Behn's Oroonoko Research Articles

Race and the politics of interpretative disruption in harriet martineau's the hour and the man (1841)

Harriet Martineau's abolitionist project in her 1841 novel, The Hour and the Man, problematizes contemporary understandings of race both on a thematic and a structural level. Martineau first revises portraits of Toussaint L'Ouverture in circulation at the time of the novel's publication by constructing him as a Westernized cross between Rousseau's Noble Savage and Aphra Behn's Oroonoko. At the same time, the text dissects the dynamics of interpretation itselfby staging its elements and dramatizing its process. This procedure reflects backon ideas of race by suggesting the limitations of this category, which functions in Western culture as one of the most significant moments of social interpretation

A Degenerate Race: English Barbarism in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and The Widow Ranter

Milton, barbarism was an uncivil taint only recently overcome and still lurking in the English people. More explicitly, Behn's position is that the nation's inability to tolerate the Stuart line (traumatized by one regicide, one forced abdication, and countless assassination or usurpation plots) is a result of a barbarous national character which prefers violence and personal independence to the mercy and moral prudence of kingly government. Poised on either side of the 1688 revolution, two of Behn's last works, Oroonoko (1688) and The Widow Ranter (performed posthumously in 1689), exploit English anxieties about the nation's racial incapacity to live in a peaceful, civil society-in current parlance we might say Behn sees the English people as possessing a collective genetic predisposition towards violence, greed, and restless disobedience. Her argument invokes a common seventeenth-century narrative of political origins which tracks the emergence of civil society from a primitive and violent prepolitical state. But unlike early liberal political thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, Henry Neville, or John Locke, and much like her contemporary John Dryden, Behn inverts that narrative of political origins to display the dangerous tendencies of the English race. Behn uses the Americas, traditionally imagined as the site of primitive governments, to demonstrate the barbarous and rapacious qualities of European political society. Yet in her late works, Behn worries over the English national proclivity for lawless violence in a manner that a colleague like Dryden would find both unpalatable and

Laurence Sterne and the Ethics of Sexual Difference: Chiasmic Narration and Double Desire

Ethics has gained new resonance in literary studies during past dozen years, announces Laurence Buell in his introductory essay to January 1999 special issue of PMLA on Ethics and Literary Study. As he goes on in following pages to map distinctive contours of this still imprecisely defined movement, Buell is increasingly convincing that groundswell of valenced critical may be building to paradigm-defining concept that textuality was for 1970s and historicism for (7). There is a problem, though, and Buell acknowledges as much. That problem is politics: Perhaps touchiest single issue for both exemplars and critics of ethical turn is issue of whether it boils down, whatever nominal agenda, to a privatization of human relations that makes social and political secondary. (14) The vexed relationship between political (social imperatives) and ethical (privatized relations) is one that also characterizes sentimental literature of eighteenth century. Since 1980s in particular, with growth of politicized criticism informed by Marxist and feminist theory, sentimental literature has been read as a site of conflict that both exposes social problems resulting from economic and cultural iniquities and avoids articulating demand for large-scale reform through what could be called rhetorical fallacy of (individual) feeling heart. (1) Laurence Sterne poses a special problem in terms of political/ethical divide. While it is true that Sterne's scenes of sentiment feature power relations that place his male protagonists (Tristram, Yorick, Toby, and Trim) in sympathetic alliance with bird, ass, dwarf, slave, injured soldier, and fly, most such scenes involve a moment of sympathetic exchange between male character and a young woman (usually a stranger). And, while sensual contact stimulates all moments of sentimental connection in Sterne's work, they do so to more ethically problematic effect when Beguine foments Trim's knee or when Yorick counts beats of grisset's pulse than they do when Toby releases a fly or when Yorick responds to cry of a caged starling. Acute sensitivity between men and women in Sterne's fiction seems driven, by Sterne's own design, as much by prurience as by innocence. Sterne's sentimental signature is ambiguity; however, political readings of these scenes of psychosexual attraction, readings that emphasize presence of male sexual aggression, tend to find ambiguity less real than imagined, less persuasive than convenient. In this essay I wish to reintroduce, as it were, an awareness of earnest longing that imbues such scenes, not to deny their prurience but to recognize that their power derives as much from ethical sincerity as from political skepticism. Levinas and Female Other There is mounting evidence, Buell suggests, that Emmanuel Levinas is the most central theorist for postpoststructuralist dispensation of turn-of-the-century literary-ethical inquiry (9). Levinas's insistence that obligation to other takes precedence over being itself radically alters politicized reading of relation. According to Levinas, other has first claim on self through difference that is never absorbed or dominated or totalized (to use Levinasian vocabulary) by that self. If political self needs other for definition, ethical self, according to Levinas, needs other for transcendence. A recent issue of The Eighteenth Century has demonstrated how work of Levinas opens up ethical dimensions of texts ranging from Aphra Behn's Oroonoko to Choderlos de Laclos's Les Liaisons Dangereueses to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister; same issue includes articles comparing philosophies of Levinas, Baruch Spinoza, and Immanuel Kant. …

