Abstract
In this chapter Shapira explores the echoes of the dead body’s long didactic history in two groundbreaking works of fiction, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) and Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). Both abound with allusions to older genres that used graphic death imagery to teach a lesson: martyrologies (such as John Foxe’s The Book of Martyrs), plague narratives, and newsbook reports of political executions. But while Oroonoko and the Journal resonate constantly with the language and purpose of these didactic precursors, Defoe and Behn also acknowledge that vivid descriptions of the corpse are a source of authorial profit and readerly pleasure. Long before Gothic and horror literature, these early novelists begin to transform the dead body from a vehicle of instruction into a form of fictional entertainment.
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Notes
- 1.
Janet Todd, “General Introduction,” in The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, vol. 1: Poetry (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1995), xx–xi; Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 56–57. In addition to the Journal, Defoe published Due Preparations for the Plague (1722) and several periodical pieces on the same subject, part of what Paula Backscheider describes as a “stratagem to exploit different markets” that “became more frequent, calculated, and obvious” in the course of his career. Paula Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 143.
- 2.
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, or, The Royal Slave, a True History, in The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, vol. 3, “The Fair Jilt” and Other Stories (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1995), 118.
- 3.
See, for example, Moira Ferguson, “Oroonoko: Birth of a Paradigm,” ELH 23 (1992): 339–59.
- 4.
On Behn’s debt to Foxe see Roy Eriksen, “Between Saints’ Lives and Novella: The Drama of Oroonoko, or, the Royal Slave,” in Aphra Behn and Her Female Successors, ed. Margarete Rubik (Berlin/Vienna/Zurich: LIT-Verlag, 2011), 121–36; and George Boulukos, The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 65–74.
- 5.
John N. King , Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1.
- 6.
See Eriksen , “Between Saints’ Lives,” 123; John Foxe, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs: Select Narratives, ed. John N. King (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2009), 235–6. This recent selection from the Book of Martyrs, which I use for the accessibility of the modern spelling, is based on the fourth edition of Foxe’s book, which was published in 1583 and continued to appear in unabridged form until 1684. It is therefore the version Behn and her readers were most likely to know. See John N. King’s “Note on the Text,” in Foxe, Foxe’s Book, xli.
- 7.
Foxe, Foxe’s Book, 122–3.
- 8.
Ibid., 70.
- 9.
Ibid., 137, 123; Behn, Oroonoko, 119.
- 10.
Laura Brown sees the end of Oroonoko as a “reenactment” of the traumatic execution of Charles I, while Maureen Duffy and George Guffey explore links between Behn’s hero and the soon-to-be-deposed James. Brown, “The Romance of Empire: Oroonoko and the Trade in Slaves,” in The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, ed. Felicity A. Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York: Methuen, 1987), 57–8; Duffy, The Passionate Shepherdess: The Life of Aphra Behn, 1640–1689 (London: Cape, 1977), 275; and Guffey, Two English Novelists: Aphra Behn and Anthony Trollope (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1975), 16, 17. See also Anita Pacheco, “Royalism and Honor in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 34.3 (1994): 491–506.
- 11.
Pacheco , “Royalism and Honor,” 497.
- 12.
Behn, Oroonoko, 116.
- 13.
Ibid., 118.
- 14.
See Gallagher , Nobody’s Story, Chaps. 1 and 2.
- 15.
Thomas Freeman offers a compelling discussion of the politicization of martyrologies in the seventeenth century in “‘Imitatio Christi with a Vengance:’ The Politicisation of Martyrdom in Early Modern England,” in Martyrs and Martyrdom in England, c. 1400–1700, ed. Thomas S. Freeman and Thomas F. Mayer (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2007), 35–69.
- 16.
See note 10 above.
- 17.
Paula Backscheider, Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 7.
- 18.
Laura Lunge Knoppers, Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 44.
- 19.
Parliamentary Intelligencer 42, October 8–15, 1660.
- 20.
Mercurius Publicus 42, October 11–18, 1660.
- 21.
