2
The Author-Monarch and the Royal Slave
Oroonoko and the Blackness of Representation

Prostitution was not Behn's only metaphor for authorship. In the early eighties, the prologues and epilogues to her works featured a different figure: the author-monarch. The royalist politics of her most popular comedies during these years—The Rover, Part II (1681), The City Heiress (1682), The Roundheads (1682), The False Count (1682)—carried over into her self-presentations, especially into the presentations of the financial exchange between herself and her audience. The playhouse audience became the object of raillery for its stinginess and low tastes; and the playwright implies that just as she has been loyal to her king, the audience should reform and be loyal to her.

Although it is clear from both the success of these comedies and the abuse the Whig playwrights heaped on Behn during this period that her audience was indeed large and loyal, the conceit of the epilogue to The Rover, Part II is that the playgoers, like a Whiggish parliament, are on the verge of rebellion:

Poets are Kings of Wit, and you appear
A Parliament, by Play-Bill, summon'd here;
When e're in want, to you for aid they fly,
And a new Play's the Speech that begs supply:
But now—
The scanted Tribute is so slowly paid,
Our Poets must find out another Trade;
They've tried all ways th'insatiate Clan to please,
Have parted with their old Prerogatives,
Their Birth-right Satiring, and their just pretence
Of judging even their own Wit and Sense;
And write against their Consciences, to show

How dull they can be to comply with you.
.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
And yet you'll come but once, unless by stealth,
Except the Author be for Commonwealth.^[1]

The monarch and the whore might seem incompatible metaphors for authorship, the monarch stressing the masculine qualities of commanding presence and forthright self-expression and the whore stressing the feminine modes of manipulative invisibility and deceptive disguise. Indeed, Behn sometimes figured the adoption of her political persona as putting off the mask of the prostitute, a "true," full revelation of the real author: "The Vizor's off," declares the actress who recites the epilogue to The Roundheads ,

                               and now I dare appear.
High for the Royal Cause in Cavalier;
Tho once [I seemed] as true a Whig as most of you,
Cou'd cant, and lye, preach, and dissemble too:
So far you drew me in, but faith I'll be
Reveng'd on you for thus debauching me:
.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
For since I cannot fight, I will not fail
To exercise my Talent, that's to rail.^[2]

It seems as though self-expression has been achieved through politics. Shady difference, anonymity are banished and identity emerges into the light. The actress, probably in tights,^[3] unmasks and exposes herself as a cavalier, and the cavalier, like the playwright, is a simulacrum of the monarch. Thus the new persona seems to deemphasize Behn's gender;^[4] although it could easily be heard as a double entendre, her complaint against those who "come but once" (that is, who fail to return on the third night) is not that

[1] The Rover; or, the Banish'd Cavaliers, Part II , in The Works of Aphra Behn , ed. Montague Summers (London, 1915), vol. 1, pp. 212–13. Unless otherwise noted, subsequent quotations from Behn's works are from this edition, hereafter cited as Works .

[2] The Roundheads; or, the Good Old Cause , in Works , vol. 1, p. 424.

[3] See Frances M. Kavenik, "Aphra Behn: The Playwright as 'Breeches Part,'" in Curtain Calls: British and American Women and the Theater, 1660–1820 , ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 177–92.

[4] The king did not entirely replace the prostitute as a figure of the author; Behn used both figures during the last seven years of her career. For another discussion of Behn's change of persona, see Deborah C. Payne, "'And Poets Shall by Patron-Princes Live': Aphra Behn and Patronage," in Curtain Calls , pp. 116–17.

they have deserted an inventive and entertaining woman who depends on them, but that they are refusing to defer to a superior wit who had, moreover, in her own political deportment set them an example of proper loyalty.

Despite these differences, however, Behn's author-monarch retains many of the prostitute's characteristics. The gender contrast between the two figures, for example, was not stable. Although always abstractly masculine, the monarch could legitimately be played by a woman, and the likening of women's rights to the rights of monarchs was a chivalric cliché often used in Behn's career to beg applause. We should also note that this courtly trope had bawdy undertones since "quean" was the age's most widespread slang term for "whore." These rather stiff lines from one of the epilogues (written by "a Friend"), for example, would probably have been heard as "gallant" in both senses of the word:

                                            [M]y Sex's Cause,
Whose Beauty does, like Monarchs, give you Laws,
Should now command, being join'd with Wit, Applause.^[5]

The fair sex's demand for approval, like the monarch's, is based, not on an exchange between equal individuals, but on a God-given right.^[6]

Whatever ideal rights monarchs and "queans" had, in the prologues and epilogues to Behn's political comedies they are always financially at the mercy of their subjects. Because the monarch, like the prostitute, appears in the prologues and epilogues only in this

[5] Abdelazer; or, the Moor's Revenge , in Works , vol. 2, p. 98. It should also be noted that men generally delivered the prologues, while women were assigned the epilogues so that they could appeal to the audience's gallantry and not just their judgment in begging applause.

[6] I have tried to demonstrate elsewhere that some seventeenth-century women writers, most notablyes of absolutism, carried to their logical conclusion, tended to enlarge rather than fill the void of female identity. See "Embracing the Absolute: The Politics of the Female Subject in Seventeenth-Century England," Genders 1 (1988): 34–54.

context of want, Behn's rhetoric of absolutism begins to sound like a bargaining position, a language of rather than against marketplace exchange. The absolute prerogative may be asserted as a birthright that should "naturally" free one from negotiation. However, since the occasion of the assertion is the negotiation of an exchange, the right that is claimed must be one that has already been violated. The metaphor, therefore, ennobles the author by providing a reference point against which her dependence on the audience appears unnatural; but that reference point, the monarch's "natural" right, must already have been denied by the time it is invoked.

In the prologue to The False Count , for example, the monarch of wit has been forced into the "Whiggery" of writing a farce:

Our Author, as you'll find it writ in Story,
Has hitherto been a most wicked Tory;
But now, to th' joy o'th'Brethren be it spoken,
Our Sister's vain mistaken Eyes are open;
And Wisely valuing her dear Interest now,
All-powerful Whigs, converted is to you.
.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
We have fitted you with one today,
'Tis writ as 'twere a Recantation Play;
Renouncing all that has pretence to witty,
T'oblige the Reverend Brumighams o'th'City.^[7]

The theme of the split author is as evident in this self-presentation as it was in the prefatory epistle to Sir Patient Fancy .^[8] Although the "real" author behind the "interested" one has definable qualities, such as true wit and royalism, these have already been sacrificed to the theatrical marketplace, where the audience is now expected to pay its due to both her natural superiority and her condescension. Hence, although the monarch seemed at first an alternative persona to the prostitute, one offering the possibility of representation through sameness, he/she turns out to be another internally divided figure. Just as the real woman could only be inferred from her misrepresentations, the real monarch, with his "divine" rights, becomes a rhetorical effect of the needy monarch searching for a bargaining position.

[7] The False Count; or, a New Way to Play an Old Game , in Works , vol. 3, pp. 99–100.

[8] See Chapter 1, pp. 16–18.

During the years when the political comedies were produced, the spectacle of the needy monarch was at the center of the severest political crisis of Charles II's reign: the exclusion crisis. The immediate allusion in Behn's prologues was no doubt to the 1681 decision of the Commons to refuse all supply to the crown until Charles assented to the Exclusion Bill, which would have barred the succession of Catholics and hence of Charles's brother, James. Charles ultimately ended the crisis that year, not by capitulating (parting with the old Prerogatives, to paraphrase Behn), but by dissolving Parliament and ruling without it for the rest of his reign, financed by French subsidies. The topic of the prologues, then, the contrast between the author-monarch's rights and wherewithal, was inspired by the spectacle of the actual sovereign in the political marketplace.^[9]

The scandalous contrast between old prerogatives and new poverty, however, was even starker for the author than for the monarch because the playwright's equivalent of dissolving Parliament would only be "to find out another Trade." Thus Behn's prologues further ironically contrast the recent actions of the poet-monarch with those of the actual king, announcing that the former has been ignominiously subdued by her audience's financial pressure, whereas the latter scorned the demands of the Commons. By the end of the prologue to The False Count , the author, in order to remain in the theater, has become a counter-example to the heroic Charles; she is almost a parodic carnival queen, even though she makes it clear that this, too, is just a comic pose. The possibility of finding wealthy allies, patrons on whom one could depend, just as Charles was depending on the French to establish his independence from the Commons, was no doubt the implied alternative to authorial Whiggery.^[10]

Thus, Behn's political persona, by figuring the contrast between the ideal of an absolute sovereignty beyond exchange and the reality of utter dependence on one's inferiors, provided a more explicit rhetoric of dissatisfaction with the marketplace than had the prostitute persona. Simultaneously, though, the political em-

[9] On the financial instability of the king, see Payne, "'And Poets Shall by Patron-Princes Live': Aphra Behn and Patronage," p. 106.

[10] For an investigation of Behn's patronage possibilities, see Payne, pp. 105–19.

phasis was calculated to give Behn a marketplace advantage. The exclusion crisis was accompanied and preceded by a series of plots, counter-plots, and sham plots that kept the polity both excited and polarized for several years, during which playwrights made themselves into political personages to attract interest and audience loyalty. The theaters, like the monarchy, had fallen on hard times; indeed, the companies finally merged in 1682, when it seemed that London could only support one stage. Like other playwrights under such conditions, Behn probably thought it wise to cultivate the patronage of the great on political grounds rather than rely on the playgoing audience, no matter how loyal. All these circumstances underscore what the prologues reveal: that the antimarketplace rhetoric of absolutism is itself a commercial strategy.

It would be possible to explore the dramatic elaboration of these themes in Behn's political comedies, especially in both parts of The Rover and The City Heiress . One might show, for example, that in these plays the cavalier ("A Cavalier was but a Type of Tory"^[11] ) is locked in amorous combat with either a prostitute or a woman who wishes, like the prostitute, to reserve her selfhood and use her representations to her best advantage. In each case the cavalier seems to unmask her by eliciting her true desire. But in each case, too, the cavalier prostitutes himself, accepting money for sex, marrying for money, or joining forces with the prostitute. His language of wit and honor turns out to be itself a form of dissimulation. Thus the king's representative, the cavalier, conquers the prostitute only by changing places with her.

