In the case of the *The Female Quixote*, one aspect needs further attention before closing the discussion, and that is the relation between comparison and parody. A parody always invites a comparison between the parody and that which is parodied. Gray, Jones and Thompson distinguish between satire which "draws on social conventions" and parody which "draws on aesthetic ones" (2009: 17). According to this approach, when looking at parody one looks at formal features in a text and how these features are enacted. The parody must repeat these formal elements of that which it parodies yet it must walk the fine line between repeating these elements without becoming that which it parodies. This can be achieved by repeating some, but not all elements or by rearranging or recontextualising the repeated elements. Hence, if the(se) shared elements are added in great number, the parody paradoxically deviates and repeats the original simultaneously. Since a parody repeats mainly formal features, it might be considered a performative practice of literature. The repetition invites readers to compare and the deviation in the performance has the potential to subvert the argument of the parodied text.  For this intermediate position of parody between deviation and repetition, Laurent argues that parody can be seen as a technique to "keep meaning from becoming lethargic" (59). It is a way of negotiating meaning by the comparative confrontation of the parody with its source texts. Parodies in novels according to the suggested grouping above fall under intertextual comparisons and support the statement by Angelika Epple and Walter Erhart that comparisons are "instruments of power" (2015: 15) and as such ideologically charged. However, Lennox's novel is a complex intertextual comparison because it does not limit itself to two *comparata*. Instead, it simultaneously draws on romance novels, *Don Quixote* and the perception of both in eighteenth-century British society, hence creating a relation between four entities.The complex meaning can only be constructed from this comparison by making oneself familiar with all four sources. It is not enough to be familiar with romance novels, *Don Quixote* and the text by Lennox, but rather the public discussion of all three such as offered by More (1999) must be taken into consideration as well.8 The ambiguity of her remarks about romance novels and the praise of *Don Quixote* offer a tension of rejection and admiration that is echoed in the argumentative structure of the *The Female Quixote*. Hence, it critically highlights that Arabella is ridiculed

8 More's text was published in 1799 and *The Female Quixote* 1752 hence, it would be misleading to argue that Lennox took the text by More into consideration when writing her novel. However, More's text can be taken as exemplary for the ambivalent discourses on romance novels at the time. It was chosen for the paper because it addresses female education in *Maria; Or, The Wrongs of Women*, romance novels and *Don Quixote,* and hence offers a particularly suiting source for a discussion of both novels in terms of the arguments they pose on female education.

for taking romance novels as historically accurate yet idolized for upholding the virtues of these novels.

#### **5. Conclusion**

This chapter analyzed practices of comparing in *Maria; Or, The Wrongs of Woman* by Mary Wollstonecraft and *The Female Quixote* by Charlotte Lennox to argue that the comparative practices employed in novels are not innocent but are invoked in support of certain ideologically charged arguments. In *Maria; Or, The Wrongs of Woman*, the narrative comparison between Jemima and Maria turns the novel from a romance to a Jacobin novel, conveying a feminist argument against marriage that is entangled with an argument against the political order and in favour of a better position for women in eighteenth-century British society. Hence the narrative comparisons between Jemima and Maria do not just support the arguments presented in the novel; rather, the comparative practices employed in the text provide no less than the basis on which the arguments of the novel are built upon. In *The Female Quixote*, the intertextual comparison between Lennox's novel and *Don Quixote* by De Cervantes offers the framework in which the novel parodies romance novels and their perception in eighteenth-century Britain.

Certain arguments developed in the novels analyzed here are difficult to construct from the text unless comparative practices receive more attention and are included in the examination of those texts. Based on the heuristic distinction between direct and indirect comparisons suggested by Hartner and Schneider with an added subgrouping into narrative, imagery and intertextual practices of comparing, the chapter suggested that literary practices of comparing can co-occur and build complex networks that can contribute to creating multi-layered argumentative structures within a novel. By taking into consideration not just who compares what, and for what purpose, but taking a closer look at the textual practices employed in a literary work, the underlying ideological premises of the ideas posed in a novel can be addressed. In Wollstonecraft's novel marriage is compared to a form of slavery, while Lennox employs intertextual comparisons and narrative comparisons to outline the ambiguous position in British society towards romance novels and the female virtues they propagate. Both novels pose strong feminist arguments, and both do so by employing certain practices of comparing. Thus,

to outline the underlying ideological investment in a novel, it is necessary to analyze *how* novels compare.

#### **Bibliography**

Allen, Graham. *Intertextuality*. New York: Routledge, 2000.

### **"'tis by Comparison we can Judge and Chuse [sic!]": Incomparable Oroonoko**

*Monika Class*

#### **1. Introduction**

Aphra Behn's *Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave, a True History* was first published in early summer of 1688 less than a year before the author's death. The novel narrates the short life of a royal West African general. It delineates how it comes about that this prince, who starts his military career successfully defending his kingdom at the age of seventeen, who undergoes experiences of forbidden love, kidnapping, and enslavement, and who leads a slave rebellion that fails, ends up dismembered in the British colony of Surinam. The British had colonized the territory in 1652, but the Dutch usurped the colony in 1667 (Hughes 2007: xxxi). Aphra Behn probably resided on a Surinamese sugar plantation in the early 1660s, but there is no extant trace of the enslaved figure whose free name was Oroonoko and slave name Caesar; nor is there documentary evidence of a slave rebellion on a British Surinamese plantation at the time (Britland 2019).

Since the mid-1980s, *Oroonoko* has been elevated to the status of a canonical work of English prose fiction (Aravamudan 2014: 27). Some scholars have designated *Oroonoko* the origin of the English novel and the first American novel as well (Azim 1993: 35; Doyle 2008: 97; Spengemann 1984; Schabert 1997: 305). While the scholarship on *Oroonoko* is vast, the ideology of the novel is particularly contested partly because the ambiguous configuration of the text – a dialogization of multiple discursive practices – resists a translation into stable ideologies (Athey and Alarcón 1993: 417). Central to this body of scholarship is the question to what extent Oroonoko's struggles work as a surrogate for late seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century dominant British historiography. This focus can be traced back to Laura Brown and Felicity Nussbaum's *The New Eighteenth Century* (1987). Building on New Historicism, the edited volume played an important role in the integration of gender, race, class and empire studies into (American) eighteenth-century scholarship (Alkon 1989: 581). In her essay, Laura Brown influentially established the reading that the figure of Oroonoko alias Caesar stands in for the Stuart monarchs and by extension for Behn's allegiance with them.1 Accordingly, Anglocentric Restoration politics have served as the major *tertium comparationis* for analyses of Behn's powerful work of literature. Commentators disagree about the colonial significance of *Oroonoko*: Some scholars regard the narrative as an endorsement of plantation slavery (e.g. Moira Ferguson 1992: 356), others as a denouncement (e.g. Goreau 1980: 289) and many address the intrinsic ambivalences about colonial power, the slave trade, race and gender within the text (Griffin 2019: 107; Lipking 2004: 175; Morrissey 2016: 11; Margaret Ferguson 1991: 159; Hughes 2002: 1).

In light of these developments in eighteenth-century studies, the present essay contributes to the investigation of the practices of comparing in long eighteenth-century Britain by examining the comparisons and the rhetorical suspension of comparability in the narrative configuration of Behn's *Oroonoko*. In the preface, dedicated to the Scottish nobleman Richard Maitland, Behn draws attention to the importance of comparison for the "*Critical Reader*" (*Oroonoko,* 1995: 56): "'*tis by Comparison we can Judge and Chuse* [sic!]" (55). At the same time, however, Behn configured reversals of the eponymous hero's fate in ways that complicate and postpone comparability. Scholars have noted that analogies between Behn's text and British historiography of the period include inconsistencies. They observe, for instance, that this "hybrid masterpiece" (Botelho 2014: 34) contains "contradictory" combinations of rhetorical patterns (Chibka 1998: 513).

In this spirit, this essay follows a hermeneutic-phenomenological approach by analysing the operations of comparability and incomparability within the emplotment based on Paul Ricoeur's theory of triple mimesis (Ricoeur 1984). Broadly speaking, the approach means that readerly embodiment plays a vital role in the signification process that results from the encounter of readers with the text (Ricoeur 1988). Not only is meaning constituted through the intellectual fusion of horizons (Gadamer 1989), the

1 According to Sal Nicolazzo, the collection has had the adverse effect of priming "eighteenth-century scholarship to understand race and empire primarily as topics that politicized enquiry might peruse, rather than as foundational material structures that implicate us and our work in objects of study" (Nicolazzo 2020: 233).

signification of fiction also depends on readers' emotions and affects according to Ricoeur (1988: 137). Author's compositions play an important role in such embodied reading experiences. Ricoeur theorizes such representations under the heading "emplotment".

The term "emplotment" designates "the operation that draws configuration out of a simple succession" (Ricoeur 1984: 65). Emplotment (*mise en intrigue*) creates narratives by lending a mere sequence of events a coherent form that encompasses a beginning, a middle and an end. The entire level of configuration within Ricoeur's mimetic model consists of this narrative operation (i.e., emplotment). Besides configuration, there exist two further levels in the mimetic process, namely prefiguration and refiguration. Configuration, which is synonymous with narrative composition, is the middle part of the model, preceded by the prefiguration and followed by refiguration. Ricoeur bases emplotment on the Aristotelian notion of "muthos", modifying the latter in two ways that are relevant for the present argument. First, emplotment ultimately serves the development of fictional character and not vice versa (Ricoeur 2005: 216). Second, Ricoeur generalizes "muthos" to such an extent that it characterizes narrative *per se* and not only dramatic art (Bläser 2015: 18).

On the one hand, emplotment accounts for coherence inasmuch as the former synthesizes heterogeneity. On the other hand, emplotment also creates pathos and emotionality in the widest sense of catharsis (Ricoeur 1984: 43). Therefore, Ricoeur speaks of two opposing poles at work in emplotment: concordance (synthesis of heterogenous elements) and discordance (unresolved dissonances). The notion of discordance includes reversals (peripeteia) in the story that inflict an unexpected turn on the hero or heroine: The "play of discordance internal to concordance" is the "internal dialectic of poetic composition" (38). Derived from Aristotelian tragedy, Ricoeur's narrative theory, then, can be said to be interwoven with emotionality (especially with pity and fear): "By including the discordant in the concordant, the plot includes the affecting within the intelligible" (44). These reversals trigger readers' emotions for the hero and, in doing so, hamper his comparability insofar as the figure's sustained struggles reinforce readers' imaginings of the very characters as if he were an individual (Ricoeur 2005: 216). In brief, the discordant elements of the emplotment do much to rhetorically suspend the hero's comparability and thus reinforce Oroonoko's literal persona, namely the enslaved African prince.

That discordance outweighs concordance in the case of *Oroonoko* underpins my argument about the dynamics of comparability and incomparability. I contend that three reversals in the narrative suspend comparability momentarily, emphasize the hero's action and suffering irrespective of the narratorial commentary, and, in doing so, recalibrate otherwise Eurocentric analogies inherent in the novel. The first part of this article focuses on three major analogies with the Stuart monarchy and Roman history and the second half highlights three major peripeteia – from bliss to sullenness, from enslaver to the enslaved, and from martyrdom to infrahuman spectacle – each of which suggest that the emplotment ultimately transcends Eurocentric analogy. The contradictions in the plot cluster around the materiality of plantation slavery. Instantiating rhetorical incomparability mainly through sullen bliss, the enslaved enslaver, and unwitnessed martyrdom, I propose that Behn makes a virtue out of discordant configuration by constructing her eponymous hero as an exceptional human being (as opposed to a moral exemplar or racialized type). The figure of the entitled West African leader of a slave rebellion galvanizes singularity. In so doing, Behn's tale can be said to establish a hallmark of the novel as a literary genre in terms of formal realism (Watt 1957).

