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

In the novel, the natives' conversion to Christianity is effected by Unca's manipulation of their religious structures and practices. While exploring the island for a hiding place before the natives' annual visit, Unca discovers a "temple" with a statue of the "Oracle of the Sun." The description of the idol is particularly significant given Unca's later objectives:

   The image itself, of gold, greatly exceeded human size: it resembled a man
   clad in a long robe or vest; which reached quite down to the pedestal stone
   of the foundation on which it stood, and lay in folds upon it. This image
   was girt about the waist as with a girdle, and on each breast gathered to a
   point, fastened as it were, with a button; the neck and bosom quite bare
   like the manner of women. (105)

This hollow and trap-doored statue with its bisexual potential provides Unca with an "opening" that is consistent with the narrative's putting aside of the priorities of male conquering force for female civilizing.(12) Unca subsequently discovers a stairway running up the statue that takes her "quite into the body of it. and [her] head within the head of it. There were holes through the mouth, eyes, nose and the ears of it; so [she] could distinctly see all over the island before [her], of which height, [she] was at gave [her] a great command" (110). The statue's panoptic capabilities are then supplemented with a technological secret, discovered when Unca speaks her thoughts-aloud: "I had scarce uttered [these words] before I was stunned by the sound of my own voice. This image, particularly the head of it, it seems, was so wonderfully constructed as to increase the sound of even a low voice to such a degree as to exceed that of the loudest speaker" (110). After this point, the reader does not have to wait long before Unca's desire to convert the natives is actually realized with this technology that enables her at the same time to surmount her position as a relatively disempowered castaway: "I had no sooner made my fixed determination to retire to this place, but a very strange thought arose in my mind. It was nothing less than this, to ascend into the hollow idol, speak to the Indians from thence, and endeavor to convert them from their idolatry" (117).

Buttressed by the instruments of phallic power, a big body and booming voice, the ventriloquism pays off and enacts an ironic reversal of the usual distribution of religious and political power in the eighteenth century when male public spheres emphasized both orality and literacy, as opposed to the female private sphere from where literacy and circumscribed forms of writing provided the only tickets into the public arena.(13) Here it is the disembodied but female voice amplified beyond the range of the human, impersonating an oracle and terrifying the natives with mimicry, that has greater power than Crusoe's musket or the book wielded by the male missionary. It is as a woman and a missionary that Unca goes to the heart of the other culture's belief system and colonizes its soul.(14) Triumphantly, she asserts after her success, "As I was well acquainted with the manners of the Indians, I adapted my discourse to their own way of reasoning and avoided all such terms and modes of speech, as are intelligible only to Europeans" (167).