what is aphra behn's oroonoko about? what does it have to do with women in literature?

Answer 1

Aphra Behn is a forerunner in English literary history in more ways than one; she is not only the first professional woman writer, she is also an important innovator in the form of the novel. Using the epistolary form of Lettres portugaises as a model and combining it with elements of the drama, with Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister she created the first true epistolary novel. In Oroonoko she used a narrative voice that combined proximity to her readers with an unusual wealth of detail, while the plot itself involves one of the first examples of the concept of the "noble savage" in literature.

In her search for a prose form appropriate to stories with contemporary rather than purely heroic settings and themes, Behn wrote her novels in a conversational tone strewn with personal references such as, "I have already said...", or "I forgot to ask how...,", making the narrative resemble an ongoing conversation with her readers and lending her tales a more everyday tone than was usually the case in earlier prose forms. In addition, the presence of the narrator as the interpreter of the story makes her a part of the narrative herself. In Behn's works, this presence goes beyond that of an authorial narrative strategy, however; the narrator frequently takes part in the story as well. Behn's narrative strategy is the predecessor of the omniscient narrative voice such as that used by Henry Fielding, Jane Austen and George Eliot. On the other hand, Behn's narrator is more intrusive and relates events in such a way to emphasize the narrating voice.

Despite Behn's important innovations in prose narrative, her literary reputation lags far behind her accomplishments. The sixth edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, published in 1990, still did not contain a single work by Behn, and as Anglo-American literary critics are well aware, the two heavy volumes of the Norton Anthology are the physical incarnation of the literary canon in English. Since the publication of the Behn biographies from Maureen Duffy (1979) and Angeline Goreau (1980), research on Behn has experienced a renaissance, particularly among feminist critics, Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684-87) has been reprinted by Virago Press, and five of her plays in paperback by Methuen, making these works more readily available. Fortunately, the feminist interest in Behn is not letting up; unfortunately, it still seems to be primarily a feminist interest.

"The female voice and the rise of the novel"

Numerous feminist disciplines have shown that the interests of women in a patriarchal society are rarely taken into account. The traditional view of history, for example, is that it is the story of great political events; by contrast, feminist historians have tried to uncover evidence of women in this chronicle of great events and looked into the circumstances of women's lives through the centuries. Now "everyday life" is becoming a more prominent concern of mainstream historians as well. The situation in the history of the novel is quite different, however. Several women authors at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century made important contributions to the development of the English novel, and the genre has always shown a concern for and an interest in domestic arrangements. As opposed to history, the protagonists of the novel have been women as often as they have been men, and the story of the woman trapped in social constraints became a particularly novelistic subject.

Daniel Defoe has frequently been cited as the Father of the English Novel (capitalization intended). An outsider from the literary establishment ruled by Alexander Pope and his cohorts, Defoe was in some ways an anomaly during a period defined as 'Augustan,' despite the fact that he was a writer of social criticism and satire before he turned to novels. He did not belong to the respected literary world, which at best ignored him and his works and at worst derided him. (In 1709, Swift for example referred to him as "the Fellow that was Pilloryed, I have forgot his name.") But the works of fiction for which Defoe is remembered, particularly Moll Flanders (1722) and Robinson Crusoe (1719), owe less to the satirical and refined impulse of the Augustan tradition, and more to a contrary tradition of early prose narrative by women, particularly Behn, Mary Delariviere Manley and Jane Barker. Since Ian Watt's influential study, The Rise of the Novel (1957), literary historians have generally considered Robinson Crusoe the first successful English novel and Defoe as one of the originators of realistic fiction in the eighteenth century, but he was deeply indebted to his female precursors and probably would never have attempted prose narrative if they had not created an audience for it in the first place.



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Answer 2

Oroonoko is about the Slave trade. To give a quick synopsis, a prince in an african nation i can't remember the name of falls in lvoe with a princess, but he can't have her as she is promised to someone else. The prince is a mighty warrior and there is some sort of war between two african tribes.

A ship from europe (probably the UK) arrives and the prince and his men are coaxed into boarding where they are captured and shipped to the plantations where they are sold.

Anyway, this prince meets his princess there. He organises a slaves revolt. Eventually he and the princess try to escape together but they can't and he ends up cutting her head off (a mercy killing as they don't want to bring their child up onto slavery)

Then he is punished (possibly killed i don't recall) for organising the revolt.

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What does it have to do with women in literature? Aphra Behn not only wrote professionally, the first women of her kind, but Oroonoko is arguably the first 'novel' written in the English language.