By "rhetorical incomparability", I mean certain textual devices that effectively postpone or suspend comparability. Jean-Jacques Rousseau rightly observed that "[w]hoever sees only a single object has no occasion to make comparison" (qtd. in Cheah 1999: 3). The same applies to whoever only imagines a single person. Having said this, rhetorical incomparability does not rule out the structural ubiquity of comparability (Sass 2020: 94). Rhetorical incomparability in this essay should not be conflated either with "the line of argument – popular within literary studies, where it […] repeats the discipline's selfdefining reverence for the unique, the particular and the incomparable, while making it seem that the dislike [of comparability] itself is anti-imperialist by its very nature" (Robbins 2013: 191). Anything and anybody can be compared in principle, but one of the innovative virtues of early eighteenth-century novels (and novellas) was the introduction of fictional characters that strikingly resembled real-life people. John Bunyan's allegory *The Pilgrim's Progress* (1678, 1684) features figures that stand in for certain moral types or abstract ideas such as the main character "Christian". By contrast, early novels in English are invested in the imitation of human beings (Bode 2005: 127; Auerbach 1946). Such a fleshing out of fictional character is more likely to occur in text-reader interaction "if no information is presented that would allow easy initial categorization" or comparison (Schneider 2013: 123). For life-like

characters to emerge from prose fiction, it is vital to postpone comparability to some degree. The rhetoric of incomparability in novels resembles "the suspension of structurally possible comparisons [in other fields such as] in morals and public life as well as in intimate contexts" (Sass 2020: 94). After all, rhetorical incomparability is, Hartmut von Sass notes, a "highly important institution" (ibid.). Eighteenth-century critical readers and philosophers like Rousseau emphasized comparability (Epple/Erhart 2020: 25), but early anglophone novelists nonetheless made a virtue out of postponing comparability by narrative means that evoke the hero's seeming incomparability. In brief, the demands that early novelists made on their readers allowed and even encouraged them to simply follow the life and adventures of their hero. In Behn's case, I propose in Part II of the present essay, such followability does not suspend comparisons for good but reinforces Oroonoko's non-European persona as a West African prince: The peripeteia of the emplotment – sullen bliss, the enslaved enslaver, and unwitnessed martyrdom – are effective in mainly three ways: First, they postpone and arguably even occlude Eurocentric comparisons; second, they evoke Oroonoko as a strong man of action, and, third, they make room for comparisons with the transnational history of slavery. In so doing, they evoke Oroonoko's literal persona, namely as a West African warrior-prince who is unjustly sentenced to be dismembered in the British colony Surinam.

Comparability plays a vital role in the vast scholarship on Behn's foundational novella. "Comparative work", Pheng Cheah notes, "is generally understood as a mode of analysis that begins from one given national or cultural case of subject of legitimate interest, X, which is the basis for forming a provisional hypothesis or working idea about this subject that serves the *tertium comparationis*" (1999: 3). Methodologically speaking, the grounds of comparison inevitably shape the results and therefore call the "objective basis" of comparisons into question (ibid.). "In the past, the grounds of comparison were undeniably Eurocentric", Cheah claimed in 1999 (3). Part I "The Analogies of Plot" supports Cheah's hypothesis that the bias of comparison in Behn's case is Eurocentric on two levels: that of the primary text, i.e., Behn's novella, as well as that of the critical intervention made by Laura Brown and others.

Drawing on Geoffrey E. R. Loyd, some scholars agree that comparisons can be classified along the axes of five valences: (1) one's own superiority claims, (2) other's superiority, (3) priority of communalities, (4) insurmountable of differences and concomitant incomparability, and (5) novelty (Epple/Erhart 2020: 23). By opposing "the theoretical pitfalls of the 'other'" (1987:

185), Brown prioritized above all the third valence, namely the communalities between the African hero and the Stuart Monarchs. In this line of argument, scholars have shown how the similarities exoticize the protagonist. My point in Part I is that such an emphasis on communalities with European monarchs unwittingly or wittingly reinforces the Eurocentric bias of comparisons; indeed, the emphasis on communalities with the Stuarts has effectively occluded the novella's potential for lateral comparison, for instance, the work's comparability with the transnational history of slavery (even if Brown tried to salvage the latter). By "lateral comparison", I mean the modes of comparability that "balance the 'frontal comparisons' of 'us' and 'them' as practiced in much traditional as well as in postcolonial anthropology" (Epple/Erhart 2020: 17). As an alternative to Brown's communality-focused comparisons, Part II of this essays suggests that the novelty of Oroonoko's story at the time warrants a lateral comparison with the transnational history of slavery.

#### **2. The Analogies of Plot**

The narrative configuration of *Oroonoko* partly does run parallel to the historiography of the Stuart Monarchs, with Charles I and also with Charles II and James II. In its beginning, middle and end, the short novel establishes suggestive analogies between the murdered West African crown prince and English historiography from the Civil Wars to the Glorious Revolution. Charles I features initially in the narrator's reference to Oroonoko's aristocratic breeding and education. Much narratorial emphasis is placed on Oroonoko's knowledge of "the late Civil Wars in England, and the deplorable Death of our great Monarch" and Oroonoko's moral judgement that this execution means an "Abhorrence of the Injustice" (*Oroonoko,* 1995: 62). The hero's knowledge of British politics and his evaluation thereof operate as narratorial recommendations. They work as attempts to assimilate Oroonoko's manner and moral compass into some equivalent of "some European Court" (ibid.). These statements thus seemingly align Oroonoko with Restoration ideology: first, the royalist position in mid-seventeenth-century English politics; secondly, the indefeasibility of the monarchy; and, thirdly, the glorification of Charles I.

Parts of the middle section in the narrative reinforce this parallel. Upon arrival in British colonial Surinam, which completes a series of events consisting of the kidnapping, the Middle Passage, the enslavement and commodification of the African prince, readers learn that the overseer of the Lord Governor's plantation gives Oroonoko a new name as a rite of passage into enslavement: "Mr *Trefry* gave Oroonoko that of Caesar, which Name will live in that Country [Surinam] as long as that (scarce more) glorious one of the great Roman" (*Oroonoko,*1995: 88). It is commonly accepted that "Caesar" is the code name Behn used for the Stuart kings in her other writing (Doyle 2008: 103). Long after the death of Charles I in 1649, Behn and her audience had lived under the rule of Charles II until he passed away in 1685 and James II succeeded to the throne. Charles II is Caesar in Behn's "poem 'A Farewell to Celladon on His Going Into Ireland' (1684) as is James II in her poem 'Poem to Her Sacred Majesty Queen Mary' (1689)" (Brown 1987: 199). Analogous to that, Oroonoko alias Caesar can be said to personify three English monarchs at once while the analogies match above all the two failed kings in need for mystification, Charles I and James II.

Progeny features as a thematic catalyst for the intradiegetic crisis in a way that compares to the Glorious Revolution. It is Imoinda's pregnancy that precipitates Oroonoko's rebellion since revolt offers the only option for escape from the enslavement of their offspring (Sussman 1993). Central as reproduction is to dynasties, this emplotment has been said to run parallel to the birth of James II's son in 1688 and the Catholic king's deposition (Guffey 1975; Miller 1982: 541). This analogy fails to consider the unpopularity and arbitrariness of this British ruler, who according to Whig and Tory parliamentarians had "tried to destroy the constitution and impose popery and absolutism" (Miller 1982: 545). Nonetheless, it is fair to say that the birth of James' heir spurred on the rebellion (against James II) since the male progeny entailed the threat that the next ruler of England "would be, not one of James' Protestant daughters, Mary or Anne, but a Catholic son" (Page/Sonnenburg 2003: 236). In addition, Surinam belongs to the British history of Dutch usurpation. The intradiegetic location thus aligns the English colonial defeat in 1667 with William of Orange's, "the Dutchman's", seizing the English throne in 1688.

If we read *Oroonoko* as such an allegory for the Glorious Revolution, the signification of the eponymous hero is reduced to universalist claims of royal bloodlines and the meaning of his enslavement by white colonisers dwindles into a hazy figure for the threat of illegitimate rule, social unrest in the wake of the deposition of the legitimate monarch, and the jeopardy of the "patrilineal ideology" of landownership (Pacheco 1994: 500). This reductive analogy can be extended to the indefeasibility of the English monarchy even at the expense of Anglican Protestantism, which opens up questions concerning the author's biography and her loyalism to the Stuart kings that lie outside of the theoretical frame of the present analysis of narrative configurations.

The beheading of Charles I has served as a *tertium comparationis* for the brutal, graphic ending of *Oroonoko*. "For Behn and others", Brown notes, "the colonies stage an historical anachronism, the repetition of the English revolution, and the political endpoint of Behn's narrative is the re-enactment of the most traumatic event of the revolution, the execution of Charles I" (Brown 1987: 197). In the novella's final section, Behn's principal character is confined to Parham Hill and thus protected from his persecutors so that he can recuperate as far as possible from the horrific torture the British inflicted on him after the revolt. However, as the personification of evil tyranny, the Deputy Governor Byam calls in his council consisting of "notorious villains" from Newgate prison (*Oroonoko,* 1995: 112), sentences Oroonoko to death, kidnaps him once again and has him quartered at the hands of the Irish henchman Banister. As Oroonoko is being brutalized to death, he remains stoic "without a Groan, or a Reproach" (118).

These events correspond roughly with the execution of the English king in 1649. Charles I was imprisoned, tried for treason, and beheaded by a small group of Members of Parliament called the "Rump" following his defeat in the Civil Wars. Behn's configurations echo, according to Doyle, the "language used in sympathetic Restoration histories and biographies of Charles, revealing the close connection" (2008: 103). These texts represent Charles I as the heroic martyr, who betrays no sign of fear at the verge of imminent death (Brown 1993: 58). Moreover, the figure of the "wild" Banister resembles the descriptions of the "absolute barbarity" of the king's executioner (Doyle 2008: 103). Inasmuch as these royal hagiographies recount the dismemberment of the king's corpse and the parading of his body parts in London streets, Behn's narrator recalls how the pieces of Oroonoko's remains, the "frightful spectacle of a mangle'd king" (*Oroonoko,* 1995: 118), are sent across South American plantations. Along these lines, the fictional life narrative of Oroonoko appears basically as a surrogate for the commemoration of English kings and English glory in the 1640s, 1660s, and 1680s. In these terms alone, the narrative configuration of *Oroonoko* would amount to an exoticized version of the English trauma of regicide.

But "there is no simple political allegory in Behn's novella" (Brown 1987: 197). Critics tend to overlook that, irrespective of Behn's codename, Julius Caesar was also "the perhaps most celebrated victim" of kidnapping from a coastal region (Patterson 1982: 115). Ransom was paid and Caesar freed. But

Caesar stepped in, according to Plutarch, to crucify his captors himself once they had been caught (Osgood 2010). Oroonoko's fate matches Plutarch's historiography insofar as the narrative configuration begins with the analeptic representation of Oroonoko's royal ancestry and military achievements in the storyworld called Coromantien, continues on the slave ship and then in Surinam with Oroonoko's failed attempts to negotiate his release and that of others against a ransom – "either Gold, or a vast quantity of Slaves" (*Oroonoko,* 1995: 93) – and ends with his thwarted plan to take revenge on the villain Byam and "all those he thought had inrag'd him [sic!]" (113).2 Crucially, the analogy with Julius Caesar's kidnapping does not extend to the Roman's liberation and revenge on the captors. It is Oroonoko who is quartered in the end. Nonetheless, Plutarch's subtext opens up an analogy that casts not only the villains, Byam and Banister, but also the supposed colonial benefactors, the plantation overseer Trefry and Colonel Harry Martin, into the mould of a band of mean pirates.

The significance of the narrative incorporation of Plutarch's histography leads beyond the analogy with late seventeenth-century domestic politics since it provides a subtext for the re-enactment of British imperial history of enslavement and slave revolt in the West Indies and Guiana. That Roman history and in particular the English version of Plutarch's *Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes* (1579) offers parallels for the intradiegetic slave rebellion is a rhetorical move that features prominently in Oroonoko's important anti-slavery speech. Oroonoko appropriates the legend of Hannibal for his revolt (see also *Oroonoko,* 1995: 93). The assimilation of Hannibal is part of the rhetorical feat that helps Oroonoko to regain the support of his former slaves and fellow Africans (453, fn. 93). For Oroonoko compares himself to Hannibal and the flight from the plantation to Hannibal's crossing of the Alps: "He told them that he had heard of one *Hannibal* a great Captain, had Cut his Way through the Mountains of solid Rocks; and shou'd a few Shrubs oppose them; which they cou'd Fire before 'em [sic!]?" (106). The significance of this comparison is disputed. Commentators have explained Oroonoko's summoning of Hannibal in terms of racial identity: "*This is a black pride incarnate*" (Polk 2000: 158; see also Margaret Ferguson 1994: 170). Derek Hughes notes that "Hannibal, however, was not black, or even African. The Carthaginians were

2 I will discuss the enslaved enslaver in detail in the second part of the present essay.

Phoenician colonists in North Africa" (2002: 9).3 What remains undisputed, however, is Hannibal's reputation as one of the great military leaders of antiquity and as the most dangerous obstacle to Roman global dominance during his lifetime. The comparison thus flatters both parties: the African rebels and the British slaveholders.

