False Gifts/Exotic Fictions: Epistemologies of Sovereignty and Assent in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko

Catherine Molineux

ELH, Volume 80, Number 2, Summer 2013, pp. 455-488 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/elh.2013.0015

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/elh/summary/v080/80.2.molineux.html

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False Gifts/Exotic Fictions: Epistemologies of Sovereignty and Assent in Aphra Behns Oroonoko
by catherine molineux

The final cause, end, or design of men (who naturally love liberty, and dominion over others) in the introduction of that restraint upon themselves, in which we see them live in Commonwealths, is the foresight of their own preservation . . . that is to say, of getting themselves out from that miserable condition of war which is necessarily consequent . . . when there is no visible power to keep them in awe. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)1

Oroonoko, the eponymous West African prince of Aphra Behns novella, is well known to modern scholars for his problematic embodiment of early modern English notions of sovereignty.2 At seventeen he became, in Behns words,
one of the most expert captains and bravest soldiers that ever saw the field of Mars. So he was adored as the wonder of all that world. . . . Besides, he was adorned with a native beauty so transcending . . . his gloomy race, that he struck an awe and reverence even in those that knew not his quality.3

A native beauty transcendent of his gloomy race: Behns racialized construction of Oroonokos singular physical appearance and natural aristocracy has troubled modern attempts to understand him as a surrogate Stuart king. The impulse to do so, which animated the earliest efforts to integrate this important text into the literary canon, reflected a desire to recognize what Behns contemporaries had notthat this story of an African prince wronged by his king and then enslaved to a violent, greedy, and divided planter class in colonial Surinam echoed James IIs predicament in England when London print shops advertised the novella in June of 1688.4 The evolution of Oroonoko in modern scholarship has paralleled, and at times intervened in, deepening understanding of the complexity
ELH 80 (2013) 455488 2013 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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of political discourse in the decades following the English Civil War. The seventeenth-century crisis of political obligation brought about a difficult and protracted search for new epistemological foundations for sovereignty and assent that has received growing scholarly attention. But few historians of political thought would consider Oroonoko alongside Leviathanthe largely successful integration of Behns novella into the literary canon has not translated into its incorporation into political histories of the Civil War or Glorious Revolution, except to a certain extent in recent work by literary critics.5 Two problems, one authorial and one textual, have together contributed to the uneasy placement of Oroonoko within the history of seventeenth-century English political thought: Behns murky biography, which has generated a long debate about her politics, and the novellas internal contradictions and inconsistencies, which render interpretations of its political ideology unstable. Efforts to fix Behn, and by extension her narrator (who is both character and omniscient voice in Oroonoko), in the Whig or Tory camp have focused attention on her party affiliation, despite increasing awareness of the fluidity of such affiliations in the seventeenth century. On the one hand, scholars who have stressed Behns Tory allegiances have described Oroonoko as a coded warning to James II of the uprising against him, a defense of royalism, and a critique of Whig ideology that emphasized commercial relationships and popular sovereignty. When not ignored, the textual inconsistencies emerge, most creatively, as a reflection of the instability of late seventeenth-century royalist ideology.6 On the other hand, those who have stressed Behns proto-feminism and her friendships with radical freethinkers have instead emphasized Oroonokos blackness and the subversive possibilities generated by the novellas textual ruptures, leading to a spectrum of readings that see the work as everything from a political satire to an allegory of female anonymity in the literary marketplace.7 That scholars have recently returned to George Guffeys initial characterization of the prince as James II reflects a developing understanding of the varieties of royalism, which has allowed some of the transgressive aspects of Behns politics to be incorporated into Tory readings of the text. At this point, Behn appears more royalist than freethinking, but also able to critique her sovereign in ways that commentators in the 1970s, operating within a much narrower vision of royalism than we now have, were unable to imagine. I want to suggest a redirection of interpretive energies. We do not have to define Behns party allegiance to understand Oroonokos contribution to philosophical debates about political obligation or its novel 456 False Gifts/Exotic Fictions

construction of the political subject. And putting aside her specific party ideology (and the attendant desire to impose a resolution on the texts internal contradictions) allows this novellas analysis of the uncertainty and fragility of social and political bonds to come powerfully into view. It was not, as Guffey maintained, that Oroonokos blackness was less important than his royalty to interpretations of the novellas politics, but rather that at the Atlantic intersection of race, gender, and status Behn could raise new questions about political authority and subjectivity. The exoticism of her tale was a fundamental component of, not a mask for, her philosophical exploration of the fictions of sovereignty and assent. At the core of this novella is a crisis of representation, sanctioned and shaped by the Atlantic context of analysis that narrated the failure of traditional ideals of sovereignty and the problems of and with submission. The availability of colonial experience and the historical particularity of imperial formations produced a new meditation on the uncertainty, indeed the illegibility, of appearance, formulated acutely around the question of whether a black prince could be a prince. If Leviathan revealed the violence of the impulse toward stabilization in the midst of civil warfare, Oroonoko revealed the violent unsettling of sovereignty and subjectivity in the entanglement of domestic and imperial spaces, and the creative possibilities of political empowerment for a female storyteller in this New World.
i. entanglements: a dystopian mirror and atlantic terrain

About twenty pages after the narrator first describes Oroonokos ability to strike awe as a natural effect of his aristocracy, a subsequent encounter with the princes physical appearance introduces a different picture of the origins of his social and political power. Oroonoko rises from grief to resist a devastating attack on his West African country, appearing on the battlefield like some Divine Power descended to save his Country from Destruction; and his People had purposely put on him all things that might make him shine with most Splendor, to strike a reverend Awe into the Beholders (29). The narrators revelation of Oroonokos subjects dressing skills stresses their critical role in fashioning his divinity. This glimpse backstage reworks his natural luminosity, unsettling his initial characterization by emphasizing the contingencies of his representation. As a female playwright versed in the theatricalities of power and a royalist poet who often extolled the virtues of her Stuart kings, Behn frequently engaged the subjects role in shaping kingship. That Oroonoko offered both natural and fabricated Catherine Molineux 457

constructions of sovereignty is not therefore surprising, but its Atlantic stage licensed a new philosophical exploration of political association and contributed to a debate that had occupied English writers since before the Civil War. Whether a prince was inherently a prince (either by nature or by God) or whether he was someone dressed up as a prince was a familiar question, but whether a black prince was a fiction of sovereignty offered a new formulation of this troubling uncertainty. Although recent studies of European state formation have turned attention to its connection to the political structuring of empires (recognizing that both processes were perpetually being created, negotiated, and transformed in response to and through each other), the overwhelmingly domestic focus of seventeenth-century English political histories has tended to isolate the crisis of political obligation from its imperial and Atlantic context.8 Emerging legal geographies of colonial spaces and encounters with African and Native American polities produced new sites, both literal and imaginative, of sovereignty.9 That entangled context is critical to understanding a text like Oroonoko, which integrates the imperial margins into understandings of political association by mobilizing both their analogical or metonymic and organic or literal connection to the metropole. Behn engaged novel ideas about the basis of political authority, while using an Atlantic space to stress the problems of uncertainty and representation in politics. The novella connects West African and English Caribbean histories of violence in the 1660s through their links to the Atlantic slave trade, depicting the origins of African slaves in West African wars and European trade practices, the Anglo-American turn to plantation slavery, and European rivalries over the lucrative West Indies.10 Its account of broken allegiances, rebellion, slavery, unfulfilled promises, regicide, and invasion embeds (from a royalist perspective that characterized the republic as a period of bondage) a compressed political history of seventeenth-century England in this history of the Gold Coast and English Surinam. The basic plot outline is as follows: Oroonoko falls in love with the beautiful African maiden Imoinda, but his impotent grandfather prevents their marriage by placing her in the royal harem. Refusing to accept the kings prerogative to do so, Oroonoko sneaks into the harem and ravish[es] her (24). Their breach of royal custom leads to Imoindas enslavement in Surinam, while Oroonokos misinterpretation of his status with a slave trader soon leads him to the same fate. The narrator encounters the royal pair in the colony, where they rediscover their love and their desire to be free, raising a slave rebellion against the unsavory planters. After 458 False Gifts/Exotic Fictions

the field slaves desert their revolt, the lovers die in a botched murdersuicide pact: Oroonoko kills Imoinda, but his need for revenge ends in his gruesome dismemberment at the colonists hands. This history of the royal slave, which contemporary readers understood to be truth embellished with strange fabulous circumstances, was both a reflection of the domestic crisis of political obligation and an extension of its geographical and racial reach.11 Behn used the fractious nature of this young colonial settlement and the political alternatives figured in African and Native Surinam societies to interrogate the nature of political conquest and dominion; moreover, she used a female narrator at a moment when womens ability to manipulate political events and male authority was deeply contentious.12 As Elliott Visconsi and Richard Kroll have pointed out, violent conflict ensues from the clash of chivalric values of love, honor, and virtue (embodied in Oroonoko and Imoinda) and the pursuit of self-interest (embodied in the old West African king, the English slave trader who captures Oroonoko, and the Surinam planters who execute him).13 Dramatizing tensions created by both royal impotence and new commercial wealth, Oroonokos bondage and execution denaturalize the idea of romantic kingshipthe chivalrous ideal of sovereignty in which kings were warriors and loversby revealing its threat to, rather than inspiration of, an aged king and planter elite. I would also add that the novella compares Oroonokos vainglorious struggle to regain his status to the ritualized self-mutilation of old Surinam Indian warcaptains who have lost theirs, borrowing a view, popularized by Spanish authors, of splintered, non-heritable Native American sovereignties to contextualize the black princes fall into bondage. The failures of sovereignty figured in the African kings tyranny, colonial Tyranny (59), and the Native Surinam captains self-mutilation interpolate this corruption of romantic kingship into an imagined Atlantic world. Or to put it another way, Oroonoko explores the fictions of sovereignty through these exotic political forms. Behns choice of 1660s Surinam may have resulted from her own colonial travels (it is possible she visited the colony as an agent of Charles II).14 but it also reflected peripherally on renewed fascination during the 1680s with the tumultuous years of the Civil War. Scholars have pointed to the republication of Civil War tracts during the 1680s as evidence of the centrality of this conflict to contemporary understandings of the Glorious Revolution, but little attention has been paid to how colonial peripheries of the Civil War also became part of seventeenth-century discussions about the origins and progress of Catherine Molineux 459

