Frightful Vision
What is significant about this lengthy
account of the narrator’s visit to the Indian village finally is the spectacle
of the warriors challenging and taunting each other. This shocking emblem
becomes a horrible and frightful vision, the sight of self-inflicted bodily
mutilation. Both the fractured bodies
and the process by which these self-inflicted wounds are made shocks the young narrator,
her party and, she rightly assumes in a shift of perspective, her readers in
London—and beyond in time and space to ourselves. However, while modern readers (you and I) are
certainly disgusted by these bloody rituals performed by the Indians, several
factors require that we put our own feelings to the side for a moment while we
consider the explicit and implicit contexts for this spectacle.
To begin with, it must be
recalled that in both Protestant and Catholic Europe, torture and abuse of both
the living and dead bodies were common; and physical punishments were conducted
in public as deterrents to further crimes, as well as being indicative of a
kind of visualization of the consequences of the misdeed itself. Tony Stroobant consolidates several sources
to present a striking overview of the terrible visions available through
personal witness, sensationalist pamphlets, and monitory sermonizing
The
punitive dismemberment of Henry Garnet, Superior of the Jesuit Order in
England, for his alleged involvement in the Roman Catholic “Gunpowder Plot” of
1605—he was hanged, castrated, had his tongue cut out, was beheaded,
disemboweled and quartered—was no mere medieval gore-fest; each of those
actions was imbued with a particular significance associated with the different
parts of his body…On another plane entirely, a French literary fashion of the
period was the “anatomical blazon”…lyric poems in praise of (sometimes
disparaging), not the person, but her (usually her) body parts (hair, hands,
breasts, feet, etc.)….this “tropic disfiguration” articulated conditions of
bodily, social and syntactic dislocation typical of subjectivity in the social
and political world of early modern Europe…[i]
Thus such articulated conditions
belong as much to the public and conscious spheres of early modern life
projected into Aphra Behn’s narrative and especially on to the person of its
heroic Royal Slave, as they do to the private and unconscious realms of
experience that this book, among many other things, embodies as a myth or
public dream—a deeply troubled inner vision of a frightened female, an
abandoned and abused child, and a sensitive soul in an insensitive civilization. At this level of unconsciousness, where
primary structures of personality are precariously balanced against the inside
and outside world, the hidden psychic or social “alters”[ii]
reach out and stimulate responses beneath the radar screen of language with the
incomplete and anxiety-stressed alters of the audience. The original English audiences of Behn’s Oronooko in the last quarter of the
seventeenth century would have felt some discomfort and yet also
experienced a fascinated sympathy for
the exotic creations of her pen—handsome African slaves, savage South American
Indians, weak, nearly-orphaned young European females, idealistic but powerless
young men in colonial service—and been shocked by the gruesome details of the
lives they see and experience in Surinam.
Yet our own moral shock is
different qualitatively and quantitatively from that of seventeenth-century
persons for several additional reasons:
(a) corporal
punishment and public anatomies were part of the culture, as evidenced in
accounts of drawing and quartering of traitors, often followed by theatrical
dismemberment and explicit displays of extracted organs; and yet we remain
squeamish as modern media draw us into ever closer details of real and
culturally constructed fictionalizations of mutilation, torture, natural and
man-made disasters, warning us—oddly enough—that “some people” may be “offended by these “graphic images”:
(b) horror stories,
already approaching Gothic intensity, about the Inquisition’s tortures, were
available through Protestant propaganda in England, Holland and elsewhere when
anti-Catholic attitudes had to be inflamed; and , though we suffer the
indignity of terrorist attacks at home and abroad, on our own bodies and those
of our proxies in exotic places, where our captives are “rendered” for “Intense
interrogations,” we pretend to be further distanced from our retaliatory
strikes—through guided missiles, drone and stealth bombers, and our own proxy
armies; and
(c) published accounts
of European encounters with “savage” nations in the New Worlds of America,
Africa and Asia often contained both graphic verbal descriptions and colorful
illustrations of atrocities on both sides, the natives or “Indians” engaged in
cannibalistic rites and the Spanish or Portuguese conquerors performing
terrible and bloody deeds that constituted the Black Legend of Iberian
colonialism; while we play cat and mouse games of evasion and denial, with
major news networks refusing to bring to air beheadings and other dismemberment
by enemies of our civilization, yet governments are unable to stop private
individuals from leaking information and circulating U-tube footage of these
events.
These three points provide the
kind of background which scholars are usually willing to accept in discussions
of Aphra Behn, taking her unquestioningly, as they do, as an English-born,
probably nominal Catholic writer. The
grotesque scenes of Onoonoko sacrificing Imoinda and then being tortured to
death by a small contingent of English officers and plantation-owners are thus
taken to confirm the somewhat radical views of the author, including a
metaphorical re-imagining of what happens to the two royal black slaves as
Behn’s critique of the treatment of women in Western Europe at the time. This seems an acceptable approach, so far as
it goes.
