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Title: Royalism and honor in Aphra Behn's 'Oroonoko.'
Author(s): Anita Pacheco
Source: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. 34.3 (Summer 1994): p491. From Literature Resource
Center.
Document Type: Article
Full Text:
Apart from the longstanding argument about its historical authenticity, criticism of Aphra Behn's
Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave (1688) has tended to focus on the novella's treatment of slavery and race,
specifically on the ideological significance of Behn's granting of heroic stature to an African prince.(1)
Numerous scholars have made claims for Oroonoko as a kind of proto-abolitionist tract, some seeing the
novella as a genuinely humanitarian statement of the evils of slavery, while others, more circumspect about
casting Behn in the role of abolitionist, have insisted that Oroonoko did make an early contribution to
antislavery thought, whether through its alleged criticisms of Western civilization or through its ennobling
and humanizing of an African.(2) In his article, "Aphra Behn's Oroonoko: Occasion and Accomplishment,"
George Guffey challenged such readings by asserting that the significance of Behn's hero resides not in his
African origins but in his royal blood; his enslavement, according to Guffey, presents a mirror image of the
disorder inherent in the imminent deposition of the legitimate monarch, James II.(3) Guffey claims,
moreover, that as an apologist for indefeasible monarchy, Behn endorses the conservative, hierarchical
principles that legitimate rather than question the institution of slavery. While not wishing to read
Oroonoko as an allegory of the Glorious Revolution, I want to argue in this essay that the text's ideology is
distinctly royalist, but that its effort at ideological closure is undermined both by its reliance on the unstable
discourse of honor and by its own continuity with a historical period whose shifting social and power
relations disrupt its ostensible unity.
There is no doubt that Oroonoko influenced the development in the eighteenth century of a sentimental
antislavery literature based on the depiction of noble African slaves. Indeed, part of the reason why Behn's
novella can today accommodate such opposed readings lies in the intrinsic ambiguity of eighteenth-century
emancipationist strategies. Abolitionists sought to counter the various arguments in defense of slavery, all
of which ultimately derived their power from assumptions about the African's innate inferiority, by granting
the black man an individual identity--complete with feelings, abilities, and a moral life--that made it
increasingly difficult to regard him as merely an alien object in the colonial system. Yet this humanizing
technique more often than not amounted to Europeanizing the African, allowing him to live up to an
exacting standard of European refinement.(4) This double-edged strategy, which endows the African with
human stature while simultaneously assuming that human stature is by definition European, makes it
possible for a text to establish identification with the "Other" while at the same time remaining
complacently Eurocentric. Thomas Southerne's 1696 dramatic adaptation of Behn's novella is certainly
deeply resistant to humanitarian readings. For instance, when the play's hero is incited to revolt, Southerne
has him repeat a favorite rationale for slavery--that the planters did not make them slaves but merely
bought them "in an honest way of trade."(5) Yet in her 1787 poem "The Slave Trade," Hannah More wrote
in praise of "plaintive Southerne" who made "millions feel what Oroonoko felt."(6) Apparently, the
suffering of Southerne's Europeanized and hence recognizably human African possessed an emotive power
capable of overshadowing even the most flagrant proslavery stance.
In the same way, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Behn's portrait of her African prince, of both his
physical appearance and his character, is profoundly Eurocentric:
His Face was not of that brown rusty Black which most of that Nation are, but of perfect Ebony, or
polished Jett. His Eyes were the most awful that cou'd be seen, and very piercing; the White of 'em being
like Snow, as were his Teeth. His nose was rising and Roman, instead of African and flat. His Mouth the
finest shaped that could be seen; far from those great turn'd Lips, which are so natural to the rest of the
Negroes. The whole Proportion and Air of his Face was so nobly and exactly form'd, that bating his Colour,
there could be nothing in Nature more beautiful, agreeable and handsome.
The text is clearly eager to distinguish its hero from other blacks: his beauty generally and his individual
features distance Oroonoko from what the narrator calls "his gloomy Race" and identify him with European
ideals of beauty. The consequent disparagement of the African is obvious; indeed, the phrase "bating his
Colour" makes us feel Oroonoko's African origins as a positive liability, the one lamentable flaw in an
otherwise perfect picture.
