Asia Out of Place: The Aesthetics of Incorruptibility in Behn's Oroonoko
Chi-ming Yang
Eighteenth-Century Studies, Volume 42, Number 2, Winter 2009, pp. 235-253 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/ecs.0.0037
For additional information about this article
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Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 42, no. 1 (2008) Pp. 235–53.
A siA O ut Of P lAce : t he A esthetics Of
i ncOrruPtibility in b ehn ’ s O rOOnOkO
Chi-ming Yang
Time and place are notably elusive in the Surinam of Aphra Behn’s Oroo- noko (1688). The more one looks, the more the entire globe seems to be present in this small space. At one point, Behn even includes Asia within the parameters of the New World by referring to Surinam as a “Continent whose vast Extent was never known . . . it reaches from East to West; one Way as far as China, and another to Peru.”1 Even as she laments the unexplored vastness of this land of po- tentially infinite resources, she joins together the earth’s furthest imaginable points into a global unit of cultural and commercial exchange. In parts heroic romance, oriental tale, travel narrative, and antislavery manifesto, the novella follows the plight of the noble African prince Oroonoko as he is kidnapped into slavery and transported across the Atlantic to a West Indian plantation colony. Once in Suri- nam, he is miraculously reunited with his lost love, Imoinda; despite the privileges bestowed upon them by the English narrator and her circle of friends, Oroonoko struggles to uphold his honor and leads a failed slave rebellion that also results in his and Imoinda’s deaths.
The sheer amount of stuff packed into Oroonoko has generated a wealth of criticism on the narrator’s traversing and agglomeration of three continents and various genres to tell the story of an honorable African prince who tragically succumbs to New World slavery.2 Studies of the novella’s engagement with race, commodification, and colonialism have, however, largely failed to account for the presence of a fourth continent, Asia, that rounds out a picture of the global
Chi-ming Yang is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Her areas of research and teaching include eighteenth-century literature and culture, colonialism and postcolonialism, early modern orientalism, and transatlantic slavery. She is completing a manuscript entitled The Example of Asia: Importing Virtue in Eighteenth-Century England.
and complements, as well as complicates, our understanding of Behn’s colonial imaginary.
The phantom place of Asia in Behn’s Surinam of the late seventeenth century is the subject I wish to explore in this article, with the aim of attending to what Lisa Lowe has recently termed the “intimacies of four continents.”3 Whereas Lowe analyzes the importation of Chinese slave labor into the Caribbean of the nineteenth century, I approach the question of East-West labor relations indirectly.
The romanticization of African slave labor in Behn’s text takes place, I argue, through a particular form of commodification, that of early modern orientalism.
Far from a stable, systematic, or scientific construction of the East, early modern orientalism imparts commercial value upon an idealization of Asiatic antiquity as manifested in modern objects and the decorative sensibility of chinoiserie. The relevance of the East Indies trade to the Black Atlantic of the early modern period is well documented, beginning with the large flows of silver extracted from Ameri- can mines to Asia in exchange for tea, textiles, and other goods; the purchase of African slaves with East Indies textiles; and the English consumption of tea and Asian manufactures in tandem with the sugar, coffee, and tobacco of an African- ized New World.4
One consequence of this global trade is the penchant for Asiatic goods and Chinese-style gardens, furniture, and architecture in European courts and bourgeois estates as early as the 1670s. The English demand for Japanese lacquer, for one, begins with James I; the subsequent vogue is initiated in 1614 by the first major shipment of furniture from Japan to London with the East India Company.5 In the Restoration period, the Company sends models to China for the construction of cabinets and screens; the popularity of lacquer panels in the 1670s and early 1680s spurs an English japanning trade that strives to emulate the superior artisanship of China.6 In fact, the desirability of relatively unattainable Asian manufactures propels scientific experimentation at home, a source of innovation that will usher in an age of industry.7
The high-quality details of Asian design, durability, and production of luxury—their superior technology—are what chinoiserie imitates, often poorly. By definition a European mishmash of iconography and a commodification of Asian cultures, chinoiserie materializes a fantasy of globality in the form of ornamenta- tion. Indeed, images from travel writings to the New World, Africa, and Asia are from the start recruited and embellished as part of an aesthetics of borrowing that whimsically juxtaposes figures from disparate cultures in ornate decorative motifs applied to an array of materials.8 Itself an amalgamation of styles and places, Behn’s text is akin to a piece of chinoiserie; moreover, its embedded references to an ancient yet modern Orient are central to the narrator’s interpretation of Afri- canness in the New World.
Used as a mode of describing New World peoples and objects, an idea of the Orient—which in the early modern period encompasses points as widely dispersed as Egypt and Japan—is suddenly placed in close proximity with, indeed superimposed upon, the imagined Amerindians and Africans of Behn’s Surinam.
These entwined representations show us how perceptions about New World indi- geneity are premised not only upon global market relations, but also upon cross- cultural substitutions between East and West. That is, what we have here is not a
black-white understanding of racial difference, nor even a conceptual triangula- tion of the corners of the transatlantic world. Rather, Asia mediates interactions between Europe, Africa, and the New World; in Oroonoko, Africanness is made recognizable to the English reader through a set of orientalized, intercontinental transpositions.
I argue that the text’s awareness of a global system of commercial and cultural exchange between East and West is encoded in two material practices it features—lacquerwork, or “japanning,” and royal tiger hunts—each of which invokes in condensed form the world of the East Indies. In Oroonoko, both are indigenous to a forest typically read as a space of encounter between the three worlds of Europe, Africa, and America. The invocation of the Orient in this forest zone—in the form first of an object and then of an animal—constructs a myth of intercontinental intimacy, and a conflation of one culture with another. This inti- macy is appropriate to a world in which commerce with Asia links disparate spaces and cultures even while the novella seems limited to the traversal of the Atlantic.
Faced with the problem of preserving the reputation of her royal hero in the new, debased context of slavery, Behn superimposes the idea of a luxurious, ancient, yet thoroughly commodified Orient onto a violently modern plantation economy.
I am interested in how the preservation of a black character’s honor—through the conventions of a classical heroic romance meant to bridge distant times and geog- raphies—is shaped by a contemporary concern with Asiatic techniques to preserve the life of a commodity as it crosses oceanic distances and enters foreign markets.
