This essay has been hidden away in the back of my computer for a number of years. It as to form part of another book in the series of exploring how a few English authors were actually either Crypto-Jews or Marranos. The rest of the book on Aphra Behn would have consisted of the various published articles that are referred to in the notes, as well as a few others--and, of course, new material to be added as I brought the volume into shape. Other interests,m along with illness and retirement got in the way.
Introduction
In 1688, the year of the
Bloodless Revolution in England, Aphra Behn published a strange book entitled Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave. A True
History.[1] Almost everything about it is baffling, from
the questions concerning its genre—such as, is it a novel, a travel book, a
heroic romance, a satire, an autobiography or something completely sui generis?—to what is meant by “true
history.” Even the identity of the
author, “Mrs. A. Behn” raises serious problems of identity, since the
well-known playwright and woman-about-town indicated on the title page and who
signs “The Epistle Dedicatory/To The/Right Honourable/The/Lord MAITLAND”[2]
is and at the same time is not recognizable in the unnamed young adolescent
girl who encountered the African royal slave of the title a generation earlier
in what was then the British colony of Surinam. Who is or what is (an) Aphra
Behn?[3] We have argued elsewhere that she does not
fit with the supposed fair maid of Kent who grew up to be a clever and
successful London figure, but rather to be a more mysterious personage whose
first appearance in documents places her in Surinam as a spy by the name of Astraea,[4]
a designation occasionally found in her other books. In this essay, I am going to put these
historical or biographical questions to the side, and move into the centre of
attention the author’s style.
Nonetheless, those other mysteries tied up inside puzzles will appear
occasionally as the argument requires. Several significant scenes in
Aphra Behn’s Oronooko indicate that
her mode of composition, at least in this narrative is based on a complex
interweaving and juxtaposition of discursive modes. I will argue later that the book is a form of
menippian satire rather than a novel in the sense developed over the next century
of English literary history [5] These discursive modes may be called, in
general terms, poetic and prosaic, or even romantic or realistic. But, as emblems developed into a major
rhetorical form during the sixteenth and seventeenth century, the age of the
Baroque, it is important to know what thee were and why they are to be found
embedded in the core of Aphra Behn’s work, not only as rhetorical figures but
as conceptual aspects of her thought.
Rolf P. Lessenich aptly points out that in this historical period, prior
to the Enlightenment, “the conceit replaced the Renaissance image.”[6]
The metaphysical conceit—the English version of Continental concettismo—is
both opposed to the rigid, literalist mentality of Calvinism, with its
Puritanical distrust and abhorrence of sensuous imagery, theatrical spectacle
and extravagant speech. Such a mode
developed as part of the Baroque in response to the Counter-Reformation’s
stress on the importance of visual, tactile, and oratorical performances as the
most powerful media of religious experience.
The emblem, in particular, brought together words and pictures in a
tripartite format: (a) a symbolic image, (b) a dark or complex verse poem, and
(c) a brief motto usually in one of the classical languages (Greek, Latin or
Hebrew) but occasionally (depending on the prime language of the text) in a
vernacular European language such as Italian or French. These three components are inter-related, with
the image and the verse poem each dependent upon one another for completion, or
at least for making evident the allusions, references or echoes necessary for
creating a relatively complete intellectual statement; while the motto acts to
interpret the two other components and their signifying relationship, presents
an interpretation of the whole—or it might be better to say: hinting at such an
interpretation. At the same time, in this kind of very thick textuality, the
motto may also be functioning as the title for the completed emblem.
Yet merely to have described the
emblem, the conceit and the Baroque as literary or artistic forms is not yet to
explain why either they were appropriate for the period in which they set the
stylistic agenda nor in what way it proper to think of emblems as vital to our
understanding of Aphra Behn, a Marrana writer
in England—that is, a descendant of Iberian Jewish converts to Catholicism,
whose knowledge of and allegiance to either religion is vacillating and
confused, and whose poetry, plays, short stories, novels and essays express
what José Faur calls the converso mentality. These aspects of her character—her ethos,
ethnicity and personality—are filled with paradoxes, displacement, disguises,
dissimulations and antinomian teasing.[v7] As Lessenich puts it,
The typically Baroque use of paradoxes
must be understood as the literary expression of an age that did not only have
to face new contradictory theologies, philosophies, and views of history. The age had, above all, been taken by
surprise in having to face a totally new, non-geocentric world picture. Where the center is lost, excess and
eccentricity are the new norm itself. Thus an aesthetics of excess,
eccentricity, disproportion, non-balance, monstrosity, and stupendousness
became the hallmark of the Baroque: “la estetica di stupare.”
How so?
If it was bad and hard enough to be a loyal Catholic in England after
1660, when Aphra Behn probably came to London as a young refugee from Surinam,
it was that much worse and dangerous to be a Jew, even though by tacit
agreement first Oliver Cromwell and later Charles II gave permission for
selected Sephardim to take up residence in the British Isles. In both instances, caution, prudence and
deviousness were required to survive. As
a single woman without proper “covering” (i.e., a male protector such as a
father, husband, brother or a trustworthy friend), further care was
necessary. If she and her ancestors had
been Crypto-Jews, she would have been able, if not to come out fully as a Jew
and rejoin one of the small but legally-functioning Sephardic communities in
and around London, but if they were not—and her attitudes show skepticism,
antinomianism and free-thinking, something akin to that of Spinoza in Holland,
but without his philosophical systemization and self-control—she would have had
to devise some other strategies to meet these highly unpropitious circumstances. All the evidence seems to point to the fact
that she (under what name she passed before she invented her pen-name or
adapted some current version of the encoded Astraea)
was alone, and found it most convenient to be a part of the always suspected
theatrical and witty, free-lancing writers group (not yet Grub Street) of
London. Another suggestion could be that
her previous services rendered in Surinam earned her an entrée into this
demi-monde, provided, as we shall see, that she made herself available for
further duties as an intelligencer (spy) on the Continent when requested.
