Old Genres, New Worlds: Behn Domesticates the Exotic

Abstract

This final chapter serves almost as a coda to the rest of the book, in that the plays it discusses — whilst an integral part of the voyage drama tradition which I have been sketching throughout my argument — differ significantly from their dramatic predecessors in their use of the exotic. The representations of the New World in Aphra Behn’s The Widow Ranter (and Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko, which is also briefly considered here) are conditioned by historical circumstances and eyewitness evidence that was unavailable to earlier dramatists. Behn and an increasing number of her playgoers now had first-person eyewitness accounts (what Karnes would call ‘first order presence’) against which the ideal presence of the theatre could be tested. Hence whilst the mind-travelling phenomenon is still at play in these examples, its novelty and significance are gradually becoming subservient to the interest in depicting a genuinely New World story for its own sake. The Widow Ranter and Oroonoko allow a local politics to emerge, and foreground the ethics of domesticity in colonial life rather than retaining an epicentre in London society.