Race, gender, and scholarly practice: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko

Essays in Criticism

Volumn 52, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 1-22

  Hughes, Derek ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 62749178969     PISSN: 00140856     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/eic/52.1.1     Document Type: Note

References (52)

1. Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and its Transformations (Oxford, 1982), p. 13;
2. Hendricks, ""Tis not the fashion to confess": Shakespeare - Post-Coloniality -Johannesburg, 1996', in Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (eds.), Post-Colonial Shakespeares (London and New York, 1998), pp. 84-97: 87.
3. Lines 301 and 715 in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York and London, 1997).
4. Women's Studies, 19 (1991), 159-81.
5. The essay is reprinted in Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (eds.), Women, 'Race', and Writing in the Early Modern Period (1994), pp. 209-24,
6. and Janet Todd (ed.), Aphra Behn, New Casebooks (Basingstoke, 1999), pp. 209-33. I cite the text in Women, 'Race', and Writing.
7. In Marianne Novy and Peter Erickson (eds.), Cross-Cultural Performances: Differences in Women's Re-Visions of Shakespeare (Urbana, 1993), pp. 15-49.
8. In David Lee Miller, Sharon O'Dair, and Harold Weber (eds.), The Production of English Renaissance Culture (Ithaca, NY, 1994), pp. 151-89.
9. For Behn's marketability in the 1680s, see Robert D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1976), pp. 360-1, 371.
10. 'Transmuting Othello', p. 17;
11. 'News from the New World', p. 156.
12. Jane Jones, 'New Light on the Background and Early Life of Aphra Behn', Notes and Queries, 235 (1990), 288-93
13. repr. in Janet Todd (ed.), Aphra Behn Studies (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 310-20.
14. The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, 7 vols. (1993-6), ii. 111. All citations of Behn are to this edition.
15. Great Newes from the Barbadoes (1676), p. 10.
16. Suvir Kaul, 'Reading Literary Symptoms: Colonial Pathologies in the Oroonoko Fictions of Behn, Southerne, and Hawkesworth', Eighteenth-Century Life, 18 (1994), 80-96: 88.
17. 'Civility, Barbarism, and Aphra Behn's The Widow Ranter', in Hendricks and Parker (eds.), Women, 'Race', and Writing, pp. 225-39: 234.
18. Ferguson cites Winthrop Jordan's statement that black men were seen as a greater sexual threat than native Americans, but ignores it in her argument: Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill, 1968), pp. 161-2.
19. Peter M. Rinaldo, Marrying the Natives: Love and Interracial Marriage (Briarcliff Manor, NY, 1996), p. 26.
20. The History of the Caribby-Islands, trans. John Davies of Kidwelly (1666), p. 252.
21. ('Témoin Mademoiselle de Rossolan, femme de Mounsieur le Gouverneur de Sainte Alousie': Histoires Naturelle et Morale des Iles Antilles de l'Amerique (Rotterdam, 1658), p. 383.)
22. America (1671), pp. 201-5.
23. Africa (1670), p. 315; Pseudodoxia Epidemica, VI. x.
24. r-v). Godwyn is aware of Spanish arguments against the humanity of the native Americans (p. 3).
25. For a particular case of denial of baptism, see Richard Ligon, A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes (1st pub. 1657; 1673), p. 50.
26. Iosephi Acosta, De Natvra Novi Orbis Libri Dvo. Et De Promulgatione Evangelii apvd Barbaros [Cologne, 1596], pp. 151-2;
27. Godwyn, The Negro's & Indians Advocate, p. 36.
28. 'Alliance and Exile: Aphra Behn's Racial Identity', in Karen Robertson and Jean E. Howard (eds.), Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women's Alliances in Early Modern England (Oxford and New York, 1999), pp. 259-73: 272. The reference is to 'To Mrs. Price' (Works, i. 361).
