SOURCE: “The Disappearing African Woman: Imoinda in Oroonoko After Behn,” in ELH, Vol. 66, No. 1, 1999, pp. 71-86.

[In the following essay, MacDonald discusses why the character of Oronooko's black African wife, Imoinda, in Aphra Behn's novel Oroonoko is depicted as white in later adaptations of the work. The critic claims that Imoinda's whiteness is used to suppress the facts of racial and gender conflict and to confer racial authority on white women.]

At the climax of a mid-eighteenth-century heroic tragedy, the black hero, discovered in a private chamber with the dead body of his white wife, urges the white men who come upon the sight to “Put up your Swords, and let not civil Broils” involve them in his own desperate fate.¹ The play in question is not a version of Othello, as the remark about (bright?) swords and civil broils might at first suggest, but rather John Hawkesworth's 1759 Oroonoko. Clearly, as Hawkesworth refashions Thomas Southerne's 1696 dramatization of Aphra Behn's 1688 novella so as most readily and rightfully to fix “Attention … upon the two principal Characters, Oroonoko and Imoinda, who are so connected as to make but one Object, in which all the Passions of the Audience, moved by the most tender and exquisite Distress, are concentrated” (H, A2v), he has Othello—a dignified, pathetic, mid-eighteenth-century kind of Othello—in mind. The kind of transaction he conducts with the Shakespearean tragedy, however, ranges beyond establishing similarities of tone. What this revision of Southerne (and beyond him, of Behn) also appropriates is a ready theatrical language for regularizing both Shakespeare's wild passions and the radical racial and sexual ill-ease occasioned by Oroonoko. Audiences, it would seem, had a ready-made sentimental frame of reference for a miscegenous Oroonoko, but not for one whose enslaved lovers were of the same race.

Hawkesworth's play is only one part of a remarkable constellation of texts originating from Behn's novella as it entered its eighteenth-century afterlife. In Behn, Imoinda is black like Oroonoko. In Hawkesworth and every other text following Behn, she is white. Only recently has this racial transformation become a subject for extended discussion in the work of postcolonial and feminist critics, primarily in relation to Southerne's play, where it first occurs.² Yet there are several other white Imoindas after Behn, and I would like to direct my own inquiries into some of them, rather than solely into Southerne, whose play seems to me so radical a revision and literalizing of the sexual and economic implications of Behn as to require a separate discussion of its own.

Behn's Oroonoko, of course, poses the most obvious exception to Lynda Boose's assertion of the “unrepresentability” of African women in early modern texts.³ Following Janet Adelman's psychological analysis of masculine fear of women's reproductive power in Shakespeare, Boose argues that the reason for the virtual absence of black female characters from this discourse is the white and masculine fear that the blackness of black female characters visibly marks them as the location of that dark place through which men must pass in order to be born as men: “The mother's part in him threatens the fantasy of perfect self-replication that would preserve the father in the son.”⁴ I follow Boose, but consider the possibility that a denial of representation to African women has other rationales than the psychic; or rather, that the psychic is supplemented and articulated by the material practices of racism. The racial revisions eighteenth-century authors make in Behn—revisions which extend beyond the color of the heroine's skin to include Behn's constructions of character and gender identity—are worth examining for what they reveal about the relationships the period established between the social and sexual values and meanings implied by white and black skins, and by white and black sexual bodies.

Historians of Atlantic slavery have only begun recovering the experiences of enslaved African women, detailing how their experiences in bondage differed from and overlapped with those of male slaves.⁵ In the interest of extracting as much agricultural work from as many physically able slaves as possible, slave owners in the American colonies and the Caribbean made no distinction between male and female, putting women to work at the most difficult jobs alongside men: harnessing mules or oxen to steer crude wooden plows, cutting logs, hoeing and picking cotton, or chopping and milling sugar cane. Female slaves mined coal, dug canals, and built railroads, although they seem not to have performed much skilled artisanal or mechanical work; the cost of training a slave whose labor power was needed elsewhere and whose availability for skilled jobs could be interrupted by childbirth and nursing was too high. Put to perform men's work, female slaves were frequently regarded as somehow masculinized, as the reports of many observers of American slavery suggest.⁶ While gender was thus not always relevant in distinguishing the work of slaves and masters, slave women's field work did become a means of racing the female gender. One historian notes that in Barbados after about 1660, black female slaves began to replace indentured white women as workers in the sugar cane fields in a “racially-inspired labour policy” aimed at establishing “the ideology of white racial superiority … a long-term attempt to elevate white women and degrade black women.”⁷