Similarly, when the novella comes to consider the hero's equally extraordinary virtue, it concludes that his
natural gifts were enhanced by his education in "Morals, Language and Science" at the hands of a French
tutor "of Wit and Learning," and by his extensive contact with European gentlemen. Some scholars cite as
evidence of the novella's egalitarian or anti-European implications the narrator's judgment that Oroonoko's
cultivation explodes the myth "that all fine Wit is confined to the white Men, especially to those of
Christendom".(7) However, they perhaps fail to take on board the extent to which this sentiment is
neutralized by the fact that the hero owes his "fine wit" in great part to the redeeming benefits of European
culture. Indeed, the discursive weight that Behn gives to European civilization establishes a disturbing
connection between her portrait of the African prince and the argument that slavery was justified because it
rescued blacks from savagery.(8)
It is also difficult to discount the abundant and frequently cited textual evidence that Behn's narrative is
entirely uncritical of the institution of slavery: the matter-of-fact account of the operation of the colonial
slave trade in Surinam; the hero's involvement in a slave trade based on the sale of all prisoners of war
except those whose high birth exempts them from such indignity; Oroonoko's self-reproach, after the
collapse of the slave uprising, for having expected courage and valor from men who are "by Nature
Slaves".
These textual features give support to the contention that what some have taken to be emancipationist
outrage is in fact concern for the prerogatives of class, that Behn is repelled not by slavery per se, which is
unobjectionable when it involves common people, but by the enslavement of a prince, born and brought up
to command others.(9) Although the emphasis Behn places on education and culture makes it difficult to
agree with those critics who see Oroonoko as a noble savage, the text is certainly not indifferent to the idea
of natural virtue. The account of Oroonoko's upbringing stresses both nature and nurture, both his "natural
Inclination to Arms" and his training in martial virtue, his natural quickness of apprehension and his
tutelage in "Morals, Language and Science". Yet this "nature" belongs not to primitivism but to royalism,
for it is inseparable from exalted birth: Oroonoko's "native Beauty," we are told, "struck an Awe and
Reverence, even into those that knew not his Quality". The word "quality" combines connotations of virtue
and high birth (in this case, royal birth), which are here reflected in the prince's exceptional beauty.(10)
Thus individual value is associated with birth, virtue with an inherited rank which is conceived of as
"natural." This, of course, is the conceptual basis of hierarchy; through the mysteries of blood, virtue is
supposedly transmitted from one generation of the ruling class to the next, so that power is legitimated on
the grounds of worthiness, authority presented as hereditary and innate. This endorsement of the claims of
birth and rank is intensified by the
depiction of Oroonoko's inherent quality as recognizable to all, for this is the romantic myth of royalty,
which endows blood and ancestry with a mysterious potency. In those onlookers fortunate enough to
witness royalty, it inspires "Awe and Reverence": this choice of words establishes as deeply right a
relationship between the prince and the rest of humanity in which hereditary power is greeted with a
deference barely distinguishable from worship. There is no mention here of the doctrine of the divine right
of kings that was so dear to the Stuart monarchs, but the sanctity of kingship is implied insofar as the prince
himself is invested with something akin to divine power.
This kind of royalist discourse pervades Behn's story of the prince who is "belov'd like a Deity". Yet it is
after Oroonoko has been seized and sold into slavery in Surinam that Behn foregrounds the royalist myth.
Trefry, the Cornish gentleman who buys Oroonoko, knows immediately that he is no ordinary slave,
despite the prince's attempts to hide the facts of his background. At this point, Oroonoko is richly dressed,
in accordance with his exalted social position. In an attempt to gain anonymity, he begs Trefry for clothes
befitting a slave, but to no avail; he cannot conceal "the Graces of his Looks and Mein":
The Royal Youth appear'd in spight of the Slave, and People cou'd not help treating him after a different
manner, without designing it. As soon as they approached him, they venerated and esteemed him; his Eyes
insensibly commanded Respect, and his Behaviour insinuated it into every Soul. So that there was nothing
talked of but this young and gallant Slave, even by those who yet knew not that he was a Prince.
Even when disguised as subservience, authority shines through and receives due "veneration." A violated
order thus mysteriously and infallibly reasserts itself. Consequently, Oroonoko is a slave in name only;
that, apparently, is degradation enough; actual slave labor is quite unthinkable.
When Oroonoko reaches the plantation, the response of the slaves to his presence makes the significance of
his royal status abundantly clear:
the Negroes all having left work, but they all came forth to behold him, and found he was that Prince who
had, at several times, sold most of 'em to these Parts; and from a Veneration they pay to great Men,
especially if they know 'em, and from the Surprize and Awe they had at the sight of him, they all cast
themselves at his feet, crying out, in their Language, Live, O King! Long live, O King! and kissing his Feet,
paid him even Divine Homage.
