Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Disclaimer
- Introduction: women, race, and Renaissance texts
- 1 Cleopatra: whiteness and knowledge
- 2 Sex, race, and empire in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra
- 3 Dido and Sophonisba of Carthage: marriage, race, and the bonds between men
- 4 The disappearing African woman: Imoinda in Oroonoko after Behn
- 5 Race, women, and the sentimental in Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko
- 6 Chaste lines: writing and unwriting race in Katherine Philips' Pompey
- 7 The queen's minion: sexual difference, racial difference, and Aphra Behn's Abdelazer
- Conclusion: “The efficacy of Imagination”
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Race, women, and the sentimental in Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Disclaimer
- Introduction: women, race, and Renaissance texts
- 1 Cleopatra: whiteness and knowledge
- 2 Sex, race, and empire in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra
- 3 Dido and Sophonisba of Carthage: marriage, race, and the bonds between men
- 4 The disappearing African woman: Imoinda in Oroonoko after Behn
- 5 Race, women, and the sentimental in Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko
- 6 Chaste lines: writing and unwriting race in Katherine Philips' Pompey
- 7 The queen's minion: sexual difference, racial difference, and Aphra Behn's Abdelazer
- Conclusion: “The efficacy of Imagination”
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Imoinda, the “beautiful black Venus” of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688), is probably the most well-known of the few representations of dark-skinned African women in early modern literature. Thomas Southerne's 1696 dramatization of Behn's novella is, in its turn, probably best known for changing the skin color of its Imoinda from black to white. As her racial and sexual identity are reconstructed in whiteness, Behn's black Imoinda becomes an early example of the enforced invisibility of the black female subject in the Americas' dominant cultural discourse. In turning to Southerne's play as the primal scene of this abduction from representation, I hope to emphasize Oroonoko's cultural vitality after Behn as a site for the deconstruction and reformation of women's racial and sexual identities.
For all its audacity – an audacity largely unremarked by his contemporaries – the black Imoinda's disappearance into whiteness is not the only way in which Southerne re-visions women in his Oroonoko. The play is equally taken up with the sexual disguise of its white comic heroine Charlot Welldon, who masquerades as a man for most of the action. Revising Southerne as he revised Behn, the play's later adapters experienced its double plot – one strand dealing with the tragic fates of its newly miscegenous African lovers, the other with Charlot's comic maneuvers aimed at finding rich husbands for herself and her sister Lucy in Surinam – as a structural defect.
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- Women and Race in Early Modern Texts , pp. 108 - 123Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002