The comparison with Hannibal highlights a virtue of the African prince that tends to be overlooked, namely Oroonoko's military prowess. Critical assessments largely focus on Oroonoko's whitewashed physiognomy, Eurocentric education, and commodification as a pet slave (Aravamudan 1999: 29-70; Brown 1987: 187). But the length of narratorial commentary dedicated to European assimilation should not distract scholarly attention from Oroonoko's military achievements in Coromantien at a very young age. After all the African backstory begins with Oroonoko's military promotion to the rank of general in the army and his victorious intervention in a two-year war at the tender age of seventeen. This is to say that in contrast to court-centred medieval romances like *Roman de la Rose*, Behn's novella begins with the hero's absence from court. Overall, the young prince spends more than ten years in the company of "fighting Men, or those mangl'd, or dead; who heard no Sounds, but those of War and Groans" (*Oroonoko,* 1995: 62). What underpins the narrative discourse on Oroonoko's looks and gallantry is the emplotment of his leadership legitimized not only by royal birth but also earned by military merit and his other pursuits of honour. Having said this, the comparison with Hannibal does not only help to throw Oroonoko's bellicose acumen into relief, but the analogy also keeps counterhegemonic formations in check: the comparison signals that the enslaved African general will be the defeated by the British colonisers, inasmuch as Hannibal ultimately loses his battles against Rome.

#### **3. The Peripeteia of Plot**

New Historicism has taught us that a work of literature does not exist in a vacuum (Greenblatt 1995). Through this lens claims of incomparability *per se* become indefensible. However, New Historicism has a blind spot insofar

3 Derek Hughes reviews key texts from Sepúlveda and Las Casas through Arthur, Comte de Gobineau on the discursive formation of "race" in the late seventeenth century (2012).

as fictional narratives like Behn's powerful novella also convey a pathos that interrupts and recalibrates underlying comparability. In this regard, the remainder of this essays departs from the New Historicist analysis in the wake of Braun's influential essay. I provide instead an alternative interpretation of Behn's novella by combining the premise of what Sass has called "the dimension of an ethics of comparison" and the ethics of reading based on Ricoeur (Sass 2020: 95; Ricoeur 1988).

Rhetorical or "performative incomparability implies [as mentioned] structural comparability" (Sass 2020: 95). Incomparability in a work of literature is rhetorical insofar as it suggests a refusal to compare while the structural comparability of the work persists. If incomparability is a matter of rhetoric, as Sass claims, it is also a matter of affect. Brown largely failed to take the role of affects into consideration. Paying close attention to the ways in which emplotment stirs affects, I argue that Behn's emplotment (1) engages readers so thoroughly in the hero's action and suffering through the horrific trials he encounters that it reinforces the African hero's literal persona and, in doing so, undermines Eurocentric comparisons and (2) redirects them towards lateral comparisons such as with the transnational history of slavery.

Central to the present interpretation is my contention that incomparability in the case of Behn's novel is rhetorical and evokes primarily an affective disposition. "Nothing compares to you" is not only the title of Prince's pop song covered by Sinéad O'Connor (Sass 2020: 91), the *Oxford English Dictionary* also tells us that one of earliest recorded meanings of "incomparable" is meant in the affective sense of "matchless", "peerless", and "transcendent" such as the record dated to 1662 in Thomas Elyot's *The Castle of Helthe*: "She was afterwards his incomparable wife" (OED 2021). Behn composed the plot in such a way that readers follow Oroonoko's trials and tribulations in the narrated world and not Charles I's tribunal and execution. The emplotment conveys rhetorical incomparability insofar as the novelistic evocation of pity and fear depends on Oroonoko's actions. The peripeteia direct readers' attention away from Eurocentric comparisons inasmuch as these moments of sudden reversal in the hero's fortunes compare above all to specific elements of West African culture as well as plantation slavery.

By tracing Oroonoko's action and suffering in the second part, my essay contributes to a specific debate in Anglo-American literary criticism. Current scholarship about the role of affect and Ricoeurian hermeneutics is embroiled in the debate about "postcritical reading" spearheaded by Rita Felski's *Uses of Literature* and other publications (e.g. Anker/Felski 2017; Felski 2020). "Postcritical reading" is defined by a goal rather than a methodology, namely "to do better justice to the transtemporal liveliness of texts and the coconstitution of texts and readers – without opposing thought to emotion or divorcing intellectual rigor from affective attachment" (Felski 2015: 154). The proponents of postcritique broadly follow Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's shift from paranoid to reparative reading, intending to recast literary criticism as an affective and critical practice (Sedgwick 2002). My line of argument is sympathetic to this aspect of "postcritical reading" but not the entire polemic (see Landy 2020). I agree "that critique is as much a matter of affect and rhetoric as of philosophy or politics" (Felski 2015: 3). In this spirit, my interpretation of *Oroonoko* suggests that the lateral comparisons in Behn's novel are reinforced and even driven by Oroonoko's rhetorical incomparability insofar as it focuses attention on his character development. At the same time, however, my uses and understanding of "neophenomenology" (Felski 2015: 191) are diametrically opposed to Felski's reduction of Ricoeur's hermeneutics. Felski caricatures Ricoeur as a hardened hermeneut in whose view "[m]eaning can be retrieved only after arduous effort; it must be wrested from the text, rather than gleaned from the text" (Felski 2015: 31). From the vantage point of postcritical reading, the hermeneutics of suspicion serves merely as a foil in the recalibration of literary criticism. Collapsing Ricoeur's entire theory of narrative into the hermeneutics of suspicion, postcritical reading has so far failed to consider Ricoeur's *Time and Narrative* and other writings that actually elucidate affective styles and modes of reception. In this respect, I emphatically depart from postcritical reading and draw on Ricoeur's narrative and reception theory, conceptualising the rhetorical incomparability in Behn's novel in the aforementioned terms of emplotment as the interplay of concordance and discordance (Ricoeur 1984, 1985, 1988).

Emplotment suits the analysis of Behn's contradictory novella because the Ricoeurian concept provides insights into the internal dynamic of the narrated actions independent from narratorial commentary. The homodiegetic white female narrator in *Oroonoko* colours the events in the shades of western standards of evaluation (see Nadine Boehm-Schnitker's article in this volume). The present essay focuses instead on Oroonoko's actions as presented in the narrative composition in order to eschew the opinionated narrator. It is Oroonoko's actions that provide readers with a perspective that leads beyond the comparisons with British and Roman historiography; indeed, it is Oroonoko's actions and suffering that transcend an allegory of the Glorious Revolution. This excess of meaning erupts above all at the points of configuration of plantation slavery. These unsettling formations take primarily the shape of three important reversals: sullen bliss, the enslaved enslaver, and unwitnessed martyrdom.

It is at midpoint in the novella that the testimonial configurations clash head-on with Eurocentric history and romance. Consequently, incomparability begins to outweigh comparability within the overall narrative configuration. Crucially, the supposed happy ending of the conventional marriage plot – Oroonoko and Imoinda's wedding – entails a perfidious reversal: the incompatibility of slavery and marriage turns bliss into "sullenness" (*Oroonoko,* 1995: 93). This incompatibility has to do with the material conditions of slavery.

According to Orlando Patterson, enslaved persons are alienated from their social order. This alienation is the reaction to and result of their coercion into total submission to the master. Patterson's "celebrated" comparative study of slavery is designed to identify the "inner dynamics" and "institutional patterns" of slavery (Patterson 1982: ix; Gilroy 1993: 63). The sociologist influentially theorized slavery as the state of social death: "the man who was enslaved was in a permanent condition of liminality and must forever mourn his own social death" (Patterson 1982: 60). Slaves are socially dead to the extent that they are "alienated from all 'rights' or claims of birth" and thus cease to belong in their own right to "any legitimate social order" (5). Enslavement involves the loss of social existence other than under the master's dominance and thus "the incorporation of the slave into the marginal existence of the permanent alien" (54).That this alienation extends to marriage rights is dramatized in *Oroonoko*.

When Oroonoko and Imoinda marry and conceive a child, marriage fails one of its main purposes: the legitimisation of progeny and of the custodial powers of parents. The hereditary status of slavery precludes marriage from fulfilling these very functions (Patterson 1982: 187). One of the crucial differences between Oroonoko's parentage situation and that of the English king James II lies in the fact that plantation slavery contributed substantially to the erasure of family trees among the descendants from enslaved Africans in the West Indies: "One of the most important findings of Michael Craton's study of the oral history of the descendants of the Worthy plantation slaves of Jamaica" (6) was the near impossibility "to trace precise lineage" (Craton 1978: 374-375). In the storyworld, the dissolution of the parental rights, which marriage otherwise secures, contributes to the social death of slavery, too: "This Thought made him [Oroonoko] very uneasy and his Sullenness gave them [the enslavers] some Jealousies of him" (*Oroonoko,* 1995: 93). The pregnancy brings the alienation inherent in slavery into focus and renders Oroonoko and

Imoinda's happiness sullen. Behn configures the masculine drive to preserve patrilineal ancestry as a major cause for Oroonoko's decision to challenge his British enslavers after all: "This new Accident [Imoinda's pregnancy] made him more Impatient of Liberty" (ibid.). The collision of the romance configurations of the Anglo-Roman comparison with the testimonial configurations of hereditary plantation slavery thus marks a major turning point within the emplotment of *Oroonoko*. This discordance tends to move readers and inspire compassion.

Another reversal that distinguishes Behn's novella consists in the enslavement of the enslaver. Commentators have regarded the fact that Oroonoko "is described as having captured and sold black slaves in African wars before he himself was enslaved" as an ideological indicator for the whole work of fiction. Margaret Ferguson, for instance, interprets such "'civilised' doubleness" as an endorsement of "the privileges of the nobility with the profits of the slave trade" (Margaret Ferguson 1994: 179). This argument disregards the heterogeneity of slavery, overlooks the exceptional brutality of plantation slavery in the West Indies and reinforces the Western polarisation of "slaves and nonslaves" (Patterson 1982: 27; Patterson 1967; Mintz 1986: 48-51).

Historians of slavery conceive of a spectrum between two extremes of slavery. In his foundational monograph *Many Thousands Gone*, Ira Berlin distinguishes between a "society with slaves", where slavery exists but does not function as the dominant labour system, and a "slave society", where slavery represents the dominant form of labour and shapes every other social relationship within that society (between man and women, parents and children, husbands and wives, workers and bosses, as well as rulers and rules). Far from justifying slavery, the distinction offers a way to differentiate between West Indian plantation slavery and certain forms of African slavery rather than conflating them as the same evil. The abolitionist pamphlet, written by the former slave trader John Newton and published in 1788, compared British with African slavery as follows:

The state of Slavery, among these wild barbarous people, as we esteem them, is much milder than in our colonies. For as, on the one hand, they have no land in high cultivation, like our West-Indian plantations, and therefore no call for that excessive, unintermitted labour, which exhausts our Slaves; so on the other hand, no man is permitted to draw blood, even from a Slave. (1788: 15-16)4

According to Newton, enslaved labour at the sugar plantations in the Caribbean was merciless whereas slavery among Africans was "much milder". Newton's pamphlet appeared in 1788, but the use of African labour at sugar factories and plantations was already in place since the middle of the seventeenth century. Sidney W. Mintz has established the argument in economic history that the preindustrial state of seventeenth-century British society does not preclude the "recognition of the industrial aspects of plantation development" in the West Indies during the period (1986: 49). Slaves in the sugar factories, for instance, worked "continuously in shifts lasting all day and part of the night, or the whole of every second or third night" (50). The homodiegetic narrator describes this economy: "Those then whom we make use of to work in our Plantations of Sugar, are Negro's [sic!], Black-Slaves altogether" (*Oroonoko,* 1995: 60). The configurations of Oroonoko as the enslaved enslaver, which the eponymous "royal slave" anticipates, captures the heterogeneity of slavery mentioned by Newton and studied in the history of slavery. The figure of enslaved African enslaver points to aspects of the African practice of slavery in terms other than those of the Western ideology of freedom.

Oroonoko features initially as an enslaver of Africans when he presents the prisoners he has taken in battle to the daughter of the general who gave his life in order to save the prince: "Oroonoko coming from the Wars […] thought in Honour he ought to make a Visit to Imoinda, the Daughter of his Foster-father, the dead General […] to present her with those Slaves that had been taken in this last Battel, as the Trophies of her Father's Victories" (*Oroonoko,* 1995: 63- 64). The scene configures the enslavement of the defeated soldiers as an act of honour attributed to both the killed general and to the victorious prince. The figuration suggests that Oroonoko's reputation as an African hegemonic male depends on the number of dependents he can obtain. It matches the sociological data for sub-Saharan Africa gathered by Patterson, who shows that power and honour are intricately linked in enslavement practices (1982: 79, 11). According to Patterson, slavery served as a means alongside kinship and

4 For a discussion of the contemporary relevance of the conflation of different types of slavery see Akala's *Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire* (2019: 139). For more information about John Newton see the entry in Postma's *The Atlantic Slave Trade*(2003: 95-96).

affinal relations for an "ambitious man" to acquire prestige, which is "critical in *all* African societies" (1982: 83; see Athey and Alarcón 1993: 443, fn. 41). The dishonour experienced by the enslaved prisoners of war directly serves the prince's honour, bolstering his social status and appeal for his love interest Imoinda. Her appreciation reinforces the hero's honour rhetorically.