unrest. On the one hand, Oroonoko looks back to Henry Nevilles Isles of Pines (1667) and forward to Daniel Defoes Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Jonathan Swifts Gullivers Travels (1726), literary works that appropriated colonial settings to elicit greater reflection on authority and subjectivity at home.15 But, on the other hand, in its explicit claims to historicity, it also shares genre space with accounts of the colonial frontiers of Civil War. Such tracts as A. B.s A Briefe Relation of the Beginning and Ending of the Troubles of the Barbados (1653), which includes many of the historical personages found in Behns quasifictional Surinam, narrated the continuation of political antagonism among exile settlements in the Caribbean.16 Looking to this colonial past, Oroonoko borrows a periphery of the Civil War to think through the continued dissolution of political relationships. The princes life plots the ambiguities of equity and abuses of power, along with their tragic consequences, in an Atlantic world that both refracted and extended troubling political and social changes at home. Re-presenting the monarchical crisis in terms of a slave rebellion in the Caribbean was not an entirely novel move. Known for its anarchic, violent, and profit-oriented societies, the Caribbean had become, by the late seventeenth century, a popular setting for reflection about political instability and social corruption. Some writers, especially those with Whiggish sensibilities, linked this space of intense imperial competition to the rise of commerce and spread of liberty at home.17 But such encomiums to empire jostled with more pessimistic views of colonization, which criticized the slave societies that had emerged. An emerging moral geography of empire located the outer edges of civility in the colonies, where planters turned heathen and heathens proved more ethical than their purportedly Christian masters. Imperial propaganda that had, since the late sixteenth century, vaunted settlement as a means to relocate unwanted Britons had fostered pejorative views of white settlers. Lord Frances Willoughby of Parham (lieutenant governor of the West Indies from 1647 to 1652 and 1660 to 1663, royal governor from 1663 to his death in 1666, and likely the model for the narrators unnamed dead father and Oroonokos master in Behns novella) pointed out, All new colonies you know of what sort of People generally they are made up of; so that, what we in probability can expect from them, must be from length of time, and the good example of those who have been more civilly bred.18 Oroonokos evocation of these issues of demography, violence, and greed reflects a deep engagement with contemporary responses to the West Indies. Rather than take an overt stand in colonization debates (or a moral 460 False Gifts/Exotic Fictions

position on African slavery), however, Behn invoked the dystopian colonial society that worried political writers about empire to reconsider the foundations of political association.19 The novella highlights how fears of English degeneration on the peripheries exported domestic concerns about continued internecine violence at home in the wake of civil warfareand also how the appetite for conquest and dominion figured most clearly in imperial spaces became a particularly useful trope to investigate the causes of political unrest. Behn domesticated the colonial subject in her analysis of the failures of sovereignty. While Thomas Hobbes, James Harrington, John Locke, and other political writers sought to conceive the social contract in such a way to ensure governmental stability and longevity, Oroonoko views through an Atlantic displacement the abuses of authority and appetites for power that made such bonds unlikely. Fashionable distaste with the English Caribbean (many wished the islands would sink to the bottom of the seas) and general notions of African despotism and Indian savagery sanctioned Behns broader inquiry into the uncertainty in and abuses of political relationships.20 Scholars have typically seen this dystopian political vision as calling, in a Hobbesian vein, for an absolute prince to subdue the population; but the novella stages this political and social corruption to invoke the representational failure of such visible power (perhaps, in so doing, commenting on James IIs difficulties in his attempt to centralize Englands growing empire). A variety of forms of political and social tension dramatize and personalize the causes and effects of unrest, but the core conflict in Oroonoko pivots around Oroonokos enslavement and execution. The narrator explicitly differentiates the black prince from the field slaves, both in his physical form and in his refusal to submit to even the Name of Slave (42). Doing so affirms the exceptionalism of royal blood, but it also hides Behns investigation of royal power by directing attention to the peculiarity of the princes circumstances, which play on, among other things, contemporary concerns with English slavers indiscriminate approach to their trade.21 That redirection occurs within the context of Oroonokos blackness, situating reactions to his predicament in the realm of sentiment rather than explicit political critique and allowing Behn to navigate treacherous waters in her depiction of the failures of sovereignty in the refusal of assent to its embodied values. Her novella encourages indignation rather than outrage at the princes subjugated condition, as his exoticism absolves, or partially absolves, her readers from culpability in his demise. Appealing to the man of feeling who was becoming central to what Victoria Kahn calls Catherine Molineux 461

a newly aestheticized order of sensibility in post-Civil War England, Behn invited identification with Oroonoko as she explored through his exoticism the representational, and thus epistemological, crisis around sovereignty and assent.22
ii. love and awe

English anxieties about arbitrary government and what constituted legitimate resistance had resurfaced in the 1670s, often around colonial rebellions (such as Nathaniel Bacons in Virginia, which Behn also parodied). These rebellions and the anxieties they provoked provide a critical context for the absences of de facto authority that are a central, recurring, and driving force in Behns novella.23 Whether an original social contract circumscribed royal authority and legitimated resistance, or whether divine right necessitated non-resistance (or at least passive obedience) to royal authority occupied both popular and elite forms of political debate. As Thomas Otway lamented in his prologue to Behns The City-Heiress (1682), a demon had filled the heads of Fools with Politicks.24 Behns earlier characterizations of the psychological and social conflicts generated by royal power provide some insight into her awareness of the growing uncertainty about divine right and its attendant focus on the individualistic nature of assent. In her comedy The Amorous Prince (1671), Curtis struggles with his obligations to his friend Frederick, a Florentine prince, because the prince has both defiled his sister and attempted to rape his lover. Curtis stops the attack on his lover, but the prince cannot brook his resistance and challenges him to a duel. Believing that his sister committed suicide because the prince betrayed his marital promises, Curtis ponders the nature of his relationship with the prince:
Poor Cloris dead, and banishd too from Laura; Was ever wretched Lovers fate like mine! And he who injures me, has power to do so; But why, where lies this power about this man? Is it his charms of Beauty, or of Wit? Or that great name he has acquird in War? Is it the Majesty, that Holy something, That guards the person of this Demi-god? This aws not me, there must be something more, For ever when I call upon my wrongs; Something within me pleads so kindly for him, As would perswade me that he could not erre. Ah, what is this? where lies this power divine, That can so easily make a slave of mine?25

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Behn explained royal power in terms of the enslaving effects of love, emphasizing in different ways the reverend awe that it inspired in ones heart.26 Love was, in her works as with most of her contemporaries, a passion that bound one involuntarily to another. She used such reverent awe interchangeably in scenes of royal power and in those of more general experiences of love. In her novella The Lucky Mistake (1689), Rinaldos Heart faild [at the sight of the beauty, Atlante], and a certain Awe and Reverence, or rather the Fears and Tremblings of a Lover, prevented him [from approaching her].27 In The Amorous Prince, Cloris tells Prince Frederick that she is in love, and if he saw the object [him], his wonders would cease, / Each look does even Animate Insensibles, / And strikes a reverend awe upon the Soul; / Nothing is found so lovely.28 Such awe involved a sight of wonder and beauty that made one a slave to it. Echoing her literary predecessor Margaret Cavendish and English political theorists following Jean Bodin, who stressed the foundations of sovereignty in affective ties, Behn found in love an explanation of and basis for irrevocable allegiance, allowing her to explore and then discard the potential for resistance.29 Ignorance of the origins of such natural attachments was critical to their binding effects. The role of love in Oroonoko, however, suggests that such attachments were no longer, in Behns view, so universally or politically compelling. Although Oroonoko foregrounds a story of love, beyond the two royal slaves such affective bonds are few and far between.30 Instead, the failure of such bonds and, by extension, such representational truths carries the plot forward. Behn stylized various absences of authority in ways that range from physical absences of royal power to individual selfinterest that disrupts its expression. Different governmental systems exist in this transatlantic world, but none produce stability. The West African events unfold because of the kings sexual impotence, which gives Oroonokos rebellion legitimacy, while Willoughbys prolonged absence from Surinam provides room for a slave rebellion and royal execution to occur. The narrator never names Willoughby, allegedly the only individual with greater authority than herself in the colony. His absence situates her narrative between the departure of one authority and the arrival of a replacement. When Willoughbys overseer seeks to invoke his authority, he argues that his Lord (who there represented the Kings person) stood above the law imposed by the deputy governor, William Byam (59). The extended dash stands for the kings authority. That Willoughby had been accused of high treason against Charles I, that Oliver Cromwell had appointed him to his West Catherine Molineux 463

