Realism and the Unreal in The Female American

The Female American was, until recently, a little-known anonymous novel tracing the transatlantic adventures of a bi-racial, multilingual castaway-turned-missionary named Unca Eliza Winkfield. Critics now see its alternative constructions of individualism and gender as a challenge to canonical novels such as Robinson Crusoe or Pamela. This essay focuses on the novel's many oddities— not least the fantastical island setting with its central oracle statue worshipped by the local natives— in order to demonstrate that The Female American is an ironic pastiche of images and texts about the Americas. The oracle statue, which Unca Eliza improbably uses to convert the natives, mirrors Enlightenment debates about pagan prognostication at a time when ancient and indigenous paganisms were systematically compared. Although Enlightenment writers demystified pagan oracles, they did not renounce the mystical experience that animated them. Similarly, the novel's oracle statue, which is a mechanical object, is never unveiled as such, and thus ironically mediates the immaterial world of spirits. This imbrication with the unreal reveals fissures not only in some of the social aspects of the realistic novel, but in the fundaments of Ian Watt's formal realism.