.................., .... ........

xiv
CHRONOLOGY
16
9
6
TheYounger Brother, Or, The Amorous]ilt performed
and published with emendations. Thomas Southerne's adap
tation of Oroonoko performed. The Histories and Novels
published, including La Montre and the story 'Love-Letters'.
16
98 All the Histories and Novels published, adding more
stories: 'Memoirs of the Court of the King of Bantam', 'The
Nun or the Perjured Beauty' and 'The Adventure of the Black
Lady'.
1
7
00
Histories, Novels, and Translations published, adding
'The Unforntnate Bride or the Blind Lady', 'The Dumb Vir
gin', 'The Unfortunate Happy Lady', 'The Wandring Beauty'
and 'TheUnhappy Mistake'.
Introduction
As a famous woman author Aphra Behn was unique in the
Restoration, me penod after 1660 when Charles II wasrestored
to the English throne. She sustained a career through twenty
eventful years. Hugely successful on the stage, she was also
renowned forher erotic poetry and political propaganda on
behalf of Charles 11 and his brother James II. By the rime She
turoed to prose at the end of her life in the 1680s, she had a
keen.sense of her abilities. In the preface to a play staged in
1686 she wrote, 'I value Fame as much as if Ihad been boro
a Hero',
1
while Oroonoko ends with the boast, 'I hope the
reputation of my pen is considerable enough to makehis glori
ous name to survive to all After comparing painting and
writing in her dedication to one of James II's ministers, Lord
Maitland, she exulted that 'the pietures of the'pen shall outlast
those of the pendI, and even worlds themselves'. The exagger
ation indicates how far she had come since the beginning of
her career when she had seen herseli simply as the author of
entertaining plays. In a translation published in the year of her
death, she inserted the 'give my Verses Immortality'.2She
would have relished the fame that Oroonoko has brought her
in the twentieth century and the present day.
Aphra and fiction

Aphra Behn had already been remarkable as the onlyfemale
dramatist through most ofithe Restoration whenshe became a
major writer of prose. Inevhably there are echoes in her stories
of earlier fiction, of Elizabethan narratives, of French novellas,
r l.
xvii
1.
xvi
Hl INTRODUCTION
j'i
heroic romances and Spanish tales, but, except for one straight
translation, no work of hers has a precise source. Oroonoko
Il
has no c10se parallel and no one in the seventeenth century
wrote a story quite like it.
I
I
From 1670, through most of the reign of Charles Il, Aphra
Behn provided modish comedies for the stage. But towards the
end of Charles'srelgn, thefliatreswereemptied by political
plots as people began to fear the accession of his Catholic
brother James. The two companies, The King's and the Duke's,
which had ~ b e e n started just after the Restoration, had to
merge and far fewer new plays were required. As a result, many
dramatists moaned with Behn that 'a' body has no creditt at
the Playhouse as we used to have'.3 At this point, the educated
playwright turned to translation from the c1assics, as did
England's poet laureate, John Dryden; Behn made some
indifferent French poetry into more stylish English verse - then
she moved into prose.
So Behn's preparation of five stories towards the end of her
life can be partlyexplai.ned by a need for money.4 She revealed
herpoverty in a begging letter to herpublisher, Jacob Tonson,
in 1683, and in her negotiations in August 1685 with the deputy
treasurer of the theatre company for which she wrote. Despite
her laments, however, she was one of the few playwrights to
have new and successful plays performed durin:g the short reign
of James Il. She may not have been as poor by 1688 when she
published her stories as she had been in the earlier part of the
decade.
Beyond need of moneyBehn probably turned;to prose because
she enjoyed it. With it she could play with authrial control and
investigate themes of love and obsession impossible in drama,
which displayed the cut and thrust of sexual relations but not
the inner life of a character or a changing personality through
trying times. Fiction could do this, as she discovered with her
first attempt, Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister,
a long novel .based on fact and written over the politically
tempestuous years of 1684-7 whenJames Il caP1e to the throne
and began to lose it. The book followed the sqandalous events
in an aristocratic family and chronic1ed the failed rebellion of
INTRODUCTION
Charles Il's illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, which
darkened the first year of his unc1e's reign. Anonymously pub
lished, the novel was a remarkable production, moving from
heady epistolary form into cooler narrated fiction, and it gave
Behn confidence in her powers as a storyteller.
One area of experimentation in Love-Letters and the short
stories that followed is the narrator, sometimes female, some
times of indeterminate sex. l hese narrators are not omniscient
. like those of nineteenth-century fiction but function as charac
ters within the text. They pIace the action morally or satirically,
validate events, stand for wavering public opinion and take the
spotlight from the main character, who.becomes less knowable
and more ambiguous. The narrator of Oroonoko often identifies
with her hero but also inc1udes herself in the 'we' of the Euro
peans, so sharing their fear of Oroonoko's possible cruelty when
baited, and she sometimes supports, sometimes' controls him.
