Female Robinsonades

Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is a male adventure story in which females are overlooked or paid little attention to. As Ian A. Bell comments, “Crusoe’s story is overwhelmingly an account of male experience, or at least of the strange surprising experiences of a particular male . . .” (30). In such a male narrative, women play insignificant and peripheral roles and, in a sense, are absent. For instance, Defoe’s Crusoe mentions little about his wife and she remains anonymous. Besides the absence of a female voice, Robinson Crusoe omits any account of Crusoe’s sexuality.

As Bell notes, “Crusoe’s remarkable lack of erotic urges and sexual fantasies during his twenty-eight years of isolation can be seen as one of the most curious of incidents in nearly ten thousand night-times, inviting speculation, scholarly commentary and perhaps even a little amusement” (29-30). Although Robinson Crusoe shows little concern with gender and sexuality, later writers creatively fill in such a gap in Robinsonades. For instance, in Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton, Lady Mary is a female castaway, a heroine that can be regarded as the counterpart of Crichton, her

male adventure companion. In Walcott’s Pantomime, although there is no female character, Jackson plays the part of Harry’s ex-wife when Harry talks about her.

In modern and contemporary Robinsonades, women are not merely foils simply because they subvert the male adventure narrative in Robinson Crusoe, which focuses solely on the man-to-man relationship. Issues of gender, sexuality, and female

experiences are brought into Robinsonade and enrich the topics of this genre.

As Tina L. Hanlon observes, “modern Robinsonnades for children focus on dolls, dogs, dinosaurs, and dragons as well as human castaways, and on babies and

females in addition to traditional male heroes” (61; emphasis added). Take, for

example, Carol Ryrie Brink’s Baby Island (1937). Like Theodore Taylor’s The Cay,

Baby Island is a children’s novel, but, unlike The Cay that focuses on the interaction

between two male castaways, Baby Island narrates the experience of female survivors on an island. After the shipwreck, twelve-year-old Mary Wallace and her ten-year-old sister Jean are adrift in a lifeboat on the sea and, besides these two girls, four babies are also in the tiny boat. The two girls play the role of young mothers who take care of these babies throughout the entire journey. In contrast to Defoe’s Crusoe, who feels fear, worry, and danger, and even thinks of death on his sea voyage, these two little girls, especially Mary, have a rosier view of their destiny partly because Crusoe serves as their precursor. While floating on the sea, Mary is sure that they will reach some little island, just as “shipwrecked people always do” (Brink 20). As Mary says, “Why, the public library at home is just full of books about shipwrecked people who landed on tropical islands. And did you ever see a book written by a person who was

drowned at sea? I never did” (20).

While Defoe’s Friday is a black young man described as a savage, his

counterpart in Baby Island is replaced with a bad-tempered, middle-aged European man. The two little girls do not know that there are other inhabitants on the island

until they find footprints left on the sandy beach. At the time, they speculate on the identity of the Other. Jean thinks that he may be a “savitch” like Friday in Defoe’s novel, and if so, they do not have to worry because Friday is “good to Robinson Crusoe” (Brink 82). Mary corrects her that she should not call him a “savitch.” Jean continues and says that if he wants food, she will let him eat her first. Jean’s words reflect the notion that her understanding of the Other is influenced by Robinson

Crusoe in which Friday is considered to be a cannibal. Nevertheless, the Friday that

Mary and Jean first encounter is not a savage or a cannibal but is an English seaman named Arvey Peterkin, who lives alone on the desert island. Although at first he appears gruff, he gradually likes the babies and enjoys the company of the two girls and four babies. Later, Peterkin makes tools for their everyday use, such as a bamboo chair.

Baby Island, published in 1937, shifts the focus from activities conducted solely in a male context in Robinson Crusoe to female experiences such as baby nurturing.

Adventure stories like this that feature female protagonists were not common during Carol Brink’s time. Even “the idea of a female lead in an adventure story” was “a radical notion in the early 1960s” (Rochman 54). One of the examples is Scott O’Dell’s children’s novel Island of the Blue Dolphins (1960), which describes how a young native Indian girl named Karana lives on San Nicolas Island for eighteen years.

The people of the Ghalas-at inhabit the island, which is surrounded by blue dolphins and provides a place for sea otters to play and seabirds to roost. Because of their conflicts with the Aleuts, who seek to hunt the sea otters for profit, the Ghalas-at people decide to leave the island and sail east. On the departure day, when the ship sails out, Karana’s brother, Ramo, is not on board because he goes back for his

hunting spear that he has forgotten to bring with him. Upon seeing Ramo still back on the beach of the island, Karana jumps into the water and swims back to the island

after the ship is at sea. Because of this, neither of them board the ship in time with their tribe but are left to live on the island where they work hard together to meet their basic life needs. One day, Ramo is killed by the wild dogs on the island; therefore, Karana becomes the only inhabitant on the island.

