Oroonoko is one of the earliest works of prose fiction that has been seen as a

precursor to the eighteenth century novel because it adopts a realistic mode of

narration and draws attention to its truth content rather than to its artifice, i.e. the
way the story is put together in three episodes. The author claims to give an eyewitness account of the events in the first and third sections of the narrative, when
she first meets Oroonoko on the island of Suriname and later when she attempts to
mediate between Oroonoko and the slave-masters of the plantation colony. The
intermediate episode of the story, recounting the life of Oroonoko and Imoinda in
their African land of Coramantien, the author claims to have heard from the mouth
of Oroonoko himself. The authenticity of the authors experience, on which the story
is founded, seems to interweave three strands of storytelling that of the personal
memoir, in which the author is narrating a part of her own lifes experience as the
prospective deputy governors daughter stranded in Suriname after the death of her
father; that of a travel narrative, in which the author as a traveler presents true, but
unfamiliar descriptions of strange lands and foreign customs such as the details of
native Indian communities and natural resources of South America or of tribal life in
West Africa; and that of biography, in which the author repeatedly presents
Oroonoko as a real life hero and his tragedy as a true story to her patron and
readers. In the letter to Lord Maitland Aphra Behn avows that What I have
mentioned I have taken care should be Truth, let the critical reader judge as he
pleases. In the opening lines of the story the author writing as an autobiographical
narrator again insists that she does not mean to entertain the reader with the
adventures of a feigned hero in writing the History of this Royal Slave. Critics have
been very perplexed over this anxiety on the authors part to establish a kind of
credibility for her story and its characters that is not claimed by writers in other
genres of fiction like the romance or the tragedy, which provided certain literary
conventions that Behn continued to follow. Most critics think that this anxious claim
to the status of true history marks a historical departure from the earlier traditions
of prose fiction towards the modern genre of the novel.
Even though the author of Oroonoko is eager to differentiate her narrative from a
romance, for which reason some critics think that it deserves to be read as a protonovel, early historians of the novel like Walter Allen and Ian Watt thought that Behn
ultimately depended on romance conventions to create the full effect. Walter Allen,
author of The English Novel: A Critical Introduction (1954), noted that Oroonoko is
an anticipation of Rousseaus concept of the noble savage, through whom Behn
makes a case for the abolition of slavery. But Behn has merely attempted to engraft
verisimilitude to a conventional story of romance. In the 17 th century the term
verisimilitude meant life-likeness, but it had no direct relation to factual truth. A
Renaissance critic like Sir Philip Sidney, following Aristotle, had pointed out that
there is a difference between poet and a historian who is tied not to what should be,
but what is. In other words, the historian describes what actually happened, but the
poet represents what might happen or ought to happen that is to say, a poet

writes not simply about factual truth which is particular, but about a general or ideal
reality.
In Oroonoko Aphra Behn goes beyond the neoclassical dictum of verisimilitude. The
descriptions of landscape in Suriname are not only geographically accurate but also
refer to a symbolic space of prelapsarian nature. The customs of Africans and native
American tribes are recorded with anthropological faithfulness, but they also
represent Hobbesian and Lockean communities of men in a primitive state of
nature. Aphra Behn is not only writing about Oroonoko as a real hero of tragic
proportions whose innate royalty and capacity for stoic suffering make him
comparable to the martyred king Charles I but she is also painting a vivid picture
of contemporary economic relations now known as the triangular trade. This refers
to the beginning of the colonial interpenetration of three worlds, or three continents,
where Europe invests, America provides land resources and Africa supplies labour or
man power but not on equitable terms of exchange. This is revealed not only in
the degrading institution of slavery in the novel, but also suggested in the details of
commodities exchanged between the Europeans and the native Americans, where
the balance of trade always remains in favour of the Europeans. This hard headed
economic realism continues into Behns analysis of the political relations that the
colonizers maintain with the local natives whom they never try to engage as slaves,
but retain as friends necessary for their own survival in the event of a slave
rebellion. The Africans, on the other hand, who are sold as slaves by their own
brethren or cheated into slavery by white men, receive brutal treatment from their
European masters especially if they are reluctant to accept the inhuman terms of
their bondage. Oroonoko is now read as a philosophical novel as it introduces
enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality in the speeches of Oroonoko. It is
suggested that he had imbibed these ideals from a free thinking Frenchman who
had tutored him in Africa. Aphra Behn locates her novel in the contemporary
political context to advocate a libertarian ideology in spite of her political royalism.
From this vantage point the slave trading British merchants and plantation owners
are shown as betrayers of true Christianity in their deceitful, treacherous ways. Thus
Aphra Behn combines both factual and ideal truth through her critical
representation of British civilization and its commercial values in Oroonoko.
From a biographical point of view, the narrators familiarity with the Parham Estate
at Suriname is usually seen as evidence of Behns own sojourn in Suriname during
her early youth, even though Behn did not come from a class in which her father
could have been appointed the lieutenant governor of the colony. Again, when the
author pays tribute to Trefry as a noble-hearted man whose pen might have done
justice to Oroonokos story had he lived to write it, it is thought to be an expression
of Behns desire to memorialize the historical figure of this benevolent overseer of
Lord Willoghbys plantation, who was the truest friend of Oroonoko in the civilized
world. The author mentions that Trefry was killed during the Dutch invasion of
Suriname shortly after Oroonokos death, after which the British settlement in

