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Consentir à la Restauration: signes, récits, performances

Consent and Obedience in Oroonoko

Line Cottegnies

Résumés

Selon Victoria Kahn, les guerres civiles anglaises furent responsables d’une crise des notions transcendantales du pouvoir, car la crise de l'obligation politique met à nu les fondements contractuels de la société. Aphra Behn est consciente de la crise du consentement, comme en témoignent ses comédies, dans lesquelles elle explore de nouvelles façons pour les femmes de refuser ou de négocier leur consentement dans les relations amoureuses et avec leurs pères. Dans Oroonoko, la question du consentement semble être exclue d’emblée : Oroonoko et Imoinda sont des étrangers par l’origine et la race, vendus en esclavage, ce qui les prive du statut de sujets politiques. En raison de son statut ambivalent d’« esclave royal », néanmoins, Oroonoko est invité à plusieurs reprises à consentir à son asservissement et à renoncer à la résistance. La nouvelle, qui se lit d'abord comme une romance ratée (dans laquelle le héros n'est pas miraculeusement sauvé comme il l'aurait été dans les romances du passé), bascule dans la fable politique. Dans un contexte de crise du gouvernement central résultant de la disparition du régime monarchique, Oroonoko est paradoxalement placé dans la position d’un sujet politique qu'il faut convaincre d’accepter d’obéir. Cet article avance qu’Oroonoko peut se lire comme une parabole sur la crise du consentement et de la représentation dans une société qui a perdu son centre transcendantal. On se propose de lire la novella à la lumière de la conception de Hobbes du contrat politique, qui affirme la nécessité d'un gouvernement fort pour sortir de l'état de nature. On montrera comment le récit complique la question du consentement en présentant un cas de rébellion contre une société civile corrompue, tout en mettant en avant la notion de conscience.

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1In England, the era that followed the Civil Wars was one in which transcendental notions of power appeared to be durably compromised. Victoria Kahn has thus argued that the crisis of political obligation that ensued laid bare the de facto contractual foundation of society, and its reliance on consent (4-5). Even though Aphra Behn repeatedly asserts her Stuart loyalism throughout her career as an author, she is aware of the challenges posed to absolute monarchical rule in the period. That she understands the importance of consent in the domestic sphere is obvious in her comedies, where she explores new ways for women to withhold or negotiate their consent in courtship and in relation to their fathers. By virtue of her alignment with pro-Stuart Tory politics, however, Behn would have been reticent to consent theory in the realm of politics. Her political writings clearly reassert her loyalist attitude to the monarchy. Her outspoken political views in favour of Stuart rule de facto excluded any form of contractual basis for political obedience. In A Pindarick on the Death of our Late Sovereign With an Ancient Prophecy on His Present Majesty (1685), Behn thus compares King Charles II to God (2), in fact to nothing less than Jesus on the Cross (3), and James II is described as a new Joshua of “Glorious Magnitude” (4, [6]). In such a conception of absolute rule, obedience is a sacred duty and rules out consent, while disobedience must be interpreted as a mortal sin against God as much as against the King. Yet in Oroonoko, which was written in 1688, on the cusp of the Glorious Revolution, but set in the early 1660s, Behn represents a slave rebellion in the context of a dystopian colonial society fraught with division. In this article, I argue that the novella questions the notions of consent and obedience in a troubled political context, which suggests a more nuanced conception of the monarchy than the one that is celebrated in her epideictic verse to the Stuarts. What Behn seems to suggest is the need for a consent theory that implies absolute submission to a strong governor, a position that is in fact reminiscent of Hobbes’s notion of the social contract.

  • 1 See Ballaster 192ff, Brown 57ff, Ferguson 1992, 354-355, Pacheco 1994, 491.
  • 2 Kroll and Visconsi. For a caveat about reading Oroonoko as a narrow political allegory, Molineux 45 (...)
  • 3 Oroonoko has logically not been read as a political allegory of the Glorious Revolution in the seve (...)

2At first, the question of political consent might seem to be foreclosed in the fictional world of Oroonoko: the eponymous hero, born as a (racial) outsider to the colonial society of Surinam, is a slave, which makes him fall outside the domain of political subjects. Yet this has not prevented critics from reading the novel as a political allegory about the consequences of rebellion, in which Oroonoko, renamed Caesar in the novella, represents a version of the “martyr” Charles I, sacrificed by a corrupt society of base interlopers reminiscent of the Commonwealth of the 1650s – at least as their opponents saw them.1 Other critics have seen in Oroonoko a warning to James II in the fraught political context of 1688. Mistreated by his own tyrannical king in Africa, Oroonoko unjustly falls into slavery in Surinam where the currency of his royal nature fails to be acknowledged.2 While these readings might be valid, the fact remains that Oroonoko is a black slave in a New World plantation, one, what’s more, who ends up leading a rebellion, and failing – this racial and political identity sits somewhat uneasily with such political allegories.3 A close reading of the novella also complicates a superficial interpretation: through his ambivalent status as a “royal slave,” Oroonoko is repeatedly asked to assent to his own enslavement, which means embracing obedience and renouncing resistance. The novel first reads, in fact, like a failed romance in which the “royal slave” is not miraculously saved as he would have been in romances of the past, and then veers into a political fable. In the context of a crisis of regime, which results in the failure of a central authority, Oroonoko, even though he is supposed to be a slave, is paradoxically placed in the position of the modern political subject of Behn’s own time. This subject, oppressed by an iniquitous, tyrannical regime, must repeatedly be coaxed and wooed into obeying, but ends up rebelling against tyranny – a position which might seem at first sight to align with a Whig perspective of obedience. Following up Catherine Molineux’s suggestion that Oroonoko can indeed be read as a subtle and wide-ranging “contribution to the philosophical debates about political obligation and its novel construction of the political subject,” (456-457) I would like to decentre the critical gaze by focussing first on Oroonoko and Imoinda’s progress from Africa to the colonial New World and on what this shift might tell us about new, more nuanced conceptions of the relationship between the individual and the state, and between the individual (male and female) and society. I argue here that Oroonoko can then be read as a fable about the crisis of consent and obedience which ensues when a society loses its irrefragable, legitimate centre – and thus as an experiment in thought that argues for a strong transcendent power in a Hobbesian perspective.

