The contrast between Oroonoko's treatment as a general in Africa and as a slave in the West Indies illuminates these eurocentric standards for royalty.
Her most famous novel, Oroonoko or, The Royal Slave (1688), introduces the reader to an inherent contrast: can a person be born royal and become a slave? By depicting Oroonoko as the embodiment of qualities revered by European men, but also making him African and therefore black-skinned, Behn raises questions about the foundation of slavery in the Restoration Period. Her portraits of the convent, nuns, and Catholic lords illuminate injustices of the patriarchal systems in place during her lifetime. Lewis Melville.Virginia Woolf once wrote: 'all women ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.' Mainly working as a playwright, Behn released several works from poetry to prose fiction, chronicling the plights of women. “Negritude and the Noble Savage.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 11. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press University Press. Fictions of Anomaly,and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century. “Peripheral Echoes: ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Worlds as Reciprocal Literary Mirrorings.” Comparative Literature 58. “Oroonoko: Birth of a Paradigm.” New Literary History 23. “Religio Laici or, a Layman’s Faith.” įerguson, Moira. Theory and Criticism after Structuralism.Ithaca:Cornell University Pressĭryden, John. “Pope and the Other.” The Cambridge Companion to Alexander London and New York: Routledge.īrown, Laura. Chicago: The University of Chicago Pressīehn, Aphra. The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Politics of Oroonoko.” Cultural Critique 27: 189‒214.īarker-Benfi eld, Graham J. “White Skin, Black Masks: Colonialism and the Sexual
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