Indian office, and that he then switched sides at the Restoration all add ambiguities to this characterization of royal power. Such shifting allegiances may not have been foremost in Behns mind as she wrote this novella, but the Uncertainty of political conflicts, which made People still entertain a Correspondence with the adverse Party, was the backdrop to the failure of political attachments in her tale.31 The novella investigates a series of failed bonds. In West Africa, the kings courtiers abjure their responsibilities to him and, for personal interests, help Oroonoko to enter the harem. On the slave ship and in Surinam, self-interest continues to destabilize ritual expressions of submission. The ship captain breaks his friendship and economic relationship with Oroonoko when he seizes the prince as cargo; Oroonoko submits, but only because the captain falsely promises to restore his freedom. The prince submits to Byams power in Surinam on the basis of a written contract, but neither party holds to that relationship. Oroonokos overseer, who defends the enslaved prince to the end as a representation of the Kings person, is undermined by other planters refusal to recognize that authority (59). For Kroll, these moments reflect the consistency of Behns royalism, as those like the captain and Byam who should mediate royal authority in fact subvert it, while . . . Oroonoko, obeying royalist principle, still submits to the duly constituted powers.32 But to that list, one should add Imoindas submission to the African king and subsequent invitation to Oroonoko to ravish her; her agreement to live in bondage as long as the prince is with her and her incitement of his rebellion; Oroonokos initial submission to his kings claim to Imoinda and his subsequent resistance, as well as his extended (and homoerotic) submission to his overseer and later rebellion against the planter system.33 Such politicized eroticism is a central trope in Behns plays, in which internal struggle between self-interest and subject devotion provide a crucial animating conflict. In Oroonoko, however, love loses. Devotion no longer overrides self-interest, which Behn predominantly characterizes, in gendered and imperialistic terms, as a masculine appetite for conquest and dominion. As a result, Oroonoko highlights how imperial expansion perpetually disrupted the establishment of sovereignty by creating (either through the racialization of sovereignty, or through the agency of white subjects or delegations of power to imperial proxies like proprietors or slaveholders) spaces in which the fictions of rule were revealed to be fictions dependent on assent. Recent interpretations of Oroonoko as a royalist text understand these stylized absences of power as figuring a nostalgic invocation of 464 False Gifts/Exotic Fictions

strong monarchy, which reanimated Hobbesian notions of the necessity of awe to compel obedience.34 Such awe, in Hobbess political theory, explains why men who naturally love liberty, and dominion would consent to restraints on their freedom.35 This justification of a strong monarch flows from his explanation of the terror required to induce obedience as a means to self-preservation, a physiological response to a visible power suggested, in Behns formulation of Oroonokos physical appearance, by the verb strike (12). But a Hobbesian reading of Oroonoko encounters two problems: first, Behns notion of awe was rooted in love, not fear; second, Oroonokos rage against the system provides the driving force for his rebellions against West African and colonial Surinam authorities, creating a critical parallel between the African kings abuse of his royal prerogative and the planters petty tyranny. Kroll circumvents this leveling of royal and elite pursuits of personal interest by arguing that Behn critiqued the Stuarts abuse of power to recall them to their best selves.36 But that neat explication of her dark view of royal powers efficacy overlooks her simultaneous ambivalence about whether subjects would or should assent to it in the first place. Depicting the failure of affective bonds did not necessarily mean making an invocation of coercion and force: for Behn, it enabled a new meditation on the uncertainty of political association. The failure of Oroonokos royalty to elicit obedience, except when his interests mirror those of his subjects, encapsulates these broader problems with submission. As the royalist Samuel Butler remarked, Oaths and obligations in the affairs of the world are like ribbons and knots in dressing, that seem to tie to something, but do not at all. For nothing but interest does really oblige.37 Subjects or potential subjects see Oroonokos royalty and refuse to internalize its obligations. The novella thus turns attention from the problem of whether God had sanctioned a king to the uncertainty of assent, engaging readers in questions about the motives for obedience. Oroonokos Divine Oracle (33), in which he tells his fellow ship captives that they will be freed, turns out to be false; and the Divine Homage (37) that plantation slaves pay him is broken when he calls upon their military duties, those invoked by the feudal relations implied by homage. The slaves desertion of Oroonokos colonial rebellion undermines his royal authority, imaginatively reworking questions about de facto government. Hobbes had suggested that once a sovereign lost the capacity to protect his people, consent evaporated in the face of the natural right to self-defense. This proposition horrified some of his readers: John Bramhall (15941663) hyperbolized, Where these principles Catherine Molineux 465

prevail, adieu honour, and honesty, and fidelity, and loyalty; all must give place to self-interest. What for a man to desert his sovereign upon the first prevalence of an enemy, or the first payment of a petty contribution, or the first appearance of a sword, that is more able to protect us for the present?38 Although the romance between Imoinda and Oroonoko appears to drive this novella (because it drives the main characters), in fact such self-interest, carefully located in this other world, determines the direction of events (7). Oroonoko emphasizes how, for Behn, sovereignty depended not on abstract values but on the ability to acquire an audience that identified its own interests with the sovereigns. Oroonoko reflects a broader seventeenth-century shift in what Kahn calls the libidinal economy of political obligation, in which individual passions and interest became as important as or supplanted more traditional royalist conceptions of love as the basis for obedience to the sovereign.39 Through the repeated breaking of relationships, Oroonoko emphasizes the impermanence, ineffectuality, and outright manipulation of such forms of allegiance. Behn was far from unique in recognizing that political instability grew from the failure of these basic ties: much ink was expended in an effort to naturalize conscience and counter or qualify Hobbess suggestion that man was principally guided by interest.40 By staging (in this colonial past) the lack of compulsion to maintain political alliances, Behn emphasized that power structures relied on the fundamentally unstable confluence of personal and political interest. Rather than invoke the need for an absolute sovereign, Oroonoko instead mobilizes the exotic to figure the uncertainty of representational truth that haunted the fiction of sovereignty, underscoring the epistemological difficulties of identifying or determining interests: the sovereigns ability to ascertain a subjects true motives and the subjects commitment to the idea of sovereignty was problematic because it was difficult to judge appearance.
iii. the illegibility of the exotic

Key to understanding Oroonokos ambiguous moral perspective on this new politicization of individual passions and interest is its engagement with contemporary debates about mans nature. While Behn invokes corrupt Atlantic polities to test romantic kingship, she also borrows an Atlantic stage to interrogate the state of original innocence, using the illegibility of the exotic to explore the interpretive problems raised by new foundations of political obligation. Political writers from both parties of her day preferred to stress mans natural 466 False Gifts/Exotic Fictions

sociability rather than trademark Hobbesian anti-social tendencies and individualism.41 But descriptions of native American societies, which complicated abstractions of the original state of mankind precisely because they were sometimes perceived to be present embodiments of it, had long articulated a dualistic vision, one which sought and generally failed to reconcile notions of prelapsarian innocence with fears of human barbarity. Some English travelers stressed the cruelty and treachery of native Caribbean peoples, even as others found in them a prelapsarian past.42 Both of these perspectives appear in Oroonoko, creating a critical ambivalence about mans natural inclinations. The morality of pursuing self-interest, if so clearly evil in Bramhalls rejection of Hobbesian notions of natural law, is more ambiguous in Behns Atlantic world. Oroonoko contextualizes the princes fall into slavery (and thus the failures of sovereignty) by drawing upon the more ambivalent picture of mans native innocence. Oroonokos enslavement by his slaving friend, a man supposedly unique among the traders for his civility, offers a base picture of the greed that drove transatlantic trade and a familiar story of the failure of traditional bonds of trust.43 The narrator, however, explains this act not through a discussion of corrupt English merchants (as, for instance, the celebrated story of Inkle and Yarico would), but rather by comparing it with English relationships with Surinam Indians. Near the beginning of the tale, she says that to understand the Gallant Slave the reader needs a history of how he came to be in Surinam. This statement gives way to a description of the Indians:
[B]efore I give you the Story of this Gallant Slave, tis fit I tell you the manner of bringing them to these new Colonies; for those they make use of there, are not Natives of the place; for those we live with in perfect Amity, without daring to command em; but on the contrary, caress em with all the brotherly and friendly Affection in the World; trading with em for their Fish, Venison[.] (8)

Native Surinam provides context for Oroonokos enslavement. At first, indigenous freedom embodies an absolute Idea of the first State of Innocence, before Man knew how to sin: no laws teach grievances; no religion destroys tranquility; no concept of lying or curiosity exists (10). The narrator returns to the tale of Oroonokos enslavement: tyranny, war, flattery, and intrigue victimize those, such as the prince, who share the Indians belief in honor, virtue, and truth. The narrators second visit to native Surinam, however, destabilizes this absolute Idea of innocence. She borrows Oroonokos protection to Catherine Molineux 467

go to an Indian town, where they see more superstition and gullibility than innocence, more deception and curiosity than content. She first had singled out curiosity as non-existent in the natives prelapsarian state, stressing the transparency of their verbal and physical relationships: in her words, all you can see, you see at once, and every Moment see (9). But curiosity enables the friendly reception that they receive in the later visit; in fact, she designs her approach based on the most effective means of eliciting their curiosity (deliberately putting on a Glittering and Rich English outfit ridiculous for the Surinam jungle [48]). And the Indians now have a word for Numberless Wonders (48). The second view of native Surinam contradicts the first, raising epistemological questions, formulated again through the problems of appearance, around a central concept of political philosophy that framed moral judgments of mans associative patterns. The state of nature in Behns Surinam depends on whether the second visit to native society is understood as historical chronology or as a reflective revision of a misguided first impression. If the Indians love of small and unvaluable Trifles (10) represents Europeans degenerative effect on them (an argument common among Whigs and an effect in which the narrator is then complicit as she makes herself a curiosity), the later visit exposes the corruption of native purity and narrates the Fall. Such interest in European technologies had also led to Oroonokos enslavement, as he was enticed by the objects of science (the maps, globes, and mathematical instruments with which the slave trader entertained him) and finally by his curiosity about the slave ships inner structures: so that he was curious of beholding every place, where he decently might descend and promptly fell into slavery (31).44 The narrators two Indian encounters could similarly contribute to colonial discourses that constructed the savage subject from anxieties about the dangers of civilization, translating innocence into fated ignorance, virtue into blindness. If, however, the second visitation qualifies the first, then mans natural state appears Hobbesian, revealing war, greed, and superstition, regardless of first impressions, to be the first State of mankind (10). Spanish chroniclers had long described autochthonous New World polities as inhabiting an intermediary position between wildness and civilization, associating their non-heritable and local forms of sovereignty with a state of perpetual war.45 In Oroonoko, the African prince wonders at the native Surinam war captains terrible Dismemberings (50). At first he is uncertain how they all came by those frightful marks of Rage or Malice, rather than Wounds got in Noble Battel (50). Once 468 False Gifts/Exotic Fictions

