Aestheticizing Empire: The Mapping of Colonial Ideology Across Behn’s Oroonoko and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe

Abstract

This article compares Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) to show how both early English novels, despite their distinct ideological stances, helped legitimise slavery and reinforce a Eurocentric imperial worldview. Behn’s narrative upholds aristocratic hierarchy, while Defoe’s celebrates middle-class rational individualism. Yet both authors draw on key formal features of the emerging novel, such as truth-claiming narrative, empirical observation, and moral purpose, to construct representations of the colonial Other that align with England’s imperial ideology. This comparative study argues that these representative early novels reconfigure rather than dismantle existing social, racial, and epistemic hierarchies. By linking literary form to the epistemological and political transformations of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, the study delves into how early prose fiction participated in shaping an imperial mode of vision. This “imperial optic” not only justified domination and slavery but also transformed the colonial subject into an object of knowledge and possession, revealing continuity between differing ideological frameworks in the service of empire.