29. I suspect that Behn got the idea for this description from another's account of the Other, William Penn's description of the Pennsylvania Indians: 'the thick Lip and flat Nose, so frequent to the East-Indians and Blacks, are not common to them; for I have seen as comely European-like Faces among them, of both, as on your side the Sea; and truly an Italian Complexion hath not much more of the White, and the Noses of several of them have as much of the Roman': [Richard Blome], The Present State of His Majesties Isles and Territories in America (1687), p. 96;
30. taken from A Letter from William Penn ⋯To the Committee of the Free Society of Traders of that Province, residing in London (1683), p. 5.
31. 'White Skin, Black Masks: Colonialism and the Sexual Politics of Oroonoko', Cultural Critique, 27 (1994), 189-214: 202-3, 206, 204.
32. The interplay between body language and speech is, however, well discussed in Robert L. Chibka, '"Oh! Do not fear a woman's invention": Truth, Falsehood, and Fiction in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko', Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 30 (1988), 510-37.
33. Ferguson, 'News from the New World', p. 166;
34. Lobsien, 'Caliban erzählen: Strukturelle Skepsis und die Erfindung des Anderen in der englischen Literatur der Frühen Neuzeit', LiLi: Zeitschrift fur Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, 28/110 (1998), 98-127: 126.
35. 'Juggling the Categories of Race, Class, and Gender', p. 222;
36. Women's Studies, 15 (1988), 23-42;
37. issues 1-3 of this volume were reprinted, with the same pagination, as Regina Barreca (ed.), Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy, Studies in Gender and Culture 2 (New York, 1988).
38. The essay also appears in Heidi Hutner (ed.), Rereading Aphra Behn: History, Theory, and Criticism (Charlottesville and London, 1993), pp. 65-85
39. in revised form in Catherine Gallagher, Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 1-48
40. and in its original version in Todd (ed.), Aphra Behn, pp. 12-31. I cite the version in Nobody's Story.
41. A Satyrical Epistle to the Female Author of a Poem, call'd 'Silvia's Revenge' (1691), pp. 5, 19.
42. 'The Masked Woman Revealed; or, the Prostitute and the Playwright in Behn Criticism', Women's Writing, 7 (2000), 149-64.
43. 'Oroonoko's Blackness', in Todd (ed.), Aphra Behn Studies, pp. 235-58
44. repr. in Gallagher, Nobody's Story, pp. 49-87,
45. and Robert DeMaria Jr. (ed.), British Literature, 1640-1789: A Critical Reader (Oxford and Malden, Mass., 1999), pp. 86-104. My references are to the version in Nobody's Story.
46. See Derek Hughes, The Theatre of Aphra Behn (Basingstoke and New York, 2001).
47. 'The Romance of Empire: Oroonoko and the Trade in Slaves', in Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (eds.), The New Eighteenth Century (New London, 1987), pp. 41-61: 48;
48. repr. in Laura Brown, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature (Ithaca and London, 1993), pp. 23-63 (see p. 36)
49. For a law encouraging baptism, see The Laws of the Province of South-Carolina, In Two Parts ⋯ Collected in Two Volumes, By Nicholas Trott (Charles-Town, 1736), pp. 212-13.
50. As late as 1748 a law was passed in Virginia affirming that one could only enslave those who 'were not Christians in their native Country, except Turks or Moors in Amity with his Majesty, and such who can prove their being free, in England, or any other Christian Country': The Acts of Assembly Now in Force, in the Colony of Virginia (Williamsburg, 1752), p. 285.
51. Albert J. Rivero, 'Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and the "Blank Spaces" of Colonial Fictions', Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 39 (1999), 443-62: 452.
52. This article was completed before Catherine Gallagher's edition of Oroonoko (Boston and New York, 2000) was noticed in bibliographies. The edition repeats some of the key errors of Gallagher's earlier work and explicity corrects none of them. Perhaps most remarkably, she reprints 'The Unfortunate Bride' in its entirety, without admitting that her apparent quotations from it in Nobody's Story are nowhere to be found. Gallagher is, however, now aware of the existence of white slaves, and of the role of religion in determining fitness for slavery.