Week 12, Aphra Behn

General Notes on Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, or, the Royal Slave

Narrator Describes Surinam (Guiana) in South America (2183-85)

The slave trade had long been carried on by the Portuguese and the Arabs, and then the English got into it and did not abolish such human trafficking until March 1807, when Lord Grenville’s Whig administration dealt it a fatal blow. Slavery itself was fully abolished in England only in 1833, while in the American South it was taken down even later, when President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 during the Civil War. At the story’s outset, we hear that the natives of Dutch Guiana are not to be enslaved. The West Indies are described as almost prelapsarian, a paradisal place. The narrator says that the English deal with the natives almost as equals because they are useful: they know their own land and can help the settlers. So African people are brought in to work the cane fields. The Englishmen use cunning and economic calculation in dealing with the people of other lands: they size up the natives and consider how best to use them. Supposedly, at some point Aphra Behn herself may have been in Surinam, so she must have understood the slavery issue well. The story she tells is fiction, but there’s considerable realism in its description of relations with the natives of Surinam and its characterization of the African slave trade.

Oroonoko’s African Homeland, Coramantien (2186-2200)

In order to make Oroonoko an exotic and yet familiar figure, the narrator describes him as having European-like features. His skin is ebony or polished jet, but his facial features are like those of a Caucasian. He is “Afropean,” we might say. He is also characterized as a Renaissance-style prince, and he had been given a French tutor. Coramantien culture is hardly “primitive,” and it’s clear that there have been interrelations between the Africans in the text and the Europeans. Oroonoko himself has had dealings with the English slave-trader who subsequently enslaves him.

The King seems unable to control his passions, while Oroonoko possesses more restraint. Throughout his disagreement with the King over Imoinda, he plays his cards close to his chest. See 2191 bottom: “he showed a face not at all betraying his heart.” This quality will serve him well later in Surinam. But in Coramantien or Ghana he makes one serious mistake, or at least an accident occurs: Imoinda falls by accident into his arms, and he doesn’t refrain from embracing her. This event angers the King, who values Oroonoko as a fine warrior and feels dependent on his skill in that capacity. So the King sells Imoinda into slavery but doesn’t tell Oroonoko because he needs him to fight Jamoan. Oroonoko takes his own disfavor in an Achilles-like way, sulking in his tent and avoiding the fight.

Oroonoko’s Enslavement, Sea Voyage to Surinam (2200-04)

The text determines for us the manner in which Oroonoko is heroic: Oroonoko decides that he should go out to meet death in the noblest way, and he captures Jamoan and makes a friend of him. The kind of heroism he exhibits will be put to the test in the second part of the story, where he won’t be as free to act the way he does at this early point. He will retain his royalty, but as a “royal slave,” he will not be given the scope necessary for successful heroism. After the fight he returns to camp, and the King lies about Imoinda, saying he has had her killed. An English ship appears, and we hear that Oroonoko has had prior meetings with the captain. His relationship with this slaver isn’t meant to drag the Prince down to a less heroic status since his royal birth probably meant that he had the right to sell others into slavery. But the captain’s dishonesty is foreign to Oroonoko, so the Englishman succeeds in enslaving him and forcing him to undergo the dreadful passage that so many African people suffered in subsequent years—millions probably died and were tossed into the sea because of the inhumane living conditions during the passage. The supposed justification for enslaving African people, by the way, was not well developed before the nineteenth century, when abolitionists challenged American slavery as a moral evil. But opposition to slavery was not unknown, either—it’s clear that Aphra Behn’s narrative weighs heavily against the practice in that Oroonoko seems superior to his captors. When a hunger strike begins on board the ship at sea, the captain again deceives the Prince into diffusing the explosive situation. Oroonoko is stripped of his delusion that the white men are honorable, and part of his heroism will later show itself in his becoming wise to the fiendish dishonesty of the white men.

Oroonoko’s Captivity as “Caesar” in Surinam (2203-16)

Once in Surinam, Oroonoko shows himself to be cagey and bold. He is renamed “Caesar” after the erudite and militarily capable Roman Julius Caesar. In one sense, it’s an honor to be renamed Caesar, but in another the name indicates the transgressiveness of a superior man like Oroonoko, who must be brought down by upholders of the status quo. He will be struck down as Caesar was. The text captures Oroonoko’s strangeness; a man who is a king (a Caesar) and yet feared and disrespected because he’s a slave. In this situation, his options to shape his own fate are limited—there seems to be the potential for dramatic action, but the protagonist cannot fulfill that potential due to circumstances.

Oroonoko decides to plan his rebellion when Imoinda becomes pregnant. But the men Oroonoko persuades to make the rebellion with him are unworthy of him, and they desert him without hesitation, even turning on him after the battle is over. Imoinda shows herself a fitting match for Oroonoko—she wounds the scurrilous Governor General Byam. After being captured, Oroonoko knows that he must seek revenge against Byam and that as a consequence Imoinda will be punished, so when he recovers, he kills her with his own hands.

Oroonoko’s Rebellion in Surinam (2216-26)

The narrator’s sympathies are with Oroonoko. She consistently describes him as a great prince. But at the same time, she is implicated in the English colonial project. Her father was to have been the governor of a province, but he died during the sea passage to the New World. Her safety is with the English. The narrator helps to protect Oroonoko after his capture, and later on she and Trefly (who had bought Oroonoko when he first arrived in Surinam) do everything they can to convince him to go on living even after he has killed Imoinda and wounded himself gravely. But why would they want him to survive after all this? It seems as if the best thing would be to assist him in dying—he needs a sword, not medical care. The narrator doesn’t fully enter into Oroonoko’s heroic sensibilities. At the end of the tale, the narrator does a fine job of showing how savage the English could be. Oroonoko is executed at the same post where Governor-General Byam had him whipped. He suffers a variation on the English punishment for traitors, which often included castration and dismemberment. The English scarcely recognize Oroonoko as a human being, but he preserves his dignity in the teeth of savage retribution, calmly smoking his pipe and defying his executors to the bitter end.