Chapter 14 - ‘Our Black Hero’

Summary

John Staines explores the role of compassion in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave (1688). He argues that although the novel’s attitude towards slavery is complicated, its pathos makes readers feel compassion for an injustice committed against a noble human. Behn’s narrative stands at the start of the creation of the modern novel, a new genre that justified itself as a means of educating readers in sentiment and sympathy. Yet Behn’s decision to end her story by torturing and dismembering her hero is, by the standards of later novels, shockingly indecorous as it forces readers to confront his body in a final scene of compassion. In this chapter, John Staines demonstrates that the appeal to compassion is central to Behn’s text, as it is central to neoclassical discussions of rhetoric and poetics. Oroonoko’s pathos helped it continue to have influence long after its political interventions had passed into obscurity and irrelevance. Its shared suffering endured.