he understands that these aged warriors, when they could no longer fight in war, competed with each other by voluntarily self-mutilating as a battle waged, he admires them but thinks that their Debate is a form of Courage too brutal to be applauded (50). The narrators absolute Idea of the first State of Innocence turns out to be not so absolute, while the state of nature may be far less than innocent.46 For her part, she first mistakes these captains for Hobgoblins, or Fiends, rather than Men (50). Oroonoko narrates the ambivalence that characterized contemporary discussions about the state of nature by drawing upon an illegibility that also constructed the exotic. What one saw was perhaps not what one saw, or perhaps it was. In Behns seventeenth-century context, the failure of the representation (the Idea of innocence originally embodied in native Surinam) to produce knowledge reflected its incomplete identification with the external objects of sensethe social experience of encounter. Behn appropriates that failure to talk about the failure of ideals in general and those that supported romantic kingship in particular. Echoing contemporary political disputes about how to know what was natural, Oroonoko stresses the improbability of knowing with any certainty the true nature of man.47 Epistemological uncertainty haunts both sovereignty and moral judgments of individualistic behavior, as the ambiguity surrounding mans native innocence makes ethical judgments of the pursuit of self-interest difficult. The postlapsarian vision of native Surinam, for instance, collapses the narrators initial distinction between the earthly colonial garden of native-English friendship and the greed and corruption sustaining the slave trade. The introductory section describes Surinam as a natural bounty that friendship with natives could transform into a rich source of commodities. The narrator offers this alternate model of colonization in direct contrast with the slave trade; she explains that such friendship reflects the Indians demographic superiority, severely qualifying the old imperial myth of a free trade that would benefit European interests. The narrators second visit to native Surinam, however, unsettles this Edenic vision, inflecting it with a natural barbarity that renders it an ambiguous counterpoint to the anarchic and oppressive plantation society. On the surface, this Idea of innocence serves as a foil for the corrupt actions of the planters, slaver, and African king. But paying attention to how Behn plays with contemporary uncertainty about human nature reveals how the novella places individual appetites for conquest and dominion in a morally ambiguous light, appropriating the colonial encounter to figure the uncertainty of social and political bonds. Catherine Molineux 469

At the heart of this novella is an investigation of representation of how ideas about the world are embodied and then disrupted. The innocent bodies of native Surinam Indians become potentially savage; the natural aristocracy of an African prince becomes perhaps a fabricated shininess dependent on subjective participation; chivalric virtues become myopic beliefs; the imagined, tragic death of a romance becomes an enslavement; and so on. The ironic disruption of the Idea occurs in the epistemological questioning of truthhow to know what we know about the world around us. Some seventeenth-century theories of representation, drawn from natural philosophy and the stage, perceived every act as an act of representation: as Hobbes famously observed, a person is the same that an actor is, both on the stage and in common conversation; and to personate is to act, or represent himself, or another.48 The interactions in Oroonoko are based on a central disjunction between outward appearance or persona and internal motivations: outward appearance might be traditional gallantry (Oroonoko), Christian piety (slaver), or royalist passive obedience (Martin), but internal motivations reflect an appetite for conquest and dominion. Byam, in his face-off with Oroonoko, relies on his ability to twist the truth: as the narrator remarks, he more thirsting after Revenge of another sort, than that of depriving him of Life, now made use of all his Art of talking, and dissembling (55). Colonel Martin hides his participation in these conflicts of interest by relying on a more passive form of aggression, elevating himself above the colonial executioners by expressing a disdainful interest in Oroonokos quartered body that reaffirms his own dominion over his slaves. Oroonokos overseer is the only English character to remain consistently other-oriented, but as he fails to save the prince, the novella suggests that public resistance in the name of true Notions of Faith, and Excellent Morality makes one susceptible to subversion (6). Using the illegibility of the exotic, Behn exposes a structural problem of determining true motivations, and suggests that, in this interested world, being what you seem can lead to your downfall.49 Indeed, Behn tells her literary patron that Oroonokos overseer had intended to write about the princes life, but he died in the Dutch invasion of Surinam, highlighting her narrators timely escape from those political conflicts. Oroonoko is the visible power that should have induced obedience and brought order. Starting with her dedications lament of the dearth of Great men in England, Behn repeatedly asserts the power of this moral exemplar to invoke emulation and thereby promote certain social mores (5). But as the black prince continues to believe 470 False Gifts/Exotic Fictions

that people will respect his status, slavery levels him with Imoinda; his gullibility or, in Adam Sillss words, fatal myopia is equated with his beloveds unsuccessful challenge to patriarchal power.50 He falls to the slaver, the slaves, and Byam because he believes they will treat him with respect. Oroonoko emphasizes how the Great Man depends on popular assent by literalizing how, in fact, this prince becomes a slave to individual interest, even as it underlines the difficulties of assessing individual motivation for obedience (5). The novellas final reduction of the prince to a psychological portrait of impotency brings Behns meditation on the fictions of sovereignty to a close. The novellas last scenes revisit the earlier contrast of the African prince with the native war captains: Oroonoko sheds his active military honor for a version of the aged Indians Passive valour. If the prince originally viewed their self-mutilating Debate (50) as too savage for his tastes, in his last stand he embodies the passive courage of suicide: tis not life I seek, nor am I afraid of Dying, Oroonoko declares before proceeding to cut a piece of Flesh from his own Throat and thr[o]w it at em, then finally disemboweling himself (6263). Behn links such Passive valour to a desire to possess oneself, and attributes it to a masculine response to social and political impotence. The exoticism of this tale thus enables a critique of Oroonokos heroism as his rebellion ultimately turns inward to the perhaps admirable, but savage destruction of himself. Oroonokos cyclical progress of masculine domination and enslavement involves a series of Atlantic couplingsAfrican on African, English on African, African on Indian, Dutch on English and Indian. Visconsi points to this serial experience of conquest as evidence of Behns belief in the necessity of an absolute prince, without whom English political life spirals back down into barbarism.51 But the modern uncertainty about whether Oroonoko is that absolute prince is an extension of the very problem with representational truth that made Behns story possible. No indication emerges that an absolute prince, another conqueror, would arrive; rather, Oroonoko elaborates upon the transitory nature of conquest and repeatedly defers the question of just or unjust conquest to the reader. And thanks to the narrators contradictory and inconsistent representations, similar epistemological problems complicate the readers ability to judge. Encountering in the colonial narrator the same problems of appearance that shape her tale draws the reader into the interpretive problems that the text itself explores, ironically illuminating the instabilities of social and political bonds by emphasizing the instability of signification. By involving her Catherine Molineux 471

readers in this fraught interpretive experience, Behn draws attention to the female storytellers fresh opportunities for political empowerment in this new and possibly fallen world.
iv. the dissembling female narrator

Oroonoko highlights the potential benefits of allying but not sacrificing oneself to a Gallant mans pursuit of power, stressing the importance of identifying the form of authority most appealing to a broad audience (7).52 Placed alongside her ambiguous portrait of human nature, the narrators involvement in Surinam society leads to a revelation of the strategic possibilities for empowerment, especially for women. As a single, fatherless woman in Surinam, the narrator attaches herself to the displaced royal prince (or rather he to her), purportedly as his patron (an inversion licensed by the colonial context). Through him she gains access to the Surinam forests, an Indian village, and his tragic romance. If Imoindas acceptance of the prince in place of her dead father offers a counterexample to the narrators own avoidance of that consequence to her fathers interminable absence, the delay between Oroonokos disgruntlement with slavery and his rebellion appears to be as much about the narrators positioning as his: as she carefully says, it may not be unpleasant to relate to you the Diversions we entertaind him with, or rather he us (4243). As Oroonoko grows more irritated and Willoughbys arrival to free him seems increasingly less likely, the narrator tries to give him all the Satisfaction I possibly coud (41). Yet as the prince borrows Hannibals flight plans, taking gratification from the vainglorious thought that he could do what no other man could, female arts encourage his mimetic desire as the narrator offers him garlands and praises his bravery. Her successful adventuring and acquisition of this tale is an artifice created by and in the space enabled by a gallant mans presence. It is, like Behns authorial fame was, contingent and dependent on her relationship with a prince. The female narrator, however, never fully aligns herself with Oroonoko, constructing an outsiders position to the unfolding events that approaches, while never quite acquiescing to, an apolitical perspective. When the English slaver entices the prince onto his ship and then hides his act of seizure behind Christian piety, the slaving galleon ma[kes] from the Shore with this innocent and glorious Prize. The narrator reports: Some have commended this Act, as brave, in the Captain; but I will spare my sense of it, and leave it to my Reader, 472 False Gifts/Exotic Fictions