The comedies, though, are not the best examples of Behn's writing on the relationship between sovereignty and the marketplace, which is far more extensively and seriously explored in her most famous prose narrative, Oroonoko; or, the Royal Slave .^[12] As the

[11] Roundheads , p. 425.

[12] Oroonoko is the one text that kept Behn's name in the literary histories of the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth. Even the Victorians praised it: "When Mrs. Behn's shortcomings are remembered against her, 'Oroonoko' should be put to her credit; it is instinct with real feeling and womanly sympathy" ("Our Early Female Novelists," Cornhill Magazine 72 [1895]: 590). Each century seems to have been able to reconcile this one story with its ideas of what a woman writer should accomplish. Late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century readers saw it primarily as a heroic love story, complete with a royal protagonist, who performs deeds of superhuman strength and stoically suffers unbelievable torments for the sake of his honor. For these readers, Oroonoko's slavery is significant primarily because it illustrates that nobility is inborn and manifests itself even under the most adverse circumstances. Later eighteenth- and nineteenth-century commentators, like the Victorian quoted above, read Oroonoko as a sentimental tale expressing sympathy for oppressed people in general and slaves in particular. After 1850 it became common to compare it to Uncle Tom's Cabin and read it as an emancipationist tract. See, for example, "England's First Lady Novelist," St. James Magazine 7 (1863): 854. Twentieth-century commentators have concentrated on the work's satire of European civilization, reading it as a descendant of Montaigne's "Of Cannibals" and an ancestor of Rousseau's Second Discourse . This lineage partly accounts for the work's popularity in France; see, for example, Bernard Dhuicq, "Oroonoko: Expérience et création," in Mémoire et création dans le monde anglo-américain aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles , Société d'Etudes anglo-américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Strasbourg: Univ. of Strasbourg, 1983), pp. 41–47. Satiric readings of the work interpret slavery as an instance of the corruptions of commercial society in general, so that Oroonoko himself is seen not as the oppressed slave but as the "natural man," the necessary satiric foil to civilization. See, for example, Peter J. Weston, "The Noble Primitive as Bourgeois Subject," Literature and History 10 (1984): 59–71. For a study of the tale that locates it at the beginning of the sentimental novel tradition and emphasizes Behn's gender, see George Starr, "Aphra Behn and the Genealogy of the Man of Feeling," Modern Philology 87 (1990): 362–72. Most recent criticism of Oroonoko has focused on racial and gender issues. See, for example, Ros Ballaster, "New Hystericism: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko: The Body, the Text and the Feminist Critic," in New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts , ed. Isobel Armstrong (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 283–95, and Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women's Amatory Fiction, 1684–1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 94–99; Laura Brown, "The Romance of Empire: Oroonoko and the Trade in Slaves," in The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature , ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 41–61; Margaret W. Ferguson, "Juggling the Categories of Race, Class and Gender: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko," Women's Studies 19 (1991): 159–81; Moira Ferguson, "Oroonoko: Birth of a Paradigm," NLH 23 (1992): 339–59; Beverle Houston, "Usurpation and Dismemberment: Oedipal Tyranny in Oroonoko," Literature and Psychology 32 (1986): 30–36; Jacqueline Pearson, "Gender and Narrative in the Fiction of Aphra Behn," part 2, Review of English Studies 42 (1991): 184–90; Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 47–52; and Dale Spender, Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers before Jane Austen (London: Pandora, 1986), pp. 60–64. Relevant discussion of Oroonoko may also be found in Robert L. Chibka, "'Oh! Do Not Fear a Woman's Invention': Truth, Falsehood, and Fiction in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 30 (1988): 510–37; George Guffey, "Aphra Behn's Oroonoko: Occasion and Accomplishment," in Two English Novelists: Aphra Behn and Anthony Trollope , Papers read at a Clark Library Seminar, May 11, 1974, by George Guffey and Andrew Wright (Los Angeles: Clark Library, 1975); Katharine M. Rogers, "Fact and Fiction in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko," Studies in the Novel 20 (1988): 1–15; and William C. Spengemann, "The Earliest American Novel: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko," Nineteenth-Century Fiction 38 (1984): 384–414. Unlike the plays, then, this tale has attracted readers in almost every generation and has accumulated a body of historical meanings that is a significant part of Behn's posthumous adventures in the literary marketplace.

very phrase "royal slave" implies, Oroonoko's tragedy is his commodification. His story elaborates the dark side of the marketplace in persons; in Oroonoko , trade in bodies cannot be comically redeemed, as it was in The Lucky Chance . Nevertheless, oroonoko,

like Julia, is a creature conceived entirely within such a marketplace. Both the prostituted wife and the enslaved king, by virtue of their oxymoronic nature, are ideal commodities.

As ideal commodities, moreover, each emphasizes a different aspect of Behn's vendable authorship. Chapter 1 concentrated on theatrical exchange and the representation of the emphatically female author through the presence of female bodies on the stage. This chapter concentrates on a far more disembodied form of representation and a less insistently gendered authorial persona. However, what was said in Chapter 1 about the interpenetration of femininity and commodification should still be borne in mind, for it helps explain why Behn, of all Restoration writers, would connect the author with a sold king.

That Behn should give her most thoughtful consideration to the issue of sovereignty in the marketplace in a nontheatrical form is significant in light of the prologues discussed earlier. Theatrical representation was consistently characterized there and elsewhere in her work as inimical to sovereign authorial selfhood. In contrast, her various remarks on her reasons for publishing her plays link the medium of print to authorial supremacy. Hence, before turning to Oroonoko , I would like to describe the characteristics of authorship that Behn associated with her dissemination in the disembodied, inky darkness of print. For Oroonoko is associated with Behn's authorship not only through his kingly commodification but also through his very blackness.

<><><><><><><><><><><><>

Shortly after Behn started using the monarch-author metaphor, she stopped being a prolific playwright. After 1682 only two new plays were produced in her lifetime: The Lucky Chance in 1686 and The Emperor of the Moon in 1687. It is improbable that, like Charles II, she had come across a secure source of income, for her letter to Tonson in 1684, discussed in Chapter 1, indicates that she was suffering financially. Almost all the playwrights were. In 1683 Dryden was complaining bitterly of debt and a vastly reduced income, Otway was almost starving to death, and Wycherley was

in debtors' prison.^[13] Behn, like the other poets, turned to writing occasional political poetry, translations, miscellanies, and prose narratives. She no doubt also sought patronage all the more assiduously.

In addition to the diminished demand for plays, from which all the authors suffered, Behn might have had special reasons for avoiding the stage. In 1682 one of her prologues, which "reflected" on the duke of Monmouth (Charles's illegitimate and soon-to-be openly traitorous son), seems to have displeased the king, and a warrant was issued for her arrest under the libel law. Although there is no record of an actual arrest or prosecution, the warrant might have made the theater seem a more dangerous arena than before. Hence, Behn might have sought the potentially greater anonymity of the print medium. Her massive Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–87), for example, also "reflected" on Monmouth and others of his circle, but part 1 was published anonymously. Moreover, there is evidence that Behn was ill during these years, and hence she may have lacked the stamina required of Restoration playwrights, who were often involved in casting the plays, altering them during rehearsals, and generally struggling to see that they were well produced.^[14]

Behn's sense of her medium, therefore, was shifting away from theatrical production toward print, and the shift probably intensified her concern with the issue of authorial sovereignty in the marketplace. Even quite early in her career, Behn had contrasted print with theatrical performance and (unexpectedly, given the comparatively small income books provided) extolled the power of the printed word and its superior ability to communicate the author's intentions and designs. One of the themes of Behn's forewords to the printed editions of her plays is that publication shows the reader just what the writer had in mind, without the distorting effect of playgoers' noise or actors' quirks. Over the printed edition, she suggests, the mind of the author has sovereign control; other people's collaborations and interferences are minimal, and hence the printed text is the real play, disseminated for careful and private

[13] Angeline Goreau, Reconstructing Aphra: A Social Biography of Aphra Behn (New York: Dial, 1980), p. 253.

[14] Emmett L. Avery and Arthur H. Scouten, introduction to The London Stage. Part I: 1660–1700 , ed. William Van Lennep (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1965), pp. clii–cliii.

perusal. It is the objective evidence that she sends into the world to establish supremacy over works that have been appropriated and "marred" by actors or misinterpreted in the reports of critics. "I Printed this Play with all the impatient haste one ought to do, who would be vindicated from the most unjust and silly aspersion,"^[15] begins the epistle to Sir Patient Fancy . What the printed text will represent perfectly and directly, she claims, is the author's individual design, her intellectual conception. She asks her readers not to be swayed by reports of the performance but rather to take the printed play "into their serious Consideration in their Cabinets."

Thus print is presented as a superior medium because it is relatively independent of time and place. Since it is explicitly opposed to live actors performing for an often raucous and crowded audience, its appeal seems based on its transcendence of these physical conditions, which had obstructed the public's view of the author's thought. Indeed, the preface to The Lucky Chance implies that the excitement of the moment in the theater overwhelms the audience's judgment: "I cannot omit to tell you, that a Wit of the Town, a friend of mine at Wills Coffee House, the first Night of the Play, cry'd it down as much as in him lay, who read it and assured me he never saw a prettier Comedy."^[16] The medium of bodies striding about and speaking on a stage, which Behn skillfully exploited, is potentially an impediment to authorial communication:

Know then that this Play was hugely injur'd in the Acting, for 'twas done so imperfectly as never any was before, which did more harm to this than it could have done to any of another sort; the Plot being busie . . . and so requiring a continual attention, which being interrupted by the intolerable negligence of some that acted in it, must needs much spoil the beauty on't.^[17]

[15] Works , vol. 4, p. 7.

[16] Works , vol. 3, p. 187.

