Aphra Behn's Cousheree Diagnostic
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: A short essay arguing that Aphra Behn's description of a "cousheree" in Oroonoko (1688) is evidence she actually visited Surinam in the 1660s. Following Derek Hughes (2007), the essay identifies the cousheree as a golden lion tamarin and asks why Behn's comparison of the animal to a lion lands so precisely when a biological lion looks almost nothing like a tamarin. The answer: Behn's mental archive of "lion" was the heraldic lion of East Kent parish churches, inn signs, embroidery, and royal arms, and that specific cultural image matches the tamarin almost feature by feature, where a biological lion does not. A writer working from secondhand sources (such as George Warren's 1667 Impartial Description of Surinam) would have inherited Warren's primate categorization; Behn doesn't, reaching instead for a feline heraldic comparison that makes no zoological sense but perfect cultural perceptual sense. The cousheree passage thus functions as a cultural-fingerprint diagnostic: textual evidence of the writer's perceptual provenance. The argument does not prove Behn went to Surinam; it shifts the balance of likelihood. We name the method the "Cousheree Diagnostic" and propose it as a tool with reach beyond Behn, applicable to other contested cases in early modern travel writing where the question of authorial presence is in dispute.
Author: Braun, Sheila
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7161595463
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