The slaves, unlike many of the inhabitants of Surinam, are privy to Oroonoko's identity; they know he is
the prince who sold most of them into slavery, and they throw themselves at his feet and worship him as a
god. It would be hard to imagine a more radical vindication of the royal prerogative. If, on the one hand,
royal power defies effacement, on the other, its legitimacy is asserted by the spontaneous and voluntary
veneration of that power by its most abject victims. The slaves in Oroonoko serve the function of affirming
the rightness and sanctity of the royal power that has been infringed; thus Trefry reflects happily that
Oroonoko's "Grandeur" is "confirmed by the Adoration of all the Slaves"
This royalist discourse essentially portrays royal power as a natural law, suffused with divine purpose,
residing in the blood of the legitimate royal line. Evil men may violate this order but they cannot, at least at
this stage in the narrative, destroy it. Yet the text seeks to reinforce its royalist ideology with a broad range
of ruling-class values. I have already mentioned the importance attached to Oroonoko's European education
as the complement of his natural abilities. This dual emphasis on nature and training not only naturalizes
Oroonoko as a European aristocrat, but also privileges European upper-class culture. The claims of birth
are consolidated by the education and training available only to a social and power elite. Therefore, just as
Oroonoko's qualities make him the model of the European ideal of aristocratic cultivation and refinement,
so his allies throughout the novella are presented as products of upper-class culture: the Europeans who
contribute to Oroonoko's education are gentlemen; Trefry likewise is a gentleman of "great Wit, and fine
Learning"; and the English colonists who support Oroonoko are termed "people of quality," "the better
sort," or "men of fashion." Conversely, his enemies tend to represent a barbarity more often than not
associated with low class origins. We are told, for example, that the English sea captain who abducts
Oroonoko "seem'd" better bred than others of his vocation. If one detects a class bias here, it may be that
Southerne did also, for his captain is "an Upstart to Prosperity; one that is but just come acquainted with
Cleanliness, and that never saw Five Shillings of [his] own, without deserving to be hang'd for 'em."(11)
The two other principal villains of the story, Deputy Governor Byam and his henchman, Banister, are
actual historical figures who were both high royalist officials in Surinam. Although Behn cannot explicitly
accuse them of common birth, she nevertheless does her best to associate their opposition to Oroonoko with
low status. She demotes Byam from his actual position of governor to that of deputy governor, locates his
contemptible character at the bottom of a moral hierarchy (he is "not fit to be mentioned with the worst of
the Slaves", and places him at the head of an absurd rabble of a militia and a council of bickering, swearing
vulgarians; Banister, meanwhile, is fixed at the opposite pole to European culture: he is "a wild Irish Man"
and "a Fellow of absolute Barbarity".(12)
Whether or not one wishes, with George Guffey, to see a definite political strategy in Oroonoko, it seems
clear that the novella, written at a time of intense upheaval in social and power relations, endorses the
hierarchical and elitist values of the ruling class, validating the authority not only of the monarchy, but also
of the upper classes that clustered around the throne, allied to it through a shared interest in preserving the
distinction of hereditary power. For Behn's hero, honor is one of the chief expressions of the ruling-class
distinction he embodies in a text that is, in significant ways, a narrative of honor.
Within aristocratic ideology, honor is presented as the property of the class whose public function
differentiates it from other social groups and entitles it to respect and authority; honor signifies both the
internal mechanism through which the aristocrat overcomes ordinary fears and desires in order to fulfill his
public role and the esteem and power which reward that capacity. Honor is thus a measure of the excellence
of individual members of a superior class. Traditionally, it was manifested preeminently on the battlefield,
where its contempt of danger and death was considered capable of generating exceptional feats of valor.
Behn makes her hero not only the heir to the throne of Coramantien, but also a great warrior and general;
the chief military leader of his warlike people, who in battle performs deeds of superhuman valor: "he
fought as if he came on purpose to die, and did such things as will not be believed that Human Strength
could perform".
