“The Imperfect Enjoyment” and Aphra Be

Home , George Etherege

THE MASTER AND THE MACHINE: APPLYING THE PERCEPTION OF MIND

AND BODY TO ROCHESTER’S “THE IMPERFECT ENJOYMENT” AND APHRA

BEHN’S “THE DISAPPOINTMENT” AND OROONOKO

Thesis

Submitted to

The College of Arts and Sciences of the

UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

The Degree of

Master of Arts in English

Lynn Marie Roesch

UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON

Dayton, Ohio

May 2017

THE MASTER AND THE MACHINE: APPLYING THE PERCEPTION OF MIND

AND BODY TO ROCHESTER’S “THE IMPERFECT ENJOYMENT” AND APHRA

BEHN’S “THE DISAPPOINTMENT” AND OROONOKO

Name: Roesch, Lynn Marie

APPROVED BY:

______Elizabeth A. Mackay, Ph.D. Thesis Advisor Assistant Professor of English at The University of Dayton

______Rebecca C. Potter, Ph.D. Faculty Reader Associate Professor of English at The University of Dayton

______Cynthia D. Richards, Ph.D. Faculty Reader Professor of English at Wittenberg University

Lynn Marie Roesch

2017

iii

ABSTRACT

THE MASTER AND THE MACHINE: APPLYING THE PERCEPTION OF MIND

AND BODY TO ROCHESTER’S “THE IMPERFECT ENJOYMENT” AND APHRA

BEHN’S “THE DISAPPOINTMENT” AND OROONOKO

Name: Roesch, Lynn Marie University of Dayton

Advisor: Dr. Elizabeth Ann Mackay

When applying the relationship between the mind and the body to the literature of

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester and Aphra Behn, a relationship forms between a master and a machine. In this case, the master is the mind, and the machine is the body. I argue that using this application with Rochester’s “The Imperfect Enjoyment,” and Behn’s

“The Disappointment” and Oroonoko, relationships between the self and others become more difficult and complex. When connecting the theory of the mind/body split to

Rochester, the outer relationship between the mind and body is displayed. However, when moving on to Behn’s writings, she corrects the Imperfect Enjoyment genre by turning the relationship inward. In this paper, I also argue that a new reading of the novel

Oroonoko should be one which places it within the Imperfect Enjoyment genre. In this novel, Oronooko displays scenes of Imperfect Enjoyment within himself in not being able to kill himself and in his response to his slave master torturing him.

Dedicated to my husband, Moose, who gave me the opportunity to follow my dream.

Without his amazing ability to keep everyone together during these two years of insanity,

this accomplishment would not be possible. Thank you also to my children, Jack and

Allison, for dealing with my long hours both at school and at home. I am very blessed

and grateful to each of them.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My special thanks to Dr. Elizabeth Mackay, my advisor, for providing me with the tools to create a piece of work that I am truly proud of. Thank you for all of the time and effort you put in to giving me amazing feedback and support. I could not have done this without you.

I would also like to thank Dr. Cynthia Richards for inspiring me to take on this topic and make it my own. You are an amazing instructor, and I am forever in your debt for providing a learning experience that pushed me to a place I did not realize was possible.

Special thanks also go to Dr. Rebecca Potter for agreeing to be one of my reading advisors for this thesis. Thank you for all of your time.

Huge thanks go to my TA Advisor, Dr. Bryan Bardine, whose continued encouragement over the past two years has been unmatched. Thank you for allowing me to come to your office to laugh and to cry. You have been an amazing mentor. I’m sure you will miss Amanda and me just standing in your door, waiting for you to look up and invite us in. I know that I will.

Finally, I want to thank my TA buddy, Amanda Reed, for being a true friend and confidant these past two years. I will miss being able to yell across the hall to find out an answer to something or to make you laugh. Good luck to you in your next journey.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………...….………...iv

DEDICATION…………………………………………………………………...…...…...v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………………...….vi

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION……………………………………………...... ….1

CHAPTER II MEDICINE AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE SEVENTEENTH-AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES ……………….……….……..………….5

CHAPTER III HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF IMPERFECT ENJOYMENT GENRE……….…………………………………………………..….….9

CHAPTER IV ROCHESTER’S “THE IMPERFECT ENJOYMENT………….….….11

CHAPTER V BEHN IMITATES ROCHESTER…………………………….………15

CHAPTER VI OROONOKO AS MASTER, MACHINE, AND SLAVE………….....20

CHAPTER VII CONCLUSION………………………………………………….…….32

WORKS CITED...... …....35

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CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

The Restoration period caused much turmoil and chaos spiritually, politically, and philosophically. Aristotle and John Locke’s views of how the inner workings of the human body were being challenged and corrected by philosophers like Thomas Hobbes and Rene Descartes.1 The body spirits that were once thought to help make the body work and the biles that cause illnesses could be explained by science. Rather than seeing the body as a whole entity, it began being seen as a body with a mind, a mind that could think and choose. Even though the body began to be altered by philosophy and science, philosophers maintained that the soul still exists.

Politically, kings were being ousted, wars were ongoing, and the writers of the time were caught up in all of it. An openness to discussing the body and the pleasure it could bring began with the libertine thinking and appeared in the poems during this time.

A revival in Lucretian poetry arrived when Thomas Creech translated into English Titus

Lucretius Carus’ poem “On the Nature of Things.”2 From there, more translations by

Lucy Hutchinson, John Evelyn, and John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester occurred and began to be interpreted and translated into a new genre called the “Imperfect Enjoyment”

1 Thomas Hobbes. Levianthan. Ed. J.C.A. Gaskin (1651: New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Rene Descartes is the father of modern philosophy.

2 Thomas Creech translated Lucretius into verse in 1682. Titus Lucretius Carus was a Roman poet and philosopher.

genre.3 The group contained few authors but all were connected by their interpretations and responses to each other’s work. John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester remained the biggest poet in the genre. He created the “Imperfect Enjoyment” poems whose male speaker searches for sex but in the end fails to perform. The performance malfunction exhibited the body being used as a machine, capable of breaking down for many reasons.

