[ENGL 3203] Oroonoko: à la Behn and à la Southerne

So once again, we find ourselves in the midst of a split-plot tragicomedy - at least, for Southerne's stage version. It's a shame the novel wasn't written similarly, I think a Benny Hill-style sub-plot with some slapstick would have livened up Behn's novella significantly. For the sake of chronology and comparison, I'll talk about the novella first.

After I finish this glass of wine. And maybe another.

Apparently, I am not a fan of Behn's prose. Where is the scintillating dialogue that I enjoyed so much in The Rover? Why am I instead drowning in paragraphs that must have been at least eight pages long? I realize that this was the style of the day, that novels and novellas were really just starting to come to the fore. That's great. Let's just say that my very favourite part of Southerne's adaptation was the fact that he (by necessity) skipped the whole first half of the novella, relegating that backstory to exactly as much time as it warranted: 40 or so lines, ending with "I'll trouble you no farther" (II.iii). Oroonoko, baby, you have no idea how much I appreciate that.

Slavery doesn't really seem to the the focus of this novel. Behn is much more interested in setting Oroonoko up as a natural king - and as white a king as possible. He speaks French and English and is generally very well-mannered. He even looks white: "His nose was rising and Roman, instead of African and flat. His mouth the finest shaped that could be seen; far from those great turned lips which are so natural to the rest of the negroes."

After sanctioning him in this way, it's interesting that she portends to set him up as an example of a non-Christian who is still a legitimate ruler. Even people who think "that all fine wit is confined to the white men, especially to those of Christendom'" would "have confessed that Oroonoko was as capable even of reigning well..." Well, of course he is. He's about as white-upperclass as a black man can be, right? He even has and deals with his own slaves, and in a break from his grandfather (who has a big ol' harem) he falls into a monogamous one-true love.

When the slaves he was leading in the revolt chicken out on him, his place as an outsider from the race of slaves is cemented again. He regrets and is ashamed of "endeavoring to make those free who were by nature slaves, poor wretched rogues, fit to be used as Christian's tolls; dogs, treacherous and cowardly, fit for such masters, and they wanted only but to be whipped into the knowledge of the Christian gods, to be the vilest of all creeping things; to learn to worship such deities as had not power to make them just, brave..." (Southerne translates this passage nearly word-for-word for the stage.)

Basically, Behn's tragedy isn't slavery - it's the ill-treatment of a natural born king. The Oroonoko Wikipedia article has this to say:

... however tepid her feelings about slavery, there is no doubt about her feelings on the subject of natural kingship. The final words of the novel are a slight expiation of the narrator's guilt, but it is for the individual man she mourns and for the individual that she writes a tribute, and she lodges no protest over slavery itself. A natural king could not be enslaved, and, as in the play Behn wrote while in Surinam, The Young King, no land could prosper without a king. Her fictional Surinam is a headless body. Without a true and natural leader, a king, the feeble and corrupt men of position abuse their power. What was missing was Lord Willoughby, or the narrator's father: a true lord. In the absence of such leadership, a true king, Oroonoko, is misjudged, mistreated, and killed.

As for Southerne's adaptation, some of these assumptions remain strongly intact (his decision to replicate the quote I mentioned above nearly word-for-word is telling.) Other things change - strangely, Imoinda seems to be a much stronger character for Southerne than she was for Behn, which is kind of strange. (Goodbye, Hellena - hello, weepy Imoinda!) She even has a hand in her own death in the play, when ol' Oro couldn't get up the guts (like, after five tries.) Whether there was a reason to change Imoinda from black to white apart from making her accessible to the Lt Governor as an object of lust, I have no idea. Apparently it was acceptable for a black man to want to be with a white woman, but too risqué for a white man to want a black woman.

While I found Oro (I feel that after a novella and a play, I know the guy well enough to shorten his name) to be generally weepy and annoying in the novel, Southerne gives him a voice that seems to suit his supposedly-noble character. While the motivations and emotions in the novella felt kind of muddy and subdued to me, the stage version really made them "pop" - whether this is Southerne in particular or just a necessity of the shift from one medium to another, I'm not sure.

The interweaving of the two plots felt a little strained to me, but I was happy for the presence of some lighter fare (and pretty gutsy ladies) to mellow out the tragic, tragic, tra-diddly-agic romance/heroic plot. Charlotte was a hoot, but I think the Widow pretty much stole every scene she was in. That would be a terribly fun part to play. As fun as it was, I can understand why it would have been cut from later adaptations.


I have a question about how these plays would have been billed. For something like this or "Marriage à la Mode", would it have actually been called a "split-plot tragicomedy", or just a "tragicomedy", or what? (Or maybe a tra-diddly-agicomedy?)

Until next time - same blog time, same blog channel!


Number of plays read: 4
Ladies-dressed-as-boys: 5 (Thanks to Marriage à la Mode we have a buffer, in case one play should omit this all-too-necessary component!)