Oroonoko

Summary

Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave (1688) is a short prose history, told by an unnamed Englishwoman who says she knew its hero in Surinam, of an African prince who is tricked into slavery, renamed Caesar, leads a slave revolt and is executed by dismemberment. Behn dedicates it to Richard Maitland, a Scottish nobleman, and insists in her opening sentence that she does not offer the adventures of a feigned hero: she was herself an eyewitness to much of it and heard the rest from the prince. Before the story proper the narrator describes the native peoples of Surinam, with whom the English trade on friendly terms, as an image of mankind's first state of innocence, and explains that the plantations are worked instead by Africans bought from ship-captains in lots. The tale then moves to Coramantien on the Gold Coast. Oroonoko, grandson and heir of a king over a hundred years old, has become a great general at seventeen and has been educated in morals, languages and science by a French tutor; he admires the Romans and abhors the execution of Charles I. He loves Imoinda, daughter of the general who died saving his life, and she accepts him, but his grandfather sends her the royal veil and takes her into his harem. With the help of his friend Aboan and the old woman Onahal, Oroonoko spends one night with her; the king discovers them and secretly sells Imoinda into slavery, telling the prince she has been executed. Grief-stricken, Oroonoko is lured aboard an English slaver whose captain has bought his war-captives and is taken in irons with a hundred young nobles. He tries to starve himself, is coaxed back by the captain's promise of freedom, and is sold on arrival in Surinam to Trefry, the overseer of Parham plantation, who names him Caesar and promises to obtain his liberty. There he finds Imoinda, now called Clemene, and marries her. The narrator and her household entertain the couple with stories of the Romans and lessons in Christianity, which Caesar mocks. Caesar hunts tigers and is shocked by a numb-eel. When Imoinda becomes pregnant, the repeated postponement of his release, until the Lord-Governor should arrive, convinces him the English mean to enslave his child. He leads the slaves in flight. Deputy Governor Byam's militia pursues them; most of the fugitives surrender, Imoinda wounds Byam with a poisoned arrow, and Caesar yields only on a sworn promise of pardon. Byam then has him whipped and his wounds rubbed with pepper. Resolved on revenge, Caesar kills the pregnant Imoinda, with her consent, in a wood, then lies beside her body for two days until he is found, disembowels himself rather than be taken, and is sewn up by a surgeon. While the narrator is away, the councillor Banister ties him to the whipping-post, and he is cut to pieces while smoking a pipe, without a groan. The narrator closes by hoping her pen will make his name survive.

Plot or Argument

• Epistle dedicatory to Lord Maitland

  Behn compares the poet to a portrait-painter who draws the soul, praises Maitland's learning and piety, and presents the book as a true story of a man gallant enough to merit his protection, written in a few hours without resting her pen.

• Truth-claim and the Surinam frame

  The narrator disclaims a feigned hero, declares herself an eyewitness, and describes the native peoples of Surinam, their trade with the English, their beads and feathers (she gave a set to the King's Theatre for The Indian Queen), their innocence, and the Peeie who is both priest and physician. She explains how Africans are bought by lot for the sugar plantations.

• Coramantien: the general, the king and the royal veil

  Oroonoko's education, his victory at seventeen, and his love for Imoinda; the old king's claim on her through the royal veil; the night at the Otan arranged by Aboan and Onahal; the king's discovery, his sale of Imoinda abroad, and the false report of her death; Oroonoko's victory over Jamoan, whom he makes his friend.

• The treacherous captain

  The English captain who has bought Oroonoko's slaves invites him aboard to dine, seizes him and his companions in irons, and sails. Oroonoko starves himself until the captain gives his word as a Christian to free him on landing, which Oroonoko answers by swearing on his honour. The captain sells him and his companions in separate lots in Surinam.

• Caesar and Clemene at Parham

  Trefry recognizes his quality and renames him Caesar. He is reunited with Imoinda, called Clemene, and they marry. He refuses field work, receives visitors, and spends time with the narrator's household, which tells him Roman histories and tries to teach him the Trinity. Episodes of tiger-hunting, the numb-eel, and a visit to a native town where he meets war-captains who have mutilated themselves for honour.

• Revolt and the broken promise

  Fearing that his unborn child will be born a slave, Caesar rouses the slaves with a speech against being bought and sold, leads them toward the sea, and is pursued by Byam's militia. Deserted by most of his followers, he surrenders on a sworn treaty, then is seized, whipped at the post, and rubbed with pepper.

