Interrogating Oroonoko: Torture in a New World and a New Fiction of Power

Abstract

This article interrogates the function and effect of the penultimate paragraph of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, where Oroonoko is tortured and executed. Reading the scene through the prism of European practices of ritual punishment and judicial torture as well as New World uses of torture, I argue that the scene cannot be read, as many critics have, as one of martyrdom. Rather, the scene emerges as closer in its rhetorical aims to those articulated by Elaine Scarry in her seminal analysis of torture, The Body in Pain (1985). As is the case with judicial and modern torture, Behn deliberately produces a body in pain in order to give legitimacy to the truth of her own narrative. Yet, in opposition to that brutal practice, she simultaneously exposes the fictional nature of her own narrative power. She reminds the reader of the violence inherent in any appropriation of another’s story for one’s own political or literary ends, and in the process paradoxically produces one of the first modern, democratic subjects.

The contemporary making and unmaking of Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain

“…Mol, 2008;Puig de la Bellacassa, 2009). Throughout this period, the influence of Scarry's thesis has been visible across multiple disciplines and topics, including black subjectivity (da Silva, 2012;Douglass and Wilderson, 2013), drama (Thompson, 2006;Freeland, 2011), history (Bourke, 2011), literary studies (Krimmer, 2008;Bernatchez, 2009;Townsend, 2012;Richards, 2013;Zhang, 2014), media and cultural studies (Biressi, 2004;Dauphinee, 2007), political and feminist scholarship (Philipose, 2007), and sexuality studies (Ross, 2012). As the diversity and reach of Scarry's influence demonstrates, her ideas have consistently provoked and informed debate about the body, about pain, and about the making (and unmaking) of subjectivity and world (and note that these last two are necessarily conjoined, since Scarry clearly shows how the making or unmaking of one is inevitably and simultaneously the making or unmaking of the other).…”