Title: Oroonoko Author: Aphra Behn Creation Date: 1688 Location: England Collection: Women Who Wrote When They Weren't Supposed To
Brief
Aphra Behn published Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave in 1688, the year of the Glorious Revolution, when she was in her late forties and had already spent two decades writing plays, poems, and novels for the Restoration stage and press. She died the following year. The novella was her last major prose fiction, and it claims — as part of its rhetorical strategy — to be a true account of events she witnessed personally in Surinam during a visit in the early 1660s, when the colony was still English. How much of this claim is verifiable is uncertain; how much is deliberately constructed is one of the central interpretive questions the text poses to every subsequent reader. The biographical scholarship on Behn is fragmentary: she may have gone to Surinam in 1663–64, may have worked briefly as a spy for Charles II in the Low Countries during the Second Anglo-Dutch War, and certainly turned to writing for the London stage by the late 1660s when her other options ran out.
The novella concerns Oroonoko, a Coramantien prince of exceptional nobility, beauty, and military valour who is tricked into slavery, transported to Surinam, reunited there with his beloved Imoinda (already enslaved), leads a slave rebellion, and is executed with horrific cruelty. The narrator — a woman who identifies herself as Behn, the daughter of the lieutenant-governor appointed to the colony — observes and partially participates in these events, admires Oroonoko extravagantly, and is ultimately unable to save him. The story is told after his death, partly as memorial, partly as accusation against the colonial administrators who failed him.
The novella is canonical for three distinct reasons. First, it is one of the earliest texts in English to present an African protagonist with full interiority — as the hero rather than an exotic object or a comic type. Second, it is among the earliest anti-slavery texts in English literature, though its antislavery argument is complicated by its aristocratic logic: Oroonoko is objectionable as a slave because he is noble, which is a different argument from the argument that slavery itself is wrong. Third, it is a major document of female authorship: Behn writing in her own name about her own presence in a colonial scene, claiming the authority to witness and to judge. The three strands are genuinely difficult to separate, and that difficulty is the novella's enduring vitality. Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One's Own, would name Behn as the woman "to whom all women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of," because she earned the right of women to speak their minds by earning her living with her pen.
The Prohibition
The prohibition Behn wrote against was more absolute than it would be for any woman of the following century. Restoration England in the 1670s and 1680s had no category for a respectable professional woman writer. The stage, where Behn did most of her early work, had opened to actresses only at the Restoration in 1660 — women had been legally barred from English public stages until then — and the presence of women on stage was still, for conservative opinion, proof of the theatre's moral degradation. For a woman to write the plays that actresses performed, rather than merely perform them, was a further step beyond what respectable society approved. The assumption that operated throughout the period was that a woman who sold her words in public was not fundamentally different from a woman who sold her body in public, and Behn's contemporaries made the equation explicit in print, repeatedly. She was attacked in prefaces, lampooned in satires, and accused of bawdiness for writing scenes that her male competitors wrote routinely.
The economic prohibition was equally sharp. A woman in Restoration England had almost no legal means of supporting herself outside marriage. Coverture meant that a married woman's earnings belonged to her husband. An unmarried or widowed woman of the middling sort could keep a shop, go into service, perhaps run a boarding house, or make a marginal living as a seamstress or midwife — but the respectable professions (law, medicine, the church, scholarship, the civil administration) were closed to her entirely. Behn had been widowed young — her husband, a merchant named Behn about whom almost nothing is known, had died in the mid-1660s — and she had no family money to fall back on. When her brief employment as an intelligence agent for Charles II ended in unpaid wages and a stint in debtors' prison, she turned to writing for the stage not as a calling but as the one remaining way she could earn a living that did not involve destitution or remarriage.
The prohibition specific to her subject matter in Oroonoko added a further layer. Slavery was a growing and profitable feature of the English colonial system in the 1680s. The Royal African Company, chartered in 1672 with James, Duke of York (later James II), at its head, held the monopoly on English slave-trading and was one of the crown's most valued commercial instruments. To write a novella in which the slave trade was presented as a system of betrayal, torture, and judicial murder — in which an English sea captain lies and an English colonial administration tortures — was to publish an argument against the economic foundation of part of the royal establishment Behn otherwise supported. She was a Tory, a royalist, a defender of the Stuart line. Oroonoko was nevertheless a document that any careful reader could use against the slave trade, and she knew it when she wrote it.
