Making Whiteness Visible: Slavery and Oriental She-Tragedy in Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko (1696) PDF Free Download
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Making Whiteness Visible:
Slavery and Oriental She- Tragedy in
Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko (1696)
Angelina Del Balzo
Bilkent University
Scholars have marked the Enlightenment as the time when the concep-
tion of race in Europe and settler colonies in the Americas began to solid-
ify into our modern race categories. As this focus on race formation has
become central to research and teaching in the period, texts such as Aphra
Behn’s Oroonoko () have taken a more prominent place in the scholarship
and curriculum than ever before. In the period itself, however, it was not
Behn’s novella, but Thomas Southerne’s stage adaptation that was more
widely known. The stage Oroonoko and its adaptation by John Hawkesworth
() remained among the most popular theatrical productions well into the
nineteenth century. Famously, Southerne makes one signicant change that
remained in the various revivals and adaptations of his Oroonoko through-
out the following century and a half: Imoinda, the enslaved African prin-
cess and wife to Oroonoko, becomes a white woman, the daughter of a
European who joined the Coramantien court. In the context of the history
of abolition, Imoinda’s change in race is striking, since it eliminates the
opportunity for representing an enslaved Black woman onstage. The theat-
rical Imoinda stands as an irreconcilable paradox: a white woman enslaved
under chattel slavery as practiced in the Americas. Then, as now, this is a
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8 Eighteenth-Century Life
well- documented historical impossibility. But while the play’s depiction of
Imoinda is unusual, its formal structure is actually characteristic of tragedy
of the period. I argue that the dramatic conventions of the Oriental she-
tragedy make this representation of the white Imoinda imaginatively viable,
and that the dissonance of her character reveals the contradictory nature of
racial thought in the long eighteenth century.
Many scholars have oered dierent explanations, or emphasized dif-
ferent aspects, of what the white Imoinda says about the period, part of a
conversation that Srinivas Aravamudan terms the “imoindaism” of Oroonoko
studies. Derek Hughes suggests that Imoinda’s slavery could be read as
part of the historic discourse that described transported convicts and inden-
tured servants as “white slaves.” The white Imoinda is part of the adapta-
tion’s “Othellocation,” which Virginia Mason Vaughn calls the trend of
giving Black characters similar characteristics to Othello, arguably the most
important Black character in English theater, in one of the most frequently
performed Shakespeare plays in the period. Anthony Gerard Barthelemy
notes that while Oroonoko shares the miscegenated romance at its core with
Othello, the context of chattel slavery means that Oroonoko experiences the
powerlessness and vulnerability that Othello only fears. Others emphasize
how Oroonoko deals with white femininity specically. Suvir Kaul argues
that the space of Behn’s white woman narrator is taken by Imoinda when
the novella is adapted to the stage. Felicity Nussbaum extensively tracks
the different factors that may have contributed to Imoinda’s newfound
whiteness, including a reluctance to feature white actresses in blackface
and a desire to have Imoinda represent a universal (European) femininity.
Later in the eighteenth century, when Southerne’s play was being revived
and rewritten to reect abolitionist narratives, the white Imoinda repre-
sented a proto- feminist linking of women’s oppression in England to that
of enslaved Africans in the empire. As Joyce Green MacDonald points out,
the white Imoinda works both to erase Black women from the stage and to
remind white women of their relative “social erasure” through her enslave-
ment (). Lyndon J. Dominique argues that Imoinda works on two dif-
ferent levels during the long eighteenth century: on the stage, she is seen
as English, while she is read as African in the published works (and their
accompanying illustrations). The changing and mutually constitutive dis-
courses of race and gender are complicated, and I have no doubt that all of
these arguments help explain not only why Southerne made this change,
but also why it was accepted and embraced for more than a century.
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Making Whiteness Visible 9
I think it would be a mistake to look for one single explanation for
Imoinda’s change of race when seventeenth- and eighteenth- century con-
ceptions about race and gender are so variable. But there is another reason
for this shift being omitted from the previous scholarship, and that is how
genre expectations for theater generally and tragedy specically created a
theatrical language of enslaved white femininity. This generic explanation
comes from the new forms of tragedy that emerged with the reopening of
the theaters. The new, indoor- based Restoration theaters helped spur on
developments in theatrical machinery, shown- o with plays set in exotic
locations, as with Inigo Jones’s revolutionary set design for William Dav-
enant’s The Siege of Rhodes (). This emphasis on grand spectacle com-
bined with nascent globalization popularized the Oriental tragedy, which
dramatized international empires both as metaphoric explorations of Eng-
lish global ambitions and as a means of negotiating moments of cultural
contact. The Ottoman Empire was a particular object of interest, result-
ing from a period of Ottoman territorial expansion in the s and s.
