“A Negro Can Change Colour”: Racializing Gender and Virtue in Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko
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This paper reads the racial blanching of Imoinda, Aphra Behn’s African heroine, in Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko as a performance based on cultural forgetting, to use Joseph Roach’s term. Specifically, Southerne’s play manifests the association of female virtue and white Englishness as a carefully constructed cultural legacy resting on Transatlantic crossing. Seven years after Behn published her novella, Southerne wrote a dramatic adaptation in which Imoinda turns into a white European woman. By removing the black female body, Southerne erases the history of master-slave rape in which black slaves were sexually exploited. Instead, he enables Imoinda to refashion herself as a Lockean individual who claims to own property in herself despite her servile status. In a period when race was yet a slippery and elusive category, Southerne renders whiteness the social fabric on which female virtue can be depicted. Yet Imoinda’s whiteness bears not only on the white women of England, but also on the black slaves of Surinam. Put another way, virtue is made recognizable through Imoinda’s white masking as a displacement of the black body; Imoinda, in this sense, embodies a creole whiteness. Imoinda, whose bleached body travels in the Transatlantic world, signifies the turbulent yet intimate relationship between England and the American colonies. Southerne’s Imoinda, I argue, is the reincarnation of the dead, violated, and forgotten bodies of the black female slaves, making visible the untold sexual history of the Transatlantic. In this sense, Imoinda is both black and white, self and other, remote and near. Southerne thus taps into the discourse of gender, race, and virtue that becomes pivotal in the construction of English consciousness; the white female body becomes the site on which gendered virtue is performed, but only at the cost of erasing a Transatlantic awareness that in turn shaped the national imagination.
Abstract
This paper reads the racial blanching of Imoinda, Aphra Behn’s African heroine, in Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko as a performance based on cultural forgetting, to use Joseph Roach’s term. Specifically, Southerne’s play manifests the association of female virtue and white Englishness as a carefully constructed cultural legacy resting on Transatlantic crossing. Seven years after Behn published her novella, Southerne wrote a dramatic adaptation in which Imoinda turns into a white European woman. By removing the black female body, Southerne erases the history of master-slave rape in which black slaves were sexually exploited. Instead, he enables Imoinda to refashion herself as a Lockean individual who claims to own property in herself despite her servile status. In a period when race was yet a slippery and elusive category, Southerne renders whiteness the social fabric on which female virtue can be depicted. Yet Imoinda’s whiteness bears not only on the white women of England, but also on the black slaves of Surinam. Put another way, virtue is made recognizable through Imoinda’s white masking as a displacement of the black body; Imoinda, in this sense, embodies a creole whiteness. Imoinda, whose bleached body travels in the Transatlantic world, signifies the turbulent yet intimate relationship between England and the American colonies. Southerne’s Imoinda, I argue, is the reincarnation of the dead, violated, and forgotten bodies of the black female slaves, making visible the untold sexual history of the Transatlantic. In this sense, Imoinda is both black and white, self and other, remote and near. Southerne thus taps into the discourse of gender, race, and virtue that becomes pivotal in the construction of English consciousness; the white female body becomes the site on which gendered virtue is performed, but only at the cost of erasing a Transatlantic awareness that in turn shaped the national imagination.
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