Oroonoko was Aphra Behn’s most published work, being noted to have a character of it’s own. It has become well known due to it hybrid and idiosyncratic nature. It is a novella that is best read and understood as a fusion of genres, between travel writing and French romance, but also with an undertone of drama and theatricality. However as discussed by Marta Figlerowicz in her article “Fruitful Spectacles of a Mangled King’: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and Narration through Theater’, it is also a novel that uses the narrator to evoke responses from the reader, and to authenticate her own narrative through these responses.
Oroonoko is a travel narrative that is deploying the colonial discourse of wonder, where things are vividly described in depth, but there is also a status of the historical veracity. Using the place of Suriname, Behn sets her story in a place of reality, with a context and history of its own while also delving into the realm of romance. However, there is a third genre that has inspired Behn in regards to the structure of her text, and that is drama. Therefore as Figlerowicz notes in her article ‘it proves both viable and fruitful to read Oroonoko as a highly creative, consistent attempt at recreating, the medium of prose fiction with the dramatic effects generated by the interactions between and actor and his audience.’ With this in mind one can see that Behn relies heavily on the concept of mass sensory experience both by the narrator but also the other characters within the text, compounded with the nature of spectatorship that is revealed throughout the novel. Both of these techniques allow Behn to dramatize the historicity and high tragic nature of the novel, while also claiming to reveal a ‘true history’ that is highlighted on the title page of the text.
