Deflecting the Marriage Plot

Abstract

The robinsonade, a genre of literature named for Daniel Defoe’s 1719 Robinson Crusoe, features (usually male) European protagonists defeating and taming indigenous flora and fauna in various non-European locations. The female robinsonade, however, is a type of adventure literature with female protagonists that is much more interested in the nature of girls’ education and the capacity of female self-reliance.¹ It creates a space for exploring tensions between conventional notions of femininity and female aspirations for personal development. The heroine of the female robinsonade is a type of colonial girl, a European girl who must make a new home in territory that is uncharted both physically and ideologically. Given the exciting possibilities of such adventures, as well as the possible anxieties engendered by young women having to act unconventionally, it is not surprising that the colonial girl makes regular appearances in the late nineteenth-century English periodical press, particularly magazines for girls and young women. Both fiction and essays describe the experiences of British girls emigrating to one of the colonies and girls born and bred in some of those colonies; in addition, correspondence columns feature responses to girls living in the colonies and girls interested in emigration.² The figure conspicuously absent, however, is the Indigenous girl.