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Department of English and American Studies Castaway Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Bc. Barbora Novotná Castaway Crusoe contra Colonialist Criticism: Racial and Gender Stereotyping in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe and Derek Walcott’s Pantomime Master‟s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: Mgr. Martina Horáková, Ph. D. 2014 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Author‟s signature Acknowledgement I would like to thank my supervisor, Mgr. Martina Horáková, Ph.D., for directing me towards postcolonial and feminist literary criticism, for her careful reading of my drafts, as well as for providing me with many insightful comments and suggestions. Table of Contents Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 1 1. Castaway Crusoe and Colonial Criticism ................................................................. 5 1.1 Crusoe‟s Origins ................................................................................................................. 5 1.2 Crusoe‟s Inspiration ............................................................................................................ 8 1.3 Imperial Legacy ................................................................................................................ 10 1.4 Postcolonial Responses ..................................................................................................... 13 1.5 Crusoe‟s Metamorphoses .................................................................................................. 17 2. Mocking Movies and Madness of a Man ................................................................ 23 2.1 Authorial Identity .............................................................................................................. 23 2.2 Pastiche vs. Parody............................................................................................................ 27 2.3 Self and Other ................................................................................................................... 31 2.4 The Male Gaze .................................................................................................................. 34 3. Prosaic Patterns and Postcolonial Play ................................................................... 38 3.1 Narrative Strategies ........................................................................................................... 38 3.2 Verisimilitude and Mimesis .............................................................................................. 44 3.3 The Three Unities .............................................................................................................. 48 3.4 Stylistic Devices ................................................................................................................ 53 4. Foe, Friday and Feminism ....................................................................................... 63 4.1 Feeling Displaced .............................................................................................................. 64 4.2 The Power of Metafiction ................................................................................................ 67 4.3 A Woman‟s Story? ............................................................................................................ 72 4.4 Suffering Bodies ............................................................................................................... 80 5. Race and Role Reversal ............................................................................................ 85 5.1 Racial Perceptions ............................................................................................................. 85 5.2 Indigenous Voices ............................................................................................................. 90 5.3 The Politics of Naming ..................................................................................................... 95 5.4 Crusoe the Mimicked Man ................................................................................................ 98 5.5 Friday the Master ............................................................................................................ 102 Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 109 Bibliography ................................................................................................................. 113 Appendices .................................................................................................................... 121 Appendix 1: Crusoe‟s Sequels .............................................................................................. 121 Appendix 2: Film Adaptations .............................................................................................. 123 Appendix 3: Figures of Speech ............................................................................................ 125 Summary ....................................................................................................................... 127 Resumé .......................................................................................................................... 129 Introduction Postcolonial literatures have attracted a considerable amount of scholarly attention in the past four decades. Similarly to other disciplines beginning with the prefix „post‟, postcolonial studies respond to history and tend to explore, challenge and deconstruct historical consequences from modern perspectives. Moreover, postcolonial rewritings have been particularly important in addressing the issues of otherness, questions of identity and specific problems of cultural appropriation that often come to the fore in various postcolonial contexts. J. M. Coetzee‟s novel Foe (1986) and Derek Walcott‟s play Pantomime (1978) are, in this respect, an ideal response to the imperial discourse in Robinson Crusoe (1719), the classic tale that stood the test of time. The aim of this thesis is to analyze the story of Robinson Crusoe within the postcolonial and feminist contexts of the two creative rewritings under scrutiny. The primary focus is on the deconstruction of racial and gender binaries as well as on the reversal of roles that often intertwine in these works. The thesis, divided into five chapters, aims to explore the ways in which the concept of race and gender intersect and how it constructs the identities of the postcolonial characters incorporated in the works in question. Daniel Defoe‟s eighteenth-century novel, that has established its firm position in the English literary canon as a master narrative, has been reworked in many ways. Over centuries it has captured the imagination of countless readers until it has acquired the status of a cultural myth. This phenomenon is explored in the first chapter of the thesis since it is necessary to historicize literary practices at the time to be able to adequately understand the postcolonial responses that followed afterwards. Therefore, the first part of the thesis deals with the historical background of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe‟s literary inspiration and the eighteenth-century cultural context. The aim is to explore the ways in which the famous story inspired so many postcolonial and 1 feminist writers and resulted in numerous adaptations. For this purpose, Lieve Spaas and Brian Stimpson‟s Robinson Crusoe: Myths and Metamorphoses provides a comprehensive collection of data. Further, the chapter introduces the theoretical concept of postcolonial rewriting and the „writing back‟ paradigm in general, discussing the impact of colonization on gender and racial construction. The books by John Thieme, Homi K. Bhabha, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, prove to be a valuable source of information to outline a necessary theoretical background in this part. Responses to the canonical „pretexts‟1 that were obviously engaged with colonialism, Robinson Crusoe in particular, have been produced across cultures in many different forms, including numerous film adaptations. This is seen for example, in the phenomenon of popular Hollywood-made films like Cast Away (2000) featuring Tom Hanks, and Robinson Crusoe (1997) featuring Pierce Brosnan, which more or less successfully helped Defoe‟s hero to survive in the contemporary mass culture. By focusing on these two American films, the second chapter demonstrates that cinematic adaptations may usurp reader‟s imagination and cause distortions from the original book. This is confirmed by literary and film critic Linda Hutcheon who examines the impact of adaptations on the readers of literature. This chapter is significant in that it addresses the transposition of a written text to a performance medium and its consequences. Methodological and theoretical approach in the thesis is achieved by applying the postcolonial and feminist concepts to the chosen texts. They are explored primarily from the perspective of literary criticism; nevertheless a transposition of a written text to a performance medium is also concerned. Thus, the third chapter is devoted to the creation of Walcott‟s two-hander play Pantomime, which represents a parodic 1 This term has been employed by John Thieme to refer to the canonical texts to which postcolonial
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