Ottoman plays most often depicted Solyman the Magnicent (Suleiman I),
the greatest sultan from the empire’s sixteenth- century prime. These nar-
ratives usually include or center on depictions of the women of the harem,
the secluded women’s quarters in Topkapı Palace where the sultan’s con-
cubines lived.
The reign of Suleiman I also oered playwrights the opportunity to
showcase the actress through the character of his queen Roxolana. Hür-
rem Sultan, known in the West as Roxolana or Roxelana, was captured by
slave traders in what is now Ukraine and rose from a harem concubine to
become the rst legal wife of a sultan in over a century. Roxolana along
with the unrelated character that shares her name in Nathaniel Lee’s The
Rival Queens () helped establish the stock character of the virago East-
ern/Oriental queen in the repertoire. Roxolana’s popularity and the rst
unnamed actress’s appearance as Desdemona in Othello revealed that now,
gender is inseparable from dramatizations of race and empire. As these
women became some of the most successful and popular actors, playwrights
employed them in “she- tragedies,” which emphasized stories of pathos and
distress. In Oriental tragedy, this often took the form of women enslaved
in or threatened with enslavement in the Ottoman harem.
With the prevalence of these often- overlapping genres, Restoration
drama invited explicit comparisons between domestic and foreign atti-
tudes toward gender (Orr, ). While many scholars have pointed to how
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10 Eighteenth-Century Life
Behn’s Oroonoko draws on the generic conventions of heroic drama for her
tale of the “Royal Slave,” what has been unexplored is how Southerne,
in adapting the novel to the stage, “translates” the narrative to incorpo-
rate tropes of Restoration tragedy. In doing so, he makes the incongruous
white Imoinda make generic sense: Oriental she- tragedy primed audiences
to see and sympathize with the suering of enslaved European women. If,
as Sara Ahmed has shown, whiteness “gains currency by being unnoticed,”
the stage Oroonoko (to use Kim F. Hall’s phrase) makes whiteness visible.
The white Imoinda revealed the way that gendered performance worked
through naturalizing white women as the default sympathetic subject for
Enlightenment audiences.
A white Imoinda was also made possible by the instability of scien-
tic and cultural understandings of physical and cultural dierences in
the period. What counted was religious and clothing dierences, not skin
color. Explanations for skin- color dierence itself were drawn from older
Galenic humoral theory, but were also being oered by Robert Boyle and
Isaac Newton. Even as the discussions of race were marked more by
debate than consensus, however, slavery was becoming an explicitly race-
based and gendered practice in the Atlantic world. The rst English slave
code established in Barbados in designated separate categories for the
enslavement of “Negroes” and for conduct toward white servants, signify-
ing the island’s growing reliance on chattel slavery over indentured Euro-
pean labor, and the infamous French code noir established a racial hier-
archy that made enslavement a matrilineal inheritance. Slavery in the
Mediterranean and the Black Sea regions not only preceded the Atlantic
slave trade, but also continued during the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies and beyond. The major dierence between Ottoman and Atlan-
tic slavery is not that the latter was racialized and the former was not, but
that dierent groups had dierent experiences under Ottoman slavery, and
Europeans were not excluded from the possibility of Ottoman enslave-
ment. Importantly, the Ottoman Empire included a form of enslavement
that explicitly targeted women whom we would now categorize as white:
the mostly Circassian and Eastern European non- Muslim women of the
harem.
Oriental she- tragedy oered the opportunity to feature women in slav-
ery scenarios that emphasized their pathos, often from the threat of or the
result of sexual violation. Unlike Aristotelian or Jacobean tragedy, Res-
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Making Whiteness Visible 1 1
toration tragedy is dened by the emotions depicted onstage and by their
eects on audiences, rather than by aesthetic or formal qualities. As Laura
Brown contends, seventeenth- century tragedy is not concerned with hubris
but rather brings pathos to the forefront:
The unique and dening characteristic of this form is its dependence
upon the audience’s pitying response. The characters and episodes of an
aective tragedy are comprehensible not in terms of an internal standard
of judgment that directs our assessments and expectations, but rather
in terms of the expressed pathos of the situation. In the ctional world
posited by such a form, merit is either ignored or assumed, and action and
meaning depend upon the aective power of the protagonist’s plight.20
It is not the actions of the protagonist, as in Greek tragedy, that matter, but
rather the response of the audience to the distress dramatized. Part of this
is the result of contemporary translations of Aristotle: Renaissance trans-
lations of the Poetics interpreted “pathos” as feeling; only later philologists
would read “pathos” as a dramatic action. The tragic focus is not on an
inner conict or aw brought to disaster by action, but on external factors.
