Interrogating Oroonoko: Torture in a New World and a New Fiction of Power

This article interrogates the function and effect of the penultimate paragraph of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, where Oroonoko is tortured and executed. Reading the scene through the prism of European practices of ritual punishment and judicial torture as well as New World uses of torture, I argue that the scene cannot be read, as many critics have, as one of martyrdom. Rather, the scene emerges as closer in its rhetorical aims to those articulated by Elaine Scarry in her seminal analysis of torture, The Body in Pain (1985). As is the case with judicial and modern torture, Behn deliberately produces a body in pain in order to give legitimacy to the truth of her own narrative. Yet, in opposition to that brutal practice, she simultaneously exposes the fictional nature of her own narrative power. She reminds the reader of the violence inherent in any appropriation of another’s story for one’s own political or literary ends, and in the process paradoxically produces one of the first modern, democratic subjects.