  • 4 For the shift from romance to novel, see Brown, Ferguson 1994 178n55, and Cottegnies 82-83. For the (...)
  • 5 “he struck an awe and reverence even in those that knew not his quality” (Behn 1994, 10). All quota (...)
  • 6 On passive obedience, see Molineux 462 and Harol 448-450.

3Oroonoko has often been read as a new form of mixed fiction manifesting the death of romance, through its radical shift from a romance-inspired African court, complete with a culturally-resonant harem, to a pre-capitalistic colonial society dependent upon slavery for its subsistence, thus as a novel de facto celebrating a new kind of fiction, anchored in the here and now (rather than in the remote past).4 Yet this reading tends to make light of the embedded narrative of Oroonoko’s life and amours in Africa to focus on what arguably constitutes the main and most original part of the story, his adventures from the moment of his enslavement. This is perhaps because the apparent disjointedness of the story makes it difficult to keep the two strands together, and also because Behn’s informed representation of a contemporary colonial society fascinates more today than the depiction of an Africa that has more to do with Heliodorus’ Aethiopica or the Arabian Nights than with early-modern Coramantien (present-day Ghana), its alleged location. But although the African Oroonoko is a prince of royal blood whose nobility, manifested by his beauty, is universally recognised by his own people, he is nevertheless described as a rebel to his king, his own grandfather. 5 This is problematic, because as a subject of the old king, Oroonoko should submit and obey, on pain of being condemned to death. Absolute obedience due to the old king is acknowledged in the novella: “they [the African community] pay a most absolute resignation to the monarch, especially when he is a parent also” (14), for “’tis death to disobey; besides, held a most impious disobedience” (15). But the king’s power is questioned by his own grandson, however, when Oronoko and his grandfather become rivals in love, from the moment when Oroonoko’s fiancée, Imoinda – who is doubly subjected as a subject of the king, and as a woman – is forced to enter the king’s harem. From that moment on, the king’s absolute rule is denounced as a form of tyranny. Yet from the king’s perspective, his prerogative should be absolute in that matter as in everything else, for “the obedience the people pay their king, was not at all inferior to what they paid their gods; and what love would not oblige Imoinda to do, duty would compel her to” (15). But Oroonoko’s greater love for Imoinda leads him, however, to challenge this authority by secretly marrying her, after she “condescend[s] to receive him for her husband”, but without obtaining the prerequisite consent of his grandfather (14). Marriage itself is described as a form of political contract, when Imoinda is said to have concluded a “solemn contract” with Oroonoko (17). It will have tragic consequences, however, since it is just after this “ceremony” that the king sends Imoinda the veil, which is how he makes his choice of concubines known. Even though Imoinda then confesses that she is already married to a mysterious man (although still a maid), the lovers’ very disobedience, in not asking for the king’s consent, comforts him into imposing himself on the young woman. Later hearing that it is to Oroonoko she is married and that the marriage has been consummated, the furious king secretly sells Imoinda, now “a polluted thing” in his eyes (27), into slavery. Later repenting, he asks for Oroonoko’s forgiveness, but keeps Imoinda’s fate secret, confessing to his grandson that he has put her to death instead. Oroonoko is heart-broken, but Imoinda’s disappearance somehow quenches his desire for rebellion, and the rivalry with his grandfather and king is extinguished: Oroonoko rules revenge out, bidding the messenger “return his duty to his lord and master, and to assure him, there was no account of revenge to be adjusted between them” (29). Yet he acknowledges that his grandfather has behaved as a tyrant to him (“the breach of the law being on his grandfather’s side” 17), by taking his grandson’s wife as a prize, and although Oroonoko has fleetingly thought about “abandon[ing] [his] country and fly[ing] with her to some unknown world who never heard [their] story” (17). In spite of this recognition, however, the young prince eventually reintegrates the political order by returning to passive obedience And even though he has defied his king’s authority in private, by secretly “tak[ing] the rights of love” and “prevail[ing]” with Imoinda (25) – a vocabulary of male conquest to which I will return –, thus taking possession of the prize the king had – legitimately in the absolute monarchy of Caramantien – reserved for himself, his rebellion is eventually pardoned. As for women, they appear as passive objects of male rivalry, and victims of a double oppression, patriarchal and political. When the cause of his rebellion (Imoinda) vanishes, however, the rebellious subject Oronoko falls back into his default position, that of the obedient subject.6

  • 7 “I must say thus much of it, that certainly had his late Majesty, of sacred Memory, but seen and kn (...)
  • 8 See for instance Behn 1994, 34, when the female narrator dissociates herself from the captain and h (...)
  • 9 For the social heterogeneity of the colonial world, see Pestana 206 and Parker 2011, 32-51.

