The 18th century brought about an era of tumultuous change, both at large as colonialism reshaped English commerce and society, and in literature. Among this sea of change was Aphra Behn, a female author and poet. In this course, we studied perhaps one of her most well-known works, Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave. A True History., a gripping and vivid tale about an African prince who was tricked and captured into slavery. It's now considered one of the first novels and an influential piece for the abolitionist movement. This page seeks to document how Aphra Behn's Oroonoko undulated in both the eye of popular culture and the literary world over the course of three centuries, examining how perceptions of Behn and Oroonoko as well as themes within the work changed with each iteration.
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1640 ──────────────────────────
1688 ────────────────────────── Aphra Behn's Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave
I hope, the reputation of my pen is considerable enough to make his glorious name to survive all the ages, with that of the brave, the beautiful, and the constant Imoinda. 1700 ──────────────────────────
1703 - 1711 ────────────────────── Criticism from peersHer Restoration-era contemporaries, Thomas Brown (1703), William Wycherley (1704), and Richard Steele (1711) denounced Behn's works as "lewd" (Hutner 2). For the next couple of centuries, Behn's writings would repeatedly be criticized for its sexual content ("Aphra Behn").
1759 ──────────────────────────
1803 - 1897 ────────────────────── Victorian-era Criticism
1957 ──────────────────────────
1999 ────────────────────────── Biyi Bandele's Oroonoko
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1630
2000 |
──────────────────── 1663 - 1664
───────────────────────── 1689
───────────────────────── 1696 Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko: A Tragedy
I stand engag'd to Mrs. Behn for the Occasion of a most Passionate Distress in my Last Play; and in a Conscience that I had not made her a sufficient Ac∣knowledgment, I have run further into her Debt for Oroonoko, with a Design to oblige me to be honest. ───────────────────────── 1760
───────────────────────── 1929 All women together, ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn... for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds... Behn proved that money could be made by writing at the sacrifice, perhaps, of certain agreeable qualities Virginia Woolf famously credits Aphra Behn as the forerunner of female writers in her literary philosophy book, A Room of One's Own (Hoey).
───────────────────────── 1967 The tide changes.
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Google Books Ngram Viewer shows the frequency of specific words or phrases over time. The Ngram graphs for Aphra Behn and Oroonoko (both case-insensitive) respectively show how although Behn's work ended up becoming incredibly successful and remains alive even today, for the duration of the height of Oroonoko's popularity, Behn herself was forgotten. Around the 1970's, Behn's popularity upticks as feminist critics "rediscover" her.
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Conclusion
Not only has perceptions of Aphra Behn herself changed radically throughout the centuries, but her work, Oroonoko, has been written and re-written to suit changing tastes and political climates. What begins as an engrossing and complex tale of an African prince forced into colonial South America, becomes a tragicomedy filled with grief and romance and humor, becomes a more clear-cut anti-slavery moral. Nevertheless, the persistence of Oroonoko, regardless of the iteration, speaks to its timelessness.
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