Three Major Adaptations of Robinson

NARRATIVE RETELLINGS AND THE CREATION OF IDENTITY DISCOURSE IN

WESTERN LITERATURE: THREE MAJOR ADAPTATIONS OF ROBINSON

CRUSOE

Christopher David Stein

A Project Presented to

The Faculty of Humboldt State University

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts in English: Literature

Committee Membership

Dr. Michael Eldridge, Committee Chair

Dr. Corey Lewis, Committee Member

Dr. Nikola Hobbel, Graduate Coordinator

May 2013

ABSTRACT

Narrative Retellings and the Creation of Identity Discourse in Western Literature: Three Major Adaptations of Robinson Crusoe

Christopher David Stein

Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is one of the most frequently retold narratives in western literature featuring over 700 adaptations in its 200-year history. Such copious retelling has turned the story into an occidental myth, a folktale of western identity relative to the rest of the world. This project explores three adaptations of Robinson

Crusoe in the Robinsonade tradition and how they alter or contest the meaning of the canonical narrative by their retellings. These three novels— The Coral Island, Lord of the Flies, and John Dollar—produce their own branch of the Robinsonade tradition by speaking simultaneously to Defoe and to each other, signaling multiple associations within a single text. Examining the ways in which these narratives interact with each other and with the larger myth that encompass them will sheds light how literature contributes to developing archetypes that help society define their cultural identities

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... iii INTRODUCTION ...... 1 ADOLESCENT IMPERIAL LITERATURE: EXAMINING THE CORAL ISLAND AND ITS ROLE IN THE ROBINSONADE ...... 13 LORD OF THE FLIES: EXPLORING A CRISIS IN BRITISH IMPERIAL IDENTITY ...... 29 JOHN DOLLAR: THE ROBINSONADE IN CONTEMPORARY WESTERN LITERATURE ...... 46 CONCLUSION ...... 58 WORKS CITED ...... 62

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INTRODUCTION

In 1966, the Chilean government renamed two of the Islands of the Juan

Fernandez archipelago the Island of Alexander Selkirk and the Island of Robinson

Crusoe, in tribute to the historical castaway and the fictional character he inspired. Few literary characters have exercised such a powerful influence in the world as to warrant the renaming of the physical landscape. Daniel Defoe’s character Robinson Crusoe, the shipwrecked sailor who carves out a new life for himself in the face of isolation and loneliness, stands out as such a figure, affecting not only the naming of the physical world but also the ideological construction of how we see that world. With over seven hundred adaptations since its initial publication in April 1719, Robinson Crusoe has acted as reservoir of cultural memory and has been repeatedly appropriated by other authors to express their intellectual positions (Watt 95). Novels, movies, television shows, video games, and even an operetta have all taken the overarching story of Crusoe and adapted it to their particular generic forms, simultaneously altering and reinforcing the ideological underpinnings of Defoe’s novel.

This project explores three adaptations of Robinson Crusoe and how they alter or contest the meaning of the original prototype by their retellings. Situated at different historical positions within the tradition, R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1858),

William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), and Marianne Wiggins’ John Dollar (1989) represent three major shifts in the cultural and ideological construction of British identity.

Each consecutive novel attempts to redefine the tradition by introducing new ideological

2 assumptions through the rewriting of the classic narrative. By entering into a discussion with previous texts within the genre, each author creates a critical dialogue with the literary form that attempts to evaluate the legitimacy of earlier cultural positions. In forming such a dialogue, the authors have also opened up lager questions about the position of the English empire within the world, the role of nature and gender in colonial discourse, and the legitimacy of a single authoritative ideological position.

Moving chronologically though the tradition allows the mapping of significant shifts that have occurred across the Robinsonade’s history. Examining the tradition by looking at its processes of change provides a structure that simultaneously joins the tradition’s individual parts while, at the same time, acknowledging the tradition’s continual state of flux. As we will see as we move through all three texts, each adaptation becomes increasingly fractured and decentered, showing the difficulty in finding an authoritative center even within the tradition itself.

The sheer number of variations of the Crusoe story means that, in many cases, modern readers come to Defoe’s book, itself, already having experienced several different adaptations of the original. The narrative of Robinson Crusoe has ingrained itself so thoroughly into the minds of western society that the basic story has taken on a life of its own distinct from the novel that developed it. Michael Seidel suggests that

Robinson Crusoe, along with such books as Homer’s Odyssey and the Bible, maintain a culturally privileged position of “acquaintance before a reader engages the special pleasure afforded by reading them” (8). This disassociation between narrative and text has caused many scholars to identify Robinson Crusoe, and more specifically the

3 character Crusoe, as an occidental myth, a story that western society has used to define itself in relation to the rest of the world. Crusoe, through the actions he performs, creates a model which readers are to replicate in their real world encounters. More than simply a model to emulate, Crusoe also codifies various beliefs about foreign people and the natural world, beliefs which themselves carry underlying assumptions about the structure of the external world. Ian Watt noted in “Robinson Crusoe as a Myth” that “[w]e do not normally think of Robinson Crusoe as a novel. Defoe’s first full-length work of fiction seems to fall more naturally into place with Faust, Don Juan, and Don Quixote” (95). In becoming a myth, the literary figure of Crusoe takes on a life of its own, gradually gaining more representational significance than the original novel could ever hope to produce. Authors are not only able to grapple with major images of their culture through the highly recognizable image of Crusoe, they are also given relatively free reign over the representation of the character, because in its mythic form it is within the public domain, being owned by no one and possessed by all within the culture. It is important, then, to return to the beginning of the Robinsonade tradition, namely Robinson Crusoe.

In writing Robinson Crusoe, Defoe created a fictionalized version of the biographical accounts of Alexander Selkirk, a marooned sailor who lived four years on the island of Juan Fernandez. Defoe actually wrote three full-length novels detailing the adventures of Robinson Crusoe: Robinson Crusoe (1719), Further Adventures (1719), and the Serious Reflections (1720). However, of the three novels in the series, Robinson

Crusoe remains the only one still remembered and associated with the myth of Crusoe.

The original novel met with immediate success both in Britain and on the continent. As

Greene details, there was a nearly endless stream of “pirated, abridged, adapted, and dramatized” editions of Defoe’s novel circulating soon after its initial publication (20).

Outside of Britain, Robinson Crusoe was soon translated into other European languages such as French and Dutch; these foreign editions were also wildly popular in their respective countries. The largest success outside of Britain, however, was found in

Germany,

where a great number of books were issued with “Robinson Crusoe” in their titles.

Some of them had been published before 1719, but were reissued to cash in on the

enthusiasm for Defoe’s book. Some were famous in their own right. Both Gil Blas

and Don Quixote appeared in German as, respectively, the Spanish and the

Schwaebische Robinson. (Greene 20)

This co-optation surely speaks to the resonance that Defoe’s narrative had for the British and European reading public. With British overseas trade and expansion growing in importance, Defoe echoes many of the fears and possible triumphs surrounding such ventures in a way that must have been highly identifiable to his readers.

Hulme notes that much of Defoe’s “patchwork economic ideology” echoed the golden age of Elizabethan privateering, where ill-fated adventures merged in the imagination with equally triumphant successes. Of these stories, the most successful

“adventure” to capture the imagination in Defoe’s lifetime was William Phips’s 1687 attempt to locate the lost Spanish ship, Nuestea Señora de la Concepción. Phips’s eventual success ended with a forty-seven-fold return on investment and is argued to have formed the foundation of England’s modern system of public finance (Hulme 181-

182). Like the privateering stories circulating through Britain’s cultural imagination,

Defoe’s representations of foreign lands and people were, of course, stock tropes existing

since the discovery of the new world, if not earlier. What distinguishes Defoe’s work

from his predecessors within the desert island genre was his preoccupation with newly

emerging ideas about male identity and individuality. With his fixation on personal labor

and his endless calculation of individual profit and risk, Crusoe’s “homo economicus”

puts a new spin on Britain’s relationship with “exotic” cultures and the outside world.

Defoe’s novel remained consistently popular for the first two hundred years of its

history and his representation of an economically independent male whose tireless labor

masters the world in which he lives was endlessly repeated. Indeed, it’s this image of the

ideal male, with his ability to claim mastery over his environment, that quickly became a

central focus of the Robinsonade tradition. In his treatise on education, Emile, Rousseau

decreed that Robinson Crusoe would be the “whole of his [pupil’s] library”—even above the works or Aristotle—because it was a “complete treatise on natural education” (66).

Marx, too, found Crusoe to be an exceptional work that accurately illustrated the individual’s relation to his labor (236). In most of the early analysis, which includes figures such as John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens, and James Joyce, much of the discussion focuses on Crusoe’s ability to master both his own emotional anxieties and the new environment surrounding him. Joyce goes so far as to single out Crusoe as the prototypical British colonist, citing Crusoe’s qualities of manly independence and unconscious cruelty as fundamental to the British spirit (Joyce 24-25).

In recent decades, literary criticism has focused intently on the relationship

between colonialism and literature, mapping the literary “encounters” between colonizers

and indigenous people and exploring both the West’s representations of the non-Western

world and the non-Western world’s responses. Because of the Robinsonade’s early and

continued association with colonialism and colonial discourse, it is not surprising that

much has been written about its relationship to both subjects. The Robinsonade was part

of Britain’s attempt, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to use literature

as a tool to develop modes of understanding that were sympathetic to colonial rule.

Through institutionalized social structures such as domestic and foreign educational

systems, literature was used to help encode racial and cultural assumptions about western

superiority and to instill the proper views, values, and perspectives in the colonial elites

ruling in Europe’s name. At the same time, literary instruction was instituted

domestically on the assumption that “English literature was necessary for those who

would be administering British interests” abroad (Loomba 75). Indeed, R. M.

Ballantyne’s adolescent shipwreck tale, The Coral Island, was written explicitly to give

young British boys examples of brave and morally superior young men for them to emulate. Underlying Ballantyne’s noble intentions, however, is a vast repository of ideological presumptions that position indigenous groups, females, and the natural world into hierarchical power relations that strip these groups of their own forms of agency.

The Robinsonade established itself in western literature during the same period

that saw the rapid expansion of European imperialism. Europe’s increased exposure to

foreign cultures amplified the need for discourses fashioning connections between these

7 cultural encounters and the colonial practices that shaped the emerging imperial rule.