That the labor and social history of African women's enslavement has, until recently, been scanted in the interpretive record speaks to the requirements of an older historiography of slavery in the Americas—exemplified by the work of Eugene Genovese—which implicitly modeled its understanding of the structure of slave families on that of slaveholding families, which were held to be at least notionally structured around a benevolent patriarchalism.⁸ This domestic historiography of slavery paid small attention to the economic and social roles played by African women in slave communities, but—most crucially, for my interests here—it also contributed to the suppression of knowledge of the extent of female slaves' sexual exploitation and abuse by the men of their masters' families, fearful knowledge which emphasizes the interplay of race, gender, and sexuality in the institutional maintenance of slavery, and the inadequacy of family as a structuring framework for understanding it.⁹ As early as 1662, the Virginia colony had passed a law which held that all children born within the colony would follow the condition of the mother, in a departure from English common law which held that children followed the condition of their fathers (or of their mothers' husbands). Such a law implicitly excused white men from paternal responsibility toward their children born of slave mothers, rendering sexual connection with and sex crimes against slave women legally invisible. Indeed, a contemporary feminist analysis of sexuality and slavery suggests that a self-imposed response of concealment and denial to the continuous experience of sexual assault resulted in a kind of self-silencing by slave women, a self-silencing which may be crucial in their absence from the historical record.¹⁰ What was not rendered socially invisible was the frustration and anger of the slave owners' wives, who often reacted against the black women in bondage in their households with rage: “Under slavery we live surrounded by prostitutes, like patriarchs of old, our men lie in one house with their wives and concubines.”¹¹

In Behn's Surinam, the links between whites' racial authority, black women's sexuality, and white women's social repression were even more explicitly institutionalized. John Stedman, a debt-ridden young Englishman, arrived in Surinam in 1773 as a volunteer for military service on behalf of Surinam's planters, who were engaged in trying to fight back against the ongoing guerilla attacks staged by bands of maroons, or escaped slaves. Composing a Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Suriname some years after he had settled his debts and returned to England to marry and raise a family, Stedman writes that he is sorry to have to describe a custom which he is “convinced will be highly censured by the Sedate European Matrons,” the so-called “Suriname marriage.” The practice, “as common as it is almost necessary to the batchelors who live in this climate,” involves having

a female Slave / mostly a creole / in their keeping who preserves their linnens clean and decent, dresses their Victuals with Skill, carefully attends them / they being most excellent nurses / during the frequent illnesses to which Europeans are exposed in this Country, prevents them from keeping late Hours knits for them, sows for them &c—while these Girls who are sometimes Indians sometime Mulattos and often negroes, naturally pride themselves in living with an European whom they serve with as much tenderness, and to whom they are Generally as faithful as if he were their lawfull Husband to the great Shame of so many fair Ladies, who break through ties more sacred, and indeed bound with more Solemnity, nor can the above young women be married in any other way, being by their state of Servitude entirely debard from every Christian privilege and Ceremony, which makes it perfectly lawfull on their Side, while they hesitate not to pronounce as Harlots, who do not follow them / if they can / in this laudable Example in which they are encouraged as I have said by their nearest Relations and Friends.¹²

The differences between Stedman's existing accounts of “Surinam marriage” provide an example of how the tropes of sentiment could be employed to represent the harsh sexual exigencies of life in a slave society. The manuscript of the Narrative and the personal diary Stedman kept in Surinam are full of accounts of his own and others' casual sexual encounters with slave women; eighteenth-century British observers are repeatedly shocked at the offhand brutality with which colonial planters expressed their sexual ownership of their slaves.¹³ Stedman himself was involved in a “Surinam marriage” with a slave named Joanna for virtually the entire length of his stay in the country, its financial terms agreed on in advance with Joanna's mother. Such concubinage, as well as the widespread prostitution of slave women by their owners during sugar's fallow season, were common practice throughout the Caribbean. For the reading of “Sedate” (P, 47) European women, however, Stedman censored many invidious comparisons between white women of the colony and its Indian and slave women, to whom he is much more attracted because of their “remarkable Cleanliness and youthfull vigour” (P, 49). Such censorship points to ways in which slavery was ideologically reproduced for the consumption of an audience of European women, cleansed of the sexual coercion and the depersonalized sexual contacts which formed the fabric of its daily experience for both slaves and masters. The achievement of a new social and economic status for planters' wives and daughters in the colonies occured within this social immersion in a commodified sexuality. Slavery threw white and black women together in a violent, and violently sexualized, intimacy which mocked any idea of the sanctity of home and hearth.¹⁴

And yet, it is the familial, the domestic, and the private, which figure so significantly in the transformed Oroonokos of the eighteenth century. A white heroine in these eighteenth-century dramas of pathos and sensibility affirms a new means of socially and culturally producing white Englishwomen as part of the reading and theater-going public and in the growing abolitionist movement during which these plays were performed or otherwise circulated.¹⁵ For the consumption of a theatrical audience in which women of leisure were present in increasing numbers in a Britain first entering into the full scope of an imperial expansion crucially supported by Atlantic slavery, a white Imoinda also performs acts of cultural forgetting, organized around tropes of white womanhood and its domestic realm. Those acts of cultural forgetting facilitate the erasure of African women from Oroonoko and colonial cultures deeply troubled by the sexual implications of white men's supremacy for the social welfare of white women.¹⁶