The acts of myth-making, japanning, embalming, and tiger hunting as manifested in this literary text all can be seen as techniques of attaining everlasting life that borrow from new developments in science and material culture, as well as from existing ideas about the antiquity of the imagined Orient. Reading these practices together invites us to consider what a discourse of immortality looks like in the context of transatlantic slavery, where old and new worlds meet. The makings of a global marketplace are already embodied in the cultural and commercial geography of Behn’s novella; the presence of the East Indies through cultural proxies—human, object, and animal—illustrates the material and imaginary function of the Orient in commodifying New World slavery and mediating relations between colonizer and colonized.9
Japanning in Surinam
It is perhaps an irony of travel writing that in reading Oroonoko, one jour- neys into the West Indian wilderness only to find elements of English domesticity in the form of chinoiserie. Seeing the familiar in the foreign is a trope of travel writing, but what happens when the familiar is itself a sign of difference? In one episode, the narrator and her English entourage venture away from the plantation into the forest to go tiger hunting; they later return to the wilderness to tour Indian villages.
Led by the enslaved African prince Oroonoko, their guide and protector who can shield them from potential Indian hostility, they seek “diversion” (O, 62); their entertainment serves the added purpose of diverting the royal slave from thoughts of insurrection. He is drawn away from his fellow Africans into an encounter with a foreign species and a foreign people: tigers on the one hand, and Amerindians on the other. Both are curiously orientalized.
The appearance of the East in the West Indies suggests a notable level of familiarity with Asian objects that retain enough novelty to communicate the ex- oticism of the New World. Visiting one Indian village, Behn’s narrator observes as part of its novel decor “little bow Indian Stools, which they cut out of one intire piece of Wood, and Paint, in a sort of Japan Work” (O, 82). In a previous pas- sage, the desirable tattooed body of the female African slave Imoinda is likewise described as being entirely and delicately “carved . . . in fine Flowers and Birds . . . as if it were Japan’d” (O, 73). Two instances of cultural difference are imagined through the practice of japanning, which indicates the extent to which the bour- geois consumption of the Orient functions as an interpretive strategy in the New World context. For one, the initial plight of the star-crossed lovers in the setting of an African seraglio unfolds as an oriental-tale romance replete with the stock figures: a despotic king who desires a beautiful young courtesan, a shining, love- sick prince, and a royal court with all its splendor and intrigue.10 More specifically, the descriptions of the African bodies as collectible artifacts—both Imoinda’s “ja- panned” skin and Oroonoko’s “Polished Jet” blackness of “statuary” proportions (O, 43)—further inscribe them in a material discourse of chinoiserie that relies upon a commercialized Asia of coveted resources and luxury imports already in vogue in 1680s Europe.11
The forest of Surinam is also a place of untapped natural resources. The narrator’s repeated mention of the imminent Dutch takeover situates the Anglo- Dutch contest for West Indian resources alongside their warring over trade and territory on the other side of the globe, in the East Indies.12 The numerous pas- sages in Oroonoko that catalog the wonders of New World nature also register a competitive utilitarianism echoed in later accounts of Surinam concerned with finding natural products that can rival those of the East Indies. Edward Bancroft laments nearly a century later that few “have ever penetrated the woods farther than the confined limits of their plantations; and hence the properties of that vast multitude of plants and herbs with which the earth is every where covered, remain almost wholly unknown.” He lists the locust tree that “affords a varnish superior even to the Chinese Lacque[r]”; a mawna tree whose nuts are inferior to “Oriental Nutmeg”; a launa tree, whose juice “affords the paint so delightful to the Indians, and which in colour nearly resembles Indigo.”13 The dream of creating Indian ink out of American trees holds the “West” up to an Eastern standard and begs us to consider not only the symbolic black ink of Behn’s self-termed “female pen,” but also the material ingredients of her work in a global marketplace.14
“Japan-work” became a leisure-time activity for English ladies in the early eighteenth century, a specialized craft made popular and affordable by developments in paint technology.15 Technically defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “a varnish of exceptional hardness, which originally came from Japan,” japanning more broadly understood is the art of imitating the gloss and raised decorative designs of Japanese and Chinese lacquer associated with the wooden cabinets, screens, boxes, and chests imported from East Asia. Japanning invokes the Orient in general, and can refer to engraved or embroidered designs, entire objects or pieces of furniture, the varnish itself, or the people and practices of Asia. Limits to trade with East Asia at once curbed the market for actual lacquer imports and fueled the chinoiserie fad of imitating Eastern techniques of decoration for English
domestic consumption.16 Thus, while Behn’s slave romance immortalizes two fig- ures of African nobility by rendering them legendary lovers, it also depicts them as both bourgeois consumers of living objects (on the plantation Imoinda, exempted from manual work, keeps a lap dog of her own) and as consumable living objects themselves.17 Not only are they slaves, but they are doubly commodified through the association of their skin with Amerindian village furniture and Asiatic varnish.
In a global marketplace where commodities must be preserved and trans- ported over long distances and periods of time, Eastern patina promises an object’s everlasting shelf life. That Behn applies, in literary form, a protective, aesthetic coating of Eastern lacquer onto the skin of her African characters makes them smooth and transportable. At the same time, it shows the extent to which this type of decorative orientalism constructs a fantasy of impenetrable beauty and honor that distracts from the horrors of the Middle Passage and what lies beneath the surface. Ironically, African cultural difference is made more familiar—ornamental and refined—through its association with the Orient, a site of prolific trade and production of commodities, whose labor and laborers nonetheless go largely unseen and unrepresented in the West. Conflating African person with Asian decorative object—and an imagined East of self-reproducing commodities—thus doubly mystifies plantation slave labor.
