Oroonoko in Nineteenth‐Century Germany: Race and Gender in Luise MüHlbach's Aphra Behn

Abstract

Many critics consider Aphra Behn's novella Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave (1688) the first anti‐slavery narrative. England's first professional woman writer, Behn left a literary legacy divided between recognition of Oroonoko by abolitionists and rejection of her reputation for indecency. In her novel Aphra Behn (1849), the German author Luise Mühlbach joins these disparate strands of Behn reception. She adapts Behn's slave story within the historical context of nineteenth‐century abolitionism, and she reinterprets Behn's biography and controversial literary reputation, transforming Behn into a respectable female literary predecessor. Mühlbach's text asserts a specifically female authorial legitimacy and challenges male dominance in social relations and in literary culture. Drawing on post‐colonial cultural criticism, this essay examines Mühlbach's alterations of Behn's Oroonoko, focusing on the racial and gendered dynamics of power in the white female protagonist's relationship to the black slave couple and to male colonial authority. Although Mühlbach employs a more modern anti‐racist discourse than Behn, Aphra's position remains implicated with the colonial order, and while the black woman Imoinda gains in agency, she lacks the autonomous subjectivity of Aphra and Oroonoko. In her larger project of recuperating Behn's literary reputation, Mühlbach privileges the white European woman's subjectivity against the background of the black woman as ‘other’.