Although the mind was at play, it was unable to keep the machine functioning. While using Rochester’s “The Imperfect Enjoyment” poem as a tool, I apply the philosophy of the mind and body working together to create movement and expression. In stating that the body is a machine and the mind its master, the poem becomes an example of the mind and body dichotomy and questions who really is in control.

As the genre moves throughout time, the poems become more complex to relate to the chaos of the outside world. Aphra Behn takes the poems at this point and adds more speakers, allowing for choices and unfulfilled desires from both sexes. In Behn’s poem, “The Disappointment,” we see the woman take the role of the mind, the master, as she plays with the body, or machine, of the male speaker. As seen in Rochester’s poem, both personas remain unsatisfied. An extension of the Imperfect Enjoyment genre’s complexity is also seen in the relationship between two bodies rather than one, setting up the question of who gets to be the master and who remains the machine. While in “The

Disappointment,” Behn extends the boundaries of “Imperfect Enjoyment” poetry and also applies it to scenes in her novel, Oroonoko, where the character Oroonoko has his own mind and body as well as a real slave master. Although other critics have ignored

Oroonoko as an Imperfect Enjoyment genre text, I argue that using the lens of the mind

3 Lucy Hutchinson was the first person to translate De rerum natura by Lucretius into English. John Evelyn was a seventeenth century writer and diarist. 2 and body dichotomy to read the novel adds an element of depth to the already complex text. This paper will apply the philosophy of the mind controlling the body to the literature of the times. Scholars such as Amelia Precup and Hannah Lavery have connected the “Imperfect Enjoyment” poems to the historical actions of England under

King Charles II; however none directly use the medicine of the eighteenth-century to do the same thing.

Ultimately, the philosophical mind/body split not only applies to the inner human being but also to the perception of the outer sense of body as seen in literature such as

Rochester’s poem “The Imperfect Enjoyment,” Behn’s poem “The Disappointment,” and her novel Oroonoko. These texts not only can be read as reflecting the more libertine attitudes of the times but as a movement in philosophy, changing the mind/body thought into the master/machine hierarchy. In rereading Rochester’s poem “The Imperfect

Enjoyment” with the master/machine understanding, the movements of the characters become more purposeful and the action between the personas engages in a whole new process of thinking. The reader can not only enjoy the poem at face value but also understand the underlying workings of the body as the personas try to please each other.

In Behn’s poem “The Disappointment,” the master and machine insight engages two personas rather than Rochester’s one, extending the Imperfect Enjoyment texts to more intricacy. Reading these poems through this lens causes sex to be more than just an action; sex becomes a complex process of the mind and body working together to get all of the parts to engage at once. Finally, Behn expands the genre to her novel Oroonoko, containing not only scenes of imperfect enjoyment but the addition of another master-the human slave master. “Imperfect Enjoyment” texts are reflecting and addressing the

3 relationship and anxieties between the mind and the body in literature, just as anxieties of the relationship between the mind and body are occurring in the area of philosophy.

CHAPTER II

MEDICINE AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE SEVENTEENTH-AND

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURIES

Medicine has changed over the years and has influenced the way people think about everything from how they feel to how they relate to the world around them. In the

Middle Ages, doctors and philosophers were able to perform autopsies, allowing them to see inside the body and learn how the circulatory system worked. These new discoveries led to new understandings which earlier were not thought possible. During this time, humoral theory was accepted as medical truth. This theory, “recorded in the Hippocratic corpus,” states that in order for the body to perform well, the four bodily fluids (called humours) of phlegm, bile, blood, and black bile must be in complete balance. These four humours related to many aspects and beliefs of the times, for example, “the four primary qualities . . . the four seasons . . . the four ages of man . . . the four elements . . . and the four temperaments” (Porter 47). The explanation of how the limbs moved and how emotions were felt rested on the powers of the ‘animal spirits’ who traveled between “the mind and the vitals” (Porter 47). In keeping with Aristotle’s teaching, souls were functioning as the givers of nutrition, reason, memory, and will. In Claudius Galen’s philosophy of medicine, he expands on the spirits and elaborates on them, labeling them

5 as either generic or specific.4 This philosophical thinking continued until the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries where we finally see a new transcendent perspective emerge.

The eighteenth-century philosophical shift creates a division of thought concerning the body and how it works. In conflict with Aristotle and John Locke’s views of the person as a whole entity with a “spirit,” William Harvey’s circulatory system research opens the door to “Mechanical Philosophers” who had a new way of thinking about and viewing the body.5 This discovery of how the blood flows through the body by way of the heart allows philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and Rene Descartes to begin to rethink how the body works. These philosophers, along with others, describe

“the body as a piece of machinery” (Porter 50-51). With the movements of the body being compared to pulleys, levers, and wheels, more research in the areas of physics, anatomy, and medicine leads philosophers to refer to the body as a “machine of the flesh”

(Porter 51).

In “Medicine and the Body,” an article discussing medical thought in the eighteenth century, Roy Porter explains a change transpiring in how the body is seen. No longer are people whole “machines” but separate parts working together. Just as a machine must have a master to make it run, so must the body. The master, in this case, emerges as the mind, separating the body into two parts: the mind and the body-master and machine. Rene Descartes states, “I am thinking, therefore I exist” (qtd. in “The

Rational Self” 65). Here, Descartes notes how “the mind [creates] consciousness,”

4 Aelius Galenus or Claudius Galenus was a Greek physician, surgeon and philosopher in the Roman Empire.

5 William Harvey was an English physician and the first to discover how the systemic circulation and properties of blood are pumped to the brain and to the body by the heart.

6 leaving the body to be “divisible” or broken up into parts (Porter 65). The once whole machine or body theory began to be challenged, and these challenges or risks taken by poets of a conservative environment surfaced in the poetry of the day. The silenced authors of the seventeenth century such as John Donne, Ben Johnson, and George

Herbert who were unable to discuss lewd or bawdy topics due to their Puritan upbringing began to vicariously find a voice in the works of authors embracing the new dynamic workings of the body.

