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Oroonoko in France in The XVIIIth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Edward D. Seeber
Edward D. Seeber*
Affiliation:
College of Charleston
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Extract

M. Etienne, in his study of the sources of Victor Hugo's first novel, Bug-Jargal, suggests that a kinship clearly exists between this, as well as earlier French stories of Negro characters, and Mrs. Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave. He is led to this conclusion because of certain indications of the popularity of Oroonoko in France during the eighteenth century, and because of the recurrence in French literature of the noble, romantic Negro. This very just inference as to the importance of Oroonoko is worthy of elaboration and emphasis because in this early English novel we can find the substance and technique of much of the littérature négrophile of the eighteenth century, a period in which the Negro emerges from his despised condition and takes on heroic qualities and possibilities; and also because this English story, of which the purpose might well have been didactic, written by “the first literary abolitionist … on record in the history of fiction,” as Swinburne called Mrs. Behn, was to have far-reaching consequences in French humanitarian thought.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 51 , Issue 4 , December 1936 , pp. 953 - 959
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1936

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References

1 Servais Etienne, Les Sources de Bug-Jargal (Bruxelles, 1923), passim.

2 A. C. Swinburne, Studies in Prose and Poetry (London, 1915), p. 95.

3 Act i, sc. i, in part, and all of Act ii, sc. ii.

4 ii, 246–262.

5 IIe année, ii, 1–86.

6 Reviews for 1745 may be found in Desfontaines, Jugemens sur quelques ouvrages nouveaux, v, 354, and the Mercure de France, février, i, 114.

7 i, 188, note G. For a tentative identification of this Negro, see Henri Grégoire, An enquiry concerning the intellectual and moral faculties and literature of Negroes … (Brooklyn, 1810), pp. 196–219.

8 viii, 188–202; see also L'Année litt, for 1769, vi, 118–120.

9 D. Mornet, “Les Enseignements des bibliothèques privées (1750–1780),” RHLF, xvii (1910), 461.

10 See V. Pinot, “Les Sources de L'Orphelin de la Chine,” RHLF, xiv (1907), 463–465.

11 Candide, ou l'optimisme, ed. André Morize (Paris, 1913), p. 56, n. 1; p. 127, n. 2.

12 Rousseau probably meant that Southerne's play was little known in France. The present rarity of Du Bocage's translation substantiates this interpretation.

13 IIe partie, liv. xi (1761). I am indebted to M. Etienne's book for this reference.

14 The Novels of Mrs. Aphra Behn, ed. E. A. Baker (London, 1913), p. 6.

15 Œuvres de Saint-Lambert (Paris, 1795), ii, 125.

16 Œuvres complètes (Paris, 1844), i, 73.

17 Paris, an 7, i, 19.

18 Quoted from S. Etienne, op. cit., p. 51.

19 Sélico, nouvelle africaine (1793), in Nouvelles Nouvelles (Paris, 1796), pp. 63–64.

20 Quoted from S. Etienne, op. cit., p. 12.

21 Loc. cit.

22 Loc. cit.

23 Loc. cit.

24 Vide supra.

25 Londres et Paris, 1789, pp. xix–xx.

26 Loc. cit.

27 Etienne, op. cit., p. 12.

28 Op. cit., p. 7.

29 Op. cit., p. 24.

30 Op. cit., p. 74.

31 Op. cit., p. 130.

32 Op. cit., p. 9.

33 The passage is quoted in Etienne, op. cit., p. 19.

34 There is a striking analogy, for instance, between the scene wherein Oroonoko calmly smokes a pipe during his torture and execution, and a scene in Chateaubriand's Les Natchez describing the antics of the Negro Imley (like Oroonoko, a fugitive slave), while suffering a similar death. That Chateaubriand knew or used Oroonoko, however, is by no means a certainty. Cf. Les Natchez, ed. G. Chinard (Paris, 1932), pp. 482–483, and Aphra Behn, op. cit., pp. 80–81. He was, moreover, acquainted with the stoical American Indian.

35 Cf. A. Lichtenberger, Le Socialisme utopique (Paris, 1898), pp. 27–28.

36 Myra Reynolds, The Learned Lady in England, 1650–1760 (Boston, 1920), p. 131.

37 E. W. Blashfield, Portraits and Backgrounds (New York, 1917), pp. 252–253. Cf. also H. N. Fairchild, The Noble Savage (New York, 1928), p. 35 f.; J. W. Dodds, Thomas Southerne, Dramatist (New Haven, 1933), p. 139.

38 Conquest of Granada, i, i.

39 Reynolds, op. cit., p. 130.

40 1771, vol. vi.

41 The American Museum, ix–x (1791), according to M. S. Locke, Anti-Slavery in America from the Introduction of African Slaves to the Prohibition of the Slave Trade (1619–1808), (Boston, 1901), p. 167. An English edition was published also in London, in 1790.