[17] The Dutch Lover , in Works , vol. 1, pp. 224–25. Shirley Strum Kenny gives other examples of "the battles of actors and authors over the text" (p. 316). She quotes a satirical scene from Richard Sheridan's The Critic in which the character of the author laments the destruction of his play in performance and consoles himself with the thought of print: "The pruning knife—zounds the axe! why, here has been such lopping and topping, I shan't have the bare trunk of my play left presently.—Very well, Sir—the performers must do as they please, but upon my soul, I'll print every word" (quoted on p. 317 of "The Publication of Plays," in The London Theatre World, 1660–1800 , ed. Robert D. Hume [Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1980], pp. 309–36).

The dense, embodied nature of theatrical production seems peculiarly unsuited to the representation of that mental essence, the playwright's intention, whereas the comparatively disembodied marks on the page are imagined as transparent revelations of her design. Hence, she claims that she should be judged only after "reading, comparing . . . thinking."^[18] Through print readers can separate themselves from the crowd and find, in private places and moments, the author's intended meaning.

By stressing the speed and extent of her textual dissemination, Behn's epistles make it clear that she is contrasting printed , and not just written, representation with performance. Her need quickly to counteract mangled performances or false rumors of her plays puts a certain emphasis on the technology of rapid and standardized reproduction.^[19] Moreover, only through print publication could she even conceive of herself as an author with the power to make a direct textual appeal to the public: a set of discrete but anonymous individuals, each of whom would possess other books with which to compare and judge hers.^[20]

The epistles to the plays, therefore, demonstrate a high level of consciousness of print as a separate and superior form of representation, one that allowed the author a sovereign control and gave her thoughts a disembodied, almost unmediated, presence in the public mind. Nevertheless, the printed plays remained an aftereffect, or epiphenomenon, of theatrical production; they derived their peculiar charm and also their raison d'être from the shortcomings of performance. Moreover, we should bear in mind that the epistles helped create the sense of obligation on the part of playgoers that might be redeemed on future third nights. Hence print and performance are peculiarly enmeshed in the marketplace of the theater.

[18] Works , vol. 3, p. 185.

[19] Shirley Strum Kenny points out that "most plays of the period have the appearance of hasty and careless printing. . . . The kinds of error corrected most frequently suggest that printinghouse personnel, not authors, read proof. . . . The important thing was not neatness or accuracy but speed" ("The Publication of Plays," p. 319).

[20] On the relationship between new forms of individualism and print technology, see Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 50–58. My remarks on the general features of print culture throughout this chapter are heavily indebted to part 1 of Eisenstein's book.

When Behn turned to publishing prose narratives that were independent of her theatrical career,^[21] another potentially advantageous aspect of print emerged: anonymity. The ultimate unknowability of the prostitute had always been part of the allure of Behn the playwright, but her first prose narrative, the initial volume of the Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister , was anonymous in the more usual sense of being unsigned. We do not know how many of Behn's other stories were intended for anonymous publication, since all but two of them, The Fair Jilt and Oroonoko (both 1688), were published posthumously by editors and booksellers who capitalized on her name. Internal evidence, drawn primarily from the narrative personae, suggests that some of them were to have been anonymously or pseudonymously published.

Even if Behn intended to publish these works under her own name and draw, as she did in Oroonoko , on her established reputation as a playwright, a leitmotif linking written representation and anonymity runs through the stories. The narrators, for example, are even more shadowy than the protean designer of the majority of the comedies, and their obscurity paradoxically enhances the effect of authorial control and independence. The tales stress that all written communication takes place in the dark, which is only intensified by publication. Such a darkness, however, is also presented as the natural element of authorial transfiguration.

[21] I do not call Behn's stories novels in this study because I prefer to reserve that term for self-proclaimed fictional works. Critics have argued that Oroonoko strongly resembles a novel because of its uncertain veracity: thus Lennard Davis, for example, argues that "every turn reveals fact warped into fiction which turns back upon itself to become fact," while Robert L. Chibka, agreeing with Davis, claims that "the novel is a form of discourse that suspends its readers on a knife-edge between belief and disbelief" (see Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel [New York: Colubia Univ. Press, 1983], p. 110; and Chibka, "'Oh! Do Not Fear a Woman's Invention': Truth, Falsehood, and Fiction in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko ," p. 513). These arguments do not persuasively link Oroonoko to the novel. When the conventions of novelistic form are truly in place, we do not wonder about a book's referentiality. In contrast to Chibka and Davis, I argue that the truth-falsehood byplay marks Oroonoko as, at best, a proto-novel. For other discussions of genre in Behn's tales generally and Oroonoko specifically, see Frederick M. Link, Aphra Behn (New York: Twayne, 1968), chapter 8; Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 111–13; Rogers, "Fact and Fiction in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko ," pp. 1–15; Paul Salzman, English Prose Fiction, 1558–1700: A Critical History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), chapter 17; and Spengemann, "The Earliest American Novel: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko ," pp. 392ff. Both Chibka and Davis also provide excellent accounts of the veracity issue in the novel and its importance for narrative structure.

Behn's narrators, to be sure, are not the faceless, third-person, omniscient storytellers invented by later generations of writers. In accordance with the conventions of the seventeenth century, almost all of them intermittently use the first person, especially to explain how they came by their knowledge of the story. In the very process of explaining themselves, however, the narrators often become mysterious. The following passage from Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister is typical of these first-person statements: "I have heard her page say, from whom I have had a great part of the truths of her life, that he never saw Sylvia in so pleasant a humour all his life before, nor seemed so well pleased, which gave him, her lover [the page], a jealousy that perplexed him above any thing he had ever felt from love; though he durst not own it."^[22] At first glance, the passage seems to reveal the narrator; however, it actually serves to obscure her.^[23] Her information comes from servants, who, moreover, like the page mentioned here, long to be actors in the drama they are only allowed to observe. She moves mysteriously below stairs, collecting information like a spy.

Often allied in this way with the frustrated and relatively anonymous instruments of the main characters (Sylvia's page has no name), Behn's narrators are sometimes associated with a marginality that becomes sinister. One such instance is particularly interesting in connection with Oroonoko . In "The Unfortunate Bride; or, the Blind Lady a Beauty," the narrator claims that much of her information comes indirectly from a black woman, Mooria, who not only longs to be the object of the hero's love but also steals his letters to his mistress and forges letters to drive the lovers apart. The story makes the lady's blackness a metaphor for her "dark designs" and for her means of accomplishing them: stealing the writings of others and writing "in a disguised hand." The black lady, in other words, is an inky creature who separates people from their written representations and plunges them into obscurity. She is more designing than the narrator and more adept than any other character at achieving her designs by textual misrepresentation.

Although in Behn's stories there are several such designing

[22] Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister , introd. Maureen Duffy (London: Virago, 1987), p. 405.

[23] Love-Letters sometimes presents the narrator as masculine, but in the third volume, a feminine persona is consistently used.

women, who manipulate the action by disguising their "hands," Mooria is the only one who embodies this form of power. The darkness of her skin is associated with invisibility and magical powers of transformation; that is, her black body seems a metaphor for the disembodying potential of writing. The very ink that allows graphic representation, and the consequent dissociation of bodies and language, seems to cover Mooria herself.

Since Mooria's skin becomes an emblem of the disembodying power of writing, for which the blackness of ink is a related sign, her darkness suggests by association the "anonymous hand" par excellence: print, the medium of the story's dissemination. Print intensified anonymity simply by increasing standardization, making the graphemes relatively interchangeable regardless of their origin, and by wide dissemination, which broke the link common in scribal cultures between texts and specific places where they could be read. The more identical copies of a text there were, the less that text seemed to occupy any particular location, and the less it seemed the physical emanation of any body. The figure of the black woman combines the blackness of racial difference, the obscurity of the narrative "I" in this particular story, and the potential erasure of the writer through the "anonymous hand" of publication.^[24]

However, since our modern notion of the author is itself a feature of print culture, we must acknowledge that the disembodiment of the writer in the standardized, multiplied, and widely disseminated text was the condition of her appearance as an author . As Elizabeth Eisenstein shows, "Until it became possible to distinguish between composing a poem and reciting one, or writing a book and copying one; until books could be classified by something other than incipits;^[25] the modern game of books and authors could not be

[24] As we might also have predicted, the black lady of this story identifies all these aspects of difference with female desire. As in The Lucky Chance , the very principle of difference, and hence, paradoxically, of interchangeability, is the "nothing" of female sexuality, whose obscurity is stressed in yet another seventeenth-century slang term for the female sexual part: "the black ace" (Goreau, Reconstructing Aphra , p. 232). In The Lucky Chance , however, the "nothing" is "but a part" of Julia, whereas the black lady is the black ace writ large. Hence, in the act of identifying her source, the narrator of "The Unfortunate Bride" implies that to appear in print is to reach some apotheosis of femaleness by not appearing at all.

[25] Scribal copies generally did not have title pages; instead they opened with conventional phrases or incipits, a word deriving from the commonplace opening phrase "Incipit Liber" (Here begins the book).

played."^[26] The potential anonymity realized in the figure of Mooria, therefore, was merely the underside of that seemingly unmediated and purely mental presence that Behn celebrated in the epistles to the printed edition of her plays.

This same paradoxical effect vis-à-vis the author—that decreased physical proximity enabled increased mental intimacy—was also built into the property exchanges that accompanied the production of the books. There was no third night in the print shop, no specific time and place for gathering to reward the author. The printed work appeared before public and patron only after it had ceased to be the exchangeable property of the author. The books that came out during Behn's lifetime were printed under the Licensing Act of 1662, which gave the court of the Stationers' Company, that is, the guild of printers and booksellers, control over the printing of texts entered in the company's register. Behn sold her manuscripts, the only actual commodities she ever owned, to booksellers, who sometimes traded on her name and sometimes did not; but she never trafficked in the right to print her text, since that was brought into being only when the bookseller registered the work.^[27] Hence Behn, unlike authors after the passage of the 1710 Copyright Act, never had potential property in the text, as distinct from the physical manuscript. She had no share of the income from the book's sales, and the only hope for remuneration after publication

[26] Eisenstein, p. 84.

