Home Words: Discourses of Children’s Literature in Canada

CHAPTER 4: Island Homemaking: Catharine Parr Traill's Canadian Crusoes and the Robinsonade Tradition

It is perhaps not surprising that one of the earliest Canadian books for young readers tells the story of a group of children of European settlers who survive the elements and the hostilities of the Native people and build a home for themselves in the wilderness. While Catharine Parr Traill’s Canadian Crusoes (1852) is an early entry in the tradition of Canadian wilderness survival narratives, it is also, as its title suggests, part of a three-centuries-old international and persistent literary tradition of the “robinsonade.”1 This narrative form, as well as the Daniel Defoe novel from which it derives, is generally associated with tales of adventure and exploration. As such, they have participated in what has conventionally been understood as the masculine-coded ideology of colonial adventure and conquest. They are, however, not just stories about discovering strange and exotic places, but about making these places “home” for their adventuring protagonists. In other words, they are stories that also include a strong focus on the usually feminine-coded practices and ideology of domesticity. In this chapter, I am interested in examining how these seemingly contradictory ideological formations have intersected and even sustained each other in both Traill’s robinsonade and in examples from the tradition that preceded it. A brief look at this literary/cultural tradition and its ideological implications seems like the natural place to start such a discussion. The robinsonade became an enormously popular type of narrative in the eighteenth century in England, France, and most pronouncedly in° C H A P T E R 4 Island Homemaking: Catharine Parr Traill’s Canadian Crusoes and the Robinsonade Tradition Andrew O’Malley 67 Germany, where, according to Jeannine Blackwell, over 130 of these stories were published between 1720 (the year Robinson Crusoe was translated into German) and 1800 (7, fn 12). The form has lent itself to countless variations, including stories in which children, individual women, individual men, groups of adults, groups containing adults and children, and even stranded animals have survival adventures in remote places— remote from Europe, that is. At the peak of British imperial power in the nineteenth century, the robinsonade was perhaps the dominant mode for boys’ adventure stories: examples include Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and almost any of the boys’ stories written by R.M. Ballantyne,2 Captain Frederick Marryat, and others. Such television shows as Gilligan ’s Island in the 1960s and Survivor and Lost more recently, as well as films ranging from Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964), to The Blue Lagoon (1980), to Castaway (2000), attest, I believe, to the continued cultural resonance of this basic narrative structure. Theories abound as to why Defoe’s model has maintained such tremendous and widespread appeal. For the purposes of this paper, among the most intriguing of these are Susan Naramore Maher’s view that “[t]he island setting … from Defoe on, serves as an archetypal laboratory for a society’s ideology” (“Recasting” 169), Diana Loxley’s related but more specifically postcolonial suggestion that narrating an individual (or small group) isolated on an island acts as “the ultimate gesture of simplification … draw[ing] a line around a set of relationships which do not possess the normal political, social and cultural interference” (3), and Joseph Bristow’s view that the isolated settings of robinsonades, especially those for children , provide “the European imagination with an ideal scene of instruction ” (94). Artur Blaim, author of “The English Robinsonade of the Eighteenth Century,” one of the few substantial, English-language studies of the genre, suggests that to qualify, a robinsonade must have a number of features and elements beyond the obvious narrative of shipwreck and survival. For example, Blaim observes that robinsonades often also contain sub-narratives of spiritual redemption after the protagonist’s descent into despair. This personal spiritual growth is often followed by the conversion to Christianity of some sort of savage indigenous population. Blaim also remarks that robinsonades tend to focus closely on the minutiae of setting up and maintaining a safe domestic space in a foreign, alien environment (84). This domestic concern is quite consistent in the form’s history but has generally been overshadowed in criticism of both Robinson Crusoe and its progeny by the attention paid their more “masculine” attributes of imperialism and adventure (in its various meanings). 68 Andrew O’Malley Over the last few decades, Robinson Crusoe has been studied predominantly in one of...