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.
The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature
The "project" of this collection of essays, as its editors declare in their introduction, is "the revision or problematization of period, canon, tradition, and genre in eighteenth-century literary studies" (p. 14). Though no single book could altogether fulfill such an ambition, The New Eighteenth Century goes a long way toward doing so. The twelve essays gathered by the editors are consistently provocative and fresh, almost always strongly and lucidly written, bold in their rereadings and reassessments of works (and the issues raised in them) by writers as diverse as Dryden and Behn, Fielding and Mary Collier, Smollett and Shaftesbury, Pope and Charlotte Charke, Johnson and Sterne, Radcliffe and John Serle. The approaches vary widely, frequently merging in a single essay; they range from Marxist to feminist, new historicist to deconstructionist. The introductory essay with which the collection begins not only outlines the contributions that follow but also provides a ringing justification for the revisionist project they represent. Always civilized and respectful, but uncompromisingly blunt, Nussbaum and Brown bravely take on the entrenched traditions of eighteenth-century scholarship and criticism, not so much to dismiss or discredit them as to proclaim their inadequacy to our full acceptance and understanding of the age as it really was, and of the great variety of important writing (much of it noncanonical) it produced. Frankly polemical in purpose, the argument of this essay manages also to be scrupulously fairminded. I confess to being more than a little shocked as I read. But I am convinced that Nussbaum and Brown
"The Plain Round Tale of Faithful Thady": Castle Rackrent as Slave Narrative
Critics of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent tend to focus on textual elements—gender issues, the symbolism of the Big House, colonial hegemony— or contextual readings by placing Edgeworth in the Anglo-Irish history and tradition. While such criticism usually in some way examines the main theme of the text, the appropriation of power and authority, little of it accomplishes both the textual and contextual analysis that Castle Rackrent deserves. Exploring Thady’s “plain round tale” as a slave narrative in content and form sheds new light on the work both textually and contextually; in Thady Quirk, Edgeworth has created a typical slave narrator who recounts a history of oppression which is ultimately mediated by an outside editor. As John Cronin writes of Castle Rackrent, “What Maria Edgeworth has given us . . . is a magnificently realised slave, a terrifying vision of the results of colonial misrule. There must have been a moment of clearly deliberate artistic decision in which she realised that what needed to be said must be said through one of the submerged people.”1 The three main textual elements of the narrative indicate its likeness to typical slave narratives: its presentation of a conflicted slave narrator, its use of the framing device of the outside editor, and its narrative structure of episodic anecdotes that utilizes memory, description, and didacticism.