Empire Islands: Castaways, Cannibals, and Fantasies of Conquest

310 Pages·2007·4.963 MB·English

by  Rebecca Weaver-Hightower

UTC
Empire Islands
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Empire Islands
Castaways, Cannibals, and
Fantasies of Conquest
Rebecca Weaver-Hightower
University of Minnesota Press | Minneapolis | London
Chapter3 was originally published as “Voracious Cannibals, Rapacious Pirates, and the
Empire Island,” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies8.1–2 (2002):81–107.
An earlier version of chapter 6 appeared as “Cast Away and Survivor: The Surviving
Castaway and the Rebirth of Empire,” Journal of Popular Culture39, no. 2 (2006).
Copyright2006 Blackwell Publishing; reprinted with permission from Blackwell
Publishing.
Copyright2007 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Weaver-Hightower, Rebecca.
Empire islands : castaways, cannibals, and fantasies of conquest / Rebecca
Weaver-Hightower.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn: 978-0-8166-4862-7 isbn-10: 0-8166-4862-X (hc : alk. paper)
isbn: 978-0-8166-4863-4 isbn-10: 0-8166-4863-8 (pb : alk. paper)
1. Islands in literature. 2. English fi ction—History and criticism. 3. English fi ction—
English-speaking countries—History and criticism. 4. Castaways in literature.
5. Imperialism in literature. 6. Cannibalism in literature. 7. Pirates in literature.
8. Monsters in literature. 9. Psychology in literature. 10. Psychoanalysis and literature.
I. Title.
pr830.i75w43 2007
823.009'32—dc22
2006100756
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
12 11 10 09 08 07 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For
Jack Weaver and Betty Nester Weaver
Dana
and Marcus
and in memory of
Matilda Weaver-Hightower
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Contents
Introduction
Islands and the Narrating of Possession ix
1 Monarchs of All They Survey 1
2 Disciplined Islands: White Fatherhood,
Homosocial Masculinity, and Law 43
3 Voracious Cannibals, Rapacious Pirates,
and Threats of Counterincorporation 91
4 “Falling to the Lowest Degree of Brutishness”:
Wild Men, Monsters, and the Bestial Taint 128
5 Island Parodies and Crusoe Pantomimes:
Resistance from Within 170
6 The U.S. Island Fantasy,
or Cast Away with Gilligan 205
Acknowledgments 225
Notes 229
Works Cited 245
Index 269
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Introduction
Islands and the Narrating of Possession
Gilligan’s Island.Robinson Crusoe.Fantasy Island. We are fasci-
nated with islands, both real and imaginary, mysterious and elemental.
Combining the allure of sexy sunset beaches with the titillation of risk,
islands evoke romance and danger. This lure of islands permeates litera-
ture. Particularly popular are stories, written during fi fteenth- through
early twentieth-century Europe’s colonization of much of the world,
which typically tell of a person—most often a single man—stranded on
an island, a castaway. He is forced to survive, usually on wits and coconuts
alone, the perilous situations that island life often brings: hunger, loneli-
ness, madness, fi erce weather, cannibals, pirates, and monsters, real or
imagined. Also prevalent are twentieth-century postcolonial stories of
castaways that revise many of the trope’s key elements. What is it about
this story that gives it such endurance and appeal? Why the island?
Empire Islands will engage with those questions by providing a de-
tailed unpacking of the psychological draw of the castaway genre and
analysis of how it worked as a tool of European imperial culture. One of
the central tenets of this book is that by helping generations of readers
to make sense of (perhaps feel better about) imperial aggression, the
castaway story, in effect, enabled the expansion and maintenance of Eu-
ropean empire. Empire Islands, then, reads hundreds of years of castaway
narratives. Though these are often called “Robinsonades,” after their
progenitor novel, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), I prefer “island
narrative” or “castaway narrative,” since this project includes narratives
set on islands that aren’t strictly speaking Robinsonades, including those
(such as The Tempest) written before Robinson Crusoe, and others (such as
H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative
of Arthur Gordon Pym) that, while set on islands, don’t explicitly respond
to Defoe’s story. Understanding of this psychological power of castaway
tales requires analysis of how they made imperial expansion and con-
trol seem unproblematic and natural, like the innate processes of the
human body. These tales, this book demonstrates, accomplished this
ix