Many scholars, such as Loomba, have argued that British imperialism permeated every aspect of daily English life, and so in some sense every novel, regardless of how divorced from daily affairs it claimed to be, was nevertheless deeply engaged in the colonial discourses that prevailed at the time (Loomba 73). When Gayatri Spivak argues that “[i]t should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as England’s social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representations of England to the English,” she emphasizes the connection between literature and the political, economic, and social elements that made up the daily experiences of the English people. In the case of the Robinsonade, there is little possibility of abstracting the novels’ aesthetic content from the world of politics and ideology. On the contrary, the desert island genre, since Robinson Crusoe, has always been closely associated with the idea that the novel was speaking to a real world setting even at the expense of its aesthetic literary qualities (Greene 27-28). Indeed, the

Robinsonade’s appropriation of Britain’s early stories and factual events surrounding imperial expansion helped the tradition resonate throughout Britain from its time as an early world power until the present day. In the case of Robinson Crusoe, Defoe represented his texts as part story, travel journal, and educational treatise, encouraging readers to understand his texts as presenting an objective reality rather than a story that was inherently symbolic. This blurring of fact and fiction remained a strong trend well into the Robinsonade’s history and was to some extent expected by many readers. By merging traditional cultural representations and historically remembered stories, with a

journal entry format that evoked factual authenticity, Defoe complicated the lines

between colonial discourse and colonial practice. Like the scientific racism of the

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the narrative discourse which Defoe creates

gains credence by its claim to authenticity. This false authority then creates a stage

where narrative meaning can be shaped as if the events in the story were historically factual and thus corresponded to the real world.

Recent entries in the Robinsonade, aware of the tradition’s troubling imbrication

in colonialist ideology, have in a variety of ways set out to critique their predecessors—a

trend that some contemporary scholars have termed the “anti-Robinsonade.” As Karin

Siegl puts it, recent retellings of the Crusoe story are about “the failing [of] Robinson.”

The “failing” Crusoe becomes the protagonist of a story whose author, William Golding

being the prime example, reacts against the classical representation of European cultural

and moral supremacy. This “negative form” of the Crusoe mythos questions the

possibility of gaining mastery over not only the self but the outside world as well (21).

Martin Greene comes to a similar conclusion about twentieth-century Robinsonades in

The Robinson Crusoe Story. Although Greene sees Lord of the Flies largely as an

argument pitting Catholicism’s notion of Original Sin against Puritan ideas of man’s

perfectibility, he still finds that like other contemporary versions of the Crusoe myth, it

attacks ”the Enlightenment ethos [that] Ballantyne, Defoe, and the Robinson story” itself

have constructed over the last three hundred years (183).

In both of these arguments, we see a focus on the connection between the

mythical image of the character Crusoe and a rejection of a particular ideological

perspective being worked out in Defoe’s novel and later refined in future Robinsonades.

However, I argue that the Robinsonade has always served as a constructor of various

ideologies—not just the early colonial ideals presented by Defoe. The twentieth-century

shift in desert island narratives is not merely a rejection or counter-argument against

earlier ideologies, but rather a positive articulation of newly emerging ideological

positions that necessarily contend with earlier perspectives. By tying Crusoe’s

ideological character to the literary tradition, critics have failed to notice that the

tradition, almost from its beginning, has moved away from an “original” understanding of

Crusoe. Rather than merely repeating the basic narrative of Crusoe, authors have inserted

their own historically situated ideologies into the growing myth, inscribing new and even

antithetical images of Crusoe into the tradition while simultaneously repeating many of

the representations that came previously.

For example, R.M. Ballantyne’s juvenile novel, The Coral Island, written in

1858, took Defoe’s island and turned it into a playground for young boys. Ballantyne

reshaped the narrative into one of pure adventure, of exploring the unknown territories in

spite of the dangers to be faced. Although The Coral Island is largely remembered today for its association with Golding’s Lord of the Flies, it still stands as emblematic of the

boys’ adventure stories which were popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The tale is structurally similar to the original, consisting of the classic scenes of shipwreck, island isolation, and confrontation with other people that come onto the island. The underlying message of the narrative, however, differs from its predecessors.

The Coral Island valorizes Britain’s imperial mission, unabashedly claiming colonial

expansion as an English birthright, while Robinson Crusoe, at least initially, places

Crusoe’s ability to master the world into question. The uncertainty of Crusoe’s mastery

actually acts as a major fulcrum for the plot’s development. Although, in the novel’s close, we come to see Crusoe’s success almost as divine providence, it is essential that the narrative begin with Crusoe’s success in question. Susan Maher suggests, rightly, that “Crusoe's boys'-book imitators simplif[ed] its interplay of romance and realism in

order to articulate a myth of cultural superiority...recast[ing] their Crusoes into

quintessential empire builders, creat[ing] islands that signify a hierarchy of culture and

race, and ultimately mirror a conquering people's mythology” (169). For the purpose of

this project, then, The Coral Island can be read as our first example of Britain

appropriating the Crusoe figure to bolster its own ideological understanding of itself.

The Lord of the Flies, published in 1954, took The Coral Island’s imperial

optimism and turned it on its head. In the years after World War Two, Britain faced a

crisis of identity that had slowly been developing since before 1914. Building off of his

own personal anxieties that developed during his naval service in World War Two,

Golding created a narrative that openly questioned the imperial mission he was taught in

his formative years at boarding school. Taking many formal elements from Ballantyne’s

The Coral Island, Golding counters the traditional nineteenth-century Robinsonade by

questioning the continuous optimism and moral purity found in Ballantyne’s work. Lord

of the Flies presents a perspective that questions the possibility of discovering a culturally

or morally pure human identity.

Marianne Wiggins’ John Dollar, published in 1989, continues the Robinsonade’s

relatively new “anti-Crusoe” mode inaugurated by Golding. Wiggins, however, draws

attention to the overwhelming predominance of the male perspective in the tradition by

making her castaways predominantly female. Like the young boys of Lord of the Flies,

the young female castaways perform the gendered roles traditionally prescribed by their

British upbringing. The difference between the two is that where the boys were taught to

become warriors and administrators of an empire, the girls of John Dollar are paralyzed by inaction and await a hero to bring them to safety. Rather than attempt to rebuild their previous civilization, the girls spend long hours on the beach awaiting rescue from those trained for action. By changing the form of the Robinsonade—altering its setting, character composition, and gendered point of view—Wiggins asks readers to look at the desert island tradition with a new set of critical lenses, lenses that have become prevalent since the publication of the novels previously discussed. For the purpose of this paper,

John Dollar stands as a contemporary Robinsonade, one that makes full use of the major theoretical shifts arising in the last forty years.

Exploring these three Robinsonades, both as a whole and in their unique historical positions, provides access into the discourse that arises between these adaptations. As each novel attempts to rewrite the tradition, we are able to see how the European ideological landscape has continued to evolve as each new appropriation enters into the discussion. The large chronological distance between each novel amplifies the distinguishing features of each text’s ideology so that it becomes easier to map out what

connects and separates newer Robinsonades from their predecessors. Though

12 demarcating the tradition with such strong dividing lines is largely artificial, it does allow for the tradition to be seen as being in a continual state of flux. As we will see in the texts examined, each novel becomes increasingly aware of the problematic ideological underpinnings that define earlier Robinsonades. Questioning many of the assumptions underlying this long tradition now becomes a major focus in the discourse that exists between these texts. This form of self-reflective examination ultimately alters the course of the Robinsonade, allowing a multiplicity of voices and perspectives to enter into the tradition.

ADOLESCENT IMPERIAL LITERATURE: EXAMINING THE CORAL ISLAND AND

ITS ROLE IN THE ROBINSONADE

R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, published in 1859, marks the Robinsonade’s transition from an early colonial narrative to a narrative of empire. Many of the differences between Robinson Crusoe and The Coral Island can be interpreted as extensions of the earlier colonial experiences and perspectives that were presented in

Defoe’s novel. Ballantyne’s characters begin their story with the same ideological

assumptions that Crusoe comes to at the end of his narrative, and maintain them

throughout the novel. Only after a long period of uncertainty does Crusoe feel that he has

gained mastery over the island’s environment and population, for example, whereas

Ballantyne’s boys feel this immediately. Ballantyne’s novel also reflects a shift in British

cultural identity that had occurred in the one hundred and forty years that separate

Defoe’s novel from his own. Britain’s transformation from an emerging colonial power

to one whose influence now spread across the world had greatly influenced Britons’ understanding of their identity and the way they saw the larger world. The Coral Island is an unabashedly proud expression of this new-found identity, a representation of imperial

Britain, as William Golding later put it, “at the height of Victorian smugness, ignorance, and prosperity” (Golding 88). The ideological shift from a developing colonial power to an established economic, political, and naval powerhouse prompted Ballantyne to create an entirely new island with a new set of cultural challenges suited to an established

British Empire. The new ideology also created a new type of survivor, one whose

primary purpose was to defend the natural wealth of the island he believed he now

possessed rather than cultivate and master its unseen wonders.

R.M. Ballantyne, born April 24, 1825, descended from a family of printers who

published the work of Sir Walter Scott. With the bankruptcy of Scott, Ballantyne used

his family’s connections to secure a position with Hudson’s Bay Company in Canada in

1841. With the end of his contract in 1847, Ballantyne returned to Scotland to begin a

career in juvenile literature, eventually writing almost one hundred novels throughout his

life (Greene 117). His first major success came in 1858 with the publication of The Coral

Island. Widely read well into the early twentieth century, the novel has never gone out of

print in its one-hundred- fifty year history (Ballantyne vii). It was highly praised by

several contemporary authors and influenced the creation of future Robinson Crusoe

adaptations such as R.L. Stevenson’s Treasure Island and J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan

(Greene 123).

In many respects, The Coral Island is a typical Robinsonade, possessing all the customary elements of the tradition: shipwreck, survival in a remote locale, and eventual mastery over the exotic environment. The protagonists’ pre-island history is condensed into a short twelve pages. There, readers are introduced to Ralph, the most reflective and bookish of the three boys, Ballantyne’s narrator and the reader’s surrogate in the story.

We are also given a brief depiction of the South Pacific which contextualizes the appearance of the fierce “savages” encountered in the latter half of novel.

The bulk of the boys’ adventure takes place on an uninhabited coral island that is depicted as a lost Garden of Eden. In the latter half of the novel, this island sanctuary is

invaded by both “savage” natives and evil pirates. Encountering these new antagonists

leads to a series of battles and adventures where the boys’ physical prowess and quick thinking are tested to their limits. Ballantyne’s novel concludes with Jack, Ralph, and

Peterkin sailing home to the England, filled with adventure and wisdom gained in their journey throughout the South Seas. The boys return home as glorious victors, reassured by their explorations, knowing that their missionary zeal has carved a path for Christian cultural values.

