‘Tis she alone, if she were permitted that better instructs the world than all the inventions of man” (ebook p. And ’tis most evident and plain that simple nature is the most harmless, inoffensive, and virtuous mistress. She described the natives saying, “these people represented to me an absolute idea of the first state of innocence, before man knew how to sin. Perhaps she is responding to the political turmoil in England during this period in the aftermath of the English Civil War. Her descriptions suggests that prominent attitudes toward native peoples during the Early Modern Period were that natives were to be collected and consumed like goods, which explains the acceptance and rationalization of slavery throughout the book.īehn also seems to idolize nature and look upon foreign lands as pure or free of corrupted influence from the West. Such phrases could easily have been used to describe land that the English wish to colonize or goods to be imported abroad for consumption. 9) to describe their appearance, which makes them into a commodity because it portrays them as a rare and exotic thing to be obtained. She uses phrases like “native beauty” (ebook p. What struck me most as I read Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko was the way that Behn describes the natives.
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