Captains and Slaves: Aphra Behn and the Rhetoric of Republicanism

When one considers the extraordinary amount of criticism published about Aphra Behn's Oroonoko in the last few years, it is surprising how little critical consensus there is about how that work treats the institution of slavery - whether it is pro-slavery, anti-slavery, thinks slavery is generally acceptable except when those who are enslaved happen to be heroes or kings, or, indeed, whether it simply treats slavery as a convenient metaphor. My own contribution to this debate takes its origin from the use in Oroonoko of language and arguments associated with classical republicanism, in some ways surprising for an author like Aphra Behn, known in her lifetime to be a staunch Tory.Oroonoko's speech inciting his fellow slaves to revolt, in which he eloquently points out 'the miseries and ignominies of slavery', and his bitter remarks after the defeat of the rebellion, on the folly of 'endeavouring to make those free, who were by nature slaves', echo the rhetoric and the concerns of seventeenth-century republicans who regarded 'brutish Servitude' as an affront to human dignity.1 Milton in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) had presented the natural birthright of freedom, extending to all mankind, as a self-evident axiom:No man who knows ought, can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were borne free, being the image and resemblance of God himself.Consistently, Milton also argued that the strenuous defence of liberty against powerful, entrenched forces of oppression entailed a burden of responsibility few were willing to undertake, choosing instead to 'give up thir understanding to a double tyrannie, of Custom from without, and blind affections within':But being slaves within doors, no wonder that they strive so much to have the public State conformably govern'd to the inward vitious rule, by which they govern themselves. For indeed none can love freedom heartilie, but good men.2Like many writers in the republican tradition, Milton combined an impassioned advocacy of liberty, as a principle universally operative, with a bitter, contemptuous dismissal of those who preferred to 'renounce thir own freedom' and live in servitude - 'worthie indeed themselves, whatsoever they be, to be for ever slaves'.3Slave revolts, as Robin Blackburn has shown, were relatively common in the late seventeenth century in the colony of Surinam, where much of the action of Oroonoko takes place, because the geography of that colony, situated on the South American continent, permitted escaped slaves to live at some distance from the coast, free from possible recapture.4 But it is unlikely that any rebellious slave, even if he had been 'entertained with the lives of the Romans, and great men', ever addressed his troops in quite the terms used by Oroonoko. The 'harangue' of this 'great captain', aimed at motivating the hitherto passive body of slaves to heroic resistance, could be cited as an instance of Hobbes's claim that 'the reading of the books of policy, and histories of the ancient Greeks and Romans' had encouraged impressionable young men, eager to perform 'great exploits of war', to rebel against those ruling over them:5Caesar, having singled out these men from the women and children, made an harangue to 'em, of the miseries and ignominies of slavery; counting up all their toils and sufferings, under such loads, burdens and drudgeries, as were fitter for beasts than men; senseless brutes, than human souls. He told 'em, it was not for days, months or year, but for eternity; there was no end to be of their misfortunes: they suffer'd not like men, who might find a glory and fortitude in oppression; but like dogs, that lov'd the whip and bell, and fawn'd the more they were beaten; that they had lost the divine quality of men, and were becoming insensible asses, fit only to bear. (Oroonoko and other stories, pp. 69, 82-3)There is of course no more intrinsic improbability in the classicizing eloquence of Oroonoko (including a reference to 'one Hannibal, a great captain', as role-model) than in his physical description in conformity with Western ideas of beauty ('his nose was rising and Roman, instead of African and flat') or the emphasis on his status as 'great man', akin to the exotic warrior princes of Restoration heroic drama and romance: Behn is addressing a popular audience in Restoration England, and using the conventions at her disposal. …