At the same time, the reference to japan-work invokes a temporal paradox of sorts—an ideal commodity, the perfectly preserved lacquer object that will live forever, despite the very likelihood of its disintegration. If “china” in this period connotes a fragile porcelain product always—like female virtue—in danger of being shattered, japanning in theory suggests a more virtuous, sought-after durability and permanence—an applicable technique as well as a refined object—with powers of exceptional hardness.18 Arts manuals on japanning read like trial-and-error recipe books of early modern scientific experimentation. In William Salmon’s Polygraphice:
Or, The Arts of Drawing, Limning, Painting (1672), a section on cosmetics follows one on varnishing; the coloring of faces and of furniture, both pictorial and fleshly, share a technique of application that leaves bodies undifferentiated. The end result is the same: the creation of lasting value through adding an extra skin. Japanning is, after all, the general “art of covering bodies.”19 Indeed, one cosmetics manual from later in the period includes an entry for “a curious varnish for the face” to
“give the skin the finest luster imaginable.”20 Another manual includes a section on
“Curious Compositions to Varnish Prints and Paintings” that follows “A Curious Varnish for the Face.”21
Robert Dossie’s 1758 Handmaid to the Arts, a work addressed to serious artisans, may disparage earlier texts for including “heaps of absurd stuff” such as alchemy, chiromancy, and cosmetics in an unsystematic fashion, but throughout the eighteenth century, japanning remains a “mysterious art” of preserving surfaces and making objects of bodies.22 Stalker and Parker’s widely cited manual A Treatise of Japanning, Varnishing, & Guilding (1688) legitimizes japanning by placing it within a Western classical tradition of art conservation while at the same time extending the trope of painting bodies to a broader scale of cultural preservation:
[A]s Painting has made an honourable provision for our Bodies, so Japanning has taught us a method, no way inferior to it, for the splendor
and preservation of our Furniture and Houses. These Buildings, like our Bodies, continually tending to ruin and dissolution, are still in want of fresh supplies and reparations . . . the Art of Japanning has made them almost impregnable against both [time and weather] . . . True, genuine Japan, like the Salamander, lives in the flames, and stands unalterable . . . Just so the Asbeston of the Ancients, the cloath in which they wrapped the dead bodies, lay unchanged and entire on the Funeral Pile, and pre- served the body, when reduced to ashes, from being mixt with common, and undistinguisht dust.23
The added comparison to ancient funeral practices that keep human ashes sealed off from common dust—and thus identifiably human and pure—attributes to japan- ning an ancient ability to delineate a metaphysical as well as a material boundary between inside and outside. Not only does “true, genuine Japan” remain eternally fixed and timeless, but it is compared with a salamander in flames, a metaphor of female chastity or virtue. Japan-work is thus doubly gendered as outer protector and inner embodiment of virtue, and further distinguished from the ephemeral and effeminate traits attached to china. Its quality of timeless antiquity, to become a staple trope of nineteenth-century orientalism proper, here markets it as the superior material.
In an era of controversy over the naturalness of female beauty enhanced by “art,” Stalker and Parker construct a commercial rhetoric of the Orient’s im- mortalizing powers through a disavowal of feminine artfulness. They argue that, unlike painting, which only temporarily beautifies the “Jezebels” and “Walking Pictures” of their critique, varnish never comes off. In the eighteenth century, face painting and dark skin colors were thought to prevent the readability of facial features, namely the all-revealing blush of modesty.24 Instead of chastising the im- morality of face painting, they fault its failure to measure up to the masculinized durability of japanning. In their words, Japan is “not only strong and durable, but delightful and ornamental beyond expression.”25 Here, the question of interpret- ing the interiority of female virtue is deferred; instead, we see a turn to a new and improved technology of the impenetrable surface. This sheer exteriority is achieved by a doubly-gendered, model substance that includes the feminine (“delightful and ornamental”) within a less-suspect masculine (“strong and durable”) frame.
In Behn’s novella, the japanned couple of Imoinda and Oroonoko conveys this image of the ultimate Asiatic commodity that can be marketed to surpass previous associations with feminine frailty. Oroonoko’s “Polished Jet” black- ness and statuesque Roman features might appear to be of a separate order from Imoinda’s delicately tattooed body. But the discourse on japanning allows us to read the combined characters of Oroonoko and Imoinda—whom Behn calls “the beautiful Black Venus, to our young Mars” (O, 44)—as exemplary of japanning’s counterpart qualities of “strong and durable, but delightful and ornamental.”26 The lovers’ tattooed appearances are described at length in one of the narrator’s characteristic digressions:
I had forgot to tell you, that those who are Nobly born of that country, are so delicately Cut and Rac’d all over the fore-part of the Trunk of their Bodies, that it looks as if it were Japan’d; the Works being raised like high Poynt round the Edges of the Flowers: Some are only Carv’d with
a little Flower, or Bird, at the Sides of the Temples, as was Caesar; and those who are so Carv’d over the Body, resemble our Ancient Picts, that are figur’d in the Chronicles, but these Carvings are more delicate. (O, 73)
Interestingly, Imoinda’s full-body carvings identify her as unmistakably African even as they affiliate her with a certain primordial Britishness—she resembles
“our Ancient Picts”—referring to the tattooed tribes of a Celtic, northern past (O, 73; emphasis added). Describing her as an ancient rather than a modern Pict also registers her exemplary virtue, given the increasingly negative association of the term “Pict” with paint and artifice. Addison and Steele will, for example, typify female “Picts” as modern-day painted women whose cosmetically applied beauty is impermanent and, furthermore, prevents them from being kissed or touched. The man who is fooled into “embracing a Painted vapour” steps into the undesirable position of ingesting the woman’s face.27
Imoinda’s permanent beauty, however, surpasses ancient and modern Pict alike and is, through its association with japanning, temporally coded as eminently modern, yet also thoroughly ancient. Her japanned body marks the superior quality of contemporary Asian decorative art that circulates in a new commercial market even as it is inscribed in an oriental discourse of age-old wisdom. As Stalker and Parker would argue, japanning, unlike cosmetic paint, cannot be wiped off; it mar- ries novelty and delight with durability. In the passage quoted above, Imoinda’s markings are described as “more delicate” than the ancient Celtic Picts’. After all, her tattoos assure her captors she is “of Quality,” that is, of noble African birth (O, 73). Her body as portrayed by Behn thus allegorizes the meeting of four continents:
Africanized nobility civilizes British primitiveness in America, through the Asiatic technique of japanning. Indeed, the entire globe—and its Asia-centered trade—is condensed in a description of a New World slave [Figures 1 and 2].
Oroonoko’s tattoos, although less conspicuous (“at the Sides of the Tem- ples”), also register his racial difference as a function of commodified orientalism.
The flower/bird carvings on his and Imoinda’s bodies could well be likened to or- namental japanning patterns applied to furniture of the day; Behn refers to them as
“Works being raised like high Poynt,” further directing our attention to japanning’s dual practice of varnishing and embroidering surface decorations in the fashion of needlepoint. Skin here becomes a canvas for artisans or (female) authors, amateurs or otherwise. Likewise, Oroonoko’s “Polished Jet” skin color can be read in terms of japanning’s connotation with blackening with a hard gloss, as black varnish was the most common and accessible type of contemporary lacquerwork.28
Japanning markets a new technology of preserving the lives of objects as well as cultures according to Eastern knowledge; the author aspires to this fantasy of immortality in the form of literary longevity and her “Female Pen,” an instru- ment both of writing and of varnishing. Her descriptions of japanned bodies invite us to understand cultural difference in Oroonoko as a process, even a technique, of reading Africanness through images of modern and ancient Asia. The constantly shifting references to Oroonoko and Imoinda as “Caesar” and “Clemene,” and the juxtaposition of classical antiquity with modern slavery in the New World, signal the narrator’s tenuous ennobling of her characters through a mythical greatness and exotic beauty that, in the passages analyzed here, verge on barbarism but instead are
Figure 2. John Stalker and Robert Parker, A Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing, plate 5, 1688.
