The story takes place in the years surrounding the French Revolution, from Ourika’s childhood in the pre-Revolution years, to her time in the convent during the rule of Napoleon. Slavery is a thriving institution during this time; the French are major perpetrators of the transatlantic slave trade. Enlightenment ideals simultaneously seek to elevate the status of the common man. Founded upon the principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as well as a political and intellectual shift away from monarchy toward democracy, America’s Revolutionary War inspires the French to rebel against their monarchy. The French Revolution is founded upon the principles of liberty, fraternity, and equality. The decadent behavior of the royalty and aristocrats in the face of the largely poor common man leads to great social upheaval. The Revolution overthrows the royal family and sees the mechanization and systemization of death in the form of the guillotine. The black people of France—slaves, servants, and the overall disenfranchised—are left out of the equation of equality.  

Even though the Revolution preaches brotherhood, it continues to promote a system of racism, exploitation, inequality, and cruelty. The Haitian Revolution of 1791, sparked by the Santo Domingo massacre, marks the beginning of the end of the French system of slavery. Haiti becomes an independent French state. In line with the French aristocratic perspective, Ourika views this event negatively. She laments, “Till then I had regretted belonging to a race of outcasts. Now I had the shame of belonging to a race of barbarous murderers” (21). Rather than being a source of hope for equality, the Haitian Revolution further alienates Ourika. 

The doctor finds Ourika in a convent, recently reopened, that still bears the scars of the Revolution. The doctor’s admitted “anticlerical prejudices” are a holdover from the Revolution and the Reign of Terror (4). In those periods, clergy, seen as antithetical to the logical basis of Enlightenment thought, were targets of the guillotine.  

Ourika astonishes the doctor. Upon meeting her, he writes that her “welcoming grace of manner and the elegant simplicity of her language” are apparently incompatible with her skin color (4). This dichotomy takes center stage when Ourika begins to recount her upbringing. While Mme de B. raises Ourika to conform to French aristocratic society, she also exhibits Ourika’s exoticness for the benefit of her friends and guests. Ourika is a spectacle of otherness, even as Mme de B., as Ourika describes it, “guided my intellect and formed my judgement” (9).  

The idea of Ourika as a spectacle is highlighted best in the dance she performs for the benefit of Mme de B. and her friends. The dance is part of a ball, a “quadrille symbolizing the four corners of the globe” in which Ourika “is to represent Africa” (10). Ourika alone is left to symbolize a vast continent with myriad cultures. Great efforts are put into an “authentic” reproduction of “African culture” in the French salon. Ourika performs the national dance of Senegal, the country of her birth, lost to her by the French slave trade. Ourika’s dance partner wears “a black mask of crepe” (10); essentially, he is in blackface, aligning with a racist tradition of imitating black and African people in theater, song, and pantomime. Ourika notes that this is “a disguise I did not need. I say that sadly now. But at the time it meant nothing to me” (10). 

Ourika’s reception of her partner’s costume is problematic in two ways. First, it means nothing to her at the time of its use. Ourika is raised (or at least initially thinks she is raised) in a “colorblind” society. Mme de B., Charles, and Mme de B.'s friends accept and love her; they do not appear to treat her differently. But the happiness of her childhood is the bliss of the ignorant. The reality of her social situation destroys her; this shows the fragility of her early worldview.  

Second, Ourika's depression regarding her race highlights the racism of French society. Mme de B. and the marquise’s conversation leads her to conclude: “I was black. Dependent, despised, without fortune, without resource, without a single other being of my kind to help me through life. All I had been until then was a toy, an amusement for my mistress” (12). She realizes not only that she is black, but also that she is inferior. To be black in this era is to be treated as a slave, a servant, and a second-class citizen, if a citizen at all. Ourika, so often assured as a young girl of her talents and prowess, is raised unaware that society promises nothing for her, that her upbringing—one which would no doubt benefit any white woman of the time—is a curse in disguise.