Abstract
Carol Ryrie Brink’s Baby Island (1998/1937) draws directly from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (2007/1719) but revises the prototypical castaway novel by depicting two young girls who not only ensure their own survival but also mother four babies while cast away. Preceded by Crusoe-themed toys such as tea sets and paper dolls that allow girls to “play at” Crusoe and prepare for future motherhood, Baby Island extends Defoe’s narrative to demonstrate the compatibility of adventurous qualities with domestic roles. By framing an analysis of Brink’s novel with a historical examination of the early twentieth-century glorification of motherhood, the article shows how qualities typically associated with masculinity, such as pluck and resourcefulness, ultimately lend themselves well to a new model of robust maternity. Late nineteenth- through early-twentieth-century Crusoe-inspired toys and novels for girls appropriate and revise Defoe’s prototypical castaway to construct Crusoe as a figure that is capable of inspiring maternal ideals in girls.
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Notes
Though Brink published numerous adventurous tales for young readers, Baby Island is her only contribution to the corpus of children’s castaway fiction. Since its initial U.S. publication in 1937, Brink’s Robinsonade has been through several editions and is currently in print.
For analyses of the boys’ Robinsonade as a vehicle to construct masculinity through imperialistic narratives, see Butts’s “The Birth of the Boys’ Story and the Transition from the Robinsonnades to the Adventure Story” (2002), Carpenter’s Desert Isles and Pirate Islands: The Island Theme in Nineteenth-Century English Juvenile Fiction, A Survey and Bibliography (1984), Green’s Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (1979) and The Robinson Crusoe Story (1990), Maher’s “Recasting Crusoe: Frederick Marryat, R.M. Ballantyne and the Nineteenth-Century Robinsonade” (1988), Phillips’s Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of Adventure (1997), and Thomson’s “Robinson Crusoe and the Shaping of Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century America” (2008).
I have not been able to acquire much information about the Crusoe tea set. According to two online auction sellers in the United States that have sold these tea sets within the past three years, the tea set was originally produced in Germany around the 1890’s. The complete tea set has between 17 and 21 pieces, including plates, saucers, teacups, a creamer, a sugar bowl, and a teapot.
Other scenes depicted on the tea set are a sailing ship, the shipwreck, Crusoe washing ashore after the shipwreck, Crusoe outside his island home, Crusoe sailing the raft he built on the island, and Crusoe encountering the mutineers.
The creator of the Crusoe paper dolls is unknown; there is no illustrator signature or mark on the Ladies’ Home Journal page from which the dolls come.
Brink’s Mr. Peterkin is an intertextual nod to R.M. Ballantyne’s character Peterkin in A Coral Island (2006/1858), a popular nineteenth-century children’s castaway novel. This example demonstrates how Baby Island also draws on the tradition of the boys’ Robinsonade. I am grateful to an anonymous reader for pointing to another intertextual reference between Mr. Peterkin and an earlier castaway character. Mr. Peterkin, alone on the island for years, harkens back to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Ben Gunn, a castaway in Treasure Island (2014/1883) is alone on the titular island for years before Jim Hawkins finds him.
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Amy Hicks is a doctoral candidate at Illinois State University where she teaches children’s literature and writing classes. Her current research focuses on the intersections of place, gender, and identity in the girls’ Robinsonade.
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Hicks, A. Playing at Crusoe: Domestic Imperatives and Models of Motherhood in Robinson Crusoe-Inspired Toys and Novels for Girls. Child Lit Educ 46, 110–126 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-015-9251-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-015-9251-5