to judge as he pleases (31). When she describes the Surinam slaves reception of Oroonoko as comparable to how the English King would have been received, she defuses the comparison by inserting a parenthetical adulatory statement, (God Bless Him) (37). When she offers a critique of the colonial council that executes Oroonoko, she also retreats from it, so as (not to disgrace them, or Burlesque the Government there) (59). Her departure from the scene of Oroonokos final rebellion, attributed explicitly to her femininity, hides her conspicuous absence from his death: in the dedication, Behn tells her literary patron, Lord Maitland, that she wanted power to prevent Oroonokos death (7), yet her narrator tells the reader that, had she been there, she would have had the authority and interest to have prevented it (57). These dissembling and contradictory statements, often expressed in parenthetical retreats, obfuscate her perspective, while allusively manifesting her power as storyteller to control the representation of her subjects, shape the direction of events, and dictate her relationship to them. Her omniscient voice allows her to participate in the characterization of resistance and authority. She exists above and beyond while within the story, eternal in contrast to the cycles of masculine conquest and subjugation that we see through her narrative effects.53 Her ability to extricate herself from both rebellion and regicide, while rendering her perception of these events ambiguous, models how a woman of her time might survive and potentially benefit from such conflicts. As the narrator dissembles, forgets parts of the story, absents herself from key moments in which she would have to reveal her allegiances, stages questionable educational moments for the royal slaves, and exposes the deception involved in other characters self-representations, readers confront a text that demonstrates the subversive possibilities available to women in new political ideologies, especially of passive obedience, emerging in the Stuart era. Such narrative ruptures draw attention to the reliance of authority on subjects, including female subjects, collaboration in its representation. Her self-dissimulations craft a disinterested self-portrait, but her interpretation and withdrawal from interpretation of other characters behaviors become more significant as she reveals the Dissembling of other characters in the tale (55). The expos of the West African kings Court-flatterers, who say whatever appeases his desires to protect their court positions, provides one example (16). The Surinam slaves who greet Oroonoko with overjoy and over-ceremony (37) offer another: their display of adoration worries the prince, and he has reason to be anxious. Their desertion of his rebellion destabilizes the meaning of their original adoration, Catherine Molineux 473

making it possible to infer that the narrators hyperbole (over joy and over ceremony) suggested that their motives were different from her explanations.54 The many instances of such dissembling create an ongoing theme of problematic submission that characters, including the narrator, recognize and that shapes how events unfold. At its simplest, Oroonoko is a tale in which the reduction of bodies to property renders romance tragically impotent.55 While the narrators romantic portraits of the slaves contribute obvious moral valences to their experiences of enslavement, her unreliability makes it impossible to pin down the authorial perspective on their relationship. The first indication of this ambiguity arises in the narrators explication of the princes resistance to his king. She disrupts her omniscient presence by remarking upon her own forgetfulness in telling certain parts of the tale. She forgets, for instance, to discover the specifics of the royal lovers informal marriage in West Africa: a certain Ceremony was to be observd, but the narrator has forgotten to ask how it was performed, leaving the marriage vows obscure (16). By forgetting to ask about the first marital ceremony, the narrator generates two possible readings of Oroonokos honor: the first scenario involves an impotent king breeching custom and taking Imoinda, but being incapable of having sex with her. Oroonokos ravishing of her therefore consummates their original vows (24). This reading supports his heroic image: the narrator stresses the kings impotency and Oroonoko asserts that the Breach of the Law was on his Grand-fathers side, encouraging the reader to overlook this act of rebellion (18). After Imoinda has been placed in the harem, however, a similar disjunction occurs as the king takes her to a Bed of state strewn with flowers. Sometime later the pair returns and dancing brings another Ceremony to a close (22). The two unexplained ceremoniesthe first with an occasion (marriage) but a forgotten event and the second with an event (the bed of state) but no stated occasionsuggest that Imoinda has been ritually bedded. The narrators rhetorical ambiguities integrate the uncertainty over the moment of marriage that plagued English politicians into this foreign tale, facilitating a second reading of Oroonokos actions. The two ceremonies dramatize Imoindas struggle between informal and formal possession, yet the kings possess[ion] of her also raises questions about Oroonokos manic focus on her virginity (18). We, like Oroonoko, are forced to wait outside the royal marital bedroom, sharing his uncertainty and identifying with his anxiety.56 Yet, if consummation, as Tories believed, held no prima facie right over formal marriage, Oroonoko is already unmanned before he reaches 474 False Gifts/Exotic Fictions

Surinam, and Imoindas virtue compromised from the start. Similarly, if consummation, as some Whigs argued, signified marriage regardless of priestly ceremony, then only the Idea that Oroonoko finds the most pleas[ing] thought that flatterd best his heartthat the king cannot have sex with Imoindamaintains the romance in his repossession of his beloved (17). That the prince believes he should (if he has taken a wife of the king) abandon [his] Country, and fly with her to some unknown World, who never heard [their] Story foreshadows, in a characteristically incomplete way, actual events (18). Oroonoko, in this version, defiles a kings wife, his chivalry unsettled by the narrators suggestion of baser motives and her allusions to a forgotten antiheroic version of events. His rebellions legitimacy depends on the power of the romantic to overshadow the political narrative of resistance, but the narrator destabilizes the romantic narrative by drawing attention to her forgetfulness in telling the story. The narrator offers a second act of narrative forgetting after the lovers reunite in Surinam, a literal forgetting of Imoindas body that again raises questions about her virtue. I had forgot to tell you about Imoindas scarification, she says (40). Through laced edges we learn that her skin is a portrait of flowers and birds (40). This forgotten point reinvokes an image of flowers just before the royal slaves marry in Surinam, recalling those scattered on the kings bed of state and foreshadowing her death, where her body severed from her face will lay decently on Leaves and Flowers; of which he made a Bed, and conceald it under the same cover-lid of Nature (61). Imoinda suffers the consequences of Oroonokos acts of resistance: she is sold and then murdered. Her flowerbed of state becomes her body carved with flowers, which, in turn, becomes her deathbed. That the flowers strewn on her marital bed become etched onto her body and reappear as her deathbed ties these three moments together in an unstable constellation of virtue and prostitution.57 Her tragedy has a long, and yet curious past; her body is a wonder (16) fit to become one of the prized antiquaries (8) with which the narrator says the English King fills his cabinets. The princes murder of her (and failure to complete the suicide pact) makes this instability permanent as it elicits one of the narrators paranthetical retreats: he first resolvd on a Deed, that, (however Horrid it at first appeard to us all) when we had heard his reasons, we thought it Brave and Just (60). Behns works centralize, generally to critique, such forward women who die at the hands of male tyrants, a martyrdom brought about by their attempts to challenge patriarchal structures. Imoinda embodied Catherine Molineux 475

this form of self-martyring female virtue.58 Its value becomes tenuous early in the story, when the African kings messenger arrives to dissemble her sale into slavery as her death: Oroonoko replyd, with a deep Sigh, and a languishing voice,I am armd against their worst Efforts ; for I know they will tell me, Imoinda is no more (27). Not long after, though, Oroonoko revokes his resolution to die:
[I]n spite of all his Resolutions, he had not the Constancy of Grief to that Degree, as to make him insensible of the Danger of his Army; and in that Instant he leapd from his Couch, and cryd, Come, if we must die, let us meet Death the noblest Way; and twill be more like Oroonoko to encounter him at an Armys Head, opposing the Torrent of a conquering Foe, than lazily, on a Couch, to wait his lingering Pleasure, and die every Moment by a thousand wrecking Thoughts; or be tamely taken by an Enemy, and led a whining, Love-sick Slave, to adorn the triumphs of Jamoan, that young Victor, who already is enterd beyond the Limits I had prescribd him. (29)

In contrast to Imoindas constancy, Oroonokos desire for ennoblement overcomes his grief. Pride pulls him out of despair: to adorn Jamoan, who has already enterd beyond acceptable limits, is unthinkable. He is unwilling to be taken passively, averse to an ignoble death as a Love-sick Slave (29). Vernon Guy Dickson argues that Oroonokos return to his warrior persona reinstitutes civil order, but it does so only through the relinquishment of his bonds to Imoinda.59 This scene foreshadows the novellas closing events, when the prince again fails to remain true in his grief. Instead of killing himself, as he told Imoinda he would, his lust for revenge makes him vulnerable to Byams machinations and leads to his dishonorable death by dismemberment, with only his pipe of tobacco left as his last symbol of proto-existential defiance. Imoinda is the final sacrific[e] to this masculine conflict (61). Such self-martyring virtue was one common form of female allegiance to the Great Man, but in Behns works it is often a foil to female dissembling. As Dolors Altaba-Artal argues with regard to Behns nun novels, certain women with wit and beauty influence men and, to a great extent, shape their own lives.60 Although the narrator celebrates Oroonokos heroism and, prior to her death, praises Imoindas romantic love, her forgetfulness raises competing antiheroic and anti-romantic perspectives on their tale. These moments, as well as the long digressions that draw attention to themselves, offer a central commentary on authorial voice: the digressions and lacunae, narrative gaps and moments of forgetting refract the compositional process, the act of 476 False Gifts/Exotic Fictions

