Re Crusoe/Pocahontas: Circum-Atlantic Stagings in The Female American - playing - Critical Essay

REWRITINGS OF CANONICAL NOVELS from marginal perspectives not only demonstrate the power of the original to command the desire for imitation but also expose its silences and contradictions. Where the prior text's contradictions may have been resolved through a variety of dominant readings, the rewritings go beyond the moment of critical rereading to one of production. They foreground concerns that have slipped through the operations of various critical unfoldings of the text and set up another text as a relatively autonomous but supplementary interlocutor, which seems to add to and substitute for the original at the same time. Thus, even though Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe has continually lent itself to textual reevaluations from various theoretical positions, the novel's glaring absence of women has kept it away from the focus of much feminist analysis of eighteenth-century fiction. On the other hand, contemporary rewritings of the novel, like J. M. Coetzee's Foe, have tried to address this exclusion by recasting both Defoe and his protagonist, Crusoe, as minor characters within a woman-centered narrative, or in the case of Michel Tournier's Friday, have reinscribed Crusoe's island as "woman" and renamed the novel for its colonial Other.(1)

It would, however, be a mistake to think that such revisionings are confined to our historical moment, a moment inflected both by critical theory debates within the literary establishment and by the legacy of feminist and anticolonial movements. In fact, because Robinson Crusoe became immensely popular at a time when the status of both the European woman and the colonial Other were being debated and inscribed into the discourses of the Enlightenment, it is very likely that the novel was easy game for a reader or writer interested in supplanting the white male of property as human norm.(2) In this essay, I will look at The Female American (1767), an anonymous novel which is for the most part ignored in studies of eighteenth-century British or American literature, as a text that not only rewrites Robinson Crusoe but also tries to replace the original through a complex process of surrogation, rendered all the more complex because it transforms Defoe's castaway narrative into one of female self-fashioning and into a critique of colonialism at the same time.(3)

"Surrogation," as Joseph Roach's recent study Cities of the Dead suggests, is a matrix within which historical consciousness as such is performed or reenacted as the praxis of memory, as a performance of the past as "restored behavior."(4) So why, one may ask, would a female playing Crusoe have any special claim to "complexity" when she is only reenacting a narrative already mythical in its cultural influence? The answer, I think, lies in what Roach identifies as the limits to the performances of the already-familiar:

   Into the cavities created by loss through death or other forms of departure
   ... survivors attempt to fit satisfactory alternates. Because collective
   memory works selectively, imaginatively, and often perversely, surrogation
   rarely if ever succeeds. The process requires many trials and at least as
   many errors. The fit cannot be exact. The intended substitute either cannot
   fulfill expectations, creating a deficit, or actually exceeds them,
   creating a surplus.(5)

This imperative to replace that is also and at once the impossibility of doing so creates both new spaces and objects; it is a divergence where new historical subjects may appear and take their place in a literary tradition. In Female American, the fictional narrator-author Unca Winkfield is quite aware that no actual or perceived vacancies occur in Defoe's narrative or in eighteenth-century British novelistic conventions for her to move in and occupy through a simple sleight of hand. For the female subject of adventure, the entry into writing is always a deliberated clearing of space rather than the act of occupying a vacancy; hence, the novel's early caveat about the appropriateness of a woman protagonist is a sort of forced entry:

   The lives of women being commonly domestic, the occurrences of them are
   generally pretty, nearly of the same kind; whilst those of men, frequently
   more vagrant, subject them often to experience greater vicissitudes, many
   times wonderful and strange. Though a woman, it has been my lot to have
   experienced much of the latter; for so wonderful and strange and uncommon
   have been the events of my life, that true history, perhaps, never recorded
   any that were more so. (6)

Even as she apologizes for the uninteresting lives of women and the homogeneity of their experiences, Unca also suggests that simply being men makes adventures of vagrancy "frequently" commonplace for them rather than exceptional. She thus questions the promised novelty behind Defoe's title of his 1724 first edition: The Life and Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe ... Written by Himself (my emphasis). Then, in the next sentence, when she appropriates and substitutes "wonderful and strange" from the narrative of male vagrancy to female vagrancy, which is without doubt, Unca claims, more "uncommon," she successfully enacts a kind of transplanting by using the same criteria whereby the novel provided "novelty" in its early stages of emergence in the eighteenth century. Yet, this moment of claiming the right to write her tale is not sufficient for the author-protagonist. Since Female American is set in the 1630s, she also goes on to perform a tongue-in-cheek usurpation of Defoe's place as a "founder" in the novelistic tradition by suggesting that Robinson Crusoe and similar tales are but imitations of her own unusual tale which she has already titled The Female American, or the Extraordinary Adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield, Compiled by Herself. Here is Unca's foreshadowing of Defoe's "later" arrival into the canon: