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Re Crusoe/Pocahontas: Circum-Atlantic Stagings in The Female American - playing - Critical Essay
Criticism, Summer, 2000 by Betty Joseph
This ambivalent process of identification and disavowal in literary history is foreclosed in Davidson's otherwise illuminating account; her focus ends up falling on the institutionalization of a literary object that is taken to be the property of one national space. On the other hand, Benedict Anderson's highly influential book, Imagined Communities, addresses not only the psychic pleasures of such simultaneous identification and disavowal but also theorizes the movement of commodities and peoples as a process that serves to congeal national identity rather than disperse or unfix it.(21) So, while for Davidson the avowed national identity of the title of the novel, Female American, its anonymous author, and its original place of publication (London) pull the text in opposite directions (both sides of the Atlantic) and make its national status indeterminable, Anderson would say that it is precisely this tug-of-war that constitutes nationality in the first place. Asking why it was "creole communities that developed so early conceptions of their nation--well before most of Europe" (50, emphasis in original), Anderson offers a possible answer: "the `journey' between times, statuses and places as a meaning creating experience" (53). Elaborating on what he calls the "arrested pilgrimage" of the Spanish Creoles, Anderson argues that those in the colonies soon realized that their "accident of birth" in the Americas consigned them to subordination, though in every other way they were indistinguishable from the Spain-born Spaniards. The Creole circulated mostly in the colonial spaces, while the metropolitan or peninsular could easily move between the highest echelons of power in Madrid and any place in the colonies (58).
Read through this analogy, The Female American never gives us Unca as the irremediable Creole. Rather, almost like Pocahontas, she is made over as English, with the markers of her ethnicity only heightening her readability as "exotic" and thus enhancing her ability to circulate in the highest circles in England. The multiple crossings Unca makes back and forth across the Atlantic attest that her pilgrimages are not arrested or hindered. In fact, the only constraint on her movements, besides the one of being abandoned on the island, is a self-chosen one. In a final gesture, Unca closes off her island to all future pilgrimages from Europe and instead sends the narrative we are reading back to England for her family. Thus, her last transaction with Europe is a textual one and it is one of affiliation and separation at the same time--of identification with England as the recipient or addressee of her text, but also of disavowal with no promise of any further communication. In this ambivalent movement of identification and disavowal, the novel could be read as a representation of a "political unconscious," where the American as Creole resolves through the novel as a "socially symbolic act" the very contradiction that cannot be (yet) transcended in reality (to be English).(22) It resolves this inadequacy in the social by staging a "parallel" existence between the metropole and its numerous offshoots in the colonies. This parallelism soon leads to what Anderson has argued is a fantasy of surrogation: "of reversing the previous relationship of subjection by transferring the metropole from a European to an American site."(23) Read this way, the closing off to Europe at the end of the novel can also be read as the "dream of replacing the old center."(24) Unca's island will be more of a New England than a radical break with the past and "home."