While many argue that Britain’s empire was not at its height until the late 1880’s, nevertheless the years preceding 1880 saw “British expansion [moving] apace, even though the official attitude was frequently to resist that expansion” (Brantlinger 19-20).

1815 saw the defeat of Napoleon in France by Britain and her allies. The victory over the rival imperial power not only helped Britain display its cultural and diplomatic leadership to other European powers but also reinforced its internal understanding of itself as culturally dominant (Hoock 354-355). The first half of the nineteenth century saw continual expansion of Britain’s military and political power. Later military aggression,

such as the First Anglo-Chinese War in 1839 and signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in

1840, continued to expand Britain’s reach throughout the world. Despite the occasional

loss or misstep, the majority of Britain’s attempts at expansion were successfully

wrought. Compared with the earlier colonial endeavors attempting to gain geographic

control in the New World, these later imperial missions were substantially more lucrative.

Early failures such as Jamestown and Roanoke were infrequent. In the twohundred years since the “lost colony,” Britain had claimed territory on every continent in the world and

16 wrested control over parts of Africa, Australia and the majority of India, in addition to maintaining naval outposts throughout the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans.

By 1859, Britain’s primary concern was the maintenance of its new political and economic powers rather than continued expansion. This required the creation of a bureaucrat class, the construction of a group of functionaries who, from a young age,

“were being readied to lead, to keep order, to maintain discipline--to help run empire”

(Greene 113). If the intended readers of The Coral Island were boys expected to become the new administrators of empire, then it is possible to read the novel as a heroic vision of

British self-identity. The novel’s romantic portrayal of British colonial expansion provided justification for the mission the young audience was being trained to perform. It is not surprising, then, to find the island that the boys inhabit to be full of effortlessly available bounty and dangers providing chances for valor. Such a glamorous depictions is in stark contrast to Crusoe’s island, where his survival is uncertain.

Comparing how the two islands are first represented shows many of the changing concerns of the British people. In Robinson Crusoe the description of the island reflects the early colonial fears of losing the risky gamble of world exploration. The following passage seems to reinforce Crusoe’s father and mother’s earlier warnings against leaving

England and going abroad, and supports the conclusion that one should not leave one’s designated domestic space (4).

I began to Look round to see what kind of Place I was in, and what was next to be

done, and I soon found my Comforts abate, and that in a word I had a dreadful

Deliverance: For I was wet, and had no Clothes to shift me, nor any thing either to

eat or drink to comfort me, neither did I see any Prospect before me, but that of

perishing with Hunger, or being devour’d by wild Beasts…. (Defoe 36)

The island is presented as being completely inhospitable to the presence of man. It does not provide food, shelter, or protection from the elements. On top of this, Crusoe believes the island is populated with wild beasts. Crusoe only finds comfort on the island after he has spent long periods of time laboring to improve it. Indeed, in the early stages of the novel, before Crusoe encounters the footstep in the sand, the island itself is Crusoe’s only antagonist, acting against any improvements he attempts to make. The uncultivated world seems to actively counter act much of Crusoe’s attempts to make the island “civilized.”

The island of The Coral Island, by comparison, is portrayed as an infinite, and effortless, bounty willingly given to those that come across its wonders. The island’s plenty, coupled with the boys’ natural ingenuity, is all that is needed to colonize the new territory. The three are not even in need of the sorts of supplies that Crusoe salvages from his ship in order to survive. Rather, the island willingly gives itself to the boys without struggle. At this point in the story, Ralph briefly considers being stranded on the island just as Crusoe did, namely as the worst possible outcome for the boys’ seafaring journey.

However, his open utterances of distress are quickly countered by both his companions:

“Do you know what conclusion I have come to?” said Peterkin. “I have made up

my mind that it’s capital—first-rate—the best thing that ever happened to us, and

the most splendid prospect that ever lay before three jolly young tars. We’ve got

an island all to ourselves. We’ll take possession in the name of the King; we’ll go

and enter the service of its black inhabitants. Of course we’ll rise, naturally, to the

top of affairs. White men always do in savage countries.” (Ballantyne 16)

Immediately we see that the boys feel completely different about their shipwrecked plight because they perceive the natural world differently. The whole event looks to be such a great adventure that they even look forward to being stranded on the island. Unlike

Crusoe’s need to wrest control from the island, the boys come to the island “naturally” assuming that they will rule over the island and any of its potential inhabitants. From these early moments, before the island is even explored, readers are presented with an entirely different set of feelings about being isolated in an exotic land, removed from the boys’ original civilization. The boys do not share the same fears of nature that Crusoe experiences for much of Defoe’s novel; rather, their optimistic disposition comes from their desire to be shipwrecked alone on the island.

One of the most emblematic scenes in the Robinsonade tradition is the mountaintop scene, where the survivors make it to the top of the highest peak on the island and survey the whole of their world. Again, when comparing Robinson Crusoe to

The Coral Island, we see a complete reversal in the way the two groups of survivors perceive their islands. Crusoe is constantly fearful of his island, afraid that it will devour him in its wildness:

after I had with great Labour and Difficulty got to the Top of the Hill, I saw my

Fate to my great Affliciton, (viz.) that I was in an Island environ’d every Way

with the Sea, no Land to be seen…I found also that the Island I was in barren,

and, as I saw good Reason to believe, un-inhabited, except by wild Beasts, of

whom however I saw none, yet I saw Abundance of Fowls, but knew not their

Kinds, neither when I kill’d them could I tell what was fit Food, and what not; at

my coming back, I shot at a great Bird which I saw sitting upon a Tree on the Side

of a great Wood, I believe it was the first Gun that had been fir’d there since the

Creation of the World; I had no sooner fir’d, but from all parts of the Wood there

arose an innumerable Number of Fowls of many Sorts, making a confus’d

Screaming, and crying every one according to his usual Note; but not one of them

any Kind that I knew: as for the Creature I kill’d…its flesh was Carrion and fit for

nothing. (Defoe 40)

The carrion flesh of the bird is a telling symbol of the challenges presented by the island.

The island denies Crusoe the possibility of subsisting as the native population is believed

to, namely as a “primitive” hunter-gatherer. The native plants and the wildlife are inedible, nothing more than rotten flesh to be thrown away. It is as if Defoe wanted to deny Crusoe the possibility of living in any way other than as a European agrarian. Any attempt at surviving in a way more “primitive” than the European model is thwarted

outright without even a possibility of laboring to make it work. The trip to the top of the

mountain only solidifies the isolation and fear Crusoe already feels. Seeing the island in

its entirety tells Crusoe that he is in a world that is, as yet, wholly alien and outside of his

control.

In contrast, the journey to the top of the mountain for the boys only confirms the

preconceived notions that they brought with them to the island; every succeeding step

brings with it a new and wondrous discovery. Their trip to observe the island begins

similarly to Crusoe’s own journey. They arm themselves with an axe and clubs, fearful of

what lies in the interior of the island. But soon their fear is overcome by a paradise

forever in bloom. Ralph quickly notices similarities between the island and England,

“recogni[zing] many berries and plants that resembled those of [his] native land” (34).

Even before ascending the mountain the boys make another joyous discovery. “Jack told

us that this tree…that it bears two, sometimes three, crops of fruit in the year; that the

fruit is very like wheaten bread in appearance” (36). By the time the boys reach the top of

the mountain they feel as if they are in full control of the island: “from it [the highest

point of the island] we saw our kingdom lying, as it were, like a map around us” (39).

The island is never presented as resisting the boys. Rather, the opposite is actually the

case. Every turn of the head presents a new wonder that requires no labor to attain.

Without the many fears about nature seen in Robinson Crusoe, the boys live in a

world that is welcoming rather than antagonistic to them. Trouble arises in their paradise

only when the boys are faced with outsiders invading their territory. In The Coral Island, trouble presents itself in two forms: pirates and “natives.” The indigenous people of the

South Sea are presented as childlike and savage, gluttonously feasting on the flesh of their enemies. This representation of non-Europeans is, of course, not original to

Ballantyne. Some of Crusoe’s most anxious moments come when, after many years of isolation, he is confronted with the specter of other people on his island. However, what seems to be different between the representations of natives in Robinson Crusoe and The

Coral Island is that in the former the natives, as represented by Friday, can be absorbed into the island once they become aware of their “rightful” position as dutiful slave and laborer. The Coral Island, however, can find no such places for “natives.” With their

21 pagan religion, and their incorrigibly “savage” ways, they are completely unredeemable and antithetical to the Christian conquerors of Coral Island.

Crusoe’s actual experience with the local population begins with a single footprint found on the shore. The moment Crusoe sees the evidence of others on his island—by this time in the novel the island has been cultivated enough to be considered mastered— he is thrust back into the wild panic characterized by his first landing:

I was exceedingly surpriz’d with the Print of a Man’s naked Foot on the Shore,

which was very plain to be seen in the Sand: I stood like one Thunder-struck, or

as if I had seen an Apparition; I listen’d, I look’d round me, I could hear nothing,

nor see any Thing; I went up to a rising Ground to look farther; I went up to the

Shore and Down the Shore, but I was all one, I could see no other Impression but

that one, I went to it again to see if there were any more, and to observe if it might

not be my Fancy; but there was no Room for that, for there was exactly the very

Print of a Foot, Toes, Heel, and every Part of a Foot; how it came thither, I knew

not, nor could in the least imagine. (Defoe 112)

The appearance of a ghostly apparition throws Crusoe into a state of panic, causing him to mistake every bush and tree for a ‘savage’ in the shadows. In many respects, the thought of others on his island is more terrifying than the tumultuous experience of being shipwrecked in the middle of a devastating storm. Crusoe even goes on to justify his intensified fear, stating that “I presently concluded then, that it must be some more dangerous Creature. (viz.) That it must be some of the Savages of the main Land over- against me” (113). This example helps Crusoe begin to equate the native population with

22 nature’s inhospitable character. They both instill the same fears, trepidations, and anxieties. The native population is only a more challenging form of nature to control, worthy of such fear because they exhibit a more sinister and evil disposition than even the uncultivated wilds of the island.

