Interrogating Oroonoko: Torture in a New World and a New Fiction of Power
This article interrogates the function and effect of the penultimate paragraph of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, where Oroonoko is tortured and executed. Reading the scene through the prism of European practices of ritual punishment and judicial torture as well as New World uses of torture, I argue that the scene cannot be read, as many critics have, as one of martyrdom. Rather, the scene emerges as closer in its rhetorical aims to those articulated by Elaine Scarry in her seminal analysis of torture, The Body in Pain (1985). As is the case with judicial and modern torture, Behn deliberately produces a body in pain in order to give legitimacy to the truth of her own narrative. Yet, in opposition to that brutal practice, she simultaneously exposes the fictional nature of her own narrative power. She reminds the reader of the violence inherent in any appropriation of another’s story for one’s own political or literary ends, and in the process paradoxically produces one of the first modern, democratic subjects.
Captains and Slaves: Aphra Behn and the Rhetoric of Republicanism
When one considers the extraordinary amount of criticism published about Aphra Behn's Oroonoko in the last few years, it is surprising how little critical consensus there is about how that work treats the institution of slavery - whether it is pro-slavery, anti-slavery, thinks slavery is generally acceptable except when those who are enslaved happen to be heroes or kings, or, indeed, whether it simply treats slavery as a convenient metaphor. My own contribution to this debate takes its origin from the use in Oroonoko of language and arguments associated with classical republicanism, in some ways surprising for an author like Aphra Behn, known in her lifetime to be a staunch Tory.Oroonoko's speech inciting his fellow slaves to revolt, in which he eloquently points out 'the miseries and ignominies of slavery', and his bitter remarks after the defeat of the rebellion, on the folly of 'endeavouring to make those free, who were by nature slaves', echo the rhetoric and the concerns of seventeenth-century republicans who regarded 'brutish Servitude' as an affront to human dignity.1 Milton in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) had presented the natural birthright of freedom, extending to all mankind, as a self-evident axiom:No man who knows ought, can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were borne free, being the image and resemblance of God himself.Consistently, Milton also argued that the strenuous defence of liberty against powerful, entrenched forces of oppression entailed a burden of responsibility few were willing to undertake, choosing instead to 'give up thir understanding to a double tyrannie, of Custom from without, and blind affections within':But being slaves within doors, no wonder that they strive so much to have the public State conformably govern'd to the inward vitious rule, by which they govern themselves. For indeed none can love freedom heartilie, but good men.2Like many writers in the republican tradition, Milton combined an impassioned advocacy of liberty, as a principle universally operative, with a bitter, contemptuous dismissal of those who preferred to 'renounce thir own freedom' and live in servitude - 'worthie indeed themselves, whatsoever they be, to be for ever slaves'.3Slave revolts, as Robin Blackburn has shown, were relatively common in the late seventeenth century in the colony of Surinam, where much of the action of Oroonoko takes place, because the geography of that colony, situated on the South American continent, permitted escaped slaves to live at some distance from the coast, free from possible recapture.4 But it is unlikely that any rebellious slave, even if he had been 'entertained with the lives of the Romans, and great men', ever addressed his troops in quite the terms used by Oroonoko. The 'harangue' of this 'great captain', aimed at motivating the hitherto passive body of slaves to heroic resistance, could be cited as an instance of Hobbes's claim that 'the reading of the books of policy, and histories of the ancient Greeks and Romans' had encouraged impressionable young men, eager to perform 'great exploits of war', to rebel against those ruling over them:5Caesar, having singled out these men from the women and children, made an harangue to 'em, of the miseries and ignominies of slavery; counting up all their toils and sufferings, under such loads, burdens and drudgeries, as were fitter for beasts than men; senseless brutes, than human souls. He told 'em, it was not for days, months or year, but for eternity; there was no end to be of their misfortunes: they suffer'd not like men, who might find a glory and fortitude in oppression; but like dogs, that lov'd the whip and bell, and fawn'd the more they were beaten; that they had lost the divine quality of men, and were becoming insensible asses, fit only to bear. (Oroonoko and other stories, pp. 69, 82-3)There is of course no more intrinsic improbability in the classicizing eloquence of Oroonoko (including a reference to 'one Hannibal, a great captain', as role-model) than in his physical description in conformity with Western ideas of beauty ('his nose was rising and Roman, instead of African and flat') or the emphasis on his status as 'great man', akin to the exotic warrior princes of Restoration heroic drama and romance: Behn is addressing a popular audience in Restoration England, and using the conventions at her disposal. …
Medieval Modal Theories and Modal Logic Handbook of the History of Logic. Volume 2: Mediaeval and Renaissance Logic
1The translation of the Categories is edited by L. Minio-Paluello in Aristoteles Latinus 1.1-5 (Bruges-Paris: Descl~e de Brouwer, 1961) and the translation of the De interpretatione by L. Minio-Paluello in Aristoteles Latinus II.1-2 (Bruges-Paris: Descl~e de Brouwer, 1965). The translation of Porphyry's Isagoge is edited by L. Minio-Paluello and B.G. Dod in Aristoteles Latinus 1.6-7 (Bruges-Paris: Descl~e de Brouwer, 1966). Boethius's commentary on Aristotle's Categories is found in Patrologia Latina (ed. J.-P. Migne), 64, 159-294, De syllogismis categoricis in Patrologia Latina 64, 793-832, In Ciceronis Topica in Patrologia Latina 64, 1039-1169; an English translation with notes and an introduction by E. Stump, and De differentiis topicis in Patrologia Latina 64, 1174-1216; an English translation with notes and essays by E. Stump, Boethius's De topicis differentiis (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1978), Boethius's In Ciceronis Topica (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988). Boethius's two commentaries on De interpretatione are edited by C. Meiser (Leipzig: Teubner, 1877-1880), his two commentaries on Porphyry's Isagoge by S. Brandt, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 48 (Leipzig: G. Freytag, Vienna: F.Tempsky, 1906), De hypotheticis syllogismis by L. Obertello (Brescia: Paideia, 1969) and De divisione by J. Magee, with a translation and commentary (Leiden: Brill, 1998). Some other ancient works were also used, such as Apuleius's Peri hermeneias (ed. C. Moreschini in Opera III (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1991), Augustine's Dialectica, trans, with notes by B.D. Jackson from the text edited by J. Pinborg, Synthese Historical Library 16 (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1975), and pseudo-Augustinean De decern categoriis, ed. L. Minio-Paluello, in Aristoteles Latinus 1.1-5, 133-75. For the sources of eleventh and twelfth century logic, see J. Marenbon, 'Medieval Latin Commentaries and Glosses on Aristotelian Logical Texts, Before c. 1150 AD' in Ch. Burnett (ed.), Glosses and Commentaries on Aristotelian Logical Tezts (Warburg Institute Surveys and Texts 23), (London: Warburg Institute, 1993), 77-127, republished and revised in J. Marenbon, Aristotelian Logic, Platonism, and the Contezt of Early Medieval Philosophy in the West, Variorum Collected Studies Series (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). 2Analytica priora, ed. L. Minio-Paluello, Aristoteles Latinus III.l-4 (Bruges-Paris: Descl~e de Brouwer, 1962), Analytica posteriora, ed. L. Minio-Paluello and B.G. Dod, Aristoteles Latinns IV.l-4 (Bruges-Paris: Descl~e de Brouwer, 1968), Topica, ed. L. Minio-Paluello and B.G.