“Imperfect Enjoyment” prose spoke for the seventeenth century writers in offering authors the ability to portray the body in a new light. With the new wit of the

King Charles II era in play, topics previously deemed too explicit or sexual in nature were now openly expressed in writing. Richard E. Quaintance was the first to identify poems as “Imperfect Enjoyment” poems, defining them as “a form of dramatic narrative in which an interrupted sexual episode [was] narrated and discussed” (O’Neil 198). He also determined the authors and the placement of these writers in terms of time by linking each author’s writing to the previous author’s. O’Neil writes, this “network of borrowing

. . . links all the English poems . . . which can be used to ascertain the relative order of their composition” (200). Each poet uses or responds to the previous poet’s work to build on their own type of “Imperfect Enjoyment” text. Authors such as John Wilmot, Aphra

Behn, H. Walker, and George Etherege are among the “Imperfect Enjoyment genre.”

Literature is able to pursue topics in which the body (machine) opposes the mind controlling the body (master over the machine). Examples of this new thinking are portrayed particularly in literature by John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester (usually referred to as Rochester) and Aphra Behn. In following sections, I demonstrate ways

Rochester focuses on the weakness of the machine, while Behn demonstrates the mind’s power over the machine.

CHAPTER III

HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF IMPERFECT ENJOYMENT GENRE

A connection between the anxieties of the mind/body literature and the philosophy of the time is a result of the anxieties concurrently going on in the politics.

Even within the kingdom, views of this new mind/body split differ. Walter Charleton, the royal physician for both Charles I and II, wrote Natural History of Passion claiming “the blood ‘ascends to the brain,’ but never descends to the genitals” (Benedict 63).6 This belief reflects the rejection of “scholars to integrate the lower parts of the body with the passions” (66). Adding to the turmoil of the times, King Charles II’s view of life and philosophy began changing according to his actions in the kingdom. Charles II also took over the kingdom from Charles I after he was taken out of power. The war that took

Charles I out of power occurred due to conflicts between Catholics and Protestants. The

Stuart family realized the only way to return to power was to become Protestant (Johnson

17). Young Rochester grew up within this anxious time. As a young boy, Rochester lost his father, Henry Wilmot, in the English Civil War while he aided in King Charles II’s escape. Much like his father Henry, John Wilmot grew up without a father as a result of his service and death in the war. The return rule of King Charles II to the throne of

England in 1660 relaxed the strictness of the earlier Puritan attitude. With Charles’

6 The views of Walter Charleton can be found in Leah Benedict’s “Generic Failures and Imperfect Enjoyments: Rochester and the Anatomy of Impotence.”

9 return, the culture of England changed: “theatres reopened, moral sanctions on behavior were removed, [and] wit and libertinism made way into the restored Court of the Merry

Monarch” (Precup 116). The poet laureate, John Dryden, made sure libertinism was prominent in the Court with plays dealing with political satire, licentiousness and wantonness. The royalist poets promoting the King followed suit by choosing topics which may or may not have been appropriate. Some went straight for the lewd and sexual topics while others used the monarch’s behavior as a way to parody the times. Rochester, who fought in the Anglo-Dutch war, returned to King Charles as his Gentleman of the

Bedchamber. During this time with the King, Rochester is privy to all of the King’s intimate relationships within the confines of his private chamber. His exposure to these sexual encounters as well as other bodily occurrences gave Rochester a constant view into the King’s personal entertainment. Although his time with the King was one of turmoil while being exiled and returned numerous times for his behavior, his time in the

King’s bedchamber allowed for many of the poems’ subjects throughout the Imperfect

Enjoyment genre. As Carole Fabricant describes in her article, “Rochester’s World of

Imperfect Enjoyment,” “all political affairs are ascribed directly to the length and comportment of King Charles’ sexual organ” (338). Clearly Rochester had a vast amount of material to use for his work.

CHAPTER IV

ROCHESTER’S “THE IMPERFECT ENJOYMENT”

In Rochester’s poem, “The Imperfect Enjoyment,” we see seventeenth-century theories of separation of mind and body at work. Rochester’s speaker seems as if he is going to “please” his female with his “machine” (or his penis), but as the speaker soon finds out, his master-mind has other plans. Master and machine are clearly not working together but separately in completing this connection. The subject of the poem, a man, wants to show his love to Corinna but has prematurely spent himself and can no longer fulfill her pleasure. As the speaker begins to tell his tale he claims, “Her nimble tongue

(love’s lesser lightning) played/Within my mouth and to my thoughts conveyed” (ll. 7-8).

These lines use two words which distinguish the body and the mind: “mouth” and

“thoughts.” While the speaker’s body receives his beloved’s “tongue,” a signal is sent to his mind and creates “thoughts.” The master of the machine takes over as sparks ignite to trigger the part of the body that needs to be moved. Sadly for the speaker, the master has conveyed the message too quickly, exhausting the machine of its power. The machine is no longer able to function and the beloved is left unfulfilled.

The pattern of the body being made up of more than one body part seen in the example above is continued throughout the poem by applying the theory of another philosopher that Porter discusses. Porter writes that Thomas Willis, an 18th century philosopher, “distinguished sensory from motor functions” (57), showing that the body is

11 a dual working machine. In his poem, Rochester extends this analogy by using words that are mechanical in function and combining the machine with the mind again. He writes,

“My fluttering soul, sprung with the pointed kiss” (l. 10). The word “sprung” gives the image of a spring or the action of a spring, a mechanical object, but it is combined with the “soul,” the inner workings of the brain.

Another example of Rochester imagining the body as a machine is seen when trying to move the man’s “soul up to her heart” by using the woman’s hand (l. 14). The movement of soul is unable to manage the jump by itself. The movement of her hand is used to help stimulate the body, creating a mechanical tendency. The woman feels she is about to be satisfied, yet as the speaker has already shown us, his mind has decided that her pleasure must wait for another time. The machine is out of order. The mind ordered pleasure, but the body was unable to hold off until it was time. In this case, we can say that all systems were “a go” but resulted in a misfire. In keeping with the genre’s tradition, for Rochester’s speaker, “rarely do inner wants match worldly practice...erotic love [leads] to disappointment” (Kramnick 277); such disappointment is the loss of pleasure for the woman as well as the man.