She is boastful of her power at one time, at another c1early
impotent. Thomas Southerne, whosuccessfully dramatized
Behn's story (in 1696) shortly after her death, wondered why
such a great playwright had not written a play for her hero
instead of 'burying' him in a noveI. He speculated that she could
not bear an actor to represent him or thought none could do it
welL But the reason may have been generic: that the story was
best told through the eyes of a narrator, with all the cultural
complexity the device allowed, as well as the subtle interplay of
a tale with its unstable, per:haps even at times duplicitous, teller.
In a poem she wrote to al follower of William of Orange just
after the fall of James Il, B ~ h n admitted that the vietor controls
history,s but Oroonoko suggests that a c1ever storyteller can
evade this controI. ,
Southerne made Oroonf>ko into heroic stage tragedy, a form
Behn used only once: in !anotherwork about a black man,
this one a villainous Mooi called Abdelazer. Mostly she pulled
away from the form, whih usually required c1ear masculine
heroism and moral absolutes. Yet at theend of her life she grew
fascinated with the tragic $ode in fiction; where only Abdelazer
among her plays ends in qeath, three of the five stories end so,
and another has a near death. Of these Oroonoko is the most
xix
- _.
. --
xViii INTRODUCTlON
c1assically tragic, with its centraI character reminiscent of heroic
tragedy in his nobility, political significance, honour and truth.
Even here however the effect of the tragedy is not simply cathar
tic. At the end the reader is in the position not of the spectator
at thec10se of a Shakespearian play or of theinvolved reader
of a realist novel, but rather of a person in the crowd at an
execution. The event of Oroonoko's death is tragic - there
was nothing more so, either in the Restoration or in the two
thousands years of Western art before it, thana prince or king
made impo!ejlt - but the actual details are grotesque. Southerne
ended his play more traditionallywith Imoinda (a white woman
in his version) committing suicide and Oroonoko tidily dis
patching both the governor and himself. Behn conc1udes with a
stinking corpse and a mangled body. With her-narrative she had
already gained a strangeness beyond drama when her theatrical
noble hero suddenly became an ordinary man who might have
cut 'all our throats' (p. 68). The deaths go further and both
shock and appaI with their unnerving physical detail.
Aphra Behn's life
The fust (contemporary) biography Aphra Behn the
daughter of an intended lieutenant-general of Surinam and the
Caribbean islands, but these details are-mainly taken from
Oroonoko, in which Behn cast herself as the inarrator. In fact
she is more likely to have been born of humble parents in Kent,
with probably a barber for a father. The great unanswered
question of her childhood is, therefore, where she acquired the
extraordinary education which allowed her fxom her earliest
works to display a knowledge of European culture and to play
expertly with literary genres. What is certain iSthat she carne to
loathe the Puritans who ruled England duringthe interregnum
between the execution of Charles I and restoration of his son
Charles II in 1660; she associated them with dishonour, joyless
ness, commerciaI values and the controlling ofiwomen.
According to Colonel Thomas Colepeper, relative of the
aristocratic Sidneys, Aphra's mother was his wet-nurse and it
may have been through him that she spied fot royal1sts in the
,
INTRODUCTION
Low Countries before the Restoration and then for Charles II's
in Surinam. There, according to reports, someone
nicknamed 'Astrea' after a character in a French romance was
associating with the undesirable parliamentarian William Scot,
nicknamed 'Celadon' after the romance lover of Astrea. (Later
Behn used the name 'Astrea' in her literary works as her nom
de pIume). When Astrea left Surinam, Celadon followed. In
London Aphra apparently married a merchant of German
extraction living there, possibly theJohann Behn who had served
on a ship in the Caribbean. Whoever he was, she immediately
. lost him through death - or more likely separation since she
never called herself a widow. Then in 1666, the year of the .
Great Fire of London, 'A. Behn', code-named 'Astrea', was
dispatched as a royalist agent to Antwerp where she once more
liaised with William Scot; Engiand was at war with the Dutch,
and Scot, in Dutch pay, was offering Dutch' secrets to the
EngliSa -
As. spy ehn was not a complete successo She was fooled by
Scot, acting as a triple agent, while a rival spy c1aimed
she was too garrulousand open. After some months her English
masters stopped paying her. As a result she returned to England
,,-,:.
penniless and was threatened with debtors' prison. At this point
she turned to the stage. She claimed she had already written a
play in Surinam but her occurred with The Fare'd Mar
riage, which opened the 1670 season of one of the two theatre
companies. The prologue wittily alluded to her sex and past:
'The Poetess too, they say, has Spies abroad.' There followed
at least eighteen more plays, making Behnthe most prolific
dramatist of the period between 1670 and 1690. Some such as
The Rover were extremely'popular and associated her with the
kind of comedy that witty couples, spirited women
and rakish men, very much the types of people who frequented
-Charles II's court. Behn \Vas an adrnirer of the major royal
mistresses and her first drahiatic dedication was to Nell Gwyn.
w
To support the court and its flamboyant ethos, Behn also turned
to writing politically engaged plays when the royal govemment
carne under attack from tqose she regarded as heirs of the old
Puritans.