Yet honor in Oroonoko serves not only to define the prince's heroic nature, but also to provide the structural
center of the narrative, the two halves of which place Oroonoko in situations that threaten his honor. Here it
must be remembered that honor, as an ethic of individual pride, is extremely vulnerable to insult or injury;
any treatment not consonant with his dignity diminishes the man of honor, who must refuse to endure such
degradation if his honor is to remain intact. In the first half of the narrative, set in Coramantien, Oroonoko's
honor collides with the absolute power of the king, his grandfather, who claims the prince's betrothed for
himself. The nature of the old king's fault is that he takes what belongs to another: the woman, Imoinda, is a
very special instance of private property, possessing honor only in relation to the men in her life. The
narrative at this point harps obsessively on Imoinda's virginity. When the prince learns of the wrong that
has been done him, the only consideration capable of calming his rage is "the King's Old Age, uncapable of
injuring him with Imoinda". By constantly reminding us that the old king is feeble and impotent, and by
showing us Oroonoko's eventual possession of his betrothed--he "ravished in a moment what his old
Grandfather had been endeavouring for so many Months"--the text diminishes the dishonor done its hero,
affirming his virility and rightful possession of the woman.(13)
In the Surinam part of the narrative, the danger to Oroonoko's honor is considerably more serious. For a
prince, enslavement obviously entails a monstrous loss of face. Oroonoko's initial reaction to the shock of
his captivity is to try to kill himself by any means at his disposal. As his fetters prevent him from stabbing
himself or even battering in his head against a wall, he determines to starve himself to death and thereby
"quit himself of a Life that wou'd by no means endure Slavery". Clearly, death is preferable to such a
flagrant dishonor. The captain's deceit succeeds in keeping Oroonoko alive, however, and although his
enslavement is eventually rendered marginally less odious by his reunion with Imoinda and by the
respectful treatment and promises of freedom he receives from the English colonists, Oroonoko grows
increasingly impatient for his liberty. But it is Imoinda's pregnancy that turns impatience into desperation
and generates intense anxiety in the colonists, who begin to fear a mutiny. What suddenly makes his
bondage intolerable is the thought that his offspring will be born a slave and so inherit, not the position of
superiority commensurate with its royal lineage, but the condition of servitude: "he began to suspect them
of Falshood, and that they would delay him till the time of his Wife's Delivery, and make a Slave of that
too: for all the Breed is theirs to whom the Parents belong". Imoinda's grief and fears for the future
contribute to Oroonoko's determination, but it seems clear that his central motive for instigating the slave
revolt is a concern to vindicate the honor of his royal line--an end he can achieve only by inciting the other
slaves to rebellion.(14)
It seems likely, then, that Oroonoko's rousing speech to the slaves should be read not as evidence of Behn's
sympathy for the oppressed, but as military rhetoric. Oroonoko is a general, after all, practiced in inspiring
men to valor. And what he appeals to, like so many literary commanders before him (Shakespeare's Henry
V is a case in point), is his soldiers' honor. Slavery, he tells them, entails an appalling degradation. Their
oppression leaves no room for "Glory and Fortitude"; it only transforms them into "Dogs, that lov'd the
Whip and Bell, and fawn'd the more they were beaten": the more they are humiliated, the more they grovel
before their masters. This concern for loss of dignity need not betray a humanitarian spirit. It can instead be
seen as symptomatic of the psychology of honor--a regard for human dignity rooted not in compassion, but
in pride.
When Oroonoko's argument moves to the cause of their enslavement--not the "Chance of War" but mere
commerce--the appeal is still to honor, to the desire to repudiate the shame of being "bought and sold like
Apes or Monkeys". Yet this argument is curious, chiefly because we have already been told that Oroonoko
captured most of these men in battle and sold them into slavery. Hence, according to his logic, they have no
grounds for complaint. Oroonoko alone (apart from the companions originally abducted with him, who go
unmentioned here) has been tricked into slavery rather than beaten in a fair fight. His argument, like his
motive, is self-referential; the slaves are merely necessary means to an end. Moreover, this section of the
prince's speech clearly sanctions slavery as long as it derives principally from military and not commercial
expertise.(15) This Tory rhetoric does not, of course, rule out the upper classes' profiting from their
conquests. It assumes rather that the victor in battle has proven his superiority and therefore has absolute
power to dispose of his captives as he pleases.(16) This is convenient, given the aristocracy's traditional
anxiety about which forms of economic activity were compatible with high rank and authority. Slaves here
are a bit like land, the customary form of aristocratic wealth, which was not only a capital asset but also
involved lordship over others.(17)
The slaves receive Oroonoko's speech not as an expression of fellow feeling but as the words of "a great
Captain . . . a great King". Rather than placing himself on their level, Oroonoko appeals to the slaves to
raise themselves to his; and when they are easily persuaded to abandon him and the mutiny collapses, he
has cause to rue "what he had done, in endeavouring to make those free, who were . . . Dogs, treacherous
and cowardly, fit for such Masters".
The text even privileges honor over Christianity as an anchor for individual virtue and moral order. After
Oroonoko is captured by the treacherous English sea captain, he requests leave to move freely about the
ship, vowing not to seek revenge for his ignoble treatment. The captain, however, is disinclined to trust the
word of a heathen who has no belief in an omnipotent deity and hence no fear of otherworldly punishment
to bind him to his oath. Oroonoko responds:
Let him know, I swear by my Honour; which to violate, would not only render me contemptible and
despised by all brave and honest Men, and so give my self perpetual Pain, but it would be eternally
offending and displeasing all Mankind; harming, betraying, circumventing and outraging all Men. But
Punishments hereafter are suffer'd by one's self; and the World takes no Cognizance whether this GOD
have reveng'd 'em, or not, 'tis done so secretly, and deferr'd so long: while the Man of no Honour suffers
every moment the Scorn and Contempt of the honester World, and dies every day ignominiously in his
Fame, which is more valuable than Life.
