In 1688 Aphra Behn published a poem:
To the Fair Clarinda, Who Made Love to Me,
Imagined More than Woman
Fair lovely maid, or if that title be
Too weak, too feminine for nobler thee,
Permit a name that more approaches truth,
And let me call thee, lovely charming youth.
This last will justify my soft complaint,
While that may serve to lessen my constraint;
And without blushes I the youth pursue,
When so much beauteous woman is in view.
With thy deluding form thou giv’st us pain,
While the bright nymph betrays us to the swain.
In pity to our sex sure thou wert sent,
That we might love and yet be innocent:
For sure no crime with thee we can commit;
Or if we should—thy form excuses it.
For who, that gathers fairest flowers believes
A snake lies hid beneath the fragrant leaves.
Thou beauteous wonder of a different kind,
Soft Cloris with the dear Alexis joined;
When e’er the manly part of thee, would plead
Thou tempts us with the image of the maid,
While we the noblest passions do extend
The love to Hermes, Aphrodite the friend.
The language is simple but the style baroque. Behn’s play with Hermes and Aphrodite, her intimation that she can pursue a boyish young woman with less embarrassment or risk than a young man, and that the erotic charge is no less real for being appropriate only toward a man, takes us about as far into the maze of human sexuality as any text of 1688. (Saikaku is more frank but much more crude; Sor Juana deeply hidden and allusive.)
Other baroque minglings of the licit and illicit, the hidden and the theatrically public are to be found, along with interesting shifts in style, in two major stories Behn published in 1688. Both stories begin by asserting in plain language a determination to tell only the verifiable facts but later shift to long and dramatic stories told by others to the narrator. Their melodramatic shifts of plot and expressions of the most violent emotions cry out for transformation into the scenes and arias of a baroque opera. The central figure in The Fair Jilt is a monster of feminine wiles and greed who throws herself at a handsome young priest and cries rape when he resists her, so that he almost goes to the gallows. She tempts a young servant with promises of her love until he tries to poison her younger sister so that she can gain her sister’s share of their inheritance; she then persuades her husband to try to kill the sister. But Behn begins her account of this figure out of a misogynist’s nightmares by describing her as a young woman “naturally amorous but extremely inconstant,” loving the strongest quality of each man she met, wary of marriage because “she knew the strength of her own heart, and that it could not suffer to be confined to one man. . . .” In writing The Fair Jilt, one suspects, Behn was drawing not only on stories she heard during an early sojourn in Antwerp as a singularly unsuccessful spy but also on her own passions, frustrations, and resentments of society’s hypocrisies and confinements.
By the 1680s Aphra Behn had survived for more than twenty years as a widow without fixed means of support in London’s colorful and dissolute theatrical world. The men she fell in love with were married or unsatisfactory, and she probably did not want to settle down and put herself under the authority of one man, no matter how much comfort he could offer her. So she wrote for a living. She was good at it and added a distinctive woman’s voice to the raucous chorus of Restoration melodrama, metaphor, and bawdy. Her poem “The Disappointment,” written before 1680, was an adaptation of a theme of impotence or premature ejaculation that can be traced all the way to Ovid. Her version takes the woman’s part, describing her confusion, blushes, disdain, and shame as she flees her now-useless lover.
Behn’s Oroonoko: Or, The Royal Slave, also published in 1688, is framed as an autobiographical account of events seen far across the seas, a popular genre in 1688. It draws on Behn’s experiences on a brief stay in Surinam, on the north coast of South America, when she was young, but much in it almost certainly is fictional. The author is determined that her story “shall come simply into the world, recommended by its own proper merits, and natural intrigues; there being enough of reality to support it, and to render it diverting, without the addition of invention.” It tells the story of the capture and brutal punishment of the leaders of a group of African slaves that seek to flee the Surinam plantations. The scenes in Surinam are plain in style and often concrete in detail of places, plants, animals, and people. But the cruelty of the whites and the nobility of the slave leaders are presented in the most lurid colors possible.
The melodrama is even more dense in the first part of her little book, where Behn claims to relate her hero’s story of how he came to be enslaved and transported to the Americas. Oroonoko is a prince and a great general of his people, very black, with a Roman nose, thin lips, and austere Stoic virtues. His beautiful fiancée, Imoinda, is summoned to the harem of the aged king, and there is no refusing such a summons. Her despair, Oroonoko’s rage, and the turns of plot by which they finally consummate their love but then are betrayed and sold into slavery are the purest baroque theater. His speech rings out like a defiant hero’s aria: “Whoever ye are that have the boldness to attempt to approach this apartment thus rudely, know that I, Prince Oroonoko, will revenge it with certain death of him that first enters. Therefore stand back, and know that this place is sacred to love, and me this night; tomorrow ‘tis the king’s.”
