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The Shakespearean Cadences of The King’s Speech (2010)

The following is a revised version of a talk given as part of a “Shakespeare on Film” panel at the 2013 Popular Culture Association/ American Culture Association National Conference in Washington, D.C., and, like Writing Assignment 4 for this cycle of Humcore, it performs a comparative analysis on an example of Shakespearean appropriation, identifying how certain themes originally appeared in Shakespeare’s plays and then reflecting on how these themes have changed in the process of adaptation. For students currently writing and revising their own essay drafts, it offers a model of how to a) select and incorporate relevant passages from Shakespeare, b) use secondary sources to develop a central argument, and c) describe and analyze film as a medium. While this post does not rely heavily on the technical vocabulary of film analysis (a good introduction to which can be found here), it does include detailed descriptions of the various scenes and cinematic elements being analyzed. Students may compare these descriptions with the actual excerpts of the film provided throughout to get a sense of how to translate the medium of cinema into written form.

Dramatizing the historical events surrounding George VI’s ascension to the English throne in 1936 after his brother Edward VIII famously abdicated to be with “the woman I love,” The King’s Speech eschews the more typical Hollywood melodrama of Edward’s romantic scandal and instead follows George VI (“Bertie”), played by Colin Firth, during his personal battle to overcome a debilitating stammer and become the inspirational spokesman for a nation on the brink of war. The film is part of a new wave of historical cinema that has revived the most salient elements of the Shakespearean history play, particularly the genre’s fascination with crises of sovereignty and the role of individual personality in the ineffable tide of historical change. But unlike the epic costume dramas of the 1960s, such as Becket (1964), A Man for All Seasons (1966), or Anne of a Thousand Days (1969), these recent films are set within the pointedly modern contexts of mass media, celebrity culture, and global politics. Other examples of this cinematic trend include Peter Morgan’s films The Deal (2003), The Queen (2006), and The Special Relationship (2010), which explore the recent history of Britain through the career of Tony Blair, while the HBO films of Danny Strong – Recount (2008) and Game Change (2012) – apply the genre to contemporary American politics.

The King’s Speech, however, is the film that most consciously and explicitly engages with its Shakespearean influence, embodied in the character of George VI’s Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue, played by Geoffrey Rush. Screenwriter David Seidler cleverly exploits the biographical fact that Logue was an amateur Shakespearean actor to weave the Bard’s words and themes throughout the film. In fact, Logue’s very first appearance on screen is attended with a Shakespearean quote. In this scene, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, played by Helena Bonham Carter, having come to Logue’s office to enlist his services for her husband, discovers a rather drab and dilapidated space. Emerging from the bathroom with the sound of a flushing toilet receding into the background, Logue, aware of the impression his home can make, quips, “Poor and content is rich and rich enough” – a line from Othello. When Elizabeth responds with a bemused, “I’m sorry,” Logue promptly interjects, “Shakespeare. How are you?” and thrusts out his hand in a remarkable gesture that fuses citation and introduction – as if he were claiming to be the Immortal Bard himself.

Logue’s practice of speaking with a Shakespearean cadence reflects, at one level, his status as a product of empire. As an Australian transplanted to London, Logue is an outsider in love with an English cultural tradition that actual English men and women seem all too ready to deny him. To drive this marginalization home, the film presents a brief interlude where Logue auditions for an amateur Shakespeare troupe from Putney, the leader of which barely lets Logue get out the lines to Richard III’s opening soliloquy before cutting him off with a derisive, “I didn’t realize that Richard III was king of the colonies.”

But the allusion to Richard III in this scene serves as something more than just an opportunity to illustrate Logue’s experience of cultural rejection. Instead, I want to suggest that it represents Seidler’s winking acknowledgement of the film’s conscious appropriation, and often inversion, of a host of Shakespearean themes and tropes.

In fact, the overall arc of the film’s action is an ironic reversal of the plot to Richard III. In Shakespeare’s play, Richard III is presented as a man who, because he possesses a defect that keeps him from enjoying a private life, pursues instead a path of public ambition through cunning and strategizing. As the hunchback Richard tells the audience in his opening monologue, “since I cannot prove a lover / To entertain these fair well-spoken days, / I am determined to prove a villain / And hate the idle pleasures of these days” (1.1.28-31). In the King’s Speech, however, Bertie’s “defect” frustrates the demands and expectations of his public position, and where Shakespeare’s murderous “Machieval” claws his way to the crown by sheer force of will, Bertie practically has to be dragged there kicking and screaming. When Bertie’s wife tells Logue that her husband has to speak publicly and can’t switch jobs, Logue jokes, “indentured servitude?” She replies, half-grinning, “Something of that nature, yes.”

Benedict Cumberbatch as Richard III in PBS’s The Hollow Crown (2016)

Indeed, this sentiment of being overwhelmed by public duty and desiring the life of a private man is a common theme in Shakespeare’s histories. In Henry V, a play about one of England’s most celebrated medieval kings, the eponymous ruler delivers the following melancholy reflection, just before the fateful battle of Agincourt:

        O hard condition,

Twin-born with greatness, subject to the breath

Of every fool, whose sense no more can feel

But his own wringing! What infinite heart’s-ease

Must kings neglect, that private men enjoy!

And what have kings, that private men have not too,

Save ceremony, save general ceremony?