[27] The question of common law copyright prior to 1710 is vexed. Some historians have claimed that before the Statute of Anne the author was assumed to be a common law owner of a literary work, but the case for such a view is very weak. See Frank Arthur Mumby, Publishing and Bookselling (London: Cape, 1930), pp. 169–71; and Joseph Loewenstein, "For a History of Literary Property: John Wolfe's Reformation," ELR 18 (1988): 389–412. For a refutation of this view, see Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993). The copyright and a script of the work were both called the copy, indicating that someone who managed to procure a copy of the text that had not been registered had the right to copy it. For a lucid discussion of the complex relationship between the laws governing the book trade and the actual practices of London booksellers, see Graham Pollard, "The English Market for Printed Books," Publishing History 4 (1978): 7–48. Useful analyses of print culture in this era may also be found in Julie Peters, "The Bank, the Press, and the Illusory 'Return of Nature': On Currency, Print, and Dramatic Property in the 1690s"; and Gerald M. MacLean, "Class, Gender, and the Progress of Property: Scattered Speculations on Print Culture in Seventeenth-Century England," unpublished conference papers, Center for Seventeenth-and Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, 1990.

was founded on a dedicatee's generosity. Nevertheless, the author seemed to participate quite cheerfully in the process that turned her physical product, the manuscript, into the multiple standard copies that she praised as the carriers of her true design, for the less Behn owned it, the more perfectly it conformed to her intention. The sale of the manuscript and the inconceivability of any property in the text were indeed forms of alienation from the work, but they were also the conditions of what Behn seemed to imagine as her ghostly endurance in the text. The appearance of the multiplied, perfected text magnified her lack of dependence on any particular material object. The more standardized and impersonal the medium became, the more sovereign the creating mind appeared.^[28] The delivery of the manuscript to the bookseller, the alienation of one's "hand" and the first occasion of payment to the author, was also the first step in liberating the text from graphic contingency. A second step, at which the author normally received the balance of the money due from the bookseller, was the return of the corrected proofs, a hybrid of anonymous print and authorial marks signaling progress toward an ever more readable copy. Finally, the reproduction and sale of the identical text in numerous copies provided proof of the ideas' transcendent nonmateriality, their escape from the physical accidents of place and time,^[29] and therefore of their substantive likeness to the immaterial and immortal mind they represented.^[30]

[28] Critics of Elizabeth Eisenstein have pointed out that many early modern writers complained about the inaccuracy of print and the tendency of printers to introduce changes as well as to make errors. We have no warrant, however, for believing that Behn shared these grievances. Rather, the internal evidence suggests that she thought publication superior to performance as a means of conveying her conceptions. She was fortunate to have a reliable bookseller, Jacob Tonson, to look after the publication of her tales and poetic works. For a description of Behn's booksellers, see Payne, "'And Poets Shall by Patron-Princes Live': Aphra Behn and Patronage," p. 109.

[29] See Eisenstein's remarks on the preservative powers of print, pp. 78–88, where she explains that wide dissemination became the means of making the text imperishable. "The notion that valuable data could be preserved best by being made public, rather than by being kept secret, ran counter to tradition," she claims, and was still controversial in the eighteenth century. Behn, however, seems to have been quite secure in the belief that publication would make her words immortal.

[30] When Walter Benjamin argues in his famous essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" that the artwork loses its aura when it is reproduced and disseminated en masse, he fails to distinguish between books and texts. Thus he does not acknowledge that mechanical reproduction results in a new auratic emanation, even if it is one that is easily detachable from the physical book itself. Stephen Greenblatt comes closer to the argument I am making here in his chapter "The Word of God in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," where he argues that the wide dissemination of the published English Bible gave the English a far more powerful sense of the immediate presence of God's word than could have been provided by the scarcer and more "auratic" scribal copies. Although he does not emphasize the distinction between the physical book and the abstract text, he implies it when he notes that "the power of the English Bible was at its height precisely in the years when copies were publicly burned by the authorities" (Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980], p. 96).

Such a notation of a transcendent text, elevated above all materiality, preceded print; but print paradoxically gave material evidence for a text surpassing all copies. The potential for seemingly infinite reproduction obviated the possibility of equating the text with any, or for that matter all, of its instantiations. Behn imagines that through such wide dissemination her ideas can be anywhere and yet nowhere in particular. Like other seventeenth-century writers,^[31] she seems fascinated with not only the appearance of the anonymous hand but also the gap between the physical act of writing and the immaterial result. Hence she confesses the haste of the book's composition in the dedication to Oroonoko —"I writ it in a few hours . . . I never rested my pen a moment"^[32] —even as she contrasts the ephemeral, bodily labor to the eternal, static, spiritual product: "[Poets] draw the nobler part, the soul and mind; the pictures of the pen shall out-last [the drawing] of the pencil, and even worlds themselves." Oddly, Behn used her preoccupation with her pen—she frequently thematized the physical production of words—to remind us that writing is not really a graphic art. The black ink that outshines the "pencil" marks of the visual artist signifies the incorporeal and immortal, not only because it "draw[s] the nobler part," but also because the text perpetuated in print

[31] Not until the Restoration did writers explore the implications of communicating with readers through print. Although the technology was two hundred years old by 1660, Dryden seems to have been the first author to notice its impact. "Dryden is among the first English writers to understand, at least implicitly, the conditions imposed on a literature that is primarily printed and read . . . where books and writing are the main instruments of transmission," claims James Engell in Forming the Critical Mind: Dryden to Coleridge (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989), p. 22.

[32] Oroonoko and Other Stories , ed. and introd. Maureen Duffy (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 25.

seems to rise above its own graphics. The blackness of ink, therefore, paradoxically seems to presage even its own disappearance, a disappearance that Oroonoko ultimately achieves.

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The relationship of blackness, authorship, textuality, exchange, and transcendence helps explain why Behn's most sustained work on heroic kingship should make black the color of both exchange and sovereignty. In Oroonoko Behn breaks the traditional Western metaphoric connection between black bodies and moral degeneracy that she had drawn on in characterizing Mooria, and blackness takes on unprecedented meanings, including representation itself, kingship, exchange value, and the paradoxes of absolute property.

Oroonoko seems the polar opposite of "The Unfortunate Bride." The narrator not only claims her authorial identity and her personal experience of the events but also gives herself an important role in the story and hence a sustained presence.^[33] She identifies herself as Aphra Behn, a writer already known to the public as a playwright, whose established reputation should guarantee her veracity. She even discusses her next play, stressing that, like Oroonoko , it is based to some extent on her life experience: "Colonel Martin [was] a man of great gallantry, wit, and goodness, and whom I have celebrated in a character of my new comedy, by his own name, in memory of so brave a man."^[34] Clearly, she highlights personal-authorial continuity as a guarantee of the tale's authenticity.

This stress on the work as an expression of the author's identity has a parallel in the metaphoric use of blackness. Whereas in "The Unfortunate Bride" the narrator's anonymity seemed intensified by

[33] This presence is not unusual in stories about the wonders of the New World, where narrators routinely felt obliged to claim that they were eyewitnesses of the events they relate. Most of the evidence, though, does point to Behn's presence in Surinam in the early to mid 1660s; see Rogers, "Fact and Fiction in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko ," pp. 1–3. For discussion of the critical controversy over Behn's eyewitness status, see Chibka, "'Oh! Do Not Fear a Woman's Invention': Truth, Falsehood, and Fiction in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko ," pp. 510–13.

[34] Oroonoko; or, the Royal Slave: A True History , in Oroonoko, the Rover, and Other Works , ed. Janet Todd (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 132. Subsequent quotations from this edition are cited parenthetically in the text.

the "dusky" obscurity of Mooria, the narrative's source, in Oroonoko the gleaming blackness of the eponymous hero corresponds to the narrator's heightened presence. If Mooria's color emphasized her invisibility and that of the narrator, Oroonoko's radiates, illuminating the narrator's identity. He is blacker than the black lady—indeed he is blacker than anybody—but that does not make him "dusky." Instead, it makes him brilliant: "His face was not of that brown, rusty black which most of that nation are, but a perfect ebony, or polished jet" (pp. 80–81). He is not a brown black, but a black black. Behn's distinction between brown blacks and black blacks departs from the convention of representing sub-Saharan native people, who, according to Winthrop Jordan, were normally all described as absolutely black: "blacke as coles," as one voyager to Guinea put it a century earlier.^[35] By making complete blackness a distinguishing characteristic of the noble Oroonoko, Behn attached a positive aesthetic value to the skin color: the brown blacks are dull, but the shiny black black reflects light.^[36] Even when he was dressed in slave's clothes, Oroonoko's gleaming blackness "shone through all" (p. 108). The lustrous quality of the hero's blackness, which is "so beyond all report," requires the eyewitness reporting of a known author; Aphra Behn, therefore, must emerge from her obscurity and explain the circumstances of her witnessing. In short, the hero's blackness calls the authorial persona into existence.

As a character, Behn is also clearly paralleled with Oroonoko.^[37]

[35] Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1800 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1968), p. 5.

[36] In a footnote Jordan names several later writers who celebrate "the Negro's jet blackness," but Behn's is the earliest instance by over thirty years. Jordan, p. 10 n. 23. Lines 16–20 from Milton's Il Penseroso , which Jordan does not cite, might be taken as a precedent:

Black, but such as in esteme
Prince Memnon's sister might beseem
Or that starred Ethiop queen that strove
To set her beauty's praise above
The sea nymphs, and their powers offended.

The mythical nature of these beings and their allegorical use as illustrations of the attractiveness of Melancholy's blackness, however, disqualify them as representations of seventeenth-century Africans.

[37] For analyses of the narrator-hero relationship, see Martine Watson Brownley, "The Narrator in Oroonoko," Essays in Literature 4 (1977): 174–81; Ferguson, "Juggling the Categories of Race, Class and Gender: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko ," pp. 165–66; Pearson, "Gender and Narrative in the Fiction of Aphra Behn," part 2, pp. 184–90; Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist , pp. 47–52; and Starr, "Aphra Behn and the Genealogy of the Man of Feeling," pp. 362–68.

