Aphra Behn, Part 12

Caesar’s Death’s Head 

and The Hidden Face of Defiance

Police-officers tell us that it is very difficult to make a prostitute confess anything concerning her _souteneur_. Thus, Rosa L., whom her 'Alphonse' had often threatened to kill, even putting the knife to her throat, would say nothing, and denied everything when the magistrate questioned her. Maria R., with her face marked by a terrible scar produced by her _souteneur_, still carefully preserved many years afterward the portrait of the aggressor, and when we asked her to explain her affection she replied: 'But he wounded me because he loved me.' The _souteneur's_ brutality only increases the ill-treated woman's love; the humiliation and slavery in which the woman's soul is drowned feed her love." (Niceforo, _Il Gergo_, etc., 1897, p. 128.)[i]

Here are some of the details we find in the description of Caesar and his wife Imoinda: cutting of the throat, production of a violent sign to be seen by others, the persistence of love in an act of cruelty, silence, and slavery.  This is what we expect to find as the background to the appearance of bloody wounds, threatened murder, and even murder in sexual crimes, and what the sexologists (Havelock Ellis, Krafft-Ebbing, etc.) of the fin de siècle and on through to World War II confirmed: not just the violence itself, here mostly against women, and in this instance a prostitute, but also the claims of love both by the perpetrator and his victim.  They deal with mental phenomena—symptoms, syndromes, cases—that they name after literary figures, the Marquis de Sade for sadism and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch for masochism.[ii]

This report, whether or not it is accurate as a fact about particular persons, reminds us of several key aspects of a psychohistorical approach to history: (1) passions roused by events or by misperception of events can be more persuasive than the truth observable by objective spectators; (2) the passion known as love is rarely if ever a romantic attachment and desire roused by noble generous and caring relationships but deep mental aberrations that recapitulate and reactivate dysfunctional primary relations between infants and mothers, thus passing from generation to generation trauma experienced in archaic times, even when there may be gaps of centuries or more between exacerbating circumstances; (3) the dialectic of sadism-masochism forms only part of the tension that binds two types of persons into a vicious circle of abuse, humiliation and anxiety; (4) the capacity for self-delusion is great and can become contagious, affecting other contiguous persons not originally part of the earlier traumas or irritations; (5) groups based on shared child-rearing practice and experience of similar abusive events may reinforce one another’s irrational needs to deny, to project outward and to introject rationalizations, fabulations into art, literature and drama, and self-balming dreams, discourses and cultural acts of charity or sacrifice.

It is sometimes now explained that such phenomena result from “hard-wiring” of the brain or genetically-coded connections between immediate impressions of compassion and impulses of empathy, as though brains were merely computers or superficial organs determined by archaic evolutionary needs for survival.  My argument—that of psychohistory—is opposed to such evolutionary, deterministic, one-directional explanations: the mind-brain-hormonal-nervous system should be seen rather as complex, reversible, dynamic and subject to historical change.  In this I follow Lloyd de Mause who explains:

While adaptation to the natural environment is the key to genetic evolution, relationship to the human environment is the key to psychological evolution, to the evolution of “human nature.”  Psychogeneis is also the key to cultural evolution, since the range of evolution of childrearing in every society puts inevitable limits upon what it can accomplish—politically, economically and socially.[iii] 

Nevertheless, going further and against some of the determinism inherent in this kind of psychohistory, which also manifests in paradigmatic schemes of coordinated chronological schemes of types of childrearing, characteristic social structures and relationships, and moral attitudes—certain individuals and small groups have been historically capable of limiting the pains, the reverbatory disturbances of nervous energy, and generating alternating discourses, gestures, ritual processes and aesthetic codes.  Indeed, as deMause himself notes, citing other researchers in the field, “early environment actually change genetic expression.”[iv]  While Jews in general have developed processes for absorbing the shocks of persecution, expulsion and mass murder and turning them into narratives of salutary suffering, engaged performances with God and the Law, and so constantly re-inventing their immediate circumstances, languages and customs into manifestations of midrashed continuity in the midst of cosmic shock and dispersion;

Crypto-Jews have sometimes been able to manipulate the surface signs of submission, conversion and self-loathing to maintain secret stories, dreams and rituals of continuity, interpreting the anxiety, hurts and losses as superadded proof of their superiority over those former co-religionists who avoided the worst of the persecutions or escaped from the Lands of Idolatry and reconnected to existing rabbinical communities; Marranos, seemingly less certain of which identities to take as true for themselves or to display to the external and always hostile contextual society, have also donned masks and duplicitous faces, but done so by constantly stripping away surfaces and replacing them with newer versions of themselves. 

