Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (1688)

I. What is “American” Literature?A. Defined by the author’s place of birth and/or residence in the AmericasB. Defined by setting, i.e., in the AmericasC. Defined formally by topics, themes, and genres

1. hybridity2. wonder3. combination of Romance and Realism, myth and history = Oroonoko (and Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, etc.). O sometimes called the “first American novel” (William Spengeman).

D. Romancea. Medieval verse narratives about marvelous adventures of a chivalric hero (e.g., King Arthur), often with moral or didactic ends. b. Later prose narratives (17th-C. on) that emphasize strange and exotic characters and events, supernatural events (gothic novels, etc.)c. Behn combines romance, heroic epic, revenge tragedy, all old-world European forms with particular formal characteristics and themes o omniscient narratoro generalized or abstract settingo heroic characters (Oroonoko’s hunting, pp. 50-54[44-47).o Petrachan love poetry (e.g., p. 17[20])o idealized moral paradigmso O. is a perfect Blend of Europe and Africa, all of the sophistication and moral

rectitude but with a native/savage innocence of the corruption that accompanies it: 7-8[12-14]. He is the ideal solution that is brutally destroyed by the reality of the new world. The very brutality of that account is indicative of the immense emotional and ideological weight his character carries."Having embodied her romantic hopes in the noble African Prince Oroonoko and then cast him upon the narrative tide of the Brief True Relation, it seems she could only sit and watch him perish" (spengeman 67).

E. Realism—the “True Relation”o repetitive insistence on eye-witness testimony, "the authority of personal

experience," which we find "[o]nly in the narratives of New World travelers" (Spengeman 70).

o This consideration for the particulars of time and place as they bear upon the narrative plot is one of the early marks of the novel and "fiction" as a genre. (Earlier forms of myth and romance unfolded within ideational paradigms that were free from influence by the world.} description and detail for its own sake, without overt moral or other ends

o and the "Brief True Relation" or “True Relations” characteristic of exploration literature,

o the pressures of local geographical situationso contact motifs, including wonder, go-betweens (46, 54, 56), etc.o Because this latter genre valued the personal experience of the author as the

source of authority, she could overcome the limitations faced by a woman writing and her less than exhalted social status.

Oroonoko Lecture Outline, p. 2

The "true" relation also appealed to the emerging middle class audience, hungry for practical facts about the new world and contemputous of the elite world of high culture associated with the romance genre.

F. Combining Romance and Realism produces an early Novel

The combination "generates a sequence of events and a level of discourse somewhere between fiction and history, whose import can only be called novelistic" (Spengeman 58); first step toward the novelistic narrator and its "realism.” (Blake liked Behn's novel.) o The evolution of the narrator's pov, esp. her increasing sympathy with Oroonoko.

vs. the Whites who kill him, again looks forward to the notion of character development and thematic contradiction as parts of narrative conflict.

Cf. 46 (with the whites); 63, still white, but distanced from the clownish army pursuing Oroonoko;

Utterly contemptuous of the powerful men in the colony chasing Oroonoko, but that is focused on the abuse of their authority more than their being white/English.

o The blend of Old and New World genres takes place uneasily. The narrative begins as a True Relation based on the personal

experience of a specific narrator, but then it abruptly shifts to third-person omniscient to tell the story of the Court of Coramatien, Oroonoko, Imoinda, and O's grandfather, the King. The organization is mythic/narrative rather than geographical/epistemological.

With the shift to Surinam, it becomes clear that the conflicts associated with old world romance are to be repaired in the arcadia of the new world. Trefry, his new owner, recognizes O's superiority, etc. The problem is not with the natives, but with the rulers of that area, who are savage Englishmen: Byam and Banister, uncultivated renegades (56). This is a chaotic new world, posed between moments in history.

Oroonoko’s heroic, tragic death blends new world, Indian customs of self-mutulation (from p. 58[50]) to his heroic scorn of his tomentors: 75[62-63].

