Review: Oroonoko by Aphra Behn
Year published: 1688
Language: English
Region: UK/Europe
Number of pages: 41 (PDF)
Approximate age recommendation: 16-18
Triggers: torture, death
This novella’s captivating slave narrative holds up as a gripping, tragic story in the 21st century. It is deemed to be the first novel written in English, published as a “true history”, making it an interesting study for exploring the ways in which the novel has evolved over the last 300+ years.
Students find the language of the novel difficult, mostly because of its sentence structure (although there are a few good vocabulary words in there as well). Teachers can use this as an opportunity to guide students through lessons about sentence structure – why and when we use different types of sentences and the effects they have on the reader. It is also a good opportunity for students to practice “finding the main idea” of a sentence by searching for the independent clause; a helpful skill for timed, external examinations. The novel’s narrator is the author (or author surrogate) who tells the tale of the African prince since he is no longer able to tell it himself. Students claim they are able to understand the role and evolution of the narrator much more clearly after reading this novella, including how and why the 3rd person limited and omniscient narrators were developed.
While short, the story covers a lot of ground. It starts in Africa, telling the backstory of the African prince, Oroonoko, and the cultural traditions that shape his character and values; it then follows him to Suriname, chronicling his transformation into slavery. Behn’s vivid descriptions capture her wanderlust as she paints the lush landscapes of the “new world” into words and immortalizes the natures of both the early natives and their colonizers. Several issues are raised in the story, and while they are not all fully developed, the narrative does give readers insight into the tensions of early globalization that can still be felt today. It can be difficult for a 21st century reader to imagine a world with unchartered territory; Behn’s novel quickly transports us back to a time when man’s war with nature was just as terrifying and dangerous as man’s battle with man.
The novella’s violent scenes are detailed and gruesome, but this is a good opportunity to discuss the role of the reader’s imagination in reading. In my experience, students in the last 10 years have struggled more with using details to trigger their imaginations, building and creating scenes in their minds. The details are in the literary work, but students are so used to having visuals produced for them, that they struggle to do this automatically for themselves. With this text, I have used some mindful reading practices, asking students to sit with their eyes closed as I slowly read a passage aloud and ask them to reconstruct it in their minds, piece by piece. Students are amazed at how different this reading experience is, ultimately developing an appreciation for “all those words” and what they are trying to accomplish. The gruesome scenes can be disturbing, but because the novel is so far removed from our current time, students (and parents) seem to tolerate it more easily, appreciating that our violent history is part of our human history.
