Student Question
Can you analyse the language used in Oroonoko?
Quick answer:
Behn's voice is very different than the voice of any contemporary writer. Her vocabulary, syntax, and even her tone is unusual in a modern context. The main character, Oroonoko, speaks with the same rhythms as the narrator but not quite as ornately.Aphra Behn, an English woman who may have lived in Suriname and was
definitely a spy for a time in Antwerp, wrote the novel
Oroonoko from the voice of a speaker who has traveled
to other lands. Therefore, there are incorporated some elements in the
narrators voice that are unusual, such as an over wordy vocabulary, an example
of which is on page one, chapter one. Behn writes about "fortunes fancy" and
truth not adorned with any "accidents but what arrive in earnest." So Behn's
vocabulary has a robust superfluence in its descriptive phrases.
Behn also has a tendency to anthropomorphosize. As is seen on page one,
"accidents arrive." A few pages over in the same chapter (p.3), Nature is
called a "harmless, inoffensive and virtuous mistress." Behn also has a
tendency to long sentences with one example (p. 5) running eleven lines, having
three semicolons and ten commas. Another characteristic is that Behn employs
the effects of heart and soul and eyes and tears, in other words, she makes
very concrete references to the seats of emotion and deep feeling, something
done only sparingly in contemporary writing.
As for syntax, Behn uses a classic English construction using that-clauses and
prepositional phrases to modify nouns, restricting which-clauses to clarify
references and sequence indicators like while, then, before, etc. Behn also
begins many sentences with conjunctions like "but."
The voice of the main character, Oroonoko himself, is
structured with the same intricacy as the narrator's, but there is even more
elegance and fluidity. For example, his sentences depend even more heavily on
prepositional phrases that allow his long discourses to proceed unbroken by
insertions set off by commas, as the narrator's writing is.
Oroonoko's language is flourished with feelings of the heart
and visions of the eyes, etc, just as the narrator's is, however
Oroonoko also weaves in the language of the warrior and the
battlefield: "...you can still conquer..." (p. 26).
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