The “wonder” typical of European contact with the new world is turned on the English themselves as the novel suprisingly takes on the perspective of the Indians encountering white people for the first time (though later we find this is a wholly-staged contact for the amusement of the Europeans): 55-56[47-51].

The most important inconsistency in narrative pov is, however, the increasing identification with O. vs. the English who torture him. He goes native, dying finally with in Indian Pipe in his mouth (he picked up the habit in Surinam). This shift in perspective and sympathy to the New World is always there as the "Americanness" of early texts like this one, and is most dramatically thematized in the captivity narratives.

II. The World of Oroonoko

A. Correcting our focus

Oroonoko Lecture Outline, p. 3

Historical correction: In the 17th C., people would not have understood us spending so much of our time talking about New England. The Puritans were often dismissed as a bunch of religous fanatics roaming around in the snow. The real action was in the West Indies and, as Behn show us, in Surinam.

B. Surinam and Coramantien [map]

Coramantien was a slave trading post. It is on the Gold Coast of Africa (modern Ghana). Surinam is on the northern coast of South America. Behn’s novel is the first effort to depict African life below the Sahara, but highly romanticized.

C. Slavery in the New World

http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/geography/slave_trade.htm

England a bit slow, but first licence for slave-transporting passed by Charles I in 1630. 1672: Royal African Company established for slaving, fought off the Dutch as rival slavers. Slavery was not a major moral issue at the time.

That accounts for the strange instability of the moral perspective on slavery in O, and Behn’s ambivalence. She simply does not see slavery per se as so evil; it is the enslavement of a noble soul like O that apalls her; the rest of the slaves deserve it in some ways.

Selling slaves in Surinam: Penguin 41negroes recognize O’s nobility as King: Penguin 44Caesar/O actually trades slaves himself, offering slaves to Trefry to let him and Imoinda/Clemene go: penguin 48

Caesar’s rousing speech to the slaves to foster a slave revolt: Penguin 61-62.Tuscan asks him what to do, and Caesar responds with the dream of a free slave state: 63. (Liberia would be founded by freed slaves from America in 1812.

The revolt is quashed by trickery when Trefry adn Baym talk them into surrendering, which Caesar does out of consideration for Imoinda. The slaves turn against Caesar and whip him (Penguin 67).

D. Aphra Behn

Oroonoko Lecture Outline, p. 4

http://www.belchetz-swenson.com/AphraBehn.php

B. 1640? in Kent, England? D. 1689. Prolific playwright, often sexually risqué plays. The most prolific dramatist 1670-90. Erotic poetryProse narratives near the end of her life (1680s on)Hated the Puritans, who ruled England during the Interregnum (1650s). Spied for the Royalists in the Low Countries and then for Charles II (restored to throne in 1660) in Surinam. Behn not very good as a spy, returned to England penniless and turned to writing plays in 1670.1685: Charles II dies, his brother James II ascends to throne (both Stuarts, James was a Catholic). Behn thought of James II as a naive but heroic king—like Oroonoko. O can be read as a Royalist allegory defending the ideal of the Monarchy against those (Puritans) who would replace it with a mercantile middleclass Parliment. If the nobility had protected James, he might have made it, like O was not protected.

III. How That World Was RepresentedA. Narratives of Exploration and Discovery (Columbus, Vespucci)B. Chronicles and Conquistador Narratives (Diaz, Garcilaso de la Vega)C. Typological narrative (sacred or "providential" histories) (Bradford)D. "Romance" and myth (The Tempest [1610/11], based partly on the shipwreck in the Bermudas and other American shipwrecks)E. Captivity Narratives begin to combine romance and realism, myth and adventure, conversion and captivityF. The Novel

Oroonoko Lecture Outline, p. 5

These categories are seldom pure, and they often blend into one another when you apply them to a specific work, but they represent generally recognized genres.

