Executing the Body Politic: Inscribing State Violence onto Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko

Abstract

This striking conclusion to Aphra Behn’s novel Oroonoko¹ highlights, above all, the barbarity exerted on this heroic African protagonist. A victim to the mechanisms of the British colonial slave trade, Oroonoko, renamed “Caesar” once in the seventeenth-century Surinam colony, dominates Behn’s now canonical romance-inflected novel as much as violence dominates his final moments. Yet, despite the possibly exotic detail of smoking tobacco during his death scene, this account of Oroonoko’s ad-hoc execution within the English colony needs to be contextualized amidst specific historical events and explicit acts of political violence characterizing the decade during which Behn wrote and published her novel. In the 1680s in England, the feared Popish Plot, the Rye House Plot, and the Monmouth Rebellion all delivered either victims or traitors to the block—depending, of course, on one’s political affiliation.² And while, as Melinda Zook suggests, the Bloody Assizes generated bodies and body parts strewn barbarically around western English counties, the details in Oroonoko’s death scene draw us back to London’s staging of numerous state-authored punishments during this period. In 1683, the now infamous trial and sentencing of Algernon Sidney for the treasonous “act” of “writing” the Discourses Concerning Government detail the traitor’s end to which he is to be condemned:

That you be carried hence to the place from whence you came, and from thence you shall be drawn upon an Hurdle to the Place of Execution, where you shall be hanged by the Neck, and, being alive, cut down; your Privy Members shall be cut off, and burned before your Face, your Head severed from your Body, and your Body divided into four Quarters, and they to be disposed at the Pleasure of the King. And the God of infinite Mercy have mercy upon your Soul.³

He had learn’d to take Tobacco; and when he was assur’d he should die, he desir’d they would give him a Pipe in his Mouth, ready lighted; which they did: And the Executioner came, and first cut off his Members, and threw them into the Fire; after that, with an ill -favoured Knife, they cut his Ears, and his Nose, and burn’d them; he still smoak’d on, as if nothing had touch’d him; then they hack’d off one of his Arms, and still he bore up, and held his Pipe; but at the cutting off the other Arm, his Head sunk, and his Pipe dropt and he gave up the Ghost, without a Groan, or a Reproach.

—Aphra Behn, Oroonoko