5/16 Questions for Carol (revised):




QUESTIONS FOR CAROL (4/26)


-- I'm trying to understand the differences in attitudes (toward empire, colonialization, non-white peoples) between when these plays were written (1660s-80s) and 1710 when they were presented for the "Four Kings". What has changed? Doesn't`o audiences see these plays differently in 1710? Help!

-- Why did Southerne make Imoinda white (a change which was criticized at the time)?

-- Surely the fact of King Philip's War (1675) changed how English viewed Iroquois, and how they viewed Indians. ["The war proved a critical turning point by destroying the interdependent world constructed jointly by white colonists and Native Americans and replacing it with a new culture in which native peoples were marginalized and the white settlers were dominant." (Wikipedia entry)]

Doesn't this view contradict Roach's idea of negotiation between "equals" (visit as Condolence Council) and an alliance against the French? Or does it?

-- In Southerne's Oroonoko, no one seems upset by the fact of a white slave (Imoinda). Why not?

-- How is the tension between aristocratic (Tory) contempt for mercantilism and greed (especially regarding slave trade) and desire for empire/pride in British identity playing into view of Africans/Indians and identity as White/English? In other words, what values are associated with English/White identity? As represented by whom? Is this tension between the idealistic and pragmatic/commercial values something that has been bequeathed to us today in terms of White identity/privilege? (duh!) Who won? Am I oversimplifying? (again: duh!)

-- What about this idea of the threat posed by colonists changing sense of identity reflected in plays? Image of slave trader and planters, for sure; otherwise?
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.
Visconsi's "A Degenerate Race: English Barbarism in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and The Widdow Ranter" on file)

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—
(Visconsi)

-- Reading The Indian Emperour, I was really struck by the scene (4.1) in which Cortez is imprisoned and in chains and Almeria comes to murder him but cannot in the face of his absolute equanimity; instead, she falls in love with him. What a strange scene! Cortez does nothing but lie there and say, "I cannot feare so faire an Enemy," and Almeria is stopped in her tracks. She asks, "Whence can thy Courage come?" and he answers only, "From innocence." He is absolutely virtuous.
Along these lines, I'm wondering if there is something in the nature of Dryden's heroes, and in their connection to the libertine, which could be central to the developing sense of English identity during the Restoration (I sound like I know what I'm talking about...) I'm getting this from the introduction to John Dryden: Four Tragedies (1967, Beaurline and Bowers, eds.) in which the editors say that Dryden adapts the earlier English and continental hero "... to Restoration times and [depicts] him as a natural man who prized his freedom and self-respect above all things. That strain of primitivism was woven through contemporary libertine thought, and it was manifest in comedies of the age." They go on to cite contemporary ridicule of Dryden for making gallants into heroes. Then--I'm happy to say, because I read this after being knocked out by the prison scene--they discuss Cortez and the prison scene, and conclude that the virtue he shows in this scene (by remaining true to his first love, Cydaria, and honest with Almeria in the face of both his imminant death and her professed love) is repeated in subsequent scenes until "He wins both power and beauty, demonstrating that independence and truth to an inner code of natural virtue are finally consistent with power and public virtue."
So: Does Dryden's portrayal of this kind of hero (and the continued popularity of this and similar plays) reflect an attempt by the English to justify all the benefits gained through what they also seem to perceive as rapacious colonial mercantilism? Is it their attempt to have their cake and eat it too? How are our attempts to justify (and/or be blind to) White privilege similar to these earlier attempts? Are we doing the same thing, and, if so, are we re-producing, re-performing, the same behavior? Or am I being entirely too simplistic?

-------------------------------------

LATER QUESTIONS:

Is this idea any good at all? Does some kind of look at London, 1710, Indian Kings visit, plays being performed--does that really have anything to do with the construction of white identity? Is that period a particularly good time to examine the question?

I like the idea that the Enlightenment, the Scientific Method, the need to categorize all life according to its outward, surface appearance led to the idea that skin pigmentation is the prime signifier of cultural difference. Is this idea valid?

Do these plays--Oroonoko, The Indian Emperour, The Widdow Ranter, Davenant's Macbeth, and whatever the heck was going on at Powell's Puppets--provide a reasonable window into how whiteness, or English or European identity was being constructed? Especially since the issue isn't race as much as the idea of a commercial empire based on trade in Africans among other things.

Should I try to work in Philip's German angle? It certainly enriches the mix by reminding us that Germans were "other" white people in British America. And the encounter (sort of) with the Kings--and subsequent Iroquois/German relations--is intriguing. Also the idea that the English are struggling with the question of immigrants and naturalization and citizenship (topical!) as the Kings are visiting. (If the structure of the play is a series of digressions, well, such a structure could accomodate including the Germans.)

Is there a link between the (Tory?) idea that English culture is vulnerable to the "degeneracy" of planters and other colonials and the fear that the white race is vulnerable to being overwhelmed by the dark races? (see Visconsi's "A Degenerate Race: English Barbarism in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and The Widdow Ranter" on file)

Why were these plays (Oroonoko, Indian Emperour, Widdow Ranter) being revived in London at this time? Were they just part of the repertoire and constantly revived? Even if that's so, what is the reason for their constant popularity, given that they were written as reactionary attempts to sway the public to the Royalist causes? Was it that the Tories were back in power? but more than twenty years had past?