4In the second part of the story, he is again involved in an episode of rebellion, this time in the New World, when he leads a slave rebellion. This time there is no transcendent notion of obedience to revert to when the uprising fails; for the abusive colonial society whose long-awaited “Governor” never materializes is a far cry from the African monarchy: even though Oroonoko’s grandfather abuses of his authority, the absolutist rule of the African king is nevertheless based on unshakeable principles of legitimacy. By contrast, the English colony is left to its own devices at a great distance from the centre of power in England. It is presented as an unstable and vulnerable society, in the midst of a hostile natural environment, among indigenous people whose “numbers so far surpassing [theirs]” (9) are a threat to their very existence; it is also threatened by rival colonial nations – so much so that it was soon going to be lost to the Dutch.7 This colonial society is soon seen as illegitimate by Oroonoko and, at times, by the female narrator herself, whose attitude towards her own community is ambivalent.8 Oroonoko’s rebellion thus takes on a larger political dimension; it can be read as a warning that consent or assent to the social order can be withdrawn when a transcendent legitimacy is replaced by a system whose bases are immanent and consensual. For the regime against which Oroonoko rebels can in fact be described as a debased version of the English Republican Commonwealth, here a form of oligarchy based on a council of plantation motley crew of owners and merchants headed by the deputy-governor Byam, an assembly which “consisted of such notorious villains as Newgate never transported; and, possibly originally were such who understood neither the laws of God or man, and had no sort of principles to make ‘em worthy the name of men” (65-66).9

  • 10 “The Passions that encline men to Peace are, Feare of Death; Desire of such things as are necessary (...)
  • 11 “[I]t is a reall Unitie of them all, in one and the same Person, made by Covenant with every man, i (...)
  • 12 For Hobbes’s ambiguity on the withdrawal of consent, see Sheridan.

5Oroonoko does not immediately rise up in arms to lead his fellow slaves into rebellion: he spends his first few weeks, or months in Surinam patiently waiting for his situation to improve, accepting a series of compromises which require his consent day after day. His final rebellion highlights in fact, by contrast, how his former patience was based on tacit or explicit assent to his status as a slave – which he thinks is only temporary at first. That his condition of slave should require his consent might sound like a paradoxical statement, given the status of chattel slaves in the early modern period; but Oroonoko is not exactly a common slave: he is a “royal slave”, and his progress in the colonial society shows in fact how he is gradually made to assent to the planters’ order. He is literally wooed into obedience, contrary to his fellow slaves, who are submitted by force – or so we suppose, since they are not represented in the novel. Yet as Oroonoko himself argues when he finally rebels when haranguing them, even his fellow slaves’ submission hides a form of acquiescence to their own condition: according to him, it is their fear of death that keeps them in slavery (rather than rebelling).10 It might be possible to see here in Oroonoko’s discussion of the slaves’ condition an ironic illustration of the Hobbesian concept of consent to a strong government as a way of exiting the state of nature. For Hobbes there was no confusion possible between a servant, who was indentured to his master for a limited period of time, and a slave, who was coercively maintained in obedience. The slave could not be supposed to have “[c]ontracted with his Lord,” (Hobbes, De Cive viii, 2-3, 118) whereas the social contract allowed all other citizens to contract the covenant to leave the state of nature – by submitting to the greater power of a sovereign.11 But should this sovereign (which could be an assembly of men) fail to protect, then Hobbes argued, “[w]here there is no trust, there can be no Contract(De Cive, cited in Baumgold 839).12 When self-preservation cannot be guaranteed, the social contract can be dissolved.

6The particular status of the slaves in Oroonoko – the fact that they are all originally free men, who were captured and then sold into slavery – allows Behn to suggest that even slaves must give their assent to their enslavement, which paradoxically reinserts them into the commonwealth. Oroonoko, who was himself a slaver in Africa, accepts in fact only one form of slavery as legitimate, slavery by conquest; but the latter form of slavery is inextricably linked with chattel or commercial slavery in the New World. Oroonoko has to face, therefore, a contradiction: he himself provided slave dealers with chattel slaves, and in the New World, no difference exists between slaves by conquest and chattel slaves. Yet he viscerally rejects the condition of chattel slaves for himself and his former men: “Have they vanquished us nobly in fight? Have they won us in honourable battle? And are we by the chance of war become their slaves?” (58), he asks indignantly. But Oroonoko is hard put to justify his own exclusion from a system to which he contributed. He suggests, however, that the slaves are all collectively complicit in their enslavement: by meekly obeying, they have tacitly abdicated their freedoms to unworthy masters, “rogues, runagates, that have abandoned their countries for rapine, murders, thefts, and villainies” (58). Hoping to preserve themselves and their wives and children, the slaves have abdicated their right to fight back against what must be seen as tyranny; but in so doing they were mistaken, he claims, because their self-preservation is still not guaranteed, and they are not rid of the fear of death. They have yielded to unjust and unreliable masters, “a degenerate race,” who cannot be trusted, because they have no honour, “no one human virtue left to distinguish ’em from the vilest creatures” (58).

  • 13 That this episode should go uncommented in the story complexifies the possibility of reading the st (...)
  • 14 On the symbolism of these instruments, see Hughes 271, and also Sills 320.

