ABSTRACT
The peculiarities of Aphra Behn's multiple and shining class positions are inextricably linked to, indeed, partly determined by, the anomalies of her situation as a female writer, one who sold her wares to male patrons as a prostitute sells her body to clients. As Catherine Gallagher has shown, Aphra Behn herself elaborated the prostitute-woman writer analogy along with an even more ideologically mystified one of the female writer as an absolutist monarch. The analogy between white women and Oroonoko, and particularly the alliance between the narrator and her hero, is, however, extremely volatile, partly because it posed an obvious double-pronged threat to the colonial social hierarchy in which white men occupied the top place. The facet of Behn's 'market representation' to which the author's referring is her textual staging of the implicit competition between the white English female author and the black African female slave-wife-mother-to-be. The competition is for Oroonoko's body and its power to engender something in the future.