Furthermore, the figure of the enslaved enslaver contains configurations of African cultures, probably those of the Ashanti people. Scholars have observed that Oroonoko's invented homeland is named after a West African trading post formerly used by English and Dutch slave merchants (Hughes 2012: 127). According to Susan Andrade, "Coromantien, also spelled Coromantyn and Koromanty, was the name given in the New World to ethnic groups like the Ashanti, who came from the interior of the African Gold Coast, now Ghana" (1994: 209). Moira Ferguson notes that "people from that region in question would have spoken Ashanti, Fanti, and possibly some less widely spoken languages such as Twi or Ga" (1992: 342). The configuration of Oroonoko's social relations in Coromantien and in particular his enslavement of prisoners of war runs parallel to customs in a society with slaves like the early Ashanti kingdom in West Africa, also known as Asante.5

The author-narrator describes Oroonoko above all as "Prince" and "General" (*Oroonoko,* 1995: 63). The configuration of Oroonoko, his military merit, his gold and slave resources bear witness to a struggle for hegemonic masculinity in African societies of the period if one follows the character development closely. That Oroonoko belongs to the highest ranks of his society is literally inscribed in his face: the sides of his temples feature the cutaneous carvings of animals, such as "a little Bird" (92). Yet birth alone does not secure his social status. Oroonoko's constant efforts to reinforce his prestige are apparent from his long-standing preoccupation with war and slave trade in the Coromantien narrative, which resonates with the figure of the "big men" and chiefdoms in African history. His struggle for prestige continues even in the conflicted terms of slavery in the Surinamese part of the story. While in the British colony, it is Oroonoko who re-establishes, for instance, after a period of violent confrontation, peaceful relations between the indigenous inhabitants that allow him and the English "open, and free Trade with 'em" (103). This configuration resonates with West African culture. The Asante emerged

5 "Asante." *Encyclopedia Britannica*, 26 January 2021. ‹https://www.britannica.com/topic/As ante›. See also Ivor Wilks who traces the history of the Asante, one of the most powerful peoples of Ghana, from the fifteenth century onwards (Wilks 1993).

from the Akan states at the close of seventeenth century (Wilks 1993). The ethnic group is reported to have the "popular proverb […] If you have not a master, a beast will catch you" (Patterson 1982: 27). The early Asante were a tribal community in which boundaries of social order were porous enough to allow for, and even to fuel, the competition for prestige (Wilks 1993: 95-98; Patterson 1982: 83). This competition extended to any so-called "*abirempon* (big men)", who endeavoured to establish themselves as dominant hegemonic males by engaging in the Atlantic slave trade and using slave labour to clear land and found villages (Miescher 2019: 40). The intradiegetic designations "Prince" and "General" for Oroonoko echo the "*abirempon*".

According to Patterson, the power structures among the colonial Ashanti are typically "personalistic", which means that power structures are direct and open and that the principle of kinship played a crucial role in them (Patterson 1982: 19). Patterson describes the personalistic power idiom as a network of interdependences, which exists irrespective of any Western notions of freedom: "the most unslavelike person was the one in whom a small number of claims, powers, and privileges were spread over a large number of persons; the slave, on the other hand, was someone in whom a large number of claims, privileges and powers were concentrated in a single person [the master]" (27). Within this framework, the only way for a slave to achieve privileges and powers was through the master.

This interdependence goes some way to account for the reversal of fortune that turns the enslaver into the enslaved and for the relation between Oroonoko and his former slaves in Surinam as well. The first response of the enslaved Africans at Parham Hill plantation when they recognize their former slaveholder in Oroonoko is grief. When Oroonoko assures them "he was no better" than "their Fellow-Slave", they deem this piece of news worthwhile "Mourning and condoling" (*Oroonoko,* 1995: 89). The enslavement of their master entails the dissolution of the little access to privileges and power they once had (through him). In traditional African societies, Patterson notes, the difference between enslaver and slave was "difficult for an outsider" to ascertain and came down to the "honorlessness of the slaves" (1982: 83). Oroonoko resists such honourlessness; that is, he insists on his honour despite his enslavement. Holding on to his former status as master, he is able to immediately command respect from his former and other fellow slaves when he decides to rebel. Oroonoko's act of rebellion entails the resumption of his former role as master by representing himself as their access to high social status, a state that the narrator calls "free", once they all escape and return to "his kingdom"

(106). Accordingly, Oroonoko then takes charge of the collective flight from the plantation, which constitutes the act of rebellion.

The representation of the majority of slaves (except for Oroonoko, Tuscan and Imoinda) has been understood as a justification of plantation slavery, dehumanisation and racialisation of Africans. Richard Frohock notes that "Behn's narrative implies that the vast majority of enslaved Coramantiens are naturally suited to their position in the colonial economy" (Frohock 1996: 442). The figure of the African enslaved enslaver complicates this view. Put simply, the narrative configuration shows the power of plantation slavery to trump and dismantle the power of all existing social relations between husband and wife, parents and children, but also (milder) forms of slavery of African societies with slaves.

Crucial to the configuration of the anonymous crowd of Africans on the plantation is their final acceptance of the British masters as their only option to remain alive irrespective of any other former claims, privileges, or power they once had. This resignation manifests itself in the African slaves' participation in Oroonoko's beating. Inasmuch as Oroonoko is defeated in his rebellious struggle for mastery, his former slaves lose his protection (as a master) again and, in turn, become complicit in his public humiliation. The configuration of the failed revolt – the defeat, Bynam's betrayal of the written contract of surrender, and Oroonoko's extremely brutal public flogging – operates as the materialisation of Western plantation slavery in the story. Oroonoko's furious condemnation of the slaves' cowardice – "he was asham'd of endeavoring to make those Free, who were by Nature *Slaves*" (*Oroonoko,*1995: 109) – sets an end to his aspirations to act as the conduit to privileges for his former slaves and expresses his particular outrage about the cowardice of his countrymen. Moreover, the configuration of the Deputy Governor's betrayal – the disregard of the written terms of surrender – and the total humiliation of the whipping marks the turn from Oroonoko's wish to regain his full honour towards the ardent desire for revenge on Bynam and his accomplices.

The third and final reversal features in the execution scene at the end of the novella: unwitnessed martyrdom. The analogy of Oroonoko's quartering with the decapitation of Charles I disregards a crucial difference in Behn's configuration. The scene of Oroonoko's slaughter takes place in the absence of the prime witness, the homodiegetic narrator. This absence is crucial for the distinction between the representations of martyrdom and testimony according to Aleida Assmann. 'Martyrdom' is derived from Greek '*martys*' and "refers to the witness in the religious sense" (Assmann 2006: 268). The lexemes "*martyr* and *martyrdom* maintain an important link with the highly symbolic act of witnessing, as developed in the three monotheistic religions and immediately related to persecution and violent death" (ibid.). Martyrs in Judaism, Christianity and Islam undergo violent death and, in doing so, triumph over their persecutors. For the violent public death to attain the symbolic meaning of martyrdom, the martyr "depends on someone to witness the suffering, to identify him or her as a martyr (rather than a justly persecuted rebel), and to codify the story for future generations" (ibid.). Such witness and codification exist for Charles I (to attain the symbolic meaning of martyrdom), but the author-narrator's absence from the scene of execution bars the figuration of Oroonoko from it.

However, the narratorial absence corroborates the configuration of the final scene as a testimony in the tradition of ancient Greek tragedy and Shakespearean drama, according to which the messenger conveys the news of the catastrophe from which he has escaped. To quote the dying Hamlet, in act 5, scene 2, when he asks Horatio to be his witness: "Absent thee … in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, to tell my story" (qtd. in Assmann 2006: 267- 268). The function of the witness is to describe "what cannot be brought onto the stage, in the name of those who are no longer able to speak for themselves" (Assmann 2006: 268). Likewise, the author-narrator is removed from the scene of horror while the last sentence of her testimonial configuration omits the main subject's name: "to make his Glorious Name to survive to all ages; with that of the Brave, the Beautiful and the Constant*Imoinda*" (*Oroonoko,* 1995: 119).

The testimonial register of the final scene is consistent with the notion of slavery as social death. Inasmuch as slavery brings about the "secular excommunication" of the enslaved (Patterson 1982: 5), the latter and in particular the enslaved African man is excluded from the powerful symbolism of martyrdom in Western representation. There is no possibility for triumph in the configuration of Oroonoko's death. Faith is not at stake in this scene, nor collective identity, nor solidarity or compassion (see Griffin 2019). Instead, the scene graphically configures torture with the exception of the pipe as a token of remaining masculine dignity. The scene, first published in London in 1688, influentially configures the iconography of the brutalized male black body, which has been remediated and fetishized in multiple media up to the present day (as such in the case of the video recordings of the murder of George Floyd

by a U.S. policeman on 25th May 2020). At the same time, the narrative by virtue of its written composition and thanks to the literary acumen of its author represents readers up to the current day with the troubling discordances that challenge Western understandings of the relation of master and slave.

Having said this, the ending does not determine the significance of the entire narrative. The contradictions in Oroonoko's actions embedded in the storyworld resist the complete infrahuman codification of the final paragraphs (Gilroy 2000: 22). Crucially, the peripeteia of the plot lend Behn's hero the singularity that distinguishes this figure in literary history, transcends the operations of the then nascent racialized typologies as well as those of the moral exemplar and elevates him to the level of an exceptional human being: "*this Great Man*" (*Oroonoko,* 1995: 56). The incomparability inherent in the actions of the enslaved African warrior-prince thus corroborates the foundational role of Aphra Behn's *Oroonoko* in the emergence of the novel as a literary genre.

#### **Bibliography**

Azim, Firdous. *The Colonial Rise of the Novel*. London: Routledge, 1993.

*naissance Culture*. Ed. David Lee Miller, Sharon O'Dair, and Harold Weber. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. 151-189.

### **Articulating Differences: Practices of Comparing in British Travel Writing of the Long Eighteenth Century**

*Nadine Böhm-Schnitker*

#### **1. Introduction**

The time frame from the Glorious Revolution to Romanticism – the time frame of the long eighteenth century – is crucially defined by an increasing dominance of comparative practices that are fundamentally "entrenched in networks of circulation of bodies, artefacts, discourses and ideas", as we argue in the introduction to this edited collection (16). In that context, the modern novel emerges as a symptomatic genre that provides ample opportunities for comparisons on all literary levels, first and foremost certainly on the level of the characters in a system of contrasts and correspondences together with the level of narrative transmission (see the contribution by Hartner/Schneider).1 Comparisons are understood as the outcomes of comparative *practices* and, as such, they are "interwoven with the interests and perspectives of the ones who compare" (Epple/Erhart 2020: 16). They do not only occur intraculturally – for example with reference to modes of behaviour in different social classes or with regard to different genders – but also interculturally, predominantly with reference to other cultures and ethnicities. The texts under consideration here – Aphra Behn's *Oroonoko* (1688) and Daniel Defoe's *The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner* (1719) – vicariously and imaginatively negotiate such comparative practices and they reflect on the fundamental interdependence of self and other in the emergence of the modern Western individual by a generic hybridity that combines (auto)biograph-

1 On different types of comparing in narrative fiction, see also the contribution by Anne Lappert in this volume.

ical with travel writing: the emerging novelistic 'individual' or 'self ' is thus crucially articulated with the 'other' encountered abroad. A generic hybrid, Behn's novella represents a mixture between a memoir of the author herself, a biography of its main character Oroonoko, a novel, an Oriental romance, a heroic tragedy, and a New World travel story (see Gallagher 2000: 13). Defoe's *Robinson Crusoe* is equally defined by overlapping genre conventions, as this fictional autobiography draws on both travel writing and the spiritual autobiography.

The genre of the novel develops at a time when British colonial expansion is in the midst of a "shift from a subsistence-based to profit-oriented colonial economy dependent on African slaves" (Wheeler 1995: 825). However, the work force required for plantations, e.g. sugar plantations, was rather diverse between the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, and thus both the actual interethnic encounters of the emerging Empire as well as the genres negotiating such encounters draw on quite diverse "racialized differences competing for dominance", including "religion, national origin, ownership of property, or skin color" (Wheeler 1995: 839); thus, "emergent racialized categories of difference are indeed produced" in order to legitimate and undergird social stratifications between 'masters', 'servants' and 'slaves', but they "are not stable in either the literary or social text" (852). Indeed, skin colour seems to take on a new significance after 1680 (see 839), and hence I employ it as a particular focus point in this article on practices of comparing in British travel writing of the long eighteenth century.

In a social context, comparative practices can be considered paramount cultural practices that are employed for social stratification in the contact zones of colonial encounters. In the literary field, comparative practices crucially impact on the construction and authority of narrators, the construction and constellation of characters, the very notion of 'character' as well as the construction of space. It is my aim in this chapter to explore the cultural relevance of comparative practices in the emerging novel genre as a literary negotiation of British colonial expansion that is articulated with the emergence of the 'individual' as marked by categories of difference such as race, class and gender. For that end, I will focus on the interconnection between the literary construction of and interaction between characters and spaces as mediated by different kinds of narrators. I will show that the literary 'individual' emerges defined by a close articulation of economic/capitalist, political/colonial and social discourses that shapes and determines the viability of subjects in the

long eighteenth century. Comparative practices are the means by which this subject gains its contours.