Unlike Crusoe’s slow and laborious conquering of the island, however, his mastery over the indigenous population is swift and violent. The obvious example of

Crusoe’s interaction with the natives comes with the introduction of the character Friday, a native to the area surrounding the island who becomes Crusoe’s servant. Before readers are given a description of Friday, Defoe depicts him in the same manner that he described the island after Crusoe fired his rifle for the first time. When Friday hears a gun for the first time, Crusoe tells the readers that “[Friday] was so frighted with the Fire, and Noise of my Piece; that he stood Stock still, and neither came forward or went backward, tho’ he seem’d rather enclin’d to fly still” (147). This description of Friday’s reaction is strikingly similar to the reaction the island has when Crusoe fires his gun for the first time. As described earlier, “I had no sooner fir’d,” Crusoe notes, “but from all parts of the Wood there arose an innumerable Number of Fowls of many Sorts, making a confus’d Screaming ” (40). The similarities between the reaction of the animals and

Friday’s own response only strengthen the assumed connection between native people and nature. Such equating of man with nature naturally leads to a desire to control the

“natural” man just as Crusoe has controlled the nature of the island.

As soon as Crusoe fires his rifle, defending Friday from two other natives, Friday is immediately mystified by the explicit power Crusoe displays, and this shows, at least to

Crusoe’s eye, proclivity towards lifelong service:

I smil’d at him, and look’d pleasantly, and beckon’d him again to come still

nearer: at length he came close to me, and then he kneel’d down again, kiss’d the

Ground, and laid his Head upon the Ground, and taking me by the Foot, set my

Foot upon his Head; this it seems was in token of swearing to be my Slave for

ever; I took him up, and made much of him, and encourag’d him all I could.

(Defoe 147)

Just moments after Crusoe and Friday meet, Crusoe is already claiming mastery over

Friday, calling Friday “my Savage.” That the native population was perceived by Crusoe as being more evil and more frightfully powerful than nature—yet ultimately far easier to

control—is seemingly contradictory. The apparent explanation is that Friday naturally

understands his subordinate position.

Crusoe sees both nature and humans primarily in terms of their value as capital.

That is, they are both controlled or cultivated in order to be profitable for him. In this

respect, native people can be seen to be integrated or absorbed into Britain’s colonial

sphere like the new lands that Britain was rapidly gaining. Granted, the integration of

native people into the empire was relegated to a wholly subservient position. However,

Crusoe considered it possible to incorporate peoples other than the British on to the

island, so long as he remained king and ruler over all others. This incorporation of people

into the hierarchy of power can be seen after Crusoe rescues a Spaniard and Friday’s

Father. At this moment Crusoe sees the island, now owned by him, in its ideal state:

My island was now peopled, and I thought to myself very rich in Subjects; and it

was a merry Reflection which I frequently made, How like a King I look’d. First

of all, the whole Country was my own meer Property; so that I had an undoubted

Right of Dominion. 2dly, My People were perfectly subjected: I was absolute

Lord and Lawgiver; they all owed their Lives to me, and were ready to lay down

their Lives, if there had been Occasion of it, for me. It was remarkable too, we

had but three Subjects, and they were of three different Religions. My Man

Friday was a Protestant, his Father was a Pegan and a Cannibal, and the

Spaniard was a Papist: However, I allow’d Liberty of Conscience throughout my

Dominions. (Defoe 174)

By this point in Defoe’s novel, readers can see the alleviation of early colonial fears of hardship, financial loss, and death. Crusoe’s narrative has largely climaxed now that he controls island, native, and European foe. The fears that once brought chaos to Crusoe’s mind have now resolved themselves by his absolute control over the world. With mastery seemingly certain, there is little fear in bringing others into the margins of the British colonial world.

In The Coral Island, however, imperial anxiety is alleviated only with the spiritual conversion of all other voices. The boys of The Coral Island almost instantly become lords of the island and this quick dominance, like Crusoe’s dominance over Friday, comes about largely unquestioned. But unlike Crusoe, who with ultimate control incorporates others into his island kingdom as his servants, the boys attempt to convert others into spiritually like-minded beings, leaving only those essentially British in their territory. Events such as the Indian Mutiny of 1857 created fears about “native”

populations that either no longer served an economic purpose or were openly hostile

toward the colonizing powers. Patrick Brantlinger notes that many white settlements were

given partial self-government around the time The Coral Island was written. However,

the Indian Mutiny halted “arguments for the independence for largely nonwhite parts of

the Empire” (21). The question of how to control a resistant native population is

answered by Ballantyne by expunging cultural “impurities” through religious conversion.

The rebellion of the sepoy, indigenous soldiers loyal to the East India Company,

reinforced the already established mistrust regarding the loyalty of the native people

within the colonies. The mutiny of seemingly trustworthy natives only solidified the need

to maintain a constant British presence in the colonies to maintain control, since even the locals that had sworn loyalty to the Crown could not be trusted to defend the interest of the empire. Ballantyne’s solution was to turn to the power of the Gospel. Only through religious conversion was it possible to maintain “civility” in the “savage” colonies. His beliefs in the transformative powers of Christianity move beyond the religious and extend to the social and cultural identities of the people, in what Brantlinger calls a “typical missionary conversion fantasy” (18).With the power of the Gospel, Ballantyne whitewashes the indigenous people out of existence, destroying all semblance of their native culture and replacing it with a traditional image of a small British village.

The boys’ first encounter with outsiders is not foreshadowed by the ghostly specter of a footprint. Rather, their encounter is immediate and certain. “They are

Canoes, Ralph! Whether war canoes or not I cannot tell; but this I know, that all the natives of the South Sea Islands are fierce Cannibals, and they have little respect for

strangers” (Ballantyne 137). Jack’s assertion reinforces the preconceived constructions of

the South Sea islanders Ralph was given before leaving England (7). The boys have had

no direct experience with the local population, yet come to the encounter already loaded

with the cultural baggage of one hundred and fifty years of imperial exploitation.

In a scene again reminiscent of Robinson Crusoe, the boys view “cannibals”

preparing a grisly feast. They, like Crusoe, initially attempt to stay out of the terrible

scene. The boys, happily isolated on their island paradise, feel they should remain out of

the local affairs of the indigenous people and stay hidden from sight. However, Jack

becomes morally compelled to act when he believes that their own society is being invaded. The symbolic threat to European values is characterized by a native, converted

Christian, woman who represents the essential qualities of European femininity. The attack on a European female at the hand of the “savage” chief, rather than the killing of other natives or feasting of human flesh, is what finally forces the boys to become aggressively involved with the native population.

One of those women was much younger than her companions, and we were struck

with the modesty of her demeanor and the gentle expression on her face, which,

although she had a flattish nose and thick lips of the others, was of a light brown

colour, and we conjectured that she must be of a different race….[w]ith a savage

laugh, the chief tore the child from her arms and tossed it into the sea. (Ballantyne

140-141)

Only when their own cultural security is threatened do the boys feel compelled to leave

their isolationist position and interact with other peoples. They remain out of the fighting

27 only to maintain security over what they see as their territory. The appearance of the

Europeanized female and mother gives the boys the symbolic threat of cultural invasion which, in turn, provides moral justification for leaving their defensive isolation and going to war with the natives. Violently interacting with the locals in The Coral Island is portrayed as a completely defensive act. The boy’s “intervention” is portrayed as a deed that proactively defends the territory of Britain from an alien force.

After the ensuing battle, where Jack is victorious over the “savage” chief, the surviving natives are, like Friday, quite taken by the three boys’ physical power.

However, unlike Crusoe, the boys do not have a physical representation of power. The gun that surprised both nature and Friday is completely lacking in Ballantyne’s scene, replaced by the physical prowess of Jack’s body in hand-to-hand combat against the cannibals’ “Herculean” chief (141-143). Implied in this scene is that the power externally present in Robinson Crusoe is now believed to be an internal characteristic of the British people. The arms needed to defend against and control both nature and

“native” in the earlier novel are no longer necessary protectors of Britain’s power. Now, at the height of the British Empire, the wealth of the colonial territories can be defended with merely the physical bodies of British men.

The general sense of optimism that permeates all of Jack, Ralph, and Peterkin’s actions can be seen as one of the most pervasive changes between Robinson Crusoe and

The Coral Island. Though Defoe’s novel ends with a similar feeling of prosperity and success, it begins by questioning the possibility of ever coming to such prosperous ends.

Ballantyne’s novel, by comparison, holds the ideals of optimism and moral purity as

28 axiomatic to the British character. Some of the moral simplicity and fearless adventure of

Ballantyne’s text can, perhaps, be partly explained by the young male readership who were the intended consumers of Ballantyne’s work. However, by the same token, the seemingly simplistic representation of colonial adventure can also be viewed as a less complicated version of the ideological structure of Britain in the 1850’s. Shifting from an adult to a juvenile audience shows how ingrained the colonial mission was by the 1850’s.

Peter Hulme suggests that “[t]he imperial production of Robinson Crusoe as a boys’ adventure in the nineteenth century inevitably foregrounds the colonial alibi” (222). The colonial mission, no longer a hypothetical possibility, roughly sketched out and attempted by only the boldest of men, rather the mission of imperial conquest was believed to be a

British birthright. It was so firmly rooted in the minds of the British on every social level that children were now being taught to fulfill their roles as explorers, soldiers, and colonial administrators from a very early age. What was expected from the children of a successful empire was the defense and perpetuation of that empire, maintaining the

“blood” inheritance of the civilizing “race” (Brantlinger 21). Thus, instead of the adventurous and risky venture of Crusoe and early imperial expansion, that same journey is seen as a conservative and necessary mission for the continued success of the British imperial rule.

LORD OF THE FLIES: EXPLORING A CRISIS IN BRITISH IMPERIAL IDENTITY

William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, published in 1954, radically departs from the

Robinsonade tradition by questioning many of Britain’s ideological positions previously

assumed to be uncontestable. The most striking difference is Golding’s open criticism of

Britain’s sense of moral and cultural superiority in relation to the rest of the world,

particularly with regard to its colonial satellites. Golding’s skepticism of Britain’s

imperial mission, coming at the end of the Second World War, arguably marks it as the

first of what Karin Siege and Martin Greene call “Anti-Robinsonades,” island stories

critically taking issue with the mythical image of Crusoe and his attempts at

environmental and social mastery. Golding’s use of—and perspective on—the Crusoe

myth constitutes a drastic departure from his predecessors. Indeed, Golding constructs his

novel as an explicit counter-argument to the boys’ novel The Coral Island, which he

finds emblematic of the “smugness” that Britain exuded during the colonial era (“Fable”

88).

In The Coral Island, moral purity and mastery over the world is always assured.