Like him, she arrives a stranger in Surinam but is immediately recognized as superior to the local inhabitants; like him, she appears a shining marvel when she travels to the Indian village; and like his words, hers are always truthful. As narrator, she repeatedly identifies herself as the well-known author Aphra Behn to vouch for the otherwise incredible brightness of Oroonoko. The sustained authorial presence in this book is thus closely connected to the black hero's luster; as the story moves forward, narrator and hero polish each other's fame. Although in the beginning Oroonoko had the misfortune "to fall in an obscure world, that afforded only a female pen to celebrate his fame" (p. 108), by the end the narrator presumes to hope "the reputation of my pen is considerable enough to make his glorious name to survive to all ages" (p. 141).

Hence through an intensification of blackness, hero and narrator emerge into the light. Like Behn's forewords to her plays, this process can be read as a full-blown celebration of the bright, transcendent possibilities inherent in print, possibilities that Mooria only darkly suggested. Oroonoko resembles the mystical body of the text.^[38] His blackness is a luminous emanation of the author that gleams forth from multiple inscriptions.

Such an interpretation of this "admirably turned" (p. 80) ebony figure is consonant with one of Oroonoko's most remarked features: he is densely overwritten. Indeed, the narrator seems quite self-consciously to present her hero's story as a layering of narrative conventions. She moves from her de rigueur promise to tell the unadorned truth in the opening paragraph into a brief wonders-of-the-New-World passage whose extreme conventionality has often been noted. Indeed, she notes it herself on the second page when the wonders turn into London's stage spectacles, and the authenticity of her story momentarily depends on its "intertextual" relationship to one of Dryden's plays: "I had a [suit of feathers made by the Indians] presented to me, and I gave them to the King's Theatre; it was the dress of the Indian Queen, infinitely admired by persons of quality; and was inimitable." The momen-

[38] For a fascinating discussion of the parallels between kingship and textuality in the early modern period, see David Lee Miller, The Poem's Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 Faerie Queene (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1988).

tary uncertainty about which Indian queen is being referred to, a queen of the Indians who owned the dress or Dryden's stage heroine, only emphasizes the lack of distinction between the two possible meanings. As a real Indian artifact transferred to the stage, the dress authenticates both. Readers can be assured of the truth of Behn's claims because their own eyes have seen such things on the stage. The early part of Oroonoko's story is no less dependent on references to the theater and on the self-conscious employment of courtly intrigue conventions to familiarize and authenticate the action. And the brief idyll of the middle section is similarly realized through reference to a literary model; when Oroonoko and his wife, Imoinda, are reunited, Oroonoko's English protector and putative master, looking on, "was infinitely pleased with this novel" (p. 112). One could continue to multiply the evidence, for the last half of Oroonoko's history is particularly thickly encrusted with tragic references and is highly wrought in the histrionic codes of heroic drama.^[39]

This dense literary artificiality has exasperated some modern readers of Oroonoko and has been the chief evidence in the twentieth century for the story's inauthenticity.^[40] The stress on Oroonoko's conformity to literary conventions, however, was probably intended to make him seem believably noble. The narrator proves the hero's greatness by showing how closely he adhered to heroic models. The sense that Oroonoko was made up of myriad literary conventions would have made him familiar and hence credible to contemporary readers, for real heroic action was necessarily imitative.^[41] The resolute intertextuality of the narrative was not a failure of imagination but rather a proof that the author deserved fame because she had a legitimately heroic story that was recognizable as such only because it conformed to other such representations.

We can read Oroonoko's gleaming blackness, then, as a celebration of inscription without turning it into a self-reflective modern

[39] In 1696 Thomas Southerne turned the story into just such a play, which, in various versions, was a staple of the eighteenth-century repertory.

[40] See, for example, Ernest Bernbaum, "Mrs. Behn's Oroonoko , in Anniversary Papers by Colleagues and Pupils of George Lyman Kittredge (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1913).

[41] On Oroonoko 's relation to heroic drama, see Brown, "The Romance of Empire: Oroonoko and the Trade in Slaves," pp. 48–51.

text. However, a danger lurks in such a reading. If Oroonoko's blackness becomes mainly an allegory of textuality, even with such historical and formal qualifications as have been introduced, we lose sight of the phenomenal wonder that empowers the text in the first place. Unless we acknowledge that Oroonoko's blackness refers most importantly to racial difference and indeed is dependent on a stock response of racial prejudice in the reader, we cannot explain what is so wonderful about him and so meritorious in the author. The reader is frequently invited to marvel that Oroonoko, although black , behaves like a conventional European tragic hero. Hence passages such as the following rely for their sense of the marvelous on the very racial prejudice they seem to dispel:

His nose was rising and Roman, instead of African and flat. His mouth, the finest shaped that could be seen; far from those great turned lips, which are so natural to the rest of the Negroes. The whole proportion and air of his face was so noble, and exactly formed, that, bating his colour, there could be nothing in nature more beautiful, agreeable and handsome. . . . Nor did the perfections of his mind come short of those of his person; for his discourse was admirable upon almost any subject; and whoever had heard him speak, would have been convinced of their errors, that all fine wit is confined to the white men, especially to those of Christendom; and would have confessed that Oroonoko was as capable even of reigning well, and of governing as wisely, had as great a soul, as politic maxims, and was as sensible of power, as any prince civilized in the most refined schools of humanity and learning, or the most illustrious courts. (p. 80)

Oroonoko is a wonder because blackness and heroism are normally thought to be mutually exclusive qualities; indeed, the passage asserts that they normally are mutually exclusive. Only in his differences from other Africans does Oroonoko achieve heroism, but in his blackness his heroism partakes of the marvelous. His is a "beauty so transcending all those of his gloomy race, that he struck an awe and reverence, even in those that knew not his quality; as he did in me, who beheld him with surprise and wonder" (p. 79). Thus his color, as a sign of racial difference, itself reminds us that all his features differ from those "which are so natural to the rest of the Negroes."

Oroonoko's blackness must therefore be seen as at once authen-

tically and unnaturally African. It is the exotic trait that makes his story worth writing, the feature that makes him unprecedented as hero, and hence a wonder. However, it is also the feature that necessitates such an energetic marshaling of heroic literary precedents. Both hero and writer must overcome his blackness, which "naturally" threatens to become the condition of his obscurity even though it also makes him worthy of fame. The author packs Oroonoko so densely with heroic reference as to prove him wonderful, making his very blackness shine. Blackness as racial difference at once helps explain why Oroonoko's color gleams with "unnatural" intertextuality and reveals how such gleaming redounds to the glory of the author.

Oroonoko's blackness, a "natural" physical indication of racial difference, even inferiority, is transubstantiated textually into a wonderful sign of heroic distinction. It is thus highly appropriate that descriptions of Oroonoko's and Imoinda's heroic bodies should emphasize their artificiality; they are not so much bodies of flesh and blood as pieces of polished handiwork. "The most famous statuary could not form the figure of a man more admirably turned from head to foot" is the sentence that precedes the description of Oroonoko's color as "not of that brown, rusty black which most of that nation are, but a perfect ebony, or polished jet." Readers are called on here to put the actual African bodies they might have seen (the brown black ones) out of mind and substitute for them statues of ebony. Indeed, when Oroonoko alights at Surinam dressed in his "dazzling habits" to be gazed at in his journey to his new home by the whites and the merely "brown" blacks, he resembles nothing so much as the statue of a magus. These common Africans eventually greet him as king and even, in a scene that fuses Christ child and magus, fall to worshiping him as divine when he finally arrives at his destination.

Imoinda's body is also artifactual, but in a slightly different way. At first she is described merely as a female version of Oroonoko; the allusions are appropriately classicized to suggest a female divinity: "To describe her truly, one need say only, she was female to the noble male; the beautiful black Venus, to our young Mars" (p. 81). Her features, like his, are to be imagined as European, and the description of the pair of lovers might well have evoked images of Jonson's Mask of Blackness , or of the actors and actresses in black-

face and lavish costumes who played the "kings" and "queens" of Africa and India in the lord mayors' pageants.^[42] Such figures would have been quite appropriate to the court intrigue section of the novel. However, after Imoinda has been sold into slavery, has had her name changed to Clemene (as Oroonoko has his changed to Caesar), and emerges into our view through the eyes of the white colonists, her body undergoes a fabulous transformation:

Though from her being carved in fine flowers and birds all over her body, we took her to be of quality before, yet, when we knew Clemene was Imoinda, we could not enough admire her.

I had forgot to tell you, that those who are nobly born of that country, are so delicately cut and raced all over the fore-part of the trunk of their bodies, that it looks as if it were japanned; the works being raised like high point round the edges of the flowers. (p. 112)

This abrupt scoring of Imoinda's body, so strongly and clumsily marked in the text ("I had forgot to tell you") coincides with the narrator's re-vision of her as at once slave and romantic heroine, "Clemene" and Imoinda. Appropriately, Imoinda's body is not just transformed textually, through metaphor, but is supposed to have been transformed materially into an artificial decorative object of exotic origin; she is "japanned," like a highly varnished and intricate piece of oriental carving. And yet she is not quite statuary in this description because the plasticity and pliancy of actual flesh as well as its susceptibility to wounding, scarring, and discoloration are invoked by the description. Finally, the reference to "high point" makes Imoinda's flesh into its own laced clothing.^[43] Her body becomes a fabric for representing other things; it is inscribed.

[42] For a description of the blackface characters in the lord mayor's pageants, see Anthony Gerard Barthelemy, Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1987), chapter 3. For other possible references in Imoinda's iconography, see Ferguson, "Juggling the Categories of Race, Class and Gender: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko ," p. 181 n. 49.

[43] The Reverend Richard Hakluyt, indeed, calls this kind of African body carving a form of "branched damaske" and says that it takes the place of clothing (Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation , 12 vols. [Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1903–05], vol. 4, p. 62). For other discussions of the insistent physicality of Imoinda and its hint of a conflict between the narrator and this black heroine, see Ballaster, "New Hystericism: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko ," pp. 290–93; and Ferguson, "Juggling the Categories of Race, Class and Gender: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko ," pp. 170–71.

