7 - Romance, the Robinsonade, and the Cultivation of Adolescent Female Desire in Libba Bray's Beauty Queens

Summary

When a plane crashes en route to the Miss Teen Dream Pageant in Libba Bray's Beauty Queens (2011), the remaining contestants ensure their survival by battling giant snakes and making novel use of the available resources, including hair dryers, sequined gowns, and make-up. The titular beauty queens must also shrug off the competitive nature of the pageant itself to form relationships in order not only to survive, but also thrive on the desert island. The friendship of two of the girl castaways evolves into romance, and the introduction of boys onto the island also provides opportunities for other girls to explore their sexual desires. In this way, Bray's Robinsonade draws on a broader literary tradition that codes desert islands as ‘fertile landscapes for fantasies of pre-industrial peacefulness and prelapsarian sexuality’ (Woods, 1995, 126). This codification of the desert island as a setting for romantic interludes was arguably introduced by Henry De Vere Stacpoole's The Blue Lagoon (1908) and popularised by the 1980 movie adaption of the same name, starring Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins. Other Robinsonades have followed suit, ranging from the pornographic, such as Humphrey Richardson's The Secret Life of Robinson Crusoe (1962) and the X-rated film Robinson Crusoe on Sin Island (2005), to the romantic, such as the Harlequin novels Girl Crusoe (1976) by Margery Hilton and Deserted Island, Dreamy Ex! (2010) by Nicola Marsh.

Beauty Queens positions the island not only as a setting for sexual rendezvous, but also a distinctly experimental arena for girls to navigate gendered behaviours and question conservative social mores concerning female sexuality. This chapter explores the didactic intent achieved through Bray's use of satire, as well as her creation of emulatory castaway characters who construct modes of femininity through their interactions and connections with other people and the natural world to subvert masculinist paradigms in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and boys’ Robinsonades, including R.M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1858) and William Golding's Lord of the Flies (1954), among others. Such novels depict, as Martin Green claims, ‘the liturgy of masculinism [that] identified power with violence for men, and has told stories about men acquiring power by relating to other men’ (1990, 6). Bray's girl castaways, conversely, achieve power through self-actualisation cultivated by relationships formed when they are placed in a setting away from civilisation.