5/16 EXCERPTS FROM Visconsi's "A Degenerate Race: English Barbarism in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and The Widdow Ranter"


The fear is not that the barbarous colonial renegades and
criminals will come home to England, but rather that the primitive
tendencies already loosed in Surinam and Virginia are emerging in
England, spurred on by the seventeenth century’s multiple rebellions
and many emergent, subversive theories of political obligation.
(p. ??)

Such a conclusion is crucially important to the development of
early modern English nationhood. Instead of a naturalized or intrin-
sic racial quality, geographically determined barbarism was an oner-
ous and regrettable aspect of the English past which could be
expunged from the national character through the rigorous applica-
tion of political, social, linguistic, and epistemological civility.20 Thus
the process of English civilization was fashioned as heroic and
exceptional by its triumph over the rather cumbersome burden of a
“barbaric” geography. The process of civilizing England, as Helgerson
argues, was conducted with direct reference to the primitive north-
ern past: “sixteenth-century national self-articulation began with a
sense of national barbarism, with a recognition of the self as despised
other, and then moved to repair that damaged self-image.”21 By the
beginning of the seventeenth century, English culture had been
regulated, civilized, and refined as a response to the barbaric past—
(p.?)


Even when confronted with native people in America or
Africa, English merchants and colonists relied first on class as a
means to comprehend and sort the people they met. While theories
of racial superiority were current and powerful, in most cases they
were secondary evaluative indices, as Karen Ordahl Kupperman has
argued in her study of seventeenth-century English interpretations of
native Virginians.26 (p. 8)

Oroonoko’s position as an advo-
cate for slavery looks deeply ironic to us. There seems to be a conflict
between Oroonoko’s status as a chattel slave and his embrace of
natural slavery. But the text does not share this ambivalence, endorsing
the right rule of natural superiors like Oroonoko while decrying the
unnatural authority of a degenerate race of colonial rapists, thieves, and
barbarians. Thus the novella suggests a modified Aristotelian view of
natural class status in which a benevolent and paternalistic master-slave
or monarch-subject relationship stabilizes the household and the state.
(p. 16)



Oroonoko's blackness:

Behn uncharacteristically refrains from lightening Oroonoko’s skin to make
him more palatable to an European audience. But Oroonoko’s
blackness carries with it much ideological freight—as Gallagher
points out, black skin meant, above all, that a person was subject to be
exchanged as a commodity.45 It is precisely that blackness which
allows Behn to point out the depraved and wrongheaded priorities of
Whig capitalism. There are two models of value mapped onto
Oroonoko’s body—one of commercial value, the other of political and
moral value. The commercial system within which Oroonoko circu-
lates repeatedly demonstrates these competing models of value,
forcing its agents to choose between them. Either Oroonoko is to be
treated as a man of honor and an exemplary monarch, or he is to be
treated as chattel, as a valuable commodity to be exchanged and
employed for financial gain. Not surprisingly, from the slave trader’s
duplicity to Byam’s and Banister’s cruel barbarism, in every case
Oroonoko’s value to the agents of commerce is exclusively financial.
Oroonoko’s blackness, his value as chattel, trumps his value as an
intrinsically noble and gracious monarch within the acquisitive and
debased moral calculus of Whiggery.
(p. 18)

Margo Hendricks has argued that the play [The Widdow Ranter] uses the threat of a
barbaric, potentially miscegenous Indian other to stabilize and re-
unify the English colony in Virginia and ratify the genocidal aims of
the imperial project. While Hendricks is quite correct to point out
the genocidal implications of the colonial project, as well as Bacon’s
own deep involvement in such ideology, she misreads the play’s
central threat. The barbarians at the gate are not Indians but tailors,
panders, and pickpockets. The few representations of Indians in The
Widow Ranter are almost all positive from a royalist perspective
(p. 20)

While it seems that Bacon is a second Oroonoko, his suicide is the
result of a misreading of the battle, and in the context of a tragicom-
edy it is at least partially ridiculous that the victorious general kills
himself after his forces have won. Bacon is hardly the transparent
vehicle for absolutist ideology that Oroonoko is—his insistence on
the points of honor is overwrought, making him look either foolish or
tendentious. (p. 20)

As a propagandist, Behn argues that the moral calculus of Whiggery is
corrupt and politically irresponsible, for it privileges exchange value
over virtue, commerce over justice, violence and barbarism over
stability, and the rule of the wild and ignorant people over the rule of
the educated and just. These American texts, which are so critically
concerned with forms of government, are not primarily warnings
against colonial dissolution, miscegenation, or imperialism. Rather
they represent Behn’s more local warnings tuned to a fever pitch; for
the barbarians are at the gate in England, and popular rule means that
the project of English civilization has failed and chaos is come again.
(p. 25)
-----------------------------------
See Laura Brown, “The Romance of Empire: Oroonoko and the Trade in
Slaves,” in The New Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Brown (New
York: Methuen, 1987), 41–61. See also Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The
Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley: Univ.
of California Press, 1995); Margaret Ferguson, “Juggling the Categories of Race,
Class, and Gender: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,” in Women, “Race,” and Writing in the
Early Modern Period, ed. Patricia Parker and Margo Hendricks (New York:
Routledge, 1994), 209–24; Judith Andrade, “White Skin, Black Masks: Colonialism
and the Sexual Politics of Oroonoko,” Cultural Critique 26 (1994): 189–214; Anita
Pacheco, “Royalism and Honor in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,” SEL 34 (1994): 491–
506; and Richard Frohock, “Violence and Awe: The Foundation of Government in
Aphra Behn’s New World Settings,” Eighteenth Century Fiction 8 (1996): 437–52.