The Strategy
Behn's strategy was professional writing of the highest order: produce volume, command multiple genres, stay ahead of the market. Across the 1670s and 1680s she wrote roughly nineteen plays — more than any of her male contemporaries except Dryden — along with poems, translations, and works of prose fiction. She wrote comedies, tragicomedies, political satires, and love songs, and she did all of this while contending with hostile reviewers who used her gender as their primary critical vocabulary. The strategy was to be so productive and so commercially successful that the London theatres could not afford to exclude her. Her plays were performed at the Duke's Company and later at the United Company, her plays made money, her plays kept actresses in work, and the manager who decided whether to stage her next comedy had to weigh the abuse he would take for producing a woman's play against the receipts her last one had brought in. The receipts usually won.
Within Oroonoko specifically, her strategy was the deployment of the female witness. The narrator is present throughout the Surinam section as an observer, a cultivator, an intercessor — but pointedly not as a wielder of power. She reads to Oroonoko, takes him hunting, introduces him to European literature, admires him extravagantly, and at key moments claims to have attempted intervention on his behalf with the colonial administration and failed. This narrative position accomplishes two things at once. It gives the female narrator the authority to bear witness to events in a male colonial world that women were not supposed to know about, and it simultaneously exculpates her from the failure to prevent those events, since she was structurally excluded from the power needed to prevent them. The move is ingenious and also morally partial: it lets Behn claim the higher ground of compassion while admitting, in the same gesture, that she was a beneficiary of the plantation system her narrative is accusing.
Her third strategy was generic innovation. Oroonoko is not exactly a novel — the English novel as a form was still decades from consolidation — but it is not a traditional romance or a pamphlet or a travel narrative either. It combines the heroic romance's aristocratic hero, the travel narrative's ethnographic detail about Surinam's landscape and indigenous peoples, the journalistic pretence of eyewitness reportage, and the political pamphlet's implicit argument against colonial maladministration. Behn was working in a form she was partly inventing, and the hybrid character of the text — which has given every later generation of scholars something to argue about — was itself a strategy for saying things the pure forms of the period did not have a vocabulary for. She could not write a straightforward abolitionist tract; the genre did not exist. She could not write a conventional Restoration tragedy about an African prince; the stage would not have taken it seriously. She wrote something that used the emerging techniques of prose fiction to get around both constraints at once.
The Price and the Legacy
The price Behn paid was ongoing and personal. She was abused in print throughout her working life. She was accused of bawdiness, of plagiarism, of loose morals, of atheism, of having written things she had not written and having meant things she had not meant. Her name became, for a certain kind of critic, synonymous with the moral dangers of female authorship, and that reputation outlasted her by two centuries. Eighteenth-century editors who reprinted her plays routinely softened the sexual content not because it was worse than what the men were writing but because it was worse for being written by a woman. In the Victorian period she was largely dropped from anthologies. A writer could admit to having read Dryden; a respectable Victorian woman writer could not admit to having read Behn. She was also, by all accounts, ill and in pain during much of her final decade — she suffered from some condition that made walking difficult — and she died on 16 April 1689 in genuine poverty despite a lifetime of productive work. She was buried in the cloister of Westminster Abbey, which was its own belated acknowledgement that the English literary establishment did not quite know what to do with her.
The legacy is the career itself. Behn is the first English woman who supported herself by writing. There had been women poets before her — Katherine Philips, who wrote as "Orinda," is the most distinguished of the seventeenth-century predecessors — and women had published religious and domestic works across the previous century. But no woman before Behn had made a professional living from the pen across multiple genres and sustained that living for twenty years. Virginia Woolf's sentence about flowers on her tomb in A Room of One's Own is the canonical statement of what Behn opened: Behn earned the right to speak by being more productive than most of the men.
