Aphra Behn, Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave
The first major female writer we encounter in our survey of British literature before 1700 was an exceptional woman. The details of her life are sketchy, and they were obscured for more than two centuries by a "biography" written shortly after her death containing more romanticized fiction than fact, but we know she was born in the county of Kent in 1640 and traveled with her family in 1663 or 1664 to the English colony of Surinam on the Atlantic coast of northeast South America shortly before it was ceded to the Dutch in 1667 (it became Dutch Guiana). She returned to England a year later and married, but her husband died shortly after their marriage and then she went to Antwerp (in Belgium), where she was a spy for English King Charles II in the Dutch War. Back in England, where women were being allowed to become actors on public stages for the first time (previously female roles had been played by young boys), she began in 1670 to write plays, primarily, but also a variety of different types of other works, including fiction such as the brief novel Oroonoko. Behn was one of the earliest British novelists, she was the first Englishwoman to earn her living by writing, and the 1688 Oroonoko is often considered the "earliest English philosophical novel" (Drabble 81) and also "the first work in English to oppose slavery" (David 131). One eminent literary historian notes that Behn was the "most praised and condemned single writer of [17th-century English] novels" (Baugh 803). Without doubt, much of the criticism directed towards Behn was a product of male writers and critics in her own time and for some centuries after being skeptical about the abilities of any writer of the female persuasion. Her contemporaries accused her of "plagiarism and lewdness," and even in the early twentieth century her work was condemned as "false, lurid, and depraved." In more recent years Behn's reputation has been thoroughly resuscitated. She was clearly a woman ahead of her time: unapologetically bold and outspoken in a time when such daring in a woman required a great stock of fortitude.
The early English novel
The English novel as a genre would not become thoroughly established until the 18th century, with the contributions of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding, most notably, but Oroonoko is clearly a precursor of the literary form that would achieve great popularity in the 1700s. Behn presents the novel as being factual history, identifying herself as the author in the text explicitly, making direct mention of historical figures as characters, and writing of actual historical events, such as the British surrender of Surinam to the Dutch, not just for "realism" in the way modern novelists do, but as an attempt to suggest that the book was actually a matter of fact. The book is presented as being an authentic "history," or biography. However, Oroonoko is in many respects clearly a work of fiction, and the narrator is "part Behn, part fictional character," describing events that may have had some origin in actual events, but that are frequently expanded or exaggerated for purposes of entertainment. One of the great distinguishing characteristics of the novel is its seeming air of authenticity or reality, even when the characters are hobbits, dwarves, elves, and wizards, for instance. Novels portray characters and events in vivid "matter-of-fact" detail not usually found in poetry or drama, and often those events extend to improbabilities such as a slave's being permanently excused from labor to pass his days with an entourage of white Europeans who admire his royal nobility while they travel freely in the wilds, and such incredible matters as a tiger surviving seven bullets in the heart!
One particular facet of Oroonoko that gives the novel its air of credible factuality is Behn's inclusion of accurate, more or less anthropological descriptions of Indian life in the New World of South America. The 1600s were of course a time of great global exploration by the British, the island people whose imperial tentacles were extending in the 17th century throughout both American continents as well as in Asia and Africa. Purely factual accounts of travels to exotic lands across the oceans were among the most popular prose works published in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, and the opening pages of Oroonoko are pointedly factual in nature—so as to gain the reader's trusting credulity and set the tone before bringing the central characters onto the stage, where events become less certainly "factual."
Also note how the novel has two clearly separate "halves," the first set in Africa and following stock conventions of 17th-century stage romance, where love between prince and princess is thwarted by the prince's grandfather, and the second set in Surinam, where the tale becomes flavored more with tragic realism rather than romance, down to such specific concrete details as the overpowering smell of his lover's corpse alerting Oroonoko's pursuers to his whereabouts in the novel's final pages. In its blending of truth and fiction, Oroonoko is a novel that raises questions: to what degree is the story romantic, and to what degree realistic and/or tragic? to what extent is the narrator actually Aphra Behn, and how much is her persona a fictional device facilitating the telling of the story? how much of what Behn wrote is controlled by actual factual events, and how much a matter of poetic license, or even pure fantasy?
The noble savage
Writing many decades before Jean-Jacques Rousseau would make more widespread the notion of man as fundamentally innocent and noble in his most primitive state in nature, corrupted only by the influence of civilized society, Behn portrays both African and Indian cultures as primitive but morally superior to their Christian European "betters": Oroonoko is the paragon of heroic virtue, uncontaminated by Western education and religion, whereas white Europeans betray him in radically harsh ways repeatedly from his captivity by the slave-ship captain to his brutal . . . wait! I'll let you fill in this blank later. As you read, you'll see that Behn is none too kind in her portrayal of white European colonists, particularly those in positions of authority and those who sanction and facilitate black slavery. Here is another question to ponder, or more of a conundrum, really: Oroonoko himself has sent Africans into slavery, many that he sees again when he arrives in Surinam, so how is Oroonoko so radically different from the Europeans in this important respect? Not all the white characters are so morally corrupt, but as you'll see, a number of them are fairly despicable, and it does appear in the end that they are the most "savage," despite their perceived superiority as "civilized" Europeans. Perhaps most curious of all is that pagans appear to have nobler values and morals than Oroonoko's Christian oppressors, who are portrayed as ruthlessly treacherous and grossly hypocritical.
But not all the "noble, innocent primitives" are so completely admirable, and the dividing lines between primitive and civilized peoples are not as clear cut as they may appear at first. While the Indians are painted in more purely idealistic terms, the other black slaves Oroonoko encounters in Surinam seem less pointedly noble, accepting their slavery, as Oroonoko points out, with shameful brute-like docility. As Lore Metzger suggests, the hero Oroonoko rises above all three primary groups in the novel, Africans, Indians, and Europeans: "He emerges as the norm of human nobility because he possesses the necessary positive virtues and not merely the negative ignorance of deceit and fraud, which he shares with the innocent Indians. His surpassing courage and honor, strength and beauty of body and min, generosity and loyalty, characterize him both as a prince in Coramantien and in the second half as a slave in Surinam" (xii). And among the white Europeans, some, such as the narrator and Trefry, are sympathetic to Oroonoko and condemn the barbarity of his oppressors. The lines of "good versus evil" are thus not so clearly drawn as they might seem to be at times. Be thinking of these contradictions as you read, certainly, but most of all . . . enjoy the story—it absolutely is intended to entertain.