My first copy of Oroonoko (1688) by Aphra Behn (1640-1689) was a skinny little volume bound like a play. It felt a little like a travelogue, and a little like epic poetry—harder to read than either—with a love story (if one calls Romeo-and-Juliet a love story).

I knew Aphra Behn was an early woman novelist, but she didn’t appear in Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957): you’ll note that those are all fellas in there. (Somewhere I read that part of one sentence references Behn. Although Watt apparently praises Jane Austen.)

Later, books like Dale Spender’s Mothers of the Novel (1986) and, later still, Regan Penaluna’s How to Think like a Woman (2024) provided context, as to how/why women writers had been historically overlooked, and how that supported a view of the world that centred the accomplishments and needs of men.

And a single class in Restoration English literature, taught by Professor Lisa Zeitz, was key. She—and she alone in that faculty, it seems—included Behn’s poetry in a skinny coil-bound notebook of women writers, assigned alongside the heavy, tissue-paper-thin-paged anthology of Restoration literature, and the multiple works of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (also Tristram Shandy).

Relevant English history was cursorily covered, in a few sentences relating to each work—the stuff of Empire, from the perspective of those who benefited from being in the Empire.

What I lacked in my first reading of Oroonoko was an understanding of other perspectives—say, that of an Imperial subject who existed within the confines of Empire but without access to its benefits only its costs.

Actually, I lacked more than that: other than The Modest Proposal (1729), which made it clear that eating Irish babies wasn’t popular with E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E (least of all Irish babies), assigned reading was wholly the stuff of Empire. And, if you wanted to read a good book, Watt was your recommender.

But here was Behn, hovering in a between-space: a woman who earned a living from her pen, in a time when that earned ridiculing and renouncing… but, she also earned readers.

She begins Oroonoko by describing to her patron the importance of her ensuing story. She emphasises two elements: that’s it’s a “True History”, and that she has been to Surinam and witnessed its “Wonders” and its different customs, but also slavery. Because Oroonoko himself is a Gallant Slave, and his story is set both in the colony of Surinam (today, a Republic in the Caribbean, on the northern edge of South America) and in Coramantien—which Behn describes as a country, but it was actually a slave-trading hub on the Gold Coast of Africa (today, Ghana).

Public Domain, Wikimedia

There’s debate about whether and how Behn herself spent time in Surinam and how that experience impacted her narrative. (Most agree that she travelled there.) There’s also debate about how much of her story she actually knew to be true, and how she portrays her involvement. (Most agree that she is involved to some degree.)

This debate, alone, amongst thoughtful, informed readers confirms, for me, Oroonoko plays a role in the development of the novel as a form. If one accepts that novels are a mix of the author’s experiences combined with ideas and questions beyond their experience—perhaps even ideas with which they are wrestling to come to an understanding via storytelling—Oroonoko fits that description. That it’s partly true and partly invented, padded with digressions and backstories: that feels inherently novelistic.

Behn had bills to pay (well, there’s debate about that, too, debate about her parentage and her privilege as well—the records are incomplete, she spelled her own name different ways, and she also published as Astrea). She’d’ve been capable of writing to spec: to satisfy readers mostly interested socio-political or geographical details, or romantic readers looking-to-swoon. In only 60 pages or so, Oroonoko has talk of terrain in one moment, talk of empirical conquest in another, romantic conquest in yet another—that sounds like creative decision-making to me.

Behn’s story embellishes the kernel—of Oroonoko’s later life—and creates a multi-faceted narrative, in which her handling of point-of-view is creative too. Well… this could be part of the larger question of what she actually observed; but, if one suspends that debate (her “true” experience of Surinam), we can see that sometimes the narrator is situating herself on the margins and, other times, part of various events. (Or…maybe she was on deadline—writing in multiple sessions without an overarching edit upon completion.)

Some critics believe her point-of-view shifts highlight her personal disapproval of slavery in general and of Oroonoko’s treatment specifically (it’s not a long book, but I’m hoping to avoid spoilers). So it’s possible that she chose ‘we’ to suggest intimacy and agreement and, in other instances, distanced herself to demonstrate dissent and regret.