7The importance of the paradoxical notion of “consent to obedience” is highlighted in fact very early on in the story, in the founding episode of Oroonoko’s capture by the slave dealer. When still in Africa, Oroonoko is shown routinely selling the soldiers he has vanquished in battle as chattel slaves to an English captain who has become his friend.13 One day, the captain tempts him on board his ship under the pretext of entertaining him with maps, globes and other mathematical instruments – all recognizable emblems of the vanity of learning, but also, perhaps more to the point, the very instruments that allow exploration, commerce, and the Atlantic slave trade in the first place.14 But instead of entertaining him as expected, the captain claps the African prince and his men in irons, treating them exactly like Oroonoko’s own enslaved prisoners (the ones he had just sold them), immediately setting sail for the New World. In response, the prince starts fasting, and he is imitated by all the Africans on board. The alarmed captain soon realizes that he must put an end to their hunger strike as soon as possible, or his chattels will lose all value. He then uses a ploy to convince Oroonoko and his men to cooperate. Sending word to the prince that he repents his betrayal, he declares himself ready not only to free him and his men from their shackles, but also to free them as soon when they reach their destination, on the condition that Oroonoko gives his word that he (and his fellow slaves) will start eating again, and fail to revenge, promising not to do anything “fatal to himself and the King his master, to whom his vessel did belong” (35). In the first of several characteristic moments of entrusting which Sills calls “fatal myopia” (320), Oroonoko thinks he can strike a deal with the captain as with an honourable equal, and agrees to his conditions: “To this Oroonoko replied, he would engage his honour to behave himself in all friendly order and manner, and obey the command of the captain, as he was lord of the King’s vessel, and general of those men under his command” (35). Raised a royalist, Oroonoko acknowledges the captain as the king’s representative onboard; he thus swears what he is asked to swear. But the captain is now hesitant about trusting Oroonoko’s word, incidentally revealing his own vulnerability to the slaves’ potential violent resistance:

This was delivered to the still doubting captain, who could not resolve to trust a heathen he said, upon his parole, a man that had no sense or notion of the god that he worshipped. Oroonoko then replied, he was very sorry to hear that the captain pretended to the knowledge and worship of any gods who had taught him no better principles than not to credit as he would be credited; but they told him the difference of their faith occasioned that distrust […]. (35)

  • 15 Oroonoko is in fact described as an atheist in the story, see below.
  • 16 This sense of morality, which is of course imbued with a highly distinctive, aristocratic notion of (...)

8For the European captain, the absence of a shared religion, and the African man’s alleged “heathen” beliefs – whether he means his paganism, his Islamic beliefs or his atheism15 –, makes Oroonoko’s consent dubious and untrustworthy: while the captain has sworn “in the name of a greater god, which if he should violate, he would expect eternal torment in the world to come” (35), Oroonoko has not. Oroonoko’s own morality, as he argues, is based on a higher conception of honour, on a particularly demanding conception of his own fame. Betraying an oath does not expose him to some kind of invisible, delayed punishment in a possible afterlife, but causes shame here and now; for, according to him, each man stands under the gaze of all mankind. A breach of trust would therefore entail a perpetual blemish to his reputation, perceptible by all men: “‘Is that all the obligation he has to be just to his oath?,’ replied Oroonoko. ‘Let him know I swear by my honour, which to violate would not only render me contemptible and despised by all brave and honest men, and so give myself perpetual pain, but it would be eternally offending and diseasing all mankind, harming, betraying, circumventing, and outraging all men” (35).16

  • 17 On Oroonoko’s morals, see Pacheco 2013.
  • 18 When Oroonoko finally realises that the whites do not respect their given word with him, he mistake (...)

9But through a lack of reciprocity that is repeated over and over again in the novel, the deal between Oroonoko and the captain is not considered as binding by the latter, since he does not recognize Oroonoko as a moral person: Oroonoko and his men are not freed on arrival, but sold to the planters with the rest of the chattel slaves. The whites recognize no difference between the common chattel slaves and the “aristocratic” warriors: all are black, therefore perceived as interchangeable. Yet this betrayal does not prevent Oroonoko from repeatedly consenting to the conditions offered by the whites: as a man of honour, Oroonoko, like his French master, who follows him in the New World although his presence is obscured in the narrative, has “little religion [in fact no religion], but admirable morals”17 and he believes in the consensual, honourable contract struck between man and man.18 The novel includes a repetition of this scene, when Oroonoko is confronted with the devious deputy-governor Byam, with his friend, the good slave-owner Trefry and even the female narrator (both powerless at keeping their words): every time, Oroonoko strikes a deal with a white member of the colonial society, but is betrayed. On each of these occasions, his consent to obedience or patience is obtained through reasoning: the settlers need this consent for their own security, because of the danger he could pose to the colonial society as a trained warrior, but also because he is in a position, through his example, to inspire obedience or disobedience among the other slaves. Each occasion is, for Oroonoko, a trust bid through which he offers the whites his trust (only to be betrayed), since the latter repeatedly fail to respect their words, sometimes because they cannot do so. For his “friends” and allies, Trefry and the narrator, obtaining and making Oroonoko maintain his consent to the situation is also vital if they are to protect him from the other settlers. Their protection can only be intermittent, however, as they are often absent at key moments, not to mention the fact that their authority does not really extend beyond the limits of Parnham Plantation. On one occasion, the narrator thus tries to convince Oroonoko to be reconciled with his predicament: “I got, with much ado, a promise from him to rest yet a little longer with patience, and wait the coming of the lord governor […]. He assured me he would” (46). In return for his patient compliance, Oroonoko is offered an exceptional suspended status, allegedly provisional, at least, as he is told, until the return of the absent governor (who never materialises). This means for instance that he is never treated as a field labourer: he is allowed by his exceptionally friendly master Trefry to live a quiet, idle life on Parnham Plantation, miraculously reunited with Imoinda. In exchange for his acquiescence to this (transitional) liminal status, he is granted a form of marginal integration in the micro-commonwealth of the Plantation, therefore, as a second-class guest perhaps, keeping the women company, and even occasionally taking them on excursions. He is thus lulled into a false sense of his captivity being temporary, until the governor’s hypothetical return, and of belonging to a community, under the authority of a benign master and a ghostly governor. But Oroonoko finally realises, however, that, in spite of his hopes of being freed, his assent to the situation is de facto based on his consent to his condition as a slave, and that this acquiescence to the colonial system means that he does not own himself any longer. This tolerance to his own slave status implies, moreover, that he passively participates in the violent exploitation of the other Africans as chattel slaves (and field hands), which he only begins to see as a philosophical or moral question when he is at the point of rebellion.

