Death as a Pathway to Freedom from Slavery

In the following passage, the narrator makes note of the cultural custom regarding marriage, in this case between Imoinda and Oroonko:

“for wives have a respect for their husbands equal to what any other people pay a deity, and when a man finds any occasion to quit his wife, if he loves her, she dies by his hand, if not, he sells her…” ( 71).

At this particular point in the novella when Oroonko is going to kill Imoinda to rid her of terror and slavery, Imoinda is happy to submit to death by her husband’s hands. In the novella, the characters express quite a few times how they would rather die than to endure slavery. During my research, I used keywords and phrases such as west African marriage and afterlife to verify any relationship between these topics and what happens in the novella. By using the terms afterlife and African, I discovered Falkenhain and Handal’s article on religion and death attitudes in which I was able to understand why they might prefer death over slavery better than I would just reading the text at face value as the article provides data between death and the anxiety or lack thereof towards it and what that means in terms of beliefs (2003). In the novella, the narrator implies that although Oroonko does not practice Christianity, some of his beliefs align with it. It is important to consider this when reading the passage above because Falkenhain and Handal’s article underlines how religion ties into death anxiety. Oroonko and Imoinda are not afraid to die and thus, per Falkenhain and Handal’s article, they have no death anxiety and a high sense of faith. According to the authors, this is because Oroonko and Imoinda are confident in the idea that there is an afterlife. Typically, if a person has led an honest life, the afterlife will be even better for them. Considering the positions that both Oroonko and Imoinda were in and their values, the afterlife would have been a place where they could peacefully and happily live amongst one another, escaping captivity. This note may help readers’ confusion about the characters’ willingness to die in the novella and may even suggest that Behn was implicitly or explicitly implementing the Western bias that she had in terms of her religious beliefs and what she thought to be true about life after death.

References

Behn, Aphra, 1640-1689. Oroonoko, Or, The Royal Slave. Boston :Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000.

Falkenhain, M., & Handal, P. (2003). Religion, Death Attitudes, and Belief in Afterlife in the Elderly: Untangling the Relationships. Journal of Religion and Health, 42(1), 67-76. Retrieved February 10, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/27511655