The “Noble Savage”: Aristocracy, Slavery, Restoration Culture and Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave

Abstract

Evoking as historical and intertextual context the Restoration of English monarchy and the attendant political and cultural projects, chiefly royalist, legitimizing and advocating the stability of power in the period, the paper discusses Aphra Behn’s novel Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave by looking at its literary representation of the African prince as a “noble savage” – a trope that may be found also in John Dryden’s and Jonathan Swift’s work. The paper pays due attention to the politics of Behn’s novel in terms of its ambiguous treatment of race, slavery and colonialism, and evokes the concepts of “iterability” and “Third Space” in order to engage in a deconstructive reading of the novel’s royalist project of cultural investment in such notions as nobility, hierarchy and order.

"Aladdin's Cave of Processed Crap"

“…It seems that within the ideology of such "restorative" efforts, the figure of "noble savage" functioned as a trope marking a tensed conjunction of the period's different characteristic discursive frameworks, especially those of progress, colonialism, peace, enlightenment, religious tolerance and social cohesion; a trope often utilized in articulation of the ideologically motivated wish for a return to an older and hence presumably more "natural" or "harmonious" order of things, so to speak. 38 Similarly, the trope of the "noble savage" is seen in "In Defense of Food"…”