Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Contributors
- Introduction: Narrating Domestic Portability: Emigration, Domesticity and Genre Formation
- 1 Unsettled Status in Australian Settler Novels
- 2 Agents of Empire and Feminist Rebels: Settlement and Gender in Isabella Aylmer's Distant Homes and Ellen Ellis's Everything Is Possible To Will
- 3 Reconstructing British Domesticity on the North American Frontier
- 4 Divided House, Divided Self: Susanna Moodie's Flora Lyndsay; or, Passages from an Eventful Life
- 5 For Fortune and Adventure: Representations of Emigration in British Popular Fiction, 1870–1914
- 6 The Return and Rescue of the Émigré in A Tale of Two Cities
- 7 Settling Back in at Home: Impostors and Imperial Panic in Victorian Narratives of Return
- 8 Surviving Black Thursday: The Great Bushfire of 1851
- 9 ‘I am but a Stranger Everywhere’: Missionary Themes in Charlotte Yonge's New Ground and My Young Alcides
- 10 Sad Remains: Foreclosing Settlement in The Coral Island
- 11 Nineteenth-Century Female Crusoes: Rewriting the Robinsonade for Girls
- 12 ‘The Freedom Suits Me’: Encouraging Girls to Settle in the Colonies
- 13 Domestic Goddesses on the Frontier; or, Tempting the Mothers of Empire with Adventure
- 14 A ‘Curious Political and Social Experiment’: A Settler Utopia, Feminism and a Greater Britain in Catherine Helen Spence's Handfasted
- Notes
- Index
11 - Nineteenth-Century Female Crusoes: Rewriting the Robinsonade for Girls
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Contributors
- Introduction: Narrating Domestic Portability: Emigration, Domesticity and Genre Formation
- 1 Unsettled Status in Australian Settler Novels
- 2 Agents of Empire and Feminist Rebels: Settlement and Gender in Isabella Aylmer's Distant Homes and Ellen Ellis's Everything Is Possible To Will
- 3 Reconstructing British Domesticity on the North American Frontier
- 4 Divided House, Divided Self: Susanna Moodie's Flora Lyndsay; or, Passages from an Eventful Life
- 5 For Fortune and Adventure: Representations of Emigration in British Popular Fiction, 1870–1914
- 6 The Return and Rescue of the Émigré in A Tale of Two Cities
- 7 Settling Back in at Home: Impostors and Imperial Panic in Victorian Narratives of Return
- 8 Surviving Black Thursday: The Great Bushfire of 1851
- 9 ‘I am but a Stranger Everywhere’: Missionary Themes in Charlotte Yonge's New Ground and My Young Alcides
- 10 Sad Remains: Foreclosing Settlement in The Coral Island
- 11 Nineteenth-Century Female Crusoes: Rewriting the Robinsonade for Girls
- 12 ‘The Freedom Suits Me’: Encouraging Girls to Settle in the Colonies
- 13 Domestic Goddesses on the Frontier; or, Tempting the Mothers of Empire with Adventure
- 14 A ‘Curious Political and Social Experiment’: A Settler Utopia, Feminism and a Greater Britain in Catherine Helen Spence's Handfasted
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) has inspired hundreds of stories in numerous languages and its influence persists in literary and visual culture almost 300 years later. The Robinsonade conjures up images of shipwrecked male protagonists who take command of the islands on which they are stranded. Less readily called to mind are novels which feature female castaways, despite the corpus of female Robinsonades published between 1720 and 1880 that Jeannine Blackwell has identified. The Robinsonade became phenomenally popular for British children in the nineteenth century and was harnessed as an ideal genre for didactic instruction from the eighteenth century. This chapter interrogates both female and children's Robinsonades to chart how the female Crusoe was transformed into the girl Crusoe in late Victorian fiction for girls. The girl Crusoe presents an idealized, modern femininity that differs from male examples and departs substantially from mid-Victorian children's Robinsonades, in which women are either helpless or restricted to non-glorified domestic tasks. Inspired by the necessities of maintaining the British Empire, in the late nineteenth century these fictions charge girls with the capacity to become island settlers, even if in some instances temporarily, providing impetus for twentieth-century girls’ adventure fiction.
Eighteenth-Century Female Crusoes
Women are largely absent from or marginal to most castaway narratives. Rebecca Weaver-Hightower suggests that this tendency ‘show[s] women as largely incidental to the island colonization, reflecting their political invisibility in real-world imperial society’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Victorian Settler NarrativesEmigrants, Cosmopolitans and Returnees in Nineteenth-Century Literature, pp. 165 - 176Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014