The descriptions thus stress the exotic artificiality of both Oroonoko and Imoinda, but the decoration of Imoinda suggests that her sublimation, the process of becoming art, is accomplished on her body. That is, the reader's experience of flesh is not altogether banished from Imoinda's description, as it is from Oroonoko's. Even more obtrusively than Oroonoko's, Imoinda's is a body of representation. However, we are required, in this revision of her halfway through the story, to imagine her skin as the material out of which the representations are made. Oroonoko, on the one hand, is a completed representation; the African body is useful to his description only as contrast. Imoinda, on the other hand, reminds us that such refinement uses up bodies. Consequently, her image directs us to a consideration of the full relationship between Oroonoko and the commonplace "brown" Africans in the tale.

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The overwrought artificiality of Oroonoko, symbolized by the gleaming blackness of his body, not only sets him apart from his countrymen but also suggests the two ways in which he absorbs and represents them: through kingship and commodification. On an abstract level, one could point to a structural homology between Oroonoko's unnatural blackness and kingship as it was conceived from the late Middle Ages through the seventeenth century.^[44] Just as Oroonoko can be seen as the mystical body of the text, that which outlives myriad graphic instantiations to become the repository of overlapping forms of heroism; and just as his heroism, like the book's textuality, both depends on and is poised against blackness—the blackness of print, the blackness of racial difference (both, in turn, concepts abstracted from physical objects)—so kingship was perceived as a mystical body standing above and incor-

[44] I am not arguing here that Oroonoko is supposed to be any particular king or all the Stuarts collectively. Rather, Oroonoko, although he may indeed bring to mind certain Stuarts, is the symbol of an entity that is itself symbolic, kingship, and represents a seventeenth-century revision of that entity. For arguments that detect likeness with the Stuart kings, see Guffey, "Aphra Behn's Oroonoko: Occasion and Accomplishment," pp. 3–41; and Brown, "The Romance of Empire: Oroonoko and the Trade in Slaves," pp. 57–59.

porating all bodies in the realm but also outliving them and thus proving the realm's continuity through time.

In Ernst Kantorowicz's well-known account of this concept, the mystical body of the king both depends on physical bodies and is contrasted to them.^[45] Since all the realm's bodies are imagined to be incorporated in one, with the king as the head, all are imagined to be, in some sense, the bodies of the king; and yet in no physical body, not even his own, is true kingship completely contained, for the king's physical body, subject to decay and death, merely represents the immortal kingship that temporarily inhabits it. How the king's physical body represented kingship was a subject of some debate, especially in the years preceding and following the regicide, which Parliament justified by claiming in effect that it was the mystical body of the king, and Charles I's body was that of an enemy to the "real" sovereign. Such a radical splitting off of the actual and mystical bodies, however, was abnormal, and the explicit ideology of a high Tory like Behn would have held that the king's actual body, as long as it breathed, was the sacred and unique incarnation of the realm's mystical incorporation. Nevertheless, the king's two bodies were conceptually separable, and in Oroonoko they emphatically come apart so that the body of kingship itself, like the text, achieves a kind of incorporeality.

The narrator often refers to Oroonoko's kingship as if it were comparable to normal European models. In the initial description quoted earlier, for example, her stress on his heroism culminates in the greatest wonder of all, which her European readers would have found most difficult to believe: "That Oroonoko was as capable even of reigning well, and of governing as wisely . . . as any prince civilized in the most refined schools of humanity and learning, or the most illustrious courts." It is not surprising that such an ideal of princely capability would be figured in a bloodless statue of a body, one contrasted to living bodies and made imperishable through metaphors, for Behn in this figure represents not just a king, but kingship. As a specimen of a mere African king, we are given Oroonoko's grandfather, who is "a man of a hundred and

[45] I give in this paragraph a schematic summary of the intricate and complicated arguments described by Kantorowicz in The King's Two Bodies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957).

odd years old" (p. 79) but who, far from having any marks of immortality about him, is senile and sexually impotent. Moreover, the actual king's body is indistinguishable from the bodies of his subjects; to get his first glimpse of Imoinda, he dresses himself as the "slave and attendant" of a "man of quality" (p. 84) and is wholly successful in this disguise. This king's body, then, is to be imagined as one of that mass of brown black bodies that Oroonoko's unnatural blackness is defined against.

Even though the king's actual and mystical bodies seem thus separated in Oroonoko's home kingdom, Oroonoko's blackness is nonetheless defined against the mass of African bodies as an abstracted essence of them, as if his blackness were the sum and intensification of their lesser darkness. The mystical body of kingship continues to represent even that against which it is defined, the physical bodies that constitute the realm, and the physical bodies are incorporated into the mystical body. Oroonoko's representation conforms to the imaginative pattern informing centuries of monarchist thought, pageantry, state organization, criminal law, family relations, and so forth; it was the common cultural property of the time.

Such a pattern of thinking, however, does not fully account for the representation of kingship in Oroonoko , for it does not explain why the salient physical attribute of the African bodies that is abstracted, refined, and intensified in Oroonoko's body should be their darkness. Of all the attributes of their bodies, why this one? In making her hero darker than his subjects, Behn departed radically from the traditional portrayal of the noble African or Moor,^[46] who was usually painted white. Of course, we have already partly answered this question in discussing textuality and racial difference, but neither of those issues comprehends Oroonoko's princeliness, his relationship to his subjects. Why should the sign of his kingship be a body from which everything that is African is explicitly banished except a hue that can only abstractly be described as "black"?

The answer lies in Oroonoko's subjects, who, unlike those of a modern European king, are also his commodities. The narrator

[46] See Barthelemy's discussion of the contrast between the heroic white Moor and the villainous black Moor in George Peele's Battle of Alcazar (1589), pp. 75–81.

painstakingly explains that the word "black" distinguishes the bodies of people who can be bought and sold from those of people who cannot. To a twentieth-century reader the history of slavery makes this linkage obvious, but in the seventeenth century, before racial ideologies of slavery developed fully and as the institution itself was being racialized, it bore reiterating.^[47] The word "blacks" first appears in Oroonoko in contrast not to "whites" but to natives of Surinam, who are "a reddish yellow" (p. 76). These last, we are told, are not used as slaves because, through their fishing, hunting, and industry, they supply the colony with such necessities that they must be lived with in "perfect tranquillity, and good understanding" (p. 77).^[48] Hence "Negroes, black-slaves altogether," are imported. "Black" here differentiates the body of the African from that of the Native American; it signifies that one has been made a commodity, and the other has not. Because this "blackness" is the mark of commodification, we are then told, everything else about these bodies becomes indistinguishable:

Those who want slaves, make a bargain with a master, or captain of a ship, and contract to pay him so much apiece, a matter of twenty pound a head. . . . So that when there arrives a ship laden with slaves, they who have so contracted, go aboard, and receive their number by lot; and perhaps in one lot that may be for ten, there may happen to be three or four men; the rest women and children. (p. 78)

The twenty pounds paid, then, is for a "black" body, regardless of any other physical characteristic. Nor will any other color suffice, as the case of the Frenchman, seized along with Oroonoko but turned loose because of his color, makes clear. "Black" is a word that is used to describe a skin tone differing from all others that allows a body to have an abstract exchange value independent of any of its other physical qualities.

[47] For various accounts of why and how Africans came to be the enslaveable race, see Jordan, White over Black , esp. pp. 91–101; Barbara Fields, "Ideology and Race in American History," in Region, Race, and Reconstruction , ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1966), p. 178; and William D. Phillips, Jr., Slavery from Roman Times to the Early Transatlantic Slave Trade (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 184.

[48] The narrator is not always consistent on this point. On at least one occasion she speaks of "Indian slaves," but she seems to use that term loosely as a synonym for "lowly servant." She never describes the commodification of Indians.

"Black," then, is connected to bodies but is also an abstraction from them signifying exchangeable value. It is not so much descriptive of the skin as of the difference between African skin and all other skin that has arbitrarily come to take on the meaning of exchange value per se. Hence the narrator immediately becomes chary of using it as a "literal" term describing bodies. "Coramantien," we are told, is "a country of blacks so called " (p. 78, emphasis mine), that is, a country of people one could call black and thus exchange for twenty pounds apiece.^[49] But the narrator explicitly rejects this designation "black," as we have already seen, to describe the literal color of the African body, whose physicality is merely brown. "Black" identifies the commodity value of the slave body, its exchangeability for twenty pounds, as opposed to its physicality.

Thus the terrifying condition of slavery—having an African body that could be called "black"—is transfigured in this novel into a gleaming vision of disembodied value in the figure of Oroonoko's kingly blackness. Oroonoko's utterly unnatural body is the only one in which the word signifying exchangeability, "black," and the actual color of the body coincide. Only in his body is value realized as blackness. The intrinsic, nonnegotiable kingship of Oroonoko is thus paradoxically figured in the same blackness that designates the principle of exchange itself.

The superimposition of kingship and exchange, odd as it might at first appear, was not uncommon. Money, after all, was similarly a representation of exchange value underwritten by the idea of the English state's sovereignty, the mystical body of kingship. Although the relationship between the sovereign power and money was substantially revised in the seventeenth century, and the last decade saw a strong parliamentary attempt to discount the "extrinsic" value that money received from its association with sovereignty, the very agitation of the issue would have given the relationship a pronounced ideological importance.^[50] What is odd about

[49] In fact, Coramantien was not a country at all but a port on the Gold Coast where the English had a trading station. According to Rogers, though, planters in America generally referred to Gold Coast Africans as Coramantiens (Rogers, "Fact and Fiction in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko ," p. 6).

[50] For the larger political implications of the debate over money at the end of the seventeenth century, see Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 236–41. Appleby argues that "Locke's denial of the extrinsic value of coin carried with it

a limitation of government in economic affairs" (p. 237). She also quotes John Briscoe's 1696 attack on the state's power to fix the value of money, an attack phrased in language peculiarly relevant to Oroonoko: "[As] it is a mark of slavery, so is it the means of poverty in a State, where the Magistrate assumes a Power to set what price he pleases on the Publick Coin: It is a sign of Slavery, because the Subject in such Case lives merely at the Mercy of the Prince, is Rich, or Poor, has a Competency, or is a Begger, is a Free-Man, or in Fetters at his Pleasure" (p. 237).