The appearance of the actress on the professional London stage for
the rst time caused Restoration and eighteenth- century English tragedy,
in contrast to Shakespearean tragedy and French neoclassicism, to empha-
size expression of specically female pathos. Elizabeth Howe, Jean Mars-
den, Felicity Nussbaum, and Brett Wilson have demonstrated that actresses
were central to the development of English drama in the Restoration and
eighteenth century. The tropes of she- tragedy, developed in the s,
which focused on the heroine’s distress often caused by her sexual sin or
violation, crossed over into the seemingly male- dominated genres of Ori-
ental tragedy and heroic drama, where the life- and- death stakes of the
imperial project were dramatized through women caught in the middle
of the conicts of empire (Marsden, ). The conuence of the genres of
heroic drama, Oriental tragedy, and she- tragedy meant that frequently the
actress’s distress was depicted in slavery and captivity scenarios.
Oroonoko is one of the earliest dramatic representations of the slavery
that Britain itself was participating in (and would control for much of the
following century); the visual and literary vocabularies for slavery onstage
came from its predecessors, which all include captivity in very dierent
forms than those characterizing contemporary chattel slavery. Those depic-
tions of slavery were not all Orientalist fantasy; rather, they were dramatiz-
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12 Eighteenth-Century Life
ing and romanticizing a very real form of slavery that had its own compli-
cated racial and gendered logic. Southerne’s dramatization of Imoinda takes
a virtually silent but militantly active character in Behn’s narrative and
recalibrates her story into the mode of she- tragedy, where she is marked by
her eloquent but passive suering. Her whiteness is central to the remaking
of Imoinda into a sentimental character of sympathy for the stage.
While many dramas set in global locations during the Restoration
meant that actresses portrayed characters that would now be categorized
as “women of color,” these were not the terms used at the time. An Eng-
lish actress portraying an indigenous American, such as Anne Bracegir-
dle in Behn’s The Widdow Ranter (), would not necessarily register as
racialized. To take Bracegirdle’s Indian queen as an example, Joseph Roach
argues that the character’s foreignness and exoticism are paradoxically used
to enhance the whiteness of the actress playing her. While Semernia is not
rendered European/white diegetically in the way that Imoinda is, they are
both examples of what Roach describes as “blanched white . . exotic trag-
edy queens.” The famous mezzotint of Bracegirdle as Semernia shows the
actress in exotic dress (including feathers like the ones mentioned in Oroo-
noko or like those Behn provided for a performance of Dryden’s The Indian
Queen), but Bracegirdle herself is marked by her lightness, juxtaposed
against her darker attendants, the storm clouds in the background, and
the parasol shielding her skin from the elements. In fact, this separation
of diegetic indigeneity and the recorded image of aristocratic lightness in
performance reveals the ways that these tragedies with exotic settings were
used to explore the possibilities and failures of European empires, rather
than the Asian, African, and American empires of the narratives them-
selves. For my purposes here, and to understand further how Imoinda is
able to become white in Oroonoko, we need to distinguish between charac-
ters played as women of color, and characters who actually were women of
color. Unlike Bracegirdle’s Indian Queen, Imoinda as rst played by Jane
Rodgers is reinforced by the narrative, and becomes an explicit example of
the English actress’s whiteness.
A successful dramatist herself, Behn, as has been argued elsewhere,
incorporates many tropes into her prose, but there are some signicant dif-
ferences between how she engages with these tropes, and how Southerne
employs them for the stage. Both Behn and Southerne use the represen-
tational vocabulary of the more frequently dramatized Ottoman slavery in
order to depict the less familiar (at the time) West African and American
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Making Whiteness Visible 1 3
slavery, respectively. Oroonoko and Imoinda are enslaved through events
that transpire in the Coramantien court. Unaware that she has married his
grandson, the king takes Imoinda into the otan, “the palace of the king’s
women, a sort of seraglio” (), which seems more at home in an Oriental
tale than in West Africa. He gives Imoinda a “royal veil,” a command to
come to his bed (), evoking the myth of the purple handkerchief, said to
be the way that the Ottoman sultan signaled which concubine he would
sleep with that night. Oroonoko conspires to sneak into the otan and
successfully consummates his marriage with Imoinda, but is unable to res-
cue her. For her betrayal of the king, Imoinda is sold into chattel slavery,
but Oroonoko is told that she has been given the less dishonorable penalty
of death. Many critics have pushed back on a simplistic reading of Behn’s
global engagements as exclusively evidence of Saidian orientalism, reect-
ing only English ignorance. I argue that the depiction of the otan as a
harem is another example of Behn incorporating dramatic form into the
novel: her hero’s story may pull from heroic drama, but her heroine’s jour-
ney begins in the Oriental she- tragedy.
