ABSTRACT
One of the most popular narratives in the seventeenth century, and often heralded as an abolitionist novel, Aphra Behn's Oroonoko uses beauty and the body to determine whose freedom is deserved and whose enslavement is justified. Behn's innovations in prose fiction draw on established literary modes to negotiate dynamics of race, gender and class in the plantation environment of Suriname. One of the earliest English women to make a living as a writer, Behn's attention to beauty helps establish her as a credible writer at the same time as it entrenches the racialized logics of the plantation system in the Americas. She uses that narrative authority to reverse the traditionally gendered relationship between object and subject. Her inversion of the Petrarchan conceit of men viewing women's bodies gives her authorial power over the enslaved (both male and female), allowing her to both conjure and abjure her power as a colonist. Behn's version of abolition, picked up by her successors, emerges as a reformist discourse on slavery which maintains justifications of the plantation system based on perceived aesthetic inferiority/aesthetic difference.