Courtesy of Archives and Special Collections, Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, PA.
Figure 1. John White, “Young Daughter of the Picts,” plate 3, Thomas Hariot, Briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia, 1590. Courtesy of the Robert Dechert Collection, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.
reenvisioned through chinoiserie. Indeed, Behn reproduces African bodies within an orientalized aesthetic of luxury that makes them fashionable according to contem- porary trends, even as she constructs their beauty in classical terms. The presence of the Orient in this work makes apparent a series of contradictions—ancient and modern, distance and proximity, text and body, surface and depth, transience and immortality—that structures a discourse of commercialized immortality in the late seventeenth century. These paradoxes in turn reveal Behn’s grappling with a world economic system that is founded upon great violence, yet produces and circulates such beautiful, refined products.
preServing the DeaD
The discourse of immortality explored thus far is premised upon the ca- pacity of science—Eastern science in particular—to preserve the present, and to a certain extent, the past. In fact, japanning’s concern with immortality and its professed ability to thwart death cosmetically by fending off the forces of age and decay—that which makes humans more object-like and objects more ideal—can be seen as a condition of commodification, which requires an increasing degree of standardization for its relations of exchange. At the level of the body, the Orient’s powers of preservation beyond death are most evident in the related eighteenth- century material practice of embalming, or the art of “Preserving a Human Dead Body entire.” In Nekrokedeia: or, the art of embalming (1705), London surgeon Thomas Greenhill defends the profession by associating it with a history of ancient Egyptian, Hebrew, and Greek funeral and burial rites. In a mode typical of an ori- entalist collector, he calls them “the first and best Antiquities of the world.”29 He explains Egyptian embalming as a virtuous effort to achieve immortality of the soul by material means; the soul can live on by salting or preserving the body such that it becomes “as durable as Marble.” The “long duration of these Bodies,” in turn,
“proves the Immortality of the Soul.”30 If the soul is precious, Greenhill reasons, its “covering” or container should be equally prized and cared for—a decidedly materialist interpretation.
In Greenhill’s text, however, a worldly concern with preserving human beauty, a kind of toilette of the dead, outweighs the theological justifications for care of the corpse. Not only does he believe that the stench from rotting corpses poses a health hazard to the living, the putrefaction also offends the aesthetic sense.
Thus the act of embalming “[renders] the Body sweet and decorous, retaining still its natural Form, Feature and Shape.” The description of the body as “being deliciously perfum’d . . . with all the Aromatic and Odoriferous Spices and Gums of Arabia”31 echoes the toilette of Alexander Pope’s Belinda, where “[A]ll Arabia breathes from yonder Box.”32 The surgeon’s practice of rendering the “flesh firm”
and “durable as marble” and the “features smooth” makes him at once morti- cian, cosmetician, and even poet. In fact, two poems praising Greenhill liken him to an elegist, who not only preserves the name of a loved one, but also “keeps [his deceased] Friends alive” and “redeemed from the Injuries of Oblivion,” and even inspires his living friends not to fear death.33
Indeed, the embalmed body becomes a “living memory” that outshines representations such as pictures or statues with its unique “durability.” Greenhill
emphasizes the triumph of material over textual posterity in a rather remarkable pitch for a materialist, or corporealist, vocabulary:
Thus all Things intended to preserve a Name, whether Pictures, Statues, Medals, Buildings or Writings, may be comprehended under this general Sense of Embalming; nevertheless, experience teaches us the preserva- tion of a Body by the Balsamic Art is not only the best way of reviving Mens Memories, and bringing their Merits fresh in our Minds, but also the most durable; for not only Tombs and Statues have decay’d in a few Years, but also whole Towns and Cities have been ruin’d and demolish’d within the Revolution of an Age . . . whereas Embalm’d Bodies have been found entire after Thousands of Years.34
We might compare this passage to Stalker and Parker’s treatise on japan- ning, which claims that not only individual pieces of furniture and appliances, but also houses and entire civilizations can be preserved:
What can be more surprising, than to have our Chambers overlaid with Varnish more glossy and reflecting than polisht Marble? . . . The glory of one country, Japan alone, has exceeded in beauty and magnificence all the pride of the Vatican at this time. . . . Japan can please you with a more noble prospect, not only whole Towns, but Cities too are there adorned with as rich a Covering; so bright and radiant are their Buildings, that when the Sun darts forth his luster upon their Golden roofs, they enjoy a double day by the reflection of his beams.35
As with the language of embalming, japanning is described as durable and capable of preserving “whole towns and cities.” As different as they seem, cosmetics, embalming, and japanning share a discourse of craftsmanship and experimental science, of preserving surfaces and producing durability, that on the one hand pits the secular innovations of modernity against the sacrosanct. On the other hand, the craftsperson’s goal of thwarting death and achieving immortality weds mod- ern tekne with ancient episteme. Together, embalmers and experimenters in food conservation, facial powders, and varnishes for all types of objects share recipes and cite ancient Egyptian knowledge as well as the utility of the new science for trade and the practices of the everyday.36
In Oroonoko, too, the Orient functions as a borrowed medium through which people as well as furniture achieve the status of desirable commodities. Of course, things do fall apart over the course of the novella with the tragic deaths and dismemberments of Oroonoko and Imoinda. The contrast between the ini- tial idealization of surface beauty and its subsequent destruction underscores the horror of modern plantation violence as well as the resilience of character. The question of preserving body and spirit in and beyond death comes to the fore in the gruesome scenes of dismemberment and defilement of the noble slaves’
hyperaestheticized corporeality. Throughout the novella, successive displays of severed anatomy—the Indians’ noses, the hunted tiger’s heart, Imoinda’s corpse, and Oroonoko himself—rupture and render into parts the ideal heroic whole of a classical past and Old World honor. Oroonoko takes the knife to his wife as a desperate act of resistance when mutiny fails: “with a Hand resolv’d, and a Heart breaking within, gave the Fatal Stroke; first, cutting her Throat, and then severing her, yet Smiling, Face from the Delicate Body, pregnant as it was with Fruits of
tend’rest Love” (O, 95). In failing to follow through with properly disposing of Imoinda’s body and with his planned suicide, Oroonoko also exhibits a kind of distressed negligence that would, in the world of Behn’s bourgeois readers, offend the poet-mortician’s concern with prettifying death and making it inoffensive. But by allowing Imoinda and later himself to putrefy, Oroonoko also willfully refuses to preserve their physical beauty; he flouts the aesthetics of surface beauty at work in the discourses of japanning and embalming. He enacts a form of resistance not only to slavery but also to the aestheticized and commodified—indeed, the orien- talized—slave body.
In contrast with her character’s actions, Behn’s narrator describes with an embalmer’s sensibility Imoinda’s decomposing body as a stink or waste an- tithetical to the pristine, idealized nature of Surinam’s New World. The English party tracks Oroonoko in the woods by “an unusual Smell, as of a dead Body;
for Stinks must be very noisome that can be distinguish’d among such a quantity of Natural Sweets, as every Inch of that Land produces”; his inadequate burial of Imoinda’s body between a bed and coverlet of leaves and flowers produces “a Stink that almost struck them dead” (O, 97). The deathly stench, perhaps more properly relegated to the hull of a slave ship—so out of place in this sweet land of elevated nature—overpowers the discoverers, as does Oroonoko’s subsequent self-mutilation, described as a kind of failed self-embalming: “[H]e rip’d up his own Belly; and took his Bowels and pull’d ‘em out,” leaving him “so alter’d, that his Face was like a Death’s Head black’d over; nothing but Teeth, and Eyeholes”
(O, 97, 98). As a last punishment and warning, his torso is cut into quarters and distributed to the main plantations. It is up to the narrator to repair this “mangl’d King,” to embalm her characters, restore and preserve their beauty and honor by recording their story as legend (O, 100).
Notably, Behn concludes by memorializing Oroonoko as a “Great Man”
with a “Glorious Name to survive all ages,” and Imoinda in the final lines as “the Brave, the Beautiful, and the Constant Imoinda” (O, 100). It is worth noting that Imoinda/Clemene shares a name with the Greek mythical figure Clymene, known for the traits of fame and renown; daughter of Oceanus and Thethys and wife of the Titan god of mortality, she is also known as Asie or “Asia.” Through the privileging of the japanned female as hero, Behn highlights her own role as japan- ning craftswoman and skilled embalmer who immortalizes these figures with the
“Reputation of [her] Pen” (O, 100). She might be considered a punitive colonist by taking them apart to begin with, or a benevolent colonist for putting them back together in memoriam. Ultimately, her ambivalence reveals the grotesque underside of how surfaces are fashioned and products refined in this East-West network of commodity exchange. Positing a fantasy of material perfection and then registering its destruction, Behn borrows from and reinvents an aesthetics of incorruptibility;
in the process, she exposes the contradictions of a culture obsessed with new forms of materiality and the resilience of surfaces.
There are two key related moments in which Asia makes an appearance in Oroonoko, and both, I argue, have to do with negotiating a new world of un- precedented global trade in commodities as well as the trade in slaves. By force of analogy, the japanned furniture of the Indian villages and the japanned bodies of the African nobles invoke an ancient yet modern, commercialized Asia of curious
export ware, and acknowledge the long-distance flows of goods and labor that bring four continents into contact. A space of cultural experimentation, of collect- ing specimens for japanning and other recipes, the forest as colonial laboratory also hosts larger-than-life tigers for Oroonoko to hunt: an activity that, as I will discuss below, invokes an ancient world of gladiators and adventures in an Orient of fabulous beasts. The tiger hunting episodes, like the moments of japanning, link disparate times and technologies—and different aesthetics of preservation—to produce a new myth of intercontinental intimacy and immortality.
new worlD tigerS
The practices of japanning and embalming, features of modern life and even leisure in Behn’s London, seem curiously out of place in Surinam. They are moments of diversion from the conditions of slavery incorporated by the author into the dynamics of cross-cultural encounter. By definition fleeting, diversion is nonetheless central to this new type of commercialized immortality Behn utilizes in constructing her African hero. In this final section, I will explore the narrator’s turn to the ancient “Diversion and Sport” (O, 62) of tiger hunting that, like its modern counterpart of chinoiserie, superimposes the example of the East onto the West. To ask what japanning is doing in Surinam is thus also to ask what the tiger, an animal indigenous to Asia, is doing there.
The narrator first enters the forest to “surprise” Indians with her costume and trinkets and “surprise” innocent young tigers while their mothers are away:
“[We went] in search of young Tigers in their Dens, watching when the old Ones went forth to forage for Prey; and oftentimes we have been in great Danger, and have fled apace for our Lives, when surpriz’d by the Dams” (O, 77). In one instance, the English steal a young tiger only to encounter the dam, which in turn has just stolen a cow. Oroonoko, called Caesar throughout this passage, takes the sword of the gentleman Martin and gallantly defends the group from this “monstrous Beast of might, size, and vast Limbs, who came with open Jaws upon him” (O, 78). Taking up the cub, he presents it at the narrator’s feet like a true chivalric hero: “We all extreamly wonder’d at his Daring, and at the Bigness of the Beast, which was about the highth of an Heifer, but of mighty, great, and strong Limbs” (O, 78).
In a second hunting episode, Caesar likewise protects the English and their property from the menace of the forest.37 Notorious for her monstrous poaching, this female tiger “had long infested that part, and born away abundance of Sheep and Oxen, and other things, that were for the support of those to whom they belong’d” (O, 78). Believed to be a “Devil rather than a Mortal thing” as a result of having survived numerous shootings, this tiger and its killing quickly achieve mythic status. In presenting one tiger’s heart and another’s cub to his lady and in attempting to wrestle an electric eel, Caesar reenacts the Herculean feats of stran- gling by hand the Nemean lion and protecting domestic animals from monsters at large.38 This is New World legend in the making:
[N]othing can receive a Wound in the Heart and Live; but when the Heart of this courageous animal was taken out, there were Seven Bullets of Lead in it, and the wounds seam’d up with great Scars, and she liv’d with the Bullets a great while, for it was long since they were shot: This
Heart the Conqueror brought up to us, and ‘twas a very great Curiosity, which all the Country came to see; and which gave Caesar occasion of many fine Discourses; of Accidents in War, and Strange Escapes. (O, 79)
Clearly, the tiger continues to be a diversion afterward in the form of a legend that is told and retold and that, in the style of an oriental tale, perpetuates the telling of other like tales.
In both these passages, the tiger hunt directs Oroonoko’s attention away from his condition as a New World slave by reenacting the “Diversions and Sports”
of his Old World glory (O, 62). These elaborate acts of hunting stand in contrast to the conspicuous absence of any plantation labor on his part; his labor is of a differ- ent order, that of a colonial scout who establishes good relations with the Indians in a zone of indistinction where settlers by no means have a stable upper hand. As the narrator notes, “Caesar begot so good an understanding between the Indians and English, that there were no more Fears . . . [and] Caesar made it his Business to search out and provide for our Entertainment” (O, 84). At another point, she remarks, “[I]t may not be unpleasant to relate to you the Diversions we entertain’d him with, or rather he us” (O, 76; my emphasis). In the forest, Oroonoko’s old self, the Cormantien warrior, becomes a version of his new self, a noble slave turned native hunter and fisher. Indeed, he foregoes using a gun to shoot the female tiger and opts for arrows, adopting an Indian practice (O, 79). Caught between worlds and codes of honor, Oroonoko vacillates between being property and defending property from predators. He is here the hunter and later, the hunted: an escaped slave whose dismembered body—from the colonist’s perspective, damaged prop- erty—recalls that of the tiger torn apart.
