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

In this essay, I have asked to what extent "woman" is even available as a space or "cavity" for surrogation for female subjects acting as agents in the history of colonialism. I tried to answer this question by looking primarily at a text from an earlier time, when the circum-Atlantic performance had not congealed into the transatlantic moment of negotiated nationality But the point has never been simply to insert this womanist narrative into a list of circum-Atlantic textual performances. Rather, it was to ask how and if female surrogation may indeed carve out a different trajectory for a historical subject and how such a trajectory might help us imagine a postcolonial Atlantic that does parcel out literary texts, bodies, practices, and historical events into the neatly-agreed on division of Pocahontas at Gravesend.

Notes

I wish to thank Carol Mason for her first reading, Terry Munisteri for the last, and the editorial board at Criticism for detailed suggestions and important criticisms at various stages.

(1.) J. M. Coetzee, Foe (London: Penguin, 1986) and Michel Tournier, Friday or the Other Island, trans. Norman Denny ([1967] London: King Penguin, 1984).

(2.) Derek Attridge's characterization of Crusoe as "western culture's most potent crystallization of its concern with the survival of the individual, the fundamentals of civilized life, and the dialectic of master and servant" may border on the hyperbolic, but it still conveys the sentiment behind its pedagogical use as a text that illustrates the compressed bedrock of novelistic origins, individualism, European mastery, private property, colonization, Protestantism, bourgeois radicalism, and so on. See his "Oppressive Silence: J. M. Coetzee's Foe and the Politics of the Canon," in Decolonizing Tradition: New Twentieth Century British Literary Canons, ed. Karen Lawrence (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 216, 222.

(3.) The Female American or The Extraordinary Adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield, Compiled by Herself ([1767] Vergennes, Vt.: Jepthah Shedd, 1814). Further references to this edition will be cited as page numbers in the text.

(4.) Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 3.

(5.) Ibid., 2.

(6.) Tremaine McDowell, "An American Robinson Crusoe," American Literature 3 (1929): 307-9.

(7.) The narrative does not distinguish among the "Indians" or indicate to which tribe they belong. Even in her more detailed engagement with the natives on the island later in the novel, Unca makes no attempt to throw any geographical specificity on the site of the action. The natives themselves are, curiously enough, sun-worshippers with temple-like structures that evoke earlier communities of Central and South America rather than the Native Americans directly affected by British colonization in the northern part of the continent. Since the narrative cannot give us any hold on this generic category of "Indian," I have retained the novel's naming practices in my discussion.