In other words, before we plunge into the
discussion of Oronooco and its
composer, compiler, redactor or whatever she might be, the theoretical problems
to be encountered have to do with the reality or illusion of crypto- and
pseudo-Jewish writers and entertainers in London during the ambiguous period
between their tacit and legal acceptance in England (the last years of the
Commonwealth and the first years of the Restoration), the question of whether
there can be described or constructed a Jewish imagination that fits for these
slippery categories of people (returning Sephardim to Jewish life, Crypto-Jews
still playing the duplicitous game of Jews on the inside and Christians on the
outside, or Marranos experiencing the thrills and anxieties of not being able
to decide what they were or wanted to be) and, from thence, to the strange,
anamorphic and ingenious world of the “novel” published under the name of “Mrs.
A. Behn”.
NOTES
[1] All
references unless otherwise stated are to Aphra Behn, Oroonoko: An Authoritative text, Historical Background, Criticism, ed.
Joanna Lipking. A Norton Critical Edition (New York and London: W.W. Norton
& Company, 1997) pp. 1-65.
[2] “The Epistle
Dedicatory”, Oroonoko, pp. 5-7. All
subsequent references to the text will be made paren-thetically in the body of
the essay.
[3] The absent Mr Behn, either a
Dutch or German traveller Aphra supposedly met on the voyage to England from
South America, may never have existed; instead, since arriving in a new land
and new city as a single “uncovered” woman was dangerous, a putative husband,
who for unspecified reasons was no longer there to interfere with her
professional and social life, would be an advantage. As for the name Aphra, it suggests her
“African” origins, partly her identification with Oroonoko himself as a noble
other whose reputation depends on her female pen, partly her “North African”
origins as part of the Sephardic Diaspora.
With minor adjustments to its vocalization, אפר
a-ph-r
can yield the Hebrew afera, cinders
or the blackface of mourning and disguise.
On Behn’s identity as a conversa,
wither a Crypto-Jew or a Marrana, see
Norman Simms, “The Masque of the Devil and Death in Aphra Behn’s The Lucky Chance” in Charu Sheel Singh,
ed. Theory and Interpretation of
Literature: Commemorative Volume in Honour of Prof. Shiva Murti Pandeyan (New
Delhi: Anmol Publications, 1996) pp. 129-145 and a variation on that argument
in “A Dark Cynical Conceit: The Masque in Aphra Behn’s The Lucky Chance” AUMLA 88
(1997) 83-95.
[4] This star is the mystical sign of
Judgment that signals the return of the Golden Age, and was sometimes applied
to Queen Elizabeth I for religio-political reasons. Because of Aphra Behn’s supposed
Crypto-Jewish origins and the strong role that Queen Esther plays in the history
of these Secret Jews, I have suggested elsewhere that her real name was Esther
or Hester, this latter allowing a further conjunction of the biblical Esther’s
alternative Hebrew appellation Hadassah.
Esther is probably a transliteration of the Persian goddess Ashtar or
Astarte, a gooddess of erotic love and beauty similar to Aphrodite and
Venus. The Hebrew author may have calked
her name, as he did with her uncle Mordechai and the Persian Marduk. Crypto-Jews worshiped “Saint Esther” because
she represented the heroic virtues of secrecy and cunning and the
self-sacrifice of her modesty and outward devotion to God in order to save her
people from the machinations of the wicked Haman, as celebrated in the festival
of Purim. See my “Tolerance and Assimilation
in Restoration England: The Case of the Jews” Q/W/E/R/T/Y 8 (1998)
255-266. For more theoretical
background, see my "Marranism Reconsidered as Duplicity,
Creativity, and Lost Innocence," RuBriCa 13 (2004) 67-117.
[5] The novel is a “new species of writing”, as
Henry Fielding later in the mid-eighteenth cnetury put it, distinct from the
older term “novelle” which was a more fabulous and ephemeral form of
narrative. Most Continental languages
still use some variation on “roman” or “romance” for the new genre, whereas
English tends to distinguish it from the older sense of a more lyrical, poetic,
non-realistic narrative—and recently as a love story. Behn’s narrative appearts early enough for
the new genre to as yet have no specific identifying shape or content.
[6] Rolf P. Lessenich,
“The ‘Metaphysicals’: English Baroque Literature in Context” Nemandia Podviništo (1999) at http://vaseliena.blog.hr/2007/07/1622884754/font-size5the-font-color
990000 metaphysicalfont-english-baroque (read
10/07/2008).
[7] Norman
Simms, “Aphra Behn: A Conversa from
Surinam” in Mary Ann O’Donnell, Bernard Dhuicq and Guyonne Leduc, eds., Aphra Behn (1640-1689): Identity, Alterity, Ambiguity (Paris:
L’Harmitan, 2000) pp. 215=224.
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