. ,
xx
INTRODUCTlON
Behn was also a successful poet, gaining fame for her erotic
but never. crude poems of female passion. Although she was
satirized for promiscuity, her name was consistently associated
only with one man, John Hoyle, a bisexuallawyer with a repu
tation for violence, republicanism and freethinking. Her darken
ing depictions of libertines in her plays may have drawn on
Hoyle, as may her most complex love poems, which describe
rhe painful ambiguities of physical and ideaI Iove. At the same
time Behn seems to haveresponded to many other people, and
her may or may not have an autobiographical
component, address both men and women amorously. She
appreciated beauty where she found it.
In rhe 1680s, very unusually for a woman, Behn was associ
ated with freethinking, as is suggested in a poem she wrote
for a young man, Thomas Creech, who had just translated a
philosophicalwork by the Latin poet Lucretius.? The translator
was aware of his dangerously unchristian- subject-matter and
trieclto defang it, but Behn saw the work as a triumphant
assertion of rationalism and materialism, a: victory of reason
. over faith. She also wrote a crious paraphiase on the Lord's
Prayer in which she moanedthat authors could not earn their
'daily Bread' and declared 'Trespasses' were not to be resisted.
By 1688 she was both personally and politcally anxious. She
knew sh was dying andshe felt the crumbling of the royal
regime of rhe Stuarts which she had so strenuously supported.
She feared that, if James II fell, the country would return both
to the restrictive morality of the Puritans and to the political
anarchy of the Civii War which had been raging when she was
achild. In fact she Iived just long enough to the remarkably
peacefui ousting of James and the arrivaI d,f his nephew and
daughteras the joint sovereigns William and;Mary. It was not
achange she relished but she had Iittle time fo adjust since she
died a few days after their coronation in 1689.
:In her last years she seems to have been fremembering her
yuth: the first three of her stories as well! as her finai play
The WiddowRanter alI draw on materiai from rhis time. Her
months in Surinam and ?een !mportant for her
development as a writer. In allegedly begun
...
INTRODUCTlON xxi
. her first play and, if the unknown author of 'The History of the
Life afid Memoirs of Mrs. Behn' (1698) isto be believed,in
Antwerp, when her services as a spy were no Ionger needed, she
... began writing amusing prose. The city Iater provided the settihg
for The Fair Ji/t, based on areaI trial and botched execution
(Behn was fascinated by executions, often rather carnivalesque
public events during her lifetime, and she used them as the
climax of several of her novels). Surinam gave thebackground
.for Oroonoko, which tells of men known to have been' active
there in the 1660s and describes the sort of events that pepper
private reports and state records. Her portrayal of the colony
as paradisaicai in its naturai resources but hellish in its human
arrivals was supported by the Baptist pamphleteer Henry Adis
who was deeply shocked ,by the brutish nature of the Surinam
settlers. To him they displayed debauchery and atheism and
were even worse than 'the very Heathens themselves, to the
shame and stink of Christianity'. Collectively, the Europeans
were a 'rude rabbIe', given to drunkenness, blasphemous oaths
and 'lascivious Abominations'.8
Slavery and colonization
Surinam was a difficult region to settle and controi. On his third
expQition liad arrived
at the mouth of the Orinoto (or Oroonoko as it was often spelt)
on the north coast of South Amrica. He believed he had reached
the river which led to thefEarthly Paradise. The region of Suri
nam was not truly conqJ,iered by tbe Spanish or Ponuguese in
-tne-Siteenthand seventeenth centuries and so was a target for
cotoniiiTactiv!tY by manyrlater exploring nations, especiaIly the
'Frencli;DillCh: aftd Englrsp:--
"""";!n-'I-6-2r7-L"()fWiIlougHoy received from the English govern
ment a twenty-one-year of property nghfs m the Canbee
.. lslands. Me became goveIOI df narbados and auned at tound
-ing a neW colony in Surinam. In 165la party of about three
hundred was sent out fr$l Barbados - rhe fourteenth attempt
,jl.
r at settlement.
9
Plantationi were begun along the Surnam River
and soon there were abdut five hundred in alI. Although the
:'
i
I -'-'-,".--,-- . " .. ~ ,.--,
overwhelming motive of alI the settlers was financial, factional
politics inevitably travelled with them, and Behn's presence
there may welI have attested to the sense in England that poli
tical rebels might use the colonies for their own ends and even
negotiate with England's enemies, especialIy the Dutch. Presid
ing over the mixture of greed and grumbling, of renegades,
adventurers, political exiles, indentured labourers, felons and
property-starvedyounger sons that made up the colony was
Lord Willoughby's old political associate William Byam, now
made his deputy governor.
IO
By the 1660s the colony's purpose
was largely to produce sugarlOr the Enghsh market; smce su ar
was an expensive crop, t e p anters ten e to have large estates
demanding copious labour.
