III. Monstrous Gender in Alliance with Monstrous Race (Othello,
Oroonoko)
Near the end of "Soliloquy: Or Advice to an Author," Shaftesbury especially
alerts the impressionable women and effeminate men against "Heathens, and
Infidels . . . against their neighbouring Nations, of a false Religion, and Worship"
(183). For the eighteenth-century English audience, perhaps, Othello, moorish and
pagan, best reifies this very concept of racialized monstrousness in the English
imagination, that threatens to undermine the English nation of "devout Christians"
(183). Sharing Shakespeare's belief that readers have a weakness for travel tales and
apparently making a direct reference to Othello, Shaftesbury especially exhorts
women to put on their guard against this "Moorish Hero, full fraight with Prodigy: a
wondrous Story-Teller."
Shaftesbury fears that impressionable women--"A thousand
DESDEMONA'S" (179)--would find it difficult to resist "the miraculous Moor," who
"cou'd relate the most monstrous Adventures, and satisfy the wondring Appetite with
the most wondrous Tales" (178).
Indeed, Shakespeare's Othello, a paragon of "Heathens, and Infidels," does
successfully seduce Desdemona with his invented stories:
Wherein of Antars vast, and Desarts idle,
Rough Quarries, Rocks, and Hills, . . .
..................................
It was my hint to speak . . .
And of the Canibals that each other eate,
The Anthropophagie, and men whose heads
Doe grow beneath their shoulders. This to heare,
Would Desdemona seriously incline: (1.3.148-55)
Desdemona is so entranced with the exotic tales that she, in defiance of her father,
ventures to elope with Othello, and, like Senator Rinaldo, Desdemona's father,
Senator Barbantio could not hold her daughter "under some kind of Discipline and
Management." Exacerbated, Barbantio confronts Othello and charges him with
binding Desdemona "in chains of magic" and later accuses him of casting a spell on
Desdemona: "She is abused, stol'n from me, and corrupted / By spells and medicines"
(1.3.60-1). However, this accusation is later denied, as Othello, defending himself in
front of the Duke and other Senators, contradicts his father-in-law's incrimination:
"Her father loved me, often invited me, / Still questioned me the story of my life /
From year to year, the battles, sieges, fortune / That I have passed" (1.3.127-30).
Geraldo U. de Sousa remarks aptly, "Obviously on some level, he [Barbantio], like his
daughter, was fascinated with Othello's narrative" (119).
In Shaftesbury's idea,
Othello's stories of "the battles, sieges, fortune" would have in fact monstrocized the
father and daughter and they, as "the willing auditors of monstrous tales," have "come
to embody the very monstrosity themselves."
This racialized Venetian story by Shakespeare turns out tragically and ends up
monstrously in bloodshed, as Othello, out of a fit of jealousy, vows to kill Desdemona
bloodlessly and later stabs himself with a hidden weapon, after acknowledging his
fault. At the last gap, Othello hopes that the Venetians "will strive for fairness and
accuracy. His place in history depends upon the accuracy of the report." As de
Sousa reasons that "reports extenuate, distort, denigrate, malign. He [Othello] thus
finds himself at the mercy of Lodovico's ability to interpret the events in Cyprus"
(117-18), doesn't Othello's last request to Lodovico for "fairness and accuracy" echo
and correspond with Dangerfield's pleading with Behn to "give these strange Turns of
my Fate not the Name of Crimes, but favour them with the Epithet of Misfortunes"
(444)?
Like Othello, Behn's feminocentric stories also ring down their curtains
monstrously.
But perhaps more than Othello, the monstrous denouements of The
Dumb Virgin and The Unfortunate Bride do not only share the monstrosity of race, but
also experience that of gender.
In other words, the monstrous endings of Behn's
tales of defect witness the joint venture of gender and race in the sense that both
categories of difference are constructed and modeled upon the same vice of
monstrousness.
Dangerfield, with his wig falling off, reveals his birth mark, by
which the dying Rinaldo recognizes his long-lost son, and over which Maria is so
distraught to the extent that she suddenly exclaims her first and last words: "Oh!
Incest, Incest" (444), before committing suicide with her lover's/ brother's sword.
On the other hand, failing to marry Belvira, Frankwit, in a frenzied fit of jealousy,
kills his rival and best friend Wildvill, who, before he dies, accidently inflicts a mortal
wound on his beloved and newlywed, Belvira.
At her last gasp, Belvira instructs
Celesia to marry Frankwit amid the melee and misery of bloodshed and death.
Both romantic love stories wind up with a series of violent deaths of either
father, or son, or daughter or newlywed or friend, of whom the tragedies are
scandalously tarnished either by incest, or suicide, or amicicide, or uxoricide, the
havoc of which, on such a monstrous scale, could not have been wreaked alone by
monstrous gender.
In fact, the plot in The Dumb Virgin takes a startling turn in
Dangerfield's dying moments.
It is the moment when Dangerfield "accidentally
dropt his Wig in the Engagement" that "the Mark of a bloody Dagger" links this
defect-ridden household with that undesirable element of monstrous race.
In
analogy with Othello,i Dangerfield, renowned for his "brave Performance against the
Turks," is widely believed to have drowned in the Adriatic Sea; and sudden revelation
of this bodily defect brings to mind the mother's "monstrous Zeal or superstitious
Passion" (179), as Shaftesbury would have added.
This Turkish-turbaned young
suitor, found "ty'd to two Planks" and adopted by "a Turky Merchant" (443), comes
back to Venice for the purpose of finding his parents, but only to commit incest and
partake of the deaths of his father Rinaldo and sister Maria.
The element of race proves more monstrous in The Unfortunate Bride, as
Frankwit and Belvira's romance is maliciously disrupted by "a Blackamoor Lady,"
Moorea. Moorea, whose name implies her as a gendered/racial/religious other, is
sexualized/racialized/heathenized as "Devil" (410). The shedevil Moorea, "black in
her mind, and dark, as well as in her body," is instrumental in doing evil that befalls
other characters, by keeping back the letters between Belvira and Frankwit, and
sending false news of Frankwit's death. The story takes a drastic and dramatic
downturn after Belvira marries her fiancé's best friend, Wildvill, which leads to a duel
between two best friends, Frankwit and Wildvill, who dies in the duel and
accidentally murders his newlywed wife, Belvira, who, at death's door, instructs
Frankwit to marry Celesia, another disconcerting conglomeration of gender, race, and
defect. But can the promise of marriage, in the wake of amicicide and uxoricide,
flash a faint hope of an anticlimax? In spite of recovering her sight and inheriting
Belvira's fortune, will Celesia, "an Heiress, the only Child of a rich Turkey Merchant"
(405), stand any chance of faring well with Frankwit in the aftermath?
i
Othello in Aleppo (5.2.353)