Dramatic adaptations of Behn's Oroonoko include those by Thomas Southerne, John Hawkesworth, Francis Gentleman (1760), John Ferriar (1788), and at least one anonymous author (The Royal Captive, 1767). As they remade Behn, Ferriar, Gentleman, and Hawkesworth were all explicitly motivated, at least in part, by the impulse to correct the “disgusting extravagances” of Southerne's double plot—one strand of which dealt with the tragedy of Behn's characters Oroonoko and Imoinda, the other with the cross-dressed machinations of a London woman aimed at securing rich husbands for herself and her sister on the colonial frontier.¹⁷ Shakespeare's Othello also underwent a striking series of editorial and performative interventions resulting in a play which paradoxically raised white audiences' awareness of its concern with crossing sexualized racial barriers at the same time as it insisted on new decorums of language and gesture.¹⁸

Like the eighteenth-century Othello, Oroonoko in the period was also produced and understood as a drama of sensibility and pathos. Like Othello, it was also known to audiences from Southerne's time and afterwards through a long record of eighteenth-century performance as a drama centering on a miscegenous love affair between a black African man and a white woman. Here, I argue that the whiteness of Imoinda in Oroonoko after Behn is the product of a cult of sensibility as it confronted that most ungenteel of human institutions, slavery.¹⁹ Imoinda's whitening permits a broader whitening and patriarchalizing of Behn's text and all its ambivalences about the roles of white women, black women, and black men within slavery and the colonial relations it drove. Slavery in the Oroonoko plays is both domesticated and universalized, mystified through the employment of white womanhood so as to erode its historical specificity within Behn's Surinam and in the eighteenth-century Atlantic slave trade. The revisions show their Restoration roots in Behn by their preoccupation with the aristocratic value of personal honor, an ideological concept which, by the time of their performance, had been culturally eclipsed and absorbed by the bourgeois principle of individualism and self-reliance. Both ideologies, the elite and the popular, are deployed here in the service of naturalizing colonialism and its economic reliance on the slave trade.²⁰

Before proceeding with my main argument, I would like to sketch in some terms under which we can speak of an African woman's presence in Behn's text. Imoinda in fact appears there only flickeringly, and largely as a focus and a product of others' sexuality. Although we are assured she is so beautiful as to be the perfect match for Oroonoko's princely bearing. “the beautiful Black Venus to our young Mars,” she remains for the most part a mysterious and passive object of others' passions.²¹ She only assumes “all her additions to beauty” after Oroonoko silently communicates his attraction to her (O, 13), but even so she exercises a powerful sexual attraction over Oroonoko's grandfather in Coromantien as well as over “an hundred white men sighing after her and making a thousand vows at her feet” in Surinam (O, 12). She comes to Oroonoko out of his grandfather's harem, in an appropriation of subsaharan Africa and Africans to the discourse of orientalism and of orientalist notions of non-European women's sexuality.²² In captivity, she becomes a commercial as well as a sexual object. In contrast to the white narrator, who removes herself from the climactic scene of Oroonoko's scourging, presumably because of her tender sensibilities, the heavily pregnant Imoinda is carried away “not in kindness to her, but for fear she should die with the sight, or miscarry, and then they should lose a young slave, and perhaps the mother” (O, 64). Despite the sexual allure she exercises almost involuntarily, she also always yields herself to the patriarchal logic which governs familial and sexual relations in Coromantien. When she and Oroonoko agree to marry, they decide “on both sides that, in obedience to him, the grandfather was to be first made acquainted with the design, for they pay a most absolute resignation to the monarch, especially when he is a parent also” (O, 14). She accepts the necessity of her death at her husband's hands because in Coromantien, “wives have a respect for their husbands equal to what other people pay a deity; and when a man finds occasion to quit his wife, if he loves her, she dies by his hand” (O, 68).

In the first Oroonoko and Imoinda we can thus trace an example of what Homi Bhabha has called “mimicry” in the colonialist text: their black skins and the signs of cultural alterity which literally mark their bodies (the narrator somewhat fancifully compares their facial scarifications to the body painting of the Picts) come to signify primarily as touches of exoticism within the determinedly patriarchal story of gender identity being written for them.²³ And yet even within this absorption of black Africans by a white European narrative of slavery and the sexual and racial relations it dictates, Behn's Imoinda somehow confounds the construction of a seamless account. Her facial scarification is both more extensive and more elaborate than Oroonoko's, “her extraordinary prettiness” augmented rather than lessened by “her being carved in fine flowers and birds all over her body” (O, 44). Behn's pregnant Imoinda initially resembles, but ultimately diverges from, the ideal of the English mother whose employment in discourses of eighteenth-century colonialism has been so brilliantly traced by Felicity Nussbaum.²⁴ Her sexual history and her status as a sexually desiring subject, the active role she takes in fighting for her freedom by her husband's side, and the alien origin traced in her very skin, all mark Behn's production of her as finally—and only—Other than the white woman who tells her story.

Imoinda's status as breeding stock in the minds of the planters is a literal exhibition of how, for women in this period, reproduction has become the only means of production. What is missing from Behn's portrait of an African woman, however, is an acknowledgement of the material bases of differences between women which slavery threw into such sharp relief. Behn recognizes gender difference within her representation of Africans, and also acknowledges the operations of gender within whiteness. As a white woman, Behn's narrator responds to the beauty and honorable qualities of Oroonoko and his African bride, Imoinda, and is curiously powerless to intervene in the public crisis of Oroonoko's capture and final, horrible public mutilation. As a white woman, she sails upriver and delights in displaying her undergarments to the uncomprehending Indians who inhabit Surinam's interior. But, in flattening all Imoinda's labor into sexual labor, the white narrator declines to recognize how work—sexual and otherwise—distinguished black women from white ones, resulting in her reproduction of an African woman in terms of the emerging social definitions of women of her own race.

A test case for my contention that white womanhood is invoked by post-Behn Oroonoko to naturalize the collusion of patriarchy with slavery may be provided by John Ferriar's Prince of Angola, distinguished within this series of texts by its avowedly abolitionist purpose. In his preface, Ferriar announces that he is writing his version of Behn in order to shock white people out of their insensitivity to the evils of slavery: “We talk of the destruction of millions, with as little emotion, and as little accuracy of comprehension, as of the distances of the Planets” (F, i). To that end, his play, he tells us, will correct both Southerne's structural irregularity and Hawkesworth's inappropriate sentimentality. In Hawkesworth, he tells us, the hero is so passionately swept away by love for his Imoinda that he is incapable of “making any rational reflexions on his condition” (F, vi)—that is, of responding to the fact of his enslavement with rage against the slaveholders. Here, Ferriar implies, matters will be conducted differently; romance will be more carefully segregated from tragedy, and pro-slavery arguments will in no way be allowed to stand unchallenged.

Ferriar's abolitionist fervor, however, is modulated through gender both in his preface and in his play proper. He addresses a section of his Prologue to “The Ladies of Manchester,” who “have distinguished themselves very honorably” in the cause of abolition:

Here Pity lives in ev'ry gentle Breast.
Folly may scoff, or Avarice may hate,
Since Beauty comes the Negroe's Advocate.
Let others boast in Fashion's Pride to glow,
To lure the Lover, or attract the Beau;
You check Oppression's Lash, protect the Slave,
And, first to charm, are still the first to save.

(F, 2)

The advocacy of the Negroes to which Ferriar alludes here emerges as an aspect of the Manchester ladies' “charm.”²⁵ His appeal to antislavery women may in fact not be based on their feelings toward Africans at all. In his view, one of the things wrong with Southerne's play is that its hero is shown kissing the ground and asking to be allowed to worship the disguised white Imoinda, a ludicrous improbability that “will not be easily understood, by those who know, that an African's highest religious mystery is the Mumbo Jumbo” (F, v). Englishwomen's capacity to feel matters more than what they may feel about slaves.

White women are written into Oroonoko just as they were thus written into eighteenth-century debates on the slave trade and into wider representations of the gendered prerogatives of empire. Just as the Manchester ladies' femininity is essentialized into a force capable of saving slaves, presumably through the exercise of charm, so too is the femininity of Ferriar's white Imoinda, whose anxieties as a wife entirely dictate her courses of action. She wants nothing more than to belong uninterruptedly to her husband, Oroonoko, asserting that she would rather die than be left to “the wild passions” (F, 51) of the lecherous and deceitful lieutenant governor. Ferriar's Oroonoko is at first reluctant to lead the rebellion against the slaveholders as his own former slave Aboan begs him to, but he is finally persuaded to do so by the argument that slavery's worst degradations stem from its denial of male slaves' patriarchal right within the family. One day, Aboan reminds him, he might be sold to a master “Who, proud perhaps to own a Royal Slave, / May suffer you to get young Princes for him” (F, 31). Thus moved by the possibility of having the sanctity of his bloodline denied and his reproductive capacity turned to the economic benefit of another man, Oroonoko in his turn convinces the other male slaves to rebel against their owners by arguing that slavery profanes the marriage bond when it denies a husband's right to possess his wife exclusively. He reminds them of the countless times when male slaves have been forced to stand impotently by “When, in the tort'rer's hands, a wretched wife, / Has scream'd for mercy, has implored your aid, / While your distraction made the Christian sport” (F, 32).

My point here is not that slavery did not degrade intimate relations between men and women, but rather that Ferriar's fearful white Imoinda experiences her sexual danger as virtually divorced from the fact of her enslavement; in Behn, remember, Imoinda fights at her husband's side in the revolt against the planters, wounding the lieutenant governor with a poisoned arrow. Hawkesworth's Imoinda is even more explicitly exposed to sexual danger than Ferriar's, as the attempted rape is sensationally brought onstage. After unsuccessfully begging her husband to kill her in order to preserve her virtue, she finally takes the knife and stabs herself: “where I liv'd, I die in these lov'd arms” (H, 62). In the process of re-presenting slavery and the colonial enterprise it supported, a white Imoinda who actively seeks death, rather than merely accepting it as does Behn's character, creates a place for middle-class women's complicity with the aims of empire, a complicity which writes them primarily as monogamous, sensitive and maternal—all the things out of which a portrait of a savage African woman would emerge.

