‘Pictures of the Pen’: Oroonoko and the Formation of Colour-based Racial Patriarchy in Eighteenth-century Britain by Troy Walden Ewing
This essay contrasts the 1688 novella Oroonoko by Aphra Behn with an illustration by A.E. Smith and William Hamilton from a 1791 theatrical production based on Thomas Southerne's adaptation of the novella. Oroonoko's tale contains a doomed romance with the beautiful black African princess Imoinda, whose skin tone Southerne changes from a black person to a white person for the dramatization. This alteration sparked critique among feminist scholars of the twentieth century regarding a patriarchal system of domination and the erasure of the black female from Early Modern English literature. I will argue that Southerne's decision to change Imoinda’s skin colour from black to white should be interpreted more of a foreshadowing of the growing influence of colour-based race in English society. This essay will contend, based on the work of scholars such as Jim Sidanius, Carol Pateman, and Lynda Boose, that emerging racial ideologies defining blackness were the tool used to politically define, establish, and maintain colonial patriarchal social order in eighteenth-century British society. This unspoken grammar is represented in Smith and Hamilton’s illustration as a time when gender, race, and class were solidifying as conflicting ideologies moulding the political and social in the eighteenth century.