  • 19 Pacheco sees this rousing passage not so much as showing evidence of “Behn’s sympathy with the oppr (...)

10This realization comes in fact at Imoinda’s prodding, when she lets him know she is pregnant. This is the moment when Oroonoko/Caesar realises that slavery is not a transitional, temporary social function, but a hereditary status, and even that it sticks as a nature: his child will be born into slavery and will have no other existence than as a slave. Imoinda argues that the future birth of their child in slavery makes the prospect of their freedom even more remote (“if it were hard to gain the liberty of two, ’twould be more difficult to get that for three” 57). This is implicitly because a slave by birth legally and “naturally” belongs to his master. Then Oroonoko starts “accusing himself for having suffered slavery so long” (46), and he uses his authority over the other slaves to harangue them into rebelling. The passionate harangue against slavery that he delivers at that moment, probably the first ever anti-slavery plea in history – although strangely offkey, given Oroonoko’s own previous involvement in the slave trade19 –, denounces the slaves’ habituation to their condition as a form of apathy, and moral degeneracy, because it is based on the tacit assent to their oppression and to a condition worse in fact than that of an animal’s. Thus he argues:

[T]hey suffered not like men who might find a glory and fortitude in oppression, but like dogs that loved the whip and bell and fawned the more they were beaten; that they had lost the divine quality of men, and were become insensible asses, fit only to bear; nay worse, an ass, or dog, or horse, having done his duty, could lie down in retreat […]. (57-58)

11For their oppressors are not their conquerors, and in the regime of economic slavery the slaves can only be chattels. This makes a tyranny of the colonial society, which in turn justifies resistance and rebellion. The rebels then flee into the forest, where they are soon caught by the militia. Then, prodded on by their terrified wives (61), Oroonoko’s companions yield to their colonists’ deceitful offer of a general pardon in exchange for their surrender. Betrayed by all his companions except one, Oroonoko is finally taken and almost whipped to death. At this point, for Oroonoko, the illusion of consent no longer holds sway: the promise of a restoration of the monarchical order, with the return of its true representative, the ever absent governor, has lived. As Oroonoko is finally rid of his naïve credulity, the story’s gruesome ending unfolds as a one of despair and self-destruction: he kills Imoinda and their unborn child, and mutilates himself to death, because, as he argues, “Oroonoko scorns to live with the indignity that was put on Caesar” (65). This is paradoxically the moment when Oroonoko, shedding his identity as the slave Caesar, expresses his most absolute freedom, and perhaps his dignity in the face of a dehumanizing system. Contrary to his fellow slaves who have yielded to the militia to save their skins, giving in to the pleading of their “fearful and cowardly” wives (61), Oroonoko stages his heroic resistance, that of a stoic who is free of the fear of dying, a man who reasserts his ownership over his own spirit and body. The killing of Imoinda remains, of course, problematic. One way of interpreting it is in relation to the colonial society: by killing his unborn child and wife he withdraws them from the slavery economy in the same way as he has, by mutilating his own body, rendered it useless and of no value to slave-owners. In so doing, Oroonoko tragically reasserts his absolute, individual will, in absence of a transcendent political order to which he could have submitted.

12If we consider Behn’s novel not just as an uneasy hybrid between romance and modern fiction but as a philosophical tale, then at this point it could tentatively be read both as a critique of slavery as an emerging economic institution, and also as a superficial critique of contractualist contemporary political theories like those of Hobbes or Locke. These are sketched and evoked in passing (rather than being thoroughly explored), and while the narrator seems to justify rebellion on moral and philosophical grounds, the immediate context of a colonial society based on the economics of slavery and on violence makes the debate on the social contract clearly obsolete. What Behn’s novella highlights is that a society without a legitimate monarchical ruler can only fail and degenerate into tyranny. If a society based on institutionalised slavery is described as problematic in the novel, Behn seems to suggest, it is not per se, but because its subjects end up being enslaved to a myriad of illegitimate, unworthy masters, rather than one transcendent, legitimate monarch. For each slave-owner is like a king or a god in relation to his own community of slaves, with the right of life and death over them, but he is a totally illegitimate monarch, one who behaves abusively like a tyrant since he treats them as chattels, not subjects. This, the novel seems to suggest, justifies rebellion in principle – an argument that Hobbes himself made in Leviathan, when he cautiously argued that a failed ruler could be deposed. But Hobbes’s conception of the covenant, Behn suggests, can only fail, in the absence of a sovereign whose power is guaranteed on transcendent bases.