The specific legacy of Oroonoko is the longest of any of her works. It was dramatised by Thomas Southerne in 1695 — an enormously successful adaptation that held the stage for a century — and through Southerne's version it became a familiar English story, circulating in abolitionist circles well before the abolitionist movement had its own literature. By the mid-eighteenth century it was being cited by antislavery writers as an early imaginative argument against the slave trade. In the twentieth century it was recovered by feminist and postcolonial critics as a founding document of multiple traditions at once. The novella's internal contradictions — its simultaneous sympathy for an enslaved hero and dependence on his exceptional nobility — have become part of its pedagogical value: it is an unusually clear specimen of how anti-slavery arguments had to be assembled from the materials available in the 1680s.
The Reading
I do not pretend that my pen shall entertain you with the adventures of a feigned hero, for there is enough of reality to commend itself to you. I was myself an eyewitness to a great part of what you will find here set down, and what I could not be witness of I received from the mouth of the chief actor in this history, the hero himself. His name was Oroonoko, and he was a prince of Coramantien, on the Gold Coast, and his portrait requires setting down in full: he was tall, his face perfectly proportioned, his nose Roman rather than the flat shape common in his countrymen, his bearing regal, his education remarkable — he had been taught by a French tutor, knew the history of Rome and the philosophy of the ancient schools, spoke French and English, and conducted himself with a refinement that served as an immediate reproach to the Europeans who would later mistreat him. His dignity is measured here against a European standard, and the measurement contains within it the very ideology that will destroy him. But the elevation is meant to carry the weight of moral protest: if Oroonoko is as good as any European aristocrat, then what is done to him is an aristocratic crime as well as a racial one.
He is in love with Imoinda, the daughter of his father's military general, a woman of equivalent beauty and spirit. His grandfather, the old king of Coramantien, sees Imoinda first and sends her the royal veil — the summons to the royal harem that cannot, by the custom of the kingdom, be refused. Imoinda is compelled into the king's household. Oroonoko visits her in secret; they consummate their love in the king's very palace; they are discovered. The king, in a rage that is also a kind of despair (he knows he is too old for her, knows his jealousy is absurd, and cannot contain either of those knowings), sells Imoinda into slavery — a punishment even more severe in Coramantien than execution, because it entails perpetual shame and the cutting of all bonds — and tells Oroonoko that she is dead. Oroonoko grieves and fights and proves his valour in a campaign against a neighbouring state, and then is betrayed.
The betrayal is a signature piece of colonial cynicism. An English slave-trading captain who has visited the Coramantien court before and who knows Oroonoko personally invites him and his principal officers aboard ship for a feast of friendship. Wine is served. The Africans drink. When they are insensible, they are clapped in irons and the ship weighs anchor. Oroonoko wakes chained in the hold, at sea, with his companions around him, all of them sold to the English in a transaction that has been planned from the first invitation. When Oroonoko confronts the captain some days into the voyage — refusing food until the captain comes down to see him — the captain expresses a show of regret, explains that he needs the money and had no choice, and promises that Oroonoko will be treated well at his destination. Oroonoko, who has been trained all his life to take a gentleman at his word, accepts the promise and agrees to eat. The scene shows, without comment, what happens when the codes of honour that operate in the African court meet the commercial calculation that operates on the English slave ship. The codes do not translate. Oroonoko has been raised in a world where a man's word binds him; he is now in a world where a man's word is a commodity.
The ship arrives at Surinam, then an English colony on the northern coast of South America. Oroonoko is sold to a plantation owner named Trefry, who is represented as kind, literate, and entirely complicit in the system he administers. Trefry gives Oroonoko the slave name Caesar, and Oroonoko does not openly object, though the narrator is aware that the name is a theft. In Surinam, the narrator enters the story directly. She is staying at her family's estate, called Parham House, near Trefry's plantation, and she takes up Oroonoko as a project of cultivation: she reads to him, tells him European history, arranges for him to meet her circle, and accompanies him on excursions into the Surinamese interior where he hunts tigers and, in one memorable scene, a numbing electric eel. She describes his physical presence and his manners with an admiration that has a sexual register just below the surface, though she never names the register directly. These scenes establish her access to him, her sympathy, and — crucially — her distance from the administrators who will eventually have him killed.
