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Race, Women, and the Sentimental in Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko
Criticism, Fall, 1998 by Joyce Green Macdonald
In Southerne and after, the whitening of Imoinda will facilitate the white female spectator's positioning as an approving witness to her own execution and her compensatory achievement of a moral delicacy which will operate to cement her discursive segregation from the arena in which slaves are traded and empires built. In this first dramatic Oroonoko, however, the Welldon sisters offer female spectators an alternative compensation for their acceptance of bourgeois standards of womanhood and the assumption of ineradicable gender difference on which they were based. Instead of emerging as creatures of supreme feminine feeling, they get to act like men. Charlott, who will spend most of her scenes passing for a man, is initially puzzled by the difference between men, who seem born to "a trading Estate, that lives upon credit, and increases by removing it out of one Bank into another," and "poor Women," who "must keep our stocks dead by us, at home, to be ready for a purchase, when it comes" (50-51). Yet she learns and puts into action the arcane rules of acquisition which seem to differentiate men's estate from women's, and is ultimately rewarded by marriage to the senior Stanhope, who is attracted to her and impressed by her wit and nerve. That this disguise plot ends in marriage (as it is consciously intended by Charlott to do from the beginning of the play) performs the same kind of disciplined reproduction of womanhood as Imoinda.'s racial transformation does of her blackness: a "man" becomes a woman, a black woman becomes white, so that dominant constructions of male and female can emerge, seeming all the more inevitable and necessary after the masquerade. Just as Southerne's Imoinda is less delicate and submissive than the character will become in later revisions, his Welldon sisters wildly contradict every aspect of the sentimental heroine who will come to dominate the play later in the eighteenth century. Lucy Welldon is frank about her need for and enjoyment of sex, seeking the security of marriage--under whose respectable guise she can seek as many lovers as she'd like--because she is beginning to find her good reputation "impossible to preserve" (122). Charlott observes, and Lucy agrees, that the younger sister could "never arrive at the Trust and Credit of a Guinea-Bawd: You wou'd have too much Business of your own, ever to mind other Peoples" (108).
That these women's "stock" is their sexuality, as the Widow's complaint about her inability to profit from her reproductive capacity makes abundantly clear, is a given in the materialistic terms of the comic plot. This frank acknowledgment of the comic women's ownership of sexual and financial drives does not, however, disqualify them from sympathy with the plight of Oroonoko and Imoinda. In an astonishing moment, they leave the humorous plot and cross into the pathetic tragedy to enter Oroonoko's prison cell and free him from his chains. Again, I emphasize that I am not interested in drawing any crude equivalence between Imoinda's status as a fighting Amazon and Charlott Welldon's disguise as a man in order to compete on equal terms with men in an unscrupulous sexual marketplace.(28) I would, however, remark that this transition from profit-taking to nurturing sympathy marks Charlott's return to the reservation of socially-approved feminine behavior just as does the powerful new performance of Imoinda's submission to the cause of monogamous love: one fights to gain a husband while the other literally fights in order to defend her marriage. The slave economy of Southerne's Oroonoko appropriates these images of female aggressiveness to its own need to naturalize its foundation in the sexual and racial traffic in human flesh. The marketplace, and not the privatized realm of feeling, reigns supreme.