(Talk of Empire matters here, too, because there have always been abolitionists, and there were indeed people in Behn’s time who disparaged the slave trade, sought to divest from its profits, and chose not to consume or acquire goods derived from that mechanism. Even though it was the oil that lubricated society’s wheels broadly speaking.)

The “Norton Critical” edition I reread includes about 200 pages of critical responses and essays, contemporary pieces (including an excerpt from Thomas Southerne’s 1696 dramatic retelling of Oroonoko for the stage), publications about colonization and slavery, and some historical images.

All very interesting, but I really wanted to reread Dionne Brand’s Salvage: Reading from the Wreck (2024). Brand considers many books and authors—with Thackeray and Defoe immediately and thoroughly apparent, but also Austen, the Brontes and Woolf, as well as Morrison, Chamoiseau, and Glissant.

Oroonoko has its own chapter. Wherein Brand accepts Behn’s personal experience in Surinam, “her firsthand witnessing of slavery”, and her commentary on “the relations between enslavement and the daily life of settlers”. There’s artistry there, and seemingly no question in her mind that it is not only a novel but a successful one.

A novel of a very particular sort, however: “a robust form and a necessary form” of the “racial romantic genre”. The term ‘romantic racism” or “romantic racialism” is George Frederickson’s concept, and it ascribes “positive stereotypes” to a group that is, then, valorised for them. (In the Norton edition, there is a section titled “Noble Africans in Europe” which includes Southern’s dramatisation.)

As an early—possibly the first—example of this literary art form, Oroonoko is a “set of ideas that seeks to rehabilitate the essentialist categories of race, to prove they are simultaneously true and not true, but nevertheless to keep those ideas fixed”. In this context, novels are mechanisms that maintain the structure of white supremacy.

Brand positions Oroonoko in Behn’s time, outlines the elements in Behn’s world that coalesced into this story about a one-time Prince, who was then enslaved, but exercised power over other enslaved men and influence over European men who enslaved them (and him), and over a…but the rest is spoilery.

Published 23 November 1776, Public Domain.

Brand explores ways in which Oroonoko as a character both fits and challenges the expectations that others have of him as his status shifts in Behn’s story—as she displays what’s “true and not true”. In this story that, Brand says, only appears to subvert stereotypes, but actually empowers them.

In the context of Salvage, Brand’s observations about the accumulated impact of stories that ultimately reinforce the status quo are inarguable. If the same stories are consistently lauded, everywhere and by everyone, regularly shelved on the top shelf within reach, while all the rest are stuffed into the lower shelves, crowded and chaotic and—soon—inaccessible, then forgotten altogether.

I think Behn’s story is different because it begins with an apology, a lament that she is only a woman writing this story, that no male writer has undertaken to tell the story of Oroonoko’s life and death. “I lay at your lordship’s feet,” she writes to her supporter.

I think Behn’s story is different because it exposes systemic injustices that involve and impact not only Black and white characters, but also Indigenous peoples. She presents two scenes of brutal violation—one perpetrated against a male and one against a female (avoiding more specific descriptors that would spoil the story)—and presents complicated power structures and complex abuses of power.

But is it different enough—different enough to subvert the status quo of white supremacy.

I winced at Behn’s description of Oroonoko’s nose—praised as being Roman rather than African—and of his colour being remarkable—jet black, compared to the more common hue of dusky brown. (Brand writes about the exceptionalism of figures like Tiger Woods and Obama, too.)

And yet, I don’t recall other 17th-century fiction admitting how frightened settlers and colonial agents were of uprisings among the enslaved and/or Indigenous populations, of the status of the many who were abused and exploited so a few could profit. I don’t recall acknowledgement in those other novels, not only that rebellions and resistance existed but they were wholly justifiable—necessary even.

Oroonoko might be only 60 pages long, but it contains a lot of big ideas (and a lot of teeny-tiny print), and I’ll be thinking more about all of it—Brand’s work too—in the years to come. (Note: This post is a contribution aligning with Bill’s announcement about his reading about the development of the novel, officially launching one year from now, in January 2027.)