Most visitors saw the Native Americans or Indians of the
region either as happy innocents to be taught Christianity and
culture or as cannibalistic savages to be suppressed. Some had
mixed feelings, such as the writer George Warren, who found
them cowardlyand treacherous,. but also hoped they might .
be christianized. According to the Dutch traveller Esquemelin,
.before the European invasion of the region they were barbarous,
sensual, brutish and idle, rousing themse1ves Qnly to fight each
other. It was generalIy agreed by European observers that the
dimate made them lazy and that they lackednorthern shame.
Behn, however, saw them through the lens of romance. In her
pages they inhabited a pastoral Arcadia or a Golden Age of
.innocence when words were 'simple' and souls 'sincere'. Her
predecessor here is the sixteenth-century French essayist Mon
taigne, who wrote in a tolerant essay ahout 'cannibals' on this .
coast (which he had never visited) that they were dose to nature
and had no 'words that signifie Lying, Treachery, Dissimulation,
Avarice, Envy, Detraction and Pardn'.l1 A more contemporary
voice using the Golden Age myth was that fof John Milton,
who in Paradise Lost called God 'the sov'reign Planter' and
contrasted a pastoralworld associated with Adam and Eve with
a greedy commercialization promoted by Slltan, the profit
driven 'great adventurer' .12 Like Surinam andf:a fading Golden
Age realm, the earth became a colonial outpost, a receptade of
contending outcasts.
xxiii INTRODUCTlON
Despite accepting the romantic image of Surinam, Behn had
no pro em wit ng an s imperial a ventures in t e encas
- un l e many o er compatriots who dismissed this overseas
activity not as culturalIy inappropriate but as expensive and
destabilizing for England.For Behn, the New World could seem
both prelapsarian and anch commerciai opportunity. In The
'""Wi(Jdow kaiztei; wntten about TIie same time as Oroonoko and
the first play ever to be set in an English colony, she made her
hero - a figure very like Oroonoko - aware of the injustice in
conquest but also believe that the conqueror had the right to
maintain what he had won by skill or force. In Oroonoko she
lamented that Charles Il had not seen the potential of his colony
and that, shortly after she left, he had let it go - in exchange for
New Amsterdam, laterrenamed New York.
To develop Surinam through labour, Willoughby had urged
seiiIers to c o ~ f r o m BrltiaBiYthe colonies had ditfculty:
attracting bona fide immigrants atid most suspected that adver
tisements and favourable reports lied about conditions. The
colonies imported indentured labour from Britin, espec1aI1y
{rom the outfying reglOiiS11refnd, Scodand and Wales
z
and
accepted politIcal pnsoners more or Iess exiIed and enslaved for
life, but there were never enough. Until this point the African
slave-trade, established long before by the Portuguese and
Spanish to feed Mediterranean needs and later their new
colonies in South America, had not been much exploited by the
English, who had no slavery at home or much sense of chattel
slavery (where people could be bought and sold and their chil
dren automaticalIy enslaved); when they went to Africa, they
were most interested in gold. In 1630, however, they officially
entered the trade when Charles I granted the first licence for
slave-transporting. By 16t2, a Royal African Company had
been established for slaving; it spent much rime fending off the
new slaving power, theDutch, as welI as negotiating with the
African selIers who played off one Europeannation against
another to get the best prices. Unlike the relationship with the
Americas, where the Europeans carne to settle inspite of the
natives (who by the time the English arrived had long suffered
harrying from Spanish and Portuguese), that with Africa was
INTRODUCTlON
xxii
,-=

Il
il.'
'.
{
,
,
-___ "Ft....
strictlycommercial, and forts were established along the coast
only for trade, carried on by permission of the slave-selling
African chiefs. Among the trading posts founded by the English
on the Gold Coast (modern Ghana) was the one mentioned as
Coramantien in Oroonoko, variously controlled in the r 660s
by the English and Dutch. The imperial adventures were in their
infancy and Behn did not assume in her audience knowledge of
-'SoillliJtmencan colomes, of thelr fnendly inhabltants or of
.-.
is the first fictional depiction by an En lish
wn er o ncan I e e a ara.' et, w ere her account
of Surmam has the eye-wltness' truth, the Africa she
portrayed has little in common with the West Africa described
by French and English travellers and traders. Depictions of the
old customs of the Fantis and Ashantis in the Gold Coast are'
fiot especially connected to the orientaI activities and harem
intrigues of Behn's fantastic kingdom; the matrilineal, polyga
fiOUS societies of West Africa have little to :do with patrilineal
kingship and the undying love between the monogamous
Oroonokoand Imoinda. In fact her hero fuses cultures. He is
an African in the New World, with a European hberaI
glvmg hlm not tlie usuarchriStlamty but a sceptlclsm wlth
Wliich he can judge tnChristian Europeans. At th same time,
. !lkeherother blacK crea-ti'OIl,the villainous Abfelazer, Oroonoko
is a non-European prince who recalls the Moorish or Turkish
stereotype of a character in whom the common European urge
to power is presumed to course without European checks, to
. the destruetion of himself and thosearound:him.
