Aphra Behn’s White Female Pen

Mahindra Humanities Center Seminar on Eighteenth-Century Studies

Speaker: Joseph Rezek, Boston University

This talk examines the nominal emergence of the racial category “white” at the end of the seventeenth century through an analysis of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688). I argue that Behn fashioned a white authorial persona by presenting that book’s titular character as an illiterate, tragic African hero who needs a “female pen” like hers to preserve his story in the format of the printed codex. Oroonoko depicts racialized, New-World violence during the complex and uneven discursive shift that installed “white” as an identity category in the modern imagination. Behn claims the white author’s power over print, and the codex format specifically, I argue, when she dramatizes the brutal mutilation of Oroonoko’s body at the end of the novel – in a sequence that recalls a long history of colonial ideologies that fuse together ideas about print, violence, and discourses of racial difference. More information.