Dating back to classical antiquity, the sport of hunting is considered a kind of virtual war, of staying fit in times of so-called peace, and hence integral to the defense and expansion of empire. According to Edward Gibbon, “[In the] first ages of society, when the fiercer animals often dispute with men the possession of an unsettled country, a successful war against these savages is one of the most in- nocent and beneficial labors of heroism.”39 It is fitting, then, that Behn’s narrator has both been reading Oroonoko the “Lives of the Romans” and of “great Men”
(O, 74) to take his mind off mutiny, as well as enacting mock-heroic hunting trials to serve the colony and keep in check his restless energy. Oroonoko/Caesar can be seen at once as a Roman conqueror and a gladiator slave who, under Roman law, was not only subject to execution, but also forced to perform in imperial spectacles that entailed the mass slaughter of animals:40
[Caesar] had a Spirit all rough and Fierce, and that cou’d not be tam’d to lazy Rest; and though all endeavors were us’d to exercise himself in such Actions and Sports as this World afforded, as running, Wrastling, Pitching the Bar, Hunting and Fishing, Chasing and Killing Tigers of a monstrous Size, which this Continent affords in abundance; and wonder- ful Snakes, such as Alexander is reported to have incounter’d at the River of Amazons, and which Caesar took great Delight to overcome; yet these were not Actions great enough for his large soul, which was still panting after more renown’d Action. (O, 75)
Just as Alexander the Great battled Amazons in Asia Minor at the frontier of the Greek world, Caesar here takes on beasts of the far West that curiously resemble
those of the far East. We might compare the catalog of Caesar’s feats and encounters with “monstrous” and “wonderful” animals of Surinam to Alexander’s exploits in India. In one letter to Aristotle, Alexander mentions India’s “serpents and wild beasts,” and in a fashion typical of the romance tradition, depicts an East of earthly paradise and fabulous creatures, including “hippopotami,” lions, bears, leopards, and tigers, as well as “gryphons” and other hybrid creatures. Like Alexander, Caesar is portrayed as a chivalric knight and a conqueror who, in his own way, is thwarted by his excessive ambition in this New World romance.41
We should note further this continent’s strange “abundance” of tigers
“of a monstrous size,” animals imagined to be at home so far from their natural habitat of Asia (O, 75). “Tiger,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is a “foreign word, evidently oriental, introduced when the beast became known”
(my emphasis). According to our modern-day taxonomy, the Panthera tigris or Felis tigris, also known as the Bengal tiger or royal tiger, is widely distributed in Asia, and proverbial for its ferocity and cunning. Early travel accounts to Guiana list tigers as part of the abundance of the woods, a sign of America’s plenitude.42 While such reports of indigenous New World “tigers” would be hotly contested by Enlightenment natural historians of a later period, even in the seventeenth century, the Asiatic tiger is considered to be primordial.43 From common English blood sports like bear-baiting and tiger-baiting to royal contests in Windsor Park, exotic cats of the East are deemed superior when pitted against other beasts in virtual battles.44 These are experiments in testing the limits of the wild, sometimes by unleashing a foreign animal against a domestic one in a contained environment for the observation of lay spectators as well as natural historians. As human sur- rogates, animals enact geopolitical rivalries, desires for greatness, and the myths of continents.45 Like England’s royal hunting grounds, the forest-paradise of Surinam is rendered as a virtual wilderness, stocked with prey for royal sport, meant to imitate the magnificent hunts of the Chinese, Assyrians, Persians (whose hunting parks were called “paradises”), Greeks, and Romans, as well as the reported tiger, lion, and leopard chases of the Mughal empire.46
Oroonoko’s Eastern adventure in Surinam is, of course, a diversion with grave consequences. The narrator’s reinvention of the imperial hunt borrows from past accounts of glory to transfer legitimacy to the colonial project of conquering nature and acquiring property, even while making clear that this is a new world where honor no longer rules and romance fails. The tiger, at once real and mythical, marks and tests the boundary between the arable land and the forest, the human and the animal.47 A proxy figure for Oroonoko and Imoinda as well as a medium between ancient hunting cultures and the modern impulse of scientific classifica- tion, the tiger registers multiple temporalities and geographies. Although outside the governance of the colony, its wilderness is integral to the identity of the settle- ment. Similarly, the distant worlds of Eastern and Western antiquity as embodied by the tiger participate intimately in the staging of cross-cultural encounters in the New World. After all, Behn’s novella proceeds by a pattern of proxies—with one culture standing in for and imitating another—and by a logic of absent-presence.
In the course of fighting the tiger, a symbol of his subordinated royalty, Oroonoko meets the Indians who, like the mythical tiger, inhabit the forest and threaten the lives and livelihood of the colonists. Even as Oroonoko fails to lead a successful
slave insurrection, the potential for solidarity between the forest communities emerges from the seams of the text’s crowded juxtapositions. In Oroonoko, nature is a place of commerce, sanctuary, and dangerous diversions—of cataloging new species and objects, and quelling Indian and African insurrections. It presents the promise and the threat of the selva oscura and of the tiger as a prophetic symbol of future East and West Indian resistance to British colonial rule.48
CommoDifiCation anD earlY moDern orientaliSm
The orientalized worlds of romance, nature, and commerce meet in the forest of Surinam, as do concerns about how to preserve a semblance of old con- tinents in the new. By superimposing the Asia commodity trade over the Atlantic slave trade, Behn likens Oroonoko and Imoinda to decorative fetish objects, thereby aestheticizing the brutality of their condition. The reader can look fondly on them not only as nobles out of place, but also as beautiful, collectible things removed from the taint of barbarity. But even more than a diversion, an apology, or a critique of slavery, Behn’s text self-consciously exposes the demands and contradictions of a new system of commodification that takes its lead from the East.49 The Orient stands for two temporalities that would appear to be at odds: modern commod- ity culture and ancient civilization. However, its coveted manufactures showcase superior technologies of design and durability at the same time that they convey a romanticized idea of antiquity, and hence a consumerist escape from the violence of modernity. In short, the Orient is imagined to contain the secrets of maintain- ing past glory in present commercial form. Among the contradictions it embodies is a fantasy of the resilient surface: the smooth, ideally preserved, and eminently transportable commodity. Behn borrows from, and manipulates, such notions of material perfection and Eastern antiquity to preserve the image and honor of a royal slave.