making the text. Within her tale, such forgetfulness was a misstep in outward compliance, a moment in which personal interests obtrude.61 Oroonoko, for instance, forg[ets] that Reverence that was due to the Mistress of a King and divulges his resistance to the king (23). But if the princes motivations are clear, the narrators forgetfulness suggests, but never quite reveals, that her outward appearance is a mask, thereby destabilizing but not entirely abrogating her self-representation as a supporter of the royal slaves. The storytellers dissembling power is given concrete form in the narrators colonial presence, translating (through this novel form of female political empowerment) an ability to control how a story is understood into an ability to shape the story itself. To distract the royal slaves from their subjugation, she entertain[s] the prince with the Lives of the Romans, and great Men, which charm . . . him to [her] Company and tells Imoinda Stories of Nuns (41). Stories-within-astory, these tales appear to be a gendered division of narrative goods, but they have similar implications as sources of emulation.62 Such tales, as Behns dedication explains, should provide Knowledge, excellent Knowledge to men of action (6). But the narrators tales of the Romans recall Hobbess contention that the Civil War had resulted from young men educating themselves in the rebellious principles available in ancient history.63 He remarked that vainglory consisteth in the feigning or supposing of abilities in our selves, which we know are not, [and] is most incident to young men, and nourished by the Histories, or Fictions of Gallant persons.64 As Oroonoko accurately reproduces Hannibals failed attempt at escape, these stories reappear as warnings of the dangers of mimetic desire. The narrator provides a gallant man with amenable examples that have, in the past, inspired heroic actions, much as Behn herself did in her eulogies to the Stuart kings. But the narrators tales, so obliging to Oroonoko, echo the princes own persuasion of a courtier to be of his Party by saying so many obliging things (20). Similarly, the narrators stories introduce Imoinda to Christianity, but surprisingly no one has connected these Stories of Nuns to the ones that Behn wrote, which were not pious tales of submissive young women (41). Rebellious women populate Behns nun stories, with the instructive inclusion of the woman who rebels unwisely, overtly challenging patriarchy and losing the cloister as an available retreat. Oroonokos invocation of Stories of Nuns highlights Imoindas affinity to Behns other heroines as her stubbornness, like theirs, gets her into trouble (41).65 On the surface, these stories provide the slaves with moral exemplars, but their instructional value Catherine Molineux 477

becomes ambiguous when the slaves emulate them (a failure again potentially hidden in the construction of racial difference). The narrations ruptures and ambiguities highlight the contingencies of representation and the storytellers political power. In so doing, they trouble any final evaluation of the narrators character, enacting the representational crisis that lies at the heart of this exotic tale. She, like the slaver who was Oroonokos friend, pretends to entertain and is entertained by the prince, only to sail to England with a narrative ready for sale on the literary market. Akin to the slaver, she leaves on a ship carrying the royal slaves stories, masked by her benevolent, educational, and pious persona. Srinivas Aravamudan has read this representation as a political satire of prominent aristocratic women who owned slaves in the Stuart court, but the novella leaves significant tensions unresolved, inviting the Critical Reader [to] judge as he pleases (7).66 A strategic performativity (or unreliability) characterizes Oroonokos narrator, modeling a novel form of female subjectivity in a suggestive autobiographical reflection of a female poet-playwright who clearly thought of herself as a maker, or at least dresser, of kings. The visible power of Oroonokos aristocracy is brought repeatedly into view, but the failure of romance in the narrators story is also the failure of royalism. Oroonokos lingering appeal, and thus the appeal of the narrator who tells his story, would have depended not only on the fashion for African slaves in Stuart London, but also on nostalgia for an age before the loss of innocence. Like the imperfectly eponymous river, Oroonoko held a mythical value in an age of great unrest, and Behn thought that the warrior prince would, through the Reputation of [her] Pen, survive to all Ages (65). As she offered her king a sophisticated critique of his troubles, however, she also played with a skeptics retirement into privacy, suggesting that holding strong beliefs about the morality or legal rightness of any course of action was to risk taking part in the conflict, and so destroying oneself.67 Behns incomplete ownership of the tale, established by her use of a young female narrator, reinforces this move as it obscures, finally, her authorial relationship to her dissembling narrative pose. Oroonoko emphasizes how women, whose absence was expected from the political arena, could use the instability of sovereignty and political subjectivity to reinterpret the nature and power of their own passivity.68 In so doing, this novella may illuminate how the crisis of political obligation shaped Behns own relationship with the Stuart kings.
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In her dedication, Behn remarked to Lord Maitland that if he found anything Romantick about her story, he should remember that these Countries do, in all things, so far difer from ours, that they produce unconceivable Wonders; at least, they appear so to us, because New and Strange (7). Such an appeal to exoticism might appear to authorize her tale, but a few pages later the narrator tells the reader that many little Accidents have been omitted (8). These incidents were, the narrator says, pleasant to us, where History was scarce, and Adventures very rare, but the presumption is that the metropolitan reader, in a World where he finds Diversions for every Minute, new and strange, may find them tedious and heavy (8). The cumulative effect of these frequent reversals, which are licensed by the colonial encounter, is a textual vacillation that raises epistemological questions about representational truth. Those who buy into the Romantick, Behn warned, are deluded by the novellas novelty. Trying to resolve Oroonokos inconsistencies and ambiguities by making them a fixed reflection of party politics occludes the significance of the texts instability, and thus how the book, in novel ways, both contributed to and engaged the political unrest of late seventeenthcentury England. Oroonoko may well have warned James II about the destructive consequences of his actions, and it certainly provided a dominant royalist perspective on colonial corruption; but it also offered a philosophical meditation on the problems with establishing new foundations for sovereignty and assent. Behns world was changing: traditional forms of trust and allegiance were disintegrating and older ideas about political obligation were becoming untenable, but new configurations of political subjectivity were emerging in the midst of this uncertainty. Awareness of the contrivances of power, intensified in the encounter with foreign sovereignties and colonial settlements, allowed for a new consciousness of the peoples role in its construction. The result, for Behn, was a contradictory engagement with fundamental philosophical concepts of political association that opens Oroonoko to multiple political interpretations (visible in the range of modern representations of Behnfrom a free-thinking, feminist playwright to a conservative, royalist propagandist). This interpretive multiplicity is a product of a text that stages at the narrative and metalinguistic level the instability of signification, a move that, like the natural/fabricated sources of sovereignty, reproduces the political crisis of Behns age by continually undermining the readers ability to assign value. Hidden in the illegibility of the exotic was the uncertainty of appearance in this new world. Catherine Molineux 479

As globalization unsettles our own geographical imagination of the territorial nation-state, texts such as Oroonoko, which refract the entanglement of imperial and domestic spaces in the seventeenth century, should be brought into clearer constellation with the more canonical political texts that have provided scholars with their primary accounts of the reconfiguration of English sovereignty in the decades following civil war.69 The overlaying and entangling of various historiescolonial pasts, domestic pasts, Behns past, and royal pasts under the subtitle, The History of the Royal Slavereveals the complexity of early modern English political thought and illuminates how colonial peripheries became, through their analogical and organic connection to the metropole, literal and figurative sites of sovereignty. The illegibility of the exotic, precisely captured in Behns rhetorical lack of commitment to the idea of exoticism, allowed her to collapse this Atlantic periphery of civil war into the revolutionary Isles, while retreating from its implications. Oroonoko questions the greed and violence underpinning an emerging imperial age, but it is not, as other scholars have argued, unambiguously committed to feudal values or critical of self-interest.70 Behn interrogates the very instability of monarchical discourses through her representation of a violent, unstable, and corrupt Atlantic world, inflecting those ideas about political association with Atlantic contestations of race, gender, and status. Doing so allows her to explore the failures of ideas about sovereignty and subjectivity by encoding them in and finding them newly illuminated by colonial and Atlantic iterations. Writ small, the narrators stories to the royal slaves model Behns relationship to her readers: she imparts a moral exemplar that she hopes will inspire emulation, but whether Oroonoko is a false gift, an exotic fiction that could lead to a Fall, could only be decided in the experience of assent to his embodied values. His objectified worth can be realized only when a choice is made about which narrativethe heroic or antiheroic, romantic or anti-romantichis story provides. The novella might inspire imitation of royalist virtues or warn against their delusion. As the narrator dresses up people and places in this tale (including herself), while consistently drawing attention to the material and literary technologies of representation, she gave her readers a choice about what to believe, forcing them to participate in the moral construction of authority. By relinquishing judgment, Behn invited participation in the practice of ethics, but she also staged how individual appetites for conquest and dominion often overrode conscience, how ambiguities in the nature of man rendered moral 480 False Gifts/Exotic Fictions

judgments unstable, and how knowledge of human pride allowed those (including women) with the skills of representation to direct and shape the reception of power. If other Stuart writers of fiction, perhaps most notably John Milton, sought to cultivate equitable perspectives among readers, Behns Atlantic exploration of the uncertainty that haunted sovereignty and assent elaborates on her perception of her Age as one of Lying, Peaching, and Swearing.71 Rather than take this theory of the fictions of sovereignty to their Hobbesian or Miltonic conclusions, Behn remained in the midst of the unsettling, offering the narrative endpoint in her narrators own extrication from political unrest. Oroonoko is set before the Dutch invasion and conquest of English Surinam in 1667, but written and published after it, making this invasion an endpoint for the society she describes. Recasting this colonial past as a narrative future in 1688 allows the novella to function as a potential warning, offering Surinams demise as a concrete outcome of such uncertainty in the terms of political association. Scholars who have read Oroonoko as James II have seen in this text a warning to the king of his troubles in 1688. But if it is understood not as royalist propaganda but as a philosophical exploration of the crisis of political obligation, the warning was both broader and more fundamental. Indeed, Behns narrator laments Oroonokos misfortune to fall in an obscure world, that afforded only a female pen to celebrate his fame (21). She thinks his fame would have livd from others endeavours, if the Dutch, who, immediately after his Time, took that country, had not killd, banishd and dispersd all those that were capable (21). The violent and divided planter class that thwarts the royal slaves quest for freedom ends up, in this narrative future, subjugated to the invading Dutch. This endpoint, on the one hand, invokes contemporary perceptions of the importance of Caribbean colonization to monarchical power, pandering to James IIs attempts to centralize the empire and narrating domestic fears of a weakened state through the loss of control over colonial possessions.72 On the other hand, it uses past colonial fortunes to forecast the future of Englands growing political troubles in 1688. It is hard not to connect this tale to its publication in July, when England faced the impending arrival of the Dutch William III. But even if Behn did not have that parallel in mind, her narrators timely departure from English Surinam hints at her own struggles to navigate, with her exotic literary and material goods in tow, a contemporary political scene again violently divided. If we return, from this entangled perspective, to Oroonokos problematic embodiment of sovereignty, the failure of the black prince Catherine Molineux 481