In the seventeenth century the English did not consider Afri
cans as the ooly natural slaves. They themse1yes had white slaves
in Barbados and treated many European inqentured servants as
virtual slaves. On ships and in colonies felt it reason":
able toenslaveProtestants and vice versa. Although the physical
beauty of the 'gloomy race' (p. r 3) was rarely: stressed, blackness
remained to some extent a glamorous conl,tept: in the Restor
ation, Othello (r602-4) with its black her9was the favourite
Shakespearian tragedy and Ben Jonson's Masque of Blackness
(r 605) had exotically displayed court ladies blackened into
'Ethiopians' - even though in the seque1 they lost their blackness.
In thse depictions there is little of the sense of colour as a racial
curse - the notion of Negroes as descended from Cain or Noah's
accursed son Ham, doomed to be servants of servants - althou'gh
it was aIready current in some quarters. Inevitably, however,
the later history of prejudice is sometimes read back into these
early works, as it is into Oroonoko.
At the time and for about a century afterwards, as illustrations
to published versions of Southerne's play version reveal, the
hero in Oroonoko was both exotic an ulturall assimilated
In r776 Mr Savigny p aye him in full court dress with the
addition of a vestigial toga. Like other heroes he speaks with
the rhetoric of ancient Roman nobility, and the civility and
courtliness of both Oroonoko and Imoinda allow assumptions
about class and gender to be transcultural. Oroonoko is a prince
in all depictions, despite having no country to rule and no means
of getting one either through his own efforts or through the help
of those who, perhaps in part for their own entertainment, have
accepted his royal status. Although often dismissed as racist,
Behn's depictionof Oroonoko as unlike other Africans, with
his Roman nose, straight hair and extreme blackness, can be
read as a simple desire to make him distinet, other, the cynosure
of all noble meno
. Although in the r660s,when Oroonoko was
. huge1y increasing in the English Caribbean islands, 1 s not
yet a large social issue in England and nothing approaching an
abolitionist movement appeared until almost a century after
Behn's time. Yet even then there were isolated voices of protesto
One be10nged to her eccentric, mystical and vegetarian acquain
tance Thomas Tryon, who later wrote Friendly Advice to the
Gentleman-Planters of the East and West Indies (r684). In ane
seetion, 'Discourse in way of Dialogue, between an Ethiopean
or Negro-Slave and a Christian', he presents a noble African
asking his master 'what makes us your Slaves ... to be thus
Lorded and Tyrannized over by you?' He continues: 'we are
human rational Souls, ana as much the lmage ofGod as [your]
selves, and want none Qf the noble Faculties, therefore our
innocent Blood will equally call for Ve[n]geance'. In another
xxv INTRODUCTION
l:!. - _.. _._.
INTRODUCTION xxiv
="
l'
. xxvi INTRODUCTION
section, 'The Negro's Complaint of their Hard Servitude, and
the Cruelties Practised upon them', he associates African slavery
with European habits of luxury, commerce and cruelty: 'For
though we are ... made in thine Image, and endued with rational
and immortal Souls, yet we are nothing more in many of our
Masters esteem, than their Money and if some of them could
find out a way to torment and plague us tenfold more, they
" "i
would do it', provided we might still be but able to perform our
Drudgery, to maintain them in Superfluity and Gluttony.'13
Another pJ.:Otest carne from Godwyn, a Protestant min
ister in Virginia and Barbados in the 1660s and 1670S, who
wrote The Negro's and Indian's Advocate (1680). He did not
chaHenge slavery but argued for the humanity of Africans, and
he criticized their cruel treatment by West Indian planters. Since
'God had made (of one blood) aH Nations of Men', he proposed
converting the sIaves to Christianity to promote their 'integrity
andlong-livedness'.14 CQnvenient1y this would also render them
less prone to rebellion, a constant fear in these colonies where
slaves rapidly carne t outnumber their masters.
Like almost aH her contemporaries, Aphra Behn accepted
slavery for most of the enslaved; OrooOOko's first present to
lmOmdalSa group of slaves and he later bargains for his freedom
by offeringto send slaves to Surinam. But the enslaving of
someone born noble was anathema to her imd the later sense
: .
that a whole race could, without distinctions, be traded and
treated quite unlike any other would have appaHed her. Where
for the colonists the crucial difference was,between Christian
and itifidel, for Behn and other dramatists rank overtopped race
and religion; Twenty years before she wrote, Dryden with his
co-author Sir Robert Howard made the honourable in
his Indian Queen (1664), which Behn mentions in her work
(p..IO). In aH the exotic dramas ofthe time, nobles recognize each
other acrosscultures. In Southerne's in his Oroonoko,
it is horrific to enslave a man of rank from:any race who was
'born only to Command': 'here's a Prince .. among the Slaves,
and you set him down to go as a Common \man,' protests one
character.15
Although Behn did not have the modern concept of slavery,
.,..="
xxvii
INTRODUCTION
.then, did have a sense of the improper commodification of
human beings for money, against which she protests in many of
her works, and indeed Oroonoko makes a distinction between
enslaving battle-victims and slaving for money. Prostitutes and
women sold into marriage are sympatheticaHy treated, and in_
her 1686 play, The Luckey Chance, she condemned a husband
for giving his wife's sexual favours as payment for a gambling
debt. So too she sometimes lamented that an author had, for
money, to betray art in order to please. The sense of commodifi
cation of bodies and talent is at its ext'reme in the slave-trade,
and a contemporary protest about the pricing of slaves can
exemplify an attitude which she never held: 'negroes cost a third
to a half more than they did, and are difficult to procure ...