The Orient appears in the West Indian context in various forms—Japa- nese lacquer, Indian tigers, Egyptian embalming—in each instance as a medium of experimentation and nostalgia. The familiar yet exotic idea of the East is used to translate the phenomena of the New World: to make sense of the new, and to test the limits of romance. Behn’s narrator interchanges and embellishes places, times, and cultural artifacts with ease; Africanness is Americanized and orientalized ac- cording to a hybridizing logic of chinoiserie that mixes and matches iconographies.
By interweaving the cultures of four continents, Behn also participates consciously in a new system of commodification that requires the expedited substitution of one thing for another, and the exchangeability of peoples, things, and cultures.
The products and legends of the Orient may coat the ills of slavery with a patina of aesthetic familiarity, but they also expose the large distances and networks of hidden labor embedded within the object, and beneath the surface of things.
The overlay of Asia upon America shows how an East-West commodity culture travels and becomes a technique of translating racial and cultural difference; the obsession with surfaces and Asia out of place ultimately points to the underlying global forces of production. Oroonoko is, after all, a story of absent figures that include a missing governor, a disappearing narrator, and the hero himself. It is also a story of absent presences: scant indications of the actual conditions of plantation
slavery, the activities of rebel communities of escaped slaves, and the rivalries with the numerous other European settlements in the area.
Reading the traces and representations of Asiatic material culture as more than ornamental takes seriously the ability of artifacts to document social change. In Behn’s Oroonoko, for example, writing and japanning are comparable and mutually developing techniques of preservation. Japanning is by definition an experimental substitution for and restaging of an Eastern art practice; tiger hunting and romance writing might well be read within this light, as parts of a material culture in which desirable objects of disparate landscapes, East and West, are superimposed upon the heightened intimacy of a global marketplace. It is no wonder that Behn’s ex- periment in memorializing a royal slave intertwines, and thus problematizes, the value of human life and the lives of animals and objects from the far corners of the globe. As documented in Oroonoko, the world of seventeenth-century colonialism is a strikingly diverse yet coherent system that bridges two generally separate fields of study, orientalism and transatlantic slavery. The West and East Indies must, however, be read together to appreciate fully the disruptions, continuities, and complexity of early modern global culture.
NOTES
The author thanks Javier Lezaun, Suvir Kaul, and David Agruss for their insightful comments in read- ing earlier drafts of this essay. Thanks also to Michael Gamer, Eun Kyung Min, and to the graduate students of the University of Pennsylvania and Seoul National University English departments for their helpful feedback.
1. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, ed. Catherine Gallagher (Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 76. (Hereafter cited parenthetically as O.)
2. Two major publications of the text, the Norton critical edition edited by Joanna Lipking (1997) and the Bedford edition cited here, include substantial supplementary materials on the triangular char- acter of the slave trade.
3. Lowe’s phrase revises C. L. R. James’s treatment of the transatlantic slave trade; see Lisa Lowe,
“The Intimacies of Four Continents,” in Haunted By Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2006), 191–212.
4. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000), 125–26. Also see Holden Furber, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600–1800 (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1976).
5. Madeleine Jarry, Chinoiserie: Chinese Influence on European Decorative Art, 17th and 18th Centuries, trans. Gail Mangold-Vine (New York: Vendome Press, 1981), 62–64, 130.
6. Hugh Honour, Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay (London: John Murray, Ltd., 1961), 74–76.
For an excellent study of the global trade in China, see Lydia H. Liu, “Robinson Crusoe’s Earthenware Pot,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 4 (1999): 728–57.
7. Dutch lacquerware experimentations begin in the 1610s and peak in the 1690s. See Jarry, Chinoiserie, 132, 138. For East-West manufactures, see Maxine Berg, “Asian Luxuries and the Making of the European Consumer Revolution,” in Luxury in the Eighteenth-Century: Debates, Desires, and Delectable Goods, ed. Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 228–44.
8. Influential travel accounts include Johan Nieuhoff, An Embassy from the East India Company (1665), Athanasius Kircher, Chine monumentis illustrata (1667), and Louis Le Comte, Memoirs and Observations (1697). See David Porter’s work on chinoiserie in Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2001).
9. I am indebted to Laura Brown’s study of the ideology of heroism in Oroonoko and the “media- tory role” of women in what she identifies as its “parallel systems of romance and trade.” See Brown, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993), 48.
10. For the market for oriental-tale fiction in the eighteenth century, see Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England, 1662–1785 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005).
11. See J. Jean Hecht’s work on the ornamental and thus oriental status of black servants in Con- tinental and Colonial Servants in Eighteenth-Century England (Northampton, MA: Smith College, 1954), 36.
12. Behn repeatedly alludes to and laments the Dutch takeover of Surinam in 1666 (O, 69, 76, 81, 85, 93.) Indeed, the three Anglo-Dutch wars that take place between 1652 and 1672 enroll both Atlantic and Pacific worlds in a circuit of colonial rivalry reaching back to the Amboyna massacre of 1623.
See Robert Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006); Furber, Rival Empires of Trade; Joyce Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978); and J. R. Jones, The Anglo- Dutch Wars of the Seventeenth Century (London: Longman, 1996).
13. Edward Bancroft, An essay on the natural history of Guiana in South America (1769), 57, 67- 68, 74, 76.
14. See Catherine Gallagher’s essay, “Oroonoko’s Blackness,” in Aphra Behn Studies, ed. Janet Todd (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), 259–84.
15. Titles written specifically for a female audience include: A Family Jewel; or The Woman’s Councel- lor (1704); The Art of Japanning, Pollishing, Varnishing, and Gilding (1730); The Ladies Amusement;
Or, Whole Art of Japanning Made Easy (1758–62).
16. The unavailability of Rhus vernicifera resin in Europe and North America forced Europeans to use other tree deposits such as gum-lac, seed-lac, and shell-lac. See Hans Huth, Lacquer of the West (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971); and William Appleton, A Cycle of Cathay: The Chinese Vogue in England during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1951).
17. See Srinivas Aravamudan’s study of the treatment of black servants as pets in Tropicopolitans:
Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1999), 38–42.
18. See Liu, “Crusoe’s Earthenware Pot.”
19. Robert Dossie, The Handmaid to the Arts (London, 1758), 479.
20. Pierre-Joseph Buc’hoz, The toilet of Flora; or, a collection of the most simple and approved methods of preparing baths, essences, pomatums (London, 1772).
