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Apart from the longstanding argument about its historical authenticity, criticism of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave (1688) has tended to focus on the novella's treatment of slavery and race, specifically on the ideological significance of Behn's granting of heroic stature to an African prince.(1) Numerous scholars have made claims for Oroonoko as a kind of proto-abolitionist tract, some seeing the novella as a genuinely humanitarian statement of the evils of slavery, while others, more circumspect about casting Behn in the role of abolitionist, have insisted that Oroonoko did make an early contribution to antislavery thought, whether through its alleged criticisms of Western civilization or through its ennobling and humanizing of an African.(2) In his article, "Aphra Behn's Oroonoko: Occasion and Accomplishment," George Guffey challenged such readings by asserting that the significance of Behn's hero resides not in his African origins but in his royal blood; his enslavement, according to Guffey, presents a mirror image of the disorder inherent in the imminent deposition of the legitimate monarch, James II.(3) Guffey claims, moreover, that as an apologist for indefeasible monarchy, Behn endorses the conservative, hierarchical principles that legitimate rather than question the institution of slavery. While not wishing to read Oroonoko as an allegory of the Glorious Revolution, I want to argue in this essay that the text's ideology is distinctly royalist, but that its effort at ideological closure is undermined both by its reliance on the unstable discourse of honor and by its own continuity with a historical period whose shifting social and power relations disrupt its ostensible unity.
There is no doubt that Oroonoko influenced the development in the eighteenth century of a sentimental antislavery literature based on the depiction of noble African slaves. Indeed, part of the reason why Behn's novella can today accommodate such opposed readings lies in the intrinsic ambiguity of eighteenth-century emancipationist strategies. Abolitionists sought to counter the various arguments in defense of slavery, all of which ultimately derived their power from assumptions about the African's innate inferiority, by granting the black man an individual identity--complete with feelings, abilities, and a moral life--that made it increasingly difficult to regard him as merely an alien object in the colonial system. Yet this humanizing technique more often than not amounted to...