Yet while the Coramantien court is an Oriental- like setting, the nar-
rative arc and emotional register do not convey the same threat to sexual
chastity that is crucial to the female distresses of Oriental she- tragedy.
Behn almost immediately neutralizes any real sexual threat to Imoinda
from the old king, who is clearly and repeatedly described as impotent.
He may lust after Imoinda and conspire to imprison her out of the reach
of his grandson Oroonoko, but he is incapable of penetration, and “could
but innocently play” (). This is still an obstacle to the lovers, but the real
threat is not the threat of Imoinda’s sexual violation by the king, but rather
her potential state execution and eventual sale into chattel slavery as pun-
ishment for Oroonoko’s assignation with a member of the otan. Similarly,
when enslaved on the Surinam plantation and given the name Clemene,
Imoinda remains unpenetrated. Trefry, the Surinam administrator who
befriends Oroonoko during the Middle Passage, falls for Imoinda but does
not (and seemingly cannot) take advantage of her:
I confess, said Trefry, when I have, against her will entertained her with
love so long as to be transported with my passion, even above decency,
I have been ready to make use of those advantages of strength and force
Nature has given me. But oh! she disarms me with that modesty and
weeping so tender and so moving that I retire, and thank my stars she
overc ame me. ( – )
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14 Eighteenth-Century Life
Trefry reports what could be a scene from a she- tragedy, where Imoin-
da’s sentimental tears would be the paradigmatic representation of female
pathos. Behn presents a fantasy where an enslaved Black woman avoids
rape and where the brutal system of plantation slavery allows Oroonoko
and Imoinda to enjoy a bourgeois marriage that would be unavailable to
them while free in West Africa. The reader gets a reported scene featur-
ing Imoinda’s distress, but Behn resists representing that pathos directly.
Ultimately, however, the realities of chattel slavery come home when
Imoinda becomes pregnant with Oroonoko’s child. While sexual coer-
cion was a part of both Middle Eastern and chattel slavery, the progeny
produced left women in drastically dierent positions. As described in
Oroonoko, children born to enslaved mothers took on their enslaved status
(despite their fathers frequently being the enslavers), and enslaved families
were often violently separated. For much of its history, the sultanate did
not operate through a system of primogeniture, and so children born in
the harem were all equally eligible to succeed as the sultan (Peirce, – ).
Being the mother of the sultan was one of the ways for women to attain
power, by becoming valide sultan, the highest authority in the harem. The
pregnancy leads Oroonoko to rebel, in order to prevent his child, his royal
heir, from being born enslaved:
This new accident made him more impatient of liberty. . . . They fed him
from day to day with promises, and delayed him till the Lord Governor
should come, so that he began to suspect them of falsehood, and that they
would delay him till the time of his wife’s delivery, and make a slave of that
too, for all the breed is theirs to whom the parents belong. ()
When the rebellion fails, Oroonoko and Imoinda take to the forest where
he kills her, her face “smiling with joy she should die by so noble a hand
and be sent in her own country (for that is their notion of the next world)
by him she so tenderly loved and so truly adored in this” (). Imoinda’s
nal aect is joy at the promise of a reunion with her husband in the land
of their birth after death. Oroonoko himself is captured and stoically
endures his execution by dismemberment. Oroonoko ends as a noble hero
being torn apart, a death almost impossible to represent on the stage.
Southerne’s stage adaptation retains many of Behn’s scenarios drawn
from Oriental she- tragedy but changes them so that their actual staging is
in keeping with the conventions of the genre. Most visibly, Southerne adds
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Making Whiteness Visible 1 5
not one but four white women to the narrative, consistent with the practice
of Restoration stage adaptations adding female characters. In addition
to Imoinda, Southerne adds a comic subplot featuring the Welldon sis-
ters, who have traveled to the New World “a Husband- hunting” (I.i.).
Charlot Welldon passes herself o as Lucy’s brother, which is a Restoration
comedy of manners trope featuring an actress breeches role running paral-
lel to and occasionally intersecting with the main narrative. Charlot draws
comparisons between the lot of women on the marriage market and in the
global chattel slavery markets: “This is your Market for Slaves; my sister
is a Free Woman, and must not be dispos’d of in publick” (I.ii.). The
comparison has limits; the two positions must be distinct in order to be
compared, and, as Joyce Green MacDonald points out, there’s a dierence
between “being ‘treated as’ a commodity” and “actually being a commodity”
(, emphasis in the original). The Welldon sisters’ subplot, then, throws
Imoinda’s race into relief through repeated descriptions and reenactments
of the position of white women, making Imoinda’s whiteness visible as such
and not as just a standard, “unraced,” she- tragic heroine. When Hawkes-
worth adapted Oroonoko into his explicitly abolitionist version in , the
Welldon sisters disappeared, the generic hybridity of Southerne’s play fall-
ing out of fashion by the midcentury. But removing them reduced the play’s
engagement with white femininity, reinforcing the sentimental elements of
Imoinda’s story in keeping with other abolitionist art and literature at the
time.