many ships have been unable to procure negroes, and after lying
I:
. many months have left with but half their load of negroes,
though with cargo alI dispersed. AIso, we have often lost a half
toa third of the negroes shipped ... Negroes are not only very
:".: chargeable and perishable, but it is impracticable to keep any
,.
quantity unsold for many days; we must part with them for
what we can get.'16
Behn may have gone to an extreme, presenting a slave who
neverdoes a stroke of work, descends from aline ofliterary
noble savages and candid infidels, and speaks in the high rhetoric
of heroic tragedy, but yet, with alI these literary devices, she_
managed to convey a sense of the horror of slavery
noother ';-ork of the time quite caught. While intelIeetualIy
.acceptiri'g- dii: state--=-stavery aru:rCOlomlism - her genericalIy
unstable work alIows both of them to be probed and considered:
readers may read sometlles with her, sometlles from her
subtext, and sometimes against the grain.
.Political cbntext of Oroonoko
Throughout her life Behn:was a political writer, steeped in the
controversies and day-to-day politics of her age. Her works are
royalist, fiercely supportirig the reglles of the Stuart brothers,
Protestant Charles and the Catholic James. Perhaps she herself
was a Catholic, but her wrirings, inc1uding Oroonoko, suggest
i
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xxviii INTRODUCTION
she.had little religious belief of any sort, although she certainly
enjoyed the pageantry and ritual of Cathollcism and understood
that religion formed part of the state's proper controi. In her
Oroonoko dedication she clearly accepted Catholicism as one
of King James's attributes.
For Behn in her praise poems, James II was an heroic figure,
noble and guileless, a great leaoei' oI Ien. By 1b'glr,nowVer,-
.she .could see his flaws even as she continued to hymn his
'[
reign. So her works taken together give a divided message: the
'1
panegyrics- wholly supportive, the fietions admiring but also
! admonitory. The king's simple, heroic personality was out of
l.
kilter with the debased modern andcomplex worldof Engiand,
,,';
. a world exaggerated in her depictions of Surinam in Oroonoko
and of Virginia in The Widdow Ranter. Both regions lacked a
high-born governor and, in the chaos into which they feH, noble
sols such as the slave Oroonoko and therebel Bacon of The
Widdow Rariter became powerless. The point was stressed to
Behn's dedicatee, Lord Maitland: if such a nobleman as he had
been able to protect the slave prince in Surinam, the latter 'had
not made so Inglorious an end'.
Oroonoko is not transparently politicallike Love-Letters and
the :praise poems; yet political paraHels and references abound.
It wasprobably written in 1688 after the announcement of
.' Queen Mary's pregnancy, when the Catholic James II tottered
on.his throne and rumours were rife of a great Armada being
assembled by the Dutch Protestant William, invited to rule
by disloyal English peers. It was printed ust after her poem
. elebrating the royal birth, in which the story was advertised
for sale. At this point Behn was one of the few poets to welcome
the continuation of the Stuart line and to have urged the need
for royallineage and legitimacy to keep the peace. At the same
;1
J
time she encoded James's predicament and: her own perplexity
;\ in works that presented heroes of wondrous firmness but little
life-saving flexibility. In Oroonoko, the death and defeat of a
nalve royal hero comes just as his child is about to be born - the
birth of a Prince of Wales would signalthe end of James'sreign
since for many it threatened a continuation Catholic rule into
'the future; Good people failed to save Charles I - admired by

INTRODUCTION
xxix
Oroonoko - and this beheaded king must forro some warning
to his beleaguered sono James II was ofteo caHed Caesar - as
Oroonoko is - and the dark Stuarts were referred tb as 'black'.

Surinam, where Oroonokois kiHed, feH to the ignoole arid
mercenary Dutch shortly afterwards: England itself was about
to faH to the Dutch William.
The glamorous and glorious conception of personal power
which Oroonoko and Bacon hold resembles that ofheroic drama.
They recaH the mythologized 1640S, when cavalieringwas
swashbuckling, or the 1660s, when the myths were fashioned,
the early jubilant years of the Restoration with their fantastic
hopes of a Golden Age and incorruptible power. Oroonoko
believes in a kind of transcendental politics, true for aH times .
and places, a belief based on heroic myths and deeply embedded
in masculine classicalliterature like Plutarch's Lives, which he
most valued. He believes, with Bacon, in the integrity of lan
guage: the oath and word of honour. Renaissance tragedy,
especiaHy Shakespeare's,' persistently expressed a belief that .
oratorical virtuosity could dominate the rudest rabbIe.' The
Restoration had abandoned the notion, but it remains dear to
the heart of both Behn's vanquished heroes. Behn herself knew
that it had little to do with realpolitik. Oroonoko's great
speeches inspire his followers but do not sustain them.
