Island Homemaking: Catharine Parr Traill’s Canadian Crusoes and the Robinsonade Tradition

[para. 1]: “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, asits title suggests, part of a three-centuries-old international and persistent literary tradition of the “robinsonade.” 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 ide-ology 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.”