Toward the middle 1600s, we begin seeing a new kind of writing, one that spans this range to combine romance and chronicle and begins to integrate the genres to some deliberate end: Bradford's "History," Rowlandson's captivity narrative, Behn's Oroonoko. (A counter example is Columbus's reports, as facts, about strange monsters living on remote islands: we read that as a combination of fact and myth ( the islands were there, the monsters not), but it was all reported as fact by him. Also see Morton, who moves blithely from very concrete details about the Indians' lives to speaking of them as if they were characters in a romance-fantasy with nymphs, etc. The two kinds of writing are not integrated, just juxtaposed.)

This combination of romance and realism characterizes the early stages of the novel, which emerges at the same time that writing about the New World was becoming popular (i.e., late 1500s through the 1600s).

IV. Oroonoko: from Explorer to Tourist

A. Narrator as eyewitness

To develop her ethos, the narrator claims the authority of the eyewitness, either that of her own observations or via reports of other eye-witnesses (principally Oroonoko himself or her mother and sister: p. 7, 8a (nb her reference to the "curious" about his life). She calls her work a "history" and insists that it is the Truth: Penguin 9-10.

(Note that the figure of the eyewitness emerges more importantly through travel writing about the New World, because it was principally in that writing that the eyewitness began to challenge "authority" based on intellectual traditions, myth, and blind faith.)

B. The New World as Eden: marvelous, strange, and innocent

From that perspective of eyewitness, the narrator reports what she sees in the new world in terms that are very familiar to us by now: wonderful and strange animals, "marvels," etc. (8 Penguin 9-10).

She represents the world as Edenic, and the Indians are compared to Adam and Eve living in a state of natural innocence: 8/Penguin 10x, 11x. The point here is that she is reporting this as fact, just like the other travel writers before her.

NB: Columbus thought that the earthly paradise lay at the mouth of the Orinoko River. Defoe located Robinson Crusoe's island there, too.

After invoking her authority as an eyewitness to the events she recounts, and before launching into the story itself, the narrator regales us with a typical list of wonders encountered in this strange new world. Some of the marvels can now even be viewed by readers close to home, she says, as the skins of snakes: 2[8-9].Here the new world has literally been lifted from its geographical context and turned into an object of curiosity and delight, either as an object in a museum or incorporated into art as the costume for an actor on a stage. But as the narrator's account of the native's own use of the

Oroonoko Lecture Outline, p. 6

feathers suggests, even in their original context these items served a decorative, artistic end at least one remove from their origin in nature.

C. God and Gold

But something is very strange about this account if read from the perspective of this quarter: it is not motivated by the usual motives that drove earlier explorers: conversion and gold. In fact, Behn goes out of her way to invoke both of those motifs only to reject them as of any interest to her:

Conversion: Oroonoko thinks the story of the trinity is ridiculous, and he has earlier dismissed English notions of God as the source of the English Captain's hypocrisy. (41)

Gold: some maybe-Incas? Show up at one point with a bag of gold (51) and tell stories about Mountains of Gold in the interior. This is a direct allusion to all of the stories about gold inSouth America, but now the pursuit of gold is just another possible "Adventure," no more or less important than the hunting and fishing, and anyway the Dutch now have the land. In one paragraph she tells the gold story and reduces it to just another adventure.

This notion of adventure is what dominates this particular travel narrative, turning the explorer and conquistador, the missionary and the colonist, into a tourist, titilated and save in the aesthetic distance from the world in which she or he lives.

D. The New World as Museum and Stage-Set. [Indian Queen]

But notice how her description tends to emphasize the curiousity toward this scene as an aesthetic spectacle: the butterflies and other things can be viewed now in England in the King's museum, and when she receives a native costume as a gift, she gives it to a theatrical group to use as a costume in a play: 9a/Penguin 10a.

My point here is that the New World appears in this novel as a spectacle, an object of curiousity. Her account is based on facts and actual things she saw, to be sure, but she portrays the scene more as a scene in a play, or a display in a museum, rather than as a place to go live. In short, there is a kind of aesthetic distance being set up from which the new world is viewed as a spectacle.

