NARRATIVE RETELLINGS AND THE CREATION OF IDENTITY DISCOURSE IN WESTERN LITERATURE: THREE MAJOR ADAPTATIONS OF ROBINSON CRUSOE By 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 ii 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 iii 1 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 4 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”