A Look Back at the Numb Eel
and the Parallel History of the Cocoon Lady
I
think the numbness occasioned by touching this eel continues longer than that
from an electric shock of the same degree of force, and I have been assured by
a person of good sense and veracity, that a negro fellow formerly being
bantered by his companions for his fear of this eel, determined to give a proof
of his resolution, and attempted to grasp it with both hands. The unhappy consequence was, a confirmed
paralysis of both arms. I hear this
fellow is still living in the island of St. Christopher’s; if so, I can obtain
more satisfaction, for I have my doubts of the negro’s honesty.+ (p.
171)
+ This
account was afterwards confirmed to me, with the further information, that
after several years the negro recovered the use of his arms by slow degrees,
and I think without any assistance from medicine.[i]
Before we return to the text of Oroonoko, in particular her emblematic account of the electric (or
“numb[ing] eel”) we discussed earlier, it may be useful to look closely at a
similar passage taken from an explicitly scientific essay published about
hundred years later in the newly independent United States. Appearing in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Volume 2 (1786)
pp. 170-173, “Observations on the Numb Fish, or Torporific Eel,” by Henry
Collins Flagg of South Carolina allows us to see the nature of the language,
the sense of objectivity and authority in natural history, and the significance
of such an observation to science to set beside the passage by the
Crypto-Jewish Aphra Behn. It is made
more apt by Flagg’s own allusion to this same ambiguously fictional book: “Mrs.
Behn, in her Oroonoko, gives a description of this fish, which she calls the
numb-eel, and says it is taken in the river Surinam” (p. 173).
Whereas Behn’s narrator or persona representing her fictional self at a young age reports the
event of Ornooko’s encounter with the numb eel is given as a personal witness,
Flagg reports an anonymous source, though one he considers of good character
and reliable authority, but whose knowledge is limited, so that the
continuation of the narrative depends on an even more pair of witnesses: on the
hand, an indeterminate source (“I hear…”) and then on the other, the Black
victim whose honesty the writer has “doubts” about and therefore he cannot
receive full “satisfaction.” Most of
Flagg’s discussion relies on his own experiments in touching the eel and he
remains very cautious in imputing any clear proof of the electric nature of the
shock he experienced when touching the creature.
That he adduces Behn’s Oroonoko as one of his circumstantial pieces of scientific evidence
is also interesting because many contemporary scholars have noted that Oroonoko contains details on the flora,
fauna and anthropology of the region that accurate and can be confirmed by
published accounts by travelers, missionaries, government officials and
scientists—but that such accounts would either have been extremely rare during
Behn’s own lifetime or available only decades later in the eighteenth
century. Just as the episode of the
royal slave’s own personal adventures or journeys as the narrator’s companion
and guardian integrates such specific local detail into a coherent text, unlike
the essay by Flagg whose intentions are to compile a series of related
particles of knowledge and treat each as dependent upon different kinds of
“experimentation” and evaluation of secondary sources in a paradigm of skepticism, each of the passages we are
examining has a structure which goes beyond the scientifically factual or
accurately historical to suggest something else—another kind of discourse—that
is never made explicit. This reminds us
too of the several lapses in the personal letters and journals of Maria Sybilla
Merian, another female European traveler into the same part of Dutch Guyana (still
known then because of the recent and tenuous Dutch occupation of the future
French colony as Surinam).
Scientific artist (daughter of the well-known
seventeenth-century Dutch lithographer and publisher of travel and scientific
books, Matthaüs Merian) whose fame grew significantly with the publication of
her folio albums of South American birds, insects and small reptiles, each
picture not only integrating these creatures into a single environmental scene
(rather than set out logically in typological sequence of anatomical
relationship) but indicative of their organic interactions (habitat, food
sources, behavior, atmospheric conditions, and so on), Maria Sybilla[ii]
gives some small clues as to the sources of her information beyond personal
experience in the jungles, particularly from local indigenous women; but leaves
us two key factors most notable about the particular district she lived in for
several years (with one of her daughters as assistant) shortly after Behn
published Oronooko in London. So successful were these books that she
earned the soubriquet of the Cocoon
Lady.
The first factor is the large number of African
slaves maintained in the religious plantation she stayed on—her affiliation to
this strict sect of Dutch Protestants seeking an ideal pious community in the
New World somewhat ambiguous and perhaps more for the opportunity of an
unattached woman to visit South America than faith commitment. This pseudo-edenic settlement was notorious
for its ill-treatment of slaves, and Merian’s account barely mentions either
the slaves or their conditions of work, although she does rarely let drop
details of speaking with some of the female Africans and seeking their guidance
as she searched for subjects to draw.
The second factor, something she shares with Behn,
albeit Oronooko is set some thirty to
forty years earlier than Merian’s visit, at a time when the English
jurisdiction over this area was contested by both French and Dutch colonists,
seems more important to our understanding of the author and her ambiguously
fictional narrative; namely, that events transpire in that part of the later
Dutch controlled region of Guyana that was coming to be known as Judensaavan, Jewish Savannah, because of
the large number of Jewish slave-owning plantations to be found there. It is likely that many of the original
Sephardic families to arrive in this area came either directly or indirectly from
the failed Dutch colony near Reciffe and Pernambuco in northeastern Brazil, the
same pool of New World Jewish settlers who went on to the Dutch West Indies and
Nieu Amsterdaam (New York). Merian’s lapsus in this regard may be due to her
general shift in focus from her own daily experiences in the region on to the
specifics of how she came to compile her folio of drawings that she and her
daughter then worked up into full-colour lithographic print collections at the
turn of the seventeenth into the eighteenth centuries. Behn’s concerns were quite different and
suggest that her suppression of any hints at the Jewish presence and
participation in the European colonization of the area have been
deliberate.
[i] This essay is reproduced in facsimile by the American Philosophical Society in
collaboration with JSTOR online at http://www.jstor.org/stable/1005175.
[ii] For further details and sources, see
Norman Simms “Maria
Sibylla Merian in the Cocoon: Childhood Confusions: Part 1” and
“Maria Sibylla Merian: Crises in Spirit, Intellect and
Marriage: Part 2” Iakov Levi,
ed. Psychohistory online at (July
20, 2009 )
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