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Race, Women, and the Sentimental in Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko
Criticism, Fall, 1998 by Joyce Green Macdonald
The "perfect jet" of Oroonoko's skin and the snowy whiteness of his teeth suggest an almost Petrarchan blazon, with all of that device's interest in fixing a subject-object relationship between the looker and the looked-upon, but one which here reverses Petrarchanism's usual assignation of looking to men and of being watched to women.(17) Recasting this male body as the anatomized object of a female gaze, the passage also fragments Oroonoko's racial identity. His description registers him not as primarily African, but as primarily different from other Africans. His skin is "polished" and "perfect" instead of a "brown, rusty black"; his nose is "Roman, instead of African and flat"; his lips are finely shaped (i.e., presumably narrower than other Africans'); his hair falls into shoulder-length ringlets because he arranges it to do so. Such detail is missing from the description of Imoinda, whose exceptionality matches Oroonoko's and is perhaps most clearly evident in the fact that the narrator has "seen an hundred white men sighing after her and making a thousand vows at her feet" (12).(18)
Behn's Oroonoko perceives the greatness of its African lovers through a thoroughly racialized colonialist gaze which is as available to the white female narrator as it is to the white men of the Surinam colony. This gaze perceives Imoinda's sexual subjection as a slave as a feminine allure these men are powerless to resist. This idealization ensures that not only Imoinda, who is the ideal audience for "all the pretty works" the narrator is "mistress of," but Oroonoko himself becomes the particular social property of "us women" in the novella. The white women of the narrator's acquaintance have "all the liberty of speech with him, especially" the narrator herself, "whom he called his great mistress" (45).(19)
The authority that white women stand to gain from Oroonoko and Imoinda's containment and defeat by the slaveowning order is an integral part of Oroonoko's textual power. This authority is discursive--the female narrator sets the terms of exceptionality and amenability under which the lovers matter--but it is also material. The easy social intercourse their amenability enables is undertaken at the request of Trefry and the other slaveowners, who "feared a mutiny" (45) if their lies about freeing Oroonoko and Imoinda are exposed. The narrator's privilege to speak and be listened to works to identify her as a surrogate enforcer of the slaveowners' authority, and emphasizes the deep connection between gender and race under Oroonoko's colonial politics.
When a pregnant black Imoinda and the white narrator disappear from Oroonoko, so does Behn's imagination of a set of circumstances under which white women could be even this kind of second-order participant in colonial processes. In the place of these circumstances of surrogacy and indirection, dramatic Oroonoko after Southerne dedicates itself to nullifying the contingent kinds of female colonial authority over racial production exercised by Behn's narrator. John Hawkesworth's 1759 adaptation, for example, provides a sexualized performance of the new Imoinda's vulnerability as the villainous lieutenant governor gloatingly anticipates the pleasure of raping her. He believes the assault will actually work to preserve her "Sex's modesty" (53) since she will be spared the indelicacy of having to verbally consent to intercourse. Only the surprise entrance of the virtuous Blandford deters him from his dastardly intention; Hawkesworth teasingly offers, and then snatches away, the voyeuristic pleasure of watching women's passive vulnerability to male sexual aggression. In Francis Gentleman's Oroonoko (1760), the lieutenant governor threatens a rape which he never attempts, while John Ferriar's Imoinda (1788) reports an unsuccessful attempt which happens offstage. In all these cases, the lack of agency of these newly staged white women fills the vacuum created when the white narrator's power of racial naming is displaced from the text.(20) Gender difference is employed to evacuate racial difference from Oroonoko's carefully managed representations of the ugly sexual realities of New World slavery.