Race, Gender, and Scholarly Practice: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko)

Race, Gender, and Scholarly Practice: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko)

Competing conceptions: rhetorics of representation in Aphra Behn's oroonoko

This article examines the gendered and racialised dimensions of Aphra Behn's rhetorics of representation. It argues that Behn's ambivalent deployment of colonial rhetoric, particularly the discourses of sexual and racial difference, provides an important context for understanding her text's negotiation of generic categories such as romance, realism and True History, and her narrator's professions of textual fidelity and authority. The “New World Woman” figures in this analysis as both a meta-critical abstraction against which Behn measures her text's achievement, and as a central character in the drama of the novel. The author compares the role played by Aphra Behn, as the white, educated, bourgeois narrator, with that played by Imoinda, Oroonoko's African bride and fellow slave in the Indian colony of Surinam. Exploring the implicit struggle that is staged between the two women over the possibilities of “reproducing” Oroonoko, it is suggested that Behn pits her miscegenated and marketable text against the reproductive capacities of Imoinda's body.

Competing conceptions: rhetorics of representation in aphra behn's oroonoko

Competing conceptions: rhetorics of representation in aphra behn's oroonoko

Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and the "Blank Spaces" of Colonial Fictions

Near the beginning of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Marlow confides to his listeners that I was a little chap I had a for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, When I grow up I will go there. Fortunate enough to have been born nineteenth-century England, the grown man has lived out the little chap's of exploration in every sort of latitude all overthe two hemispheres. But, as Marlow ruefully confesses, the hankerings of nineteenthcentury European explorers must be tempered by the recognition that, what was once virgin territory inviting European possession has, at least since his boyhood, ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery-a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It [has] become a place of darkness.' The little chap's seemingly commendable passion for maps and dreams of glorious exploration have become the grown man's colonizing lust transformed into imperialistic nightmare. I have been begun this essay on Oroonoko with a brief excursion into Heart ofDarkness because, though written two hundred years apart, these stories show remarkable points of convergence. Both stories, for example, are told by an eyewitness narrator (Mrs. A. Behn, Marlow) who both collaborates with and criticizes the colonial enterprise; both feature a protagonist (Oroonoko, Kurtz) who, beginning as civilized, goes spectacularly native; both delineate an uncanny identification or collusion between

Behind the veil

European women in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century India were usually banished from public or political activity by colonial patriarchy, but if politics is also enacted in various non-governmental arenas, it is evident that the domestic parlor, the kitchen, the servants' quarters, and other physical spaces that colonial women managed would also become spaces where colonial ideology was constructed and modified. This paper explores the construction of a bourgeois domestic ideology as an alternative voice within colonialist patriarchy, and at the inscription of the subaltern female body as a metonymic text of subaltern conspiracy and treachery. A bourgeois ethnographic tradition of looking at the subaltern female body finds articulation in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688) and in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's (Halsband, 1965) Letters from the Levant (1716–1718). Keeping this tradition in mind, this paper will look specifically at the ethnographic body criticisms of Mrs. Kindersley, Mrs. Eliza Fay, and Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood. The “public” eastern woman appeared in many cultural contexts in the east, but in this paper she essentially signifies the eastern dancer — the nautch or tamasha girl — whose profession was frequently and unhesitatingly associated with sex work, and the Indian female domestic servant. The “private” woman, on the other hand, was the inhabitant of the zenana or the harem (the women's quarters). The profession of the dancing girl — an entertainment enjoyed by English and Indian observers — was interpreted to indicate the dancer's diseased and atavistic sexuality. However, while the public and private spheres were supposedly demarcated as secret and private in the case of the women's residential quarters, and shamelessly and spectacularly promiscuous and public in the case of the theatricl performance, in reality the narratives suggested a complicity between private and public subaltern sexual conduct and inclinations, the only difference in the case of the harem or zenana being a greater degree of masculine oppression and feminine self-censure. The strip-tease-like gradual discarding of the veil in the tamasha or nautch and its middle eastern equivalents appeared to be only the fully eroticized expression of the languid gestural language in the zenana or harem . Thus, one of the monolithic indices this body discourse achieves is a proclamation of the universal rampancy of subaltern female sexuality, destroying the patriarchally imposed distinction of public and private upon which western protofeminism constructed itself.