When white actresses performed Imoinda, the character shifted from
the object of prose to the speaking subject of the stage, to use Candy B. K.
Schille’s dichotomy. But critics have remarked on Imoinda’s newfound
passivity, despite her increase in dialogue. Yet her lack of agency, rather
than evidence of Southerne’s weaknesses, is actually part of what makes
Oroonoko a successful she- tragedy, as dened by Jean Marsden:
The dening characteristic of the genre, this obsession with tainted
female sexuality, constitutes a “technology of gender” in which female
sexuality is both demonized and dened as a treasure for homosocial
exchange. In these plays, the woman does not control her own sexuality;
rather, possession of her body is fought over and displayed by the play’s
male characters. In the semiotics of she- tragedy, control of a woman’s
sexuality is marked by control of the gaze, and the she- tragedy heroine
spends much of her time on stage subjected to a gaze explicitly dened
as male. ()
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16 Eighteenth-Century Life
The sexual threat to Imoinda is given new prominence onstage, as the
tragic hero (Oroonoko) and the villain (the Lieutenant Governour of Suri-
nam) vie for access to her body. She is an object of homosocial exchange, as
male characters together discuss the governour’s desire for her. And instead
of dying by slit throat and decapitation, as in the novella, she stabs herself
with the phallic dagger when the rebellion fails.
Many of the dierences between the page and the stage can be under-
stood as necessitated by having to adjust the story in accordance with
dramatic conventions of the time. Restricting itself to a unity of place,
Southerne’s Oroonoko is set entirely in Surinam, reducing the Coraman-
tien portion of the novella to a speech, when Oroonoko tells Blandford,
who serves the lieutenant governour, about his past. As Oroonoko explains,
Imoinda is brought to Angola as an infant of a white convert who fought
in Coramantien’s wars, and who dies on the battlefield in Oroonoko’s
arms after taking a poisoned dart meant for the prince. Oroonoko’s speech
describing how he woos Imoinda clearly shows the Othellocation of Oroo-
noko (Vaughan, ). As Othello woos Desdemona with the stories from his
life as a military adventurer, so Oroonoko woos Imoinda with the spoils
of war (including the captured slaves) and through their conversations. But
this speech also sets up the story as a she- tragedy, describing the sentimen-
tal domesticity that has been disrupted:
Oroonoko. I presented her
With all the Slaves of Battel to attone
Her Father’s Ghost. But when I saw her Face,
And heard her speak, I oer’d up my self
To be the Sacrice. She bow’d and blush’d;
I wonder’d and ador’d. The Sacred Pow’r
That had subdu’d me, then inspir’d my Tongue,
Inclin’d her Heart; and all our Talk was Love.
Blandford. Then you were happy.
Oro. O! I was too happy.
I marry’d her: And though my Countrey’s Custom
Indulg’d the Privilege of many Wives,
I swore my self never to know but her.
She grew with Child, and I grew happier still.
O my Imoinda! ( II .ii ,. – )
Oroonoko achieves the ultimate in domestic bliss, a monogamous mar-
riage with a pregnant wife, setting up the she- tragic scenario of the chaste
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Making Whiteness Visible 1 7
wife under threat. Imoinda’s virtue is proven in part by her whiteness, her
blushes emphasizing the paleness of her skin. Already, the tragic ending
that will destroy the possibility of this domesticity returning is foreshad-
owed by Oroonoko’s self- nomination “to be the Sacrice” in exchange for
her father’s loss.
Continuing with his backstory, Oroonoko recounts the tale of the
otan/harem, the rst of two scenarios that feature sexual threats. If the
story of Oroonoko and Imoinda’s love is Othello mixed with the sentimen-
tal, the story of their tragic separation is almost identical to stories of the
Ottoman harem:
But it could not last.
Her fatal Beauty reach’d my Father’s Ears:
He sent for her to Court, where, cursed Court!
No Woman comes, but for his Amorous Use.