And what art thou, that suffer’st more

Of mortal griefs than do thy worshippers? (Henry V, 4.1.233-42)

Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton University Press, 1997)

This “twin-born” nature of English monarchs – one of Shakespeare’s favorite history play tropes – was famously identified by the medieval historian Ernst Kantorowicz as the doctrine of “The King’s Two Bodies” – the first, a mortal, natural body that is the seat of the private individual, and the second, a political, deathless body that is the abstract embodiment of the English nation continuing in perpetuity.[1] According to Kantorowicz the concept of the “two bodies” developed in legal discourses of 16th century as a necessary bridge between the mystical, theological concepts of the medieval imagination and the modern secular notions of the state. In a seminal reading of Shakespeare’s Richard II, Kantorowicz asserts that “the legal concept of the King’s two bodies cannot…be separated from Shakespeare” because it was Shakespeare who “eternalized the metaphor” in a way that continues to shape the cultural imagination of Western civilization.[2]

As a modern historical drama about a modern sovereign, The King’s Speech certainly plays upon Shakespeare’s eternalized metaphor, but it does so with a keen awareness that the metaphor has undergone a fundamental re-imagination since the 16th century. Indeed, the modern conception of the English monarchy, starting with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, has been marked by a concerted effort to suppress the importance of the King’s natural body and to completely divorce the private will of the sovereign from the functioning of public authority.[3] “If I’m a king, where’s my power?” Bertie exclaims in the penultimate scene of the film, acknowledging this limited and circumscribed role the monarch now inhabits: “Can I form a government? Can I levy a tax? Declare a war? No.” But the mystical element that still peeps through, the one that almost embarrassingly attests to the fact that the king is still the clumsy persona mixta of a pre-modern constitutional tradition, is the importance of the voice. “And yet I’m the seat of all authority” Bertie continues, “Why? Because the nation believes that when I speak I speak for them.”

While acknowledging the dull reality of 20th century kingship, The King’s Speech nevertheless takes seriously this mystical kernel still alive and active in the operation of sovereignty. For even in the modern age, it is the sovereign’s voice that the nation is supposed to respond to, particularly in times of crisis, and this voice therefore continues to function as the symbol of a stable and secure order. But the film is not merely fascinated with the mystical authority of the king’s voice in the abstract; its interest also lies in the unique historical moment of the early 20th century, when the development of broadcast technology raised the stakes of the sovereign’s personality in new, and potentially disruptive, ways. “In the past, all a king had to do was look respectable in uniform and not fall off his horse,” George V, played by Michael Gambon, grumbles to his son Bertie, “Now, we must invade people’s homes and ingratiate ourselves with them. This family’s been reduced to those lowest, basest of all creatures. We’ve become actors.”

Extending and ironizing this analogy between royal authority and public performance, the visual vocabulary of the film draws remarkable parallels between the traditional iconographies of royalty and the material technology through which that royalty will be translated in the age of mass media. Thus, the very first images of the film are a series of lingering shots upon a single microphone, impressive in its bulk and resembling a kind of missile, as if to suggest that one false move will unleash its powerful, destructive force. This, as the film’s framing implies, is the new throne, the new crown.

Microphone as New Seat of Power in The King’s Speech (2010)

We are then shown the pre-broadcast ritual of a nameless BBC announcer, wherein the film offers a kind of visual parody of a coronation ceremony, inviting the audience to witness the anointing and blessing of the voice before it takes its place in this new seat of power.

The fact that it is a nameless BBC announcer undergoing this parodic coronation emphasizes the profound effect that this new technology will have upon the nature of power and authority. Later in the film, when Bertie and his family have finished watching a newsreel of his own coronation, the images and sounds that immediately follow are of Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies. Bertie sits silently watching Hitler’s bombastic performance as a young Princess Elizabeth asks, “Papa, what’s he saying?” “I don’t know,” Bertie wryly replies, “but he seems to be saying it rather well.”

As the film suggests, for a consummate speaker like Hitler, the technology of the microphone magnifies his personality, and it is in this act of technological magnification, rather than the force of custom or tradition, that the authority of modern authoritarianism is created. Bertie, by contrast, with an authority based on a tradition much bigger than his individual self – the thousand year legacy of British royalty – finds himself dwarfed and overwhelmed by the prospect of personal magnification, a theme that the film’s director Tom Hooper signals brilliantly through camera angles and shot composition, wherein microphones are continually eclipsing and obscuring Bertie’s face.

Motif of Microphones Obscuring Bertie’s Face in The King’s Speech (2010)

Bertie’s stutter thus operates as a kind of return of the repressed, embarrassingly foregrounding the continued fact of the king’s physical presence, his natural body. The plot of the film, therefore, principally revolves around achieving some kind of harmonious re-alignment of the two bodies paradox.

Enter: Lionel Logue with his Shakespearean eloquence and radical approach to speech therapy. And while Bertie’s rise to the throne is a reversal of Shakespeare’s Richard III, his friendship with Logue recalls and inverts many of the tropes contained in the Prince Hal/ Falstaff relationship of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2.

Simon Russell Beale (left) as Falstaff and Tom Hiddleston (right) as Prince Hal in PBS’s The Hollow Crown (2012)

Like Bertie, Prince Hal, in Henry IV, Part 1, condescends to a state of familiarity and equality in order to learn how to “speak” the language of his subjects, proclaiming while in the riotous company of Eastcheap, “I can drink with any tinker in his own language during my life” (2.4.18-20), a skill that will later serve him well when he must rally his troops before the battle of Agincourt – a feat he achieves through his famous St. Crispin’s Day speech, calling upon his “Band of brothers” to shed their blood with him (Henry V, 4.3.18-67).

Hal’s Rejection of Falstaff Upon Becoming King Henry V (from an 1830 Edition of Shakespeare’s Plays edited by Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke)

However, Hal must ultimately renounce Falstaff and the friendship that taught him this speech because of the threat that such a private friendship poses for the public good. Shakespeare famously illustrates this threat in Falstaff’s reaction to hearing of Hal’s ascension to the throne, where the reprobate knight proclaims, “the laws of England are at my commandment” (2 Henry IV, 5.3.136-7), a sentiment which exemplifies the common Renaissance fear that corrupt personal advisors might turn the king’s power into a tool for private gain.

The filmmakers seem very cognizant of the threat Logue represents within the confines of these older tropes, and interestingly, there are many sinister associations with Logue’s character subtly sprinkled throughout the film. Consider for instance the visual sequence of Elizabeth’s initial visit to engage Logue’s services for her husband. First, we see her in a chauffeured car on her way to the office, but because of the thickness of the fog, a man walks out in front as a guide. Then, upon arriving, she must cage herself in a rather menacing-looking elevator and wait for its slow decent to a lower floor. Though very slight visual cues, the fog and the elevator give the unsettling impression of entering a kind of Grecian underworld. The man guiding the Duchess’s car through the fog in particular conjures up images of Charon leading a freshly arrived soul across the river Styx. 