to be sovereign becomes a commentary produced by the text, not an assumption deriving from our interpretive framework. It becomes a creative act, rather than an imposition of modern uncertainty about the historical meanings of blackness in late Stuart England. That subtle, but key shift opens up new questions about how racialized and Atlantic constructions of sovereignty were becoming constitutive of English sovereignty in the late seventeenth century. As Behn denied Oroonoko the representational value of sovereignty, while making his experience of enslavement and rebellion a site of sovereignty, she registered the rising reliance on black slavery within the empire, mobilized contemporary critiques of the instability of authority based on coercion, and mapped the transition from a sovereignty founded on love to one based in the unstable expression of interest. I have argued elsewhere that Oroonoko, by exploring the limits of enslavement, exposes tensions in imperial ideologies based on racial assimilation, but the fictions of sovereignty illuminated by Oroonokos blackness invoke a broader question about how to establish a visible power in this New World.73 That Oroonokos blackness figures, for Behn, the failure of affective ties suggests that colonial plantation regimes provided both a dystopian mirror for a royalist imagination of the binding nature of political attachments and a new geography of the uncertainties of sovereignty. Instigated by and thought through the encounter with African and Native American polities and the turn to slave-based colonization, Behns quasi-fictional exploration of this periphery of civil warfare unsettled temporal, geographical, gender, class, and racial distinctions. The crisis of representation provoked by this unsettling demonstrates how the Atlantic world came to be part of and to shape the new political world of late seventeenth-century England. Vanderbilt University
notes The author would like to thank Katherine Crawford, William Caferro, James Epstein, Teresa Goddu, Katherine D. Moran, Emily C. Nacol, Mary Terrall, Daniel Usner, and the anonymous reviewer for ELH for their helpful comments on previous drafts. 1 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), 117. 2 Scholars have long debated the politics of Oroonoko, though attention has also turned to its Atlantic economies of race, class, and gender, as well as to its engagement with ideas about truth, space, and exotica. That the novella remains one of the most important and complex narrations of seventeenth-century English colonialism is apparent both in this wealth of critical commentary and in its broad adoption in undergraduate courses on empire and slavery. For general overviews, see Susan B. Iwaniszaw, introduction

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to Oroonoko: Adaptations and Offshoots, ed. Iwaniszaw (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), xixxi, Derek Hughes, Race, Gender, and Scholarly Practice: Aphra Behns Oroonoko, Essays in Criticism 52 (2002): 122; and Mary Ann ODonnell, ed., Aphra Behn: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 3 Aphra Behn, Oroonoko: An Authoritative Text, Historical Backgrounds, Criticism, ed. Joanna Lipking (London: W. W. Norton, 1997), 12. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. 4 Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century readers failed to comment in print on Oroonokos potential allegory of the Glorious Revolution, perhaps because of the novellas explicit claims to ethnographic truth, its female authorship, or the fact that its plagued prince was a black African. For the reception of Oroonoko, see Janet Todd, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2000), 38; see also Margaret W. Ferguson, News from the New World: Miscegenous Romance in Aphra Behns Oroonoko and The Widow Ranter, in The Production of English Renaissance Culture, ed. David Lee Miller and others (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994), 151189, esp. 178n55. 5 For a recent and provocative approach, see Elliott Visconsi, Lines of Equity: Literature and the Origins of Law in Later Stuart England (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2008). Among the many other works on this protracted political crisis, see Steven C. A. Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2009); Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 16401661 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2007); Jon Parkin, Taming the Leviathan: The Reception of the Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England, 16401700 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007); Victoria Kahn, Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 16401674 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2004); Jonathan Scott, Englands Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000); Rachel Weil, Political Passions: Gender, the Family and Political Argument in England, 16801714 (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1999); Arihiro Fukuda, Sovereignty and the Sword: Harrington, Hobbes, and Mixed Government in the English Civil Wars (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997); Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner, eds., Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993); J. A. I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: the Church of England and its Enemies, 16601730 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992); J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987) and Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985); J. P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party, 16891720 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977); and Gordon J. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought: The Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes Especially in SeventeenthCentury England (New York: Basic Books, 1975). 6 See George Guffey, Aphra Behns Oroonoko: Occasion and Accomplishment, in Two English Novelists, Aphra Behn and Anthony Trollope: Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, May 11, 1974, ed. Guffey and Andrew Wright (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Univ. of California, Los Angeles, 1975), 341. Guffey opened this line of argument by suggesting Oroonokos enslavement narrated the disempowerment of James II. Subsequent scholars toned down readings of the novella as a direct political allegory of the Glorious Revolution, though recent publications have moved back toward Guffeys position. See Visconsi, The Degenerate Race: English

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Barbarism in Aphra Behns Oroonoko and The Widow Ranter, ELH 69 (2002): 673701; Richard Kroll, Tales of Love and Gallantry: the Politics of Oroonoko, Huntington Library Quarterly 67.4 (December 2004): 573-605; Anita Pacheco, Royalism and Honor in Aphra Behns Oroonoko, Studies in English Literature, 15001900 34.3 (Summer 1994): 491506; Iwanisziw, Behns Novel Investment in Oroonoko: Kingship, Slavery, and Tobacco in English Colonialism, South Atlantic Review 63.2 (Spring 1998): 7598; Laura Brown, The Romance of Empire: Oroonoko and the Trade in Slaves, in Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd (New York: St. Martins Press, 1999), 180228; Todd, The Critical Fortunes of Aphra Behn (Columbia: Camden House, 1998); and Richard Frohock, Violence and Awe: The Foundations of Government in Aphra Behns New World Settings, Eighteenth-Century-Fiction 8.4 (1996): 43752. 7 Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 16881804 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1999), 2970; Catherine Gallagher, Nobodys Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 16701820 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1994). 8 Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 14001900 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009), 280. 9 For the legal geographies of empire, see Benton, A Search for Sovereignty; James Muldoon, Empire and Order: The Concept of Empire, 8001800 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999); Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2005); and M. J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c.15501700 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000). 10 For Oroonokos Atlantic geography, see Catherine Gallagher, introduction to Behn, Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave, ed. Gallagher (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2000), 325, esp. 4; see also Adam Sills, Surveying The Map of Slavery in Aphra Behns Oroonoko, Journal of Narrative Theory 36.3 (Fall 2006): 31440. 11 A Natural History of Nevis and the rest of the English Leeward Caribee Islands in America . . . in Eleven Letters from the Revd. Mr. [William] Smith, sometime Rector of St. Johns at Nevis . . . To Revd. Mr. Mason (Cambridge, 1745), 100. 12 Oroonoko appeared in the midst of the warming-pan scandal, which heightened anxiety about womens ability to manipulate political power. See Guffey, 15; Weil, 86100. 13 See Visconsi, Degenerate Race, 697; Kroll, 581. 14 For a discussion of Behns possible visit to Surinam, see Todd, Secret Life, 3945. 15 On the republication of Civil War tracts, see Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, esp. 3, 65. On fictional or quasi-fictional writings that borrowed imperial spaces to sketch out etiologies of law, justice, and government in English society, see Visconsi, introduction to Lines of Equity, 134 (33). 16 See A. B., A brief relation of the beginning and ending of the troubles of the Barbados (1653). See also N. Foster, A briefe relation of the late horrid rebellion acted in the island Barbadas, in the West Indies (London, 1650); Ten matters worthy of note (London, 1642); A charge consisting of severall heads (London, 1647); Articles of agreements made and concluded the 11th day of January 1651 (London, 1652). 17 See Pincus, 20; see also Pestana, 15782. 18 That Willoughby later lost part of his hand to a disgruntled Surinam colonist undoubtedly deepened this sentiment. Henry Adis, A Letter sent from Syrranam, to his Excellency, the Lord Willoughby. . . (London, 1664), 7; see also 4. See also William Byam, An Exact Relation of the Most Execrable Attempts of John Allin, commited on the person of His Excellency Francis, Lord Willoughby of Parham, Captain General

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of the Continent of Guiana, and all of the Caribbey-Islands and Our Lord Proprietor (London, 1665). On the degeneracy of planters, see also Catherine Molineux, Faces of Perfect Ebony: Encountering Atlantic Slavery in Imperial Britain (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2012), 11045; and Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2004). 19 On Caribbean colonization and its relevance to perceptions of domestic stability, see David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), 138, 12545; Pestana; Carl and Roberta Bridenbaugh, No Peace Beyond the Line: the English in the Caribbean, 16241690 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972); Larry Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted: The English Colonization of Barbados, 16271660 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003); Susan Dwyer Amussen, Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society, 16401700 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2007); and Stuart B. Schwartz, Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 14501680 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2004). See also Parkin, 17785; Jonathan Scott, The Rapture of Motion: James Harringtons Republicanism, in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, 13963; and Fukuda. On the metropolitan discussion of Caribbean racial demography, see Christopher L. Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2006). Many scholars have argued that Behn did not criticize the institution of slavery, but I have pointed out that Oroonoko does highlight tensions in ideologies of mastery that sustained the emerging imperial institution of slavery. By integrating perceptions of planter immorality, Behn builds into the story the failure of idealistic visions of benevolence so critical to metropolitan justifications for slavery in the late seventeenth century. See Molineux, Faces of Perfect Ebony, 6180; Margaret W. Ferguson, Juggling the Categories of Race, Class, and Gender: Aphra Behns Oroonoko, in Women, Race, and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1994), 20924; and Charlotte Sussman, The Other Problem with Women: Reproduction and Slave Culture in Aphra Behns Oroonoko, in Rereading Aphra Behn: History, Theory, and Criticism, ed. Heidi Hutner (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 1993), 21233. See also Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Marietta Morrissey, Slave Women in the New World: Gender Stratification in the Caribbean (Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas, 1989); Visconsi, Lines of Equity, 34; Iwanisziw, introduction to Oroonoko, xiii; David E. Hoegberg, Caesars Toils: Allusion and Rebellion in Oroonoko, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 7.3 (1995): 23958; L. Brown, The Romance of Empire, 51, 5759; Kroll, 589; and Derek Hughes, Versions of Blackness: Key Texts on Slavery from the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), 282. 20 Of the ill State of our Sugar Colonies, with regard to their Trade, and Slaves, &c., Gentlemans Magazine, April 1737, 215. See also Scott, Englands Troubles, 330. 21 For concerns about the enslavement of African elite, see Moira Ferguson, Oroonoko: Birth of a Paradigm, New Literary History 23.2 (Spring 1992): 33959; and K. G. Davies, The Royal African Company (London: Longmans, Green, 1957), 477. For a different, but related reading of Oroonokos exceptional blackness as a racial fantasy produced by the metropolitan market for black servants, see Molineux, Faces of Perfect Ebony, 1860. 22 Kahn, Wayward Contracts, 241.