He raging to possess her, she was forc’d
To own her self my Wife. The furious King
Started at Incest: But grown desperate,
Not daring to enjoy what he desir’d,
In mad Revenge, which I cou’d never learn,
He Poyson’d her, or sent her far, far o,
Far from my hopes ever to see her more. (II.ii.)
In Southerne’s adaptation, Imoinda is brought to Oroonoko’s father’s court
to serve the king sexually like an Ottoman concubine, and the only thing
that prevents her sexual violation is the king’s belief that father and son
having sex with the same woman is a form of incest. Oroonoko rehearses
in speech what will later be staged in the play’s conation of the plantation
with the Ottoman court: the male authority’s sexual threat to the enslaved
woman’s chastity.
The Lieutenant Governour of Surinam is the sultan- like authority g-
ure in Oroonoko. Oroonoko and Imoinda have been separated after being
sold to slave traders, and at the moment, they do not realize that they are
both enslaved at the same plantation in Surinam. Unbeknownst to Oroo-
noko, the governour is in love with Imoinda. Like Behn’s Trefry, the gover-
nour does not initially wish to force Imoinda to sleep with him, and hopes
to woo her as he would a free woman. The governour’s initial insistence on
Imoinda’s consent appears to rearm her whiteness, in that she is accorded
a freedom ascribed as unique to English women that women in chattel slav-
ery (as well as in Ottoman slavery) were denied:
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18 Eighteenth-Century Life
Governour. I’ll give you ten Slaves, for her.
Blandford. You know that she is our Lord Governour’s: but if I could
Dispose of her, I wou’d not now, especially to you.
Gov. Why not to me?
Blandford. I mean against her Will. You are in love with her.
And we all know what your desires wou’d have:
Love stops at nothing but possession.
Were she within your pow’r, you do not know
How soon you wou’d be tempted to forget
The Nature of the Deed, and, may be, act
A violence, you after wou’d repent.
Oro. ’Tis Godlike in you to protect the weak.
Gov. Fye, fye, I wou’d not force her. Tho’ she be
A Slave, her Mind is free, and shou’d consent.
Oro. Such Honour will engage her to consent:
And then, if you’r in love, she’s worth the having.
Shall we not see this wonder?
Gov. Have a care;
You have a Heart, and she has conquering Eyes. (II.iii.)
Momentarily, Imoinda is imbued with far greater power than she had as
an enslaved woman. Her eyes have the ability to “conquer” and to tempt
violent “possession” even as she is a literal possession. The insidious aspect
of whiteness emerges here even as it is unstated. In the historical moment
of both the original premiere and the subsequent revivals over the course of
the following century, enslaved Black women could not consent. The real-
ity of enslavement is not completely glossed over, however; other characters
point out the impossibility of consent for Imoinda in this context, especially
if she were sold to the governour himself.
While the governour never carries out the threat of rape in the nar-
rative, the play stages a moment of sexual violation with Imoinda’s rst
appearance. In she- tragedy, the representation of sexual violence was
accomplished through a particular mise- en- scène, indicated through visual
signs of violation, as Marsden explains:
Although rapes do not actually occur onstage, the audience is frequently
presented with a preliminary scene in which the virtuous heroine is
threatened by the villain, and in some plays in which the rape is successful,
subsequent scenes in which the ravished woman is presented to eyes of
other characters and the audience. . . . This violent sense of pathos appears
most conspicuously in the scenes of attempted rape, where violence
represents an essential part of pathos, and where the ravished woman
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Making Whiteness Visible 1 9
becomes the source of visual pleasure. The eect of such scenes depends on
the objectication of the heroine, on her representation as both object of
pity and object of desire. ()
Oroonoko’s preliminary scene, where the she- tragedy heroine is threat-
ened by the villain, inverts the master/slave dynamic. The governour woos
Imoinda by saying she is the master and he the slave, but his actions clearly
indicate the opposite:
Governour. You must not weep: I come to dry your Tears,
And raise you from your Sorrow. Look upon me:
Look with the Eyes of kind indulging Love,
That I may have full cause for what I say:
I come to oer you your liberty
And be my self the Slave. You turn away.
But every thing becomes you. I may take
This pretty hand: I know your Modesty
Wou’d draw it back: but you wou’d take it ill;
If I shou’d let it go, I know you wou’d.
You shall be gently forc’d to please your self;
That you will thank me for.
She struggles, and gets her hand from him, then he oers to kiss her.
Nay, if you struggle with me, I must take. —
Imo. You may, my life, that I can part with freely. Exit. (II.iii.)
