Kaari Newman
[excerpt from opening of her conference paper/essay, April 15, 2016]:

The Double-Edged Sword of Romance in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko

While the author Aphra Behn has been known for centuries, scholars have seemingly “rediscovered” her work in the last 25 years or so as interest in gender studies and cultural criticism has swept through academia. In particular, Behn’s most famous work, Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave (1688) has received increased scholarly attention focused on gender, race and politics of the Restoration era. Much of this recent scholarship has focused on the oscillation of contradictory viewpoints regarding slavery within the novella, which has led to an “utter lack of critical consensus” about its true intentions (Margaret Ferguson 218). Most early analyses of the novella saw it as a nascent example of sentimental, abolitionist literature that became popular in the eighteenth century (Brown 181). However, Behn’s use of the romantic genre complicates this reading, because it both elevates and alienates the African noble from the plight of the common slave, as evidenced by several textual inconsistencies within the story. Nevertheless, while Oroonoko is not an abolitionist text outright, Behn’s use of romantic tropes unconsciously encourages identification with the racial Other in Western ideology, thereby laying the literary groundwork for sentimental abolitional literature as a genre itself.

As a professional playwright, romance was perhaps Behn’s most natural and available tool for telling her story. There are several romantic tropes we can examine within the novella, most notably, Oroonoko’s physique, which makes him at once recognizable as the hero yet distinguishable from the slave. He is described as being tall and uncommonly handsome, such that “the most famous Statuary cou’d not form the Figure of a Man more admirably turn’d from Head to Foot” (Behn 271). Beyond his physical description, the narrator also takes great care in describing his mental prowess, saying he is “ready, apt, and quick of Apprehension” and that,

The most Illustrious Courts cou’d not have produc’d a braver Man, both for Greatness of Courage and Mind, a Judgment more solid, a Wit more quick, and a Conversation more sweet and diverting. (270)

These attributes make it quite clear that we are to see Oroonoko as a classical hero, and that, “bating his color,” (271) he “embodies an ideal Reformation courtier” (Andrade 202). Indeed, in her work on the use of romance in Oroonoko, Laura Brown acknowledges that despite her argument that the text should be read outside of a traditional binary between colonist and slave, these descriptions allow it to be read as such (186). In short, Oroonoko’s physique and intelligence mean “his Otherness [is] domesticated for European consumption” (Andrade 195).