I don’t know why but I find this reading for Oroonoko, by Aphra Behn to be one of the hardest one’s yet. A month
or two ago I would have been so happy to read a bit more prose and now I’m just
like holy moly there is so much text on one page. Aside from the length though
it’s still a hard read for me and I think it is because this story is further
away from religion and closer to the nasty nature of human beings. Slavery is a
topic that I both hate and love to learn about as a history major. I get
extremely passionate about it so it may be clouding my judgment somewhat while I
read Oroonoko. I’ll have to work on that.
I
have been trying to think about what Dr. Mitchell-Buck said about if there was
a hierarchy…who would be the nicest or morally good characters and I’m just
like um none of them. So far though, into the first reading, I would say that
Imoinda might be the nicest one. She seems the most innocent and obviously the
most beautiful since everyone wants her. “On the other side, the old king, who
had many wives and many concubines, wanted not court flatterers to insinuate in
his heart a thousand tender thoughts for this young beauty, and who represented
her to his fancy as the most charming…” (2189). They all seem pretty awful
though, especially their views on slavery, Oroonoko included. The main
character himself sold slaves to people and then he later ends up becoming a slave
as well. Oh the irony.
Way agree with you there! Behn's prose is just so darn cumbersome to deal with for me as well. She uses a lot of run-ons and sprawling paragraphs that jump from topic to topic, to the point where the entire story just seems like one huge stream of consciousness narrative. The topic itself, as you said, doesn't make it any easier to read either.
ReplyDeleteI agree with both of you! With Paradise Lost we needed the sentence diagram, but I feel like we need it just as much with the run-on sentences in Oroonoko. It is tough for me to read this and not go into "teacher-mode" and try to correct the run-on sentences in my head or even on the text itself. I have to learn that this was the writing style of the time, and grammar rules were not the same as they are now.
ReplyDeleteI'm not having as much trouble with the free flowing format as the subject matter. For me it is hard to push myself to read what I disagree with, which makes this an excellent exercise for me. That being said, looking at two tiny print pages with lots of words of content I dislike is a nightmare.
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