SOURCE: “Looks That Kill: Violence and Representation in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko,” in The Discourse of Slavery: Aphra Behn to Toni Morrison, edited by Carl Plasa and Betty J. Ring, Routledge, 1994, pp. 1-17.

In the following essay, Fogarty offers a new reading of Aphra Behn's 1688 novel Oroonoko, arguing that the novel does not reveal parallelisms bewteen slavery and the subjugation of women as has generally been held, but rather emphasizes that a harmonious co-existence between the black slave and his white female friend is an impossibility.

Aphra Behn's novella with its violent account of the execution of an African slave who was once a king was published—significantly—in 1688, the year that saw the bloodless deposition of King James II in England.¹ The social unrest that led to the dismemberment of the slave-king in Behn's fiction is matched by a similar discord in late-seventeenth-century England that issued in the...