Seraglios and convents: Aphra Behn's heroines in the house(s) of love

Abstract

I argue in this article that in Oroonoko, or the History of the Royal Slave (1688) and The History of the Nun (1689), Aphra Behn forwards the connections between the feminised spaces of the seraglio and the convent, presenting them as equally exotic and gendered for the English reader, but also as equally constraining for women in their everyday lives. In Oroonoko, the she-narrator instructs Imoinda into the narratives of the “civilized” west by reading diverting stories of nuns to her. At the same time, her tale in The History of the Nun represents the convent as another liminal space of interaction between the sexes which confines Isabella and originates her bouts of love and passion, following the model of the Lettres portugaises. This article will explore both spaces of confinement and the strictures Imoinda and Isabella experience in them, but also Behn’s originality as creator and narrator in making the two narrative models converge.