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

The point here is that even as Unca's closed-off island invokes this long history of an alternative (though disastrous) founding in the American colonies by missionaries (the remote control for which however still resided in England) the novel's ending also suggests the impossibility of creating such a space except as separate, or topographically isolated, from the rest of America. Ironically, its survival as a community can only be ensured by fracturing the identification held in place by the title, Female American. The novel finally creates a space that secedes not only politically but also in terms of knowledge or national history. It will continue to exist as a story that cannot be narrated for others or for a nation, and Unca's text which we are reading is thus neither the last English novel nor the first American novel but rather a story of the founding of a third space: an imagined community, where the founding father has been displaced by the not-quite-white mother, and where Christianity becomes a female fantasy of total being that rescues the native population from the history of Anglo founding and Anglo (male) missionary projects.

This is not to assert, however, that American is a text for feminism or against nationalism as such, but rather that it is a text that shows us the contradictions that must accompany one specific historical attempt to enact female liberation through writing. On the one hand, we have a woman as agent in her individual act of inscription into the field that exists around a mythical tale of male possessive individualism--Robinson Crusoe. And, on the other hand, the same individual moment of transgressive inscription is also subject to the determinations of other cultural, political, religious, legal, and sexual discourses within which this female subject can be put together--the substitute is never a close fit. As a historical subject, the woman's agency and desire are never entirely self-willed and never purely a question of unilateral movement through unmapped literary space. Unca's fantasy of unity with the native through soul-making saves the natives from themselves, but not from history, which continues to hold them captive on the island for successful missionary endeavor. Moreover, Unca's category of the "Indian" as a unified category of Central, South, and North American natives (done through the figuration of the Sun God), is an attempt to correct the cruelty of Spanish colonialism in the Americas, but it also installs by implication a kinder, gentler Protestant Christian nationalism against Catholic Spain's excesses. Finally, there is no question that Unca's marginality as woman serves, not as a tool to determine a relative autonomy for the native from European history (or the history of colonialism), but to transform this native psychically into a subject for Europe--even if not a national subject. Unca's dispersal of her subjectivity--bisexual, non-unified, and hybrid--may be a critique of the narcissistic imperial eye of mastery that surveys the native and denies its own transformation by that encounter. Yet, as Unca herself exults, this subjective lack, contrary to creating a new native mode of existence, is intended only as a strategy for further penetration.