In this passage, Behn sets up an opposition between Christianity and honor, between a religion that offers a
supernatural sanction for morality and a secular ethic that locates morality in the relationship between a
man and his fellow men. Behn has her hero assert that such a social and secular moral principle as honor is
a superior guarantor of moral conduct; its coercive power--the fear of disgrace--is more immediate and
forceful than thoughts of punishments awaiting us in the next world. And of course Behn's narrative
supports this assertion, for it invests Oroonoko, the representative of honor, with absolute moral authority,
while the captain who professes Christianity is guilty of both a flagrant breach of trust and a violation of the
principle of hereditary power.
Although this valorization of honor is consistent with the preoccupations of the narrative, its attendant
dismissal of Christianity seems stardingly at odds not only with the text's royalist discourse, which of
course legitimized the claim to indefeasible monarchical power by appeal to the Christian God, but also
with the Catholic sympathies that Behn apparently shared with James II when she wrote Oroonoko.(19)
Several scholars have explained the text's anti-Christian sentiments as part of its sustained critique of
European civilization.(20) But such an interpretation can account neither for the text's Eurocentric bias nor
for the fact that Oroonoko's European allies are consistently portrayed in a favorable light; the only
Europeans held up as objects of scorn are those villains, such as the sea captain and Byam, who transgress
the prerogatives of royalty.
Oroonoko does show traces of some of the revisionist strategies employed during the Restoration to deal
with a religious faith that was seen to have inspired rebellion as well as loyalty to King and Church: the
depiction of the Parliamentarians as greedy, power-hungry hypocrites devoid of sincere religious motives,
and the rejection of religious enthusiasm in favor of a reasonable Christianity capable of serving as an
ethical guide in this world.(21) The narrator's comment that Christian countries "prefer the bare Name of
Religion; and, without Vertue or Morality, think that sufficient" exhibits both the tendency to prioritize
moral principle and the conviction that religion can be an empty pretense. However, the opposition that the
text establishes between Christianity and honor goes well beyond the attempt to affirm the "true" faith and
vilify its travesty. Yet there was another, specifically upper-class reaction to the political and social
conflicts of the seventeenth century, which has been traced by C.L. Barber in his study of honor in the
drama of the period.(22) Honor, as an ethic of individual and class pride, had in fact never been entirely
consonant with Christianity and, according to Barber, became progressively less so as the upper classes
developed an increasingly distinctive group morality to differentiate themselves from the professional and
commercial classes and from those with Puritan sympathies. It is possible that in affirming honor's superior
moral claims, Oroonoko participates in this conservative, "closing ranks" mentality, foregrounding the
traditional and defining upper-class value at a time when Smart absolutism was once again under threat,
attacked by the Whigs who, for Behn, were merely Commonwealth men in modern dress, and betrayed by
its erstwhile supporters, the Anglican clergy.
Nevertheless, the text's privileging of honor over Christianity strongly suggests that there are tensions at
work in its upper-class discourse, that its commitments to royalism and to honor are not wholly compatible.
Certainly the roots in aristocratic pride that problematized honor's relation with the Christian faith
engendered an intrinsic resistance to authority that on occasion rendered the alliance between the monarch
and the nobility less than stable.(25) It is this tension between honor and royal absolutism that is explored
by Beaumont and Fletcher in The Maid's Tragedy and by Fletcher in The Loyal Subject, and which is
enacted in Oroonoko when the prince clashes with his grandfather, the old king whose absolute power
enables him to take Imoinda for himself. And the novella's investment in honor is such that it violates the
cardinal tenet of Stuart royalism and advocates resistance to the legitimate king:
But it was objected to him, That his Case was not the same; for Imoinda being his lawful Wife by solemn
Contract, 'twas he was the injur'd Man, and might, if he so pleas'd, take Imoinda back, the breach of the
Law being on his Grandfather's side; and that if he cou'd circumvent him . . . it was both just and lawful for
him so to do.
In contrast to Stuart nonresistance theory, which held that the monarch as the ultimate legislative authority
in the state was not liable to legal limitation, Oroonoko's comrades make the king accountable to law and so
license the prince's active retaliation against the injury inflicted upon his honor by a monarchical power
depicted as almost wholly arbitrary. The text's pursuance of the logic of honor entails diminishing the
authority of the king, with the result that one detects strain beneath the apparently tranquil surface of
ruling-class solidarity and cohesion.