The comradery between the protagonist-friends never comes into question, nor does their fidelity during trying times. With Lord of the Flies, however, we see in Ralph, the

designated leader of the boys, a complete inability to gain control of his own thoughts, let

alone move the boys to control the island. On the contrary: Golding’s boys descend into

chaos, murdering their friend, Simon, in a passionate frenzy arising from internecine fear

and mistrust. For unlike Robinson Crusoe and The Coral Island, which both take pains to

30 emphasize the authority of their protagonists, Lord of the Flies deeply questions that seemingly inherent capacity for mastery found within the characters of the first two novels. We cannot help questioning the reason for such a shift.

Golding’s work arises out of Britain’s political, military, and economic decline before, during and after World War Two. After two world wars, the British Empire, which in Ballantyne’s time spanned the entire globe, was no longer the economic or military power it had been fifty years earlier. The relatively rapid devolution of Britain’s

Empire, coupled with the very real possibility of its own destruction during the war, created a crisis that prompted an open examination of Britain’s imperial identity.

Golding’s personal motivation for writing Lord of the Flies arose out of the devastation and loss of life he saw during his service in World War Two, memories that required him to “avert [his] mind lest [he] should be physically sick” (“Fable” 86). Before the war,

Golding tells his readers in his 1965 essay “Fable,” he uncritically agreed with the then prevailing ideology that saw the British as naturally superior to other cultures. Evil, for

Golding, was something that existed in other people or in other cultures. The English might, on occasion, perform immoral acts but these, in Golding’s mind, were merely aberrations, not the norm. Only after the war, when the full horror of events such as the

Holocaust emerged, did Golding see his earlier faith in European civilization as fundamentally mistaken. For Golding and for the British, it was impossible to continue to ardently believe in the certainty of British mastery and moral superiority when the economic hardship suffered throughout two major wars and the morally questionable actions performed in those wars so diminished Britain’s authority.

Golding addresses his own momentary crisis of identity by looking back to one of his favorite childhood stories, The Coral Island, which he feels symbolizes both his own early notions of British identity and his country’s understanding of itself at the time. “It is worth looking for a moment at the great original of boys on an island,” he remarks in

“Fable.” “This is The Coral Island, published a century ago, at the height of Victorian smugness, ignorance, and prosperity” (88). Rather than seeing The Coral Island as merely an adolescent adventure novel whose fanciful stories can be written off as tall tales told to captivate its young audience, Golding sees the novel as reflecting the fundamental beliefs that Britain held throughout its imperial reign (and well into

Golding’s lifetime), beliefs that were everywhere reinforced as axioms of cultural and social reality. However, by the time Lord of the Flies was published, Golding’s view was no longer compatible with the joyous and adventurous world that Ballantyne had portrayed in The Coral Island. That world, at least from the British perspective, had been torn asunder by European military forces challenging British supremacy and by the huge financial burdens of managing a geographically large empire. These political and economic factors forced Britain to constrict its colonial influence to a point not seen in one hundred years.

In Lord of the Flies, we are given only a brief glimpse of events that happened before the beginning pages of the novel. We are told of an atom bomb that devastated

England but little else (14). By completely separating the island from any other context,

Golding forces our attention on the action that takes place there. Golding makes several explicit connections between his novel and The Coral Island. In particular, Golding takes

32 many of his main characters’ names from the names of the boys in Ballantyne’s novel and uses them to draw connections to Ballantyne’s originals. In both novels the character

Ralph narrates the events that take place on the island. In Ballantyne’s novel, Ralph is the most bookish of the three boys, contemplative of himself and others. However, in spite of his bookishness, Ralph also possesses a brave disposition and strong physical features.

His ability to master his own fears in times of crisis gives the narrative a sense of complete control. In Lord of the Flies, by contrast, Ralph possesses little of the rational mastery that characterizes his literary antecedent. His physical prowess, which marks him as a natural leader, is overshadowed by his inability to gather together his thoughts long enough to engage in action. Indeed, Ralph repeatedly wishes for more time to think about the events happening on the island but is continually thwarted by his own lack of knowledge about the right course of action.

The character Jack is reinterpreted in Lord of the Flies to reflect Golding’s growing suspicions of an absolute leader whose charisma seems to compel others to blindly follow. In the earlier novel, Jack is continually referred to as a “natural” leader, one whose position at the top of the homosocial hierarchy is never in question. Golding challenges the notion of Jack’s “natural” leadership by forcing him into a relatively submissive role under Ralph. This forced submission eventually pushes Jack to rebel against the democratic rule of the others, which he sees as going against his rightful position as master of the island. Eventually, the conflict between Ralph and Jack becomes so great that not only are Ballantyne’s earlier notions of natural mastery questioned, but so is the assumed brotherly cohesion that unifies Ballantyne’s young Englishmen.

In a less direct but still symbolically relevant allusion to Ballantyne, Golding remakes the boyish Peterkin into the clumsy Piggy, making him symbolize an enfeebled rationality that is repeatedly overwhelmed by the boy’s fears and desires. Where Peterkin acted as the forever optimistic youth that sees the best in all outcomes, even shipwreck,

Piggy is constantly agitated while on the island and is distressed when he thinks about their chances of being rescued. His reasoning mind is never able to achieve the level of control and mastery that we see displayed in earlier Robinsonades. Rather, the rationality that Piggy represents is literally dashed against the rocks of the island by the other boys, preventing the possibility of brotherly civilization, seen in The Coral Island, from taking hold there.

There are also many such echoes on the level of plot. Like the boys of The Coral

Island, the boys in Golding’s novel are initially thrilled at the possibility of being freed from the constraints of an adult world hindering their youthful inclinations. Ralph goes so far as to compare their situation explicitly to Ballantyne’s popular adventure:

While we’re waiting [for adults to come us] we can have a good time on this

island.

He gesticulated widely.

It’s like in a book.

At once there was a clamor.

Treasure Island—

Swallows and Amazons—

Coral Island— (35)

After connecting their plight with that of the novels that populate their fantasies, the

schoolboys then set out to live the lives represented in those boys’ adventure stories.

They begin by making the traditional expedition to the top of the mountain to survey the

world they now inhabit. Upon reaching the peak of the mountain, Ralph declares, like his

namesake in The Coral Island, that the island “belongs to us” (29). At this point, the boys

are beginning to act out the narratives they have read in their adolescent novels. “Eyes

shining, mouths open, triumphant, they savored the right of domination. They were lifted

up: were friends” (29). This feeling of rightful domination is the same feeling Jack,

Ralph, and Peterkin experienced when they surveyed the whole of their island: “We

found this to be the highest point of the island, and from it we saw our kingdom lying, as

it were, like a map around us” (Ballantyne 39). Both passages express a certainty of

ownership that seemingly comes from an inborn natural right. However, the close similarities in belief quickly dissolve, and as Lord of the Flies progresses we find that it

becomes harder for the boys to maintain the island fantasies they’d read about in novels.

Early in Golding’s novel, we see a fissure separating this later island tale from its

antecedent. After the crash the schoolboys are spread out across the whole of the island

and are brought together by Ralph blowing a conch shell. The tentative social cohesion

created by the blowing of the conch becomes almost instantly questioned. Jack, who in

Lord of the Flies is a natural leader but is largely denied his “rightful” position,

immediately protests against the boys making Ralph chief and repeatedly undermines

Ralph’s limited authority throughout the rest of the novel. Indeed, there is no absolute

cohesion even in the boys’ first attempts at social order. For the reader, this is one of the

first noticeable breaks between Ballantyne’s and Golding’s adaptations, for in the former

novel there is never a question of who is the right and natural leader. The hierarchy of

power is from the outset clearly defined. “[W]e would have agreed to any proposal that

Jack made,” says Ralph, “for, besides his being older, and much stronger and taller than

either of us, he was a very clever fellow, and I think would have induced people much

older than himself to choose him for their leader, especially if they required to be led in a

bold adventure” (Ballantyne 22). In this instance Jack’s leadership is a foregone

conclusion; his physical prowess and natural boldness are self-evident to all around, even going so far as to persuade those more experienced to follow his natural gifts. Golding’s boys, however, have no such self-assured aura of excellence marking them as innate masters or leaders. When the boys elect Ralph chief amid Jack’s protects, Golding says that “none of the boys could have found good reason for… [voting Ralph chief], what intelligence had been shown was traceable to Piggy, while the most obvious leader was

Jack” (22). This inability to articulate the reasons for picking a leader is again questioned at the end of the novel. The naval officer, attempting to find a leader among the boys, sees Jack “start forward, then change his mind and [stand] still” (201). The only one to come forward and claim the role of leader is Ralph, who just a moment before was running from the mutinous hunters who were attempting to make him a human sacrifice.

Both Ralph and Jack are, at best, ineffective leaders of the tribe. Jack’s need to master comes at the expense of the tribe’s civility and moral compass, while Ralph’s inability to maintain even the slightest control eventually allows Jack’s charisma to erode the tentative social cohesion that kept the boys together.

Along with the community’s unstable disruptions of social control, the boys of

Lord of the Flies are also unable to master the environment as Crusoe and the boys of The

Coral Island did before them. The boys’ inability to “master” the island is shown in their continual failure to achieve the basic comforts of “civilization.” For the boys of The

Coral Island, like Crusoe before them, crafting the essential securities of shelter, clothing, and protection is a natural and uncomplicated process, allowing them to mimic the homes that they left behind while still providing them with the time to explore and play at their leisure. For the schoolboys in Lord of the Flies, however, every step toward

“civilizing” the island ends in a failure and shows their lack of self-control even at this basic level of survival.

The first attempts at fire-building in each book, symbolically representing the first steps at mastery over the environment, are radically different affairs. The Coral Island describes the creation of a fire as if the boys had constructed them hundreds of times before:

In a few seconds the tinder began to smoke; in less than a minute it caught fire,

and in less than a quarter hour, we were drinking our lemonade, and eating

coconuts round a fire that would have roasted an entire sheep, while the smoke,

flames and sparks flew up among the broad leaves of the overhanging palm trees,

and cast a warm glow upon our leafy bower” (27).