1. Beauty and Use2. Sports3. Curiosity and an Experiment4. Diversions and Entertainment

Oroonoko Lecture Outline, p. 7

These two poles, fantasy and fact, romance and realism, are constantly worked vs. one another in the novel, but they are connected consistently via a new kind of attitude: curiousity.

Much of the novel is taken up with what she calls a long "digression" (51) from the story of Oroonoko (43-51/Penguin 52-60), which is a tourist's account of the New world, a guidebook of the strange and "entertaining."

The American Continent is praised for both Beauty and Use (43b), but for the narrator it is mainly a source of delight and adventure (43a), and Caesar/Oroonoko they are safe from harm and able to enjoy it (43-44).

The scene on the river below the house St. John's Hill is explicitly presented as a blend of nature and art, a "prospect' that "fancy" creates: 44/Penguin 52.

She then turns to their "Sports," which include "Tiger" hunting (jaguars and cougars), "surprizing" these wild cats for amusement (Penguin 52-55. Oroonoko vanquishes one just like he did his enemies while a commader of an army in Africa, and brings its heart to them to satisfy their curiousity and tell tales about it: 46a/Penguin 54-55a.

O. is "curious," too, and it almost gets him killed when he decides to catch an electric eel to see if it is really as bad as he has heard: 46-47/Penguin 55-56.. He is saved by some Indians, which introduces this theme: 47-51/Penguin 55-60.

The visit to the Indians (Penguin 56-60) is the earliest manifestation I know of what will come to be known as the "ugly American" we saw in Madama Butterfly last quarter: utterly self-absorbed, "delighted" by the curious child-like natives he or here she encounters in the travels. What is in Columbus a momentus encounter with a strange new world is here represented as a trip to Disneyland or to a zoo. She does not speak the language, so they plan to settle for the "Diversion in Gazing" at the natives (48/Penguin 56), who are "Ingnorant" and "Simple." The nakedness of the Indians vs. the tourists' finery is presented as an observation about fashion, not a profound ideological shock (48/Penguin 57). NB: the references to the Indians' Wonder, which is now presented as a sign of their "Ignorance and simplicity" (49/Penguin 58a). That is the context for the familiar scene in which they take the tourists for Gods, though here that perception is the result of simple little trick with a magnifying glass. And rather than suggesting how easy it would be to colonize them or conquer them or convert them to Christianity, now it is just a sign that they would be susceptible to any "unknown or extravagant Religoin" and that that the English might "impose any notions of Fictions upon 'em," rather than a form of government.

(NB the "Indian trader" a go between [48-49/Penguin 56-]).

For all of the narrator's emphasis on eye-witness testimony, that point of view and the authority accorded to it by exploration writing is heavily ironic in the text and is presented as a deliberate construction to produce an aesthetic effect rather than unmediated contact with the reality of the New World. The visit to the Indian town, which is carefully staged for the effect of spectacle: 54-58[47-51]/Penguin 56-60, esp. 56a.

o Unlike the accounts of Columbus, Vespucci, and the many other explorers who preceded her, however, Behn's narrator says that she imagined her encounter with the

Oroonoko Lecture Outline, p. 8

Indians merely as a "Diversion" that occupies some idle moments. She approaches it with all the titillation and amusement of a tourist standing in line for a ride at Disneyland

o The "contact" with the natives is in fact a carefully constructed illusion. The ladies are willing to chance the encounter only if the noble Oroonoko (here referred to by his slave-name Caesar) accompanies them to protect them from real harm. In addition, in order to communicate with the Indians, the ladies arrange to take along a translator, a Fisherman, but he’s too Indian so they have to hide him. Penguin 56.

o In other words, contact between European and Other, White and Indian, is possible only by hiding (literally in this case) the mediating forces that allow for its representation as an eye-witness account within an ideologically coherent framework: military superiority in the person of Oroonoko; the ideal of communication embodied in the translator; and the troublesome presence of hybridity, which complicates the simplistic binary of racial purity that structures the contact as ideological and theatrical spectacle. The result is an illusion constructed for the amusement and delight of tourists, rather than a direct encounter with some extra-textual reality of the New World, but the process of constructing that illusion is what makes the complexity of that world and our place in it visible to us

They are costumed: 55[48]/Penguin 57.