Just as a machine is triggered by the use of a power button, in “The Imperfect

Enjoyment,” Rochester illustrates how the human body can be triggered as well. No matter what the master has in mind for the lady, the speaker’s control over his body is lost with the announcement that “a touch of any part of her had done’t” (l. 17). The speaker implies that just her touch made a profound effect on him. His machine is down.

Corinna complains as “she cries; ‘all this to love, and rapture’s due-/Must we not pay a debt to pleasure too’?” (l. 23-4). But as much as the speaker wants to oblige his love, his

12 body confirms his impotency. As anger and embarrassment build up inside the speaker,

Rochester writes, “succeeding shame does more success prevent/and rage at last confirms me impotent” (l. 30). The more Corinna asks for his culmination in pleasuring her, the angrier he becomes. Such emotion, emerging within the mind, is yet another example of how his master continues to control his machine. No matter how hard he tries, the condition of the penis causes his attempts to fail.

As Corinna tries to engage his machine again with her hand, the narrator laments,

“applied to my dead cinder [it] warms no more” (l. 33). The hand as a mechanical device attempts to fix the penis to no avail. He is corpse-like, unable to move, cursing his body for letting him down, thinking back to all the times he was “a common fucking post” when his body was all that was needed (l. 63). He has been reduced to nothing but an inanimate object, a machine. Alas, “Thou treacherous, base deserter of my flame,/False to my passion, fatal to my fame” (ll. 46-47), his inability to perform now exposes a problem for his reputation. In keeping with the cold corpse image, Rochester symbolizes his becoming limp as his “flame” deserting him, just as a pilot light goes out in a furnace.

His mind is unable to deliver his passion, leaving the light to die. Never has this failure happened to the speaker, and the breakdown devastates him. His machine has relinquished control to an unknown source, love.

The speaker is like a machine, yet a machine controlled by the master “mind.”

Again like a machine in line 60, the man attempts to command his body by being in

“Love.” This love cannot trigger the man’s body into action as he declares, “thou durst not stand” (l. 61). As much as the man wants to prove his love to his lady, his feelings are not enough. He needs more to make his body function the way he desires. As Kramnick

13 states, “Rochester makes desire our presiding factor, the cause behind our actions” (277).

In this case, the narrator desires Corinna too much. She is not like all the other women he has had. By wanting so much to please her, he ultimately causes his own destruction. He allows his mind to get in the way of finishing his job. Although the man is extremely frustrated, the fact that he ‘thinks’ about loving Corinna is the cause of his malfunction.

Once the mind took control of his emotions for her, the act was no longer just mechanical, automatic; it meant something to him. His thoughts or “human reason could make inferences which far transcended mere-sense perceptions” (Porter 59). The outer senses are no match for the inner mind. His feelings simply got in the way. Because the speaker is in love with Corinna and yearns for this experience to be special, unlike the many other past experiences where he is just a “post,” his mind interrupts the action of sex, affecting his body. Sex ceases to be a process that the machine executes; sex performs a display of true love. One could say the machine was taken off of autopilot due to the mind interfering. The act of thinking disrupts the body’s working and causes a failure in performance. The speaker here wishes his mind had stayed out of it and let the machine do its job, as both personas in the poem remain unsatisfied.

CHAPTER V

BEHN IMITATES ROCHESTER

While Rochester is writing his poetry to fit the times, he is being read and imitated by other writers, including Aphra Behn. Not much is known about Behn’s early years. Some say she was born to Bartholomew Johnson and Elizabeth Denham and later became a spy for Charles II. With records of a Johnson family visiting Surinam, the likelihood of this being her family seems plausible. Speculation also surrounds the name and age of Mr. Behn who married her and soon after died (Jones 312-316). Behn places herself in the community of Imperfect Enjoyment writers by engaging with the same texts as Rochester. She translates passages from the Greek philosopher and poet,

Lucretius’ poem “De rerum natura,” just as Rochester had, and some say, her poem “The

Disappointment” is written in response to Rochester’s “The Imperfect Enjoyment”

(Livingston 191). However, her response in “The Disappointment” applies the genre to two individuals rather than one, making the poem and its application of the master vs. machine more complex. This complexity materializes in the inclusion of more speakers and in the addition of an underlying pastoral theme by setting the poem in a field.

Additionally, Behn challenges male-dominated translations of Jean Benech de Cantanec’s

French poem“L’occasion perdue recouverte” by writing “The Disappointment” about power rather than impotence as her counterparts had (Zeitz and Thoms 503). As Zeitz and Thoms note, her translation of the first third of Cantanec's poem “interrogates the

15 notion of power as a definer of male identity and, in so doing, playfully and wittily questions conventional gender roles and the structures of oppression which they support” in her own poem, “The Disappointment” (501). Behn answers these questions by attributing the master-mind role to the woman and the machine (the body) role to the man. The woman’s display of power can be seen as a game between the mind and the body, where unlike Rochester’s master, she has agency and makes choices to determine the outcome. As the poem is positioned, two speakers, one female and one male, who clearly want the same thing, both seem to be experienced when it comes to sex; however,

Behn’s addition to the Imperfect Enjoyment genre includes the woman’s point of view as well as the man’s. This set-up differs from Rochester’s use of master vs. machine in which one person is the focus rather than both characters “describing a failure of sexual mechanics” (Ballaster 173). For Behn, the extension of the genre comes in the addition of the relationship between bodies.

Behn structures “The Disappointment” into fourteen separate scenes. Each scene or stanza leads to the final result of Imperfect Enjoyment and engages in the separation of the mind/body discussion. The narrative of the poem goes something like this: Lysander and Cloris meet in a field to have sex. Cloris takes charge and begins to excite Lysander.

Both parties desire each other but when Lysander tries to please Cloris, he finds himself impotent, therein creating the Imperfect Enjoyment as Cloris leaves him lying on the moss alone. Behn positions Cloris as the master in the poem. Her mind controls her own movements as well as those of Lysander, who is treated as a machine. In the first stanza,

Lysander “surprised fair Cloris” as if to begin his production of pleasing her (l. 3). This action causes the reader to think that Lysander is in charge until the reading of the last

16 line of the first stanza, “But from Cloris’ brighter eyes was hurled” (l. 10). Her eyes convey a message to her lover: let the mind games begin.