Such instant success eludes Golding’s school boys, however, when they attempt to replicate their literary forebears’ success. Both Ralph and Jack must make “confessions of incompetence” when they are tasked with lighting the fire. And once the fire does

37 begin to take hold, it quickly grows out of their control: “[b]eneath the capering boys a quarter of a mile square of forest was savage with smoke and flame” (44). Their failure to control the effects of fire becomes apparent with the destruction of a large part of the forest and, later, with the discovery that the fire has killed a small boy. These

Englishmen-in-training do not achieve the level of control over the island seen in previous Robinsonades --a technical failure that mirrors their inability to control their own desires, with or without the pressures of civilization. By the middle of the novel, the boys become accustomed to the squalor that not surrounds them. Comparing his memories of a “sometimes clean self” with the image of the boys in front of him, Ralph finds that the boys no longer look like they used to in his memories.

hair, much too long, tangled here and there, knotted round a dead leaf or a twig;

faces cleaned fairly well by the process of easting and sweating but marked in the

less accessible angles with a kind of shadow; clothes, worn away, stiff like his

own with sweat, put on, not for decorum or comfort but out of custom; the skin of

the body, scurfy with brine— (110)

Even at this relatively early stage of the novel, the boys are shown to be completely stripped of any form of cleanliness, an elementary signifier of colonial civility. When

Ralph compares his memories with his own unkempt appearance, he finds that he takes the condition as normal and “he did not mind” (110). From this point on, the boys decline further into an uncivilized state, moving from the physical decline seen here to a mental decline that pushes them into savagery.

The middle section of Lord of the Flies brings the appearance of outside antagonists who press upon the boys, forcing them to act. In Golding’s novel, however, the adversaries are spectral in nature. They appear in the form of “Beast from Water” and

“Beast from Air,” beings that are always presumed to exist independently of the boys’ imagination, but whose appearance is never certain, just as the sighting of cannibals or pirates is always elusively on the horizon. There is no point, however, in Golding’s novel where this external danger—always referred to as “the beast”— solidifies into a form that can be battled against. The Beast appears in the shadows, casting an aura of doubt that looms over all of the boys’ attempts to discover the elusive creature. Simon, who is commonly regarded as symbolizing the possibility of inherent human goodness, is the only one to consider the possibility that the “othered” Beast resides in them rather than in

a peripheral savagery. However, Simon’s voice is silenced by the laughter of the other

boys, which “beats him cruelly” (89). His belief about what truly should be feared is

ridiculed as “foolish” and never taken seriously. Simon’s self-directed examination into

the “savagery” residing in himself and his own culture becomes incompatible with the

boys’ ingrained assumption of British cultural and moral superiority. The other boys

already believe that savagery and beastliness reside outside of their own actions and that

any evidence to the contrary is an exception rather than the rule. Later, when the boys

begin a hunting party to search for the Beast, Simon finds the image of the clawed savage

figure the other boys imagine as a ridiculous misrepresentation of savagery. Rather,

Simon feels “a flicker of incredulity—a beast with claws that scratched, that sat on a

mountaintop, that left no tracks and yet was not fast enough to catch Samneric. However

Simon thought of the beast, there rose before his inward sight the picture of a human at once heroic and sick” (103).

This internalization of anxiety stands in stark opposition to Ballantyne’s representation of the savage outside world. For Ballantyne, savagery and immorality were easily identifiable as “other”. The natives and pirates who fill the waters surrounding the island make their presence known and clearly display themselves as

“savage” by their cruel actions. Savage performances such as throwing an infant into the ocean demarcate clear lines between morally pure and impure by which the boys can set their ethical compasses. Barbarity quite simply resides in any person or culture devoid of

Christianity. When Ralph is captured by pirates near the end of the novel, he is told that the only hospitable islands in the South Sea are ones on which the powers of the Gospel have “tamed” the “wild savages”: “I don’t care what the Gospel does to them [the indigenous people],” says his informant, the pirate Bill, “but I know that when any o’ the islands chance to get it, trade goes all smooth and easy, but where they ha’n’t got it,

Beelzebub himself could hardly desire better company” (169). The native people are not the only ones who suffer from a lack of the Gospel, however. In many respects, the pirates are considered to be worse than the natives because they “know better” and have been given several opportunities to turn to the word of God. In both cases the boundaries of immorality are clear. Savagery is decidedly other, residing in those without the moral purity of Ballantyne’s British boys.

In contrast to Ballantyne’s earlier work, Golding never separates civility and savagery into distinct categories. Indeed, he highlights the confusion between

civilization and savagery by muddling Ralph’s mind to such an extent that it becomes

impossible for him to clearly articulate his own relationship between himself and the

image of the beast that haunts him. The impossibility of the finding the Beast on the

island leads Golding’s Ralph to continually question his ability to understand the world

around him with an adult’s rationality. All of his attempts to articulate the need for a

British civility are constantly thwarted by his failure to grasp the meanings of his own

mind. When pressed into action as “chief,” he originally maintains the same self- assurance that was characteristic of the always certain minds of Ballantyne’s boys: “We want to be rescued; and of course we shall be rescued…the simple statement, unbacked by any proof but the weight of Ralph’s new authority, brought light and happiness” (37).

The self-certainty quickly fades, however, and Ralph becomes literally unable to think, even to keep himself alive. The hunt to kill Ralph and make of him an offering to stave off the Beast, always lying somewhere on the margins of the island, completely clouds his mind and destroys any hope of him reasoning his way out of the savagery that has become a foundational part of the island.

With the end of Golding’s novel comes radical doubt of every ideological position

The Coral Island had portrayed with certainty. The ending of Ballantyne’s tale reaffirms the British position or moral and cultural certainty that is assumed throughout the whole of the novel. The boys, who are imprisoned after attempting to take the Christianized native woman Avatea to her fiancé, are inexplicably set free by the “despotic” chief after he and the rest of the island population miraculously convert to Christianity. The lover of

Avatea then comes to thank them for the difficulties that they have borne while living in

the South Seas, effectively praising and thanking them for undertaking their white man’s

burden to civilize the “savage” people:

Young friend, you have seen few years but your head is old. Your heart also is

large and very brave. I and Avatea are your debtors, and we wish, the midst of

this assembly, to acknowledge our debt, and to say that it is one which we can

never repay. You have risked your life for one who was known to you for a few

days. But she was a woman in distress, and was enough to secure the aid of a

Christian man. We, who live in this island of the sea, know that true Christians

always act thus. Their Religion is one of love and kindness. We thank God that so

many Christians have been sent here; we hope that many more will come.

Remember that I and Avatea will think of you and pray for you and your brave

comrades when you are far away. (264)

The passage of pure praise, which ends the relationship between the boys and the natives, is the final affirmation authorizing all of the boys’ endeavors while on the island. British culture, which the natives pray will spread throughout their territories, is openly embraced without any regret for the loss of their own culture. These final acts of the

South Sea Islanders affirm the boys’ desire to defend the island from all invaders by

“cleansing” any non-British cultural identity from the realm of British control: “in a few minutes afterwards fire was put to the pile [of wooden idols], the roaring flames ascended, and amid the acclamations of the assembled thousands the False Gods of

Mango were reduced to ashes!” (264).

The conclusion of Lord of the Flies, however, rejects the assumed moral superiority or cultural mastery celebrated in Ballantyne’s novel. Rather than maintaining a single moral position throughout the novel, the school boys’ identities are intertwined with earlier discourses of “savage” people. Intertwining these previously separated narratives creates a discourse that, for Golding, places the location of civility and savagery within individual psyches rather than in any external representation such as

Britishness. As Golding sees it, the conflict comes from the way the British conceived of their humanity. In regards to the British colonial mission, with The Coral Island acting as

Golding’s imperial template, the British had whitewashed their representations of themselves so that all moral and cultural impurities were expunged from view. The boys’ actions in Lord of the Flies, their degradation into an uncivilized state, create a counterpoint to Britain’s cultural whitewashing that we see performed in The Coral

Island.

Rather than burning the idols of “savages,” Golding’s boys turn their island to ash in a manhunt Jack perpetrates against Ralph. The act of burning their island becomes a counterpoint to The Coral Island’s destruction of the artifacts that represent the cultural identity of the “savage” people. Only with the appearance of the adult naval officer do the boys recover any semblance of civility. His presence reminds the boys of the world outside of the island, of the rescue that was sought after in the first part of the novel, causing them to return to the social behaviors they performed before crashing there. Upon discovering the stranded boys, the naval officer scolds them by using the same cultural inheritance that the boys once possessed when they arrived:

“I should have thought,” said the officer as he visualized the search before him, “I

should have thought that a pack of British boys— you’re all British, aren’t you?—

would have been able to put up a better show than that—I mean—”

“It was like that at first,” said Ralph, “before things—”

He stopped.

“We were together then—”

The officer nodded helpfully.

“I know. Jolly good show. Like the Coral Island.” (201-202)

Although challenged with the brutal events acted out on the island, the officer still

attempts to perform the myths of Britishness constructed by adventure tales such as The

Coral Island. His mind, in attempting to strengthen the now questionable belief in

Britain’s moral and cultural superiority, struggles with a world that does not conform to

his expectations. Faced with this threat to his world view the officer himself puts on a

“good show” and acts as if his notions of Britishness were still valid. The disappointed

scolding he gives the disheveled boys is shown as a failed attempt to normalize the

situation that is beyond his comprehension and threatens to upheave his beliefs in his own

identity.

The building of the fire, which is such a powerful point in both narratives, again

symbolizes the shift between the two novels’ differing ideological positions. Golding, in setting flame to the island, equates the burning of the island with the burning of the idols at the end of The Coral Island. Both represent the destruction of false beliefs. But where the burning of the islanders’ wooden idols represents a conversion to a “true” religion and

Eurocentric belief system, the burning of the island, itself, represents the destruction of those same Eurocentric beliefs which are now seen to be just as false as the wooden idols of the islanders. To some extent Ralph’s tears represent a nostalgic longing for the beliefs now lost. Past narratives depicting the civility and greatness of Britain can no longer stand in the face of the post-World War Two world in which Golding now writes. Ralph is thus forced to confront a world where his identity has no grounding.

Ralph looked at him dumbly. For a moment he had a fleeting picture of the

strange glamour that once invested the beaches. But the island was scorched up

like dead wood—Simon was dead—and Jack had...The tears began to flow and

sobs shook him. He gave himself up to them now for the first time on the island;

great, shuddering spasms of grief that seemed to wrench his whole body. His

voice rose under the black smoke before the burning wreckage of the island; and

infected by that emotion, the other little boys began to shake and sob too. And in

the middle of them, with filthy body, matted hair, and unwiped nose, Ralph wept

for the end of innocence, and the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the

air of the true, wise friend called Piggy. (202)

Golding’s criticism of Britain’s self-representation now fills the gap that was left after the decline of the British Empire. Though his own personal cynicism in humanity slowly faded and, if only partially, returned to a more optimistic view held before World War

Two, the uncertainty left by the contraction of empire remained in the Robinsonade.

