Oroonoko by Behn Aphra

Adventure. Novel. 

English 45B 

Rating: 4/5

Pages: 114 

Started: 22 January 2024

Finished: 22 January 2024

Summary:

    The first adventure story written by a published female author, Oroonoko tells the story of a heroic African prince and his beloved princess. From being separated by a malicious king in their home kingdom to being sold into enslavement, despite his sacrifice and suffering, Oroonoko is a hero to the end. 

Thoughts: 

    This was a fascinating story. The White author's take on race was rough; Oroonoko may have been a Black character but he and the purposefully civilized culture he hailed from were very whitewashed. But the story was also very dramatic, reminiscent of a Shakespeare tragedy, and so symbolically rich. Themes of race, religion, and sacrifice in order to reclaim power are all elegantly included, especially for a book published in 1688. There were definitely weird and problematic parts of the book, but especially considering the time in which it was written this was a very rich and engaging read. 

Essay: 

Oroonoko: The Body as a Cultural Artifact 

“The body is a site where regimes of discourse and power inscribe themselves,” wrote American philosopher Judith Butler, a sentiment that is particularly relevant in conversation surrounding violent clashes between societies and the abuse of human bodies (Butler 602). With Europe’s extensive colonization of other nations accompanying the rise of the triangular trade system in the late 17th century, the Western economy rapidly became defined by the exploration and exploitation of foreign lands and their inhabitants—as did Western culture (Duncan). With this economic change, the interactions between European colonizers, Indigenous South Americans, and African groups facilitated a complex convergence of cultures, a phenomenon that writer Aphra Behn explored in her 1688 proto-novel Oroonoko, a romantic work following African prince Oroonoko through his life in three locations: his West African home of Coromantien, the unexplored South American lands of Surinam, and a plantation within a British colony. Though the work reads more like an exaggerated Shakespeare tragedy in prose than a life-like snapshot of Behn’s time, Oroonoko’s physical body serves as a representation of the era’s perspective on the convergence of and tension between vastly different societies. Through representation in ways that are often complexly and paradoxically European, African and indigenously South American, Oroonoko’s body becomes an artifact in its own right, embodying the complicated interaction between the three different cultures most relevant in the triangular trade.

When Aphra Behn introduces Oroonoko at the start of the work, she uses a series of statements contrasting his European-like features against typical West African ones. Through this, she ultimately presents him as beautiful because of his proximity to Whiteness. Behn describes Oroonoko’s face: “His nose was rising and Roman, instead of African and flat. His mouth, the finest shaped that could be seen, far from those great turned lips, which are so natural to the rest of the Negroes” (12). A “rising” nose is often associated with English nobility, while a “Roman” nose suggests aristocratic stoicism. Either way,  Behn is clear that Oroonoko’s nose coheres to European beauty standards, unlike the contrasting nose described as “African and flat” which she so concisely dismisses in the following clause. The description of the hero’s mouth follows the same pattern, characterized as “finest”—hyperbolic high praise—and antithetical to the full lips common on the African subcontinent. Oroonoko is beautiful, Behn suggests—but only because he has features that fit White European standards. If that weren’t clear enough, she goes on to explicitly praise everything but the color of Oroonoko’s skin: “The whole proportion and air of his face was so noble and exactly formed that, bating his color, there could be nothing in nature more beautiful, agreeable, and handsome” (12). Behn’s description is glowing, gushing. The hyperbolic “nothing in nature more beautiful” renders this portrayal complimentary to the extreme, as does the enthusiastic enumeration of virtues, “beautiful, agreeable, and handsome.”  Yet Behn slips the comment “bating his color” in as a clause, a criticism interrupting the flow of her praise. Thus, although Oroonoko is celebrated for all the ways he fits the European beauty standard, his skin color—the one trait that distinguishes him as undeniably African—is bigotedly presented as an exception to his perfection. This seems to be Behn’s way to rationalize centering an African protagonist in her story: thanks to his European features, Oroonoko can be an exciting and heroic Black character, an artifact of European contact with African cultures, without his existence challenging 17th-century London’s racist paradigm of European supremacy.

Slightly complicating this effect of Whitening, though, Behn contrasts the color of Oroonoko’s skin against that of other African people in a representation of one way European society saw an African man as valuable: as an enticing object. She describes how “His face was not of that brown, rusty black which most of that nation are, but of a perfect ebony, or polished jet” (12). The image of rust connotes age and tarnish; by connecting it to the inhabitants of the kingdom which Behn distantly and disdainfully refers to as “that nation” she connects Oroonoko’s society to the idea of the antiquated and decaying. By contrast, the metaphors for Oroonoko’s skin are connotative of wealth. “Ebony” wood and “polished jet” stone are both semi-precious ornamental materials prized for their beauty, objects to treasure. Not only are they symbolically antithetical to the idea of decay, but they also seem to encourage the coveting and objectification of Oroonoko himself. Thus, while marking her protagonist as superior for his specific skin tone, Behn stays within the prejudiced paradigm that allows Africans—to her, the cultural other—to be valued as curious and precious objects of interest. Through the description of his skin as valuable, Oroonoko’s body becomes an exotic artifact onto which a detached and dehumanizing cultural fascination is projected.   