When the young narrator, her mother, and some other women hear of Caesar/Oronooko’s capture and the murder of Imoinda, 

We ran all to see him; and, if before we thought him so beautiful a Sight, he was now so alter’d, that his Face was like a Death’s Head black’d over; nothing but Teeth, and Eyeholes (p. 63)

Instead of the beauty of his face and total appearance which had so caught their eyes and filled their minds with romantic thoughts about him, they now perceive a grotesque ugliness—he is reduced to a skull, virtually empty, with glowing white teeth and empty eyes.  He has been stripped of more than the handsome exterior, however.  When he tells his story, and tries to evoke sympathy for the sacrifice of his pregnant wife as a means of saving her from a fate worse than death, the women, especially the young, impressionable Aphra Behn, feels at once disgusted by what he looks like and what he has done, as well as drawn towards his noble character and the courage with which he endured the ignominy of slavery and the rudeness of the rabble settlers.

Yet a final sustained portrait of the grotesque follows, just prior to the narrator’s pledge of loyalty to the memory of the Royal Slave:

He had learn’d to take Tobaco; and when he was assur’d he should Dye, he desir’d they would give him a Pipe in his Mouth, ready Lighted, which they did; and the Executioner came, and first cut off his Members, and threw them into the Fire, after that, with an ill-favoured Knife, they cut his Ears, and his Nose, and burn’d them; he still Smoak’d on, as if nothing had touch’d him; then they hack’d off one of his Arms, and still he bore up, and held his Pipe; but at the cutting off the other Arm, his Head sunk, and his Pipe drop’d; and he gave up the Ghost, without a Groan, or a Reproach. (p. 64)

In this passage, the dismemberment becomes so over the top that one cannot easily focus on its cruelty or the suffering the victim endures stoically; rather, one think of a bear cartoon skit in which the Monty Python Circus players enact a knight who tries to stand up fighting as one by one his limbs are cut off.  The grotesque here, in other words, virtually falls into the comic; in the sense of comedy explained by Henri Bergson as the transformation of the organic into the mechanical.  Moreover, it seems—because it is the slave who requests a pipe and attempts to keep puffing while his body is mutilated—as though he were both an automaton beyond pain and a puppeteer directing his own body’s demise.[v] 

The women spectators are appalled and condemn the cruelty, inhumanity and rudeness of the white male colonists.  Nevertheless, the procedure of execution does not end with the killing of the rebel; it carries on into the final stage of the public show:

They cut Caesar in Quarters, and sent them to several of the chief Plantations.  One Quarter was sent to Colonel Martin, who refus’d it, and swore he had rather see the Quarters of Bannister, and the Governor himself, than those of Caesar, on his Plantations; and that he cou’d govern Negroes without Terrifying and Grieving them with frightful Spectacles of a mangl’d King. (pp. 64-65)

Aside from Martin, who denounces the procedures of this dreadful execution, it must be assumed that the other three portions of the corpse were accepted, indeed, welcomed by other planatation-owners as a useful lesson to display before their African slaves.  Yet this man’s words are useful to examine, as the words have in our own time been laden with Romantic/Gothic overtones and lost some of their ancient and medieval significance and also diluted by the development of cinema and computer graphics, not to mention contemporary horror novels.

Look at terrify, grieve, frightful, mangled and even spectacle. 

Terror.  Perhaps we have regained some of the sense of terror with the advent of daily and world-wide acts of terrorism, including in response a War on terror, although many politically-correct post-modernist commentators have mocked former US President George W. Bush’s terminology as inappropriate (as they also did his use of the term “crusade” at the beginning of that war).   As an acute version of fear, terror from terrere carries the sense of something that deters, a bugaboo, an apotropaic face or other sight—a horrid spectral vision of the underworld or the other side, something so frightful it can kill or at least astonish (turn to stone) the victim.  In other words, it is not that the pain inflicted on Oroonoko was terrifying, but that his quartered corpse was sent about to terrify the other slaves into submission.

Grief.  Here the grieving is what causes the sense of oppression, burdening the one who sees the sight with fear, causing grievous injury to their minds and hearts.  That is, the root sense here is not that of lamentation and mourning over a loved-one’s death, which is how the primary sense has shifted for our common usage—we now expect a surviving spouse, for example, to go through a natural process of grieving to feel intensely the loss of the partner, to then return to a more normal equilibrium after a relatively short period of time, learning to accept the death, to reintegrate into the community of relatives and friends, and thus not fall victim to despair.  But for Col. Marin and the narrator, the basic meaning of grief lies in its ability to frighten, oppress and terrorize.  It is in itself more than a hardship or a loss: it is a disappointment, a cause for rage and hopelessness.  In the passage above, the bloody quartered part of Orooonoko’s body both terrorizes and grieves the slaves who see it. 

Fright.  Like fear, to which the word is etymologically related, fright comes on suddenly: it is a shock, a destabilizing apparition, a horrible sight, as it is the condition of fearfulness evoked.  The terrors of the night, the horrors of the walking dead, the grief of seeing a normal human body reduced to a bloody, mangled pulp causes this state of extreme helplessness.