Surinam came to an end. Byam and Banister, as types of the evil colonial official
and the mercenary fortune hunter, have also been identified as historical figures.
Katharine M Rogers, in her article Fact and Fiction in Aphra Behns Oroonoko makes
a balanced assessment of Behns use of factual and imaginative material, but Aphra
Behns idea of true history need not be interpreted in terms of the biographical
details of her life. As Vernon Guy Dickson observes, Behns exploration of truth must
be contextualized with respect to her periods changing notions of truths relation to
and representation of fact and fiction.
Oroonoko is a text about truths place in Behns world, fictional and actual.
Accordingly, there is a need to refocus the texts analysis to a moral rather
than a biographical or historical reading for truth.
In The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957) Ian Watt
had accused Behn of continuing to write in the romance tradition because the
names of her characters carried foreign, archaic or literary connotations which
excluded any suggestion of real and contemporary life. Other critics have pointed
out that the intrigue surrounding the relationship of Oroonoko and Imoinda, as well
as their accidental reunion in a faraway land, are stock romance motifs. The tension
between love and honour that prevents Oroonoko from claiming Imoinda for himself
in the beginning and makes him resolve to kill her at the end, is seen as a regular
trope of heroic tragedy which was the most prestigious genre of literature in
Behns time. But even as Behn incorporated these conventions of an older,
aristocratic tradition of literature, she also turned her novel into a critique of the
mercantile ethos of the society she lived in. The rise of the novel has usually been
seen as a challenge to earlier traditions of writing for promoting middle class values,
but in the case of Aphra Behn who was a Tory and an avowed admirer of the
Stuarts it is a reverse cultural agenda of launching an attack on the merchants and
middle class bureaucrats of the colonies. They are found lacking in virtue when
measured against the innate standards of nobility upheld by Oroonoko and Imoinda,
the royal couple, who are from a different, but not an inferior race.
When Behn claims to be telling the true life story of Oroonoko, the Royal Slave, she
is presenting the larger than life image of an African man as a personification of the
ideals of cosmic order, social harmony and individual nobility embodied in the
romance, ideas that Behn saw were being ravaged by modern history in the world
about her. As a member of a universal aristocracy of moral worth, rather than social
rank, Oroonoko is immeasurably superior to the corrupt society of male British
colonialists. He is instinctively respectful to the women. The women of the colonies
also trust him and feel safe to travel with him until he openly declares his rebellion
against the British men. Even the author herself plays a dubious role as she
collaborates with the colonial government at the same time as she criticizes it,
ultimately breaking the trust which Oroonoko had bestowed upon her. But the
narrator also makes it clear that as a woman author she is pledged to a solidarity
with Oroonoko, which she cannot express in the form of a rebellion like him. Like

Oroonoko, the author has experienced marginalization as a woman (as is evident in

her frequent comparison of the secure social status of a tribal wife in a polygamous
marriage with the abjection that a European woman faces as a cast mistress). But
with the advantage of being a European woman, she has also acquired public
recognition for her literary genius. The authors resolution to immortalize the true
story of Oroonoko with the reputation of a womans pen, even though she has been
powerless to protect him from death, has been interpreted as a symbolic gesture
marking the historical alliance of abolitionism and feminism. This is confirmed in
the last line of the narrative, which comes to dwell lovingly upon the memory of the
Brave, the Beautiful and the Constant Imoinda. Feminist critics have therefore
suggested that even though a middle class perspective is not foregrounded in
Oroonoko, its distinctive brand of realism is founded on the difference in the
authors gender perspective that permits her to look beyond the ideology of racial
animosity. It is also possible that Behn was trying desperately to preserve the
memory of the real historical personage that the fictional Oroonoko might have
represented, but she knew that she was fighting a losing battle. Just as the names
of some great women writers of every age are lost to posterity a phenomenon that
the feminist critic Germaine Greer calls the transience of female literary famethe
names of subaltern rebels are also often lost to history. It is also to resist such a fate
for Oroonoko that Behn proclaims him as a hero of true history in her story, because
his name will never be recorded in any other historical or fictional narrative.