The strong generic impact of travel writing on the development of the novel in the long eighteenth century is reason enough to underline the relevance of "spatialization" in the genre (Herman 2002: 263), in the sense that narratives are "systems of verbal or visual prompts anchored in mental models that have a particular spatial structure. More exactly, narratives represent the world being told about as one having a specific spatial structure" (264). Travel writing enacts such a narrative construction of space and ties it closely to the characters that experience these spaces. It is the character narrators defined by 'whiteness' that guide readers into new and unseen spaces in which intercultural encounters occur. Spatial structures also impact on the possible interactions between the traveller with the people inhabiting the spaces encountered. Hence, my approach to comparative practices is defined by a double-focus on characters and spaces and their construction in the transnational contexts of travel writing. The "unparalleled popularity" (Batten 1978: 1) of travel writing in the eighteenth century is rooted in *practices* of comparing that comprise close observation and description of the environments and people encountered as well as collecting, sorting, classifying, contextualizing and naming (see Epple/Erhart 2015: 10). Drawing on postcolonial studies, I will focus on the co-emergence of 'individuals' and 'environments' in the intimate intertextualities between travel writing and the novel in the long eighteenth century (see Reckwitz 2003: 283).

The increase in publications on the intercultural encounter with the ethnic other in the British empire coincides with a transition of power forms: In a Foucauldian paradigm, the long eighteenth century is associated with a turn to biopower and, tied to that, the emergence of racism in the context of a biological understanding of 'races' that impacts on the way in which intercultural encounters become envisaged (see Foucault 1990: 137-143). While biopolitics represent a form of power intent on managing, securing and prolonging life (see 137-138), racism is the concomitant ideology and technology to safeguard the function of killing within such a power form (see Lemke 2003: 161) that develops more fully during the second half of the nineteenth century (see Foucault 1990: 149). As Thomas Lemke elucidates, racism serves to generate a norm; the norms producing a 'normal' body rely on practices of comparing to ascertain deviations from established norms, to evaluate differences and to structure interventions (see 162). Practices of comparing serve as the praxeological articulation of an emerging biopolitics with racism during the long

eighteenth century, and this applies both to the construction of an Anglo-Saxon 'whiteness' as a norm and an African 'blackness' as a deviation from the established norm that only emerges through comparative practices that also need to tackle a complicated colour spectrum between these emerging 'poles'; hence, I will concentrate particularly on practices of comparing with the *comparata* being characters and the *tertium comparationis* being skin colour, social status, habitus, modes of behaviour and ways of thinking as markers of an emerging concept of 'race', while the agents performing the comparison are either narrators or characters. As Angelika Epple has shown, 'race' as a category of difference pertaining to human beings can be understood as an effect or outcome of comparative practices: "Comparing simultaneously creates similarities and differences in respect to a *tertium* (such as race). Overcoming racial discrimination in everyday life would mean overcoming discourses on racial comparisons" (2020: 323). An analysis and critique of racism thus needs to tackle comparative practices in particular. In Behn and Defoe, skin colour begins to be singled out as a central determiner of racial difference that allows for the classification and social stratification of bodies; this distinction turns into the central focus for racialized practices of comparing in the respective texts and it is these that deserve further scrutiny. My guiding hypothesis is that 'skin colour' as an analytical focus point may serve as a turnstile that interconnects questions of the expansion of Empire in its ideological, economic and spatial scope and helps to make 'self ' and 'other' visible in interethnic encounters, in which 'self ' and 'other' co-emerge as discursive products of travel writing.

Within the context of British Empire-building, "comparing as a globalized practice was perceived as practice of modern dominance, a tool of power, which perpetuates related relations of hegemony and subordination, center and periphery, sameness and difference" (Rocha Teixeira 2019: 6) and as a marker of modernity more generally (see Foucault 1974): "the encounters, conflicts, and entanglements of different cultures and the evolution of a comparative scholarly methodology were just two sides of one coin: the making of so-called 'Western' modernity" (Epple/Erhart 2020: 25). Hence, comparisons serve as discursive practices that construct the binaries they purport to describe. In transcultural encounters, however, comparisons are made reciprocally and may provide a means of resistance (see Rocha Teixeira 2019: 7). While taxonomies certainly represent the result of comparative practices as power/knowledge, they do not remain uncontested. Their cultural plausibility hinges on perspective, and hence narrative perspective is an important focus

for the analysis of the (fictional) (auto)biographies chosen here. Postcolonial studies have significantly shaped the way in which Behn's and Defoe's narratives have been read. They raised awareness that, in travel writing, travellers "never look on places anew or completely independently but perceive them instead through an accretion of others' accounts" (Youngs 2013: 9). The whole undertaking of travel writing consequently represents a complex effort of cultural hermeneutics in the connection of intercultural encounters, a reflection on perception and its intermedial coding, as well as its translation into cultural forms. It is perhaps not surprising that travel writers set their tales in heterotopic spaces – colonies, islands, ships – and present the described interactions between characters as a kind of experiment that diminishes the tales' direct social impact.2 Furthermore, the picaresque structure of the stories allows for the description of only loosely connected scenes that need not describe a continuous sphere of the real but that only present selections of possibilities. The comparative practices employed, however, clearly "contribute to shaping, ordering, and changing the world" (Kramer/Rohland 2021: 3), and have a crucial impact on the development of racism (see e.g. Wheeler 1995: 822-823; 852).

#### **2. Aphra Behn,** *Oroonoko* **(1688)**

Aphra Behn's 1688 novella *Oroonoko* became paradigmatic both for its importance for the development of the novel – there is an intertextual impact on Daniel Defoe's *Robinson Crusoe* (1719), for instance – despite the fact that it is interspersed with what we would now consider racist descriptions of its main character. The novella's ideological ambivalence is reflected on several literary levels, among them prominently the level of genre and the level of the narrative situation that is characterized by a clear difference between the narrating and the experiencing I of the novella's author-narrator.

*Oroonoko* provides an early example of the close connection of comparative practices, the embodiment of social positionalities and an emergent racism in a biopolitical context. Its cultural legacy reveals the wider repercussions of

2 A heterotopia serves as "a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted" (Foucault 1986: 24).

Behn's articulation of the literary value of prose fiction, gendered author positions and racialized notions of slavery. Being considered "the first English narrative with an African hero" (Gallagher 2000: ix-x), *Oroonoko* represents a novelty in terms of its production, its subject matter and its narrative strategy. The story centres on the fate of the African prince and later king Oroonoko as well as of his wife Imoinda. In close succession, both are abducted from Coramantien, an English trading port situated in today's Ghana, and taken to the English colony of Surinam in the mid-1660s that Behn claims to have visited herself in 1664.3 Depicting the triangular trade between Britain, Africa and the West Indies, the author-narrator throws into relief the different memory traces that the characters take with them to the colony. In this setting, transcultural memories come to intersect; they "migrate from one continent to another with individuals. […] As migrants carry their heritage, memories and traumas with them, these are transferred and brought into new social constellations and political contexts" (Assmann/Conrad 2010: 2). Behn's *Oroonoko* constructs transcultural memories of slavery as defined by multiple categories of difference and, more specifically, multiple intersections of race, class, and gender. With that, comparative practices become paramount for the different kinds of encounters set in the fictional space of Surinam. Furthermore, *Oroonoko* is fraught with questions of authorization and negotiations of power that are frequently played out on bodies. The novella performs the containment of a slave rebellion or revolution, ending with the representation of Oroonoko's dismembered body re-united by 'a female Pen' for commercial reproduction.

The colonial space in Surinam serves as a paradigmatic heterotopia (see Foucault 1986: 27) that allows for both a collision and a rearrangement of forms of knowledge and transcultural memories, thus provoking a plethora of comparative practices that define the narrative stance significantly: The author-narrator compares the Carib Indians of Surinam with the Coramantiens, and each group with the British settlers as well as 'common' slaves; she compares her own position in the colony with other representatives of power and with her former situation; she compares the power hierarchies in Surinam with those in Britain; she compares her gendered position with other options of narrating and compares her narrating with her experiencing self etc.

3 "During the trade war that broke out in 1665 […] Behn traveled to the Low Countries on a spying mission for King Charles II" (Greenblatt 2013: 1005). Surinam, or Willoughbyland, was an English colony from 1650 to 1667.

Oroonoko, in turn, compares different kinds of behaviour, e.g. his own code of honour, with the other social groups represented in the novella; he compares himself with 'common' slaves and draws conclusions for his future social position. These comparisons are very visibly embodied, which is shown by the care the novella takes to describe characters' bodies, particularly Oroonoko's, and especially his gory end; the narrator's position is equally embodied as an overt, female author-narrator who, on the level of the real author, represents the first British woman to earn her living by her pen.

The complex articulation of the act of writing as a gendered practice with new constructions of memory is already stressed in the novella's paratext. In 'The Epistle Dedicatory', the author-narrator states that the following narrative is "a short Chronicle of those Lives that possibly wou'd be forgotten by other Historians, or lye neglected there, however deserving an immortal Fame" (5). In her recovery of lives that remain excluded from dominant historiographic discourse, Behn draws attention to a gendering in historiography by way of an implicit comparison: while male historiographers would most probably have overlooked her subject entirely, she as a female historiographer does record the biography of a black slave. This comparison between male and female historiographers with a view to their subject choice is geared towards an economic consideration: only as a novelty can the text be turned into a commodity – *Oroonoko* is a text that needs to be 'sold', it is an object of exchange between the writer, her patron and a wider public readership. Novelty is constructed by telling the tales of peoples deemed hardly representable as main characters in literature and by emphasising the exotism of both the characters and their different settings: "If there be any thing that seems Romantick, I beseech your Lordship to consider, these Countries do, in all things, so far differ from ours, that they produce unconceivable Wonders; at least, they appear so to us, because New and Strange" (7). In the paratext, the author-narrator defines both her narrative as well as her role as a narrator by a way of thinking in terms of identity and difference; the novella can thus be understood as the result of diverse comparative practices.

She opens her narrative with a central distinction between the native inhabitants of Surinam and peoples that, in contrast to these, can be turned into slaves.4 While the Surinamese are governed by a hegemony based on consent, slaves can be dominated by force according to her account:

4 However, there is a central contradiction in the author-narrator's account when she mentions "Our Indian Slaves, that Row'd us" (*Oroonoko*, 1997: 51), which illustrates the

So that they being, on all Occasions, very useful to us, we find it absolutely necessary to caress 'em as Friends, and not to treat 'em as Slaves; nor dare we do other, their Numbers so far exceeding ours in that *Continent*. Those then whom we make use of to work in our Plantations of Sugar, are *Negro's*, *Black*-Slaves altogether. (*Oroonoko*, 1997: 11)

Correspondingly, the native Indians are widely idealized in the novella, while the slaves, stemming mainly from Coramantien, are subject to a more complicated representational regime. Oroonoko being one of them, he needs to be singled out in different terms but skin colour, and the central category of difference here is class. As a king, Oroonoko embodies the title-giving oxymoron of the "Royal Slave" and thus represents an oddity in the general class of slaves, clearly marked by their skin colour and their presumed subservience in the text. This classification of peoples becomes most obvious at the moment when Oroonoko, himself a slave trader, is betrayed by his trading partners and sold into slavery. Once part of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, he becomes subject to a different system of classification because his skin colour turns him into a tradable commodity as soon as he leaves Coramantien and with it the social context in which he is distinguished as a king; the Middle Passage over the Atlantic marks his entry into a heterotopia in which the laws of the land are suspended. Or, as Catherine Gallagher has put it:

the fact that the colonists were making up racialized slavery as they went along in the seventeenth century and that it was a local institution at the heart of an intercontinental enterprise led to marked discrepancies in the way Africans were perceived in the different 'worlds' of the trade. (2000: 9)

The author-narrator throws into relief the practice of racialization via skin colour when she, as a character in her own right, meets Oroonoko in Surinam and reveals who can be turned into a slave and who cannot. For example, Oroonoko's tutor, a French-man and a Christian, who belongs to Oroonoko's entourage when he is abducted, is the only one who remains a free man in Surinam, purportedly because he is a Christian (see *Oroonoko*, 1997: 40), a creed Oroonoko refuses to adopt. While, first and foremost, the marker here seems to be religion, it is also centrally skin colour: Oroonoko's French tutor is the only white member of his entourage; 'freedom' and 'whiteness' thus

instabilities of such categories are between the 1660s and 1680s and how contradictory the discourse on these differences can be correspondingly.

become conflated and associated. Oroonoko's perceived difference, however, needs to be adapted and assimilated to European (beauty) standards in order that his enslavement can be understood as a problem at all in the context of the novel's Eurocentric ideology:

He was pretty tall, but of a Shape the most exact that can be fancy'd: The most famous Statuary cou'd not form the Figure of a Man more admirably turn'd from Head to Foot. His Face was not of that brown, rusty Black which most of that Nation are, but a perfect Ebony, or polish'd Jett. His Eyes were the most awful that cou'd be seen, and very piercing; the White of 'em being like Snow, as were his Teeth. His Nose was rising and *Roman*, instead of *African* and flat. (13)

In this racist idealization, Oroonoko's 'Africanness' is recognizable only with regard to his blackness, but a blackness that distinguishes him from 'typical' Africans who are defined by a "brown, rusty black" (13). The text indeed betrays a clear subdivision of the human continuum into those that can and those that cannot be enslaved. As part of this process of narrative assimilation, Oroonoko is made intelligible by reference to two different forms of art: in the quotation, his beauty is likened to a *statue* of blackness, and, in the novella more generally, he is portrayed as the protagonist of the *heroic tragedy*. As a beauty ideal, he becomes a textual commodity that the author-narrator herself can turn to profit; commodified beauty yields exchange value. Towards the end of the novella, however, his idealized body disintegrates entirely. Outside of the novella's established artful and artificial norms, Oroonoko becomes unintelligible, a disintegrated body (see Butler 2004: 30). Behn's novella reveals that Oroonoko is only intelligible by way of his assimilation to European conventions, and otherwise quite outside of the boundaries of 'the human' as constructed by these comparative practices.