Then we have Logue’s Shakespearean quotes themselves, all of which come from very sinister contexts. Besides Richard III, the “poor and content” line is spoken by Iago and is delivered during the very scene where he first plants the doubt about Desdemona’s virtue in Othello’s mind, a doubt that will eventually ripen into the murderous jealousy that causes Othello’s tragic downfall. Logue’s third instance of Shakespearean quotation comes in the form of Caliban’s famous “Be not afeared” speech describing the The Tempest’s enchanted Isle (3.2.135-43), a speech which Logue delivers, with an impromptu hunchback, for the entertainment of his sons.

While the lyricism of the speech is breathtaking, it’s important to remember that, in its original context, Caliban is trying to convince the newly shipwrecked commoners Trinculo and Stephano to kill Prospero for him – an instance of the colonized subject attempting to destroy the man who holds sovereign sway over him.

Russell Brand as Trinculo (left), Alfred Molina as Stephano (center), and Djimon Hounsou as Caliban (right) in Julie Taymor’s The Tempest (2010)

Granted, the film never depicts Logue as harboring violent intentions toward Bertie, but it does position him as a subversive figure. The suspicion of Archbishop Cosmo Gordon Lang, played by Derek Jacobi, towards Logue, particularly in the run up to Bertie’s coronation, is construed by the film as mostly being motivated by class snobbery. However, the suspicion also arises from the aforementioned fear that personal advisors and favorites to the king can become threats to the constitutional order. Here we may again recall Falstaff’s hopes in Hal’s succession or the figure of Piers Gaveston as depicted in Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II. Visually, the film registers this age-old suspicion of favorites in its shot composition and its staging. Consider, for example, the camera angle during Bertie and Logue’s conversation, prior to Edward’s abdication, about whether or not Bertie has the potential to be king. As if showing us Bertie’s own internal interpretation of how taboo such a consideration is, the film frames Logue as a kind of devil on Bertie’s shoulder, whispering treasonous temptations into his ear.

Or consider the image that we get during the rehearsal for Bertie’s coronation. Having dismissed everyone but Logue, Bertie falls into a fit of despair, asserting that he has only come to this point because of Logue’s ambition to have a star pupil in the future king. Getting up from the throne and looking off into the distance, Bertie morbidly imagines that his legacy will be that of “Mad King George the Stammerer, who let his people down so badly in their hour of need that…” Bertie does not complete the self-pitying prediction because as he turns, he sees Logue casually lounging in Saint Edward’s chair, as naturally as if he were king himself.

Finally, during the climactic wartime broadcast where Bertie announces Britain’s entry into World War II, the crucial moment towards which all of Bertie’s speech therapy (and thus the film as a whole) has been building, we are given the visual of Logue actually conducting Bertie as if he were some kind of orchestra (see edited clip below). However, the film only raises these symbolic fears of usurpation in order to demonstrate that they are unfounded. Logue’s sitting in Saint Edward’s chair merely serves to demonstrate that Bertie does not need to be intimidated by the materials of ceremony. (Here, Bertie’s self-affirming shout of “I have a voice!” is essentially the film’s feel-good climax). And well before the conclusion of the wartime broadcast, Logue has stopped conducting and stands transfixed, listening to his King’s voice as merely one subject among many. In this climactic moment, we, as an audience, are meant to see how much Logue has helped Bertie discover his own voice and become his own man, registered in the shot composition by a suspended microphone that now reflects Bertie’s face rather than obscuring it.

By inverting the old Shakespearean tropes, the film validates and indeed celebrates the king’s personal friendships as an essential means to fulfilling his royal duties – a touching twist for any Shakespearean critic who thought Hal’s rejection of Falstaff was an unkindness too difficult to stomach. In fact, Logue’s insistence upon intimacy while treating Bertie, and his psychological approaches to speech therapy (an historical inaccuracy on the part of the filmmakers), remind us that the King’s Speech not only updates its Shakespearean themes according to modern media, but also updates the problem of the King’s two bodies, and the king’s voice, in the context of post-Freudian psychology. As the Lacanian critic Mladen Dolar has written in his work, A Voice and Nothing More, “we are social beings by the voice and through the voice; it seems that the voice stands at the axis of our social bonds, and that voices are the very texture of the social, as well as the intimate kernel of subjectivity.”[4] Indeed, the film presents Bertie’s stuttering as originating in the formation of this “intimate kernel of subjectivity” and further exacerbated by the process through which it gets integrated into a larger social fabric. Significantly, Logue is able to convince Bertie to start therapy through a trick. In what has become the film’s iconic scene, Logue asks Bertie to read Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy while listening to classical music blasting through a set of headphones. Logue records Bertie’s performance on a record, which Bertie refuses to listen to until much later. When he finally does, however, hearing his voice reciting Shakespeare’s most famous speech without hesitation or mistake, he immediately begins treatment. This trick works, the film implies, for two reasons. First, it allows Bertie to efface himself, to not be crushingly self-conscious of his own voice while he is speaking. Second, the recording allows him to experience his own voice from the perspective of another, to be alienated enough from it to see it as an object in itself.

As the film suggests, at a deep psychological level Bertie lacks confidence in the world of social response that his voice is supposed to elicit. Here we might recall how, according to Kantorowicz’s concept of the King’s Two Bodies, the peripeteia of Shakespeare’s Richard II occurs when the besieged monarch loses confidence in the mystical power of his kingly capacity and at last becomes aware of his own limited creaturely existence: “I live with bread like you, feel want, / Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus, / How can you say to me, I am a king?” (3.2.175-7). In Bertie’s case, however, the loss of faith is much more profound, for we learn that as a child he was subject to abuse by a nanny who wouldn’t feed him, and that it took his parents three years to notice. The scene in which this information is revealed becomes all the more poignant by the incorporation of one of Logue’s speech therapy techniques introduced earlier in the film. In that earlier scene, Logue explains to Bertie that singing his words using a familiar melody can help keep him from stuttering, at which suggestion Bertie tries the melody to “Swanee River.” So when Bertie later begins to talk about his childhood and the stress of his memories increases the severity of his stammering, Logue advises him to sing it, which results in Bertie confessing the awful neglect of his nanny – “then she wouldn’t feed me” – while finishing with the original lyrics to “Swanne River” – “far, far away.” It’s a brilliant bit of staging on the part of the filmmakers, as it serves to underscore how this traumatic experience instilled feelings of isolation and distance in Bertie, and ultimately caused him to lose faith in the power of his own voice to bridge that distance.

