"Appropriating and Remediating the Black Character in Aphra Behn's and Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko"

Feminist criticism and gender studies in particular have pointed out how during the last decades of the 17th century there exists a significant interconnection between the increasing production of plays (both tragedies and comedies) written by women and the rise of the English novel, showing that the development of female writing was decisive in the growth of the novel as a ‘new’ literary genre. At the same time, women’s plays and prose-writing contributed to the reconsidering and rewriting of some of the characters of the Elizabethan and Jacobean plays which were re-adapted and often re-thought for the Restoration stage and taste. The representation of these ‘figures’ acquired new and more complex epistemological meanings since they often had the implicit function of conveying opinions or ideas that questioned the cultural and political values of the age. I am referring to the works of female dramatists and novelists such as Aphra Behn, who re-considered the stereotype of the ‘black subject’ inherited from the Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. For example, Othello, like many of the ‘Moors’ of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, continued to be the exotic racial outsider, but also became a symbol, as Jacqueline Pearson demonstrates, employed to interrogate and question power hierarchies based on gender discriminations. For female writers, the representation of the racial and ethnic difference of the black character became a useful device to deal with questions of women’s subjugation, identity and sexuality, becoming a tool for their resistance, empowerment and agency. Within this methodological and theoretical frame, my essay analyzes the appropriation and re-mediation of Aphra Behn’s novella Oroonoko (1688) by Thomas Southerne in his theatrical adaptation Oroonoko: A Tragedy (1696) which has been erroneously interpreted by some critics as an interchangeable version of the novella by Behn. My aim is thus to investigate not only the way in which Behn re-wrote the male and female ‘black subjects’ in her novella, but also the metamorphoses that these ‘subjects’ underwent when they moved from one literary genre to another. Moreover, in its transmigration from the novella to the theatre, but also from a text written by a woman to a text written by a man, the representation of the ‘black character’ changes the symbolic functions that he/she acquires in Behn’s novella, confirming that the adaptation of Behn’s story by Thomas Southerne effects transformations not only to Behn’s story itself, but also to the symbolic and ideological meanings of Behn’s representation of the black hero and heroine.