English Trader, Indian Maid: Representing Gender, Race, and Slavery in the New World. An Inkle and Yarico Reader (review)

86 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 13:1 What is behind this shift in literary-historical fashion? Let me call it the pull of postmodernity. Even if the dry abymes of self-reflexive anti-narrative (in Barth, Robbe-Grillet, Calvino) are no longer in the height of fashion, we are nevertheless writing "novels" in scare-quotes rather than Novels that, like Ulysses or The Waves, seek to encompass all things, the world and the consciousness that experiences it. We do not want to read "Nobody's Story"—pure fiction about characters we can let ourselves identify with because we know they are unreal; we want to read Somebody's Story, fictionalized versions of reality, which may tilt towards the documentary and the historical. What we most want to read today are Toni Morrison's story about Margaret Garner (Beloved), Thomas Pynchon's story about Mason and Dixon, Russell Banks's story about John Brown (Cloudsplitter ), John Berendt's story about Jim Williams (Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil). The other great change since the achievements of high modernism is of course that the novel has become considerably less important than it had been as a class of cultural object. Competing to supply us with objects of feeling and thought are all the latest hot movies and talk shows and MTV and Star Treks and soap operas and acronymic télé-feuilletons such as NYPD and ER. And the prose fictions that grab our easily distracted attention are more often than not fantasies such as the Harry Potter stories, amatory fictions such as The Bridges of Madison County, or chroniques scandaleuses, thinly veiled romans-à-clefsuch as Primary Colors. The world of narrative in our day, in other words, looks a lot more like that of the late seventeenth century, messy and turbulent, with all of its amatory fictions, fantasies, and chroniques scandaleuses, but without a world-historical art form in the making. It certainly does not look much like the second half of the eighteenth century, when all Europe, including savants such as Goethe and Rousseau, were learning to refashion and improve a new narrative form that had begun with Richardson's Pamela. David Richter Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center Frank Felsenstein, ed. English Trader, Indian Maid: Representing Gender, Race, and Slavery in the New World. An Inkle and Yarico Reader. Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. xiii + 317pp. US$48.00 (cloth); US$17.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8018-6106-3. A real event inspires a fictionalized retelling of such power that it, in turn, is rewritten, imitated, dramatized, illustrated, and sinks deep into the European consciousness . Robinson Crusoe is the classic example, but through the eighteenth century the tale of Inkle and Yarico ran it a close second. Richard Steele tells the story in the Spectator for 13 March 171 1, the principal source for some sixty versions during the next hundred years. REVIEWS 87 The London merchant Thomas Inkle, alone and surrounded by hostile tribes in the American forests, is saved by the Indian maid Yarico. They become lovers, and he promises to take her to England as his wife. But when they are rescued by a passing ship and transported to Barbados he sells her in the slave market. Many values interrogated by eighteenth-century writers clash in this simple and brutal little tale: pagan and Christian, savage and civilized, spiritual and mercantile. Ultimately the story sets in opposition the most potent ofhuman motivations—love and money. In 1937, Lawrence Marsden Price gathered about forty versions of the tale, in English, French, and German, in his majestic Inkle and Yarico Album. Frank Felsenstein, building on the latest critical theories of colonialism, comparative literature, and gender, has here edited twenty retellings (including little-known nineteenth-century West Indian texts). He adds notes, appendices, bibliographies, and a powerfully argued fifty-page introduction. A man endangered in a strange country and rescued by a woman he subsequently deserts or betrays is a topos as old as classical myth and as up-to-date as Miss Saigon. The woman is figured as beautiful, warm-hearted, and frequently royal— Medea, Dido, or Pocahontas. For her, the relationship should be a lifelong...