Oroonoko, a ..eYDcative.tale.., Js...n.o.tJtr.aight...political
a1legofy ofCourse, and tht< fictional charaeter of the slave prince
is'not simply a substitute for James, but the stOl-y is surely'heing
tilformed'-by- the-impendhg poliE.cal tmeoyof-iil1llstoncaI
-man:UJimes a:nd. his fol1owers failed to see the analogy lIDIDedi="
'ately; Behn made it clearer in the dedication: 'mn of eminent
parts are as exemplary as even monarchs themselves, and virtue .
is a noble lesson to be learnt, and it is by comparison we can
judge and choose.'
Criticism and i\phraBehn's reputation
!
Although in many places shocking, Behn's fiction was
not as sexually risqu her plays and it did not suffer the
wholesale opprobrium her drama from the late
eighteenth century onwards. It simply fell out of print, except
for Oroonoko, which took on a quite new cultural life. The
history of this story's criticaI reception is the history of fashion
able movements and causes.
The pre-eminence of Oronoko would have surprised its
author, who, although she adtnitted spending much time and
effort on her long allegorical poem Voyage to the Island of
Love, a work hardly mentioned by modern critics, had on her
own admission dashed off Oroonoko in one sitting of a few
hours in ber last year of life. AIso, since she was loud in com
plaints that men gained more fame than she did for similar
work, she might wryly have noted that much of the renown of
her story carne through Southerne's stage version. In this the
political history Behn had enshrined was large1y evaded - inevi
tably so, since, between the writing and the acting, the tragic
fall of James II had been reinterpreted and named the Glorious
Revolution, a landmark on England's route to parliamentary
democracy and constitutional monarchy. In England, in the
eighteenth century, asDutch gave way to German kings without
any huge change to the national psyche and culture, the history
Behn had mediated was large1y forgotten. Oroonoko became
primarily a love A Generai Dictionary (1734-4
1
)
declared that in the tale Behn had drawn the 'Passion of Love
with great de1icacy and softness'. it suggested that
racial views had shifted since the Restoration, for it com
mented: 'A difference of colour does not make any difference in
the soul ... tho' some nations of Blacks appear incorrigible
brutes, there yet are others, who discover a natural fund of wit
and genius.'17
With the Cult of Sensibility and the growth of humanitarian
sentiment in the mid-eighteenth century, Oroonoko gained new
currency. The slave-trade was at its height, slavery was a fully
.developed system, and the sense of its racial basis had increased.
In this atmosphere a schizophrenic vision of Africans grew, very
different from Behn's. Those who were benefiting financially
from the slave-trade wept over the fall of an idealized African
prince on the stage.When, in 1749, a reahFanti prince with
the patina of Oroonoko appeared in Londnn with his noble
I
xxxi INTRODUCTION
companion and attended the play, theaudience enjoyed being
further moved at the idea of these men witnessing Southerne's
representation. The prince gained great popularity.when struck
'with that generous grief which pure nature always fee1s, and
which art had not yet taught them to suppress; the young prince
was so far overcome, that he was obliged to retire at the end of
the fourth act.'18 By now some people were beginning to see
England less as a slaving nation than as the opponent of slavery,
and Oroonoko in its various theatrical transformations became
part of the mission to abolish the trade - in a 1760 version a
discussion was he1d with the overt intention of influencing the
audience against the slave-trade. In France Oroonoko gained
sentimental currency in 1745, shorn of its politics and gruesome,
mangling ending: in this version the happy multicultural and
multiracial pair set off back to Africa to be king and queen and
to send presents to their friend Aphra Behn. The French work
failed to enter the slavery debate, and in the 1769 dition
Oroonoko gives three hundred sIaves to the captain who takes
him home.
19
Curiously Behn's and Southrne's works played little part in
the British effort actually to stop the slave-trade at the end
of the eighteenth century, although the now mythical name
Oroonoko was invoked in poetic arguments about individual
suffering. In the nineteenth century, however, Behn's story .
became part of the emancipation struggle to destroy slavery as
. well as the trade. Consideredto have superior moral authority,
women were always important in the movement, and an article
in the Dublin University Magazine of 1856 and a review in the
St James's Magazine of 1863 both compared Behn's Oroonoko
to Harriet Beecher Stowe's rcent1y published Uncle Tom's
Cabin. This approach allowd some critics to appreciate Aphra
Behn who would otherwise have been repulsed by her unfemi
nine and libertine attitudes;, as well as her royalist Tory politics.