A big part of Logue’s therapy throughout the film, then, is to create a smaller version of this world of social response, a more intimate realm somewhere between the purely public and purely private, where Bertie only needs to worry about a single recipient and can be confident that this recipient is a friend. This theme is most directly illustrated in the final scene where Bertie delivers his inspiring wartime broadcast in a small room just to the side of the palace offices. Only Logue is there, instructing Bertie to “Say it to me, as a friend.” Coupling the intimate space of self-with-other with a palpable demonstration of mass media’s potential for self-amplification, the scene finally banishes the specter of totalitarianism and tyranny heretofore haunting the film’s meditation on modernity and sovereignty, opting instead for the emotionally satisfying resolution of melodrama, albeit (it must be admitted in this context) melodrama of the highest order.[5]

But it behooves us as attentive viewers to recognize the quaint nostalgia at the heart of this melodramatic resolution – a nostalgia which readily acknowledges the first half of the 20th century as a time of political and social upheaval, but nevertheless takes comfort in the assurance of a worthy future ahead. How else are we to understand the bizarre incongruity of the film’s final moments, where a declaration of war is greeted not with sadness or trepidation, but with relief and triumph, as family members and palace officials cheerfully applaud Bertie like a sports movie underdog who’s just won the big game?

By contrast, at the dawn of 21st century, though we feel a commensurate sense of social and technological upheaval, what we lack is that easy faith in the brighter tomorrow, the confidence that the bitter struggle ahead will inevitably lead to some grand, ennobling victory. We shouldn’t forget that, even though it won Best Picture in 2010, The King’s Speech wasn’t the only historical drama on that year’s list of Oscar contenders. David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network garnered as much, if not more, critical and popular acclaim as the King’s Speech, but the tone and guiding metaphor of each film could not be further apart.

Even the title, The Social Network, evokes a de-centered, depersonalized world of distributed power and murky social obligations, while the film itself structurally refuses to empathize with or reject its central protagonist through the frame story of a legal deposition, leaving it unclear whose version of events is the truth. Through the course of the film, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, played by Jesse Eisenberg, is portrayed as a social maladroit, whose rise to the top is fueled by a combination of unimpeachable talent, unshakable resentment for the existing social hierarchy, and just a dash of Machiavellian ruthlessness – in other words, like a Richard III. Clearly, the more unsettling strains of Shakespeare’s tragic vision have not been rendered obsolete by the modern age, but indeed continue to resonate with contemporary doubts and anxieties about where our society might be headed.

We must ask ourselves, therefore, what it says about our own historical moment that, when it came time to choose between these two films, popular imagination and institutional recognition in America longingly bent toward the comforting paradigm of the past, indulging an atavistic impulse to listen to and follow the steady, singular voice of a sovereign.

Notes

[1] I must acknowledge Robin Wagner-Pacifilci’s post on the blog Deliberately Considered as the first public identification and discussion of this aspect of the film. 1/10/11. < http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/2011/01/the-king%E2%80%99s-speech-the-president%E2%80%99s-speech/>

[2] Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 26.

[3] The classic analysis of the sovereign’s circumscribed and symbolic role in England’s post-1688 constitutional government is Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution (1867).

[4] Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 23.

[5] For an analysis of the relationship between sovereignty and friendship in Renaissance literature, see Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

Robin S. Stewart received his Ph.D. in English from UC Irvine in 2013, specializing in early modern British literature and Shakespeare. He has written previously for the Humanities Core Research Blog on Empire and the Nation-State Before the 18th Century.  For interested students, he will be teaching a course on Shakespeare (E103) during the upcoming Summer Session that will be coordinated with the New Swan Theater’s productions of The Tempest and Taming of the Shrew. Students who enroll in the course will read three plays (The Tempest, Taming of the Shrew, and King Lear), analyze various film versions of each, and, as their final assignment, write their own creative adaptation of a chosen Shakespeare scene.

“The Beautiful and the Constant Imoinda”: A Consideration

Peter Lely, Portrait of Aphra Behn (before 1680)

“The beautiful and the constant Imoinda” (77). These are the last words of Aphra Behn’s 1688 novella Oroonoko; or, the Royal Slave, a work justly celebrated for its exploration of race and power through the figure of Behn’s titular protagonist, the “royal slave” Oroonoko. It is Oroonoko’s story that captures our attention and arouses our admiration, frustration, and horror, and it is Oroonoko who gives the book its title. Yet in a narrative that foregrounds issues of names and naming, Behn’s female narrator ends not with Oroonoko’s name but that of his wife and lover. And, as is not the case with Oroonoko, the narrator expresses no ambivalence toward her. Indeed, while the second half of the novella refers to Oroonoko by the name his European purchasers impose on him—Caesar—Imoinda’s original name is restored to her in Behn’s final sentence.

Why all of this should be is a question worth asking, for it tells us that Imoinda is as important as Oroonoko to Behn’s analysis of power in a ruthless colonial world where heroic ideals of beauty, constancy, and honor are under siege. Literary historians know that Behn published a number of romances like Oroonoko in the last years of her life, and that they tended to spotlight female protagonists, who usually appear in their titles: The Fair Jilt, The History of the Nun; The Adventure of the Black Lady; The Unfortunate Bride. If Oroonoko had been titled Imoinda, what kind of story would it have been? Would we like Oroonoko himself less or more? And in relegating Imoinda to the edges of the story we have, is Behn perhaps drawing our attention to the ways women are invisible or marginalized in all of the cultures she explores in her tale? Who is Imoinda and why and how does she matter?