In Ferriar, the whitening of Imoinda is accompanied by a broader dissociation of slavery from skin color; the first revolt in the play is actually led by angry Indians, who are never heard from again. The lieutenant governor fears that the black slaves will be drawn into fighting against their white masters and so orders Oroonoko to be chained; as for “the white slaves,” he casually remarks, “they'll not stir” (F, 18). While these mysterious white slaves are so docile or so demoralized that they are incapable of or uninterested in rebellion, Oroonoko gallantly fights “at the Head of the Planters” (F, 19) to thwart the Indians' attempt to carry off African slaves as spoils of their war against the white slaveholders.²⁶ Just as the moral Blandford has earlier been moved by Oroonoko's dignity even in chains to declare that he “will attend, and serve” (F, 9) him, Oroonoko is moved to fight on the planters' behalf after Blandford proves his decency by refusing to have him chained when the Indians' rebellion breaks out. In Ferriar, courage, character, and the right to monogamous love bind men together more than slavery can separate them; or at least, these things unite good men. Blandford bemoans the “cursed” hour that first drove Europe's “cruel sons to visit Afric's shore” and assures Oroonoko that he “must not think” himself to be a slave—without, however, manumitting him (F, 23, 25). As the play mounts toward its climax, Blandford sets out to rescue Oroonoko and Imoinda from danger and help them escape, asserting that he wishes he could extend the same “Relief to ev'ry drooping African / That now must envy their deliverance!” (F, 46). That he cannot, or at least does not, attempt to end a condition he finds so repugnant is never examined.

Capable of admiring Oroonoko's individual nobility, yet claiming to be helpless before the operations of slavery, the dramatic Blandford in effect occupies the white woman's role laid down in Behn's novella. In Behn, the white narrator and her female friends possess the kind of moral sensitivity which will allow them, as women, to be shocked and troubled by the suffering of slaves; as women, they will also be powerless to stop their men from conducting and profiting from the slave trade. Yet the difference between genders which Behn's narrative communicates by absence—her female narrator's disappearances from the action during the slave revolt; Oroonoko's execution of Imoinda; and the public torturing of Oroonoko to death—is here articulated as a difference within genders. In Ferriar, there are good white men who are shocked by the “insolence” of cruel slaveowners who will “strip the injur'd negro / Of his last privilege, the rank of man,” (F, 42) and there are bad white men like the lieutenant governor, motivated only by lust and cruelty. Oroonoko's black skin and Imoinda's white one signify here primarily in relation to the slaveowners' possession (or lack) of finer feelings. Slavery, which, the play points out existed in Africa as well as in the New World and which binds white people as well as blacks in Surinam, has less to do with the color of the couple's skins than with the fact that they are both subject to the whim of an evil man, and denied the privileges of the liberal individualism on which Ferriar's abolitionism is based. Hence, the dying Aboan wishes for a better world in which he will allowed to be Oroonoko's “faithful slave again” (F, 48).

If Ferriar's Prince comes as close as it can to delivering a slavery under whose terms Africans are no more significant than anyone else, returning to Hawkesworth demonstrates the degree to which romantic sentiment is employed in post-Behn Oroonoko to fill the space left by the evacuation of racial difference, and the spectre of conflict it raised, from the text. Confronted by white planters determined to quash the slaves' rebellion, Behn's Oroonoko demonstrates his moral indifference to their power over him by stoically enduring his public dismemberment. The body of the wife he loved and executed decomposes in the rainforest, as Oroonoko's searchers are led to it by the the smell of its decay—“a stink that almost struck them dead” (O, 70). In contrast to these haunting bodily spectacles, Hawkesworth's slaves enclose themselves within a culture of pathos and sensibility. After a scene in which the evil lieutenant governor tries to rape Imoinda, for instance, in a portrayal of the sexual horror which drives Ferriar's Oroonoko to rebellion, Hawkesworth contains and disciplines the rage that this sexual danger to Imoinda inspired in Behn and Ferriar with a musical interlude where male and female slaves sing that “Love, Love and Joy must both be free, / They live not but with Liberty” (H, 25). Hawkesworth's Oroonoko is even more reluctantly persuaded to lead the rebellion than Ferriar's. Not only was he a slaveholder in Africa, but his present enslavement is not all that unbearable: he is, after all, “Favour'd in my own Person, in my Friends,; / Indulg'd in all that can concern my care, / In my Imoinda's soft society” (F, 35). Finally convinced to rebel by the thought that the evil lieutenant governor will probably want Imoinda for himself, he is careful to specify that the rebellion be nonviolent: “The Means that lead us to our Liberty / Must not be bloody … / Whate'er the Rage of Passion may suggest” (F, 37). In fact, if the slaves can take the slave ship still moored in the harbor by surprise, they can sail back to Africa and out of Europeans' troubled comprehension altogether, thus achieving “triumph without Conflict” (F, 43).