So, for example, Julia Kavmagh in 1863 could berate her for
loving 'grossness for its own sake' and sinking her sex 'to the
leve1 of man's coarseness';20 yet redeem her for creating her
noble African prince. Ernest Baker, in bis 1905 volume ofBehn's
short nove1s, claimed although she manifested an awful.
...
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INTRODUCTION
xxx
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XXXII INTRODUCTION
tendency to lewdness elsewhere, Behnhad written the aclmirable
Oroonoko, 'the first emancipation noveI'.21
With the post-colonial interest in badies and race .in
Oroonoko became a favoured text.
22
A paradise of
. wascliscovered in the work; itssometimes awkward changes in
style became multiple discourses and its often noted contradic
tions turned inta subversions of its dominant ideas. What had
been eliminated in the eighteenth century became centraI: the
blackness of Oroonoko and Imoinda, their mutilated bodies.
Oroonok.,destabilized many oppositions of gender and race
and became a critique of colonialism and resistant to colonialist
stereotypes; at the same time it illuminated both consciously
and unconsciously European attitudes to African slavery.
Theother literary criticaI context was feminist. This criticism
brought attenton to the figure of the narrator; both with her
literary and tepresentational power and withher political impo
tenceat crucial moments. It also threw light on her relationship
with the beautiful and murdered Imoinda, who is physically
represented - she daIices and stumbles, pulls the knife to her,
and breeds a child - but who s largely kept voiceless while the
narratordominates with her word!>. Imoinda's child will not be
boro to give hisfather immortality; instead, thatwill come from
the narrator's depiction. So the narrator has in a way won the
hero from hs wife, he and she are celebrities andsuperior
tellers of truth. In this criticism, the traditionally submissive but
physically fierce Imoinda seems to holda strangeness not quite
. achieved bythe heroic Oroonoko; she is decorative and exotic,
'japanned' (p. 48) like orientaI carving, and it is her corpse that
. becomes a stinking object covered with flowers (p. 73), while
thenarratorremains very much alive.
.AphraBehn was a mistress of her craft, arid the explosion of
criticism on Oroonoko is not simply a symptom of our tirnes,
but alsoa part of a necessary rehabilitatioQ.of a writer with
rnuch to reveal about late seventeenth-centurY society and early
women's lives, fantasies and constraints, as well as the relation
shipof the female pen to the wider culture. Aphra
Behnis crucial in the history of women's writ$g; she was a good
drarnatist and poet, but women's literary lay primarily
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XXXIll
INTRODUCTION
\1

in fiction, and her achievement in Oroonoko niakes her an Il
important predecessor of aline of renowned female novelists.
il
Yet the story is more than an early example of fiction, distinctive
because written by a woman; with its significance for our under
standing of early notions of race, colonialism, class and gender,
this mlange of courtly rornance, heroic tragedy and New World
traveller's tale has become a disturbing, trmibling classic, as
exotic as Oroonoko himself.
JanetTodd
NOTES
lo Prologue to The Luckey Chance (1687), in The Works ofAphra
- Behn, ed. Janet Todd, 7 vols. (London: W. Pickering, 1992 - 6),
7. 217.
2. . 'OfPlants. Book VI' (1689), Works 1.325. Only quotations from
Oroonoko have been modernized.
See my biography, The Secret Life ofAphra Behn (London: Andr
3
Deutsch, 1996; Pandora, 1999), p. 32 5.
Of the fourteen tales ascribed to Behn five were published just
4
before and after her deatb in 1689, all bearing her name:
Oroonoko, The Fairlilt, The History oftheNun, Agnes de Castro
and The Lucky Mistake. They have an authenticity impossible
for tbe later works published some years after her deatb. These
may be by her and there are touches that indicate her authorsbip,
but some may be forgeries since her prose legacy seems to have
fallen into the hands of three young men, each unscrupulous in a
different way: Thomas Brown, poet, satirist and literary forger;
Charles Gildon, fictionist, translator and man of letters; and
Samuel Briscoe, an eccentric bookseller. In tbe 1690S, alI three
pressingly needed money indeed Briscoe went bankrupt during
these years. A contemporry, John Dunton, remarked, 'by con
tracting a friendsbip witb Tom Brown [Briscoe] will grow rich as
fast as his author can writ or hear from tbe Dead, so tbat honest
Sam does, as it were, thr!ve by bis misfortunes' (Brown wrote
Letters (rom the Dead to the Living). Conceivably one of the
'dead' from whom tbey heard was Aphra Behn, whom Briscoe
began publishing in 1696, !just when tbe successful dramatization
of her Oroonoko by Thomas Southerne gave Behn's name
renewed currency.
XXXIV INTRODUCTION xxxv
INTRODUCTION
Jane Spencer, Aphra Behn's Afterlife (Oxford: Oxford University
PreSS,2000).
20. Julia Kavanagh, English Women of Letters: Biographical
Sketches (1863), 1.21-2.
21. Ernest A. Baker, The Novels ofMrs Aphra Behn (1905), p. xxiii.
22. For a fuller discussion of criticai fashions, see my CriticaI Fortunes
of Aphra Behn (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1998).
i)
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