• Imoinda's death and the execution

  Caesar kills Imoinda in the wood, lies two days beside her, is found and wounds himself to avoid capture, and is nursed at Parham. In the narrator's absence Banister and the Governor have him dismembered at the post and his quarters sent to the plantations; Colonel Martin refuses his. The narrator ends with a short elegy for Caesar and the constant Imoinda.

Characters

• Oroonoko (Caesar), protagonist

  Prince and general of Coramantien, educated by a French tutor, who sells his war-captives to English traders, is himself enslaved by treachery, and dies under torture in Surinam.

• Imoinda (Clemene), his wife

  Daughter of the general who died for Oroonoko; taken by the old king, sold into slavery, reunited with Oroonoko in Surinam, and killed by him with her consent.

• The narrator, eyewitness and storyteller

  Unnamed English gentlewoman whose father died on the voyage to take up a post in Surinam; Caesar calls her his Great Mistress, and she is absent at both crises.

• The King of Coramantien, Oroonoko's grandfather

  A ruler over a hundred years old who sends Imoinda the royal veil and sells her rather than surrender her.

• Aboan and Onahal, go-betweens

  Oroonoko's young friend and a former royal wife, who arrange the night at the Otan; Aboan is enslaved with the prince.

• Jamoan, defeated rival

  Enemy general whom Oroonoko captures and befriends, and who is taken with him aboard the slave ship.

• The captain, slave-trader

  English ship's master who breaks hospitality to seize Oroonoko and breaks his oath to sell him.

• Trefry, overseer at Parham

  A learned Cornish gentleman who buys Caesar, honours him, and promises his liberty but cannot secure it.

• William Byam, deputy governor

  Head of the council who pursues the runaways, swears to a treaty of pardon, and then has Caesar whipped and executed.

• Banister, councillor

  Wild Irish member of the council who carries out the execution.

• Colonel Martin, planter

  Brother of the regicide Henry Marten, whom the narrator praises for refusing to display Caesar's quarter on his plantation.

• Tuscan, fellow slave

  The only male follower who stands by Caesar to the end of the revolt, later reconciled to Byam.

Lessons

• An oath on honour against the word of a Christian

  When the slave-ship captain hesitates to trust Oroonoko's parole because he is a heathen, the prince answers that a god who has not taught his worshipper to keep faith is a poor god, and swears by his honour. The same pattern returns in Surinam, where Byam swears a treaty and breaks it. Behn's narrative charges the Christian colonists not with believing too much but with performing too little, the reproach Caesar puts into the words that none professed so much and performed so little. Christian students can hear this as Paul's warning that the name of God is blasphemed among the nations because of those who bear it.

  • Compare the captain's oath and Oroonoko's oath. Which is worth more in the story, and why?
  • Is Caesar's conclusion that there is no faith in the white men a fair inference from what has happened to him?
  • What does the narrator's failed lesson on the Trinity suggest about the relation between Christian teaching and Christian conduct in the colony?

• How much can an eyewitness be trusted?

  The narrator promises truth without invention, names real men (Byam, Banister, Colonel Martin, Trefry), and supplies details of a traveller: snake-skins, butterflies given to the King's Antiquary, feathers given to the theatre. Yet the African half of the story is a court romance of royal veils and harems that she could only have heard, and at both crises of the Surinam plot she is elsewhere. Teaching students to separate what she claims to have seen from what she reports, and both from her artistry, is the best way into the book's form.

  • List the scenes the narrator says she witnessed and the ones she was told about. What changes in her style between them?
  • Why does she leave the decision about the captain's act to the reader instead of judging it herself?
  • What does her absence during the whipping and the execution do to her authority as a witness?

• A prince who sold captives

  Behn does not hide that Oroonoko sells his prisoners of war to English and Spanish traders, and his revolt speech objects that the slaves were not won in honourable battle but bought and sold like apes or monkeys. His standard is the warrior's code of ransom and conquest, not a general principle against bondage. Read historically, the book protests the treachery and cruelty of the English plantation and the degradation of a noble man, and it shows its hero taking part in a trade he condemns only when it touches him. Students should state this accurately rather than make Behn either an abolitionist or a mere apologist.