Mangle.  Perhaps known as a machine to press and smooth cloth, the mangle, the word as a verb and then as an adjective describing what it has done, is more ambiguous in its origins.  To be sure, it came to mean that which mutilates, disfigures, defaces, crushes, lacerates, tears and makes unrecognizable, but the earliest sense of mangle comes from the name of a war machine, magnanon, a device drawn by a pulley to crush down the defenses and the defenders of a fortified place.  Yet the Indo-European root lies in in the putative *mang- which means to embellish, to deceive, to create a false image of something.  Thus to mangle something carries within itself the destruction of the familiar and the production of the frightfully illusory.  The “mangl’d King” no longer looks like a human being, has lost all its natural vigor and cultural charm, and become a broken and crushed mass of mere flesh.  This is the spectacle of terror, fright and grief.

Spectacle.  It is a show—an organized public display—of something marvelous, frightening and wonderful, but also a sight so dazzling and fearful it tends to blind, to confuse and to disorientate the spectators.  When used as a synonym for eyeglasses, then in the plural especially, spectacles enhance and correct vision.[vi]

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[i] Cited by Havelock Ellis in Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. III “Analysis of the Sexual Impulse, Love and Pain, The Sexual Impulse in Women” (London: 1927-1933), Project Gutenberg.

[ii] Here one thinks of the old quip: A masochist cries out again “Hit me, hit me, please, I beg you, give me pain” and the sadist replies with a sardonic grim, “No, I will not give you the satisfaction .”

[iii] Lloyd deMause, “Childhood and Cultural Evolution” The Journal of Pscyhohistory 26:3 (1999) 649.

[iv] DeMause, “Childhood and Cultural Evolution,” 648.  Whereas many popular versions of evolutionary genetics stress the role of changes to the DNA code brought on by radical shifts in environmental conditions, lading towards the selection of mutations that prove effective in favoring species-survival in the group over long periods, this kind of psycho/cultural evolution examines the all-important expression of existing factors in the genetic codes, so that small but decisive developments can occur rapidly—in less than a generation sometimes but certainly within historical time—and also be further reversed, inhibited or even reversed.  Emotional states triggered by and influencing additional hormonal activity can and do stimulate these changes in expression of the genes and allow for individuals and small groups what amounts in some instances to almost wilful control over their human environment.  This does not mean, of course, that the participants in these small-scale psychic events are aware of or understand correctly the nature of their actions—giving greater control over education to parents who are relieved from public duties and thus encouraging closer emotional bonding, for instance, or choosing sensitive young men and women for long-term activities that preclude or delay child-bearing into early adulthood and lead towards more mature and “intrusive” (that is, “involved”) parenting in subsequent generations.  These are features to be found more often in Jewish communities than in the surrounding societies.  In terms of persecutory times, those Jews forced into more constant surveillance of their children, greater care of marital choices, and protection of some offspring rather than others are select-bearers of the hidden traditions leads towards the high number of key personality traits rare or random even among predominantly Jewish populations.  Not all these personality traits are positive or deemed necessary by later generations, as the parental choices would necessitate taking untrustworthy children—in the sense, that they are too excitable, too open in their speech, too drawn towards public church rituals—to be dedicated as monks, nuns or soldiers and thus out of the household as soon as possible.  It would be an interesting line of research to follow the careers of those converso individuals who grew into violent persecutors of their former Jewish families and neighbours to see what at what age they felt themselves to be abandoned by their parents and cast from indulgent, warm, nurturing families into harsh, cold over-disciplined institutions. 

[v] It is also almost inevitable that the reader is drawn to Jonathan Swift’s poem on the undressing of a decrepit old prostitute who, returning from her nightly rounds, removes her gaudy but raggedy clothes, then her wig, false teeth, wooden leg and other bits and pieces that made her appear to her clients as an attractive sexual object.  Swift’s main purpose is to satirise the society of spectacle and superficial beauty, his secondary purpose—and then the strength of the poem—is to cast the satirical gaze on the guardians of society who reduce women to this awful state, exclude any other remedies than whoredom, and exult in their moral superiority over her.  Here, of course, Behn’s focus is more ambiguous and tenuous: since it is not so simple a matter as contrasting the stoic dignity of Oroonoko to the lack of compassion in the executioner-torturer—particular in the use of “an ill-favour’d Knife,” one that is dull and rusted and so meant to increase the pain and humiliations of the victim.  The black victim almost is allowed to attain tragic grandeur but the keying of his loss of control to the status of his tobacco pipe blocks that generic avenue of approach, 

[vi] Or as the joke goes: “Have you heard about  the man who fell into the glass-grinding machine and made a spectacle of himself?”  This to a great extent is what Oroonoko did when he asked for his tobacco pipe and stood silently at the centre of the show of his dismemberment was enacted.