Oroonko and Aphra Behn

The map shows roughly where Oronoko is, in both Africa and South America.

Aphra Behn
1640? - 1689

Short biography from Melanie Ulrich, English Department, University of Texas at Austin:

Behn appears to have been born to a barber (or innkeeper) near Canterbury. Her family possessed the merest whiff of gentility, though her mother's acting as nurse to the prominent Colepeper children presumably helped her own daughter meet influential and intellectual figures, including the famous Sidney family. Through these connections, or through her father's clientele, who may have included some of the many Huguenot refugees in the region, Behn picked up French and Dutch. She seems to have spent her leisure absorbing French romances, like those by La Calprenede. It is speculated that at a young age, Behn became involved in espionage for the Royalist cause, through some of Colepeper's connections.

Most (though not all) authorities believe that Behn, as the narrator of Oroonoko, did in fact visit Suriname, perhaps in 1663/4. She may also have seen Virginia, site of her drama The Widow Ranter. Few believe that her father, like the narrator's, was appointed to be Lieutenant-Governor of Suriname and the islands. She may, instead, have been there as someone's mistress, or else as a spy. In any event, her knowledge of the personalities of that colony seems both authentic and too intimate to be second-hand. Of Oroonoko, there is no historical trace.

Behn's husband is a particularly misty figure, who may have actually been her lover, may have been a bona-fide husband, or may never have existed. It is possible that one Johan Behn, of the ship King David, which had sailed in the West Indies, may have met and married Aphra on the return trip from Suriname. Whether Johan quickly died or else simply separated from Aphra is unknown, but he never appears in any future episodes of her life.



In 1667, Behn resumed (or began) her spying activities, working for Charles II in Holland. Pursuing this end, she ran into debt, which Charles II refused to pay. Judging from surviving letters, she was in dire financial straits, and may have spent time in debtor's prison. If so, she quickly got out again, metamorphosed into a playwright and poet. Her first, very successful, play was The Forced Marriage, performed at Lincoln's Inn Fields by the Duke's Company. Although drama allowed Behn to feed herself, she never seems to have been financially comfortable. Nonetheless, she seems to have enjoyed the milieu, and to have been inspired by the transgressive lives of the actresses she met, many of whom (like the famous Nell Gwyn) combined sex work with acting. The parallels between their careers and hers, their need to please and entertain, their dubious sexual morality, were apparent to her, as Behn wrote plays and fictions dealing with actresses, courtesans, and near-courtesans with whom the narrators seem to identify.

For the next 22 years, she supported herself by her writing, producing, among others, The Rover, The Feign'd Courtisans, Love-Letters from a Nobleman to his Sister (called the first major epistolary novel in English), The Fair Jilt, Oroonoko, and The Widow Ranter (staged posthumously). Although she was a very popular, if controversial figure in her time, even garnering for herself a burial spot in Westminster Abbey - an honor reserved for major national figures like Geoffrey Chaucer, Charles Dickens, and Charlotte and Emily Bronte - her popularity plummeted immediately after her death in 1689. Behn's memory was reviled until Virginia Woolf turned her into a feminist icon, claiming in A Room of One's Own: "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."

Oroonoko became even more popular when adapted for the stage. While Oroonoko is played
by an English actor with African make-up, Imoinda is played as a white woman.

This article explains how common the tortures inflicted on Oroonoko were in the punishment of slaves in Suriname (roughly 25 years after the period of Oroonoko).

Writing Workshops

You have probably received notice about these Writing Workshops already. I'd like to emphasize that they could be very helpful for this course, too--especially the second one, on thesis development and creating an essay structure. I hope you'll make an effort to attend if you have concerns at all about your college writing.


Writing Workshops

Fall 2009

All workshops will take place in the Student Lounge at the Downtown campus, begin at 12 p.m., and last for approximately 45 minutes.


Session 1: Formal Analysis (November 2)

Actively looking is central to understanding and critically engaging with the art-object. More than just a “laundry list” description, formal analysis deals with the way individual formal qualities work together to form the whole. This session will focus on active looking, a central component of critiques, art history papers, and informed discussions about art.