As Oroonoko dies, the contours of the author-narrator, the heroine of the *auto*biography, come to be delineated all the more clearly. While the initial comparative practice articulated in the paratext distinguishes the female historiographer from her male colleagues by way of her subject choice – the biography of a black character hitherto allegedly unwritten – the main body of the text employs comparative practices that finally lead to the substitution of the biography with the autobiography; they help to fashion the female writer as authoritative author persona claiming cultural distinction in the face of the utter destruction of her subjects:

They cut *Caesar* in Quarters, and sent them to several of the chief *Plantations*: […]. Thus Dy'd this Great Man; worthy of a better Fate, and a more sublime Wit than mine to write his Praise; yet, I hope, the Reputation of my Pen is considerable enough to make his Glorious Name to survive to all Ages; with that of the Brave, the Beautiful, and the Constant *Imoinda*. (*Oroonoko*, 1997: 65)

What remains after the death of the subjects of Behn's biography, is her *auto*biographical self, the self that emerges as a consequence of her travels to Surinam. She returns with a story to sell and a self to promote. She represents herself as a female writer who is able – like Shakespeare in his own day – to grant literary eternity to her characters.

The construction of the author-narrator's individuality not only coincides with the destruction of her racialized protagonists but also with her masterly representation of space. Apart from her implicit comparison of herself both with Oroonoko and Imoinda, Behn also assumes a dominant role by way of spatialization. The author-narrator is the one to create the spatial structure of Surinam and to present a particular hierarchy of spaces that is also reflected in the mapping of the territory. Apart from mapping the territory (all texts analyzed here also include maps), the author-narrator describes spaces so as to set a scene for encounters and figural dramas. One short paragraph introduces the setting of the main action in the novella for Oroonoko: "The Scene of the last part of his Adventures lies in a Colony in *America*, called *Surinam*, in the *West-Indies*" (8), where the inhabitants live "so like our first Parents before the Fall" (9). The native inhabitants of Surinam are thus compared to the biblical Adam and Eve before sin came into the world. Surinam is portrayed as an Edenic space, a space in which actual experiences and historical events are still suspended in a mythical realm. This Eden is then constructed as the uninscribed foil for the events to come in the colonial space, in which slaves from "*Coramantien*, a Country of *Blacks* so called" (11), arrive to work in the plantations. That the cultural encounters staged in this setting contribute to the emergence of the white, western individual becomes conspicuous in a scene staged particularly for the native inhabitants of Surinam. Together with Oroonoko, the author-narrator and several other persons decide to travel to an "*Indian* Town" (47) and concoct a surprise visit as

we, who resolv'd to surprize 'em, by making 'em see something they never had seen, (that is, White People) resolv'd only my self, my Brother, and Woman shou'd go […]. By degrees they grew more bold, and from gazing upon us round, they touch'd us; laying their Hands upon all the Features of our Faces, feeling our Breasts and Arms, taking up one Petticoat, then wondering to see another; […] In fine, we suffer'd 'em to survey us as they pleas'd, and we thought they would never have done admiring us. (48)

While it is the native inhabitants here who seem to appropriate the power of an observing gaze and prove transgressive in their haptic exploration of their others, the tables are soon turned. After making numerous enquiries about these strangers with a fisherman who mediates between the Surinamese and the "White People" – they ask "If we had Sense, and Wit? If we cou'd talk of affairs of Life, and War, as they could do?" (49) – the fisherman soon ascertains comparability (see 49). The author-narrator, however, concludes that the Surinamese prove so ignorant and gullible that "it were not too difficult to establish any unknown or extravagant Religion among them; and to impose any Notions or Fictions upon 'em" (49). This scene nicely illustrates the fact that comparisons are practices in particular historical and social contexts imbued with power hierarchies. '*Doing* comparisons' (see Epple/Erhart 2020: 20) depends on social status and the author-narrator, while granting the Surinamese some agency in this situation, soon reveals that the "White People" wield epistemological power to which the native inhabitants do not have access in Behn's narrative. Nevertheless, the encounter, quite literally, renders the contours of the author-narrator and her entourage visible; thus, comparative practices throw into relief the connection of whiteness and (epistemic) power embodied in the author-narrator once more. The reader learns that the skin the Surinamese touch is white, they learn what the author-narrator wears and the skills she has. Her 'self ' is shaped in this encounter by the touch of the Indians, and it is a self whose characterization is directed as in a play by the author-narrator herself. She is the one to allocate roles and to highlight particular discoveries over others in a scene she herself has set.

The orchestration of arriving and leaving, presenting and hiding, permitting and forbidding is dependent on the author-narrator's strategies of spatialization. The individual and the surrounding environment are equiprimordial in *Oroonoko*. When the author-narrator learns about gold in the Amazonas, the river is described as being "almost as broad as the River of Thames" (51); this 'almost but not quite' similarity between the respective rivers illustrates how comparative practices subject Surinam to an English mapping. Historically, however, this power over space and gold is lost as the colony is ceded to the Dutch, a process that is frequently aligned with the Glorious Revolution that ends the Stuart dynasty in favour of King William of Orange (see Monika Class' article in this volume). As a staunch supporter of the Stuarts, Behn can only cling to the patronage by her Jacobite dedicatee Lord Maitland in 1688. The literal abduction of Oroonoko from Coramantien is transposed into a logical abduction that suggests that economically successful authorship by female writers is possible, albeit at the price of the utter commodification of the racialized other. *Oroonoko* as a text paving the way for the emergence of the novel thus closely aligns female middle-class authorship with whiteness and singles out skin colour as a crucial if not yet dominant racial signifier.

#### **3. Daniel Defoe,** *Robinson Crusoe* **(1719)**

Daniel Defoe's *Robinson Crusoe* "occupies a crucial place in literary history's account of the emergence of the modern English novel and for that matter of the beginning of the modern European novel" (Richetti 2018: xiii). Postcolonial theorists such as Edward Said "have looked especially at cultural forms as the novel", because he considers it "immensely important in the formation of imperial attitudes, references, and experiences" and, like Richetti, singles out *Robinson Crusoe* as the "prototypical modern realistic novel" that, symptomatically, deals with "a European who creates a fiefdom for himself on a distant, non-European island" (1994: 9-10). Said further considers Robinson's founding "a new world, which he rules and reclaims for England" as closely intertwined with the novel genre (Said 1994: 74). There are two issues at stake in these evaluations: Firstly, there is an odd slippage between England and Europe which is indicative of the co-emergence of a notion of 'whiteness' that is not clearly defined by nationality and the novel; secondly, the novel is established as the medium and central receptacle for articulations of aesthetic, economic and political discourses that allow for such an English/European modern identity to develop in contradistinction to 'the new world'. With comparisons as central cognitive practices defining modernity, the following analysis is an attempt at unravelling these interdependences that are constitutive of the 'modern' subject of the eighteenth century. Both the emergence of the modern novel and the emergence of the 'English/European' 'modern' subject envisioned as an 'individual' are rooted in comparative practices that intersect and ossify over time as myths of this origination.

"*Robinson Kreutznaer*" or later "*Crusoe*" (*Robinson Crusoe*, 2007: 5), the novel's hero and autodiegetic narrator, is of German descent, which might be the reason to construct the 'modern' subject as white or *European* rather than more specifically *English*. Robinson Crusoe, crucially, indicates the Anglo-Saxon roots of the Englishness presented in the novel. As Laura Doyle has convincingly established, this proves part and parcel of the contemporary articulation of discourses on Anglo-Saxonism, racism and freedom; besides, it indicates a "key shift in English self-fashioning, a turn away from a classical and Briton lineage and toward an Anglo-Saxon, Germanic one, a genealogy hereafter creating the nativist freedom legacy at the core of Whig ideology" (2007: 198). More generally, she traces "modern race ideologies to the Atlantic economy" and shows

that in England a prior formation of racial thinking – predating its full-scale slave trade and linking race to a freedom legacy – has given rise to its plot, its purchase, and its force in (at least) the English-language Atlantic world. That is, in early seventeenth-century England, under conditions of civil war and an emergent capitalist economy, the coupling of race and freedom issued in the notion that true history entails the progress of a race toward religious, economic, and political freedom. […] Ultimately, the notion of freedom as a racially inherited desire provided the mythic teleology of the English-speaking Atlantic world, one that still propels the speeches of its leaders. (Doyle 2007: 195-196)

Doyle describes a symptomatic connection between race, economics, politics and religion that also serves as the foundation of a view of history as directed from the desire for freedom to its eventual realization inherent in this mythic Anglo-Saxon genealogy which is bolstered further by legal discourses (see Doyle 2007: 198-199).

'The' novel offers a highly hybrid and variable genre for the further negotiation of this interconnection. As a commodity in its own right, the novel contributes to turning "the racialized rhetoric of liberty [into] a transatlantic phenomenon, embedding it deep in the structures of English-language narrative" (Doyle 2007: 200). The very language of the novel fundamentally hinges on its close ties with Britain's colonial expansion as an articulation of economics, politics, religion, and history as markers of British identity as 'white'. Anglo-Saxon whiteness is thrown into further relief in trans-Atlantic encounters as mediated in and by travel writing that *Robinson Crusoe* relies on as a generic precursor. Eve Tavor Bannet has highlighted the close interconnection between Britain's colonial itineraries and Robinson's route of travel:

Giving Robinson's voyage such geographical specificity on what was British shipping's standard circum-Atlantic route to and from the Americas, enabled epitomes to make *Robinson Crusoe* a story about the perils that Robinson faced as a mariner in a dangerous multinational Atlantic world, dominated by Barbary pirates, Africans, and Caribs, as well as by the Spaniards and Portuguese. (2018: 130)

It is Robinson's encounters and indirect comparisons with these nationalities and ethnicities constituted as the others of Anglo-Saxon whiteness that further define the character. Robinson Crusoe represents the literary embodiment of the articulation of Whig economics, politics, Puritanism and a rhetoric of freedom as the norm of the subject of the emerging realism of the eighteenth-century novel. Defoe's novel draws its plot motivation from Britain's trans-Atlantic ties in its search for 'new' worlds and workforce in triangular trade connections as depicted in *Oroonoko* and makes Robinson emerge as an individualized *homo economicus* (Watt 2000 [1957]: 63) who is clearly marked as white and male. This emergence is made possible, among other things, by a racialized spatial politics with its concomitant comparative practices as well as by a closeting of homosocial desire by way of its transference onto the island as a heterotopic space.

In a first step, the very opening of the novel may serve to illustrate the emphasis on Robinson's German roots and his close connection to trade:

I Was born in the Year 1632, in the City of *York*, of a good Family, tho' not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of *Bremen*, who settled first at *Hull*: He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at *York*, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named *Robinson*, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called *Robinson Kreutznaer*. (*Robinson Crusoe*, 2007: 5)

While this opening decidedly introduces Robinson as an *individual* – by way of starting with the first personal pronoun 'I' and the indication of his family genealogy together with his father's migratory background and social stratification – the paratext underlines the *exemplary* function of this individual for the reader in order to justify as well as perform a concentration on the middle classes in literature. In the "Preface", the fictional editor argues that "*If ever the Story of any private Man's Adventures in the World were worth making Publick, and were acceptable when Publish'd, the Editor of this Account thinks this will be so*" (*Robinson Crusoe*, 2007: n.p.). His simultaneous function as both individual and exemplum reveals the novelistic reliance on comparative practices – individual life stories need to be compared with a view to their 'tellability' (Baroni 2014), and since their tellability depends on a deviation from established norms, it is justified by way of defining sensational adventures as didactic *exempla* that invite readers to compare their own life stories with the *exemplum*.

