SOURCE: "The Author-Monarch and the Royal Slave: Oroonoko and the Blackness of Representation," in Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820, University of California Press, 1994, pp. 49–87.

In the excerpt below, Gallagher discusses the meaning of blackness in relation to European society in Oroonoko.

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...