Oroonoko and Pop Culture

Oroonoko is a case where I think I like the criticism of the story even more than I appreciated the tale. Specifically her contemporaries ideas of criticism, in that, often, they seemed to be more personal than professional criticisms.

As from Bishop Burnet (p. 189), "Some of Ms. Behn's songs are very tender; but she is so abominably vile a woman..." The man even seems to be admitting that Behn has some skill and talent with a pen, but for nothing as she misuses 'virtue' and 'religion' for personal gain. Another finds her work entirely unsuitable for either man or woman and "she was to be look'd upon as an Hermaphrodite, & consequently not fit to enjoy the benefits... of this society." (190) And my personal favorite of the negative criticism (at least as printed in the Norton Critical edition) , is not only a criticism of Behn, but of mass literacy  where Andrew Kippis declares that the only people still reading Behn’s work are “among that unhappily too numerous class of people who devour the trash of the circulating libraries.” Clearly, Behn had no shortage of harsh criticisms, but really more directed towards the fact that she was a woman, than her skill as either writer or storyteller.

This trends into the positive direction as well. Charles Cotton seems to be as much in love with Behn as with her writing. There were some that seemed to be willing to bleed for her, and others that were willing to bleed her, so that she might not write anymore. What makes this interesting to me is that it is so very much similar to what you see today, if not of book reviews, than movies or theatre productions. More than a few of the comments if updated to the language of today sounded similar to, “I guess it was alright, but I just can’t stand anything to do with Aphra Behn.”

It might be a bit of a reach, but I think this says something about the popularity of what would later become mass popular culture in that it is driven as much by people loving not only the works of creative artists, but loving to bash those works and their creators as mercilessly as their slightly less creative minds will allow. Not because any of the works are inherently bad, but because it becomes difficult to separate the person from the work, when one sees and hears of their exploits on a regular basis.

For that matter, in Brown’s “The Romance of Empire,” a case is made that Oroonoko can serve as a stand in for the execution of Charles II. Which from the standpoint of hundreds of years later means very little to me, but for her contemporaries, some of whom most certainly would have made this connection, it would have been an issue that could easily cause such remarkable disparity between supporters and detractors. In a way it simply manages to affirm for me that any publicity is good publicity, and, sometimes, the negative is just as good as the positive.