Cloris’ agency continues in the second stanza as she “permits his force,” showing her willingness to engage with Lysander, but “yet gently strove,” suggesting she may retract that permission if she chooses (l. 14). The choice of permitting Lysander to continue or not comes from her mastery of him; instead, as master, Cloris can speed up the machine or slow it down as she wishes. As she uses her body-- in this case, her hands become like parts of a machine--to pull him in, Behn crosses the restraint line by allowing Cloris to want her lover’s advance. “The reversal enacted in the poem, as Cloris, the supposed victim, is endowed with the power of ‘design’ (in the sense of ‘intention’ - of getting what she wants) and Lysander, the supposed pursuer, is unmanned and rendered powerless” (Zeitz and Thoms 503). Cloris receives pleasure from controlling the situation, and as master, clearly understands how to play the game.

Stanza 3 provides the reader with a different view of Cloris as she mockingly asks, Lysander to stop: “‘Cease, cease-your vain desire” (l. 25). Again, she is playing mind games with him and showing her agency, by turning Lysander on and off. In turn,

Lysander sees his own power in surprising Cloris and continues with his pursuit, never realizing that she is truly running the functioning of his body.

This tension between the master and the machine continues in stanzas 4-7, as

Cloris continues to master Lysander by challenging his beliefs of control. In reality, his plan of swiftly “advancing” (l. 44) is all being calculated within Cloris’ mind. She only needs Lysander’s body to follow along with her play. As the poem continues, she tweaks the machine to get the desired results. At the end of stanza 7, Lysander is broken and

“unable to perform” (l. 70). The master has played her game too long, and the machine can no longer function. Even the mechanical movement of self-starting fails to produce enjoyment, and once Cloris realizes the game is over, she leaves the collapsed machine to recover on its own. Only then does Lysander realize that he has been chosen to be used as an inanimate object, “whose soft bewitching influence/had damned him to the hell of impotence” (ll. 79-80).

Yet another twist to Behn’s mind/body discussion in “The Disappointment” brought to life is the introduction of “choice.” By giving Cloris the power of the master role rather than the machine, Behn disrupts earlier versions of “Imperfect Enjoyment” poems where the man is shown “glorifying in his sexual looseness” (Precup 118). By flipping the script (and genders), Behn challenges “the idea of expected sexual roles, undermine[s] the sexual double standard, and empower[s] female sexuality by confronting the traditional passive role of women with active female sexual desire” (118).

This female desire is not focused on as predominantly as the male desire in the Imperfect

Enjoyment genre. Usually, the man is in control of the woman whose feelings are not taken into account. In some cases, the term “slave” could be used to replace “woman” due to her agency being downplayed among writers. For example, in Rochester’s poem

“Upon Nothing,” the ‘nothing’ refers to the woman’s genitalia. For the man, she is seen as ‘nothing’ but a “hungry womb” (l. 21). The woman has a job to do, bare children, just as a slave has a job to do for her master. However, this new relationship of women’s mastery of men, found in “The Disappointment,” plays out again in Behn’s novel

Oroonoko when the title character is controlled by both his male slave master and his own mind, Oroonoko’s second master. The three characters play out the roles of master

18 and machine in a fight to the end to see who truly the one in control is. In order to understand how the novel Oroonoko fits into this discussion, the reader needs to understand the connection that Behn makes with her characters and how the slave trade impacts the novel. As I have stated earlier, the question with the mind/body discussion becomes one of control. When applying this question to Oroonoko, the complexity of the question grows. The early slave acquisition occurring due to war and expansion has changed from conquest to slave labor. This new hierarchy in the trading of slaves puts

Oroonoko in a position of being used strictly for labor, just like a machine with another human as his master.

CHAPTER VI

OROONOKO AS MASTER, MACHINE, AND SLAVE

Like Rochester, Aphra Behn was also a Royalist who supported the King. Her writing of the poem “The Disappointment” imitates Rochester’s “The Imperfect

Enjoyment” in both content and theme, with some nuances added here and there. In addition to “The Disappointment,” Behn also uses the separation of the body and mind in her novel Oroonoko. As Rochester’s speaker is controlled by his master-mind when attempting to show his love, Oroonoko allows his mind to give him the strength he needs to demonstrate his love and power as a prince, while overcoming the torture of his body.

A meaningful body of scholarship and criticism surrounds Oroonoko, yet I read the novel differently in the context of Imperfect Enjoyment texts. In Adam Beach’s article "Behn's Oroonoko, the Gold Coast, and Slavery in the Early- Modern Atlantic

World," critics such as Laura Rosenthal, Gary Gauter, and Oddvar Holmesland, respectively, choose to focus on slavery, describing the type of enslavement in the novel as “African,” “heroic,” “chivalric and courtly” (Beach 215). These critics argue this form of enslavement is superior to the labor-driven bondage that is so dominant in Surinam. In response to the two types of slavery being seen at the time, “Oroonoko proclaims that being enslaved to those who have ‘Won us in Honourable Battel’ is unobjectionable and positively compares that experience of bondage with being ‘Bought and Sold like Apes,

20 or Monkeys, to be the Sport of Women, Fools and Cowards’” (qtd. in Beach 215).7 Since

Oroonoko is enslaved as part of the dominant force in Surinam, he becomes purely a labor-force; here I draw on and expand Beach’s point arguing that he is a machine controlled by his mind and his slave master. This reading of the situation then makes it possible to resituate the novel into the Imperfect Enjoyment genre. In her novel and in the character of Oroonoko, Behn has expanded the mind/body discussion into not only the mind and body being connected within oneself but within the relationship of two people.

Other critics like Adam Sills explain that reading Behn’s novel through a realistic lens proves too difficult. Sills refers to critic Catherine Gallagher, who reads Behn from a geographical view, providing a “comprehensive picture of the Atlantic world defined by an emergent colonial system of trade and commerce” (Sills 315). This view shows

Oroonoko with a geographic context as well as an historical context. This historical background deals with the slave trade in the seventeenth-and eighteenth-centuries. Slaves are labored machines who work for their masters. Claude Meillassoux states in Beach’s article that “‘slaves, once in the hands of a master, could be assigned to any task, irrespective of their sex or age, and without being granted a status’” (as qtd. in Beach

218). By applying this quote to Oroonoko, the connection Behn makes with her title character and the mind/body theory becomes undeniable. Oroonoko is viewed as a machine.

