The Female American, and: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (review)

240EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION14:2 [Unca Eliza Winkfield.] The Female American. Ed. Michelle Burnham. Peterborough, Ont.: BroadviewPress, 2000. 196pp. $15.95; US$12.95;£8.95. ISBN 1-55111-248-5. Olaudah Equiano. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. Ed. Angelo Costanzo. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2001. 330pp. $12.95; US$9.95; £6.95. ISBN 1-55111-262-0. Michelle Burnham's edition of The Female American (1767) continues the efforts of Broadview Press to make available carefully edited, finely reproduced , and inexpensively priced editions of lesser-known works of eighteenth-century literature. One ofmany Robinsonades published in the course of the century, TheFemaleAmerican purports to be the autobiography of Unca Eliza Winkfield, granddaughter of both a native American chief and a first founder of the colony of Virginia (viz., Edward Maria Wingfield ) . As her name and lineage suggest, Unca Eliza is a biracial, multilingual , transnational heroine. Stranded in the 1630s on a deserted Atlantic island because she refused to marry the son of the captain of a ship carrying her to England, she survives on her own in the wilderness, eventually converting the native peoples of a neighbouring island to Christianity and dedicating the rest of her life to ministering to them. The Female American resists neat categorizations. It gives us a biracial heroine, but it cannot imagine that she might survive on her own in the wilderness. She is provided with a male hermit's journal to instruct her in the economy of the island and, at the end, is married to a cousin whose Anglican ministry authorizes hers. While the novel rejects Western civilization 's rapacity and greed (Unca Eliza and her husband "never intended to have any more to do with Europe," p. 154), it approves the imposition of a theatrical Christianity on natives whose lives seem otherwise content and peaceful. While it imagines a woman speaking authoritatively on philosophical , social, and religious issues, it often does so through male masks or disguises or stories, a kind of ventriloquism that lessens the force of the novel's early feminist thrust. Yet, as Burnham points out in her introduction , it is precisely the ambiguities that give the novel its peculiar force. The fact that we cannot define the novel as either "American" or "British " (the historical record gives us no clue as to the identity of the author) is a metaphor for a broad range of ambiguities that the novel everywhere insists upon. The Broadview edition, as usual, does the small things extremely well. Footnotes are kept to a minimum and are at the bottom of the page. The recommended reading list is helpful. Burnham's introduction contextualizes the novel's significance within eighteenth-century debates on truthfulness, empire-building, and gender, suggestively opening up possible readings REVIEWS241 that students can pursue. Burnham takes the first edition as her copy text, and keeps tinkering to a minimum (primarily the silent correction of obvious printer's errors). Finally, several appendices provide excerpts from other literary and historical works to which the anonymous author alludes. Broadview's publication of The Female American is an act of recovery: the novel has been out ofprint since the early nineteenth century. Angelo Costanzo 's edition of Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano represents a different kind of effort, an attempt to be competitive in the textbook market of "canonized" literary texts. Since its rediscovery by Paul Edwards in the late 1960s, Equiano's Narrative has been republished a number of times; at the moment, there are at least five worthy classroom editions in print, including Vincent Carretta's meticulously annotated Penguin edition and an inexpensive Dover edition. As a result, the Broadview edition is compelled to make itself heard in some way. Costanzo has tried to do this by providing a lengthy appendix (sixty-two pages) in which he excerpts twenty-eight different writings from the first abolitionist movement (ca. 1760-90). Though the excerpts are often quite brief, readers can still clearly see that many of Equiano's ideas and tropes derive from the larger eighteenth-century discourse on slavery and abolition. Whether this strategy ofcontextualizing Equiano within the larger debate will prove...