The Disappearing African Woman: Imoinda in Oroonoko after Behn

At the climax of a mid-eighteenth-century heroic tragedy, the black hero, discovered in a private chamber with the dead body of his white wife, urges the white men who come upon the sight to “Put up your Swords, and let not civil Broils” involve them in his own desperate fate.¹ The play in question is not a version of Othello, as the remark about (bright?) swords and civil broils might at first suggest, but rather John Hawkesworth’s 1759 Oroonoko. Clearly, as Hawkesworth refashions Thomas Southerne’s 1696 dramatization of Aphra Behn’s 1688 novella so as most readily and rightfully to fix “Attention . . . upon the two principal Characters, Oroonoko and Imoinda, who are so connected as to make but one Object, in which all the Passions of the Audience, moved by the most tender and exquisite Distress, are concentrated” (H, A2v), he has Othello—a dignified, pathetic, mid-eighteenth-century kind of Othello—in mind. The kind of transaction he conducts with the Shakespearean tragedy, however, ranges beyond establishing similarities of tone. What this revision of Southerne (and beyond him, of Behn) also appropriates is a ready theatrical language for regularizing both Shakespeare’s wild passions and the radical racial and sexual ill-ease occasioned by Oroonoko. Audiences, it would seem, had a ready-made sentimental frame of reference for a miscegenous Oroonoko, but not for one whose enslaved lovers were of the same race.

Hawkesworth’s play is only one part of a remarkable constellation of texts originating from Behn’s novella as it entered its eighteenth-century afterlife. In Behn, Imoinda is black like Oroonoko. In Hawkesworth and every other text following Behn, she is white. Only recently has this racial transformation become a subject for extended discussion in the work of postcolonial and feminist critics, primarily in relation to Southerne’s play, where it first occurs. ² Yet there are several other white Imoindas after Behn, and I would like to direct my own inquiries into some of them, rather than solely into Southerne, whose play seems to me so radical a revision and literalizing of the sexual and economic implications of Behn as to require a separate discussion of its own.

Behn’s Oroonoko, of course, poses the most obvious exception to Lynda Boose’s assertion of the “unrepresentability” of African women in early modern texts. ³ Following Janet Adelman’s psychological analysis of masculine fear of women’s reproductive power in Shakespeare, Boose argues that the reason for the virtual absence of black female characters from this discourse is the white and masculine fear that the blackness of black female characters visibly marks them as the location of that dark place through which men must pass in order to be born as men: “The mother’s part in him threatens the fantasy of perfect self-replication that would preserve the father in the son.”⁴ I follow Boose, but consider the possibility that a denial of representation to African women has other rationales than the psychic; or rather, that the psychic is supplemented and articulated by the material practices of racism. The racial revisions eighteenth-century authors make in Behn—revisions which extend beyond the color of the heroine’s skin to include Behn’s constructions of character and gender identity—are worth examining for what they reveal about the relationships the period established between the social and sexual values and meanings implied by white and black skins, and by white and black sexual bodies.

Historians of Atlantic slavery have only begun recovering the experiences of enslaved African women, detailing how their experiences in bondage differed from and overlapped with those of male slaves. ⁵ In the interest of extracting as much agricultural work from as many physically able slaves as possible, slave owners in the American colonies and the Caribbean made no distinction between male and female, putting women to work at the most difficult jobs alongside men: harnessing mules or oxen to steer crude wooden plows, cutting logs, hoeing and picking cotton, or chopping and milling sugar cane. Female slaves mined coal, dug canals...