The femininity of Oroonoko’s bride, Imoinda, is also a subject of praise in that it embodies the normative values of beauty and modesty of the time. Other males, such as Oroonoko’s grandfather, are emasculated through their failure to conform to these standards.

Indeed, Behn measures and praises Oroonoko’s masculinity only in terms of these parallels. Furthermore, my close examination of Behn's text is supplemented with political cartoons and travel narratives that similarly depict other races in order to historicize the 17th century.Aphra Behn’s genre-blending tale Oroonoko melds travel narrative with fictional biography to tell the story of Prince Oroonoko, “the royal slave.” Although Behn writes of Oroonoko’s honor as unique among men, her admiration for him seems to derive directly from how closely he mirrors the prime model of a nobly descended, Christian Englander. Because Behn chooses to revere only Oroonoko and his wife, Imoinda then, her ignorance towards the rest of the population again complicates the text's classification as “abolitionist.” Additionally, in order to gain a sense of how others perceived Behn's narrative, my research then discusses and compares Thomas Southerne's adaptation of Oroonoko in play format, where he chooses to alter the skin color of Oroonoko's wife from black to white. Also, Oroonoko's attitude toward the rest of the non-Europeanized slave population again calls attention to the separation that exists between the slave classes. Additionally, my findings suggest that Behn's text attacks the unchristian slave-owners for their immoral practices such as deceiving and lying to Oroonoko but not for actually enslaving him. Therefore, I identify numerous examples within the text that then complicate the critics' decisions to classify the text as “solely abolitionist.” Foremost, Behn's relationship with the Surinam Indians provides valuable insight as to why slavery exists between white Americans and African-Americans but not native people. However, my research discusses the seemingly problematic nature of Behn's text because of her decision to characterize Oroonoko, an enslaved African prince, as separate and above the rest of the slave population. A number of scholars classify Aphra Behn's Oroonoko as one of the first anti-slavery or abolitionist narratives.

Prince oroonoko