The Passion of Oroonoko: Passive Obedience, The Royal Slave, and Aphra Behn's Baroque Realism

The Passion of Oroonoko situatues Aphra Behn's novella Oroonoko (1689) within the context of debates about passive obedience and political obligation during the Revolution of 1688-9. It argues that Oroonoko leverages residual theories and forms of representing human action (baroque allegory, romance, patriarchal theories of obligation) against emergent ones (realism, novels, individuality) ultimately demonstrating that the natural fact (or natural law) of human passivity inevitability prevails.