Midterm Study Guide -- Spring 2008 -- part 3 (novels!)

  The picture above is from a NYC production of Oroonoko, Nigerian author Biyi Bandele's 1999 adaptation of Behn's novel.  I hope that this play comes to the DC area!  Until then, here is a link to the site for the NYC production:

http://www.tfana.org/oroonoko.html

John Beer reviewed the play for the Village Voice.  The review also has a picture from the production:

http://www.villagevoice.com/theater/0808,302441,302441,11.html

Now back to the study guide.

The novel is a fictional prose narrative (50,000 words or more) with a protagonist whom we root for.  His/her story takes place in a believable social setting, and his/her character changes in response to the events of the story.  Authors from many different literatures have written novels.  One novel from Ancient Rome was Apuleius' The Golden Ass, which literary scholar Erich Auerbach discusses in Mimesis.  In the 11th century, Japanese author Murasaki Shikibu wrote The Tale of Genji, a novel that has intrigued many 20th century Western readers, including Kenneth Rexroth and V.S. Pritchett.  Later in the semester we will read selections from The Story of the Stone, an 18th century novel from China.  In The Rise of the Novel (1957), Ian Watt argues that the first (British) novels were written in the mid-1700s.  Works that came before that time (such as Aphra Behn's Oroonoko) were prose fictions.

For the study guide, I am going to go in chronological order, starting with Oroonoko.

Aphra Behn, one of the first professional women authors in England, published Oroonoko in 1688, towards the end of her life.  Before then, she had been a spy for Charles II and written very successful plays as well as poetry and novels.  Could Oroonoko have been based on events and people in her life?  We don't know for sure. 

In Oroonoko, the first-person narrator tells the story of her relationship with Oroonoko, an African prince who was captured into slavery and taken to Surinam, then a British colony.  In Africa, Oroonoko had been the heir of an old, corrupt king and the hero of his nature because of his valor.  Then he falls for Imoinda, the daughter of one of his generals.  Then Oroonoko's grandfather decides that he wants to marry Imoinda even though he cannot consumnate the marriage.  Thanks to his friend's trickery, Oroonoko, though, is able to visit his Imoinda, but they are found out, and she is sold into slavery.  Oroonoko gets back into his grandfather's good graces, but he is eventually captured by European slavers.  He and Imoinda are reunited in Surinam where he has been renamed Caesar and she Clemene and the English offer him vague promises of freedom.  The couple are able to resume their relationship, and he travels with the narrator to an Indian village.  However, when Imoinda becomes pregnant, Oroonoko realizes that he does not want his child to be a slave, so he incites a slave revolt.  After this revolt is quelled, Oroonoko kills his wife and their unborn child.  He is then executed by the English.

Oroonoko was popular during its time, and in 1695, Thomas Southerne wrote a play based on the novel.  However, after her death, Aphra Behn became less and less popular, and her reputation became risque.  With the rise of feminism, her reputation has risen again.

In the study guide on film, I discuss Jane Eyre (a controversial novel in its day, 1847).  The title of Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic comes from Jane Eyre as Mr. Rochester secretly keeps his mentally ill first wife in the attic of his mansion.  See this site for a 2006 adaptation of Jane Eyre:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/drama/janeeyre/

Of course, the British were not the only ones who wrote novels.  (See earlier blog entry on this topic.)

Now we move to the cusp of the 19th and 20th century, to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1898; 1902).  Is it a 19th century novel?  Like many a 19th century novel, it was first serialized in a magazine.  The novel's two narrators (an unnamed man and Marlow--this novel is a frame story) are very much part of the imperialist project.  Is it a 20th century novel?  Despite Marlow's pride in being British, his narrative criticizes the imperialist project and depicts the disintegration of Europeans' characters.  At times, Marlow shows that he has greater respect for the native Africans.  However, Conrad's Congo is not quite the actual Congo (a Belgian colony that is now the Democratic Republic of Congo and that was essentially ravaged by the Belgians).  Conrad's notes from his time there reveal that there were missionaries, including some women, in this area.  Heart of Darkness sets up an opposition between men and women, with men as hard-heartedly practical and women as impossibly idealistic.  Marlow gets his position with the Company through his aunt and, at the end of the novel, returns the rest of Kurtz' papers to his fiancee.  She idealized Kurtz, and Marlow tells her that her late fiance's last words were "her name."  (They were "the horror, the horror.")

Joseph Conrad's novels puzzled their contemporary readers: were they adventure stories?  were they "something more"?  (Conrad was not a native Englishman; he was born in territory occupied by the Russian Empire, and his Polish parents' activism probably cost them their lives.  English was Conrad's third or fourth language, and he worked for a time in the French and British merchant marines or navy.)  In time, especially after WWI, Conrad's reputation rose as his work became more meaningful to readers.

Finally, we move to the 20th century and the post-colonial era with Mariama Ba's So Long a Letter (1980; transl. 1981).  Since Ms. Ba lived in Senegal, her novel was originally written in French, and with it, we truly turn to world literature.

So Long a Letter is written in the form of a diary, addressed to the narrator (Ramatoulaye)'s beloved friend Aissatou who now lives abroad and works as a translator.  Ramatoulaye is writing after the sudden death of her husband, Modou Fall, a trade unionist.  The novel details both the Islamic funeral ceremonies for Modou and Ramatoulaye's reflections on her life.  A college graduate and teacher, she is a modern woman, and her marriage was a love match.  However, a few years earlier, Modou had taken a second wife, Binetou, a poor young woman with an ambitious mother.  Binetou had been a school friend of Modou and Ramatoulaye's oldest child, the out-spoken Daba.  Similarly, Aissatou's marriage to Dr. Mawdo Ba was a love match, but disapproving of her son's marriage to a woman from a lower social class, Mawdo's mother convinced him to marry a girl whom she had raised.  (This girl later became a midwife whereas both Ramatoulaye and Aissatou were trained as teachers.)  On her husband's taking another wife, Aissatou left Senegal with her sons.  Ironically, two men propose to Ramatoulaye.  The first is her brother-in-law, a feckless man.  The second is the man whom her mother had wanted her to marry years ago.  Both men already have wives.  Polygamy is legal in Senegal.

In fact, here is a link to a Peace Corps member's blog on this very topic from January 2008:

http://caitlininsenegal.blogspot.com/2008/01/polygamy.html

At the end of the novel, Ramatoulaye has finished her 40-day period of mourning and is dealing with her daughter Aissatou's pregnancy.  (It looks like her boyfriend Ibrahim will marry her after they both finish school.)  Ramatoulaye is also awaiting her friend's visit.