Session 2: Thesis Statements and Essay Structure (November 9)

Your thesis helps spin your paper into a cohesive argument rather than just a report. Because you are students of art, your papers will generally begin with and focus on the art-object. During this session, we will discuss how to form an argument about an object.


Session 3: Demystifying Citation Systems (November 16)

Footnotes? Endnotes? Parentheses? This session will show you how to avoid plagiarism in your writing assignments.


Questions? Please contact Heather Bowling at heather_bowling@corcoran.edu.

Brian Jungen speaks tonight

Brian Jungen (Dunne-za tribe in Canada)
Strange Comfort
on view at the National Museum of the American Indian through August 8 2010

Online exhibition

Program
Meet the Artist: Brian Jungen
Ring Auditorium, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Washington, DC

On Friday, October 16 from 7 to 8:30 p.m., artist Brian Jungen discusses his work, influences, future projects, and exhibition Strange Comfort with curator, art historian, and critic Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev.

This program is co-sponsored by the NMAI and the Hirshhorn Museum.
No advance tickets; the lines for these talks start pretty early.

NEW:
5-minute interview with Brian Jungen from NPR's Weekend Edition.

Gilgamesh News

Our old friends Gilgamesh and Enkidu come up in this review of a book that seems to suggest that humans evolved to become less savage:

Until the discovery of DNA's double helix by James Watson and Francis Crick, prehistory was entirely the province of paleontologists and archaeologists. "But in the past few years," Nicholas Wade wrote in his 2006 book, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors (a work praised by Watson himself, among many others), "an extraordinary new archive has become available to those who study human evolution, human nature and history. It is the record encoded in the DNA of the human genome and in the versions of it carried by the world's population."

In the lost history whose DNA-aided recovery Wade chronicles, one of the most interesting chapters covers "gracilization" -- that is, "a worldwide thinning of the human skull" starting around 40,000 years ago. Why was it that, millenniums before the agricultural revolution, our ancestors became progressively lighter-boned and smaller? A crucial clue: The fossil record and contemporary breeding experiments alike confirm that domestication, whether accidental -- as in the evolution of the dog from the wolf -- or deliberate, induces pedomorphism, or the retention of juvenile features into adulthood. "Gracilization . . . occurred because early modern humans were becoming tamer," Wade writes. "And who, exactly, was domesticating them? The answer is obvious: people were domesticating themselves. In each society the violent and aggressive males somehow ended up with a lesser chance of breeding. This process started some 50,000 years ago, and, in [primatologist Richard] Wrangham's view, it is still in full spate."

For a student of ancient mythologies, this reference to human self-domestication -- sine qua non for the sedentary life that began 15,000 years ago -- brings to mind the oldest of all epics, the 5,000-year-old, originally Sumerian "Epic of Gilgamesh," in which the civilized, city-dwelling title character, though he has much to learn from the wild and hairy Enkidu, finally defeats him. Gilgamesh sleeps with any city woman he chooses, when he chooses. Enkidu makes do in the fields with a single woman, and her a prostitute.

Perhaps the "Epic of Gilgamesh" crystallized memories of the long human self-domestication that Wade writes of, but of equal interest is the possibility that rather than merely recalling the change, this and kindred myths may have contributed to it. If such a literary work were recited repeatedly, honored as supreme truth, taught to the young and this over centuries of time -- if, in short, it were turned into sacred scripture, then could it not create social pressure, then behavioral changes and, finally, over a sufficiently lengthy period, even genetic modification?

The full review, by Jack Miles in the Los Angeles Times, may be found
here.

History of Theater 2 - Development of Greek Tragedy

History of Theatre / Theater 1 - From Ritual to Theater / Ancient Greek Theater

The Bacchae at the National Theatre of Scotland - 2007

A brief report on the National Theatre of Scotland production at the Edinburgh Festival 2007