Still another critic Susan Iwanisziw states, “Oroonoko's final gesture in requesting tobacco . . . aligns New and Old World cultures through a shared taste for tobacco” (79),

7 Emphasis added by Beach

21 but as I will demonstrate, the request for tobacco is a deliberate use of Oroonoko’s mind to show control over his body. This once-prince whose body now encapsulates a slave has become a commodity who can be bought and sold like a machine. As a member of the new world of slavery, Oroonoko is tortured and killed while smoking tobacco. Rather than showing “stoicism” as Iwanisziw claims, I suggest that Oroonoko shows his mastery when he refuses to make a sound as his body is dismantled. His slave master can disassemble him but he cannot control Oroonoko’s reaction to it. Rather than allow a human master to manipulate his emotions and reactions, Oroonoko chooses to take back the control and show no reaction to being tortured.

Leah Benedict claims in her article “Generic Failures and Imperfect Enjoyment:

Rochester and the Anatomy of Impotence” that although

Hobbes was primarily interested in situating the machine-man within a

larger mechanical system of sociality and governance, other philosophical

materialists proposed a more descriptive account of the body’s expression

of the passions, presenting human emotion as an interweaving of breath,

pulse, imagination, and experience. (62)

In contrast, Behn imagines the mind/body split differently than materialists. When this theory is applied to the novel, Oroonoko becomes the mind, and the society in which he is placed becomes the body, where Oroonoko navigates his way through this “larger mechanical system of sociality and governance” (Benedict 62). His struggles begin here with deciding whether to be forced to become an inanimate object, a machine, or to remain the master who controls his own destiny. Behn takes the emotions and experiences of Oroonoko and stages them within his struggle between the mind and body.

She creates more complex scenes by adding more characters and the power of choice, this time to a slave. In contrast to the slave trade during Rochester’s time when slaves were acquired from war and conquest, men and women can now be taken into captivity and sold as a labor-force. Unfortunately, James II’s Royal African Company allows for slaves to become a commodity, causing this addition of cultural anxiety to the complexity in Behn’s writing.

As stated earlier, Behn takes the “Imperfect Enjoyment “ genre a step further by applying its characteristics to not only poems but to a scene from her novel Oroonoko.

The novel also represents a warning to James II of what may happen to him if he returns from exile. Even though she was known for her loyalty to the monarchy, Behn also “used the poetic-portrayal of sexual doings to incorporate commentaries on political and socio- sexual relationships” (Precup 117). Her love and

Stuart loyalism . . . [comes from] her admiration . . . of what she saw as a

new openness and honesty about sexuality and the pleasures of the

aesthetic after the commonwealth years, but also, and more contingently,

is a pragmatic investment in . . . a more ‘secure’ system of government

than republicanism. (Ballaster 172)

The Anglo-Dutch War, which took place about the time of Behn’s writing, provided the

English with the power over the trade routes. When England began to colonize, all ships and colonies were extensions of the King’s rule. In Behn’s novel, once Oroonoko is shipped to a colony, he becomes ruled by these laws. These routes were not only for goods but for human slaves, as Porter demonstrates noting that, “the materiality of the flesh” becoming increasingly important (48). Slaves were seen as commodities as society

23 was becoming more and more commercialized. The complexity of the time, where control of one’s self was being questioned in regards to race, provided Behn with the opportunity to stage the self within the novel as being in control, a master who has a choice when it comes to the machine.

Within the plot of Behn’s Oroonoko, The King’s desire for Imoinda causes her to become a machine to be used at his will. In questioning whether or not to take Imoinda as one of his own, the King knows “what love would not oblige Imoinda to do, duty would compel her” (Behn 84). The word ‘duty’ here established Imoinda as a laborer with no choice. By demoting Imoinda to that of a machine, the King demonstrates how:

the social and moral restrictions epitomized here by honour do more than

impose sanctions on female behavior - they corrode the dream of

everlasting romantic happiness by empowering the domination of the

public over private affairs, of reputation over natural impulses and drives.

(Precup 122)

Although Imoinda’s mind desires Oroonoko rather than the King, she experiences a type of “Imperfect Enjoyment” when she is unable to be satisfied by the body she wants.

In a struggle to be in control, Oroonoko’s King tricks him into slavery, and therefore removes him from his true love, Imoinda. When he arrives at his new destination, the natives of Surinam see him and his companions as only new members of the labor-force. Wondering if Oroonoko is educated, they come to question him and ask,

“if [they] had sense, and wit?” (Behn 122). When the prince answers that they do, the people invite him and the others to their houses to have a feast, viewing them as more than just machines. The separation of mind and body appears in this quote as a result of

24 the ignorance of the natives who have never been able to ask the Indians anything before now. To them, the slaves are only bodies, bodies without minds. Only when Oroonoko answers the speaker do the Surinam people realize that these new people are not just machines sent to work but are “machines” with minds that allow them to think and speak.

Although their bodies show the markings of nobility (Behn 112), the two lovers are tricked into slavery in an attempt to remove Oroonoko from the kingdom. These markings are only symbols of what he comes from, but, by applying what Porter argues about philosophy and man, “[Oroonoko] thought and felt-perception, sentience and thinking-also defined who he was, indeed might be truly definitive of it” (Porter 63). The use of the mind as the master over themselves is truly what distinguishes Oroonoko and

Imoinda from being just imprinted bodies. As Trefry moves Oroonoko up the river, the people who see him for the first time are unable to take their eyes off of him. At first, they admire his physique, implying that he is a machine; however, when the people approach him, “his eyes insensibly commanded respect” (Behn 108). A machine does not command respect of people: only a master has the ability to do that. Because Oroonoko has the mindset and body of a prince, his royalty emerges and he maintains control. For

Oroonoko, the struggle between the mind and the body becomes a reality for him. One day he is a prince who is the master of his own life; the next day he is taken to another country, enslaved, and put to work as a working machine. Fortunately for him, his strong masterful demeanor saves him from being seen as a working slave.