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On absences of de facto authority, see Kroll, 576. Thomas Otway, prologue to Behn, The City-Heiress (London, J. Tonson, 1682), line 34. 25 Behn, The Amorous Prince, or the Curious Husband. A Comedy (London: Thomas Dring, 1671), 56. 26 Behn, Amorous Prince, 57. 27 Behn, The Lucky Mistake a New Novel (London: R. Bentley, 1689), 20. 28 Behn, Amorous Prince, 57. 29 Behn, Amorous Prince, 56. See Kahn, Wayward Contracts, 67 and 5780. See also Jean Bodin, On Sovereignty: Four Chapters from the Six Books of the Commonwealth, trans. Julian H. Franklin (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992); and Benton, 28789. 30 On affective ties, see Kahn, The Duty to Love: Passion and Obligation in Early Modern Political Theory, Representations 68 (Fall 1999): 84107. 31 Bernard de Fontenelle, A Discovery of New Worlds, trans. Aphra Behn (London: Will Canning, 1688), 41. For Willoughbys political career, see Francis Willoughby, The humble remonstrance of Sr. Francis VVilloughby knight therein setting forth his faithfull services, his many sufferings, and his earnest desires to spend the rest of his dayes in the service of the Parliament, against the rebels of Ireland (London, 1649); Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick, Nine Speciall Passages, Concerning the Militia (London, Edward Blackmore, 1642); Articles of agreements made and concluded the 11th day of January, 1651 by and between the Commissioners of the . . . Lord Willoughy of Parrham . . . and the commissioners in the behalfe of the common-wealth of England . . . (London, Francis Coles, 1652); A Charge Consisting of Severall Heads (London, 1647); The Declaration and Protestation of Divers the Knights, Gentry, Freeholders, and others of the foresaid county, whose names are subscribed (London, Edward Husbands and John Frank, 1642); An acco[un]t of the unavoidable charge and the meanes to prevent it with safely in case of a warr with France w[hi]ch otherwise the nation must be at in sending forces to the Island of Barbadoes for its security w[hi] ch cannot be less then 2000 men if they resolve to preserve the same, on which island (besides its own importance) depends the safety of the Leward Islands and consequently the sugar trade to the kingdom of England (16501666). 32 Kroll, 589. 33 On the homoerotics of Oroonokos relationship with his overseer, see Jonathan Goldberg, Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1997), 4272. 34 For Hobbesian readings of Behns novella, see esp. Visconsi, Lines of Equity, 164, 15584; Kroll, 583; and Moira Ferguson, Oroonoko: Birth of a Paradigm, 354. 35 Hobbes, 117. 36 Kroll, 583. 37 Samuel Butler, The Genuine Remains in the Verse and Prose of Mr. Samuel Butler, 2 vol. (London: J. and R. Tonson, 1759), 2:485. 38 John Bramhall, Castigations of Mr. Hobbes (London: J. Crook, 1657), 519. See also Parkin, 19197. 39 Kahn, Wayward Contracts, 58. 40 See Parkin, esp. 212, 254, 27677; Keith Thomas, Cases of Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England, in John Morrell, Paul Slack and Daniel Wolffe eds., Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), 2956, esp. 29 and 4445; Edward G. Andrew, Hobbes
23 24

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on Conscience Within the Law and Without, Canadian Journal of Political Science 32.2 (June 1999): 20325, esp. 203. 41 Parkin, 139. 42 Studies of Hobbes and Locke have stressed their involvement in nascent colonization projects in Virginia and South Carolina, as well as the importance of travel literature to their differing conceptions of the state of nature. See Parkin, 179; Barbara Arneil, John Locke and America: the Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996); Noel Malcolm, Hobbes, Sandys, and the Virginia Company, The Historical Journal 24.2 (1981): 297321; and Ken Macmillan, Sovereignty and Possession in the English New World: The Legal Foundations of Empire, 15761640 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006), 89. See also Hobbes, 13, 8990. For anxieties about prelapsarian visions of native settlements, see Michael Gaudio, Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2008), 143. 43 See Kahn, Wayward Contracts, 90. 44 See Sills, Surveying The Map of Slavery, 32021. See also Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991), esp. 8486. 45 Benton, 225, 231232. 46 Compare L. Brown, The Romance of Empire, 191. 47 For debates about the natural, see Parkin, 180. 48 Hobbes, 110. See also Ananta Charana Sukla, Art and Representation: Contributions to Contemporary Aesthetics (Westport: Praeger, 2001). 49 Although beyond the scope of this article, this formulation of interiority might be brought into productive relationship with theories of the emergence of a modern self. Compare Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2004). 50 Sills, Surveying The Map of Slavery, 320. 51 Visconsi, Lines of Equity, 157. 52 Compare Gallagher, Nobodys Story, 17. 53 For the narrators physical immersion in the events, see Marta Figlerowicz, Frightful Spectacles of a Mangled King: Aphra Behns Oroonoko and Narration through Theater, New Literary History 39 (2008): 32134. 54 Compare the similarly qualified adoration of subjects in the royalist Sir Percy Herberts The Princess Cloria (London, 1661); Kahn, Wayward Contracts, 229230. 55 On the importance of romance as a genre in post-Civil War royalist writings, see Kahn, Wayward Contracts, 134251. 56 For this obscuration, see Sills, Surveying The Map of Slavery, 329. 57 For Behns identification with the figure of the prostitute, see Alison Conway, The Protestant Cause and a Protestant Whore: Aphra Behns Love-letters, EighteenthCentury Life 25.3 (2001): 119; Gallagher, Nobodys Story, 78, 14; Jacqueline Pearson, The Prostituted Muse: Images of Women and Women Dramatists 16421737 (New York: St. Martins Press, 1988), 16366. For motifs of prostitution in Oroonoko, see Aravamudan, 51. 58 For Behns critique of such constructions of female virtue, see Robert Markley, Aphra Behns The City Heiress: Feminism and the Dynamics of Popular Success on the Late Seventeenth-Century Stage, Comparative Drama 41.2 (2007): 14166. 59 Vernon Guy Dickson, Truth, Wonder, and Exemplarity in Aphra Behns Oroonoko, Studies in English Literature, 15001900 47.3 (Summer 2007): 583.

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Altaba-Artal, Aphra Behns English Feminism, 162. See also Todd, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn; Margaret Ferguson, Juggling the Categories of Race, Class, and Gender, 215; and Pearson, Gender and Narrative in the Fiction of Aphra Behn, in Aphra Behn, 11142. 61 On gaps and innuendos in Augustan political satire, see Vincent Carretta, The Snarling Muse: Verbal and Visual Political Satire from Pope to Churchill (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 4142. 62 Compare Margaret Ferguson, Juggling the Categories of Race, Class, and Gender, 20924. 63 Hobbes, 226; Champion, 37. 64 Hobbes, 42. 65 Notably Isabella in Behns The History of the Nun; or, The Fair Vow-Breaker, which was published shortly after Oroonoko in 1689. See Paula R. Backscheider and John J. Richetti, eds., Popular Fiction by Women, 16601730: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996); Altaba-Artal, 15456. 66 See Aravamudan, 2970. 67 Michael Loriaux, The Realists and Saint Augustine: Skepticism, Psychology, and Moral Action in International Relations Thought, International Studies Quarterly 36.4 (December 1992), 401. See also Visconsi, Lines of Equity, 34; and Hobbes, xiii. 68 Behns engagement, as a playwright, poet, and novelist, with the politics of sexuality and with womens struggle during the Restoration to formalize their participation in the emerging public sphere has been a subject of scholarly research for some time. See Markley, Aphra Behns The City Heiress; Janet Todd and Derek Hughes, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004); Derek Hughes, The Theatre of Aphra Behn (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001); Jane Spencer, Aphra Behns Afterlife (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000); Todd, Secret Life and Aphra Behn Studies; Gallagher, Nobodys Story; Hutner, Rereading Aphra Behn; and Pearson, The Prostituted Muse, 14649. 69 On globalization and its destabilization of spatial understandings of the state, see Neil Brenner, Beyond State-Centrism? Space, Territoriality, and Geographic Scale in Globalization Studies, Theory and Society 28 (1999): 3978. 70 Compare Pacheco, 491506. 71 Behn, dedication to The City-Heiress: Or, Sir Timothy Treat-all (London: D. Brown, T. Benskin, and H. Rhodes, 1682), 3v. On Milton, see Visconsi, Line of Equity. 72 On this formulation of fear, see, for example, An acco[un]t of the unavoidable charge, 1. 73 On the limits of enslavement, see Molineux, Faces of Perfect Ebony, 6180.
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