The suppression of conflict—racial conflict, as well as the gender conflict between white men and white women played out through the bodies of black women—was, I think, a large part of why the black Imoinda was made to disappear from Oroonoko. The beginnings of this suppression are perhaps visible in Behn, where Imoinda's decapitation and Oroonoko's dismemberment render as more easily assimilable fragments the black bodies which, whole, pose painful questions about how they should or can be smoothly incorporated within the sexual and racial processes of slavery.²⁷ The whiteness of Imoinda after Behn becomes the price of the ticket for white women's admission to a kind of racial authority. A survey of some versions of Oroonoko suggests that what mattered in this extension of racial privilege to Englishwomen was the new Imoinda's performance of a kind of gender sacrifice to the inexorable operation of a slave economy: a loving wife and mother, she allows herself to be sacrificed—or even sacrifices herself—to a higher cause. When the African woman is made to disappear—triumphally, without conflict—from Oroonoko, a European woman constructed in careful conformity with the interests of a society deeply invested in her chastity and her silence, and requiring her collusion with its new fictions of race, emerges.

Notes

1. John Hawkesworth, Oroonoko, A Tragedy, As it is now Acted at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane … By Thomas Southern. With Alterations (Dublin: G. Faulkner, P. Wilson, and M. Williamson, 1760), 62. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page number and abbreviated H.

2. See Ros Ballaster, “New Hystericism: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, the Body, the Text, and the Feminist Critic,” in New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts, ed. Isobel Armstrong (London: Routledge, 1992), esp. 288-90; Margaret Ferguson, “Juggling the Categories of Race, Class, and Gender: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko,” in Women, ‘Race,’ and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (London: Routledge, 1994), esp. 218-24; and Stephanie Athey and Daniel Cooper Alarcón, “Oroonoko's Gendered Economies of Honor/Horror: Reframing Colonial Discourse Studies in the Americas,” American Literature 65 (1993): 415-43.

3. Lynda Boose, “‘The Getting of a Lawful Race’: Racial Discourse in Early Modern England and the ‘Unrepresentable’ Black Woman,” in Women, ‘Race,’ and Writing, 35-54.

4. Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare, ‘Hamlet’ to ‘The Tempest’ (New York: Routledge, 1992), 107; see also Boose, 45.

5. See, for example, Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650-1838 (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1990); James Walvin, Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery (Washington: Howard Univ. Press, 1992), 119-34; Marietta Morrissey, Slave Women in the New World: Gender Stratification in the Caribbean (Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas Press, 1989); and Hilary Beckles, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1989).

6. Jacqueline Jones reports that one Texas farmer put his female slaves in breeches while they were out doing men's work, “thus minimizing outward differences between the sexes” (“‘My Mother Was Much of a Woman’: Black Women, Work, and the Family Under Slavery,” Feminist Studies 8 [1982]: 242). On the gender divisions which did maintain in slave societies despite this erosion of gender distinction in slaves' labor, also see Susan A. Mann, “Slavery, Sharecropping, and Sexual Inequality,” in Black Women in America: Social Science Perspectives, ed. Micheline Malson, Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, Jean F. O'Barr, and Mary Wyer (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), 133-57; and Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 5-11.

7. Beckles, Natural Rebels, 29. On the implications of race for the gendering of women and their work, see also Davis, Women, Race, and Class. She writes, “As the ideology of femininity—a by-product of industrialization—was popularized and disseminated through the new ladies' magazines and romantic novels, white women came to be seen as inhabitants of a sphere totally severed from the realm of productive work” (12).

8. Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974). Genovese's book has as its central thesis that the paternalistic structure of white slaveowning families extended to their black slaves, and that blacks eagerly sought to replicate this male-dominated structure for themselves. For a valuable review of the emergence of a feminist history of women, sexuality, and gender in writings about American slavery see Patricia Morton's introduction to Discovering the Women in Slavery: Emancipating Perspectives on the American Past, ed. with an introduction by Morton (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1996), 1-26.

9. In “Behind the Mask: Ex-Slave Women and Interracial Sexual Relations” (in Discovering the Women in Slavery, 260-277), Helène Lecaudey emphasizes the degree to which the rape and sexual exploitation of slave women has been represented as miscegenation in much historiography of slavery. In part, she is responding to Genovese, whose interest in recuperating the patriarchal family as a benevolent model for understanding social relations within slavery leads him to view sexual relations between white men and black women primarily as examples of miscegenation and not as examples of overt or covert force: “Many white men who began by taking a slave girl in an act of sexual exploitation ended by loving her and the children she bore. … The tragedy of miscegenation lay not in its collapse into lust and sexual exploitation, but in the terrible pressure to deny the delight, affection, and love that grew from tawdry beginnings” (Roll, Jordan, Roll, 415). In Women, Race and Class, Davis quotes Genovese and emphasizes that “there could hardly be a basis for ‘delight, affection and love’ as long as white men, by virtue of their economic position, had unlimited access to black women's bodies” (25-26). See her discussion, 19-29. Bell hooks has also characterized the rape and prostitution of slave women as instruments of sexual terror. On the passage from Africa into New World slavery, she writes, “African females received the brunt of this mass brutalization and terrorization not only because they could be victimized via their sexuality but also because they were more likely to work intimately with white families than with black males” (Ain't I A Woman?: Black Women and Feminism [Boston: South End Press, 1982], 20).

10. Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Southern Black Women: Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance,” in Southern Women: Histories and Identities, ed. Virginia Bernhard, Betty Brandon, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and Theda Perdue (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1992), 177-89.

11. Mary Boykin Chesnut, quoted in Erlene Stetson, “Studying Slavery: Some Literary and Pedagogical Considerations on the Black Female Slave,” in All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies, ed. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (Old Westbury, N. Y.: Feminist Press, 1982), 77.

12. Stedman's narrative, one of the most extensive eyewitness accounts by a European of life in an American slave society, exists in two versions: the manuscript he completed in 1790, and the first published edition of 1796. The 1796 narrative has been reprinted in an edition by R. A. J. Van Lier (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts, 1972), while Richard Price and Sally Price have produced a full edition transcribed from the 1790 manuscript (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1988), and an abridged Stedman's Surinam: Life in an Eighteenth-Century Slave Society (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1992), also based on the 1790 manuscript. In addition, Stedman kept a personal journal during his stay in Surinam. The 1988 edition discusses the 1796 edition's suppression of the 1790 edition and the personal journal's sexual and racial detail, much of which communicates Stedman's and other Europeans' attraction to slave women, lix-lxvi. Here, I quote the 1988 Price edition, 47-48. All subsequent references to Stedman are to the Price edition, cited parenthetically by page number and abbreviated P.

13. Beckles reports on a British Army Major Wyvill who was shocked to see a white woman in Bridgetown, Barbados' capital, examine the genitals of a male slave for sale ‘with all possible indelicacy’ (Natural Rebels, 141). The 1790 Narrative observes that “Luxury and dissipation in this Country are carried to the extreme and in my opinion must send Thousands to the Grave, the Men are generally a set of poor wither'd mortals—as dry and sapless as a squeesed lemon—owing to their intemperate way of living such as late hours—hard drinking—and particularly their too frequent intercourse with the negro and mulatto female sex, to whom they generally give the preference before the creole Ladies” (P, 49). Compare Van Lier's 1972 edition of the 1796 Narrative, where the last sentence of this passage reads that the planters are men who “have indulged themselves in intemperance and other sensual gratifications, and who appear withered and enervated in the extreme” (19).

14. This is the thesis of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese in Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1988). On the uneasy coexistence of white women and female slaves in U. S. slavery, see Stetson, “Studying Slavery,” esp. 75-78. The 1790 Narrative is not surprised that “the poor illtreated Ladies should be jealous of their Spouses and … bitterly take revenge on the causes of their disgrace—the negro and Mulatto Girls whom they persecute with the greatess bitterness and the most barbarous tyranny,” and notes that white women in the colony are so competitive for husbands that “it was even publickly reported that two of them had fought a Duel on account of one of our Officers” (P, 49).

15. Felicity Nussbaum points to the eighteenth-century shift from home-based cottage industry to wage labor taking place outside the home as a moment of women's loss of economic authority, and argues the concomitant rise of “[n]ew ideologies of maternal affection and sentiment between mothers and children” which glorified European women's relegation to the home under eighteenth-century colonialism (Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1995], 24). On the social circumstances surrounding women's new prominence in the early modern theater audience, see David Roberts, The Ladies: Female Patronage of Restoration Drama, 1660-1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Moira Ferguson's Subject To Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834 (London: Routledge, 1992) is the most comprehensive study of Englishwomen and abolitionist discourse.

16. My phrase “cultural forgetting” resembles the “historical amnesia” that Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar write that white feminists suffer as they repeat the assumptions of “white male historians” by ignoring “the fundamental ways in which white women have benefitted from the oppression of black people” (“Challenging Imperial Feminism,” Feminist Review 17 [1984]: 5). As the first major feminist discussion of the interplay of race and gender in Behn's Oroonoko, Laura Brown's “The Romance of Empire: Oroonoko and the Trade in Slaves” (in The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown [New York: Methuen, 1987], 41-61) exhibits this shortcoming to the degree it fails to address how this interplay might also involve Imoinda; the only woman she considers is the white narrator. In Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1993), Paula Backscheider, is perhaps so committed to the project of recovering Behn's discursive authority that she argues that Oroonoko's portrait of the relationship between Imoinda and the narrator demonstrates that in Behn's fictions, “all but the worst women appreciate the good and make loyal friends to other women” (95). Brown and Backscheider are usefully supplemented by the discussions of race and cultural difference in Susan Z. Andrade, “White Skin, Black Masks: Colonialism and the Sexual Politics of Oroonoko,” Cultural Critique 27 (1994): 189-214; and Isobel Grundy, “‘The barbarous character we give them’: White Women Travellers Report on Other Races,” Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 22 (1992): 73-86.