Despite his “romantic” performance as the slave of Imoinda, he does ulti-
mately end up resorting to force. As in she- tragedy, Southerne implies a
violation without dramatizing the act itself. The governour grabs Imoinda’s
hand, saying this is what she really wants despite her pretense to modesty,
and implies coerced masturbation as she is “forc’d to threat please [her]
self.” Imoinda’s enslavement renders her powerless in the face of this sexual
threat, creating the pity required for Restoration tragedy. Imoinda’s viola-
tion is then staged before the governour’s nal attempt to assault her at the
end of the play: “you may still / Refuse to grant, so I have Power to take. /
The Man that asks deserves to be deny’d” (V.iii.). In a genre where the
sexual violation of women is commonplace and the historical circumstances
included enslaved Black women who were forced into birthing enslaved
children, the governour’s initial niceties are, understandably, short- lived.
The stage Imoinda is shaped by a more ambivalently racial genre than the
original Imoinda, which had yet to represent the emerging racial hierarchy
fully.
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20 Eighteenth-Century Life
But while the narrative directly enacts tropes from the Oriental she-
tragedy, there are aspects of contemporary slavery in the Americas that
both Oroonokos cannot ignore, and that then result in the incongruous
image of a white woman experiencing childbirth under chattel slavery.
Behind Oroonoko’s fateful decision to join the rebellion, despite his initial
belief that property rights take precedent over his own human rights, is his
realization that his royal lineage would continue, but would continue as
children born into slavery. While Oroonoko is distressed by this thought,
it is Imoinda who gets a pathetic speech, as she describes her wish for death
rather than for Oroonoko to hate her for bearing his children into slavery:
Imoinda. There is no safety from it: I have long
Suer’d it with a Mother’s labouring pains;
And can no longer. Kill me, kill me now,
While I am blest, and happy in your love;
Rather than let me live to see you hate me:
As you must hate me; me, the only cause;
The Fountain of these owing miseries:
Dry up this Spring of Life, this pois’nous Spring,
That swells so fast, to overwhelm us all. (III.ii. – )
This serves as one of Imoinda’s moments of she- tragic distress. As Oroo-
noko invokes his own death in his act I speech, here Imoinda describes the
murder that she will beg from Oroonoko after the rebellion fails, only to
kill herself in the end. Imoinda’s white body carries the grammar of the
enslaved Black woman as described by Hortense Spillers: she worries that
she will lose Oroonoko’s love because their son’s enslaved status comes from
her (“the only cause”), not from him. The brutality of chattel slavery rup-
tures the generic formulae of she- tragedy enacted by the white Imoinda.
The dissonance of the white Imoinda is clear in retrospect, but was also
legible in its contemporary moment, as the plantation system enriched the
metropole.
What I am arguing is not that Oroonoko provides a coherent vision of
modern racial categories in a completely dierent way from other Restora-
tion plays, but rather that the play elucidates the contradictory and unstable
racial categories that were endemic to the theater at the time. Imoinda,
unlike other characters in Oriental she- tragedy, makes her whiteness visible
through the incongruity of her situation in chattel slavery. Oroonoko shows
us how Restoration tragedy contributed to, though in no way articulated
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Making Whiteness Visible 2 1
the gendered suering that would eventually become understood as white.
Imoinda’s presence is visually dissonant to modern readers, and that is a
perspective that was possible for contemporary audiences as well. At the
same time as British spectators were moved by the plight of an enslaved
white woman onstage, they beneted from the horrors of Atlantic slavery
experienced by the millions of Black women erased from Oroonoko.
Notes
. See most recently Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Andrew S. Curran, Who’s
Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth- Century Invention of Race
(Cambridge: Harvard Univ., ).
. Joyce Green MacDonald, Women and Race in Early Modern Texts (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ., ), – , and Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropocopolitans:
Colonialism and Agency, 1688 – 1804 (Durham: Duke Univ., ), .
. Thomas Southerne, “Oroonoko,” in Versions of Blackness: Key Texts on Slavery
from the Seventeenth Century, ed. Derek Hughes (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.,
), n. Subsequent references use this text.
. Virginia Mason Vaughan, Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500 – 1800
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., ), – .
. Anthony Gerard Barthelemy, Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of
Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
Univ., ), .
. Suvir Kaul, “Reading Literary Symptoms: Colonial Pathologies and the
Oroonoko Fictions of Behn, Southerne, and Hawkesworth,” Eighteenth- Century Life
. (): – , especially .
. Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and
Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., ), – .
. Lyndon J. Dominique, Imoinda’s Shade: Marriage and the African Woman
in Eighteenth- Century British Literature, 1759 – 1808 (Columbus: Ohio State Univ.,
), .
. Bridget Orr, Empire on the English Stage, 1660 – 1714 (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ., ), – .