The Discourse of slavery: Aphra Behn to Toni Morrison

Acknowledgements Foreword Isobel Armstrong Introduction Carl Plasa and Betty J. Ring 1. Looks That Kill: Violence and Representation In Aphra Behn's Oroonoko Anne Fogarty 2. Sex, Slavery and Rights in Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindications Jane Moore 3. That Mild Beam: Enlightenment and Enslavement in William Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion Steven Vine 4. Silent Revolt: Slavery and the Politics of Metaphor in Jane Eyre Carl Plasa 5. Anglo-American Connections: Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Iron of Slavery Elizabeth Jean Sabiston 6. Painting by Numbers: Figuring Frederick Douglass Betty J.Ring 7. Perilous Passages in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Jon Hauss 8. The Irony of Idealism: William Faulkner and the South's Construction of the Mulatto David Lawrence Rogers 9. Prophesying Bodies: Calling for a Politics of Collectivity in Toni Morrison's Beloved Notes on Contributors Index

Royalism and Honor in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko

This essay examines the treatment of honour in Behn's 1688 novella and argues that the texts' conservative, loyalist politics are undermined by its reliance on the unstable discourse of honour.

Mrs A. Behn and the Myth of Oroonoko-Imoinda

Mrs A. Behn and the Myth of OrOOnoko-ImoindaRobert A. Erickson How long wilt thou go about, O thou backsliding daughter? for the Lord hath created a new thing in the earth, A woman shall compass a man. Jeremiah 31:22 All I ask is the Privilege for my masculine Part the Poet in me ... to tread in those successful Paths my Predecessors have so long thrived in.1 Aphra Behn If the act of writing is always in some sense an abbreviated form of walking, travelling/travailing, and exploring, then Aphra Behn's unconventional "Female Pen" reiterates the adventures of a highly unconventional female explorer and literary pioneer. Amid a resurgence of recent interest in her work, especially her short narratives, we are still in the process of discovering just how richly innovative Behn is as a narrative artist. Oroonoko, published in the explosive political atmosphere of 1688 (and a year before her death) is a thickly woven and delicately allusive verbal artifact. Behn was forty-eight at the time, poor, sick, suffering from a variety of diseases, and actively and intently rereading Scripture.2 1 Aphra Behn, Epistle Dedicatory to TAe Lucky Chance (1686). 2 For Behn's biographical record I rely chiefly on Angeline Goreau's Reconstructing Aphra: A Social Biography ofAphra Behn (New York: Dial Press, 1980). For Behn's intellectual encounter EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 5, Number 3, April 1993 202 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION She was exactly double the age of her free-spirited and socially privileged and powerful "Eyewitness," the younger self-as-character who participates in the crucial historical events of the narrative.3 Oroonoko is a vital text in the multifaceted birth of the novel. Behn prefigures Defoe's invention of the retrospective Moll Flanders looking back over an active and unconventional life, but her purpose is to inscribe the experience and significance of her "Slave" within her own closing life's circle. The narrator's role in Oroonoko calls attention to the elegiac power of a narrative redolent of paradisal and gospel overtones in which Behn preserves for "Posterity" her godlike heroic pair—literally the first African-American