V. Oroonoko and the Spectacle of Nobility in the New WorldA. Oroonoko as the Perfect Prince: a Hybrid of Art and Nature

The portrayal of Oroonoko also combines a travelers's interest in the strange and exotic facts with an attempt to "aestheticize" them as a spectacle performed for the reader (who is assumed to be English or European, not a native or a colonist): he is African with a Great Soul, but has European charms and manners. He is compared to Art (a statue) but better, and his features are critiqued from an aesthetic perspective that does not fit simply into more modern forms of racist bigotry: his blackness becomes an attribute of his beauty: 12-13-14./Penguin 15

In short, Oroonoko is a hybrid himself, but a cultural hybrid that combines the refinement of Europe with the natural grace and nobility associated with the Noble Savage, and that combination is represented as the object of an aesthetic gaze--like a statue, or a character in a heroic play, or a figure in a romance--an aesthetic version of the "wonder" we have seen in travel narratives.

B. The "Japan'd" Savage [Indians][Picts]

Oroonoko Lecture Outline, p. 9

Oroonoko Lecture Outline, p. 10

In fact, both Oroonok and Imoinda are covered with tatoos to the point where they look like they are "Japan'd" (i.e., enamelled): 40a [show the colored pictures of a pict!]/Penguin 48

o In Oroonoko, the aesthetic or representational dimension of objects in the narrative is what allows contact among the different cultures brought together by the discovery of the New World. Oroonoko himself is repeatedly portrayed as the epitome of international cultural standards: 7, 8[12-13]

In short, Oroonoko embodies the international character of early America as an aesthetic ideal that depends on the suppression of racial difference for its unity, but it is an ideal that is carefully connected to the reality from which it depart

Oroonoko stands less as a self-reflexive mirror for European vanity than he is a window onto the historical practices by which that idealized image was being projected onto the world and then horribly disfigured.

(Cf. The Orientalism of the King's Harem)[harem]

Oroonoko Lecture Outline, p. 11

We get a similar effect with the presentation Imoinda and all the scenes in the King's Otan, or harem. This combination of Oriental motifs and African setting is possible because the main point is their exotic, titillating appeal to a curious audience. Hence the erotic, softly pornographic account of Imoinda disrobing before the old King, his leading her into the bath, (17), all of the dancing, etc., including the "antick Postures the women Royal made" (18). Imoinda resists the old man, but as soon as she and Oroonoko are together, he "ravish'd" her: 24. The point here is that the whole scene in the harem is just that, a scene, highly romanticized and stylized, and played for its dramatic effect on the audience rather than any ethnographic interest in how African kings may have lived. In short, we are reading here Oroonoko as romance.

C. Slavery as Captivity: Caesar in America

The reason Oroonoko is there to amuse his English friends with his hunting and fishing, of course, is that he has been sold into slavery by the evil English ship captain. The very idea of slavery

is horrible, but Oroonoko is treated like a visiting dignitary by his owner or "Backearary", the Ibo word for master (NB the Ibo connection with Bucci Emechetta) (35) because that owner, Trefry, recognizes Oroonoko's innate nobility immediately (35/Penguin 41-42). In recognition of that nobility, he names Oroonoko "Caesar." Here is an obvious attempt to set up a parallel between the events in this new world and the mythic status of Caesar as a purely secular "type" of the great man. As the narrator puts it, 36/Penguin 43. This is an overt attempt to present the story of Oroonoko as an "american myth," and herself as a mythographer, the “female pen”.