Quite in line with the tradition of the spiritual autobiography, Robinson goes on to recount his sinful tendency to disobey his father who recommends, in a direct and explicit comparison of different classes,

the upper Station of *Low Life*, which he had found by long Experience was the best State in the World, the most suited to human Happiness, not exposed to the Miseries and Hardships, the Labour and Sufferings of the mechanick Part of Mankind, and not embarrass'd with the Pride, Luxury, Ambition and Envy of the upper Part of Mankind.5 (*Robinson Crusoe*, 2007: 6)

This paternal norm, however, lacks tellability in the novel, whereas Robinson's deviation from this norm becomes constitutive of the genre's plot lines – comparative practices are thus integral to the emergence of the novel more generally in that an interest in character depends on comparative practices on the side of authors, narrators and readers with regard to the difference between individual fictional characters and established social norms. While the novel's plot conforms to one of its generic precursors, the spiritual biography, in that it leads Robinson from his sinful life and disregard for both father and God through repentance to 'salvation', it is the time of repentance on the island that becomes the core interest for the narrative in *Robinson Crusoe*. It is exactly the deviation from the – religiously sanctioned – norm that generates 'interest' in both the senses of the motivation for reading and economic turnover. While one of the eighteenth-century ideals for a good life is moderation, the novel genre's *raison d'être* depends on the outcome of readers' evaluations of the deviations from the norm that generate interest. On the intratextual level, Robinson's disregard for established norms allows him to generate interest in an economic sense, too, since his journeys turn him into a successful businessman whose time on the island translates into money (see Spivak 1990: 6): Robinson owns a plantation in Brazil that generates profit for him even without his presence.

5 On social comparisons between classes in Defoe's novel and beyond, see the contribution by Hartner/Schneider in this volume.

Defoe's story is set "on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River Oroonoque" (Defoe 2007: title page, n.p.) – the river that divides Guyana from Surinam – and thus in the vicinity of Behn's Surinam. While the setting at the river alludes to the name of Behn's protagonist, the two early novels are interconnected by intertextual ties with *Robinson Crusoe* consolidating the generic reliance on travel writing combined with the (auto)biography. Another central intertextual convergence lies in the descriptions of the respective narrators' others, and these descriptions are fraught with insecurities regarding the way in which the respective 'object' is to be narrated; it is this insecurity in the process of narration that reveals the crucial role of comparative practices as a basis of both modernity and the modern novel. As a generic conglomerate, the novel makes the white 'individual' emerge by way of comparative practices intended to reveal the similarities and differences between 'self ' and its 'other'. 'Capturing' the other – either as slaves or as objects of narration – proves an endeavour fundamentally dependent on comparative practices. Both *Oroonoko* and *Robinson Crusoe* show that it is decidedly *practices* that are geared to render the resulting descriptions of the respective others in any way reliable, trustworthy and stable in a narrative. The narrative strategies employed for 'producing' the other in discourse are frequently characterized by repetitions intended to fix meanings; however, such iterative narrative practices may inject insecurities in the versions presented whenever they entail variations and contradictions. Symptomatically, in the process of reception and in the multiple adaptations and appropriations of *Robinson Crusoe* (see Richetti 2018: 15), these insecurities were frequently harmonized. As Rivka Swenson has shown, "Crusoe's errors and self-contradictions are the signal evidence of his own foregrounded composition-and-revision methodology (omitting, expanding, transposing, consolidating, making-things-up)" (2018: 20). There is a decided rift in what he narrates in his journal as a contemporary record of the experiencing I and how he represents the entries retrospectively (see Swenson 2018: 20-21); what is more, the limited supply in ink and paper on the island renders it questionable how extensive the journal actually is and (see *Robinson Crusoe*, 2007: 56; 89), consequently, how reliable Crusoe's narrative can be on the basis of this 'journal'. "In the journal, two voices overlap awkwardly" and construct a narrative mismatch of different versions of "two Crusoes" (Swenson 2018: 21), so that ultimately, the novel tells the story of "a writer who overtly manipulates his story and audience, shaping by hindsight, reading the present into the past, omitting and compressing toward an end, forging a chain of

narrative reciprocity" (25). Clearly, it is the concatenation of events that is crucial and the question of whether these narrative concatenations add up or create inconsistencies. The novel thus invites practices of comparing both on the intratextual and on the intertextual level, and it is such networks of cross-references and strategies of narrative suture that prove fundamental for the discursive construction of eighteenth-century modernity.

While Behn installs an I-as-witness as narrator that moves increasingly into the centre of attention as her actual object, Oroonoko, slips from view, Defoe's novel is narrated by an I-as-protagonist, further characterized by a large difference between narrating and experiencing I, or what Rivka Swenson calls the "hindsight-version" of the narrator (Swenson 2018: 20). The ways in which Oroonoko and Friday are described bear multiple similarities that may also account for the fact that Friday is frequently considered to be a black character in readings or adaptations and appropriations of the novel (see Wheeler 1995: 823). The conflation between otherness and blackness rests on the conception of Friday as a slave, a conception, however, that frequently slips from 'slave' to 'servant' to 'man' in the novel and consequently proves highly slippery, reflecting "a larger cultural uncertainty about the significance of racial difference in the early eighteenth century" and its concomitant social stratification (Wheeler 1995: 821-822). For Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, I argue that comparative practices abound because they prove central for the hermeneutic process of encountering and understanding the island, its possible inhabitants and himself. Robinson implicitly compares the island to places he is familiar with and subjects it to comparable conceptual mappings. When he surveys the island from an elevated point of view, thus exerting the visual power of the male gaze over the landscape, he comments:

I descended a little on the Side of that delicious Valley, surveying it with a secret Kind of Pleasure, (tho' mixt with my other afflicting Thoughts) to think that all this was my own, that I was King and Lord of all this Country indefeasibly and had a Right of Possession; and if I could convey it, I might have it in Inheritance, as completely as any Lord of a Mannor in *England*. (*Robinson Crusoe*, 2007: 85)

His cognitive grasp of the island is coded by political notions of sovereignty and economic as well as legal notions of possession and inheritance as established in *England*, which serves as a conceptual blend (see Fauconnier/Turner 2002) to hermeneutically appropriate the island. The male gaze that awards him a "*secret* Kind of Pleasure" surveying the landscape (Defoe 2007: 85, my emphasis) additionally entails the pleasure of voyeuristic desire and eroticizes Robinson's relation to the landscape (see Turley 2003: 3). Such eroticization is transferred onto his 'subjects' in his kingdom and becomes most visible when he observes his "Man *Friday*" (Defoe 2007: 175). The island and its people are thus tied together metonymically, shedding light upon one another by proxy; spatialization and characterization closely intersect. Such conceptual blends in the narrative serve as central comparative practices that allow insights into the ways in which Robinson Crusoe subjects the island and all its inhabitants to his cognitive mastery, which, as the 'sovereign' of the island, pre-empts himself from the process. While, in Robinson's narrative discourse, the comparative practice of blending presents a form of constructing different semantic fields as congruent, a focus on the metonymical practices of concatenation, of creating the "Collection of Wonders" (217) that constitutes the narrative, is a way to understand both Robinson's narration and himself. In the following, I am going to focus on the interrelation between Robinson Crusoe and Friday as well as Robinson and the island as central aspects for the complex articulation of the emergence of the modern individual under "the ideology of industrial capitalism" (Watt 2000: 67), the emergence of racism as part of a colonial discourse and the emergence of the novel genre.

While the "primacy of individual economic advantage has tended to diminish the importance of personal as well as group relationships, and especially those based on sex" (Watt 2000: 67), it is homosocial desire that eroticizes the relationships on the island. Similarly, with Friday, Crusoe "enjoys an idyll without benefit of a woman – a revolutionary departure from the traditional expectations aroused by desert islands from the *Odyssey* to the *New Yorker*" (Watt 68). After Watt, several critics have added a focus on sexual orientation to Robinson's readings as "*homo economicus*, *homo faber*, religious figure, […] a masculine adventurer, an imperialist [… or] as an individual" (Downes 2010). Peter Hulme has established a reading of *Robinson Crusoe* as a "colonial romance" (1986: 208), situating "the true romance […] between Crusoe and Friday", a relation charged with "erotic delight" on Crusoe's side (212). Hans Turley emphasizes Robinson's "homosocial relationship with Friday" and argues that his "[w]andering seems to become the repressive mechanism for his unarticulated desires, his undetermined identity" (Turley 2003: 5); hence, Robinson's travels as a form of colonial expansion appear correlated to his homoerotic desire that is partly fulfilled in interethnic encounters (see Poole 2014: 169). Melissa K. Downes maintains that the novel is defined by "a sexually coded imperialism" (2) that relies on "ordering principles and boundaries" whose transgression "would be highly threatening, particularly since such divisions are, themselves, unstable narratives" (3), thus underlining the importance of the disavowal of this desire for the viability of the emerging modern subject. In the wider context of queer theory, one cannot but agree with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who argues that "the structuring of same-sex bonds can't, in any historical situation marked by inequality and contest *between* genders, fail to be a site of intensive regulation that intersects virtually every issue of power and gender"; drawing on Michel Foucault, she highlights that "modern Western culture has placed what it calls sexuality in a more and more distinctly privileged relation to our most prized constructs of individual identity, truth, and knowledge" (1993: 245). Hence, the modern individual that is represented in the realist novel – i.e., the novel that makes the enmeshment of individual identity, truth and knowledge co-emerge – is a construction based on the intersection of sexualities and imperialism; in *Robinson Crusoe*, this fundamental amalgamation is played out in the encounters between the colonizer Robinson, the island and his 'other', Friday.

Stereotyping is one of the strategies Robinson employs to render his picaresque narrative cohesive with regard to his rendition of 'character'. This focus on an 'other' as well as the suppression of the erotic dimension of this relation help to diverge attention from the wider colonial project of exploitation and to direct attention at the comparative practices required to decide whether the 'other' poses a threat or not. Stereotyping serves to render plausible the slippage between the terms designating Friday's status as either 'slave', or 'servant' or 'man' (see Wheeler 1995) since some descriptions need to be "anxiously repeated" to stabilize the respective subject positions (Bhabha 2008: 95). Crucially, as Homi Bhabha argues, colonial discourse is "structurally similar to realism" with regard to its representational strategies of representing the colonial other as "at once an 'other' and yet entirely knowable and visible" (101). Furthermore, stereotyping is akin to fetishism in that

The fetish or stereotype gives access to an 'identity' which is predicated as much on mastery and pleasure as it is on anxiety and defence, for it is a form of multiple and contradictory belief in its recognition of difference and disavowal of it. This conflict of pleasure/unpleasure, mastery/defence, knowledge/disavowal, absence/presence, has a fundamental significance for colonial discourse. For the scene of fetishism is also the scene of the reactivation and repetition of primal fantasy – the subject's desire for a pure origin that

is always threatened by division, for the subject must be gendered to be engendered, to be spoken. (Bhabha 2008: 107)

It is through stereotyping Friday that Robinson can get access to his own (modern, realist, white etc.) identity. Stereotyping strongly relies on comparative practices,6 cognitive strategies that correspond to subconscious processes of desiring haunted by racism. Robinson's whiteness and masculinity only emerge as such after dominating and subjecting Friday (see Poole 2014: 170). To that effect, Friday must be held in place by practices of stereotyping (Bhabha 2008: esp. 94-95, 101-102) and it is this comparative practice that highlights the many intersections that define the 'modern' individual in the novel.