  • Where in Coramantien does Oroonoko take part in the trade that later enslaves him?
  • Does Caesar's revolt speech argue that slavery is always wrong, or that this slavery is dishonourable? Quote his reasons.
  • How does Colonel Martin's refusal of the quarter differ from Caesar's objection, and what does each reveal?

• Imoinda's death: sacrifice, murder or Roman virtue?

  The narrator calls Imoinda a victim laid before the sacrificer and praises her readiness to die, explaining that among her people a wife is killed by a loving husband rather than left to others. The pregnant wife's death leaves Caesar unable to act for two days, and his revenge never comes. Students should notice that Behn borrows the language of Roman tragedy (Caesar, Cato, Lucretia), and weigh it against the Christian teaching that neither a husband's love nor a captive's despair makes killing the innocent lawful.

  • What reasons does Caesar give for killing Imoinda, and what does he actually gain by it?
  • How does the narrator's language describe the scene, and does the book want the reader to admire it?
  • How would Augustine's discussion of Lucretia in City of God Book I answer the claim that death is better than dishonour?

Context

Oroonoko appeared in 1688, a few months before the Revolution that removed James II, in the last year of Behn's life. Its Surinam scenes are set in about 1663-1664, when the colony on the Guiana coast belonged to Francis, Lord Willoughby of Parham, and was run in his absence by his lieutenant-general William Byam; the English traded with the native peoples and imported Africans, many shipped from the Gold Coast, to work sugar plantations. In 1667 the Treaty of Breda left Surinam to the Dutch in exchange for New Netherland, which the narrator mentions when she says the Dutch killed, banished and dispersed those who might have told Caesar's story. Behn wrote as a royalist: her hero mourns Charles I, and the story of a betrayed king among rebels and rabble has been read as touching Stuart politics.

Composition

Behn says in her dedication that she wrote the book in a few hours without resting her pen. It was published in London in 1688 by William Canning, dedicated to Richard Maitland (later fourth Earl of Lauderdale), and reprinted in her collected Histories and Novels after her death. Most scholars accept that she was in Surinam in 1663-1664, partly because the names of Byam, Trefry, Banister and George Marten match the colony's records, but the depth of her experience and the factual basis of Oroonoko himself are disputed. The library text is Montague Summers's edition in The Works of Aphra Behn, vol. V (1915).

Reception

Thomas Southerne's tragedy Oroonoko (1695), which made Imoinda white, held the stage for over a century and carried the story to audiences who never read Behn; the novella was translated into French and German in the eighteenth century, and abolitionists later invoked Southerne's play. Behn's reputation fell in the Victorian period because of her plays' frankness, and revived in the twentieth century, when Oroonoko became one of the most taught early English prose fictions and a central text in debates over the origins of the novel and the literature of the Atlantic slave trade.

Comparisons

• The Rover

  The Rover (1677) shows Behn's comic stage world of Cavaliers in exile; Oroonoko gives the same royalist honour code a tragic setting, with a prince who behaves like a Cavalier and colonists who behave like the Commonwealth men she despised.

• 12 Years a Slave

  Solomon Northup's 1853 narrative is first-person testimony by a free man kidnapped into slavery; Oroonoko is a royal romance narrated by a sympathetic Englishwoman. Both turn on a false promise, a whipping and a protagonist whose education the masters fear, but only Northup speaks for himself.

• Othello

  Shakespeare's Moorish general and Behn's African prince are both soldiers of royal blood who kill the wife they love. Othello acts from deceived jealousy and repents; Caesar acts with Imoinda's consent from a code of honour, and the narrator treats the act as heroic sacrifice.

• Julius Caesar

  Trefry names his slave after the Roman whose personal courage, the narrator says, he equalled. Shakespeare's tragedy of conspiracy against a great man, and Brutus's Roman suicide, illuminate the classical models of greatness and death that Behn borrows for her hero.

• The Tempest

  The Tempest imagines a European ruler and a native servant on an island in the 1610s; Oroonoko reports on a real English plantation colony fifty years later. Prospero's mastery over Caliban and Byam's treachery toward Caesar offer two very different pictures of the master's claim.

• A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies

  Las Casas's 1552 report accuses Spanish Christians of betraying the faith by their cruelty to the native peoples of the Indies; Caesar's charge that Christians profess much and perform little repeats the accusation from the mouth of the enslaved.