Lois Potter , “The Royal Martyr in the Restoration: National Grief and National Sin,” in The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I, ed. Thomas N. Corns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 244. See also Lorna Clymer, “Cromwell’s Head and Milton’s Hair: Corpse Theory in Spectacular Bodies of the Interregnum.” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 40.2 (1999): 91–112.
- 22.
Mercurius Publicus 50, December 6–13, 1660.
- 23.
David Stevenson , “Graham, James, First Marquess of Montrose (1612–1650),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/11194. See also Clare Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (London: Croom Helm, 1984), 71–2.
- 24.
The political uses of graphic death imagery and its verbal counterparts were not limited to the Royalist cause: see Melinda Zook, “‘The Bloody Assizes’: Whig Martyrdom and Memory after the Glorious Revolution,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 27.3 (1995), 373–96. Tim Harris shows that Whig propaganda in the wake of the Popish Plot used both horrific displays and their complementary descriptions in print to incite fear and anger towards Catholics: Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration until the Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 110.
- 25.
Michel Foucault , Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 47, 49. See also Freeman, “Imitatio Christi.”
- 26.
Behn, Oroonoko, 112.
- 27.
Ibid., 118. On class tensions among the colonists see Moira Ferguson, “Oroonoko,” 353–4.
- 28.
Behn, Oroonoko, 111.
- 29.
Ibid., 100.
- 30.
As Pacheco writes, “the presentation of Oroonoko’s death … suggests the stoic fortitude of the martyr,” but this “aggrandizement has to coexist with a fascinated scrutiny of the prince’s grotesque humiliation and decline that appears actually to participate in his degradation.” Pacheco, “Royalism and Honor,” 503. Brown comments on the “fascination with dismemberment that pervades the novella’s relation with the native ‘other’—both Indian and African—and that suggests a perverse connection between the female narrator and Oroonoko’s brutal executioners.” Brown, “Romance of Empire,” 55.
- 31.
As Patricia Pender notes, Oroonoko has been analyzed “under a variety of generic rubrics: as an early colonial narrative, as conservative political allegory, and as sensational travel account,” and its “oxymoronic form combines elements of biography, autobiography, heroic tragedy and romance, providing a veritable concatenation of narrative kinds.” Pender , “Competing Conceptions: Rhetorics of Representation in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,” Women’s Writing 8.3 (2001): 457.
- 32.
According to Margaret Ferguson, “Unlike some English visitors to the colonies who brought Native Americans home with them as ‘curiosities,’ Behn brought feathers for an actress’s headdress, ‘some rare flies, of amazing forms and colors,’ and, of course, material for the verbal representations of exotic bodies contained in the book she wrote many years later.” Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 357. See also her “Feathers and Flies: Aphra Behn and the Seventeenth-Century Trade in Exotica,” in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, eds. Margareta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 235–59.
- 33.
Behn, Oroonoko, 57.
- 34.
Ibid., 57, 58.
- 35.
Ibid., 59.
- 36.
Gallagher , Nobody’s Story, 68.
- 37.
Mikhail Bakhtin , Rabelais and His World, trans. Helen Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 29.
- 38.
Behn, Oroonoko, 62–3.
- 39.
Ibid., 62, 58–9.
- 40.
Ibid., 92.
- 41.
Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, 72.
- 42.
For a somewhat different perspective on Oroonoko as trapped inside Western heroic narratives he cannot control, see David E. Hoeberg, “Caesar’s Toils: Allusion and Rebellion in Oroonoko,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 7.3 (1995): 239–58.
- 43.
Behn, Oroonoko, 98–9.
- 44.
Ibid., 114.
- 45.
Stephanie Athey and Daniel Cooper Alarcón, “Oroonoko’s Gendered Economies of Honor/Horror: Reframing Colonial Discourse Studies in the Americas,” American Literature 65 (1993): 426.
- 46.
Charlotte Sussman , “The Other Problem with Women: Reproduction and Slave Culture in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,” in Rereading Aphra Behn: History, Theory, and Criticism, ed. Heidi Hutner (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 218–19.
