Reading for Friday in The Female American (1767)

Abstract

While styled on Robinson Crusoe (1719), The Female American (1767) differs considerably from Defoe’s text. In the novel, Unca Eliza, a mixed-race heroine, finds safety in an Indigenous tribe using an ‘othered’ body. While marooned, the protagonist climbs inside an oracle, a statue of a sun god. Through it, she speaks with the tribe, thereby converting them to Christianity, or at least a version of it. ‘Friday’ exists in multiple configurations across The Female American, in terms of indigenous groups and individuals who are converted, violently oppressed and threatened, and, as will be demonstrated in this essay, as an extension of the narrator’s identity. This article contends that the combination of the castaway Unca Eliza and the idol of the sun god explores the ambivalence of colonial rhetoric and represents a new configuration of the Friday/Crusoe relationship.