Angel of the Island: L. T. Meade's New Girl as the Heir of a Nation-Making Robinson Crusoe

Abstract

The little-studied work of L.T. Meade offers fruitful ground for investigating how issues of gender were marked in children’s fiction. Four on an Island: A Story of Adventure (1892) patches together socially polarized archetypes, the adventure hero popularized by Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and the Angel of the House, recuperating adventure as a domestic enterprise in the characterization of “New Girl” Isabel Fraser. By positioning this Adventurous Angel as Crusoe’s true heir, Meade challenges the exclusivity of spaces gendered as masculine, positioning girls as empire-builders because they, like Crusoe, are the preservers of nation through the maintenance of the domestic space.

In the meantime, I in part settled myself here; for first of all I married, and that not either to my disadvantage or dissatisfaction, and had three children, two sons and one daughter. But my wife dying, and my nephew coming home with good success from a voyage to Spain, my inclination to go abroad [prevailed] . . . From thence I touched at Brazil . . . besides other supplies, I sent seven women, being such as I found proper for service, or for wives to such as would takethem. As to the Englishmen, I promised them to send them some women from England, with a good cargo of necessaries, if they would apply themselves to planting, which I afterwards performed.

—Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (297-98)

Her best-loved son must have hiswanderjahre. She cannot hold him back. She can only gaze after his retreating form from the watch-tower of her love; too often he departs with never a backward glance at her . . . Why not allow the possibility that nice girls, well-disposed girls, may also desire a mild sort of wanderjahre period, during which they, too, want not to break fences, but to get occasional glimpses of the landscape beyond the family domain?

—B. A. Crackanthorpe, "The Revolt of the Daughters" (265-66)

The seemingly oppositional nature of domestic practices and adventurous pursuits can be gleaned from this passage near the end of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), in which readers learn more specifics about the nephew's voyage than about Crusoe's wife. Defoe also neatly connects women with "other supplies" in a rhetorical move that characterizes them as helpful tools for "service" in a colonial environment now that the island is being "settled." This purported split between the adventurous and the domestic spheres, in which the domestic inherits a vicarious, suitably tamed version of the adventurous, was widened in the nineteenth century by the insistence on an author- and audience-identified genre of "boy's" books, such as R. M. Ballantyne's The CoralIsland (1858) and Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883). This split was deepened by perceptions that material, military, and civil circumstances required men to march away from the domestic while women remained behind in England to wait for them, much in the patient character of the mother in Crackanthorpe's "Revolt of the Daughters" (1894). In actuality, however, no such neat divide was possible between the two realms, and elements of the domestic were often present within the adventurous. As promising scholarship has uncovered, women traveling with their husbands, missionary groups, or on their own forged domestic enclaves in "adventure" spaces in places such as India, Africa, Asia, Australia, and the South Pacific islands.¹

Women writers in England also were imaginatively entering the spaces of adventure through their writings, though they themselves may never have left their own island. Women writers of children's books—such as Anne Bowman, Angela Brazil, Bessie Marchant, and L. T. Meade—were charting new territory by placing their girl heroes in adventurous settings. The proliferation of these tales suggests the avidity with which girl readers read them. Yet these writers, who often penned under the patriarchal patronage of organizations such as the Religious Tract Society or the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, had to be wary of writing texts in which girl heroes would succeed by transgressing appropriate social bounds or by "unsexing" themselves...