. Examples include Davenant’s The Siege of Rhodes (); Roger Boyle, Earl
of Orrey’s Mustapha, the Son of Solyman the Magnicent (); and Elkanah Settle’s
Ibrahim, or The Illustrious Bassa (). Solyman was also a name used in other
Ottoman tragedies, such as Mary Pix’s Ibrahim, the Thirteenth Emperor of the Turks
(), and Joseph Trapp’s Abra- mule, or Love and Empire ().
. See Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England, 1662 – 1785
(Oxford: Oxford Univ., ), – .
. Nussbaum, Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and Eighteenth- Century
British Theater (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania, ), , .
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22 Eighteenth-Century Life
. Sara Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” Feminist Theory ():
– ; the quotation is from , and Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of
Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell Univ., ), .
. Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Dierence in
Eighteenth- Century British Culture (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania, ),
– , and Helen Thompson, Fictional Matter: Empiricism, Corpuscles, and the Novel
(Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania, ), – .
. Andrew Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of
Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ., ), – .
. In rightly emphasizing the unique horrors of chattel slavery, we might be
tempted to minimize the cruelty of Middle Eastern/Mediterranean slavery. I hope
to draw comparisons between their stage representations here, not in their historical
practice. See Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in
the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500 – 1800 (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, ); Michael Guasco, Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the
Early Modern Atlantic World (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania, ), – ; and
Mohammed Ennaji, Slavery, the State, and Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., ).
. For example, “Chief Black Eunuch” and “Chief White Eunuch” were both
ocial titles in the Ottoman harem hierarchy. See George Junne, The Black Eunuchs
of the Ottoman Empire: Networks of Power in the Court of the Sultan (London: I. B.
Tauris, ).
. Leslie P. Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman
Court (Oxford: Oxford Univ., ), .
. Robert D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth
Century (Oxford: Clarendon, ), – .
. Laura Brown, English Dramatic Form, 1660 – 1760: An Essay in Generic
History (New Haven: Yale Univ., ), .
. Blair Hoxby, What Was Tragedy?: Theory and the Early Modern Canon
(Oxford: Oxford Univ., ), .
. See Elizabeth Howe, The First English Actresses: Women and Drama, 1660 –
1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., ); Jean I. Marsden, Fatal Desire: Women,
Sexuality, and the English Stage, 1660 – 1720 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ., ); Nussbaum,
Rival Queens; and Brett D. Wilson, A Race of Female Patriots: Women and Public
Spirit on the British Stage, 1688 – 1745 (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ., ). Even a play
so apparently antithetical to the she- tragedy as Joseph Addison’s Cato features a
prominent subplot around a woman’s marriage and threatened sexual violation.
. These plays include but are not limited to William Davenant’s The Siege of
Rhodes (); the Earl of Orrey’s Mustapha (); Elkanah Settle’s Ibrahim ();
Catharine Trotter’s Agnes de Castro (); William Congreve’s The Mourning Bride
(); William Mountfort’s Zelmane (); and Delarivier Manley’s Almyna ().
. Joseph Roach, It (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan, ), .
. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (), ed. Janet Todd (London: Penguin, ), .
Subsequent quotations are cited in text. See Roach, It, – .
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Making Whiteness Visible 2 3
. Laura J. Rosenthal, Ways of the World: Theater and Cosmopolitanism in the
Restoration and Beyond (Ithaca: Cornell Univ., ), – .
. Ramesh Mallipeddi, Spectacular Suering: Witnessing Slavery in the
Eighteenth- Century British Atlantic (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia, ), – .
. There are no Ottoman records of life for the harem in this period; since
European sources are often more speculative than informative, it is unlikely that this
myth is accurate. See Peirce, Imperial Harem, – .
. See, for example, Rebekah Mitsein, “Trans- Saharan Worlds and World
Views in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,” Eighteenth- Century Fiction (): –, and
Chi- ming Yang, “Asia Out of Place: The Aesthetics of Incorruptibility in Behn’s
Oroonoko,” Eighteenth- Century Studies (): – .
. Marta Figlerowicz, “ ‘Frightful Spectacles of a Mangled King’: Aphra Behn’s
Oroonoko and Narration through Theater,” New Literary History (): – ,
especially .
. See Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American
Grammar Book,” Diacritics (): – .
. John Dryden and William Davenant, for example, add female characters in
their Shakespeare adaptation, The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island ().
. Sentiment was deployed in both pro- and antislavery literature; see George
E. Boulukos, “Maria Edgeworth’s ‘Grateful Negro’ and the Sentimental Argument
for Slavery,” Eighteenth- Century Life . (): – .
. Candy B. K. Schille, “Harems and Master Narratives: Imoinda’s Story in
Oroonoko,” Journal of African Travel- Writing (): – .
•
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