17. John Ferriar, The Prince of Angola, A Tragedy, Altered from the Play of Oroonoko, and Adapted to the Circumstances of the Present Times (Manchester: J. Harrop, 1788), viii. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page number and abbreviated F.

18. See Michael Neill, “Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in Othello,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1989): 383-414; and Paul H. D. Kaplan, “The Earliest Images of Othello,” Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 171-188.

19. G. A. Starr discusses the character of Oroonoko—but not Imoinda—as it is developed within the discourse of sensibility (“Aphra Behn and the Genealogy of the Man of Feeling,” Modern Philology 89 [1990]: 362-72), while J. R. Oldfield discusses some of the Oroonoko plays in light of growing abolitionist sympathies but does not pay particular attention to women or to women's races (“‘The Ties of soft Humanity’: Slavery and Race in British Drama,” Huntington Library Quarterly 56 [1993]: 1-14).

20. J. Douglas Canfield discusses eighteenth-century drama in terms of these epistemic shifts, in which rhetorics of meritocracy and “neostoic exemplary morality mask[s] upper middle-class male dominance over gender, class, and even race.” See his “Shifting Tropes of Ideology in English Serious Drama, Late Stuart to Early Georgian,” Cultural Readings of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Theater, ed. J. Douglas Canfield and Deborah C. Payne (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1995), 196. In discussing a group of heroic tragedies with settings in New World slavery, I am not as surprised as Canfield is that bourgeois dominance dictates the ways in which race can be performed.

21. Aphra Behn, ‘Oroonoko’ and Other Works, ed. Paul Salzman (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994), 12. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page number and abbreviated O.

22. On orientalism in Oroonoko's descriptions of Imoinda, see Diane Roberts, The Myth of Aunt Jemima: Representations of Race and Region (London: Routledge, 1994), 15; on the place of the exotic in the narrative generally, see Moira Ferguson, “Oroonoko: Birth of a Paradigm,” New Literary History 23 (1992): 347 (an earlier version of her discussion in Subject To Others); and Brown, “Romance of Empire,” 44-45 and 51-52.

23. See, for example, Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October 28 (1984): 125-133. And yet Bhabha has also claimed that developing a psychological discussion about the positions of non-white women within colonialist discourse would require “a very specific form of attention and articulation” he is not yet able to summon (“The Other Question,” Screen 24:6 [1983]: 18, n. 1). Gwen Bergner's “Who Is That Masked Woman? or, The Role of Gender in Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks” (PMLA 110 [1995]: 75-88) takes up Bhabha's proposal. Ann DuCille's “The Occult of True Womanhood: Critical Demeanor and Black Feminist Studies” (Signs 19 [1994]: 591-629) addresses the invisibility enforced on black women and black women's scholarship in the academy.

24. See especially Nussbaum's discussion of polygamy and Richardson's Pamela, in her Torrid Zones, 73-94.

25. The dedicatory poem to Francis Gentleman's revision (Glasgow, 1760) also implies a special connection between women in the audience and the fate of Oroonoko:

    Ye CALEDONIAN Fair, in whom we find,
    Each charm of person, and each grace of mind;
    For virtue's sake, a feeble genius spare,
    The cause of virtue's your peculiar care;
    In you it lies to censure, or to save;
    To your protection take the ROYAL SLAVE. (8).

    The ladies of Edinburgh, where Gentleman's play was first performed, are not explicitly addressed as abolitionists, but, as designated champions of “virtue,” they hold the power of life and death over the success of this sentimental heroic drama. The “royal Slave” will thrive or perish according to the degree of patronage the ladies extend to him, and to his author.

26. A similar racial displacement occurs in Gentleman's Oroonoko, where the slave rebellion is betrayed to the planters through the machinations of one Massingano, now a slave, who had been Oroonoko's enemy and rival in Africa. Gentleman's invention of Massingano's active scheming against Oroonoko works both to move slavery farther from the center of the plot—another African is as instrumental in causing the hero to lead the revolt as is Oroonoko's fear that Imoinda will be sexually abused by a white man—and to deny that race matters to slavery, since the black African Massingano is as malicious as the white lieutenant governor.

27. Sander Gilman suggests that nineteenth-century Parisians could achieve psychic access to the sexuality of their women only through the degraded and dismembered spectacle of a black woman's body (“Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” in ‘Race,’ Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985], 223-61). Bell hooks notes that as valuable as Gilman's discussion is, it still cloaks the particular black woman in question—Sarah Bettman, the “Hottentot Venus”—in absence, since it neither includes, nor remarks on its omission of, her own thoughts on being exhibited (Black Looks: Race and Representation [Boston: South End Press, 1992], 62-64).