Oroonoko 's depiction of this relationship is its insistence on the exchangeability of the subjects themselves for money. Exchange value and kingship are both realized in Oroonoko at the vanishing point of the African bodies, the moments when the king sells his subjects.

The kingship represented in Oroonoko, then, cannot be explained simply by noting that the king's mystical body underlay commerce; it is, rather, related to developments in the ideology of absolutism that reimagined the king's sovereignty as an absolute property right in the bodies of his subjects. It is to this notion of sovereignty that I now turn.

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As I remarked in analyzing The Lucky Chance , the idea of property as an absolute right to dispose of something in any way one saw fit—to use it, destroy it, alienate it through exchange, and so forth—was still not fully developed in English law in the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, such an idea of property underlay the vast expansion of trade during that century, and the desire of subjects to have greater dominion over their property came into conflict with what some saw as increasing claims of the crown for dominion. Conversely, some advocates of monarchical "absolutism" argued that the secure property rights of Englishmen would prevent the king from becoming a despot, but even here the complete freedom of a subject to dispose of his own goods and the power of the monarch are counterpoised. To dissociate absolute individual property claims from the claims of absolute monarchy, however, would be mistaken, for the two were sometimes powerfully conjoined.^[51] Indeed, never was the ideological connection closer than

[51] The once widely held view that the Whigs represented the interests and ideology of trade while the Tories stood for an older aristocratic order that shunned commerce is no longer tenable. The most concise statements revealing the errors and simplifications of this position are J. G. A. Pocock's "Mobility of Property and the Rise of Eighteenth-Century Sociology" and "Authority and Property: The Question of Liberal Origins," in Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays in Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 103–24 and 51–72. They show the strong connections between absolutist ideology in the seventeenth century and the spread of a notion of property as that which can be exchanged. To be sure, a Tory ideology grew up in the 1690s and the early eighteenth century that vociferously opposed this idea of property, but Pocock, again, has shown that the Toryism of Harley and St. John descends from theorists like Locke as opposed to absolutists. There is, then, no ideological contradiction between Behn's Restoration Court Toryism and her presentation of Oroonoko as a heroic warrior and slave-trader. The general intellectual history is complicated by the identification of slavery sometimes as a characteristic of precommercial societies; in Oroonoko , however, slavery is presented not as a semifeudal but as a fully commercial institution. That is, exchange, rather than mere ownership, is its essence. Tory writers such as Behn often complained that Whig "tradesmen" had reduced all issues of honor to those of barter, but as we have already seen in The Lucky Chance , the opposition comically collapses. In Oroonoko , too, the oppositions between war and commerce, possession and exchange collapse, but the effect is at once tragic and transcendent.

during the exclusion crisis of 1679–81, when the most famous work of Robert Filmer, Patriarcha , originally written in the 1640s, was published and widely cited to defend James's right to the throne. Patriarcha bases kingship itself on God-given, patriarchal ownership of the bodies of the subjects. The king's divine rights, Filmer argued, no matter how severely qualified by the customs and laws of modern nations, derived ultimately from his private property right in these bodies, his right to dispose of them in any way he saw fit. Any legitimate limitation on this right, he argued further, was to be construed as self-imposed by the king.

Filmer's defense of absolutism, John Locke pointed out in the first of his Two Treatises of Government , essentially turned subjects into slaves:^[52]

This Fatherly Authority then, or Right of Fatherhood , in our Author's sense is a Divine unalterable Right of Sovereignty, whereby a Father or a Prince hath an Absolute, Arbitrary, Unlimited, and Unlimitable Power, over the Lives, Liberties, and Estates of his Children and Subjects; so that he may take or alienate their Estates, sell, castrate, or use their Persons as he pleases, they being all his Slaves, and he Lord or Proprietor of every Thing, and his unbounded Will their Law.^[53]

[52] Indeed, Filmer's argument gave them a status lower than that of slaves under English law, for even slaves were deemed to have something like a natural right to life, and in many of the English colonies (including Surinam) they could own property themselves.

[53] Two Treatises of Government: A Critical Edition , ed. and introd. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1960), First Treatise , chapter 2, section 9, pp. 9–10.

Filmer thus pressed a claim of unlimited private property, and Locke refuted that claim in order to promote "the older and more traditional constitutionalist or consent theory of government."^[54] Filmer made not only all property ultimately the property of the king but also all proprietors, arguing that they held their very lives as well as their livelihoods by royal gift.

Without implying that Aphra Behn had actually read Patriarcha or that Filmer's formulations per se directly influenced her thinking, I would suggest that Oroonoko 's royalism, imagined through the institution of slavery, is Filmeresque.^[55] I would also venture, however, that the tale, because it depicts kingship as the absolute ownership of others, whose essence is the right to exchange or destroy them, constantly renders problematic what it takes for granted: that someone can be owned, even by himself.

The narrator never claims that the subjects of the kingdom of Coramantien are slaves of their king, but the distinction between subject and slave is often blurred. The slaves Oroonoko trades in are supposed to be prisoners of war, in conformity with traditional European ideas of how slaves might legitimately be acquired. Because Oroonoko conquered them and could have put them to death, their lives are forfeit to him, and hence he can spare them and make them the property of others. Slavery, then, is legitimate because it is incidental to war. But Coramantien is also presented as a place where war is the only enterprise and slaves the only commodity,

[54] James Tully, "The Framework of Natural Rights in Locke's Analysis of Property: A Contextual Reconstruction," in Theories of Property: Aristotle to the Present , ed. Anthony Parel and Thomas Flanagan (Calgary: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press, 1979), p. 119. For other contributions to the debate about sovereignty and the rise of absolute property, see Alan Ryan, Property and Political Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), pp. 14–48; J. G. A. Pocock, "The Mobility of Property and the Rise of Eighteenth-Century Sociology"; and G. E. Aylmer, "The Meaning and Definition of 'Property' in Seventeenth-Century England," Past and Present 86 (1980): 87–97.

[55] I mean that Behn's articulation of kingship and property in subjects is similar to Filmer's although not necessarily derived from his. It is not clear how widely influential Patriarcha was in the 1680s; but it certainly stands in the ideological terrain of the decade as a landmark that allows us to locate the general vicinity of Behn's tale. For a contrasting view of Oroonoko as the Lockean bourgeois subject, see Weston, "The Noble Primitive as Bourgeois Subject." For a shrewd discussion of a possible link between Oroonoko and a Hobbesian view of the world, see Starr, "Aphra Behn and the Genealogy of the Man of Feeling."

for that nation is very warlike and brave, and having a continual campaign, being always in hostility with one neighbouring prince or other, they had the fortune to take a great many captives; for all they took in battle, were sold as slaves, at least, those common men who could not ransom themselves. (pp. 78–79)

In this account, war seems incidental to the slave trade rather than vice versa. Moreover, as the story progresses, we are told often of attendants, mistresses, friends, and even wives who are sold as slaves. Although it is a dishonor for a subject to be sold into slavery, the king has a right to make such a sale, and we are told that every husband has the right either to take the life of his wife or to sell her. The kingdom is imagined to work on patriarchal principles closely resembling those that Filmer describes, with the members of each family living only by the father's sufferance, and the king, as the father of all, holding the same absolute power to dispose of all his subjects: "for they pay a most absolute resignation to the monarch" (p. 83). The real status of a subject, therefore, is that he may at any moment be converted into a commodity.

Indeed, the proof of the monarch's power is precisely in such acts of alienation, for merely to keep and use a slave, as one would any other servant or subordinate, is not to assert fully one's right of ownership. Hence, the slaves Oroonoko encounters in Surinam recognize him as king because he had previously sold them:

[T]hey all came forth to behold him, and found he was that prince who had, at several times, sold most of them to these parts; and, from a veneration they pay to great men, . . . they all cast themselves at his feet, crying out in their language, "Live, O King! Long live, O King!" And kissing his feet, paid him even divine homage. (p. 109)

Kingship, the right of ownership, and the act of exchange entail each other so closely in Oroonoko that they are virtually identical. It is consistent with this logic that kingship should be painted black, the color of exchange. It also follows that the representative of kingship, identified by this color more perfectly and conspicuously than anyone, should ultimately be himself taken for a commodity in the very trade he practiced.

If Oroonoko's abduction and sale seem inevitable, however, the logic of this version of absolutism must be deemed highly paradoxical. If absolute kingship is ownership and absolute ownership is

exchange, we are returned to the paradox we encountered at the climax of The Lucky Chance: the enduring, stable possession of a person, even of oneself, becomes a near impossibility. Sovereignty keeps sliding into self-alienation, and keeping someone entails the renunciation of property claims. Before his betrayal and enslavement, for example, when Oroonoko wishes to keep a captive with him, he essentially frees him:

This Jomoan afterwards became very dear to him . . . so that he never put him amongst the rank of captives as they used to do, without distinction, for the common sale or market, but kept him in his own court, where he retained nothing of the prisoner but the name, and returned no more into his own country. (p. 100)

The pattern of freeing a slave to keep him is repeated several times in the novel. After abducting Oroonoko, the ship's captain makes a pretense of freeing him to keep him from killing himself, and Trefry, Oroonoko's "master" in Surinam, also assures the hero that he is free ("had only the name of slave") in order to live with him in peace. The assertion of sovereign possession, on the other hand, is the prelude to loss.^[56]

Perhaps the most complex variation on this theme is the drama surrounding the possession of Imoinda, for in Oroonoko , as in The Lucky Chance , the paradoxes of absolute property in persons become most starkly apparent precisely where in the culture at large the property relation would be deemed most "natural": in the relation of husband and wife. Imoinda's possession is problematic from the outset. Plighted to Oroonoko, she is appropriated by his grandfather, the king, but the old man cannot consummate the relationship by "possessing" her sexually. Aware of the king's impotence, Oroonoko continues to consider her his and succeeds in possessing her clandestinely, whereupon the lovers are discovered, and Oroonoko must flee. Up to this point, the story is an utterly conventional intrigue plot, but here the slave market intervenes, giving the old man an unusual means of proving that Imoinda is actually his: he sells her. This act eventually, after Oroonoko's enslavement, reunites the lovers, but their second marriage, which

