SOURCE: "Mrs. Behn's Oroonoko" in Anniversary Papers by Colleagues and Pupils of George Lyman Kittredge, Ginn and Company Publishers, 1913, pp. 419–34.

In the essay below, Bernbaum addresses the question of realism in Oroonoko, concluding that much of Behn's material came from secondhand sources.

Historians of the novel assign to Mrs. Behn's Oroonoko a place of distinct importance in the development of realism. They concede that those parts of the narrative which recount the adventures of Oroonoko in Coramantien are full of romance, but maintain that his subsequent slavery in Surinam, his reunion with his bride Imoinda, his insurrection, and his violent death, are on the whole delineated with fidelity to fact. "Imagination," says Professor Canby, "colored the heroic life of the slave as well as the romantic intrigue of the negro prince," but only, it seems, in a few negligible respects; the rest is considered "truthful, touching, and vivid...