THE PASSION OF "OROONOKO": PASSIVE OBEDIENCE, THE ROYAL SLAVE, AND APHRA BEHN'S BAROQUE REALISM

The Passion of Oroonoko situatues Aphra Behn's novella Oroonoko (1689) within the context of debates about passive obedience and political obligation during the Revolution of 1688-9. It argues that Oroonoko leverages residual theories and forms of representing human action (baroque allegory, ro...

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Published inELH Vol. 79; no. 2; pp. 447 - 475
Main Author HAROL, CORRINNE
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.06.2012
Subjects
Allegory
Behn, Aphra (1640-1689)
Christianity
Colonialism
Ethics
Narrators
Novels
Obedience
Political revolutions
Politics
Reading
Religion
Slaves
Tyranny
Writers
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Abstract The Passion of Oroonoko situatues Aphra Behn's novella Oroonoko (1689) within the context of debates about passive obedience and political obligation during the Revolution of 1688-9. It argues that Oroonoko leverages residual theories and forms of representing human action (baroque allegory, romance, patriarchal theories of obligation) against emergent ones (realism, novels, individuality) ultimately demonstrating that the natural fact (or natural law) of human passivity inevitability prevails.
AbstractList The Passion of Oroonoko situatues Aphra Behn's novella Oroonoko (1689) within the context of debates about passive obedience and political obligation during the Revolution of 1688-9. It argues that Oroonoko leverages residual theories and forms of representing human action (baroque allegory, romance, patriarchal theories of obligation) against emergent ones (realism, novels, individuality) ultimately demonstrating that the natural fact (or natural law) of human passivity inevitability prevails.
According to Victoria Kahn, in the seventeenth century "passion and action" replace "virtue and vice" as explanations for human motivation-and thus for human ethics and politics.5 Oroonoko, written during a crucial overlap between these two systems of value and in the thick of the revolution of 1688-89 and its renewed debates about passive obedience, offers a unique theorization of the virtues of passivity. [...]Oroonoko uses the occasion of debates over passive obedience and religious toleration to instantiate the modern narrator: passive and thus politically compromised because partially detached from the situation and partially implicated, a narrator whose liberty of conscience, whose right to a different moral standard from the one depicted-indeed even from the one in which she participates as an actor-depends upon passivity and expressivity even as it precludes active agency.82 The text's ambivalence about its own generic regulations, and their political implications, is perhaps why the narrator wishes a "more sublime wit" than her own could do justice to Oroonoko's story (73).
Author HAROL, CORRINNE
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Copyright Copyright © 2012 The Johns Hopkins University Press
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Snippet The Passion of Oroonoko situatues Aphra Behn's novella Oroonoko (1689) within the context of debates about passive obedience and political obligation during...
According to Victoria Kahn, in the seventeenth century "passion and action" replace "virtue and vice" as explanations for human motivation-and thus for human...
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StartPage 447
SubjectTerms Allegory
Behn, Aphra (1640-1689)
Christianity
Colonialism
Ethics
Narrators
Novels
Obedience
Political revolutions
Politics
Reading
Religion
Slaves
Tyranny
Writers
Title THE PASSION OF "OROONOKO": PASSIVE OBEDIENCE, THE ROYAL SLAVE, AND APHRA BEHN'S BAROQUE REALISM
URI https://www.jstor.org/stable/23256761
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Volume 79
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