Manual Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave

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As is the practice with all slaves, Oroonoko is renamed. His slave name is Caesar. Oroonoko soon finds out that Imoinda is a slave on the same plantation, but  ‎Dialogues · ‎Notes · ‎Links.
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The readers, aware of the discrepancy between artifice and reality, approach the text from an external position of subjectivity and take active part in the construction of meanings. Oroonoko addresses an issue revolving which the whole world had long been divided, and which is, therefore, opened to multicultural discourses. As we go along the text, we give each sequence of actions a name in order to recognize them well.

The actions are so realistically arranged that the readers can easily codify. He plots to kill Imoinda first, then to take revenge on his white persecutor, Bayam, and finally to commit suicide in order to get free of a life of slavery. The passion of romantic love and the rage of brutality has so artistically been composed that the fiction seems to be real.

Nobody knows where this brutality happened but the European master says it happened in the darkness where the African history had not yet born! The creative writers, historians, anthropologists, scholars, and the media, come forth to familiarize the myth.

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The myth, then, becomes the real? So, the romance of a slave can only ends up in dire consequences. Edward Said has perfectly said in his Culture and Imperialism that the genre of novel is basically a product of bourgeois society and an integral part of the conquests of the Western world. But in the colonial milieu of Oroonoko, the acts of commerce between colonizer and colonized are governed by hierarchical ideologies.

On the other hand, Oroonoko attempts to preserve, by act of rhetorical violence, discrepancies of race while representing the virtual impossibility of doing so in those chaotic, carnivalesque colonial spaces. The proairetic code, therefore, contributes to represent Oroonoko in terms of stereotypes. The function of hermeneutic code is obvious in this regard. It refers to any element in a story that is not explained and, therefore, exists as an enigma for the reader, raises questions, creates suspense, and the story, before resolving these questions, proceeds along its course.

In Oroonoko, Behn seems to apply all these techniques. It also raises question at what point of history it takes place and what is the place the history encompasses. It gets heightens as Behn proceeds to: If there be anything that seems Romantic, I beseech your Lordship to consider these countries do, in all things, so far differ from ours, that they produce inconceivable Wonders; at least they appear so to us because new and strange. And in doing so in the very outset of the Oroonoko, Behn has assisted the Imperial mission of producing Eurocentric knowledge.

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As Fanon asserts in his Black Skin White Mask , the European knowledge were engaged to establish the difference between black and white and science was ready to demonstrate the difference as innate so that it could not be changed. The suspense here is intensified by the mixture of fact and fiction. Behn has used the names of a lot of historical places and persons in order to make her story credible to the readers. So, a fear is also entitled in the relationship. The readers switch between the truths - friendly or fearful? It is very likely that all these ambiguities operated by the hermeneutic code are potential for new versions of meanings.

She applies the politics of the realistic narratives of creating innocent, natural, and universal world where the Europeans are represented as the enlightened master claiming to uphold the moral rights to educate the natives. In the composition of Oroonoko, Behn has employed a numbers of codes, already recognized as so called universal.

Oroonoko occupies a fictional space based on the structure of French romance. Then, the elements of chivalry are also well embodied in the text. When in Surinam he kills the tiger, saves the women, guides them through Indian colony, the image of the great hero Hercules appears before our eyes. He will remain a hero as far he can confirm to the norms.

Eighteenth-Century Fiction

The cultural coding of Oroonoko also involves the authorial voice in guise of the narrator. She has tried to naturalize some biased cultural forms. She has justified the rule of monarchy and universalized the supremacy of the whites over the blacks. All these characters are subdued by lesser people of Parliament. The politics here in the novel is so vital. Behn needs to justify the system of slavery before she enslaves her black hero.

