Abstract
The robinsonade, a genre of literature named for Daniel Defoe’s 1719 Robinson Crusoe, features (usually male) European protagonists defeating and taming indigenous flora and fauna in various non-European locations. The female robinsonade, however, is a type of adventure literature with female protagonists that is much more interested in the nature of girls’ education and the capacity of female self-reliance.1 It creates a space for exploring tensions between conventional notions of femininity and female aspirations for personal development. The heroine of the female robinsonade is a type of colonial girl, a European girl who must make a new home in territory that is uncharted both physically and ideologically. Given the exciting possibilities of such adventures, as well as the possible anxieties engendered by young women having to act unconventionally, it is not surprising that the colonial girl makes regular appearances in the late nineteenth-century English periodical press, particularly magazines for girls and young women. Both fiction and essays describe the experiences of British girls emigrating to one of the colonies and girls born and bred in some of those colonies; in addition, correspondence columns feature responses to girls living in the colonies and girls interested in emigration.2 The figure conspicuously absent, however, is the Indigenous girl.
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Notes
See Jeannine Blackwell, ‘An Island of Her Own: Heroines of the German Robinsonades from 1720–1800,’ The German Quarterly 58, no. 1 (1985), 5–26
CM. Owen, The Female Crusoe: Female Hybriâity, Trade, and the Eighteenth-Century Individual (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010)
Michelle J. Smith, ‘Nineteenth-Century Female Crusoes: Rewriting the Robinsonade for Girls,’ Victorian Settler Narratives: Emigrants, Cosmopolitans, and Returnees in Nineteenth-Century Literature, ed. Tamara S. Wagner (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), 165–76.
See Kristine Moruzi, ‘“The freedom suits me”: Encouraging Girls to Settle in the Colonies,’ Relocating Victorian Settler Narratives: Transatlantic and Transpacific Views in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Tamara S. Wagner (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), 177–92
J.A. Owen, ‘Candelaria: A Story of the Rocky Mountains. Founded on Fact,’ Girl’s Own Paper 5 (1883–84), 1–414
Edward G. Salmon, Juvenile Literature As It Is (London: Henry J. Drane, 1888), 22–3.
Simon Houfe, The Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Book Illustrators and Caricaturists, rev. edn (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors Club, 1996), 61.
Andrew O’Malley, Children’s Literature, Popular Culture, and ‘Robinson Crusoe’ (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)
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© 2014 Terri Doughty
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Doughty, T. (2014). Deflecting the Marriage Plot. In: Moruzi, K., Smith, M.J. (eds) Colonial Girlhood in Literature, Culture and History, 1840–1950. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137356352_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137356352_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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