D. Noble and Ignoble Readers: the Tale of Clemene

Why? What is the point of that effort? We get a sense of it when Oroonoko and Trefry are talking about the beautiful young woman that Trefry has presumably bought six months earlier: 38/Penguin 45. The two men tell and hear this story as a conventional, idealized love poem of sorts, with wildly exaggerated descriptions of her modesty and beauty, etc. At the end of this tale, the "Company," i.e., the group of slave-holders, overseers, etc. working for Trefry, laugh at him for treating a slave with such respect since he could not rape her, but "Caesar" is able to understand the nobility of his passion and nature. I.e., the romanticized exaggeration, the conventions, the "romance" or mythic dimension of this story, is able to represent the nobility of the characters in this new world, against the degrading "realism" of the company who only laugh at the master for treating a slave this way instead of as merchandise or a object to be defiled.

Oroonoko Lecture Outline, p. 12

Hence, two entirely different levels of perception are represented, realism vs. romance, and on the side of romance lies moral rectitude.

o The use of a representational ideal to critique the historical practices that support it occurs again during the narrator's report of a conversation between Oroonoko and his new owner, Trefry, who has immediately recognized Oroonoko's nobility of soul and named him Caesar (38-40/Penguin 41-42). Over dinner conversation with Oroonoko and the rest of his company one evening, Trefry tells him of a beautiful young woman named Clemene, who has been a slave about six months. Both Trefry and Oroonoko have all the trappings of the Petrarchan lover. Oroonoko cannot hear the name of Love "without a sigh," and Trefry is described as "naturally amorous, and lov'd to talk of Love as well as any body" (41-42[38-39]/Pengin 45-56).

o Oroonoko finally interrupts Trefry's Petrarchan reverie, however, with an obvious question that returns to the issue of rape, but in a way that directly opposes the reality of slavery to the conventions of Petrarchan love-poetry: 42-43[38]/Penguin 45-46.

o Trefry confesses to having been tempted from time to time, "[b]ut Oh! She disarms me with that Modesty and Weeping, so tender and so moving, that I retire, and thank my Stars she overcame me" (42-43/Penguin 46). At this, Trefry's fellow slave-owners can no longer contain themselves, and only Oroonoko understands the point of the story: "The Company laugh'd at his civility to a Slave, and Caesar only applauded the Nobleness of his Passion and Nature, since that Slave might be noble, or, what was better, might have true Notions of Honour and Vertue in her" (43/Penguin 46)

o To Trefry's fellow slaveowners, that nobility is simply barbaric, and Trefry's restraint is laughable to those who only see Clemene only as another racialized object of their power and cruelty. To dismiss Trefry's vision as idealist and the literary conventions that make it possible as escapist aestheticism is to miss the point of the passage, however. Only through the aesthetic idealism of Petrarchan conventions does the cruelty of the slaveowners become visible for what it is, a crude degradation of humanity that remains invisible, as such, while it is naturalized along lines of race and economic power. In other words, the historical significance of that cruelty is revealed--constructed--only in the contrast with those ideals, and that contrast is possible only within the literary conventions of the text. To the eyewitness, the actor in history, that perspective and the values associated with it are invisible, hidden by the immediacy of fact.

E. An Unredeemed Captive

There is no place for nobility in the New World that the narrator describes, however. Trefry and the other slave-owners know that Oroonoko is potential trouble, and that is in fact why he is out fighting tigers and visiting Indians: the narrator is supposed to be keeping an eye on him. But it does not work. Oroonoko is simply incapable of living as a slave and leads a revolt, which terrifies all of the colonists including the narrator.

But the revolt fails when most of the other slaves desert him, and he is caught and whipped--by the "other" slaves (57). As you know, he is nursed back to some health, and then, plotting revenge against Deputy Gov. Baym and the others who whipped him, he decides to kill Imoinda rather than leave her to the shameful lusts of his captors: 60/Penguin 72. After killing her,

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however, he is so overcome with grief (and his wounds and hunger) that he cannot go on, and he stays with her body over a week. A posse finally tracks him down by the smell of her rotting corpse: 62/Penguin 73. He definatly cuts off a piece of his own throat just like he learned that indian warriors do to prove their bravery (62, 50) tries to commit suicide but it stopped, returned to the plantation, tied to the whipping post, castrated, quartered, and burned while smoking a pipe--a habit picked up by the English in the New world from the indians. The body is then cut to pieces and sent to the other slave owners to be displayed to the slaves as an example.