protagonists in English fiction. While she may in part alleviate her own sense of guilt in their demise, at the same time she provides a cautionary literary and political fable for her dedicatee, the young nobleman Richard Maitland (nephew of the Lauderdale of Charles's Cabal ) and his lady (another potentially important heroic pair), and for an England—and an English Catholic king—in crisis. The title page of the first edition tells us that the author is "Mrs. A. Behn." Although Aphra Behn almost always signs her name "A. Behn" in the epistles dedicatory to her works, the "Mrs." [Mistress] here—whether her own addition or, as is more likely, the bookseller's—conceals a wealth of meaning present to a late-seventeenth-century audience.4 "Mistress " was one ofthe few female words of power in this era, but of sharply with Scripture and French biblical criticism in her translation and publication in early 1688 of Fontenelle's Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (accompanied by her "Essay on Translated Prose"), see Maureen Duffy, The Passionate Shepherdess: Aphra Behn 1640-89 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977), pp. 270-74 and Robert Adams Day, "Aphra Behn and the Works of the Intellect ," in Fetter'dor Free: British Women Novelists, 1670-1815, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1989), pp. 374-80. Of recent criticism (besides that cited elsewhere), I would like to note the following as the most pertinent to my concerns in this essay: Katharine M. Rogers, "Fact and Fiction in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko," Studies in the Novel 20 (1988), 1-15; Robert L. Chibka, '"Oh! Do Not Fear a Woman's Invention ': Truth, Falsehood, and Fiction in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 30 (1988), 510-37; Beverie Houston, "Usurpation and Dismemberment: Oedipal Tyranny in Oroonoko," Literature and Psychology 32 (1985), 30-36; Martine Watson Brownley , "The Narrator in Oroonoko," in Essays in Literature 4 (1977), 174-81; and Jacqueline Pearson, "Gender and Narrative in the Fiction of Aphra Behn," Review of...

Owning Oroonoko: Behn, Southerne, and the Contingencies of Property

The adventures of Oroonoko tell a story about property. In the first half of Aphra Behn's novel, which takes place for the most part in Africa, Oroonoko struggles against his royal grandfather for possession of Imoinda, the woman he loves; in the second half, the enslaved prince fights English colonists in Surinam for possession of himself as well as his wife. Thomas Southerne play not only embraces progressive ideology, with its emphasis on private property, but parallels Lockean rhetoric that proclaims equality but constitutively depends upon limiting the category of individual and thus potential owner. Behn's Oroonoko, however, problematizes human commodification, while Southerne's seeks complex ways to justify it. Oroonoko as well as Imoinda falls victim to English exploitation of the 'African' gift economy. While Oroonoko sells slaves to Europeans, elitism prevents him from understanding Africans indiscriminately as commodities and prevents the practice of slavery from threatening the local hierarchy.

Juggling the categories of race, class and gender: Aphra Behn'sOroonoko

(1991). Juggling the categories of race, class and gender: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko. Women's Studies: Vol. 19, Women in the Renaissance: An Interdisciplinary Forum (MLA 1989), pp. 159-181.

Oroonoko, or, The Royal Slave: A Critical Edition (review)