Lord of the Flies, because of its success, completely altered the direction of Robinsonade tradition, allowing criticism to enter into the tradition in a way that was impossible

45 previously. Critiques of the social order that created the desert island narrative, though not an entirely new invention were never in the forefront of the Robinsonade as they are in Golding’s adaptation. With British society primed by world events, it became possible to openly question the social order in an attempt to find reasons for its fall. This ability to analyze society by using the easily identifiable literary genre of the Robinsonade becomes increasingly common in the latter half of the 20th century.

JOHN DOLLAR: THE ROBINSONADE IN CONTEMPORARY WESTERN

LITERATURE

A Robinsonade for the postmodern age, Marianne Wiggins’s 1998 novel John Dollar

joins the tradition warily and self-consciously. Writing in the wake of feminism and

postcolonialism, Wiggins critiques the tradition from within, questioning its Eurocentric

masculinism, its association of women with the natural world, and its characterization of

indigenous people as childlike, savage, and hyper-sexual have all come to the fore

because of these new critical perspectives. With these theoretical frameworks in mind,

Wiggins writes John Dollar with the intention of analyzing the Robinsonade from the

inside. Using the novel as her platform for critique, Wiggins employs parody, irony, and

repeated reference to earlier novels in the tradition to construct a narrative that seeks to

challenge the normal modes of the Robinsonade.

The story takes place in 1917 Burma, at the end of the First World War. Charlotte, an English war widow, moves to Burma to become a school teacher for the British colonials living in the outpost of Rangoon. Once settled there, Charlotte finds herself repelled by the colonials’ “retrogressive” and static perspectives. Increasingly drawn toward the Burmese way of life, Charlotte gradually moves to the position of social outsider, fully accepted by neither the colonial English nor the indigenous Burmese. Her position throughout the novel always teeters between that of duplicity and annihilation.

With each new ‘temptation’ towards Burmese culture, she becomes ever more “socially invisible” to both her countrymen and the locals (26). The colonial English, typified by

their antiquated and rigid beliefs, find Charlotte’s “transgressions” to be wholly un-

English and isolate her from the normal social meetings that characterize the English day

to day life. Similarly, Charlotte cannot wholly identify with the Burmese that inhabit

Rangoon. When she sees the Buddhist monks lining the market streets Charlotte instantly

is drawn to them but knows that because she is a woman she is prevented from even

touching the alms bowls with which they receive their meals. This positioning between cultural identities forces Charlotte into a liminal ground where she struggles with the isolation in which she finds herself . “She identified herself as one with them in abnegation. She envied them their received cosmology, their canonically fixed purpose.

She, too, longed to live in a non-world, outside existence of the law and literature, of the

King’s Own Version of the text” (30). From her othered position that is both internal and external, Charlotte finds herself not quite fitting into either culture’s fixed narrative. The traditional “longyi-eingyi” attire (worn by both men and women) mixed with the long- sleeved jacket, making up Charlotte’s daily wardrobe, acts as the physical manifestation of the symbolic dual cultural position that both includes and excludes her from either culture. Charlotte’s mental position, like her mixed wardrobe, takes and finds legitimacy from both, but in seeing the correctness in both excludes herself from the “canonically fixed purpose” that either side ascribes to.

Charlotte’s life continues in relative isolation until the mysterious ship captain,

John Dollar, enters her world and unexpectantly becomes her lover. Though little information is given about John (the chapter named after him and detailing his past is all of one page), what is described about him paints him as a traditionally English

adventurer, one that could come out of most of the narrative in the Robinsonade tradition.

Though relatively young at around thirty-five years old, John’s command made him seem

older: “[h]e was distinctly scientific and he understood how things should work” (36).

Worldly and independent, John was also well read, memorizing the few English books he could come across while out at sea in the far reaches of the world that are not even given a name. John’s position with the English of Rangoon is, like Charlotte, one of an outsider; however, his distance is accepted to a much greater extent because of the image his presents. Like Crusoe and the boys of The Coral Island, John Dollar presents the image of an English explorer who has left his mother country in the interest of both self and country. In this light, John represents an extreme version of all the English in

Rangoon away from their home culture yet carrying and “memorizing” the fundamental beliefs of the culture they all left behind. For the colonial English it does not matter that like Charlotte John has renounced many of the beliefs he held when he left England, what matters is that the image of John Dollar recreates the image of the swarthy independent

English sailor.

When the war ends, in an attempt to buttress themselves from the growing specter of a decaying empire, the British of Rangoon endeavor to reaffirm England’s political and economic power by renaming a nearby island in honor of King George V. They set out with their children, servants, and school teachers on an expedition to the island— which since the time of its “discovery” by Marco Polo has been called “the Island of our

Outlawed Dreams”— to claim it for the king, reasserting the hope that the world will

49 return to a more idyllic past where the British Empire was in the ascendent rather than in decline.

Wiggins deviates from the typical Robinsonade with the first ritualized landing of the island. In the traditional desert island narrative, the protagonist lands on the island through a frightful storms or mysterious providence; the survivors are ripped from their old worlds and thrust into the unknown world of the island. In John Dollar, however, we are first introduced to the island in a symbolically freighted (and highly self-conscious) re-enactment of Crusoe’s literary landing. The parody is turned into farce when the

English hotly argue among themselves about who should be first to land on the island and plant the flag for the king while at the same time sending their indigenous servants ahead of them so that camp will be ready for them when they land. The scene creates a double landing where the “first” servant landing is a magnified mockery of the performance that the English are acting out in order to honor their king.

Behind the comic irony of the scene lies a critical look at what Anne McClintock refers to as “the myth of empty land” as well as the Robinsonade’s culpability in reinforcing many of the problematic colonial narratives arising out of imperial England.

McClintock argues that “the myth of virgin land is also the myth of empty land, involving both gender and racial dispossession. Within the patriarchal narratives, to be virgin is to be empty of desire and void of sexual agency, passively awaiting the thrusting, male insemination of history, language and reason” (30). The English reenactment of the landing on the island acts as an attempt to reassert the British imperial authority which has been deeply destabilized by the World War. Coming to the island with a small flotilla

of ships, boldly landing and the island’s “mysterious” shores and thrusting the king’s flag

deeply into the soft island soft sands reenacts the constructed narrative of Europe’s

“discovery” of the world. However, Wiggins shows that what is actually revealed is the

fiction that has become central to the discourse of English identity. By repeatedly

connecting the landing on The Island of Outlawed Dreams with the narrative of Robinson

Crusoe, Wiggins connects the Robinsonade to the construction of imperial English

discourse. In planning their eventual landing on the island, many of the characters

repeatedly make reference to Defoe’s The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The

English employers call all of their indigenous servants by days of the week, for example:

“Sat, Sun, Tuesday, Wednesday… Friday” (69). The English even articulate their connections between their landing and The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, speaking with a sense of exhilaration precisely because the moment of landing bears a strong likeness to the fictions they had dreamed (67).

The cataclysm that we would expect to see in the typical Robinsonade takes place after the British make their theatrical landing. A tsunami strikes the two ships harbored off the island and seemingly kills everyone but the young schoolgirls. Like the boys of

Lord of the Flies, the girls quickly organize and begin to make laws to rule the island and, just as quickly, begin to rebel against the laws that they have made for themselves. As with the boys of Lord of the Flies, the school girls of John Dollar are unable to maintain the stable illusions of civility that encompass their world view. But unlike the Golding’s boys, the girls of John Dollar are unable to perform the traditional acts of island conquest because the stories they were taught to emulate never came from the adventurous

51 narrative of overseas conquest. Rather than gather supplies or attempt to assess their surroundings, as the men of the tradition customarily seem to, the girls make parasols to protect themselves from the sun and tell each other fairytales, such as Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood, while awaiting rescue. Not only are the girls unable maintain the tenuous illusions of civility, but they are incapable of even pretending to be the self-sufficient or rational individuals that we see depicted since Robinson Crusoe.

Unlike their male counterparts, the English girls have been raised (by Charlotte and the local “ayahs”) on stories and poems that have left them unprepared for a reality that demands that they be independent, self-sufficient, and “masterful.”

Soon after landing, in a journey to circle the island, the girls discover John Dollar alive on the beach, delirious and paralyzed from the waist down. Ignorant of any form of first aid, the girls begin to turn him to a religious idol that will bring them their salvation.

They ritually shave and groom him, eventually creating a shrine around him and ceremonially feeding him quinine as if it were the sacrament. Once John is discovered, the girls place all their hopes of survival on John rescuing them from the island. The girls are unable to remove themselves from the notion that they are in need of a male hero to rescue them from their tower or prison. Even the mentally and physically shattered body of John Dollar cannot dissuade them from their fundamental belief that John’s position on the island is one of leader and rescuer. Wiggins’s creation of a fallen male idol calls into question many of the assumptions of earlier Robinsonades—assumptions succinctly summed up by Peterkin in The Coral Island: “[o]f course we’ll rise, naturally, to the top of affairs. White men always do in savage countries” (16). Yet on Wiggins’s “savage”

island, John is literally paralyzed unable to take care of his basic needs and is completely

at the mercy of young irrational girls and the elements which Crusoe and Ballantyne’s

boys seemed easily to master.

Although Wiggins takes many cues from Golding, her criticism ultimately

extends to a much deeper and multifaceted level of British identity than her predecessors.

Whereas Golding retains a certain nostalgia for the British identity he critiques in his

novel—one cannot lament a fall from grace without presupposing that state of grace to

begin with—in Wiggins’s novel, the girls already represent a “fallen” Britain. Her

characters are never portrayed as existing in an ideal state of being from which they

descend into darkness. Wiggins refuses to separate the British world and the larger world

in the way that the other novels examined do; she links the two together so that readers

continually recognize that the two never existed in isolation with one side representing

purity and the other, savagery.

In the case of William Golding, the purity of the island plays on the narrative of

female gendered space, a space that equates “female” with “natural.” Anne McClintock

notes that the feminizing of “empty lands” has been a continually reappearing trope in the

discourse of empire and colonization (241-244). Conversely, then, “civilization” is

gendered masculine, so that when the all-male cast of Lord of the Flies descends into savagery, they descend into a “feminine” realm, as well. Without the inclusion of any female characters, the “female” defaults to the discursive position of “nature,” where, of course, lies the origin of the boys’ decent into savagery. Wiggins’s innovation illuminates the interpenetration of opposites: as civilization is shot through with savagery,

53 so masculinity is “tainted” by the feminine. As Edward Said points out, modern imperialists “are doomed ironically to suffer interruption and distraction, as what they had tried to exclude from their island worlds penetrates anyway” (163).