If, in the first half of the narrative, honor comes into conflict with royalist ideology, in Surinam it
encounters the European colonial enterprise. The narrator dwells repeatedly in the novella on the exotic and
profitable commodities afforded by the Surinam colony--skins, feathers, wood, and gold--and laments that
its loss to the Dutch should have deprived Britain of such a valuable economic resource:
Though, in a word, I must say thus much of it; that certainly had his late Majesty, of sacred Memory, but
seen and known what a vast and charming World he had been Master of in that Continent, he would never
have parted so easily with it to the Dutch. . . . It affords all things both for Beauty and Use.
These accounts of the beauty and utility of Surinam exhibit a fascination with trade and imperialist
acquisition that is inseparable from both royalist and nationalist zeal: what is mourned here is a sacrifice of
royal mastery that entails a diminution of British power in the West Indies. Colonial expansion, conceived
of as an extension of British dominion, reconciles a ruling-class royalist discourse with the discourse of
bourgeois mercantile capitalism.
The discursive collaboration evident in Behn's portrayal of Surinam works to undermine the novella's
aristocratic ideology. The text's upper-class loyalties are kept partially intact by the division of the English
colonists into two distinct camps: those people "of quality" who recognize and respect Oroonoko's royalty
and attempt to give him at least moral support in his demeaning condition (the narrator, who presents
herself as an eyewitness in this part of the narrative, belongs to this group); and the rabble who, under the
treacherous Byam, capture Oroonoko after the slave uprising has failed, and then torture and eventually
execute him.(24) Yet this tidy scheme of allegiances actually gets rather messy, for the simple reason that
terror of a slave mutiny is shared by Oroonoko's allies and enemies alike. This is reflected in the narrator's
own anomalous position in relation to the royal slave.(25) When Oroonoko grows restive during Imoinda's
pregnancy and the narrator is deputed to assure him of the colonists' good intentions, she responds to his
doubts with the threat of confinement and afterwards colludes in the decision to keep him under close
surveillance:
After this, I neither thought it convenient to trust him much out of our view, nor did the Country, who fear'd
him; but with one accord it was advis'd to treat him fairly, and oblige him to remain within such a compass,
and that he should be permitted, as seldom as could be, to go up to the Plantations of the Negroes; or, if he
did, to be accompany'd by some that should be rather in appearance Attendants than Spies.
Behn's colonists remain deeply divided, but in their concern for the safety of the colonial venture, they are
unified, however tenuously--a "Country" facing a potential threat "with one accord." Hence the narrator's
contempt for Byam's militia (in which the "men of fashion" refuse to take part out of loyalty to Oroonoko)
is coupled with her account of the upper-class panic that followed the news of the mutiny, sending the
women fleeing to the river out of fear that Oroonoko "would come down and cut all our Throats". The same
ambiguous attitude toward the prince characterizes the final pages of the novella, which chronicle
Oroonoko's demise. The realistic mode which intrudes into the world of heroic romance at this point
focuses on physical mutilation and corruption: the stench of Imoinda's decapitated corpse, Oroonoko's
deranged self-disemboweling, the loss of beauty that reduces him to a death's head, "nothing but Teeth and
Eye-holes," and the strong "earthy Smell about him" that drives the narrator from the sick room.(26) The
presentation of Oroonoko's death--only after he is castrated and his ears, nose, and arms hacked off, does
his head sink and his pipe drop from his mouth--suggests the stoic fortitude of the martyr. But this
aggrandizement has to coexist with a fascinated scrutiny of the prince's grotesque humiliation and decline
that appears actually to participate in his degradation.
The ambiguity apparent in the account of Oroonoko's demise clarifies the extent to which a literary text is
part of the historical process. In a period of crisis, the novella locates stability in a conservative upper-class
ideology. But the ideology that works to affirm an endangered tradition simultaneously connives in its
destruction, and Behn's opposing groups of colonists are felt as interrelated parts of a larger historical trend,
as collaborators as well as competitors in the British colonial enterprise. Thus the text betrays its
associations with change in the very effort to denigrate it. England in 1688 was a world in which divineright Toryism was dying, eroded by Whig principles and by the steady expansion of commerce and the
bourgeoisie. This gradual shift in power relations spelled not the eclipse of aristocratic might, but a
growing collaboration among elite groups--landed, mercantile, professional--which brought with it an
intermingling of cultural systems of value.(27) The old ruling class became involved in the bourgeois
competitive economy, while the commercial classes imitated their social superiors, not least by embracing
the ethic of dueling. However, if the bourgeoisie aspired to honor, it also challenged and redefined it, until
by the mid-nineteenth century a discourse of aristocratic distinction had become what Donna Andrew calls
a "code of Christian commerce."(28) This transformation is already suggested in Southerne's play, which is
deeply ambivalent about mercantile capitalism, but in which the hero's concern for his honor falters at the
prospect of rebellion against settlers engaged in "an honest way of trade." In 1688, honor and the
aristocracy were far from moribund, but the kind of upper-class sectionalism that Oroonoko ostensibly
advocates was becoming increasingly anachronistic. In a world where the balance of power was shifting,
the line between heroes and villains is blurred, and the royal slave becomes at once a martyr and a
dangerous rebel.
