Caesar's Toils: Allusion and Rebellion in Oroonoko

Caesar's Toils: Allusion and Rebellion in OwonokoDavid E. Hoegberg But those who came prepared for the business enclosed him on every side, with their naked daggers in their hands. Which way soever he turned he met with blows, and saw their swords levelled at his face and eyes, and was encompassed, like a wild beast in the toils, on every side.1 Plutarch's "Life of Caesar" Included in the new sixth edition of the Norton Anthology ofEnglish Literature, Aphra Behn's Owonoko has passed a literary milestone, raising anew the question of how it fits into and plays against the literary "canon" it is more and more coming to inhabit. While Owonoko's literary indebtedness has often been noticed, critics have seldom examined how specific literary allusions contribute to the novel's structure and meaning.2 Citing English heroic drama and French romance as immediate precursors of Behn's work, they view her either as slavishly derivative or as holding 1 Plutarch, Lives ofthe Noble Grecians and Romans trans. John Dryden, revised by Arthur Hugh Clough (New York: Modem Library, 1932), p. 892. 2 Exceptions include Adelaide P. Amore on the parallels between Oroonoko and Christ in her introduction to Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, or. The Royal Slave: A Critical Edition, ed. Adelaide P. Amore (Lanham, New York, and London: University Press of America, 1987), pp. xxxii-xxxiii; Laura Brown on the links to literature memorializing Charles I in "The Romance of Empire: Oroonoko and the Trade in Slaves," The New Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 57-59; and Margaret Ferguson on the parallels with Shakespeare's Othello in "Juggling the Categories of Race, Class and Gender: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko," Women's Studies 19 (1991), 169-73. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 7, Number 3, April 1995 240 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION a politically conservative ideology.3 One view produces a picture of Behn as a marginally competent artist following older models, while the other ignores the possibility that Behn's use of convention might be in part subversive. Its subversion does not lie, however, in portraying successful rebellions against those in power—Oroonoko and Imoinda are defeated both at home and abroad—but in revealing the mechanisms by which power operates, including both physical force and subtle forms of mental or psychological control.4 Robert Chibka has already done extensive work on the role of deceit by whites in manipulating Oroonoko,3 but consciously crafted deceit is only one form of mental control. I would like to extend Chibka's work to consider the role of plot in the novel's structures of domination, not only the plot of Owonoko itself, but the way it alludes to and incorporates preexisting classical narrative models, especially those of Achilles and Julius Caesar. At every stage of his life, Oroonoko is dominated by texts that shape his career in ways he cannot control.6 While his authority to act as an independent being is wrested from him, the authorship of his life story is complicated by literary allusions so that questions of constraint and freedom become wrapped up with questions of literary indebtedness and originality. In Oroonoko, the allusions form a supplement to Behn's text that deepens the analysis of power and its problems. If the main plot tells the story of Oroonoko's struggles against the old king, the English captain, and Byam, the allusions—and the processes of mental control they suggest—tell a story of Oroonoko's struggle against less tangible forces of ideology and belief. To read Behn's allusions as more than literary homage or political nostalgia we must look beyond the standard heroic qualities associated with each character. When considered in a static or synchronic mode, warrior heroes such as Achilles and Caesar, by virtue of their fighting skill 3 See Martine Watson Brownley, "The Narrator in Oroonoko," Essays in Literature: Western Illinois University 4 (1977), 174-81; Katherine M. Rogers, "Fact and Fiction in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko," Studies in the Novel 20 (Spring 1988), 1-15; William C. Spengemann, 'The Earliest American Novel: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko," Nineteenth-Century Fiction 38 (1984), 384...