While going into the houses to meet the people of the town, the prince is presented with a gruesome sight. These men who greet them are disfigured. Historically, when engaged in a war, to prove themselves worthy of being good leaders, two men cut

25 off parts of their bodies to show they are worthy. This display of pain tolerance when castrating the body establishes whether the mind or the body is in control. The men challenge each other with a competition of the mind to see who can take more pain. “But however their shapes appeared, their souls were very humane and noble” (123), even though some were in want of lips, noses, and eyes. Again, Behn takes this opportunity to express that it is not the outside appearance that matters, but what makes up the inside of the person. This example of the mind vs. the body is one that Oroonoko will experience at the end of his life when he chooses to be the master of his own machine. The outside machine, no matter what form it wears, compares not with the mastery of the mind.

The mind’s mastery of the body appears in Behn’s novel when Oroonoko debates whether or not to kill Imoinda. Here, in this scene, Behn’s prose exemplifies the example of “Imperfect Enjoyment.” Oroonoko has been chosen to be an example to the Negroes by being hanged. His dying will leave Imoinda “a prey, or at best a slave” (135).

Debating what his actions will be, Oroonoko's thoughts are provoked by his feelings for his lover, similar to Rochester’s speaker in the poem “The Imperfect Enjoyment.” The mind takes over the body when Oroonoko declares that he will kill Imoinda first, then his enemies, and finally himself. The mind will not allow the body to be taken over by his enemies. As his mind prepares for these decisions, his machine readies itself to go into battle. Once the deed of killing his wife is finished, he experiences rage and tries to kill himself before going after his enemies, only to find that his body is exhausted and unable to complete the task. His weakness shows in “his limbs [surprising him] with a faintness he had never felt before” (137). Here Behn suggests the impotency of not being able to finish the job. As Porter states in “The Rational Self,” “the flesh was divisible, the

26 rational soul, like that of the Christian, was indivisible; the essence of the body was extension...that of the mind, consciousness” (65). Oroonoko’s strength in wanting to finish his assignment disallows the motion of stabbing himself due to the state of his machine. Finally succumbing to exhaustion, he falls next to his love and remains there, corpse-like, until found by those who want him dead. In the days of his waiting, the struggle between the master and the machine continues. He is of the mindset to rise and finish his initial task; however, being without food for days and “still mourning over the idol of his heart” (Behn 137), he is unable to continue. His machine is wearing down, preparing to shut down for eternity. With his beloved already dead, one could argue that the mind is already dead, which denies the body to continue.

Oroonoko’s inability to kill himself after killing Imoinda and their unborn child shows the breakdown of the mind over the body for a short time. For when the prince finally is taken back to the village to be tortured and killed by his slave master,

Oroonoko's inner master, his mind, takes over and a battle of wills comes into play. Two masters, one mental and one physical, clash in a violent scene in which Oroonoko’s control of his mind over his body becomes the victor in the destruction of his machine.

When the prince is finally found, his master (the mind) encourages him to have strength to not give up the fight. He declares, “‘No, gentlemen, you are deceived, you will find no more Caesar's to be whipped . . . I have strength yet left to secure me from a second indignity’” (138). The indignity of being whipped, having his body tortured by those against him, is not going to happen due to the strength of his mind, his master. Caesar, the slave, no longer exists; his master has erased that persona from his own life. In

27 accomplishing this deletion, Oroonoko is able to cut himself into pieces, and even though his followers try to “fix” his machine and cure him, it is not long lived.

This scene where Oroonoko cannot continue with his plan to kill himself and the others can be seen as a “symbolic potential of impotence” (Lavery 172). The use of allegorical exploration begins with Propertius’ “‘lost opportunity recovered’ element . . .

[which allows for] movements between action and inaction, power and impotence”

(Lavery 172). Hobbes’ conclusion that man’s nature drives his desire for power (Lavery

177) conflicts with Oroonoko’s lost power to complete his destructive plans. This power loss in his machine corresponds to the impotence of a man trying to satisfy his lover.

Oroonoko tries to exhibit control in these killings in order to keep his unborn child from being born into slavery. Although Oroonoko and Imoinda are royalty in their country, the power move of the king uproots that royalty and places them in the “debate over the question of monarchical heredity” (Lavery 175). The struggle here is not one of sexual desire but one of power. Whose mind controls the machines? This allegorical struggle demonstrates “a literary engagement with political ideas concerning the nature of libertine spirit and public governing bodies current to the time” (Lavery 176). In

Oroonoko, his grandfather claims two important parts of his life, his lover and his crown.

The disturbing, logical application of this theory is that the individual has

no obedience or duty to serve governmental systems with which they are

not fully, individually aligned. In the turbulent situation of the English

political system, and at a time when the future of English governance was

in question, these kinds of ideas posed a threat to order. The impotency

poems produced during this period then pick up on this anxiety, after

Cantanec's text becomes widely known, and explore these ideas in

allegorical satires addressing the nature of duty and service to ‘rightful’

authority. (Lavery 183)

While the idea of who has the right to be in control is being questioned by society and writers during the writing of Oroonoko, we can begin to see how the relationship between

Oroonoko and his slave master plays out. Behn provides a conflict not only within

Oroonoko but an outside one as well. The master that he controls (his mind) is pitted against the master who controls him (slave master); two masters competing for the power over themselves and their people, each one not wanting to appear weak or impotent.

While Oroonoko is standing at the post, another phallic symbol of the time, waiting to be executed, he takes charge of his machine by castrating it piece by piece. He chooses to take his own life as a type of “failure to serve” attitude (Lavery 184), only this time the failure is purposefully chosen.

As Behn writes this novel, she does so in hopes of seeking “to address the Stuarts’ abuse of power…while warning the nation about the folly of betraying its rightful kings”

(Kroll 573). The novel is used to “represent the full ramifications of an institution-slavery or the slave trade” (Kroll 574). During this time, James II wears the crown in England and begins to offer more absolution and positions of power to Catholics, while suspending the Test Acts (Kroll 579). Tensions were running high; people were hostile toward James; and with the birth of his son, a new heir entered into the picture.