NOTES
1 All references to Oroonoko are to the Norton edition, ed. Lore Metzger (New York and London: W.W.
Norton, 1973). Page references will be given parenthetically in the text.
2 Humanitarian readings of Oroonoko include Ruthe T. Sheffey, "Some Evidence for a New Source of
Aphra Behn's Oroonoko," SP 59, 1 (January 1962): 52-63; and Angeline Goreau, Reconstructing Aphra: A
Social Biography of Aphra Behn (New York: Dial Press, 1980), pp. 288-89. Scholars who focus on the
novella as a critique of Western culture include Frederick M. Link, Aphra Behn (New York: Twayne,
1968), pp. 140-41; Wylie Sypher, Guinea's Captive Kings: British Anti-Slavery Literature of the Eighteenth
Century (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1969), pp. 113-16; and Katharine M. Rogers, "Fact and Fiction in
Aphra Behn's Oroonoko," Studies in the Novel 20, 1 (March 1988): 1-15. The importance of Behn's
ennobling of an African is stressed by David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 472-79; Sypher, pp. 104-10; Laura Brown, "The Romance of
Empire: Oroonoho and the Trade in Slaves," in The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English
Literature, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 41-61,
42; and G.A. Starr, "Aphra Behn and the Genealogy of the Man of Feeling," MP 87, 4 (May 1990): 362-72,
366.
3 George Guffey, "Aphra Behn's Oroonoko: Occasion and Accomplishment," in Two English Novelists:
Aphra Behn and Anthony Trollope (Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1975), pp. 3-41. Janet Todd, in
The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing, and Fiction, 1660-1800 (London: Virago, 1989), agrees that the
novella has a political project (p. 73).
4 Davis, pp. 473-74; Sypher, pp. 103-108.
5 Thomas Southerne, Oroonoko, in The Works of Thomas Southerne, ed. Robert Jordan and Harold Love,
2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 2:III.ii.109.
6 Hannah More, "The Slave Trade," in The Works of Hannah More, 6 vols. (London: Fisher, Fisher, and
Jackson, 1834-35), 5:344-45. Sypher refers to More's poem, pp. 117-18.
7 See, for example, Sypher, p. 114.
8 See Starr, p. 366; and Davis, p. 473.
9 See Guffey, p. 22; and Sypher, pp. 110, 113.
10 OED I.1.a. "Character, disposition, natures"; b. "Capacity, ability, or skill, in some respect"; c.
"Excellence of disposition; good natural gifts"; 2.a. "A mental or moral attribute, trait, or characteristic";
4.a. "Nobility, high birth or rank, good social position."
11 Southerne, Oroonoko, I.ii.54-56.
12 See Guffey, pp. 34-35. Ruthe Sheffey outlines the bitter conflicts between republican planters and
royalists in Surinam (pp. 59-62). Both Laura Brown (pp. 55-56) and Sara Heller Mendelson (The Mental
World of Stuart Women: Three Studies [Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987], p. 120) see Behn's contempt for
Byam as evidence of antiroyalist sympathies that may have originated in her involvement with the
republican, William Scot, during her probable early visit to the colony. However, as Byam is consistently
associated not with the upper crust (who generally support Oroonoko), but with the rabble, it may be the
case, as Guffey asserts, that her venom derives from the fact that it was Byam who was held responsible for
losing Surinam to the Dutch (though he was eventually acquitted after a court-martial).
13 For a very different reading of this episode, which argues that it contains a subtle critique of Restoration
sexual politics, see Moira Ferguson, "Oroonoko: Birth of a Paradigm," New Literary History 23, 2 (May
1992): 339-59, 348-50. In a recent essay, Stephanie Athey and David Cooper Alarcon discuss this episode
in terms of a discourse of rape that in the course of the narrative works to empower the white female
narrator by distinguishing her from the alien black woman. See "Oroonoko's Gendered Economies of
Honor/Horror: Refraining Colonial Discourse Studies in the Americas," American Literature 65, 3
(September 1993): 415-43, 432-38.
14 See also Sypher, p. 120. Southerne's hero, who has no taste for rebellion, is provoked to action only by
his comrade Aboan's reminder that "the last/Of your illustrious Lineage" will be born to "pamper up their
Pride, and be their Slaves" (III.ii.151-53). Athey and Alarcon (pp. 434-35) also see Oroonoko's rebellion as
motivated by honor, though in their reading Imoinda's pregnancy arouses anxiety not about hereditary right
but about the compounding of dishonor involved in enlarging the colonial labor force.
15 See Starr, p. 365; and Brown, p. 54.
16 Davis cites John Locke's claim that slaves, "being Captives taken in a just War, are by the Right of
Nature subjected to the Absolute Dominion and Arbitrary Power of their Masters" (quoted, pp. 120-21).
17 See Jonathan Powis, Aristocracy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), pp. 24-26.
18 See Ferguson, p. 343.
19 Gerald Duchovnay, "Aphra Behn's Religion," N&Q 221, 5-6 (May-June 1976): 235-37.
20 See, for example, Davis, p. 476 and Rogers, pp. 9-10.
21 "Still, I see, while the breath of religion fills the sails, profit is the compass by which factious men steer
their course in all seditious commotions." This sentiment, expressed in Eikon Basilike, The Portraiture of
His Sacred Majesty in His Solitudes and Sufferings, ed. Philip Knachel (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press,
1966), p. 80, is typical of royalist portrayals of the Parliamentarians. For other examples, see Behn, The
Round-Heads; or, the Good Old Cause, in The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Montague Summers, 5 vols.
(London: William Heinemann, 1915), 1:333-425; and P.W. Thomas, Sir John Berkenhead, 1617-1679: A
Royalist Career in Politics and Polemics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), pp. 147-48, 200, 208. For
accounts of the movement away from religious enthusiasm, see James Sutherland, English Literature of the
Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), pp. 297-347; and T.A. Burkill, The Evolution
of Christian Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 300-14.
22 C.L. Barber, The Idea of Honour in the English Drama, 1591-1700 (Gothenburg: Univ. of Gothenburg
Press, 1957), pp. 30, 266-68, 275.
23 For accounts of the relationship between the aristocracy and the crown, see Mervyn James, "English
Politics and the Concept of Honour, 1485-1642," Past and Present, Supplement 3 (1978): 2-6, 8-43; V.G.
Kiernan, The Duel in European History: Honour and the Reign of Aristocracy (Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1988), pp. 50, 68-101; and Powis, pp. 63-76.
24 Ferguson (pp. 354-55) discusses the narrator's eagerness to condemn only the bourgeois elements of
colonial government and interprets it as Behn's covert attack on the seventeenth-century revolutionaries
who deposed and executed Charles I.
25 For accounts of the significance for gender issues of the female narrator's shifting allegiances, see Jane
Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1986), pp. 47-52; Jacqueline Pearson, "Gender and Narrative in the Fiction of Aphra Behn (Concluded),"
RES 42, 166 (May 1991): 179-90, 184-90; and Athey and Alarcon, pp. 426-37.
26 Ros Ballaster argues that the hero's self-mutilation represents an alterity with which the white female
narrator refuses to identify. See "New Hystericism: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko: the Body, the Text and the
Feminist Critic," in New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts, ed. Isobel Armstrong
(London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 283-95, 292. See also Ferguson, pp. 347, 352-53.
27 Accounts of this historical trend, from various perspectives, are provided by Kiernan, pp. 101-104, 161;
Powis, pp. 94-102; Donna T. Andrew, "The Code of Honour and Its Critics: The Opposition to Duelling in
England, 1700-1850," Social History 5, 3 (October 1980): 409-34, 433; and W. Lee Ustick, "Changing
Ideals of Aristocratic Character and Conduct in Seventeenth-Century England," MP 30, 2 (November
1932): 147-66.
28 See Andrew, p. 434.
Anita Pacheco is a Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Sunderland, England. She is currently
working on a study of representations of honor in the plays of Thomas Middleton.
Abstract:
Alpha Behn's 'Oroonoko' is a powerful novella that depicts the struggle of an African prince brought to the
Western world as a slave. 'Oroonoko' tries to show the sacrifices that individuals would make to preserve
their honor and dignity. Royalism is another concept elaborately discussed in the novella. For all its
emphatic presentation of the hero's tribulations and the indifference of the British colonizers, 'Oroonoko'
succeeds in portraying the social realities of the late 1600s.
Source Citation
Pacheco, Anita. "Royalism and honor in Aphra Behn's 'Oroonoko.'." Studies in English Literature, 15001900 34.3 (1994): 491+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 8 Feb. 2012.
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