This story is no more than a melodramatic morality play about the tragic demise of a Great Soul at the hands of evil. The setting would obviously suggest that the evil might have specifici hisorical assoications wiht slavery in the New World, but slavery per se is clearly not the target since Trefry is clearly represented a a good man and Oroonoko himself claims that most of the negroes are suited only for slavery. Given the way the new world is treated throughout the novel, it would be surprising if suddently at the end that setting were now valued for its historical specifricity or significance anyway. I want to suggest that the historical significance of the book lies elsewhere, in the answer to a question that is begged by the narrator herself: since her ethos depends on her being an "eyewitness" to events, where is she while all of this is going on?

VI. An American EyeA. Escape to the River

She does not see Caesar /Oroonoko get whipped because she has fled to the river with all the other women when they hear of his revolt, even though she says she probably could have prevented the whipping had she been there: 57a/Penguin 68. When she sees him, she "Protests her innocency of the fact" [of what, having been there when he was whipped? Of the colonists cruelty?], protesting a bit too much, suggesting guilt?58/Penguin 68. Then, when he is executed, she is gone again, this time because she had to leave the place because of illness and depression (64/Penguin 75)

So, she misses his whipping, and the horrible grotesaue execution, leaving only the “frightful spectacles of a mangled king (the political allegory to James II): Penguin 76.

B. A New View

What I think is happening here is that the narrator deliberately absents herself from the scenes of cruelty as a way of maintaining, or creating, a distance beween her point of view and that of the colonists. It is a way of maintaining that "Innocency of the Fact" that is so important to her (58) Had she been there, could she have stopped it? I doubt it; her mother and sister cannot stop the "rabble" from murdering and mutilating Oroonoko's corpse at the end. That "innocence" is a product of the abscence from the scene, a distaince from the "fact' of life in the new world that we can associate with the aesthetic distance that characterizes her "curiousity" and that distances her from both the native perspective but also that of the European, English colonists. That is the perspective associate with virtue and nobility in the novel. As readers, we are left somewhere "in between" the "innocent" narrator and the guilty colonists, neither as simple and ignorant as the Indians, nor as corrupt and evil as the European colonists. That position in between those extremes, between the Indians and the Europeans, is where Crevecoeur's American lives, and we will talk more about that next time.

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[NB: take up this point as an intro to the last lecture on Crevecoeur; the guilt and alienation associated with the distance from the old world and the new. i.e., the tendency to treat the New World as an aesthetic spectacle staged for the amusement of Europe. But the novel does not let her get away with that and suggests that the narrator might not be as "innocent" as she protests--i.e., that treating the New world simply as a source of amusement, of exploiting it aesthetically, is connected to the more brutal physical exploitation and conquest we have studied this quarter.

i.e., the tendency to treat the New World as an aesthetic spectacle staged for the amusement of Europe. But the novel does not let her get away with that and suggests that the narrator might not be as "innocent" as she protests--i.e., that treating the New world simply as a source of amusement, of exploiting it aesthetically, is connected to the more brutal physical exploitation and conquest we have studied this quarter.

What I want to do is to carve out that distance from the Indians and the Europeans as the place of theAmerican, associated here with the fusion of Art andNature, capable of seeing through to the innate nobility of a Great Soul. That will set up the first Crevecoeur lecture. THEN, as an intro to the second Crevecoeur lecture, I can return to this point and say that that distance was perhaps not all that innocent, that the narrator was perhaps as guilty for not stopping them as she implies, and that guilt, too, is part of the American character as Crevecoeur describes slavery.]