Karana is the only heroine in the novel and the appearance of such an independent female figure can be treated as a type of revision project against the traditional adventure stories in which the protagonists are men. To survive alone on the island and to protect herself from being attacked by her two major enemies, the wild dogs and the Aleuts who may revisit the island anytime, Karana makes tools. She also makes weapons to defend herself, although women, according to the laws of her tribe, are not allowed to make these. At this point, she breaks the patriarchal law and becomes a self-reliant woman.

Like Island of the Blue Dolphins, Jane Gardam’s Crusoe’s Daughter (1985), whose title is indebted to Robinson Crusoe, is also a feminist revision of the Crusoe story. In an imagined dialogue between Crusoe and the female protagonist named Polly Flint at the end of the novel, Crusoe himself says, “You know, when my wife died, there were children. There was a daughter. We don’t hear about the daughter.

What became of her?” (Gardam 309). Gardam’s rewriting of Defoe’s story seems to answer Crusoe’s question and becomes the afterlife of Robinson Crusoe. Polly is greatly influenced by Robinson Crusoe and identifies with the title character. As she says, “The book was Robinson Crusoe, a book that I knew very well. Today it was going where it and I would feel at home. I pushed it inside the front of my coat and set off, giving both inner and outer door a slam, for the wide sea-shore” (40).

Like Crusoe, Polly experiences spiritual growth. As Ann Marie Fallon

comments, Crusoe’s Daughter is “an example of the feminist Bildüngsroman” (102).

In 1904, Polly is six and lives with Frances and Mar, her two aunts, as well as

Charlotte, the maid who becomes her friend, at a yellow house by the sea marsh. As she grows up, she becomes closer and closer to nature. For instance, she builds a stronger relationship with the marsh than with other people around her. At twelve, she decides not to go to church again because she “has a vision” when she crosses the marsh (Hanson 99). The landscape plays the role of enlightenment for her to guide her life and help her to see the hidden aspects of the lives of the people that she lives with.

While the three above-mentioned female Robinsonades stress the heroine’s independent character, Marianne Wiggins’s John Dollar (1989), although entitled by a male name, subverts not only the heroic images in traditional adventure stories but also the heroine’s positive and self-reliant images in female Robinsonades. Said to be stimulated by Wiggins’s reading of Lord of the Flies (Dohrmann 69), John Dollar describes how Charlotte Lewes (an English teacher), John Dollar (her lover), and eight young British school girls (her students) seek to survive on a remote island off the coast of Burma where they are stranded on a seafaring expedition in 1919.

Escaping from the ruins of her life, Charlotte, a widow, leaves England for Burma in 1917, then teaches in Rangoon and falls in love with a sailor named John Dollar. To have a day’s picnic on a theoretically deserted island, Charlotte, her English girl students and their parents, and John Dollar embark on a sea voyage together. Their visiting the island is associated with the Crusoe story, especially when the narrator mentions Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. As the novel describes it:

Everyone who stepped ashore that day . . . had either read or heard the story of The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe so there was that, that sense of exhilaration which comes when one’s life bears a likeness to the fictions that one’s dreamed; plus there was the weighty thrill of bringing light, the torch of history, into one more far-flung reach of darkness. (Wiggins 69)

This narration foreshadows the later exposure of what is beneath the veneer of civilization—that is, the evil and dark side of human nature.

The girls’ parents decide to take a different expedition, so they ask Charlotte and John Dollar to take care of the girls for them. Thereafter, a series of catastrophes including a large tsunami leave Charlotte, John, and the eight girls marooned on a desert island. The eight girls find John immediately after they had become separated from John and Charlotte, whereas Charlotte is cast away to another part of the island and becomes blind. One evening, the girls and John see a group of natives kill, burn, and eat the girls’ parents on the beach. Because they know that they can never overcome the natives, they cannot help but witness this horrible scene happening in front of their eyes. Then, Amanda and Nolly, the older girls, start to have a kind of religious ritual in which they devour the flesh of John’s thighs. Other girls are killed or die from accidents, except Menaka (called “Monkey”), the youngest girl who has a native mother and a British father. When Charlotte and Monkey go to rescue John, he is already dead. Charlotte kills Amanda and Nolly and leaves the island with Monkey.

This event is so traumatic for Charlotte and Monkey that these two survivors, after returning home to England, live together and stay isolated from society.

In Crusoe’s Daughter, the role of the Other is erased. Yet in John Dollar, the role of the Other is kept to reveal injustice and the dark side of colonial power (Fallon 102). Amanda and Nolly are educated and civilized schoolgirls. However, they lose their sophistication on the island; their education, manners, and catechisms become useless there and do not help them to survive at all. They turn out to be monstrous female figures and mimic cannibalism. Unlike Crusoe, who presents a masculine image, John Dollar cannot defend himself and thus is in a sense castrated by the females. At this point, the author seems to tell readers that there is a fine line between civilization and barbarism. As Gail V. Dohrmann remarks, Amanda and Nolly

“behave no better than the cannibals who so traumatized them earlier,” and, in fact,

“they are savage at the core” (71). The scene in which they consume John’s flesh is frightening and astonishing; it not only points out the human heart of darkness but also questions the meaning of civilization.

