A Semiotic Reading of the Proto-Feminist Narrator's Gaze in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, Or The Royal Slave: Reimagining Imoinda and Oroonoko

Creative Commons License

Karabulut T.

15th International IDEA Conference: Studies in English, Hatay, Türkiye, 11 - 13 Mayıs 2022, ss.150, (Özet Bildiri)

  • Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Özet Bildiri
  • Basıldığı Şehir: Hatay
  • Basıldığı Ülke: Türkiye
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.150
  • Açık Arşiv Koleksiyonu: AVESİS Açık Erişim Koleksiyonu
  • Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

Aphra Behn (1640-1689), the English fiction writer, playwright and poet, is known both as the pioneer of feminism and the first professional writer of her gender to make her living as a writer in the English language. As an idiosyncratic feminist writer and the founder of the English novel, Behn was far ahead of her time; she crafted untraditional narrative techniques and challenged misogynistic narratives, which objectify and devalue women in the society. Apart from the themes of European colonialism and abolitionism, she also touched upon delicate issues such as human body, female sexuality, male impotency and gender rolesin her works in the male-dominated social, literary and cultural milieu of the Restoration era. Her unique works were hailed by her successor, Virginia Woolf stating that “all women together let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn . . . , for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds (1929, 65). Behn’s Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave (1688), is a breakthrough novella in which the unnamed proto-feminist narrator constructs unconventional personas; she introduces English readers with the first coloured female protagonist, Imoinda, whom she depicts as the “the beautiful black Venus” and a coloured male protagonist, Prince Oroonoko, whom she depicts as the “young Mars.” Functioning as the subject carrying the female gaze, the narrator reverses the gender roles by masculinizing Imoinda and feminizingthe black Prince. This paper, by decoding the visual and allegorical representations related to these characters, such as biblical and mythological signs and the Europeanized names and with reference to the theories of Irigaray, Mulvey and Berger, will semiotically investigatehow the female gaze of the fictional narrator rearticulates the gender indeterminacies and subverts the traditional femininity and masculinity.