• Uncle Tom's Cabin

  Summers's introduction compares Oroonoko with Stowe's novel. Stowe writes an evangelical argument for abolition in which Tom forgives his tormentors; Behn writes a heroic tragedy in which Caesar dies seeking revenge, so the comparison sharpens two ideals of the slave's dignity.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The dedication and first two paragraphs. Behn tells Lord Maitland the story is true and says she wrote it in a few hours; the narrator then promises no invention. Keep these promises in mind as the romance unfolds.
• The two oaths aboard the slave ship: the captain's word as a Christian and Oroonoko's oath on his honour. The same contrast returns when Byam swears to the treaty in Surinam.
• The renaming of Oroonoko as Caesar and Imoinda as Clemene. Ask what the English mean by these names and what the narrator does with the Roman one.
• Caesar's speech to the slaves before the flight, especially his complaint that they were bought and sold rather than taken in honourable battle.
• Where the narrator is during the whipping and the execution, and how she explains her absence.

Key terms and names

Coramantien

Behn's name for Oroonoko's kingdom on the Gold Coast of West Africa, taken from an English trading fort; its wars supply captives sold to European ships.

The royal veil

In Behn's Coramantien, the veil the king sends a woman he has chosen for his harem; once she has received it no other man may marry her, which is how the old king takes Imoinda.

The Otan

The king's palace of women, with its orange grove, where Oroonoko meets Imoinda for one night with Onahal's help.

Parham

Lord Willoughby's plantation in Surinam, managed by Trefry, where Caesar lives and where he is whipped and executed.

Parole

A prisoner's word of honour not to escape or resist. The captain refuses to accept a heathen's parole, and Oroonoko asks what kind of god leaves his worshippers unable to trust a promise.

Peeie

The narrator's word for the native prophet-physician of Surinam, a youth trained from infancy in sleight of hand to impress the sick.

Lot

A group of slaves sold together on arrival; the captain divides Oroonoko's companions among different lots so that they cannot combine against the colony.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension How does the old king of Coramantien separate Oroonoko from Imoinda, and what does he tell the prince afterward?
2. Comprehension By what trick does the English captain take Oroonoko, and what persuades Oroonoko to stop refusing food?
3. Comprehension What terms does Byam offer Caesar to end the revolt, and what happens after he accepts them?
4. Interpretation The narrator praises Oroonoko as if he had been educated at a European court. What qualities does she admire, and what does her standard of admiration tell you about her?
5. Interpretation Caesar tells Byam that no people professed so much and performed so little as the Christians. How does the book's sequence of broken promises support or complicate his charge?
6. Interpretation Why does Caesar kill Imoinda instead of fleeing with her or dying beside her, and how does the narrator want us to judge the act?
7. Big Question Is a promise made to a slave as binding as one made to a free man, and what does a society reveal about itself when it decides the answer is no?

Faith Connections

• Romans 2:21-24 (Scripture)

  Paul tells those who boast in the law that the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of them. Caesar's refusal of the Trinity follows directly from watching Christians swear and break their oaths, a case the book sets in a slave colony.

• Psalm 15:1-4 (Scripture)

  The psalmist's citizen of God's holy hill swears to his own hurt and does not change. The heathen prince keeps this standard aboard the slave ship while the Christian captain and Byam do not, which is the moral reversal on which Behn's plot turns.

• Exodus 21:16 (Scripture)

  The law of Moses makes stealing a man and selling him a capital crime. The captain's seizure of his guests is exactly such a theft, whatever the colonists' customs of buying war-captives in lots.

• Augustine, City of God I.19-22 (Church Fathers)

  Augustine examines Lucretia and the Roman praise of suicide to escape dishonour and argues that self-killing, and the killing of the innocent, cannot be justified by fear of shame. His argument gives students a Christian standard for the Roman heroism Behn borrows for Caesar's killing of Imoinda and his own attempt on his life.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: The narrator argues that Oroonoko was a man of true greatness, educated, honourable and brave; that he was enslaved by a Christian captain's treachery and kept enslaved by the delays and broken oaths of the colony's rulers; that when he sought liberty for himself and his unborn child he was whipped and executed by men far beneath him; therefore his story deserves to be preserved as a heroic tragedy and as a reproach to those who professed Christianity without keeping faith.

Rhetorical device: antithesis. Caesar tells Byam that though no People profess'd so much, none perform'd so little, setting the Christians' words against their deeds in a single balanced clause.

