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Behn, Aphra (1640 - 89) is known to be the first professional female English author. She was is famous for her lifestyle as well as her works. She denied a woman's subservience to man and she was thought to be a forerunner of the feminist movement. But despite her success as a playwright, however, her best literary achievement can be found in her novels.
The most notable of these is Oroonoko (1688), a heroical love story, a story about colonization and the first philosophical novel in English. This is the story told by the prince, who has gotten to know Behn, a sympathetic listener, while he was a slave in Guiana. After having got a success in battle, he falls in love with a young woman, Imoinda, who also catches the eye of the king. For a while they had their love and relationships surreptitiously, but later the couple is discovered and Imoinda is sold into slavery. Oroonoko, the prince, who was himself a slave-owner, having fought a battle with Jamoans army got a defeat, but nevertheless his own troops thought of him to have the martial prowess and they were pleased to rise him to the glory and bravery. Lured upon an English ship by a captain with whom Oroonoko was selling and buying slaves, he and all his crew were betrayed and were taken to slavery in Guiana.
There he meets with Imoinda, and his noble bearing attracts the praise of all who know him. But some circumstances force Oroonoko to rebel against his masters and to lead an army of ex-slaves to seek their freedom. His capture, his murder of his own wife, and his torture and execution by the English slave-owners end Behn's narrative. Oroonoko is the story of colonialism where we read over and over about the putative superiority of the European nations and the supposed inferiority of the native ones. It is the book that presents greatly the issue of colonies that were full of contradictions: educated or untrustworthy Europeans; innocent or dangerous natives; and a 'Royal Slave'. In Oroonoko we meet with many acts of commerce between colonizer and colonized, as the story is governed by hierarchical ideologies.
What we see in this book is that cultural mix brings a disaster, leading to the transformation of highly educated men with a royal blood into a cruel and rigorous monster who destroys the fragile and porous boundaries between civilization and barbarity. Aphra Behn attempted to preserve and tried to show as those hierarchies of class and race and actually made us understand that it was almost impossible to do so in those chaotic and violent colonial spaces. Oroonoko is a fictional book that unlike other "factual" travel narratives whose primary purpose is the furthering of the colonial enterprise by encouraging readers at home either to fund future expeditions or to become explorers themselves, claims to historical events. Oroonoko is a story that travels into the other world, that is a colonized one. We see all the issues and problems that were at that time and how it affected the development of the country and nation. And of course that world and that country was America, that was unknown space until Europeans discovered and mapped it.
Before the arrival of the Europeans to present day United States, the Native Americans treated their homeland with respect and with spiritual properties. Occasionally they burned sections of land in the wilderness for better hunting area, but other than that they provided no threat to its well being. This all changed when the European settlers arrived. And that was the main and final point of the book to make us understand the time of colonization and slavery.
The Europeans believed that they got domination over the land. By building huge colonies, extensive road systems and forcing labor and their religion, the colonizers greatly changed the face and culture of our nation.
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Research essay sample on Oroonoko Story Book