In an important essay also cited in Vivian Folkenflik’s blog post on Oroonoko’s market scene, the literary critic Laura Brown observes that Behn’s “narrative must have women, and it generates […] female figures at every turn, as observers, beneficiaries, and consumers of Oroonoko’s romantic action” (235). Brown is referring partly to Behn’s female authorship and female readership at the time of the book’s original publication. But she also reminds us that Behn is interested in Oroonoko’s relationship to women—a relationship that is presented as a key component of his virtue and identity as a romantic hero. His undying ardor for Imoinda in the decadent court of Coramantien is one of the things that elevates him: he was, claims the narrator, “as capable of love as it was possible for a brave and gallant man to be; … for sure, great souls are most capable of that passion” (16). Behn’s female narrator wryly leaves it an open question as to how “capable” of love Oroonko might actually be, but Imoinda is first introduced in the context of his “passion” for her. This is treated as a source of equality and ultimately as the source of Oroonoko’s subjection to her: “To describe her truly, one need say only, she was female to the noble male the beautiful black Venus to our young Mars, as charming in her person as he, and of delicate virtues. I have seen an hundred white men sighing after her and making a thousand vows at her feet…and she was, indeed, too great for any but a prince of her own nation to adore” (16). Sure enough, the instant Oronooko sees Imoinda, she “gained a perfect conquest over his fierce heart” (17). The narrator stresses Imonda’s power over the warrior Oroonoko while also stressing the purity of their love in a “country, where men take to themselves as many as they can maintain” (17).

But if Imoinda is at first presented as powerful, her reality in a world where “men take [women] to themselves” is somewhat different. Oronooko himself “vows that she should be the only woman he would possess” and seems to regard her as his property at the same time that he idealizes her and acknowledges her sway over his heart. More to the point, their love story unfolds in the decadent court of Coramentien, bound by customs that privilege male sexual authority. Thus Oroonko’s hundred-plus-year-old grandfather, the king, identifies the “maid” Imoinda as the perfect woman to serve his own sexual desires in the “sort of seraglio” he maintains (21). The king is obsessed with Imoinda’s physical virginity, as is Oronooko, and equally obsessed with being the sole possessor of this “treasure” (21). Imoinda is valued as property belonging to men and despite the ways Behn’s imagery makes her Oroonoko’s equal, she—unlike him—has no real control over her body. She is forced to grant the old king unspecified sexual favors and all of the conflict that erupts at court is over the question of which man has the right to own her. As Brown puts it, “the desirable woman serves invariably as the motive and ultimate prize for male adventures” (334).

The critic Charlotte Sussman is even more pointed: “Imoinda is a possession even before she is a slave,” Sussman writes, and her “exile in Surinam […] is not so much a transition from freedom to slavery as a transition from one code of property relations to another” (247). At issue here is the “transition” itself. It contrasts with Oroonko’s transition into captivity: where he is tricked by  a slave trader and is in that way complicit in his own domination, Imoinda is passively sold by the king. She has no choice about the fate of her body—a state that persists in the New World. Here her owner, Trefry, is tempted to rape her and her pregnancy prompts Oroonoko (now Caesar) to revolt against European colonial rule because her child (which he regards as his) will belong to her owners, not to her. Hence, though Imoinda and Oroonoko are equally matched in many ways—Venus to Mars, elite courtier to elite courtier—Behn reminds us again and again that Imoinda’s body has never belonged to her. While most of our attention is drawn to the domination of one religious and ethnic group by another, Behn also suggest that, the world over, one gender is programmatically dominated by the other.

Most feminist criticism, like that of Brown and Sussman, focuses on the ways Imoinda is depicted as a “possession” rather than a person. Clemene, the name she is given in the so-called New World, seems to claim her as the property of those who rename her, and when Oroonoko slits her throat not long before his own death, he not only characterizes her as “the price” he has paid for his own “glory,” but buries her only up to the neck so that “only her face he left yet bare to look on,” as if to claim her as an art object that belongs to him (72). At the same time, however, we are told that once Oroonoko had done so, ”he had not power to stir from the sight of this dear object” and we also learn that she herself wanted to die: “He found the heroic wife faster pleading for death than he was to propose it” (71). It is also Imoinda who urges Oroonoko to revolt. Once she “began to show she was with child, [she] did nothing but sigh and weep for the captivity of her lord, herself, and the infant yet unborn” (61). And during the rebellion itself, Imoinda fights heroically beside her husband on a continent whose major river, the Amazon, is named after the legendary women warriors of the Greco-Roman past: “Imoinda who, grown big as she was, did nevertheless press near her lord, having a bow and quiver full of poisoned arrows, which she managed with such dexterity that she wounded several and shot the governor in the shoulder” (65). (Tellingly, it is another woman—“an Indian woman, his mistress”—who has the power to heal the governor by sucking the venom from his wound.)

Behn’s Imoinda can thus express her power and heroism only in limited, oblique ways. She is constrained by the realities of cultures that privilege men whether they are in Surinam or in Coramantien, or indeed in England, where Behn’s implied (female) reader resides. But, as Sussman observes, within these constraints, Imoinda finds ways to “take [her] biology into [her] own hands” (253), paradoxically controlling her own physical life by giving power over it away to her husband. Oroonoko’s spectacular brutalization commands most of our attention, but Behn wants us to see Imoinda’s as well. Unlike his, hers happens in the day-to-day and as a matter of course. When Behn celebrates her great beauty—the beauty that marks her as Oroonoko’s romantic equal—she thus also makes us see Imoinda’s pain, her scars. Praising Imoinda’s “modesty and her extraordinary prettiness,” Behn’s narrator also notices that she is “carved in fine flowers and birds all over her body” (48). Imoinda’s body registers an indigenous African body art not constrained by the European standards that Behn asserts elsewhere: “I had forgot to tell you,” says Behn’s narrator,

that those who are nobly born of that country are so delicately cut and ra[z]ed all over the fore part of the trunk of their bodies that it looks as if it were Japanned, […] the works being raised like high points round the edges of the flowers. Some are only carved with a little flower or bird at the sides of the temples, as was Caesar; and those who are so carved over the body resemble our ancient Picts that are figured in the chronicles, but these carvings are more delicate. (48)