Debate: Resolved: The narrator of Oroonoko is a credible witness to the events she describes in Surinam.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Trace the theme of keeping and breaking faith through Oroonoko, from the old king's promise in Coramantien to Byam's treaty in Surinam. Argue what Behn's narrative suggests is the source of trustworthiness, using at least three specific scenes.

Comparison with Othello: Othello and Caesar are both royal soldiers far from home who kill the wives they love. Compare the reasons each gives, the way each author presents the killing, and the way each man faces his own death, and argue which work offers the more searching judgment of the deed.

Medical Lens

Oroonoko is a document of seventeenth-century bodily experience in an Atlantic plantation colony rather than a medical narrative, but it contains several precise scenes. The narrator records native Surinamese medicine with mixed respect, distinguishing the Peeie's sleight of hand from the undoubted good remedies of his people, a contrast between therapeutic belief and remedy that can be compared with European cures of the period. Oroonoko's hunger strike aboard ship, his collapse after Imoinda's death (giddiness, short breath, failing limbs after two days without food), the surgeon's sewing up of his self-inflicted abdominal wound, and the remark that wounds heal almost miraculously in the Indies except in the legs reflect the surgery of a sugar colony and its limits. Byam's poisoned-arrow wound is cleansed by a native woman who sucks out the venom. The account of Caesar enduring dismemberment without a groan while he smokes is presented as heroic fortitude; any reading of it as dissociation is interpretive. The narrator's remark that she was prone to fits of dangerous illness upon extraordinary melancholy is her own explanation for leaving the scene.

• Coramantien section, after the royal veil

  On hearing that Imoinda has been taken by the king, Oroonoko rages and his companions barely prevent him from laying violent hands on himself.

  Grief Suicide
• Aboard the slave ship

  Chained so that he cannot kill himself, Oroonoko resolves to die by refusing food and is persuaded to eat only by the captain's promise of freedom.

  Starvation Nutrition Suicide
• Surinam, the visit to the native town

  The Peeie, trained from infancy as prophet and physician, pretends to draw serpents, flies and worms from the sick; the narrator notes that his people also have good remedies for almost all diseases.

  Quackery Charlatans Mind Body
• Surinam, tiger-hunting and the numb-eel

  A tigress's claws wound Caesar; a she-tiger is found with old bullets lodged in her healed heart; the numb-eel's shock leaves Caesar senseless in the river.

  WAR Wounds Pain
• Surinam, the surrender

  Imoinda wounds Byam in the shoulder with a poisoned arrow, and his native mistress sucks the venom from the wound; after the whipping Caesar's wounds are rubbed with Indian pepper, then anointed by a surgeon.

  Pharmacology Poisons Pain WAR Wounds
• Surinam, after Imoinda's death

  Caesar lies two days without food beside her body and finds his strength gone, his head turning and his sight dizzy; when discovered he cuts open his own belly and is sewn up by the surgeon, who gives him cordials and later says he cannot live.

  Grief Starvation Nutrition Surgery Suicide
• Closing scene at the whipping-post

  Caesar asks for a lighted pipe and smokes through the cutting off of his members, ears, nose and arms until he dies.

  Pain Death Dying

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Write the conversation between Caesar and the narrator about the Trinity, using only what the text tells us of his objections and her aims, and let each speaker make the strongest case available to them.

• Essay

  The narrator claims to tell the truth without invention. Using the dedication, the opening, and the scenes she says she missed, argue whether Oroonoko should be read as history, romance, or a deliberate mixture of both.

• Fiction

  Tell the night of the revolt from Tuscan's point of view, from the speech at the feast to the surrender, keeping the geography of rivers, woods and bogs that the book describes.

• Classroom

  Make a two-column table of every promise made to Oroonoko (by the old king, the captain, Trefry, the narrator, Byam) and record whether each was kept, broken, or prevented.

Further Reading

• The Rover, Aphra Behn

  Behn's best-known comedy, set among exiled royalist Cavaliers.

• Oroonoko: A Tragedy, Thomas Southerne

  The 1695 stage version that carried the story through the eighteenth century.

• The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Olaudah Equiano

  A 1789 first-person account of enslavement on the Atlantic route, for contrast with Behn's third-person romance.

• Twelve Years a Slave, Solomon Northup

  Nineteenth-century American testimony of kidnapping into slavery.

• The Secret Life of Aphra Behn, Janet Todd

  Modern biography weighing the evidence for Behn's Surinam visit and her espionage.