  • 20 See Hutner.
  • 21 See John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, section 24. He also notoriously extends this power to (...)

13Yet Behn’s political argument about consent and obligation is not fully articulated in Oroonoko. The story contains too many contradictions and loopholes to justify a reading sympathetic to the slaves, or even a political position that can be clearly identified beyond the blind belief, expressed by the narrator, in the power of the mysteriously absent Governor to put everything to rights. Meanwhile, the blurring that results from the intermittent presence-absence of an ostentatiously powerless narrator in the text draws attention to the treatment of women, and in particular Imoinda, in the story. For Behn seems to offer an indirect critique of the double standard to which women are submitted in the commonwealth, by virtue of their double subjection, making Imoinda the ultimate victim of both tyrannical systems. It might be possible to read Oroonoko’s final sacrifice of Imoinda differently. For the novel suggest an analogy in filigree between the position of women – who are doubly submitted to their absolute lords, and their fathers or husband – and that of the slaves, who are shown as emasculated and feminized, through their lack of agency.20 Thirty years later, Mary Astell would compare the condition of women to that of slaves in a critique of contractualist conceptions of society in Reflections upon Marriage. Paraphrasing Locke’s famous claim that “[a]ll men are born free,” Astell describes what she sees as female slavery within marriage, which allows women to be subjected to tyrannical husbands-cum-masters, using it to question the Lockean conception of the social contract: “if all Men are born free, how is it that all Women are born slaves?” (18). Astell is doing two things here: first she criticises the condition of married women (pointing to a blind spot in Whig contractualism), but also suggesting that Whig theorists are inconsistent and should extend the same authority to sovereigns in the state that they uncritically allow husbands in the domestic sphere. If (women’s) submission and obedience to authority is desirable in the domestic sphere, she asks, then why not in the state? Locke himself, in spite of his famous denunciation of slavery, tolerates chattel slavery, even granting the masters power of life and death over their slaves in the case of prisoners taken in a just war. 21 Astell thus questions the consistency of Whig contractualist theory, which leaves the domestic sphere outside of the political sphere.

  • 22 For the sexual politics in Oroonoko, see Andrade.

14One scene in the novella in particular, which might go unnoticed because the tone is one of banter, similarly points to the political and social relegation of women. It highlights in particular the men’s sexual exploitation of women. It is remarkable because it presents Oroonoko as sharing the slave-owners’ masculinist culture of rape in the colonial context.22 In Surinam, before he is reunited with Imoinda, Oroonoko shares a dinner with his former men and his good master Trefry (alongside with his own white friends), in a puzzling moment of fraternising; in the course of the dinner-table conversation, Trefry tells his companions about a female slave, Clemene, to whom he is attracted, but whose beauty and forbidding virtue have struck him so much that he has refrained from sexually abusing her. In this conversation between men, with no women attending (which incidentally questions the narrator’s position in the narrative), Oroonoko is shown conniving at the sexual politics of his masters: masters and slaves, blacks and whites, all men thus unite in the universal exploitation of women. Not only does Oroonoko sound particularly flippant, if not indulgent, about the right of slave-owners to rape their female slaves, just as there was a toleration for men having sex with their female servants, but he even perplexingly encourages Trefry to persist in pressing Clemene – and one is reminded of the rhetoric of conquest that was used in the narration in Oroonoko’s wooing of Imoinda in Africa, when the text describes how he “prevailed with her” (25):

  • 23 “civility” is substituted for “servility”, to correct an editorial mistake.

I do not wonder,’ reply’d the Prince, that Clemene should refuse slaves, being as you say so beautiful, but wonder how she escapes those that can entertain her as you can do; or why, being your slave, you do not oblige her to yield?’
‘I confess,’ said Trefry, ‘when I have, against her will, entertained her with love so long, as to be transported with my passion even above decency, I have been ready to make use of those advantages of strength and force nature has given me. But O, she disarms me with that modesty and weeping so tender and so moving that I retire and thank my stars she overcame me.’
The company laughed at his civility to a slave […]. (42)23

  • 24 Molineux calls the episode “a botched murder-suicide pact” (459).
  • 25 “[C]ould we travel to the Orb of the Moon,” says the philosopher, “I do not think we should find Me (...)

