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Race, Women, and the Sentimental in Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko

Criticism, Fall, 1998 by Joyce Green Macdonald

Imoinda, the "beautiful black Venus" of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688), is probably the most well-known of the few representations of dark-skinned African women in early modern literature.(1) Thomas Southerne's 1696 dramatization of Behn's novella is, in its turn, probably best-known for changing the skin color of its Imoinda from black to white. As her racial and sexual identity are reconstructed in whiteness, Behn's black Imoinda becomes an early example of the enforced invisibility of the black female subject in the Americas' dominant cultural discourse.(2) In turning to Southerne's play as the primal scene of this abduction from representation, I hope to emphasize Oroonoko's cultural vitality after Behn as a site for the deconstruction and reformation of women's racial identities.

For all its audacity--an audacity largely unremarked by his contemporaries--the black Imoinda's disappearance into whiteness is not the only way in which Southerne re-visions women in his Oroonoko.(3) The play is equally taken up with the sexual disguise of its white comic heroine Charlott Welldon, who masquerades as a man for most of the action. Revising Southerne as he revised Behn, the play's later adapters experienced its double plot--one strand dealing with the tragic fates of its newly miscegenous African lovers, the other with Charlott's comic maneuvers aimed at finding rich husbands for herself and her sister Lucy in Surinam--as a structural defect. The Welldon sisters storyline was decried as "preposterous, absurd and pernicious," "loose and contemptible,"(4) "offensive to modesty,(5) the unfortunate result of pandering to the tastes of "the gross and depraved audience"(6) of an earlier era, and is entirely absent from Oroonoko adaptations after Southerne.(7) Although some contemporary feminist critics have focused attention on the implications of Imoinda's whitening,(8) discussions of ways in which this fundamental alteration of Behn's racial materials might be related to, even required by, the inscription of gender in Southerne's Surinam are far rarer. Establishing such a link is my project here, one I take up not primarily to rehabilitate the claims of Southerne's play to formalist tidiness--although this might be an unintended effect of my arguments--but rather to restore the black Imoinda to representational significance.

One kind of link between Imoinda and the Welldon sisters I have no interest in establishing is the proposition that "women, like slaves, are treated as commodities, without regard for their humanity, their needs, or their desires."(9) The equation of the enslaved Africans' situation with that of the husband-hunting Welldon sisters can succeed only if one assumes that being "treated as" a commodity is the same thing as actually being a commodity. This formulation also fails to recognize that both its apparently absolute quantities, "women" and "slaves," are actually multiply constituted in race and status as well as gender,(10) Only after the black Imoinda's disappearance from Oroonoko can the big-city intrigue of the Welldon sisters plot--as vulgar as it was felt to be--begin to negotiate a more explicit, if still limited, authority for white women than that first advanced by Behn's narrator. Southerne's double-plotted play thus images a twinned relationship between white women's social representation and black women's invisibility and loss of agency under colonialism's raced visual regimes.(11) This twinning foreshadows the way in which British women will be constituted within the discourse of sentimentality throughout the literature and politics of eighteenth-century abolitionism, a political cause to whose service the dramatic Oroonokos after Southerne will be increasingly dedicated.(12) White women's emergence in abolitionist discourse as the sentimental agents of antislavery politics occurs in tandem with the representational policing of slaves, perhaps especially female slaves.(13)

The first white woman who possesses enunciative authority in the transmission of Oroonoko--an authority purchased through the denial of the subjectivity of its African characters--is, of course, Behn herself.(14) Studying the racial and sexual objects Englishwomen were permitted and encouraged to see in Southerne's Oroonoko can usefully begin with studying the looks of Behn's narrator at the "Royal Slave."(15) Her description of what she sees in him is acutely physically detailed:

   His face was not of that brown, rusty black which most of that nation are,
   but a perfect ebony, or polished jet. His eyes were the most aweful that
   could be seen and very piercing, the white of 'em being like snow, as were
   his teeth. His nose was rising and Roman, instead of African and flat. His
   mouth, the finest shaped that could be seen, far from those great turned
   lips, which are so natural to the rest of the Negroes.... His hair came
   down to his shoulders, by the aids of art, which was by pulling it out with
   a quill and keeping it combed, of which he took particular care. (12)(16)

Race, Women, and the Sentimental in Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko

Criticism, Fall, 1998 by Joyce Green Macdonald

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