21. The New London Toilet (London, 1778), xiv–xv.
22. Dossie, Handmaid to the Arts, xix, xiv.
23. John Stalker and George Parker, A Treatise of Japanning, Varnishing, & Guilding (London, 1688), xiv–xv.
24. Tassie Gwilliam studies the racial and sexual politics of face painting in the West Indian context in “Cosmetic Poetics: Coloring Faces in the 18th Century,” in Body & Text in the 18th Century, ed.
Veronica Kelly and Dorothea von Mücke (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1994), 144–59. See also Tita Chico, “The Arts of Beauty: Women’s Cosmetics and Pope’s Ekphrasis,” Eighteenth-Century Life 26, no. 1 (2002): 1–23.
25. Stalker and Parker, Treatise, xiv–xv.
26. Ros Ballaster makes a strong case for Imoinda’s “absolute alterity” in the text. Here I would have to agree instead with Suvir Kaul’s argument that there is no stable binary of cultural alterity in the text.
Moreover, I prefer to read Oroonoko and Imoinda together, rather than separately, as a unit of japan- work that presents itself as exotic and familiar rather than absolutely foreign. See Ros Ballaster, “New Hystericism: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko: The Body, the Text, and the Feminist Critic,” in New Feminist
Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts, ed. Isobel Armstrong (London: Routledge, 1992), 283–95; Suvir Kaul, “Reading Literary Symptoms: Colonial Pathologies and the Oroonoko Fictions of Behn, Southerne, and Hawkesworth,” Eighteenth-Century Life 18 (November 1994): 80–96.
27. The Spectator, ed. Donald Bond, vol. 1, no. 41 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 174.
28. Gallagher, in “Oroonoko’s Blackness,” interprets Oroonoko’s black skin in relation to African- ness and textual ink; she considers Imoinda’s flesh less artifactual because her scars are described as needlepoint. Japanning, however, includes lacquering as well as embroidered decorations. I argue that attention to japanning enables an analysis of Oroonoko’s tattoos as well as his skin color, and extends the consideration of material culture beyond the literary.
29. Thomas Greenhill, Nekrokedeia: or, the art of embalming (London, 1705), vii.
30. Greenhill, Nekrokedeia, 239.
31. Greenhill, Nekrokedeia, 119, 106.
32. Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock , in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (London:
Routledge, 1965), 222 (Canto I, l. 134).
33. Greenhill, Nekrokedeia, 239; J. Oldmixon, “To His Ingenious Friend Thomas Greenhill,” and B. B., “To his Friend the Author,” in Preface to Nekrokedeia, 106.
34. Greenhill, Nekrokedeia, 117–18.
35. Stalker and Parker, Treatise, xiv–xv.
36. Richard Neve, or “T. Snow,” explains his goal of “making Materials imploy’d by one sort of Craftsmen, serviceable to another,” in his Prolegomenon to Apopiroscopy: Or, A Compleat and Faithful History of Experiments and Observations (London, 1702), xi; see also G. Smith, The Laboratory; or School of Arts (London, 1756). Recipes and news of making “China Varnishes” and related products can be found in numerous Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
37. On the menace of the tiger in Surinam, see George Warren, An Impartial Description of Surinam (1667), 12.
38. Oroonoko’s failure to conquer the “Numb eel” or understand its electric shock signals his in- ability to grasp “Philosophy” (O, 80) and the novelty of European scientific experiments on electricity and the eels. See Buffon, Natural History, General and Particular, Vol. 5 (1780), 196–202; Bancroft, Natural History of Guiana, 205; Warren, Impartial Description, 2.
39. Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. four, quoted in J.
K. Anderson, Hunting in the Ancient World (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985), 125.
40. I have found one article that treats the tiger in Oroonoko in the context of Roman gladiatorial combat: Eric Miller, “Aphra Behn’s Tigers,” Dalhousie Review 81, no. 1 (2001): 47–65. For relevant background on gladiators and slavery, see Thomas Wiedemann, Emperors and Gladiators (London:
Routledge, 1992); and K. Bradley, ch. five in Slavery and Rebellion in the Roman World, 140 B.C.–70 B.C. (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1989).
41. Legends of Alexander the Great, trans. and ed. Richard Stoneman (London: J. M. Dent, 1994).
See also David Salter, Holy and Noble Beasts: Encounters with Animals in Medieval Literature (Wood- bridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2001), 135.
42. Robert Harcourt, A relation of a voyage to Guiana (1613), 29; Sir Walter Raleigh, The discouerie of the large, rich, and bevvtiful empire of Guiana (1596), 94.
43. Buffon, in his Natural History, makes an adamant case for the tiger’s uniqueness to Asia and remote parts of Africa. For seventeenth-century accounts of tiger and lion hunting in the East, see Fran- çois Bernier, “Voyage to Kachemire of 1664,” in The History of the Late Revolution of the Empire of the Great Mogol, trans. Henry Oldenburg (1671), 43–51; and John Baptista Tavernier, The Six Travels . . . to the Indies, trans. John Phillips (1684), 124–25.
44. See George Stubbs’s painting, A Cheetah with Two Indians (1764–65), which depicts a cheetah presented by Indian ambassadors to George III; it purportedly was released in Windsor Park to observe how it might attack a stag.
45. One such fight between a tiger and three “bear-dogs” is discussed between noted naturalists, Sir Hans Sloane to Mr. Ray, London, 9 March, 1698/99, Philosophical letters between the late learned Mr.
Ray and several of his ingenious correspondents (London, 1718), 302; Mr. Ray’s Answer to Sir Hans Sloane, London, 14 March, 1698/99, in Philosophical letters, 303. On tiger fighting, see Louise E. Rob- bins, Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2002), 37.
46. See Bernier’s comments on the hunts of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, “Voyage to Kachemire”
and note 43 above. See also Anderson, Hunting in the Ancient World, 58. For women hunters in sev- enteenth-century England, see Donna Landry, The Invention of the Countryside: Hunting, Walking and Ecology in English Literature, 1671–1831 (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
47. See P. Boomgaard, Frontiers of Fear: Tigers and People in the Malay World, 1600–1950 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2001).
48. It is notable that the descriptions of the bloodthirsty tiger match historical accounts of escaped rebel slaves, or maroons, who also live and fight in the forest. See John Stedman, Narrative of Five Years’ Expedition (London, 1796), 49; accounts of Tacky’s Rebellion and maroon legends collected in William Earle, Obi, or, The history of Three-fingered Jack, ed. Srinivas Aravamudan (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2005); and Richard Price, The Guiana Maroons: A Historical and Bibliographi- cal Introduction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976).
49. For accounts of an Asia-centered global trade, see Pomeranz, Great Divergence, and Andre Gunder-Frank, Reorient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1998).