#### 3.1 Racialized Spatial Politics in *Robinson Crusoe*

Making the island his own, Robinson follows an established script of colonization, declaring the island as uninhabited and wild, and thus as subjectable. Robinson fashions himself as 'master' in several ways, as a spatial master of the island, and as a master of his 'subjects', be they human or animal: "it was a merry Reflection which I frequently made, How like a King I look'd. First of all, the whole Country was my own meer Property; so that I had an undoubted Right of Dominion. *2dly*, My People were perfectly subjected: I was absolute Lord and Law-giver; they all owed their Lives to me" (*Robinson Crusoe*, 2007: 203). The life on the heterotopia of the island is thus characterized by economic anachronisms – Robinson as a capitalist entrepreneur and colonizer still combines several different functions in his own person quite contrary to

6 With regard to stereotyping, I take a detour from Epple's and Erhart's evaluation of Bhabha's approach, while I otherwise follow their definition of comparative practices. Epple and Erhart argue that postcolonial approaches often "repeated the dichotomies of 'colonial powers' and the 'colonial other' within their studies. This repetition has to do with the postcolonial interest in analyzing 'othering,' as Homi K. Bhabha would have it"; thus, these approaches place an emphasis on "the construction of the Other through comparison" rather than on "the very practices of comparing" (2020: 17). In my view, the process of stereotyping as a crucial strategy of othering is decidedly a comparative *practice* as it needs to be performed in any encounter with the other (who can challenge those practices by employing mimicry, for instance, which is a performative *practice* in its own right, see Bhabha 2008: 122-123). Stereotyping, in Bhabha's sense, is processual and hence requires constant iterations of comparative practices.

established divisions of labour (see Schmidt 2012: 193) – and, at least for contemporary readers, by political anachronisms since the absolutist reign along the lines of the Stuart dynasty Robinson imagines for himself has been abolished after the Glorious Revolution in 1688, which, however, only occurs after Robinson is rescued in the 1686 of the story world. For contemporary readers, the story world prompts and invites comparisons between their own political and economic structures and Robinson's with a view to the question in which contexts an individual can thrive and prove sovereign.7

The *terra incognita* of the island that Robinson explores is not restricted to the surface of the island, it is also and decidedly the spaces below ground that serve Robinson's "colonial project" (MacDonnell 2020: 2) at a time when "subsurface resource extraction began to play a principal role in catalyzing Britain's transition to industrial capitalism" (5). While Robinson marks the island by way of its spatial demarcation, cultivation and labour (see 10) as his own, it is the space below ground that serves as the ideal space of subjection, as Kevin MacDonnell argues:

The subsurface environments in Defoe's fiction fulfill and, in some cases, restore the Edenic fantasy of unoccupied colonial space in a way that topographical surfaces could not. The ideal conditions for colonial occupation in the eighteenth century would have looked a lot like the subsurface environments Defoe constructs: malleable, abundant, and unpopulated. Alongside the seemingly inexhaustible supply of resources and commodities Defoe locates beneath the surface, he also uncovers core features of the national and racial character of British identity. (2020:18)

It is Robinson's cave in particular that represents a central space that negotiates not only the topological value of 'above' and 'below' the surface, but also the social and sexual significance of the cave apart from its economic one (see Poole 2014: 169-170). Generally, the cave is a space whose access Robinson carefully regulates, particularly when Friday appears on the island. The close

7 With such an interplay of space and time in the novelistic setting, the island can be further described as a chronotope, defined by Mikhail Bakhtin as "the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature", so that time "thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history" (1981: 84). Importantly, this has effects on the representation of characters (see 85). Thus, the Robinsonade reflects on the emergence of the eighteenth-century individual as a product of several intertwining discourses.

connection between the presence of others and the protection of the cave already becomes clear when Robinson spots another human being's footprint "on the Shore, which was very plain to be seen in the Sand" (Defoe 2007: 130). This find sets off a bout of paranoia in Robinson: "like a Man perfectly confus'd and out of my self, I came Home to my Fortification, not feeling, as we say, the Ground I went on, but terrify'd to the last Degree, looking behind me at every two or three Steps, mistaking every Bush and Tree, and fancying every Stump at a Distance to be a Man" (130). It is after this event that he professedly calls his cave "my Castle" where he sought refuge "like one pursued" (131). Even when he dares to leave his 'Castle', he it is not without a feeling of being followed and "haunted with an evil Conscience" (134). The trace of another, the very index of presence, suffices to make him secure his cave as a fortress – a symptom that may be diagnosed as a case of "homosexual panic" (Sedgwick 1985: 91) *avant la lettre*. The trace of the other is finally 'fleshed out' by Friday, whose life Robinson saves and whom he consequently turns into his servant. The island is a space defined by Robinson's homoerotic desire (see Poole 2014: 170) that is clearly set off from the spaces of 'civilization' to which he returns after his sojourn on the island: only a few sparse sentences describe that he marries and has three children in England after his return, but he quickly leaves them for further adventures after his wife dies (*Robinson Crusoe*, 2007: 256). Crossing theses spaces by travelling, Robinson interconnects them for triangular trade and his desire for travelling similarly triangulates his homosocial desire.8

8 A further indication of homosocial desire is Robinson's moustache. On his slave-trading voyage to "*Guiney*", he falls into the hands of a Turkish pirate, who ordered Robinson "to lye in the Cabbin to look after the Ship" (Defoe 2007: 18); the duties of the household slave Robinson thus seem to entail sexual services (see Turley 2003: 7-8). After this homoerotic experience, he trims his beard in a Turkish style up to his "eleventh Year of [his] Residence" on the island and beyond (Defoe 2007: 123): "as I had both Scissars and Razors sufficient, I had cut it pretty short, except what grew on my upper Lip, which I had trimm'd into a large Pair of *Mahometan* Whiskers, such as I had seen worn by some *Turks*, who I saw at *Sallee*" and "they were of a Length and Shape monstrous enough, and such as in *England* would have pass'd for frightful" (127). Considering that "The savage and the Christian are the most important racialized categories between Europeans and others that help produce and maintain a sense of European superiority" (Wheeler 1995: 828), it is noteworthy that Robinson retains a style with much cultural effort that must remain associated with a Turkish pirate who enslaved him in several senses. Clearly, intercultural comparative practices would distinguish Robinson from

Interestingly, after coming across the footprint, Robinson already dreams of encountering a "Savage" (Defoe 2007: 167) and, in his dream, this savage is admitted to his cave: "he kneel'd down to me, seeming to pray me to assist him; upon which I shew'd my Ladder, made him go up, and carry'd him into my Cave, and he became my Servant" (167-168). The actual man that Robinson calls Friday only arrives more than one year after this dream, and then the regulations of access fall differently: "I carry'd him not to my Castle, but quite away to my Cave, on the farther Part of the Island; so I did not let my Dream come to pass in that Part, viz. That he came into my Grove for Shelter" (Defoe 2007: 173). While in the dreamscape, Robinson is 'free' to admit Friday to his Castle, and with it to the central symbol of a phallic fortress of identity, he cannot do so in the reality of the story world. The regulations of access are different in the dream and in the 'real', which first and foremost highlights that something needs to be regulated here, or, alternatively, that something needs to be narrated differently as wished for in the 'dream' – granting Friday access to the private places of the island that is metonymically connected to Robinson's body. With this juxtaposition of the dream and the real, the novel invites intratextual comparative practices that allow conclusions by way of the very contiguity of the respective scenes.

When Robinson describes Friday as he lies asleep in the cave after his rescue, he clearly fetishizes Friday's body in that he comments on body parts individually, again by a sort of listing. As Melissa Downes has shown, "The similarities of Crusoe's blazon of Friday to his other continual narrative listings of his possessions, both land and objects, show this relationship between self, possession, and the erotic. […] Indeed, within early eighteenth-century mercantilism the erotic is tied to dominating and possessing both humans (wives, mistresses, and slaves) as erotic possessions and to possessing land and material objects" (2010: 8). Focusing on comparative practices, this passage adds further aspects to this eroticized stock-taking. *Robinson Crusoe* reiterates Oroonoko's description in many respects, and thus the novel relies on intertextual comparative practices that help to reiterate and solidify a stereotype of the colonial 'other' that creates a lasting myth. The following description can thus be seen to be "part of a framework of comparative practices that have been established through repetition and routines, cultural habits, and historical patterns" (Epple/Erhart 2020: 18):

gentlemen in England, where he would appear to be 'frightful' and would be subject to othering in his very country of origin.

He was a comely handsome Fellow, perfectly well made; with straight strong Limbs, not too large; *tall* and well-*shap'd*, and as I reckon, about twenty six Years of Age. He had a very good Countenance, not a fierce and surly Aspect; but seem'd to have something very manly in his Face, and yet he had all the Sweetness and Softness of an *European* in his Countenance too, especially when he smil'd. His Hair was long and black, not curl'd like Wool; his Forehead very high, and large, and a great Vivacity and sparkling Sharpness in his Eyes. The Colour of his Skin was not quite black, but very tawny; and yet not of an ugly yellow nauseous tawny, as the *Brasilians*, and *Virginians*, and other Natives of *America* are; but of a bright kind of a dun olive Colour, that had in it something very agreeable; tho' not very easy to describe. (Defoe 2007: 173; my emphases)

Based on this indirect form of an intertextual comparison, Friday and Oroonoko share that they are "tall" and of a good "Shape" (see *Oroonoko*, 1997: 13), have straight black hair (although due to the "Aids of Art" in Oroonoko's case, *Oroonoko*, 1997: 14) and "very piercing" (13) or sharp eyes, diverge in skin colour from their peers and have some similarity to Europeans (see 13). Even though Friday is a Carib Indian and not of African descent, the narrator deems it necessary to point out that his hair is not "curl'd like wool" (*Robinson Crusoe*, 2007: 173), a mention which, despite its negation, together with the similarity to Oroonoko's description, might account for the fact that Friday is frequently portrayed as an African in Robinsonades. What is more, his description hinges on precisely such comparative practices that make him emerge and solidify as Robinson's 'other', which goes to show that "[c]omparing is a 'relationing' activity that goes way beyond stating mere differences" (Epple/Erhart 2020: 17). The contours of both Robinson and Friday are being constructed by "doing comparisons" (20). Robinson places Friday on a racialized continuum spawned between 'Africanness' and 'Europeanness'; Friday's difference from 'Africans' goes hand in glove with similarities to Europeans that are clearly gendered: While there is something "very manly" in Friday's face, he shares with Robinson some European features, defined by a rather feminine "Sweetness and Softness" (*Robinson Crusoe*, 2007: 173).

Despite racial and sexual ambiguities, comparative practices help to establish the novel's modern subject as 'white' with the Anglo-Saxon European as the norm. This norm is further defined by an inclination to freedom rooted in this racialized origin, a freedom for example in the realm of religion (see *Robinson Crusoe*, 2007: 203), options of capital expansion or in the freedom of movement ingrained in the colonial enterprise. However, what remains foreclosed in this construction is its dependence on the exploitation of its 'others', be that humans or islands. It is the deep level of the novel, the exploitation of what is below the surface level of the earth, in other words, it is what happens in the cave that forms the 'subtext' of both the novel and its 'modern' individual. Comparative practices of the 'below' and the 'above' of the wider context of *Robinson Crusoe* undo the closeting of the exploitative and extractive foundations of the novelistic construction of the modern, white individual.

#### **4. Conclusion**

In this chapter, I have shown that comparative practices prove crucial in the emergence of the novel genre in the long eighteenth century. Relying, as it does, on generic precursors such as travel writing and the (spiritual) (auto)biography, the novel closely ties the construction of the modern individual to its colonial others, whose construction, in turn, depends on comparative practices that become solidified by processes of cultural iteration. The modern individual is clearly defined by the racialized marker of whiteness that is rooted in an Anglo-Saxon genealogy of 'Englishness', further associated with industrial capitalism, colonialism, (religious) freedom and heteronormativity. Literary authorship is a function of this conglomerate of intersecting discourses and defined by its own strategies of narrative mastery.

In *Oroonoko*, Aphra Behn's author-narrator emerges at her most overt in the interethnic encounters set in the heterotopic space of the colony. She is literally thrown into relief when she is touched, observed and described by Surinamese Indians as an experiencing I in the colonial encounter, and she is fully established as a white female author with a story to live by after the demise of her biographical subjects. Commercially profitable female authorship is enabled through the author-narrator's commodification of her subjects, and through her emergence as white in the process of establishing skin colour as a central signifier of social privilege in the novel. This authorization of the white, female writer hinges on stereotyping both the Surinamese and the Coramantiens. This discursive practice is closely articulated with strategies of spatialization that subject interethnic encounters to a colonial mapping and *mise-en-scène*, calibrated by the generic hybridity. The mixture of travel writing and the (auto)biography equally characterizes Daniel Defoe's *Robinson Crusoe* as the paradigmatic modern novel; implicit intertextual comparative practices help to congeal generic conventions over time, which shape collective processes of meaning making and may even impact on the interpretation and appropriation of extraliterary experiences (see Gymnich/Neumann 2007: 40; 46) as the plethora Robinsonades, both literary and real, illustrates. Hence, the way in which the novelistic subject is constructed can be shown to have a wider impact on general cultural subject constructions. *Robinson Crusoe* is a central text in defining English identity as 'white' in the sense of the Anglo-Saxon genealogy of its main character that is closely tied to capitalist structures of mercantilism and processes of colonial expansion. By the same token, the viability of modern subjects as presented in the novel hinges on the foreclosure of homosocial desire, a desire transposed onto travelling, exploring and expanding the narrow confines of "the upper Station of *Low Life*" (*Robinson Crusoe*, 2007: 6). The exploitation of resources and human beings comes to be legitimized through discourses of freedom and (God-granted?) success tied to this subject; the articulation of colonialism, capitalism, Puritanism, racism and heteronormativity requires some further disentangling in order to resist its detrimental effects for people(s) and environments alike.