Even more complex than the dual whitewashing and valuable objectification of Oroonoko’s physical features, the treatment of Oroonoko’s body in the scene of his execution also reflects how different cultures were viewed by 17th-century Europe. In some ways, Behn in this scene presents her protagonist as a man enslaved, punished, and dehumanized: “And the executioner came, and first cut off his members, and threw them into the fire” (72). To castrate someone—to “cut off his members”—is an emasculating and degrading act, primarily used either on animals in order to make them more useful, or on men who have committed sexual crimes and thus do not deserve the humanity of wholeness or sexual function. For an executioner to perform this punishment on Oroonoko, a man whom readers know to be not a rapist but a man in love, is simply dehumanizing, an emphasis of Oroonoko’s lack of autonomy under enslavement. This subjugation is reinforced by the throwing of his cut-off genitals. The verb “to throw” carries a connotation of carelessness or violence, certainly not the reverence or care expected of those handling the parts of a corpse. Similarly, the burning—an act of evisceration—of a body part, especially while the owner is still alive, is a horrifying and torturous act of violation and disrespect only possible if the victim is entirely stripped of autonomy. To a similar effect, Behn later describes the treatment of Oroonoko’s entire corpse: “They cut Caesar in quarters and sent them to several of the chief plantations” (72-3). Again, to quarter a corpse is an act of desecration and disrespect, a dehumanizing treatment that highlights Oroonoko’s enslaved status. This highlighting continues via the recipients of the pieces of Oroonoko’s body: “Chief plantations” are run by the European men in power, the men who benefit from the system that enslaved Oroonoko in the first place. Thus, even in death, Oroonoko’s body is enslaved: used, coveted, and owned by others. 

Yet this portrayal of Oroonoko’s body as under the control of another, enslaved and objectified and desecrated, is complicated by Behn’s use of European heroic tropes in Oroonoko’s behavior during his death. Behn describes the prince’s comportment during his final evisceration as almost comically brave: “Then they hacked off one of his arms, and still he bore up, and held his pipe; but at the cutting off the other arm, his head sunk and pipe dropped, and he gave up the ghost without a groan or a reproach” (72). The verb “to bear” means literally to carry; for Oroonoko to bear up implies a heroic strength and stoicism, especially in the context of the man literally having his arms chopped off. This lack of complaint in the face of pain is echoed by the absence of any “groan or a reproach” in the face of his death. Pain tolerance and heroic stoicism in the face of torture are traits associated with the great heroes of Greek and Roman myth, and so Oroonoko’s tolerance for torture places him in line with those famous Western figures. Interestingly, Oroonoko’s pipe-holding also adds to the sentiment of laudable Westernized heroism. The pipe is a symbol of high culture or intellect in Europe, and the image of a man smoking his pipe carries a sentiment of calm and ponderous introspection. For Oroonoko to still be smoking as he is bleeding from stumps where his limbs were moments before creates a near-comical effect of collected Western bravery and strength so extreme it can’t help but be admired. His European-reminiscent stoicism also serves as a rebellion against the torture and dehumanization of his body. Brave in the face of torture, like a Western hero, his body remains at least partially his own.

To complicate Orookono’s depiction in this scene once more, it is important to note that the facial disfigurement he experiences during his torture—“they cut his ears, and his nose, and burned them” (72)—is parallel to the ritual combat via facial disfigurement demonstrated by the tribe indigenous to Surinam that Oroonoko and Behn’s self-inserted character interact with earlier in the story. On page 55, Behn describes how a challenged indigenous war captain “cuts off his nose and throws it contemptibly on the ground, and the other does something to himself that he thinks surpasses him [...] And ‘tis by a passive valour they show and prove their activity” (55). Not only is the removal of facial features here startlingly analogous to Oroonoko’s plight, but treating them “contemptibly” also echoes the throwing and burning of Oroonoko’s body parts. More significant, though, is Behn’s description of the captains’ “passive valour.” Members of the tribe prove their capability as leaders in war not by dueling to kill the other, as was typical in 17th century England, but by withstanding the immense pain of disfigurement. Thus, for Oroonoko to bear the pain of his own disfigurement places him in parallel to these valorous indigenous war leaders. Through this connection, Oroonoko’s body reflects not only enslavement and heroism, and the cultures of Europe and Africa, but also indigenous South America’s freedom and bravery. 

A beautiful man, an African prince, a heroic slave—Oroonoko is not an easy character to pin down. The features of his character, and more specifically those of his physical body, are instead an amalgamation of the races and cultures especially relevant during the time at which Behn’s novel was written. By connecting Oroonoko’s physical self to Europe, Africa, and South America, she projects the complex economic and cultural circumstances of the triangular trade onto a single body, a complex and paradoxical body, a body that exists as an artifact for readers today. Through the treatment of Oroonoko’s body and the description of his physical traits, Behn presents readers with a window into the tangled cultural landscape of the year 1688. 

Work Cited

Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko and Other Writings. Edited by Paul Salzman, OUP Oxford, 2009.

Butler, Judith. “Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions.” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 86, no. 11, 1989, pp. 601–07. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2027036. Accessed 23 Feb. 2024.

Ian Duncan, 45B Lecture on Janauary 24, 2024.