15Clemene is soon identified, however, as being Imoinda, which makes the passage retrospectively ironic. This is a fascinating example, I suggest, of the narrative voice’s flickering ambivalence that requires the reader to remain vigilant to the narrative twists and turns. The shocking realisation that these males were bantering about the rape of none other than the heroine Imoinda suddenly draws attention to her status and to the status of women in general as pawns or instruments in the service of men’s pleasure, in a patriarchal society. Even after our sight adjusts and Imoinda is restored her identity as Oroonoko’s true wife, she is not freed from her debilitating subjection. As his wife, she must submit to her lord and master: in the horrific denouement, he makes use of his power of life and death over her by sacrificing her in spite of her protestation,24 using her as a means through which he can finally assert his own free will and glory. Imoinda is thus never recognised as having an autonomous moral identity. Like the mysterious figure of the female narrator, who poses as a helpless witness and ambivalent commentator, but also as a victim of potential male violence (when she and other women must flee, in fear of their lives), Imoinda remains partially hidden from readers’ view, in the margins of this story of male affirmation. In her study of Behn’s narrative technique, Jaqueline Pearson argues that Behn creates narratives and narrators full of “unnoticed and unacknowledged self-contradictions, uncomfortable ambivalences, not fully articulated, about the tales they tell;” it is “these complex, uncomfortable, flawed, or even duplicitous narrators,” she continues, “who are Behn’s ‘most effective tool in her analysis of patriarchy” (42). By calling attention to the silencing of and violence against women, Behn, in Oroonoko, thus highlights the inchoate condition of women in a man’s world, and makes the invisibility of women glaringly visible. Throughout her writing career Behn returns to the question of women’s invisibility; and she felt so strongly about the topic that the same year she published Oroonoko, she made a point of introducing women into the philosophical discourse of the early Enlightenment by repeatedly substituting “men and women” for “men” in her translation of Fontenelle’s Discovery of New Worlds.25 In Oroonoko it is through the narrative discontinuities, contradictions and silences that she points to women’s invisibility in the political discourse.

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Bibliographie

Primary sources

Astell, Mary. Reflections upon Marriage. London: For John Nutt, 1700.

Behn, Aphra. A Discovery of New Worlds. From the French. London: for William Canning, 1688.

Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko. [1688]. Ed. Paul Salzman. Oxford: OUP, 1994.

Behn, Aphra. A Pindarick on the Death of our Late Sovereign; With an Ancient Prophecy on His Present Majesty. London: Printed by J. Playford for Henry Playford, 1685.

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Ed. C. B. Macpherson. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.

Hobbes, Thomas. De Cive. The English Version, entitled in the first edition Philosophicall Rudiments Concerning Government and Society. Ed. Howard Warrender. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983.

Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Ed. Peter Laslett. Cambridge: CUP, 1960.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. L'Existentialisme est un humanisme. Paris: Gallimard, Collection Folio/Essais, 1996.

Secondary sources

Andrade, Susan Z. White Skin, Black Masks: Colonialism and the Sexual Politics of Oroonoko. Cultural Critique 27 (Spring, 1994): 189-214

Ballaster, Ros. “‘Pretences of State’: Aphra Behn and the Female Plot”. Rereading Aphra Behn. Ed. Heidi Hutner. Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 1993.

Baumgold, Deborah. “‘Trust’ in Hobbes’ Political Thought. Political Theory 41.6 (2013): 838-55.

Brown, Laura. “The Romance of Empire: Oroonoko and the Trade in Slaves”. Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature. Ed. Laura Brown. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993. 23-63.

Cottegnies, Line. “L'Esclave, le prince et le libertin : espace colonial et figures de l'étranger dans Oroonoko d'Aphra Behn”. XVII-XVIII 52 (2001): 75-89. https://www.persee.fr/doc/xvii_0291-3798_2001_num_52_1_1563

Ferguson, Margaret W. “News from the New World: Miscegenous Romance in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and The Widow Ranter.” The Production of English Renaissance Culture. Ed. David Lee Miller, Sharon O’Dair and Harold Weber. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994. 151-189.

Ferguson, Moira. “Oroonoko: Birth of a Paradigm”. New Literary History 23.2 (May 1992): 339-59.

Glausser, Wayne. “Three Approaches to Locke and the Slave Trade. Journal of the History of Ideas 51.2 (1990): 199-216.

Harol, Corrinne. “The Passion of ‘Oroonoko’: Passive Obedience, the Royal Slave, and Aphra Behn’s Baroque Realism”. ELH. 79.2 (2012): 447-75.

Hughes, Derek. “New World Ethnography, the Caribbean, and Behn’s Oroonoko”. A Companion to the Literatures of Colonial America. Ed. S. Castillo and I. Schweitzer. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 259–74.

Hutner, Heidi. “Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko: The Politics of Gender, Race, and Class”. Living by the Pen. Ed. Dale Spender. New York: Columbian, 1992. 39-51.

Kahn, Victoria. Wayward Contracts. The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640-1674. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2004.

Kroll, Richard. “‘Tales of Love and Gallantry’: the Politics of Oroonoko”. Huntington Library Quarterly 67.4 (2004): 573-605.

Molineux, Catherine. “False Gifts / Exotic Fictions: Epistemologies of Sovereignty and Assent in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko”. ELH 80.2 (2013): 455–88.

Pacheco, Anita. “Royalism and Honor in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko”. Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 34.3 (1994): 491-506.

Pacheco, Anita. “‘Little Religion’ but ‘Admirable Morals’: Christianity and Honor in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko”. Modern Philology 111.2 (2013): 253–280.

Parker, Matthew. The Sugar Barons. Family, Corruption, Empire, and War in the West Indies. New York: Walter & Company, 2011.

Parker, Matthew. Willoughbyland. England’s Lost Colony. London: Hutchinson, 2015.

Pearson, Jacqueline. Gender and Narrative in the Fiction of Aphra Behn”. Review of English Studies 42.165-6 (1991): 40-56, 179-90.

Pestana, Carla Gardina. The English Atlantic in the Age of Revolution, 1640-1661. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 2004.

Sheridan, Patricia. “Resisting the Scaffold: Self-Preservation and Limits of Obligation in Hobbes’s Leviathan”. Hobbes Studies 24 (2011): 137-57.