According to some, the birth of James’ son was a farce; a claim was made that the midwife for the Queen smuggled in a baby boy to be raised as their legitimate son.

Before this son, the King and Queen experienced many of their children’s early deaths,

29 putting the birth of a strong boy into question. A new son, baptized Catholic, would maintain the Catholic line of kings for years to come, something the people of England did not want (Dolan 216). Oroonoko composed in conjunction with all of this political chaos “reflects the pressure produced by the volatility of the situation” (Kroll 580). The slave trade under James II allows for people to be sold as labor producers rather than becoming slaves due to conquest. Behn attempts to show her disapproval of this new arrangement of trade through the novel.

In the greatest example of master controlling the machine, when Oroonoko is set to die, Behn reframes Oroonoko as an “Imperfect Enjoyment” novel rather than a slave novel. She begins by displaying Oroonoko with a pipe in his mouth. During his time as a slave, Oroonoko learned to enjoy tobacco, another commodity. His use of the pipe while being disassembled symbolizes his life since the pipe came “ready lighted” (140). Piece by piece, the machine is dismantled as the sovereign prince stands without saying a word.

Behn describes the mutilation as the “executioner came and first cut off his members . . . cut his ears and his nose and burned them; [Oroonoko] still smoked on” (140). As his second arm is cut off, “his head sunk, and his pipe dropped, and he gave up the ghost”

(140). The extinguishing of the pipe by its being dropped symbolizes Oroonoko’s death, two commodities consumed. Just as the spectacle of the scaffold in Rochester’s time gives power back to the sovereignty, Oroonoko takes back his power and returns to the master of nobility, giving no pleasure to those who destroy him.8 Here a connection can be made to Michel Foucault’s thoughts in Discipline and Punish as he writes, “A body

8 The spectacle of the scaffold was a public display of the King’s power in which those whose crimes attacked the sovereign were tortured and killed by the hand of an executioner.

30 effaced, reduced to dust and thrown to the winds, a body destroyed piece by piece by the infinite power of the sovereign constituted not only the ideal, but the real limit of punishment” (50). Here, Oroonoko in the role of master over his machine confronts his slave master. Considering that Oroonoko is dismembered, burned, and sent to other plantations, one could claim that the prince was weakened to the object of an inactive machine. I would argue that in choosing to remain silent and accept his death, Oroonoko maintains the mastery of his mind over his body. Rather than run away, fight his captors, or speak ill of the men torturing him, he decides to control his actions. Although the slave master physically causes death to the prince, he will never be able to take away his mind.

This unique interaction between a slave, Oroonoko, as a master and the actual slave master allows Behn to present a new question to the mind/body split discussion. Can the minds of two people of different backgrounds and power be seen as equal? I would argue yes, for Oroonoko truly leaves this world as a sovereign, just as he came into it. By allowing his mind to overtake his body, he genuinely becomes the master of his machine even though his machine is destroyed. I argue that in allowing Oroonoko to be the master in his own destruction, Behn uses him as a corrective of the Imperfect Enjoyment. This correction is a result of looking at the discipline within a person’s control rather than outside of his control.

CHAPTER VII

CONCLUSION

The connection between the mind/body appears in literature in the form of relationships within and between characters. Behn’s character Oroonoko depicts the relationship between the mind and body with an extreme loss of life but on his own terms. Behn, in Oroonoko, also plays on this theme of machine and master with the physical presence of the slave master who inevitably watches the destruction of

Oroonoko while his mind overcomes his body. Here we see the difference between

Behn’s and Rochester’s interpretations of “Imperfect Enjoyment” texts. The body’s weakness for Rochester demonstrates a strength in being able to choose for Behn. This distinction shows the evolution of the “Imperfect Enjoyment” genre expanding from men being unable to find pleasure in sexual contact to the question of choice in how a person handles destruction or the breakdown of the body.

As stated earlier, the separation of the body into the body and the mind allows society to take control of their own actions. In Oroonoko’s case, the captors choose to kill the prince rather than allow him to leave, and Oroonoko chooses to show the true valor of a warrior and nobleman by remaining silent through his torture. All of the occurrences for these characters can be summed up in a quote by Porter:

[P]ersonhood was not fundamentally fixed in the ensemble of the flesh, in

the face, torso and limbs, but was borne in the understanding or self-

awareness, regarded as the ‘totality of the Impressions, Thoughts, and

Feelings, which make up a person’s conscious Being.’ (77)

Realizing the power of the mind over the body brings a new awareness to the self and to society of how people should be treated in general. The mind’s consciousness adds a new power to the development of characters in literature, allowing authors to show the power of choice.

Another of Behn’s contributions to the “Imperfect Enjoyment” genre is the addition of a woman as a main character in these poems, but not just any woman, a woman who is in control. In Behn’s poem “The Disappointment,” Cloris and Lysander attempt to engage in love making. Lysander, the machine of the poem, claims to be in control and ready to take charge of the event. Unfortunately for Lysander, Cloris is the master in the poem and uses her mind to play games with her partner, degrading him to nothing but an inanimate object.

In contrast to Behn’s use of a woman, the speaker in Rochester’s poem, a man, chooses to have many trysts with women before finding his true love. The act of lovemaking that now actually means something to him fails due to his thoughts regarding

Corinna. If not for the many women before her, perhaps he would have fulfilled her desire. Unfortunately, he chose a different route.

This era of “Imperfect Enjoyment” genre opened the door to subjects and thinking like no other. No longer were the subjects of literature limited to the strict teachings of the Puritans. Writers were allowed to focus their topics around the earlier taboo subjects

of sex and lewd behavior. Until the shift in thinking about the body occurred, no person could be completely understood. The entire being was not clear to anyone, just as a machine with no instructions is unusable. Once the master wired the machine correctly, the outcome of its use improved. These two authors chose to create stories in which

Rochester promoted the weakness of the machine, and Behn promoted the power of the master over the machine. By doing this, these authors allowed their readers to experience the power of the mind and body working together.

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