Between Oroonoko and The Fair Jilt, I'm entirely puzzled by Aphra Behn as an author. In an entirely Swiftian manner, I simply cannot decipher if her writing is meant to be a commentary on unsatisfactory happenings or if she is actually racist and sexist. If you've read my previous blog on Behn, I further explained this situation in relation to The Fair Jilt and the different lenses it can be viewed through. Where Oroonoko is concerned, she could either be explaining the issue of the noble savage concept or genuinely have a type of savior complex by inserting herself into the narrative and humanizing a brutal story. I would be very interested to read different analyses of her works to see if there is an answer hiding in all of this.
Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" is secretly about Cotton-Eyed Joe. We often talk about how poems resemble songs, so why can't the plots of short stories do the same? In the case of "Bartleby", I think that he as a person can easily be likened to our dear old pal CE Joe. We don't know where he came from, we don't know where he went (in the biblical sense). He has an air of mystery about him. He messes with the narrator's personal life. I know that this is silly, but I think it's fun to relate things that you don't necessarily enjoy to things that you do. If anyone can think of other parallels between the two, please feel free to comment them below.
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