Main Narrative Sections

1. Surinam (coast of Brazil): 2237-39

“New World,” natural historical rarities, Eden metaphors

[the narrator introduces herself (“I”)as our guide to this new world]

 

2. Coramantien ( Africa): 2239-55

The court; Oroonoko’s youth as king’s last grandson/heir: HERO

O & Imoinda’s love

king’s seizure of Imoinda; O’s great love-grief (heroic trait)

the battle

ship captain’s treachery

the “middle passage”

 

3. Oroonoko in Surinam: 2256-67

reunion with Imoinda

[meets the narrator, who learns his history and is impressed by his charisma]

adventures (hunting/fishing; Indian village visit, gold)

4. Oroonoko’s revolt: 2268-77

[Narrator (“we”) flees early in this chain of events]

O is taken

Kills Imoinda

execution

The three symbolic spaces of Oroonoko:

SURINAM – the pleasures of the eye

- allows a kind of time travel – like Locke’s and Filmer’s fantasies about what humans were like at the “dawn” of society, almost in a state of nature – before civilization. Eden references: “so like our first parents before the Fall” (2237); “… these people represented to me an absolute idea of the first state of innocence, before man knew how to sin” (2238).

- exotic and enchanting natural phenomena: marmosets “of a marvelous and delicate shape, and has face and hands like an human creature”; cousheries, “a little beast in the form and fashion of a lion, as big as a kitten…” (2237)

- AND ALSO counter-ethnography: how the Amerindians see the Europeans: “They once made mourning … for the death of the English governor, who had given his hand to them to come on such a day to them …; believing, when once a man’s word was past, nothing but death could or should prevent his keeping it” (2238).

 

CORAMANTIEN – heroic/romance values

- the HERO’s education: training as war-leader / courtier / lover

- courtly values: mix of positive and then increasingly negative readings (wealth, elegance; wit; intrigue/corruption)

- What is the role of slavery in this context?

O’s ceremonious gift to I after death of her father: “150 slaves in fetters” (2241)

O’s role in slave trade w/ Europeans

the true (exceptionalist) love of O & I: “contrary to the custom of his country, he made her vows she would be the only woman he would possess while he lived; that no age or wrinkles should incline him to change, for her soul would be always fine, and always young, and he ssould have an eternal idea in his mind of the charms she now bore, and should look into his heart for that idea, when he could find it no longer in her face” (2242)

ENGLAND - aligned, often, with “we” in this story

This is the space that narrator and reader share: see opening 2 paragraphs; refs to London museum collections, theatres; commercial and colonial interests.

Also the world of contracts and religious vows (mostly made to be broken): “religion would here [in Surinam] but destroy that tranquillity they possess by ignorance, and laws would but teach them to know offense” (2238).

Why is the narrator in Surinam? What is her role or position in regard to these three spaces? With regard to her fellow English in Surinam? With regard to Oroonoko and Imoinda? With regard to us as readers?

What can we learn from tracking the shift from “I” to “we” when she talks about events in Surinam?

 

Oroonoko:

As a king, he has almost magical power to attract and subdue (CHARISMA)

On the way upriver to the plantation, he changes out of royal robes to avoid attention, but “he shone through all”; his slave’s clothes “could not conceal the graces of his looks and mien, and he had no less admirers than when he had his dazzling habit on. The royal youth appeared in spite of the slave … . [H]is eyes commanded respect, and his behaviour insinuated it into into every soul. So that there was nothing talked of but this young and gallant slave, even by those who yet knew not that he was a prince” (2257).

“ … if the King himself (God bless him) had come ashore, there could not have been greater expectations by all the whole plantations, and those neighboring ones, than was on ours at that time; and he was received more like a governor than a slave” (2257).

HONOR: with the ship’s captain: “Oroonoko, whose honor was such as he never had violated a word in his life himself, much less a solemn asseveration, believed in an instant what this man said” (2254).

Bridges symbolic spaces of the text: speaks English, French, African languages; at ease in natural landscapes of Surinam; acts as diplomat: “In this voyage [to the village] Caesar begot so good an understanding between the Indians and the English, that there were no more fears or heartburnings during our stay, but we had a perfect, open, and free trade with them” (2267).

Oroonoko’s looks: 2240; Imoinda’s tattoos (2260): ART OBJECTS