Alternative Readings as Practice for Feminist Methodologies. A Case Study: Aphra Behn

Moving from some crucial issues of second-wave feminism and in dialogue with a “rhetoric of space” that lies at the very core of third wave feminism(s), this essay shows how Aphra Behn’s empowerment and agency as writer and subject were attained thanks to a continual intersection of various forms of stratification. The essay re-considers her emblematic experimental novel Oroonoko: or the Royal Slave, a True History (1688) and shows how Behn’s empowerment and agency were achieved thanks to a continual overlapping of forms of stratification that involved questions of class, race, gender and nationality. In so doing it also examines how these same forms of stratification which are clearly depicted in Oroonoko, allowed Behn to explore and show the reader how systems of power based on gender discriminations operate and are consolidated. Oroonoko represents an emblematic example, since it is not only the work of one of the first women who earned her money by her writing, but also a text that gave Behn a prominence among those first women who explored woman’s nature and her own personal role in the public sphere. It is also thanks to Oroonoko that Behn took up a position that was later defined as feminist and, more significantly, as anti-slavery. But Oroonoko is also a colonial text in which Behn’s struggle for her empowerment as a writer, political commentator and subject is led inside a wider and specific colonial ideology that supported the slave trade and the Caribbean sugar production. An ideology that complicates Behn’s attempts to ‘produce’ herself as a writer, story teller, woman and political observer.