In a final baroque twist, Oroonoko and Imoinda, transported across the ocean separately, are reunited and married on a plantation in Surinam. The other slaves and some of the whites recognize Oroonoko’s natural nobility. The whites call him Caesar and give him many special privileges. Despite his comfortable situation and Imoinda’s pregnancy, Caesar, as the author now calls him, leads a great escape of the slaves, who would head for the coast and defend themselves until they can find a ship and return to Africa. (As we have seen in Brazil and Jamaica, and as was true later, if not at this time, in Surinam, escaping slaves usually headed inland, organizing and defending themselves in remote areas.) Caesar’s speech is ready to be set to music: “And why, my dear friends and fellow sufferers, should we be slaves to an unknown people? Have they vanquished us nobly in fight? Have they won us in honorable battle? And are we, by the chance of war, become their slaves? That would not anger a noble heart, this would not animate a soldier’s soul. No, but we are bought and sold like apes, or monkeys, to be the sport of women, fools, and cowards, and the support of rogues, renegades, that have abandoned their own countries, for raping, murders, thefts, and villainies. . . .Will you, I say, suffer the lash from such hands?” The slaves all reply, “No, no, no; Caesar has spoken like a great captain, like a great king.”
When the ragtag “militia” of the colony catches up with the fleeing slaves, the Africans are thrown into confusion not by superior weaponry but by the disorder of the whites and by their use of their whips to lash the slaves across the eyes. Finally only one gallant friend stands by Caesar, and Imoinda, late in her pregnancy but wielding a bow and wounding several whites. Caesar, tricked into surrender, urges the whites to kill him quickly, for he will not rest until he has killed the man who has whipped him. Still, his friends shelter him after he has been condemned to hang, and his rage for revenge grows, “pleasing his great heart with the fancied slaughter he should make all over the face of the plantation.” But he and Imoinda both are determined that she should die first so that she will not be left prey to the vengeance of the whites. He will kill her himself.
All that love could say in such cases, being ended, and all the intermitting irresolutions being adjusted, the lovely, young, and adored victim lays herself down, before the sacrificer, while he, with a hand resolved, and a heart breaking within, gave the fatal stroke, first, cutting her throat, and then severing her, yet smiling, face from that delicate body, pregnant as it was with the fruit of tenderest love. As soon as he had done, he laid the body decently on leaves and flowers, of which he made a bed, and concealed it under the same coverlid of Nature, only her face he left yet bare to look on. But when he found she was dead, and past all retrieve, never more to bless him with her eyes, and soft language, his grief swelled up to rage; he tore, he raved, he roared, like some monster of the wood, calling on the loved name of Imoinda. A thousand times he turned the fatal knife that did the deed, toward his own heart, with a resolution to go immediately after her, but dire revenge, which now was a thousand times more fierce in his soul than before, prevents him. . . .
Caesar lies in mourning and rage near Imoinda’s woodland bier for eight days. Weakened as he is, he still manages to kill one of the Englishmen who come to seize him. He is defiant to the end.
He had learned to take tobacco, and when he was assured that he should die, he desired that they would give him a pipe in his mouth, ready lighted, which they did, and the executioner came, and first cut off his members, and threw them in the fire. After that, with an ill-favored knife, they cut his ears, and his nose, and burned them; he still smoked on, as if nothing had touched him. Then they hacked off one of his arms, and still he bore up, and held his pipe. But at the cutting off the other arm, his head sunk, and his pipe dropped, and he gave up the ghost, without a groan, or a reproach. . . . Thus died this great man, worthy of a better fate, and a more sublime wit than mine to write his praise. Yet, I hope, the reputation of my pen is considerable enough to make his glorious name to survive to all ages, with that of the brave, the beautiful, and the constant Imoinda.
In 1688 Aphra Behn probably was in her late forties and not in good health. Although she was not conventionally religious, her political and aesthetic sympathies were with James II and his Catholic court. She died in 1689. In 1695 Thomas Southerne adapted Oroonoko for the stage, and Henry Purcell wrote incidental music for it. Her story was important for many who turned against the slave trade in the eighteenth century and for others who sought the liberation of women from convention and male domination in our own. Virginia Woolf wrote: “All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.”