Gendering the Robinsonade
Abstract:
The success of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe in 1719 gave rise to a new genre and in the following centuries hundreds of robinsonades were published. Most of them were written by male authors and told the stories of male shipwrecked. The genre is usually understood in highly gendered masculine terms: this is the story of a male hero's fight for survival in a nature which at first sight seems hostile, but that can be mastered. However, the robinsonade is not that unigendered as canonical literary history seems to imply: women were writers and readers of, as well as protagonists in, castaway stories. This paper will present an overview of "female robinsonades" in the 18th and 19th centuries and discuss questions concerning gender and genre.
The overview will be given on the basis of the bibliography that I have elaborated, and I will concentrate on the circulation of female robinsonades in Europe. In the 19th century most robinsonades were written for a juvenile public, and they were usually translated to several other languages. The questions I will address concern both the effect of women writers and women protagonists in a genre implicitly understood as purely male (Why did women write robinsonades? How do female protagonists fit into the male schema of shipwreck and survival? What do we know about the readers?) and more general problems of literary genre (Which are the implications of gender to the understanding of genre? Do we need a category of "female robinsonade"?) and of literary history (the processes of canonization and of decanonizising, and the importance of documentary, empirical studies).
Anne Birgitte Rønning
SvD, May 2010
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