With the rise of postcolonialism, the past or the Other’s history is able to be unearthed, reread, and rewritten. As Fallon comments, “In late twentieth-century postcolonial writing, the striking absence of women in Defoe’s original story becomes an absence that speaks to the novelistic erasure of the colonized subjects in the

original Robinson Crusoe” (101). The appearance of female roles fills in the gap—the absence of women in Defoe’s story—that covers the voice of the Other or the

colonized. If Wiggins employs the theme of female cannibalism to requite the colonial power, reveal the violence of colonialism, and render the silenced voice present, then J. M. Coetzee’s project in Foe (1986) is to expose the absence of the Other’s voice, a type of absence that is by no means to be retrieved but can only be uttered by

somebody else’s lips.

Fallon claims that “if colonialism was largely a male story, postcolonialism is a story of women” (101). It is through the perspective of a female character that Foe takes a postcolonial position regarding the past and provides an alternative view of history that allows the writer to reveal the problem of reality in historical contexts. If

Foe, as Robert M. Post argues, is taken as “an allegory of contemporary South Africa,”

Cruso and the ship’s captain (who, in fact, intends to sell Friday into slavery, although he guarantees to Susan Barton that Friday will be taken back to Africa) represent “the Afrikaner government of South Africa”; then, Susan Barton represents “the liberal white South African” who is full of pity for the predicament that his or her country’s non-whites suffer from (145). Susan Barton, the female protagonist of the novel, breaks into the male adventure narrative and challenges the male order. As Peter E.

Morgan comments, “She [Susan Barton], too, links discourse with sex and presents the female urge as strong enough not only to assault the patriarchy but to overturn its corpus” (84-85).

Yet, in my view, the female voice in Foe is not so powerful as Morgan

comments because Susan is positioned in a place of the Other that fails to effectively counteract the patriarchal system. Accepting Captain Smith’s recommendation that she should publish her story of a female castaway, Susan resorts to asking the writer, Mr. Foe, to write for her because she is not confident in her writing ability. When Susan stresses the reality of her adventures, Mr. Foe adds fictional elements to her travel account and blurs the line between reality and fiction. As the novel progresses, Susan and Friday are drawn closer and closer. Susan says to Mr. Foe, “We [Susan and Friday] have lived too close for love, Mr. Foe. Friday has grown to be my shadow”

(Coetzee 115). Robinson is to Friday what Mr. Foe is to Susan. In Foe, Friday is a silenced subject. His tongue is cut, and his “tongueless mouth” represents the

“inaccessible reality” (Cowart 171). Friday’s loss of tongue symbolizes the castration of his language power (Susan doubts whether Cruso cuts Friday’s tongue off). While Susan insists on narrating the reality of the story, Mr. Foe, who holds the power of writing the story, ignores her proposal and seeks to rewrite her story as well as manipulate her life. Therefore, Susan lacks the ability to write, just as Friday cannot utter truth. This female figure, Susan, is brought into the story and at first is expected to retell the story of the silenced voice represented by Friday, but in the end, she is also to be among the silenced.

In a more recent work, Terry Pratchett’s 2008 novel Nation, Defoe’s Crusoe, a European man, is transformed into a female European adventurer. After a destructive wave sweeps an entire island and kills all the people, a young boy named Mau is the only survivor. At the same time, a European ship called the Sweet Judy crashes on

Mau’s island. All the people on the ship are dead, except for a white girl named Daphne, who becomes shipwrecked on the island. At first, she wants to shoot Mau to death (although she regrets doing so immediately), but she fails. Thereafter, they become friends after their miscommunication. Then, a group of European people come to the island; however, they are not normal explorers but mutineers. They keep Daphne as a hostage. She is not a delicate girl and, after poisoning one mutineer and injuring the other, she regains her freedom. Mau defeats their leader and the island becomes peaceful again. In the end, Daphne’s father, who is the king of the British Empire, comes to the island. Daphne persuades her father that the island should be preserved because it is a precious asset to the world. Daphne returns home to England while Mau stays on the island. Daphne is a female version of Defoe’s Crusoe who represents colonial power. Yet, unlike Crusoe, who regards the island as his own and seeks to govern the people there, Daphne does not build a colony on the island.

The female characters in the above-mentioned works are independent and self-sufficient. These female Robinsonades not only stress female self-reliance but also present unique female experiences that are distinct from male adventure narratives, such as baby nurturing.

在文檔中 當代魯賓遜文類中的生態轉向：豪斯霍弗爾、圖尼埃、巴拉德、馬泰爾 (頁 69-77)