Aphra Behn’s Black Body: Sex, Lies and Narrativity in Oroonoko

Abstract

This paper traces the peculiar relationship between Aphra Behn, a 17 th century novelist, poet, playwright and translator (by all accounts the first professional writer in English, let alone the first woman to make her living by her pen) and the hero of her novel Oroonoko (an African prince enslaved in Surinam). Although Behn ennobles the young man in the tradition of Rousseau’s “noble savage,” educating him above his owners and marrying him to a similarly “pure” African maiden, certain discrepancies stand out, among them the facial features of the two slaves (clearly European), the couple’s prim and almost-Victorian sensibil ity, and the Christian brutality of the white slavelords, intent upon destroying Oroonoko for a sacrifice beyond their comprehension. Previous research addresses Oroonoko’s value as an abolitionist work, remarking upon the romance between “lesser” equals as among Europeans, or makes political comparisons between the visage of the noble prince and the English monarchs. Neglected in the literary appreciations is Behn’s evident passion for her subject, in its colonial context of illicit interracial love and possession. Is Oroonoko a courageous celebration of racial difference itself, in the only conceivable means of presentation available to a 17 th century woman? Does Oroonoko stand in as a metaphor for an encounter of yet another kind, the trespass of race, class and gender? Couched in the poetic similes of Restoration art and artifice, Oroonoko is a story of strangled violence. It is the tale of a woman writer translating desire and meaning into flesh – black flesh, publicly consumed. Behn’s authorial “I” is transgressive, transformative. Artfully concealed between covers, Behn projects her bound English body into forbidden territories: foreign darkness, black otherness, and desires too dangerous for words.