Why did the narrator almost “forg[e]t to tell” us about Imoinda’s beautiful scars? Why is she telling us about them now? Perhaps because they have always been there, taken for granted in something of the way that the earth itself—evoked in Imoinda’s “flowers and birds,” the tree-like “trunk” of her body—is taken for granted, and wounded so “you” can live. The word “world” appears again and again in a novella whose action covers a good part of the globe. Imoinda’s body here is a world. Not just a natural world but a world of nations: it is “japanned” (seeming lacquered), it recalls the “ancient Picts” of Britain who were also tattooed, it is created through the indigenous arts of Africa, and it brings to mind the vegetation we see in Surinam. Imoinda is the world, Behn seems to say, the world at its best, harmonious and fertile and diverse.

So it is no wonder that “Imoinda” is the last word of Oroonoko. It’s an unusual name that Behn probably made up. But we cannot help but notice the first letter—“I”—that links her to the “I” of the female narrator. And the second syllable, “moi,” is the French word for “me,” tightening that link while reminding us that this is a name that incorporates the beauties of many different languages. The slave name imposed on Imoinda, Clemene, is all but forgotten. But the word “Clemene” recalls the idea of “clemency,” meaning forgiveness and, ultimately, grace. In the brutal world of power that Behn depicts, “the beautiful and the constant Imoinda” leaves open the possibility of grace.

Works Cited

Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko, ed. Janet Todd. Penguin, 2003.

Brown, Laura. “The Romance of Empire; Oroonoko and the Trade in Slaves.” In Oroonoko: An Authoritative Text, ed. Joanna Lipking. Norton, 1997, pp. 232-46.

Sussman, Charlotte. “The Other Problem with Women: Reproduction and Slave Culture in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko.”  In Oroonoko: An Authoritative Text, ed. Joanna Lipking. Norton, 1997,  pp. 246-55.

Jayne Lewis is a professor of English at UC Irvine, a faculty lecturer in the current cycle of Humanities Core, and the director of the Humanities Honors Program at UCI. Her most recent book, Air’s Appearance: Literary Atmosphere in British Fiction, 1660-1794 (Chicago, 2012) looks at how, when and where “atmosphere” emerged as a dimension of literary experience–an emergence which links the history of early fiction with those of natural philosophy and the supernatural. She is also the author of The English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture, 1650-1740 (Cambridge, 1995), Mary Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation (Routledge, 2000), and The Trial of Mary Queen of Scots: A Documentary History (Bedford, 2000). Her present research and much of her ongoing teaching focuses on middle modern generic forms in relation to changing narratives of illness and healing, including a course on the “sick imagination” that explores illness narratives from the Book of Job through 21st-century poetry and graphic fiction.

The Intersection of Race and Gender in Oroonoko

Why might it be valuable for our students to read race and gender together to understand the power structure of empire in Aphra Behn’s novel – not only in the plight of handsome prince Oroonoko and his beautiful Imoinda as individuals, but also for the economic and social structure of the slave trade? What could students learn about reading both categories together, rather than just for one? The instability of the woman narrator’s voice in her description of a slave market in the triangle trade is a useful place for students to begin understanding this intersection:

Those then whom we make use of to work in our plantations of sugar are Negroes, black slaves altogether […]. Those who want slaves make a bargain with a master or a captain of a ship, and contract to pay for them when they shall be delivered on such a plantation. So that when there arrives a ship laden with slaves, they who have so contracted go aboard and receive their number by lot; and perhaps in one lot that may be for ten, there may happen to be three or four men, the rest women and children; or be there more or less of either sex, you are obliged to be content with your lot. (12-13)

Edward Francis Finden, Slave market in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (1824)

In lecture Prof. Jayne Lewis spoke about keywords that locate the narrator among white slaveowners and buyers by starting off in the first person: “we make use of” the Africans for the sugar plantations on which she was a guest. She establishes some distance from “those who want slaves” as employers, though her visit benefits from slaves’ “work”. “They” as buyers “bargain,” “contract,” “pay,” terms that continue to identify them in the third person: here, slave buyers are white. They are also most likely male, as illlustrations indicate, and ownership makes probable. The recently licensed commerce to use Africans for profit seems almost fair: in this marketplace, buyers do not know who will be in any “lot” they have contracted for: perhaps “three or four men,” with as an afterthought “the rest women and children”? (For immediate profit in the sugar fields, the men are singled out.) But this poses a moral problem that the narrator cannot solve in first and third person narrative: in the key moment: “you are obliged to be content with your lot.” The decision may be a choice of the captain or master, but the word “lot” suggests it is something you accept as some sort of economic if not social contract. But who or where are “you”? You are a buyer – context makes it clear that you are not a slave, because slaves have no ability to contract and therefore no obligation in this situation. The slave market is a scene of identity shock. Tamara Beauchamp suggested to me that the ordinarily feminized reader of the romance, the ‘you’ in the passage, may be in an identificatory relationship with the slaves, but I don’t read the “you” that way. However, I would agree that there is irony floating around here: as a woman, the narrator is obliged to be “content with her lot” in some ways: she cannot rescue the lovers, much as she sympathizes with them. But neither can she articulate the relationship of her realistic scene to her romantic tale of the lovers. Perhaps this break is signaled by the sudden move to “Coromantien,” the first word of the next paragraph, where the narrator reclaims her authority.

Frontispiece to Irish edition of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equino (Dublin, 1791)

Among secondary sources for research on the intersection of race and gender, I would recommend Laura Brown, in her Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature (Cornell, 1993). Brown does not use this passage, but she takes Oroonoko as “a theoretical test case for the necessary connection of race and gender.” Brown argues that the “reductive normalizing” of the romantic narrative must be read together with the experiences of the slaves “because they are oriented around the same governing point of reference, the ubiquitous and indispensable figure of the woman.”

