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

Anderson's discussion complicates Davidson's sufficiently to make us rethink the markers of what creates the nationality of a given literary text, but it still does not preclude the critical energy (for Anderson) directed toward finding the correct affiliation. That is, it is still an attempt to determine nationality rather than to transcend nation as a projected aim of the narrative. For a discussion that moves us to that level of analysis, when "nation-ness" itself comes under a certain degree of erasure, we have to go to another classic discussion of the nation as narration: Homi Bhabha's introduction to, and concluding essay in, Nation and Narration.(25) Here, Bhabha argues that "the `locality' of national culture is never unified or unitary in relation to itself, nor must it be seen simply as `sother' in relation to what is outside or beyond it" (4). What the critic must aim for instead, says Bhabha, is turning this fracture at the heart of the nation--its "political antagonism" represented as moments of "incomplete signification" (Derrida's term), or "in-between spaces" (whether antinationalist or ambivalent nation-space)--into "cross-roads" for imagining a new transnational culture (4). According to Bhabha, the critic's task lies not in outlining the boundaries of national identity but in showing how that boundary may actually perform narrative cohesion even though it is contested by counternarrations that question its totalizing function to make all speak as "One." Because the nation is already a contested space, unsuccessfully trying to create an imagined community by giving itself an essentialist identity, the narrative of "the minority, the exilic, the marginal, and the emergent" will always turn the boundary into a "contentious internal liminality that provides [this subject] a place from which to speak both of and as" (300).

Read through this deconstructive lens, The Female American, in its marginality as a woman's text, is neither completely British nor American but speaks the impossibility of being either fully. And in this incompleteness of belonging (as full citizen) the novel cuts across the national boundary (as marker for cohesion of meaning) in its contradictory move toward identification with male English figures (Crusoe) and female native American figures (Pocahontas). Though this is not the story of the minority as marginal (the native American) but rather of the woman as marginal, it sublates the former into the latter; but in doing so it also enacts the woman as alienated subject from the nation's task of self-generation. By locating herself on an unnamed island, without a founding father, Unca secedes from the possibility of citizenship and consolidates herself as the delegated lawgiver of the Christian God in a third space, unlocatable in the national histories of either England or the United States. One cannot merely conclude that this novel's ending is "unsettling" because it precedes the American Revolution and that it could not anticipate the national space to which it would normally belong. Rather, one is forced to acknowledge the possibility that it renders that nationalistic settlement of the transatlantic question irrelevant in its own ideological resolution.