248 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION This is, then, a rather traditional study of generally rather obscure texts; but it is thoughtful and well written, and provides a precious aid to those involved in the effort to understand the evolution of French fiction immediately before and after 1700. Patrick Brady University of Tennessee Aphra Behn. Oroonoko, or, The Royal Slave: A Critical Edition. Edited with an introduction by Adelaide P. Amore. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987. xliv + 86pp. US$24.25 cloth; US$11.25 paper. In a recent essay Richard Altick quotes from a "deservedly scathing review" that appeared in Literary Research Newsletter, and seconds the reviewer's assertion that "[a]ny publisher honorably engaged in the production of academic books ... must be willing to accept a burden of responsibility to enforce standards of excellence." "Quality control," he added, "should be the concern of everybody involved in the gathering, evaluating, and disseminating of bibliographical information" (Literary Reviewing, ed. J.O. Hoge, 1987, p. 68). The same standards of excellence must also be maintained in textual criticism, and so the editor and the publisher have much to answer for in this edition of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, an edition that fails every test of a good edition. The first problem with this text comes on the title page where the words "A Critical Edition" are prominent. Since a critical edition of Behn's Oroonoko has been done—and done well—by Gerald Duchovnay (Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1971), what could a new critical edition have to offer? What texts might have been examined other than those Duchovnay collated? To my knowledge , Duchovnay missed only two copies of the 1688 Oroonoko, neither one significantly different from seven of the eight he examined. Adelaide Amore claims to have examined only three copies of the first edition: the Bodleian's as copy-text, the Beinecke's, and the British Library's (which seems to have reappeared after a long disappearance). Ignored are the Huntington and Harvard copies readily available in the University Microfilms Early English Book series. This, then, is a "critical edition" with no textual apparatus. Duchovnay adopted twenty-six emendations in his critical text and recorded close to one hundred accidental variants and over two hundred substantive variants in his collations, including two press variants in the 1688 text. One of these press variants, extant only in the Bodleian text of Behn's dedication to Maitland , was suppressed in a stop-press cancellation because it revealed Behn's Roman Catholicism. Yet this most important textual (and biographical) detail is buried in square brackets in the Dedication on page 2 of this editor's text. REVIEWS 249 But these are not the only problems with this edition. I fear that Restoration scholars for years will be correcting students' errors generated by the introduction , the notes, and the primary and secondary bibliography. The list of Behn's works is so filled with misdatings, mangled titles and subtitles, significant omissions, and ghosts that it would take pages here to offer corrections. The same carelessness with titles and dates surfaces in the "Selected Bibliography " (pp. 83-86). Here, under "Alphra" [sic] Behn, are listed the 1688 edition of Oroonoko, the 1871 publication in Pearson's edition (although it is not identified as such), Sey's 1977 edition published in Ghana (not Chana), two of La Place's five known editions (but the editor does not seem to realize that La Place rewrote half the novel to give it a happy ending), and the 1709 Hamburg edition with the German title butchered. Other Behn works, such as the 1698 third edition of the collected novels and Summer's edition, are listed by title, while the first edition (1696) of the collected novels is omitted. Significantly absent from the bibliography are twentieth-century editions of Oroonoko in English, of which there have been six others (to 1985) not counting Summers's or Sey's. Surely the two most important editions of the past twenty years, Duchovnay's invaluable critical edition (with its 145-page introduction) and Lore Metzger's Norton edition (which follows Summers's), merit notice. Yet they are not listed. The preliminary matter of...

The Earliest American Novel: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko

Research Article| March 01 1984 The Earliest American Novel: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko William C. Spengemann William C. Spengemann Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1984) 38 (4): 384–414. https://doi.org/10.2307/3044746 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation William C. Spengemann; The Earliest American Novel: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 1 March 1984; 38 (4): 384–414. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3044746 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1984 Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Earliest American Novel: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko

The Earliest American Novel: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko

Oroonoko in France in The XVIIIth Century

M. Etienne, in his study of the sources of Victor Hugo's first novel, Bug-Jargal, suggests that a kinship clearly exists between this, as well as earlier French stories of Negro characters, and Mrs. Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave. He is led to this conclusion because of certain indications of the popularity of Oroonoko in France during the eighteenth century, and because of the recurrence in French literature of the noble, romantic Negro. This very just inference as to the importance of Oroonoko is worthy of elaboration and emphasis because in this early English novel we can find the substance and technique of much of the littérature négrophile of the eighteenth century, a period in which the Negro emerges from his despised condition and takes on heroic qualities and possibilities; and also because this English story, of which the purpose might well have been didactic, written by “the first literary abolitionist … on record in the history of fiction,” as Swinburne called Mrs. Behn, was to have far-reaching consequences in French humanitarian thought.