The intention of Restoration author Aphra Behn, in composing her novella Oroonoko, was not to write either historical or political fiction. She conceived her story as an adventure with a romantic slant, and unlike Thomas Southerne, who later rewrote Behn’s story with a white heroine, Behn had no problem handling a black love story. She spent part of her girlhood in Surinam, and consequently is so completely at home with her black characters that she develops their story as a straightforward romance whose protagonists could be blue, black, or green. Admittedly, some of the situations in which the lovers find themselves could only happen in the West Indies during the seventeenth century; but this does not affect the power of Oroonoko’s love for the beautiful Imoinda, and her love for him.

    That being said, this may help to defray some of the critical insistence that Oroonoko ought to be read as either an anthropology text or a slave narrative. An anthropology text it clearly is not; it is utterly enjoyable popular fiction, and if Behn sets her story against a cultural background she knows well, it is for the purpose of advancing her plot, not as a means to impart everything we might ever want to know about the lifestyles of black people in the West Indies during the seventeenth century.

    Nor is Oroonoko a slave narrative. For one thing, even though slavery does prominently figure in the plot, Oroonoko cannot be a slave narrative because it doesn’t follow the basic rules of the genre. Technically, a slave narrative ought to be written or dictated by a slave. But at the very least, it needs to follow the tragic and poignant story of an honest, sincere, hard-working, faithful, submissive, and absolutely exemplary individual who is cruelly enslaved by people of a much baser moral character than his. (This would allow us to include such white-written works as Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the overall slave narrative genre, since their intent is the same; to prove that the slave in no way deserves his plight, and is in fact no different from the upstanding white people reading his story.)