SOURCE: "Usurpation and Dismemberment: Oedipal Tyranny in Oroonoko" in Literature and Psychology, Vol. XXXII, No. 1, 1986, pp. 30–6.

In the following essay, Houston discusses the construction of the text and some thematic contradictions inherent within Oroonoko.

May we assume for the duration of this paper that texts are produced by a collaboration of the conscious, the unconscious, other texts, and the institutions that shape individual life. Perhaps we may also say that literary texts come into existence as verbal representations of ideas and images that are not fully accessible to consciousness. Thus texts will reveal, not only fully accessible material whose imaginative or fantastic nature has been mediated by generic conventions, rules of grammar and discourse, and secondary revision in a number of forms. These texts will also display traces of material that has barely sneaked by the censor, that by devious methods has insinuated itself into our perception, that...