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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.