Perhaps more insidious than the
Black Legend itself, with its attempt to claim that Spanish Catholic conquest
was more cruel and vile than English or Dutch Protestant settlement, were two
additional iconographical consequences of these efforts to put into word and
picture moral aspects of Europe’s encounter with New Worlds. If anything, however, Aphra Behn is quite
explicit in assigning the worst of such colonialist atrocities, first, to the
few aberrant Englishmen she and her mother and other “friends” of the Black
Prince are incapable of preventing but which, as soon as the news reaches
higher authorities, are condemned; and, then, to the Dutch whose cruelties were
recognized by the Indians and the slaves.[iii]
Acceptable as these points may
be, however, they do not adequately explain the nature of Behn’s style or
themes in this “true history,” with its unsteady juxtapositions and
over-lappings of points of view, generic voices, and critical targets. For the emblematic composition to be more
fully understood in her case, we need to see the dark, complex layering as a
process of continuous satiric exposure.
Other points seem necessary to explain the narrative and the narrator. The two additional sources of iconography may
be set out, on the one hand, as
(a) the slandering of each
other by propagandists on both sides in the Religious Wars which wracked Europe
during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with images and imagery drawn
from reports of cannibalism, mutilation of bodies for punitive and pagan
religious spectacles, and warnings of greater reprisals by each side against
presumed atrocities committed by the other;
and on the other, as
(b) a continuation of
long-standing anti-Jewish myths of the Blood Libel and the Ritual Murder of
Christian children, arguments accompanied by images of rabbis cutting apart the
bodies of young boys, the cannibalistic feast of eating matzoh prepared with human blood, and the distorted, self-mutilated
bodies of Jewish males—circumcised and bleeding like females, excrementally
foul-smelling and with long phallic noses, and grotesque in appearance and
deportment.
But having set out these
historical sources as possible for Oronooko,
we have to add more theoretical, psychohistorical matrices. For the fantasy of the body falling apart or
being dismembered by some outward force does not need a specific political
context to make sense. Such fantasies
may arise either
(c) infantile fears
experienced in the womb as a fetus or in the birthing process itself when great
pressures of contraction, along with depletion of oxygen and other toxic
changes occur, giving to the emergent child a sense of “things falling apart.”
(d) subsequent childhood
or early adolescent anxieties and trauma accompanying violent sexual abuse,
real rape or imagined violation based on misplaced medical interference,
punitive acts, or foolish acts of play by caregivers or siblings.
There are several key factors
which contribute to the prominence of such psychotic features in Early Modern
historical events and their fictional or artistic representations. On the one hand, the breakdown of the feudal
structures of the Latin-Christian synthesis during the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries did not appear to ordinary people as the glories of Renaissance
culture—in startling inventions, like the principles of perspectival drawing or
the efficient distribution and analysis of information through the printing press, or in grand works of
architecture, classical painting, and expressive musical forms—but rather as
painful and humiliating disjunctures in social life, breakdown of domestic
order, and political persecutions.
Particularly exacerbating were
the concomitants of changes to childrearing practice, whereby instead of
abandonment or neglect of children, parents now intruded increasingly into the
lives of their minor sons and daughters, partly to ensure discipline and
loyalty where events outside caused almost daily confusion and disruption,
partly to instill religious values which could no longer be assumed to either
inhere in the baptized infant’s mind when it matured or to be strong enough to
resist external pressures from competing value systems, and also, though hardly
least, as a relief from personal anxieties through the inflicting of pain and
the gratification of sadistic sexual urges.
Infants brought up in such conditions continued to react in two ways: at
the same time as the increase of parental interference and abuse caused
traumatic problems that would be inflicted in turn on subsequent generations,
the parenting mode of intrusion led to more and more concern for the health and
safety of children, thus gradually, and with many halts and hesitations, as
well as temporary reversals, towards softer attitudes and greater and more sustained
loving attitudes.
The clash between the kinds of
personalities created by earlier forms of crude and cruel childrearing
practices and those of more modern caring and protective modes may be seen in
the climactic scenes of Oronooko when
different groups form about the response to the horrid spectacle of Imoinda’s
sacrifice and the torture of the Black Prince by the insensitive gang of European
settlers.
[i] Anthony
David (Tony) Stroobant, The Wandering Jew
as a Synecdoche of anti-Jewish Construction: A Psychoanalytic Perspective (Auckland:
PhD Thesis, University of Auckland, 2006) p 73. Stroobant cites the following authorities for
this consolidated view: A. Nicolson, Power
and Glory: Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible (London: HarperCollins, 2003); N.J. Vickers, “Members Only: Marot’s
Anatomical Blazons” in D. Hillman and C. Mazzio, eds., The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe
(New York, Routledge, 1997) pp. 3-21; Hillman and Mazzio, “Introduction:
Individual Parts” in The Body in Parts,
pp. xi-xxix.
[ii] While this is a term commonly used by Lloyd deMaus and other
psychohistorians, it is a variant on what Freud called the “ghosts from the
past as well as goblins from the present” who inhabit our minds; cf. Stroobant,
The Wandering Jew, p. 106. Psychohistorians argue that some of these
more grotesque alters are projected out on to real people who act as either
scapegoats or poison containers for the discomforts, anxieties, repressed
desires and fears of the disturbed and abused souls who have the power to act
out their fantasies in the social and political world.
[iii] On the other woman who came to Surinam and witnessed
such cruelties, see my “When Millennialism Fails: Cruelty to
Slaves at Providence Plantation” Clio’s Psyche 9:2 (2002) 99-100, as
well as “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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