For compare and contrast work, I would recommend The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano, Written by Himself; here the slaves are divided into “parcels,” or as he later says “lots,” and the buyers rush to “make choice of the parcel they like best.” But Equiano, an ex-slave, writes from the point of view of the “terrified Africans,” men, women, and children. The question of fairness here is seen from the slaves’ point of view. (I would agree that Equiano’s task is different as a man writing in 1791, but that too would be worth comparing.) Behn’s narrator could perhaps glimpse the possibility of describing the slave market this way, but her use of first-, second-, and third-person pronouns shows that she cannot yet articulate or integrate it into the story.

Works Cited

Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko. Ed. Janet Todd. London: Penguin Books, 2003. Print.

Brown, Laura. Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993. Print.

Equiano, Olaudah. Interesting Narrative and Other Writings. London: Penguin Books, 2004. Print.

Vivian Folkenflik is an emeritus lecturer in the Humanities Core Program, where she taught for over three decades. She is the editor and translator of Anne Gédéon Lafitte, the Marquis de Pelleport’s novel The Bohemians (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) and An Extraordinary Woman: Selected Writings of Germaine de Staël (Columbia University Press, 1992). She is also the author and archivist of our program’s institutional history at UC Irvine. Her thought and teaching have been at the center of many cycles of Humanities Core, and she continues to act as a pedagogical mentor for seminar leaders in our program.

Yesterday and the Dangers of Impulse Democracy

This essay first appeared on Saturday, January 29th on Susan Morse’s Humanities Core website Empires Will Fall, where she blogs alongside the students in her seminars. She has graciously shared this post with the Humanities Core Research Blog.

Andrew Zyglis, “Twitter Tirades.” Originally published in the Buffalo News, November 29, 2016.

Yesterday was January 27th, and for some people it was just another Friday, another step toward a weekend marked perhaps with overestimated potential or targeted for solitary reflection or some other form of leisure. For others, this day signaled the end of an insufferably long presidential premiere filled with a flurry of carefully choreographed executive orders signed by our newly sworn in “intimidater” and chief, or as others in the social media world have donned him, our “reprimander” and chief. For me, yesterday has meaning that moves far beyond the banality of the every day and toward the impulse diplomacy now being practiced with dangerous consistency by our late night “tweeter” and chief, my personal favorite of his nick-names. I guess what I have come to realize is that after just a few days in office, yesterday began the first day of the end of strategic and formal American diplomacy as I have experienced it during my medium young life-time and the potential return to shameful policies best left in the past.

Yesterday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, established by the General Assembly of the United Nations to commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on January 27, 1945. As a holocaust scholar, I have spent years reflecting on the slow but legalized process of removing Jewish members from their rightful place in German society in the years following Hitler’s rise to power. Initially, Jewish citizens were intimidated then compelled to leave their homes to escape the persecution made possible with the September 15, 1935 establishment of the Nuremberg Laws. Recognizing the clear dangers of remaining in Nazi Germany, some families – early on – were able to leave and to begin a new life elsewhere. However, as Hitler passed legislation to freeze Jewish assets and began closing the Reich’s borders to prevent Jewish families from leaving the nation without first paying an Exit Tax, it became next to impossible for these citizens to escape the very real dangers that this newly burgeoning empire presented to them. Only a few prominent or otherwise lucky individuals with outside connections, like Sigmund Freud, were “sponsored” financially by patrons willing to purchase their freedom and to ensure their continued existence.

Although the willing executioners sympathetic to the Nazi cause are remembered as the grand perpetrators of the Holocaust, an unforgivable and unfathomable act of human evil in the 20th Century, the list of other complicit nations is long and should not be forgotten. Our very own United States government under Franklin Delano Roosevelt played its own shameful part.

John Knott’s cartoon “Please, Ring the Bell for Us,” July 1939.

In February 1939, months before the cartoon to the right fully expressed the general unwillingness of the United States government to intervene in Hitler’s anti-Semitic agenda, two public servants called for responsible action. NY D-Senator Robert Wagner and MA R-Representative Edith Rogers offered for consideration a bi-partisan piece of legislation that would grant safe passage and sponsored refuge to 20,000 Jewish children under the age of 14. This call to action corresponded with some other national efforts at the time to save Jewish children and families from Nazi occupied Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. The most well-known of these efforts, England’s Kindertransport, saved close to 10,000 Jewish children in a nine month period between 1938 and 1939. Meanwhile in the United States, the Wagner-Roger’s Bill shamefully did not even pass through committee for a vote opportunity, with opponent arguments ranging from the claim that the nation couldn’t allow 20,000 individuals beyond the then immigration quota to the fear that these children would one-day grow up to take American jobs from other citizens; either way, these are inexcusably flimsy arguments against a clear-cut moral imperative.

During that same year, another event – the tragic journey of the MS St. Louis – further informs this history and day of remembrance. In June, 1939, 900  Jewish mothers, children and other family members were on their way to Cuba to join their husbands, fathers, and brothers, who had gone before them to establish a foundation for a new beginning. After spending several days off the coast of Cuba, at a distance so close that families could hear and see one another, the ship was turned away where it headed to the coast of Florida to make a final plea for refuge.  It was not long before the MS St. Louis was also refused entry by President Roosevelt and was forced to make what must have been an unbearable return journey. As disheartening as it is to know that nearly one third of these people were captured and murdered by the Nazis, it is also unsettling to discover Hitler made an example of this failed refugee journey in a major propaganda campaign that highlighted the idea that these Jews were so undesirable, that no nation would accept them. [Editor’s note: In the past few days, an activist Twitter called St. Louis Manifest has been using images of Jewish refugees turned away at US borders to make a poignant commentary on Trump’s immigration ban.]

Our nation did not accept those war refugees in 1939, and it was shameful.  Following the end of WWII, the United States revisited its policies, establishing the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) of 1952, which “removed all racial barriers to immigration and naturalization and granted the same preference to husbands as it did to wives of American citizens.” Further reforms were put in place in 1965 and again in the 1970s, making this a nation that welcomed war refugees.  I’m sure many of us have family members who came to this country as a result of political tyranny or due to war. In my case, the two surviving members of my Armenian family put down their roots in America after escaping the village of Parchang in Turkey in the early 1900s.