She treats slavery as a fair means of trade. This double-edged strategy, which endows the African with human stature, while simultaneously, assumes that this human stature is by definition European. In the same way, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Behn's portrait of her African prince, of both his physical appearance and his character, is profoundly Eurocentric: His Face was not of that brown rusty Black which most of that Nation are, but of perfect Ebony, or polished Jett. His Eyes were the most awful that cou'd 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. Behn 15 It is, indeed, another way of saying that the mobs and the blacks need to be guided by enlightened aristocrats and by the white Europeans. Behn also relies on maxims in order to universalize the Eurocentric discourse. She shows Oroonoko is not wrong in choosing Trefy, a white man, as friend.

All the maxims employed here are Eurocentric which underlies the bias of the writer. As I have said earlier, discourse operates beyond text.

Oroonoko: the Royal Slave (Paperback)

The maxims here could never be universal. It points to any element in a text that suggests a particular, often additional meaning by way of connotation. As we recognize a common nucleus of connotations, we locate a theme in the text. As clusters of connotation cling to a particular proper noun we recognize a character with certain attributes. Interestingly, those clusters of connotations are also contradictory to one another, interwoven among the variety of discourses, and, therefore, foster different versions of meanings.

The characterization of Oroonoko in the novel crucially exemplifies the application of the semic code. His royalty is exterior even in his physical features. When he is in letters of slave; the European master could distinguish him. Oroonoko, as a slave in the Surinam colony, wants to hide these but it is such a thing that peeps through the veil of appearance. His royalist ego is so profound that it reflects through his bodily exposures.

Oroonoko Summary | GradeSaver

For example, when Oroonoko asks for liberty, the white colonizers start to fear him. It has been made natural that for being a Negro, the great man as Oroonoko who has saved them from dangers for many times in that colony, can also cuts their throats.


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Where this fear originated from? Their fear lies in the fact that they are the exploiters but they are few in numbers. The long suppressed rage and anger, grown out of oppression and exploitations can blow out like a volcano to vanish the oppressors. But, as the production of knowledge is in their hands, they solidify that the Negroes are like beasts and can kill humans.

They never count for their own dirt. She finds him comparatively better slave and justifies that it is for his royal origin. As we explore, all the themes of the novel have been generated from various sets of symbols.


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Throughput the novel they are most often interwoven, overlap, and cross through the binary slashes underlying ample possibility of plural meanings. They demonstrate that each narrative are multilayered, interwoven with multiple codes suggesting apparent reversed meanings. A comparative analysis between the two most crucial themes of the novel, Eurocentricity and royalty, can draw on how the so called binary pairs intervene to each other resulting in contradictory discourses.

For Example, the theme of European supremacy over the native has been symbolized in various sets of binaries throughout the novel. However, the negative poles of the first sets of binaries are interwoven with the positive poles of the second sets of binaries as the latters have also been employed in order to represent Oroonoko in different occasions of the novel.

The African slave of the first set of binaries becomes a royal hero, a great man, learned and handsome, a free wit. The cluster of meanings that centers Oroonoko, therefore, simultaneously encompasses negative and positive poles of binary pairs. He is a great man, a hero of royal origin, an ideal lover, who, however, becomes a killer. The five codes together constitute a way of interpreting the text which suggests that textuality is interpretive; that the codes are not superimposed upon the text, but, rather, approximate something that is intrinsic to the text.

Indeed, Behn's Oroonoko is a text ripe with possibilities for exploring the author's complex textualization of race discourses and representation of race and colonial slavery.


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  • Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave. A True History. By Mrs. A. Behn (London: W. Canning, )..
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    • But, the European sensibility Eurocentricity refuses to accept what is inconvenient to them. Her ambivalence in the conceptualization of Oroonoko is partly sexual and mostly racial. Therefore, what this paper exposes is that the text is deconstructed within. Rather than being stable to colonialist or pro- colonialist stance, it switches between the discourses. We use language to reflect what we conceptualize.

    And our conceptualizations are determined by particular cultures we inhibit. Therefore, meaning varies from culture to culture. By shifting the voices, Oroonoko entitles the multi-facades identity of Oroonoko and the race he represents.