[56] For an exploration of this paradox in Uncle Tom's Cabin , see Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987), pp. 101–05.

takes place when they are both "slaves in name only," exacerbates the problems of possession. For Imoinda and Oroonoko slavery means nothing but potential commodification; they are not forced to labor, and their activities are almost completely unrestricted. However, as long as they remain in Surinam, they are officially Trefry's property and hence vulnerable to sale. As soon as Imoinda becomes pregnant, this state of affairs becomes intolerable to Oroonoko, for the prospect of fathering a child while officially a slave, while his patriarchal right is legally violable, makes him suddenly aware that Imoinda's body is a medium for his self-alienation. By possessing her sexually he produces another property, a child, whom he cannot legally call his own. The reappropriation through revolt of Imoinda and all the Africans he formerly sold into slavery then seems exigent, and when this plan fails, Oroonoko's only means of keeping Imoinda and his child from the market is to "free" them both from life altogether. Thus the integrity of Oroonoko's kingship is accomplished by the final "carving" of Imoinda's body:

[T]he lovely, young and adored victim lays herself down, before the sacrificer, while he, with a hand resolved, and a heart breaking within, gave the fatal stroke, first, cutting her throat, and then severing her, yet smiling, face from that delicate body, pregnant as it was with the fruits of tenderest love. (p. 136)

This quite literal defacing of Imoinda, the lifting of her still-smiling face, as if it were a mask or portrait, off her body, is presented as the "brave and just" (p. 135) liberation of her self from the body that was perpetually exchangeable. Only through this ultimate form of alienation does Oroonoko, the king of exchange, keep her and return her to herself.

Imoinda's severed face is not the first mask to signify integrity or self-possession, for in Oroonoko the problem of owning extends even to one's relationship with oneself. The great Indian warriors, for example, prove their fitness for leadership by defacing themselves. ^[57] In the contest for generalship,

[57] For another discussion of mutilation and self-mutilation in Oroonoko , see Ballaster, "New Hystericism: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko ," p. 292.

He, who is first . . . cuts off his nose, and throws it contemptibly on the ground, and the other does something to himself that he thinks surpasses him, and perhaps deprives himself of lips and an eye. So they slash on till one gives out, and many have died in this debate. And 'tis by a passive valour they show and prove their activity, a sort of courage too brutal to be applauded by our black hero; nevertheless, he expressed his esteem of them. (p. 124)

This bizarre chopping away of bits of one's body becomes, by the end of the story, the heroic alternative to the alienation of marketplace exchange, which appears to require whole bodies. Thus although the Indian's self-mutilation seems "too brutal" at first to Oroonoko, he copies it in the sacrificial transfigurations that are supposed to give him back his kingly sovereignty:

"Look ye, ye faithless crew," said he, "'tis not life I seek, nor am I afraid of dying," and at that word, cut a piece of flesh from his own throat, and threw it at them, "yet still I would live if I could, till I had perfected my revenge. But, oh! it cannot be; I feel life gliding from my eyes and heart; and if I make not haste, I shall yet fall victim to the shameful whip." At that, he ripped up his own belly, and took his bowels and pulled them out. . . . (p. 138)

Later, in the actual execution scene, Oroonoko seeks the dismemberment of his entire body, which appears all the more bloodless, inhuman, and indestructible with each partition:

And the executioner came, and first cut off his members, and threw them into the fire. After that, with an ill-favoured knife, they cut his ears, and his nose, and burned them; he still smoked [tobacco], as if nothing had touched him. Then they hacked off one of his arms, and still he bore up, and held his pipe. But at the cutting off the other arm, his head sunk, and his pipe dropped, and he gave up the ghost, without a groan, or a reproach. . . . They cut Caesar in quarters, and sent them to several of the chief plantations. . . . (p. 140)

Although this horror was aimed at "terrifying and grieving" the slaves "with frightful spectacles of a mangled king" (p. 140), it also creates the spectacle of the body of kingship, which appears most powerfully in such vanishing acts, when bodies seem at once reduced to mere things and transcended altogether. Now deprived of that which first constituted it—the ownership and exchange of others—Oroonoko's kingship comes to consist in his godlike will-

ing of the piecemeal alienation of his own body. In this contradictory manner, he proves that he still owns it. Although the moment of death is noted ("his pipe dropped, and he gave up the ghost"), it seems just another stage in the separation of his parts. Oroonoko undergoes an extraordinary self-division, only to become all the more singularly immortal, for "he" is now unlocatable. The mystical body of kingship and the actual body of Oroonoko again become identical when the latter is fragmented and scattered. Just as the brown bodies reached their vanishing point in Oroonoko's black body of kingly and monetary representation, so his own body of representation reaches its vanishing point in this dispersion.

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By using the prostitute and the monarch as her most frequent authorial metaphors, Behn views her authorship through Restoration concepts of self-alienation and sovereignty, that is, through the age's self-contradictory notions about property and exchange. Shadowy aspirations of independence from the marketplace are at once raised and renounced in a paradoxical logic of property: ownership of oneself and others, this logic states, entails their commodification or annihilation. Through this reiterated recognition, Behn renders authorship, doomed to the marketplace but struggling for sovereignty, poignant. However, the author-whore and author-king metaphors also point toward ways in which the author, of all traders, seems to escape the direct consequences of the marketplace.

To demonstrate this claim, let us return to the vanishing point of Oroonoko's body, the point at which kingship has achieved a combined dispersion and incorporeality resembling that of the text itself. At that moment, the narrator makes her most striking appropriation in the form of a disclaimer: "Thus died this great man, worthy of a better fate, and a more sublime wit than mine to write his praise. Yet, I hope, the reputation of my pen is considerable enough to make his glorious name to survive to all ages, with that of the brave, the beautiful and the constant Imoinda" (p. 141). Oroonoko's "worth" demands more sublimity than she can summon, yet her own authorial reputation, itself a mystical body existing in and between texts, will be the support of "his glorious

name." Ending the text with the word "Imoinda" reminds us of Behn's special fitness to tell this love story, her femaleness, but the effect of authorship here transcends all such physical accidents even as it takes them into account. If Oroonoko scatters his members to maintain his integrity, Behn performs a similar act of disowning the text (insisting that it is really Oroonoko's and Imoinda's) to open a rhetorical space in which she can remind us of her authorship and the obligation it imposes. In her dedication of the book to Richard Maitland, she similarly effaces herself as the principle of exchange, effecting a transfer of "the nobler part" from one great man, Oroonoko, to another: "'Tis purely the merit of my Slave that must render [the book] worthy of the Honour it begs; and the Author of that of subscribing herself, My Lord, Your Lordship's most oblig'd and obedient Servant, A. Behn."^[58]

In this odd mixture of appropriation and disowning ("'Tis purely the merit of my Slave that must render" the book worthy of Maitland), the author trades in the "parts" she claims are not exactly hers, and thus she avoids identifying herself with her commodity. Despite the insistent presence of the first-person narrator in Oroonoko , then, the phenomenon of authorship per se tends to come into view as the principle of the exchange of representations. Like Sir Cautious Fulbank, the author seems to want to trade in what she does not own, and quite literally she did not own Oroonoko by the time the printed book appeared, begging the patronage of Maitland. Or, perhaps more precisely, the authorial effect might be likened to Sir Cautious's reasoning that one may safely trade in "nothing": commodities like Julia's "part," Oroonoko's "nobler part," and finally, his "glorious name." What, after all, is a name? "Why 'tis a word, an empty sound; 'tis breath, 'tis air, 'tis nothing ," answers Sir Cautious. Such commodities certainly direct us to the anomalies of ownership in general. However, by insisting on the oddly evanescent materiality of these commodities and by showing that the human body disappears into them, she implies that they are the perfect "nothing" to set against all other commodities. Like authorship itself, they seem endlessly negotiable precisely because they are not really owned, and hence they make their vendor invulnerable.

[58] "The Epistle Dedicatory to the Right Honourable the Lord Maitland," in Oroonoko; or, the Royale Slave: A Critical Edition , ed. and introd. Adelaide P. Amore (Lanham: Univ. Press of Maryland, 1987), p. 3.

Little wonder, then, that Aphra Behn seems to us both the victim and the heroine of the literary marketplace. Her two favorite personae invite exploration of the splendors and miseries of authorship as it realized itself on the stage and in print. What is the relationship between these authorial effects and the historical woman Aphra Behn? Throughout the chapter, I have implied that the historical woman was the producer of these effects, that they are therefore not to be confused with her, indeed that "she" warns us against such confusions. Simultaneously, though, I have suggested that Behn had a heightened consciousness of the connection between self-possession and self-alienation because of her experience as a woman in the literary marketplace. Even when she universalizes the paradoxes of property in the oxymoronic "Royal Slave," her insights seem grounded in the specific entanglements between women and commodities in the late seventeenth century. But because these were the entanglements of commodification, they produce an effect of emptiness when we try to reconstruct the historical subjectivity of Aphra Behn. In the first chapter of Capital , Marx imagines what commodities would say if they could speak. They would say that their essence is not in their matter; that it is an abstract value seemingly divorced from time and place.^[59] To seek to know the interior of the commodity is thus to witness an abstraction from history. My analysis has neither exposed nor exorcised the historical woman, but has rather gained multiple perspectives on her works by composing them around the historically demarcated points where the lady vanishes.

In the chapters that follow, the self-presentations of eighteenth-century women writers will be seen to undergo alterations that are now familiar to students of English literature. The imperceptible change that Sir Walter Scott's great aunt lived through is easy to trace in what might be called the "revirginization" of the woman writer at mid-century. But through this and many other variations, the phenomenon of "Nobodiness" persists, not as an indication of the female author's lack of importance, but as a sign of her success.

[59] Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (New York, 1906), p. 95. See also Walter Benjamin: "[T]he commodity attempts to look itself in the face. It celebrates its becoming human in the whore" ("Central Park," New German Critique 34 [Winter 1985]: 42).