Though many island narratives produce troublesome hyper-sexualized narratives, particularly when representing the native populations, it is also true that an equal number present worlds that seem to be populated entirely by men. In Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe women are little more than footnotes to the story. Crusoe’s wife takes up the whole of single line at the end of the story in which Crusoe states that he married, had three children, and she died. Her death is seen as allowing Crusoe once again to roam freely throughout the world having satisfied his domestic responsibilities. Lord of the Flies includes an equally trivial amount of women in its narrative. The most notable female character in Lord of the Flies is Piggy’s aunt, who looks after him after his parents’ death.

Her role in Golding’s narrative is strictly on the periphery. Piggy’s aunt’s role in the story is to emphasize Piggy’s enfeebled and effeminate position compared to the adventurous and independent boys, a position that eventually leads to his death.

Wiggins, by comparison, largely focuses on the female perspective throughout the story. The first half of the novel centers on Charlotte, a woman whose independence marks her as socially transgressive, while the second half mostly revolves around the stranded school girls, girls that have largely internalized the discourse of female dependence. This is not a complete reversal of the tradition, a world that is solely female, rather Wiggins acknowledges the multiple perspectives of both male and female.

Wiggins’ strategy is, in part, to follow the traditional modes of the Robinsonade but,

while mimicking the traditional structure, to show a perspective rarely seen, one that

complicates the singularly male representation of the natural world. The shipwrecked

girls are themselves still framed by and reinforce many of the underlying assumptions that previous desert island writers helped to construct. However, Wiggins gives a fuller contextualized world view, one that does not mask or completely write off the other side of the traditional dichotomy. Wiggins repeatedly presents her characters as being agents of their sexual desire, and she acknowledges the existence of a sexual opposite rather than showing only the male dominated world of her predecessors. The continual focus on sexual encounters in John Dollar acts as a tool for reminding readers of the inseparability of males and females and their prescribed behaviors.

In attempting to bring attention to the lack of female perspectives and the misrepresentation of native people in earlier Robinsonades, Wiggins mixes the language of sexual desire with the discourse of cannibalism. In many respects, Charlotte thinks of herself as occupying a middle ground between the poles of several different dichotomies:

“She liked to feel she was amphibious, swimming through a double life. She was neither one nor the other, not a gill-fitted English woman who’d gone troppo nor an indigenous inhabitant of the native land” (23). Throughout the novel we are given similar representations of Charlotte’s position being both and neither, of being part of both worlds and yet not fully identifying with either. The tension that can be seen existing within Charlotte’s own internal thoughts can be seen extending throughout the whole of the novel. As Charlotte resides in contested liminal space so too do the young girls, John

Dollar, and the British colonials.

The complexity and intertwining of the gendered and racial discourses can best be

seen in Wiggins’s reproduction of two major scenes from the tradition, one taken from

Lord of the Flies while the second scene is taken from the genre itself. The first scene

Wiggins adapts reproduces Golding’s scene where the boys paint their faces to shield

themselves from their society’s notion of civility, to manifest their “primitive” desires

without prejudice. In Wiggins's version, the girls are naked in their sleeping quarters aboard ship and have their faces painted. While in this “primitive,” masked state the girls watch Charlotte and John having sex through a peephole.

He dug his fingernails into her calves and then he slapped each thigh and then he

slapped her on her rearend then he put his mouth against it. It was Gaby’s turn. It

went on for half an hour so Amanda saw the moment Charlotte mounted him. She

saw Charlotte take him into her. Oopi saw him eating Charlotte’s breasts. Jane

saw Charlotte lick her palm and rub her spit along his penis. Sybil saw John’s

head inside her legs and saw her strike his shoulders with her fists. What Monkey

watched had seemed to her a violence and when John and Charlotte reached their

ecstasy eight girls in paint and feathers, naked, heard their cries of ravishment and

looked at one and other in disguises and made a silent pledge, mistaking the sad

echo of extreme joy for a noise of an ungodly agony. (106)

With this passage Wiggins foreshadows the later cannibal scene in which the girls gaze upon natives feasting upon their parents who have just returned to rescue them. The grizzly scene is described to the readers with similarly mixed language of sex and consumption, complicating the separation between one discourse and the other.

They watched the children bind the giants, men, their fathers, to the poles. They

watched their fathers writhe and pop and as they watched, the wind brought an

aroma to them on the hill. Their eyes watered but they watched because they

couldn’t stop their eyes from watching--they didn’t mean to watch but once it

was begun it was a thing they couldn’t stop. They couldn’t make themselves

believe that what they saw was true and so they kept on watching, waiting for a

proof, a final stroke, a termination in the horror, something, anything, a moment

to arrive to signify that all hope, every hope, had ended. (184)

Without the contextual markers surrounding these passages, it would be quite difficult to

distinguish one event (intercourse) from the other (cannibalism). The language that

signals one discourse is virtually interchangeable with the other. Both events are

witnessed with a mixture of fascination and horror. “Mistaking the sad echo of extreme

joy for a noise of an ungodly agony,” the girls are unable to discriminate between the two acts and their intended meanings.

Unlike the novels previously examined, Wiggins refuses to simplify the desert island narrative so that it tells a single story. Indeed, Wiggins goes out of her way to complicate the traditional assumptions that underlie the Robinsonade, asking readers to reconsider its customary racial and gendered perspectives as well as the colonial discourses that make up British imperial ideology. Her appropriation of Lord of the Flies shows that even novels that are considered to be antithetical to the classical Crusoe myth still reinforce many of the ideological assumptions laid down by early Robinsonades. The repeated racialization of savagery, even in Golding’s argument against British imperial

57 ideology, shows the difficulty of fully removing oneself from the cultural constructions of one’s society. By forcing her audience to focus on the inseparability of these various discourses, Wiggins shows how pervasive the Crusoe myth and the Robinsonade are within British and western ideology. In this respect, her novel is the first of those examined to explicitly inform readers of the Robinsonade’s cultural influence and the meanings we still take from it today.

CONCLUSION

As we move further into the twenty-first century, the Robinsonade continues to proliferate. Ian Watt’s identification of over sevenhundred adaptations of Defoe’s novel in 1957 could not take into account the growing number of television and cinematic adaptations, nor could he foresee the rise in digitally created materials. These new mediums alone greatly increase the number of Robinsonades available for consumption by western audiences beyond the literary realm. The Robinsonade’s function as a touchstone of British identity specifically and of western identity more broadly appears to be firmly established for the foreseeable future.

When looking to the future of the tradition, one should make considerable effort to recognize the long and sometimes forgotten history that comes out of Britain’s first realist novel. This project was, in part, an attempt to remember that history, to map out the course of a tradition that still plays a role in creating cultural meaning today.

Examining that history has illuminated a tradition that continually shifts to meet the ideological needs of the culture that appropriates and rewrites it. Robinson Crusoe, The

Coral Island, Lord of the Flies, and John Dollar all mark major shifts in British ideology.

Keeping this study current with an examination of still more recent examples of the

Robinsonade would require a method of inquiry capable of tracking even more subtle and nuanced social and ideological shifts.

However, as this project has shown, what recent Robinsonades have in common is a desire to critique the tradition itself, even as they reflect their own cultural moment.

While John Dollar is informed by current theories of race, class, and gender, for

example, it articulates these modern concerns with a continual nod back to the genre in

which it is written. Indeed, the Robinsonade is a relatively unique literary genre in that

one of its significant features is its explicit self-referentiality. This internal self-reflexivity still means that any new examination of the Robinsonade must always be aware of the genre’s history, then, even as it attends to the specifics of each new text and its immediate context. Jean Rhys’s adaptation of Brontë’s Jane Eyre or Césaire’s adaptation of

Shakespeare’s The Tempest, for example, can be understood as adaptations of a specific literary antecedent but not as alterations of an established generic tradition. Knowledge of the Robinsonade as an occidental myth, then, becomes an essential component of any future examination of the desert island genre.

Film and TV adaptations of the Robinsonade are perhaps numerous enough to constitute their own extensive investigations. With the accessibility and mass appeal of film and television, it is perhaps here that the most relevant look into modern

Robinsonades can be found. Though novelists have not abandoned Crusoe—Nobel

laureate J.M Coetzee’s Foe being a prime example—the audience for literary fiction

pales in comparison to the millions that consume film and television on a regular basis.

Thus, from a strictly numerical perspective, the most influential Robinsonades may now

be in visual rather than print form. This shift from print to visual media alone is

significant in analyzing how cultures construct meaning through the Robinsonade. What

impact this shift has had is, regrettably, beyond the scope of this project, but undoubtedly

the move away from print to visual narrative is one of the most significant changes the

tradition has ever seen.

The rise of such digital media as video games over the past thirty years marks

another new stage in the development of the Robinsonade. Such texts provide a unique

set of analytical questions because the “reader” of these new adaptations is directly

engaging with the material in a way that was not possible with other forms of media.

Analysis of these “digital” Robinsonades requires a familiarity with the newly emerging

field of game studies, which is heavily influenced by the reader-response theoryof

Wolfgang Iser, Michael Riffaterre, and Hans-Robert Jauss and focuses on the player’s creation of meaning and control of the narrative’s development. Because of the interactive nature of digital games many new questions arise: How is the myth of Crusoe altered when the consumer is actively playing the role of Crusoe? Does the player identify more with the Crusoe than other characters such as Friday because they play as him? On top of these newly emerging questions scholars are still faced with the traditional questions of race and gender that preoccupy the present examination of the

Robinsonade.

As these new forms of adaptation continue to gain prominence, we will continue to see the Robinsonade revised to reflect the evolving ideologies of the western world.

The myth of Crusoe seems able to conform to shifting cultural positions with little to no resistance. In fact the opposite seems to be the case. The Robinsonade’s penchant for adapting swiftly to new forms of cultural construction, whether evidenced by Otis

Turner’s 1913 silent film adaptation of Robinson Crusoe or eGames’ 2009 video game,

Robinson Crusoe: An Uncharted Hidden Object Adventure, seems to reflect the

malleability that characterizes the tradition after three-hundred years. Its full significance in contemporary culture has yet to be fully explored. This last area of study is perhaps the most exciting for a future course of analysis.

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