Why have I gone to such lengths to revisit this history?  It is precisely because yesterday,  President Trump dishonored these traditions as well as International Holocaust Remembrance Day when he made an announcement that he had signed yet another executive order.  This is one which steps United States policy back to 1939 and brings us full circle to the beginning of my blog when I first drew attention to the dangerous implications of Trump’s Impulse Diplomacy.  Here are just a couple examples from this, Trump’s first week in office:

On January 23rd, while standing in front of the CIA memorial wall, honoring the sacrifice of American field agents, who died in service of our nation, Trump first uttered the phrase that has since become his most recent mantra regarding the Iraq War that, “if we kept the oil you probably wouldn’t have ISIS because that’s where they made their money in the first place. So we should have kept the oil. But okay. Maybe you’ll have another chance. But the fact is, should have kept the oil.” This not only has dangerous implications for the men and women in the military currently assisting Iraqi troops in their campaigns against ISIS, but it also blows up US-Middle Eastern relations.  Also, didn’t he say during his campaign that ISIS was Obama’s fault?

On January 24th, following publication of climate science data, images from the poorly attended inauguration, and other factual evidence that doesn’t meet with the president’s approval, Trump responded by ordering a Media Blackout on multiple government agencies. This ban required that targeted agency Twitter accounts (e.g., EPA, USDA, Department of Interior, National Parks) be closed and that all public announcements and data receive government approval prior to publication. [Editor’s note: Here is an NPR round-up on the many rogue Federal Twitter accounts that have sprung up in the past week as protest.]

On January 25th, Trump signed an executive order to take “steps to immediately plan, design, and construct a physical wall along the southern border,” in order to “achieve complete operational control of the southern border.” Trumps repeatedly promised during his campaign and more recently via his “diplomatic” Twitter feed that Mexico would pay for it. Later that night, during his first Presidential interview with ABC News reporter David Muir, he was reminded that the Mexican President had unequivocally stated that Mexico would not pay for a wall, to which Trump’s response was: “He has to say that. He has to say that.  But I’m just telling you there will be a payment. It will be in a form, perhaps a complicated form. And you have to understand what I’m doing is good for the United States. It’s also going to be good for Mexico.”

On January 26th, following Trump’s Twitter taunts, his “Wall” executive order, and his ABC News interview, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto canceled his scheduled, traditional “meet and greet” visit to the White House. Trump succeeded in blowing up US-Mexican relations, but he still plans on building the wall, which will most certainly place the burden of payment on U.S. taxpayers.

And yesterday, on January 27th, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Trump announced the executive order, which takes our country back in time to its 1939 era policies.  This is a “Muslim Ban,” designed to protect the nation from “Islamic Terrorism.” It prevents citizens belonging to seven Muslim nations from entering the United States for at least 90 days until serious vetting can be completed. The nations targeted are: Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. The order also indefinitely suspends the admission of Muslim refugees from Syria (but it will allow for Christian refugees from Syria).

Just to be clear here – Trump was elected as the Republican candidate, and he has a Republican Congress. Ultimately, the flurry of executive orders that he has signed throughout his first week in office definitively illustrates that his impulsive govern-by-the-gut practice is not limited to his foreign diplomacy. Regarding the “Muslim Ban,” Trump has repeatedly stated that preventing acts of violence against American citizens from “Islamic Terror” is one of his highest priorities.  So let’s take a minute to process. The 9-11 attacks were perpetrated by citizens from Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, and Egypt, all countries not included on the executive order. Other attacks or attempted attacks on US soil going back to 9-11 include the shoe bomber (from England), the underwear bomber (from Nigeria), the San Bernadino shooters (he is from America, she is from Pakistan), the Fort Hood attacker (from the United States), the Boston Bombers (from Kyrgyzstan), and the Orlando Night-Club attacker (from the United States). Okay, none of these individuals are from the nations included on the “Muslim Ban,” either, so what’s the point? Optics for his supporters while safe-guarding his Big Oil Agenda? I’d say Big Oil Empire building gets a big Yep!

The good news, if there is some to glean from this muck of a new administration, is that some of these executive orders won’t necessarily lead to the desired end, beyond having offered the president his photo op, because they require Congressional approval for minor things like the allocation of funding and resources (e.g., building the “Wall,” moving forward with the pipeline projects – #standwithstandingrock). The executive order calling for a complete investigation into voter fraud in the 2016 election goes beyond the authority of the President, because only the Department of Justice or the FBI have authority to make this call and only after they have established evidentiary justification for such an investigation – meaning that it is founded on the basis of having real facts in hand rather than on the basis of Trumpian alternative facts. With respect to the most recent executive order, the “Muslim Ban,” which impacts visitors, refugees and green card holders, it is possible that this is an illegal action altogether.

Photograph taken at the Women’s March on Washington, D.C., January 21, 2016.

Regarding the image above, “Japanese Americans against Muslim Registry”-  Right. Ya, the U.S. did that too during WWII – I have made a couple of personal resolutions. One, I will voice my dissent often and loudly so long as is necessary. And Two, if Trump eventually signs a “Muslim Registry” executive order – which he may be waiting to do until February 19th to align himself with President Roosevelt, who signed Executive Order 9066 to intern 100,000 Japanese-Americans in their own home country – then I have decided that I am Muslim. I will sign the registry myself, and I will encourage all non-Muslims to join me in line. Weirdly, he seems obsessed by size, especially by crowd size…

Susan Morse is a continuing lecturer in the Humanities Core Program at UC Irvine, where she has enjoyed teaching for many years. She received her PhD in German Studies from the UCI Department of European Languages & Studies in 2006. She also studied Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Psychology and English at the Universities of Montana and Arizona, which is another reason why she loves teaching in the Humanities. Her research focuses on Holocaust memory and the limits of representation in the Holocaust. In addition to leading seminars in Core, she also enjoys teaching a Romantic Fairy Tales course for the Department of European Languages & Studies and Comparative Literature.