Trefry, meanwhile, tells Oroonoko about a remarkable enslaved woman on the plantation — a woman called Clemene, noted for her beauty and her grief, who has refused all advances and whose presence is a kind of mystery to the other enslaved people around her. When Oroonoko insists on seeing her, he recognises Imoinda. She is not dead. The old king, unable to bring himself to have her killed, had sold her into slavery and lied to Oroonoko to spare them both the knowledge that she was being shipped away. Their reunion is rendered with considerable feeling, and for a period the novella settles into something almost pastoral: Oroonoko and Imoinda are permitted to live together as husband and wife on the plantation, Imoinda becomes pregnant, Oroonoko hunts and the narrator admires, and the reader is almost lulled into thinking the story might find its way to a benign resolution.
It does not. The promise that has been repeatedly made — that Oroonoko will be returned to Africa once the acting governor arrives from England — is not kept and was never going to be kept. The plantation depends on enslaved labour. Oroonoko is valuable. The acting governor, Byam, has no intention of freeing him. As Imoinda's pregnancy advances, Oroonoko contemplates what kind of life his child will be born into, and the contemplation produces a decision. He organises a rebellion. He speaks to the enslaved people of the plantation with an eloquence that the narrator renders in close approximation — arguments about the injustice of their condition, appeals to their dignity, the language of natural rights before natural rights philosophy has fully formed as a school. He persuades several hundred of them to follow him into the forest. The rebellion is large in its initial ambition and collapses almost immediately. The enslaved people, exhausted and afraid and confronted with Byam's armed force and a promise of pardon, begin to surrender. Oroonoko does not surrender. He is captured, tied to a post, whipped until his back is opened to the bone, and Indian pepper is rubbed into the wounds. The description is pointedly detailed. The reader must see exactly what is being done.
After the failed rebellion, Oroonoko is watched constantly and cannot escape. He makes a different decision. He leads Imoinda into a quiet part of the forest, tells her what he intends, and kills her — with her consent, the narrator insists, and Imoinda dies embracing him, because he cannot leave her behind to face what Byam will do to her after his own death, and because the child she is carrying cannot be born into slavery. He covers her body with flowers and sits with her for days, not eating, until the Europeans find him. He has been cutting himself — the physical deterioration of grief combined with a deliberate self-wounding — and is too weakened to resist capture. When the search party comes upon him, he is crouched by Imoinda's body, and the smell of the corpse has become overwhelming in the tropical heat. He tells them to come no nearer. They come nearer. He cuts a piece of flesh from his own throat and flings it at them. He is taken.
He is carried to Parham, the colonial administrative centre. He is sentenced to execution by dismemberment. The execution is an organised atrocity: he is tied to a post, and the executioner — an Englishman named Bannister — removes his limbs one at a time while he is still conscious. Oroonoko smokes a pipe throughout the procedure, looking on without expression, making no sound. His last words are a rebuke to his executioners and a commendation of his own spirit to the Christian God whose followers have destroyed him. The narrator is not present. She says she fainted and could not be there, which is the precise moment the narrative of female witness admits its own limits. Her mother and sister were present, she tells us, and have reported the scene to her. She records what she has been told.
The narrator is not present for the execution. She fainted and could not be there — and her absence is the most revealing moment in the whole account. She has been present throughout — observing, admiring, interceding — but she could not prevent this and she cannot witness it. She is left to tell a story that ends without her. Her account is retrospective and guilty: she admired him, she tried to intervene, the men in power would not listen to her because she was a woman. Her gender is the reason she had authority to observe and not authority to act. The colonial system excluded women from power; therefore she cannot be held responsible for what the men with power did. The argument has its own logic and its own blindness. Her sympathy did not translate into any act that might have saved Oroonoko, and her account of her own helplessness is also an account of her continued occupancy of the Parham House where the atrocity was administered.
She does not emerge innocent from her own story. She stands on the plantation she has described, admiring the man she has failed to save, recording the atrocity she did not witness, and closing with a prayer that her "female pen" may celebrate his name "to all ages." The prayer that Oroonoko's name would be known has been answered. What could not be argued directly was staged in the figure of the dismembered prince. What could not be prevented was insisted upon in the recording. The reader who closes the account carries the image of the pipe being smoked through the amputations, and that image, more than any philosophical claim, is what has done the long work of teaching later generations what was being done in the plantations and in whose names.
This post is part of Women Who Wrote When They Weren't Supposed To, a series on women writing against the constraints of their time. See the full collection →
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