. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 2nd ed. (London, Verso, 1992), 7.
30. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Settling with the Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America 1580-1640 (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980), 121-22.
31. See J. G. A. Pocock, "The Mobility of Property and the Rise of Eighteenth-Century Sociology," in his Virtue, Commerce, and History (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), 115.
32. See Laura Brown, "The Romance of Empire: Oroonoko and the Trade in Slaves," in The New Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Brown (New York: Methuen, 1987), 41-61.
33. See also Catherine Gallagher, Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1995);
34. Margaret Ferguson, "Juggling the Categories of Race, Class, and Gender: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko," in Women, "Race," and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Patricia Parker and Margo Hendricks (New York: Routledge, 1994), 209-24;
35. Judith Andrade, "White Skin, Black Masks: Colonialism and the Sexual Politics of Oroonoko," Cultural Critique 26 (1994): 189-214;
36. Anita Pacheco, "Royalism and Honor in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko," SEL 34 (1994): 491-506;
37. and Richard Frohock, "Violence and Awe: The Foundation of Government in Aphra Behn's New World Settings," Eighteenth Century Fiction 8 (1996): 437-52.
38. Daniel Defoe, The True-Horn Englishman (London, 1701), 2.2.814-19.
39. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave, in Oroonoko, The Rover, and Other Writings, ed. Janet Todd (New York: Penguin, 1992), 79. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number.
40. See Gerard Reedy, "Mystical Politics: The Imagery of Charles II's Coronation," Studies in Change and Revolution, ed. Paul Korshin (New York: Scolar Press, 1972), 19-42.
41. Harold Weber, Paper Bullets: Print and Kingship Under Charles II (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1996), 43.
42. Brown, 57.
43. Brown, 58-59.
44. Aristotle, Politics, ed. and trans. Trevor Saunders and T. A. Sinclair (New York: Penguin, 1981), 68-69.
45. Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians: a Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1970).
46. Stephanie Athey and Daniel Cooper Alarcón describe Behn's critique of the colonial lack of discipline thus: "while the narrator is in favor of colonization and regrets the eventual loss of the colony to the Dutch, she finds the mode of government under Lieutenant Byam and his men to be dishonorable and therefore reprehensible. This is no condemnation of the imperial venture itself, however; both Oroonoko and the white female narrator believe that the 'noble' are the rightful rulers of 'brutes and slaves.'" See their "Oroonoko's Gendered Economies of Honor/ Horror: Refraining Colonial Discourse Studies in the Americas," American Literature 65 (1993): 426.
47. Also see chapter 1 of Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery 1670-1834 (New York: Routledge, 1992), on the text's ambivalent relationship to slavery.
48. Brown, 52-55.
49. See Richard Ashcraft's superb Revolutionary Politics and Locke's Two Treatises of Government (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1988), 38. Merchants are not always vilified in pro-absolutist literature.
50. In "Violence and Profits on the Restoration Stage: Trade, Nationalism, and Insecurity in Dryden's Amboyna," Eighteenth-Century Life 22:1 (1998): 2-17, Robert Markley contends that in Amboyna, for example, the heroic merchant Towerson is the agent of the genteel extension of English imperial power and is dialectically related to the development of English national identity.
51. For more on the turn to "political hedonism" as a mode of political philosophy in Hobbes, see Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1953);
52. and on the subject's political obligations imagined as love and duty, see Victoria Kahn, "The Duty to Love: Passion and Obligation in Early Modern Political Theory" Representations 68 (Fall 1999): 86-107.
53. For references to the trope of Stuart blackness, see George Guffey, "Aphra Behn's Oroonoko: Occasion and Accomplishment," in Two English Novelists: Aphra Behn and Anthony Trollope (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1975);
54. and also Gallagher, 75-78.
55. See Gallagher, 77.
56. Thompson, 6.
57. Thompson, 3.
58. Behn, The Widow Ranter, The Works of Aphra Behn, vol. 7, ed. Todd (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1996), 1.1.113-15. Hereafter cited parenthetically by act, scene, and line number.
59. For more on the history of Bacon's rebellion, see Charles Lynn Batten, "The Source of Mrs. Behn's The Widow Ranter," Research in Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theatre 13 (1974): 12-18;
60. and Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1997), 61-62.
61. See Margo Hendricks, "Civility, Barbarism, and The Widow Ranter," in Women, "Race," and Writing, 225-239;
62. and Margaret Ferguson, "News from the New World: Miscegenous Romance in Aphr a Behn's Oroonoko and The Widow Ranter," in The Production of English Renaissance Culture, ed. David Lee Miller, Sharon O'Dair, and Weber (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994)..
63. See Kupperman, "Presentment of Civility: English Reading of American Self-Presentation in the Early Years of Colonization," William & Mary Quarterly 54 (1997): 193-228.
64. Jim Egan reads John Smith as a kind of colonial crypto-Leveller, advocating for individual colonial experience as an administrative credential, and against the kind of class-based credentials Behn would later prefer. See his "'Hee That Hath Experience . . . To Subject the Salvages': British Colonialism and Modern Experiential Authority," Genre 28 (1995): 445-64.
65. For a discussion of Sidney and Locke's use of natural law to theorize rebellion, see Jonathan Scott, "The Law of War: Grotius, Sidney, Locke, and the Political Theory of Rebellion," History of Political Thought 13 ( 1992): 565-85. Scott contends that Sidney legitimates armed rebellion while Locke insists that any absolutist monarch is in rebellion against the polity and thus illegal.
66. For a related discussion, see Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (London, Faber and Faber, 1984).
67. Hendricks, 235.