Sills, Adam. “Surveying “The Map of Slavery” in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko.Journal of Narrative Theory 36.3 (2006): 314–40.

Smith, Norval. “The Early History of Suriname: Why is Suriname Different. Surviving the Middle Passage: The West Africa-Suriname Sprachbund. Ed. Pieter C. Muysken and Norval Smith, in collaboration with Robert D. Borges. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2015. 17-42.

Todd, Janet. The Secret Life of Aphra Behn. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2000.

Visconsi, Elliott. The Degenerate Race: English Barbarism in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and The Widow Ranter”. ELH 69 (2002): 673-701.

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Notes

1 See Ballaster 192ff, Brown 57ff, Ferguson 1992, 354-355, Pacheco 1994, 491.

2 Kroll and Visconsi. For a caveat about reading Oroonoko as a narrow political allegory, Molineux 456-457.

3 Oroonoko has logically not been read as a political allegory of the Glorious Revolution in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For the reception of the novella, see Todd 38.

4 For the shift from romance to novel, see Brown, Ferguson 1994 178n55, and Cottegnies 82-83. For the context of early-modern slavery in the region, see Smith, and Parker 2015, 112.

5 “he struck an awe and reverence even in those that knew not his quality” (Behn 1994, 10). All quotation will be from this edition. As critics have noted, Oroonoko is described as the model of the European ideal of aristocratic royalist virtue and beauty (in a rhetoric of praise steeped in a loose form of Neoplatonism). See Pacheco 1994, 496-497.

6 On passive obedience, see Molineux 462 and Harol 448-450.

7 “I must say thus much of it, that certainly had his late Majesty, of sacred Memory, but seen and known what a vast and charming World he had been Master off in that Continent, he would never have parted so Easily with it to the Dutch” (Behn 1994, 47).

8 See for instance Behn 1994, 34, when the female narrator dissociates herself from the captain and his supporters; such moments of dissociation are repeated throughout the novel: “Some have commended this act as brave in the captain, but I will spare my sense of it, and leave it to my reader to judge as he pleases.”

9 For the social heterogeneity of the colonial world, see Pestana 206 and Parker 2011, 32-51.

10 “The Passions that encline men to Peace are, Feare of Death; Desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living; and a Hope by their Industry to obtain them. (Hobbes 1968, 188)

11 “[I]t is a reall Unitie of them all, in one and the same Person, made by Covenant with every man, in such manner, as if every man should say to every man, I Authorize and give up my Right of Governing my self, to this Man, or to this Assembly of men on this condition, that thou give up thy Right to him, and Authorise all his Actions in like manne. This done, the Multitude so united in one Person, is called a COMMON-WEALTH […].” Hobbes 1968, Part II, Chap. 17, 226-227.

12 For Hobbes’s ambiguity on the withdrawal of consent, see Sheridan.

13 That this episode should go uncommented in the story complexifies the possibility of reading the story as critical of transatlantic slavery.

14 On the symbolism of these instruments, see Hughes 271, and also Sills 320.

15 Oroonoko is in fact described as an atheist in the story, see below.

16 This sense of morality, which is of course imbued with a highly distinctive, aristocratic notion of honour, is strangely reminiscent of Sartre’s own existentialist conception of a secular morality (see Sartre 36).

17 On Oroonoko’s morals, see Pacheco 2013.

18 When Oroonoko finally realises that the whites do not respect their given word with him, he mistakenly believes that having them put it in writing will be more binding that an oral oath: “Caesar was overcome by [Trefry]’s wit and reasons, and in consideration of Imoinda, and demanding what he desired, and that it should be ratified by their hands in writing, because he had perceived that was the common way of contract between man and man amongst the whites.” (63) But even then he is betrayed, severely whipped, his wounds then rubbed with pepper (64).

19 Pacheco sees this rousing passage not so much as showing evidence of “Behn’s sympathy with the oppressed, but as military rhetoric” (1994, 498).

20 See Hutner.

21 See John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, section 24. He also notoriously extends this power to the owners of African-American slaves in his contribution to the constitution of Carolina (if indeed he was involved in it). See Glausser 203.

22 For the sexual politics in Oroonoko, see Andrade.

23 “civility” is substituted for “servility”, to correct an editorial mistake.

24 Molineux calls the episode “a botched murder-suicide pact” (459).

25 “[C]ould we travel to the Orb of the Moon,” says the philosopher, “I do not think we should find Men and Women there” (Behn 1688, 88).

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Line Cottegnies, « Consent and Obedience in Oroonoko »XVII-XVIII [En ligne], 82 | 2025, mis en ligne le 31 décembre 2025, consulté le 16 mars 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/1718/15641 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15ffh

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Auteur

Line Cottegnies

L. Cottegnies is a Professor of early modern literature at Sorbonne University. She is the author of a monograph, L’Éclipse du regard: la poésie anglaise du baroque au classicism (Droz, 1997), and has published several collections of essays, including Authorial Conquests: Essays on Genre in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish (AUP, 2003, with Nancy Weitz),Women and Curiosity in the Early Modern Period (Brill, 2016), with Sandrine Parageau, and Henry V: A Critical Guide (Bloomsbury, 2018), with Karen Britland. She has published numerous articles and chapters on seventeenth-century literature, from Shakespeare and Raleigh to Aphra Behn and Mary Astell. She is currently completing an edition of three works by Aphra Behn, to be published by Cambridge University Press.

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