- 47.
Behn, Oroonoko, 117.
- 48.
Ibid., 103.
- 49.
Ibid., 114.
- 50.
Stories of self-wounding were common in contemporary accounts of the New World; see Ramesh Mallipeddi, “Spectacle, Spectatorship and Sympathy in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 45 (2012): 480–1.
- 51.
David Roberts , Introduction to Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. Louis Landa and David Roberts (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, rev. ed. 2010), x.
- 52.
Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Contexts, Criticism, ed. Paula Backscheider (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 65, 141.
- 53.
Ibid., 65.
- 54.
Roberts , “Introduction,” x.
- 55.
Margaret Healy , Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: Bodies, Plagues and Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 55–6.
- 56.
Margaret Healy , “Defoe’s Journal and the English Plague Writing Tradition,” Literature and Medicine 22 (2003): 28. On plague literature in England, see also Ernest B. Gilman , Plague Writing in Early Modern England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009); and Rebecca Totaro and Ernest B. Gilman (eds.), Representing the Plague in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2011).
- 57.
Watson Nicholson , The Historical Sources of Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (Boston: Straford, 1919).
- 58.
Thomas Vincent, God’s terrible voice in the city … By Thomas Vincent. With a preface by the Reverend Mr. John Evans (London, 1722), 27.
- 59.
Ibid., 45.
- 60.
Ibid., 58.
- 61.
Ibid., 56–7.
- 62.
Ibid., 33–4.
- 63.
Defoe, Journal, 53.
- 64.
Ibid., 54, italics added.
- 65.
Ibid.
- 66.
Healy , “Defoe’s Journal,” 27.
- 67.
Raymond Stephanson , “’Tis a Speaking Sight’: Imagery as Narrative Technique in Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year,” Dalhousie Review 62 (1982): 685.
- 68.
Defoe, Journal, 18, 86–7.
- 69.
Gilman , Plague Writing, 240.
- 70.
Carol Houlihan Flynn, The Body in Swift and Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 11, 9.
- 71.
On the history of the Bills of Mortality, see Will Slauter, “Write Up Your Dead: The Bills of Mortality and the London Plague of 1665,” Media History 17 (2011): 1–15, and Stephen Greenberg, “Plague, The Printing Press, and Public Health in Seventeenth-Century London,” Huntington Library Quarterly 67.4 (2004): 508–27.
- 72.
Defoe, Journal, 147.
- 73.
Ibid., 25.
- 74.
Ibid., 191–2.
- 75.
Ibid., 96, 97–8.
- 76.
[Daniel Defoe,] “To the Author of the Original Journal,” Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal, With fresh Advices, Foreign and Domestick. Saturday, November 23, 1723, 3147.
- 77.
Ibid.
- 78.
Ibid., 3148.
- 79.
Roberts, “Introduction,” xv.
- 80.
Richard M. Rambuss, “‘A Complicated Distress’: Narrativizing the Plague: in Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year,” Prose Studies 12 (1989), 123; Roberts, “Introduction,” ix.
- 81.
As John Richetti comments, rather than making his narrator a “professional sermonizer,” Defoe gives us a “bewildered individual … attempting to apply Christian categories to what he sees in order to find their consoling patterns,” and often failing in the attempt. Richetti, Daniel Defoe (Boston: Twayne, 1987), 122.
- 82.
Defoe, Journal, 141.
- 83.
Ibid., 54.
- 84.
Ibid., 52, italics added.
- 85.
Ibid., 53.
- 86.
Scott Juengel , “The Early Novel and Catastrophe,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 42.3 (2009): 445.
- 87.
Ian Watt , The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 88.
- 88.
Juengel , “Early Novel,” 445.
- 89.
Defoe, Journal, 55.
- 90.
Ibid., 68.
- 91.
Ibid., 71.
- 92.
Ibid., 181.
- 93.
Ibid.
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Shapira, Y. (2018). Spectacles for Sale: Reframing the Didactic Corpse in Behn and Defoe. In: Inventing the Gothic Corpse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76484-9_2
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