Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Contributors
- Introduction: Narrating Domestic Portability: Emigration, Domesticity and Genre Formation
- 1 Unsettled Status in Australian Settler Novels
- 2 Agents of Empire and Feminist Rebels: Settlement and Gender in Isabella Aylmer's Distant Homes and Ellen Ellis's Everything Is Possible To Will
- 3 Reconstructing British Domesticity on the North American Frontier
- 4 Divided House, Divided Self: Susanna Moodie's Flora Lyndsay; or, Passages from an Eventful Life
- 5 For Fortune and Adventure: Representations of Emigration in British Popular Fiction, 1870–1914
- 6 The Return and Rescue of the Émigré in A Tale of Two Cities
- 7 Settling Back in at Home: Impostors and Imperial Panic in Victorian Narratives of Return
- 8 Surviving Black Thursday: The Great Bushfire of 1851
- 9 ‘I am but a Stranger Everywhere’: Missionary Themes in Charlotte Yonge's New Ground and My Young Alcides
- 10 Sad Remains: Foreclosing Settlement in The Coral Island
- 11 Nineteenth-Century Female Crusoes: Rewriting the Robinsonade for Girls
- 12 ‘The Freedom Suits Me’: Encouraging Girls to Settle in the Colonies
- 13 Domestic Goddesses on the Frontier; or, Tempting the Mothers of Empire with Adventure
- 14 A ‘Curious Political and Social Experiment’: A Settler Utopia, Feminism and a Greater Britain in Catherine Helen Spence's Handfasted
- Notes
- Index
10 - Sad Remains: Foreclosing Settlement in The Coral Island
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Contributors
- Introduction: Narrating Domestic Portability: Emigration, Domesticity and Genre Formation
- 1 Unsettled Status in Australian Settler Novels
- 2 Agents of Empire and Feminist Rebels: Settlement and Gender in Isabella Aylmer's Distant Homes and Ellen Ellis's Everything Is Possible To Will
- 3 Reconstructing British Domesticity on the North American Frontier
- 4 Divided House, Divided Self: Susanna Moodie's Flora Lyndsay; or, Passages from an Eventful Life
- 5 For Fortune and Adventure: Representations of Emigration in British Popular Fiction, 1870–1914
- 6 The Return and Rescue of the Émigré in A Tale of Two Cities
- 7 Settling Back in at Home: Impostors and Imperial Panic in Victorian Narratives of Return
- 8 Surviving Black Thursday: The Great Bushfire of 1851
- 9 ‘I am but a Stranger Everywhere’: Missionary Themes in Charlotte Yonge's New Ground and My Young Alcides
- 10 Sad Remains: Foreclosing Settlement in The Coral Island
- 11 Nineteenth-Century Female Crusoes: Rewriting the Robinsonade for Girls
- 12 ‘The Freedom Suits Me’: Encouraging Girls to Settle in the Colonies
- 13 Domestic Goddesses on the Frontier; or, Tempting the Mothers of Empire with Adventure
- 14 A ‘Curious Political and Social Experiment’: A Settler Utopia, Feminism and a Greater Britain in Catherine Helen Spence's Handfasted
- Notes
- Index
Summary
While exploring the Pacific island on which they have been shipwrecked, the three British boys of R. M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean (1857) stumble across ‘a small hut or cottage’ containing two skeletons. On leaving the ‘melancholy stillness’ of the scene, the boys ‘brought the whole hut in ruins to the ground, and thus formed a grave to the bones of the poor recluse and his dog’. Understanding the dead recluse to be white given his form of habitation, the boys’ deployment of the cottage as a tomb frames this episode as one of failure, specifically a Western failure to establish ongoing domestic settlement of the island. But why does a boys’ adventure narrative linger on this episode of domestic desolation and decay? What are we to make of the relocation of the iconic English cottage to an island in the South Pacific? And how does masculinity inhabit the cottage's traditional alignment with domestic femininity? This reading of The Coral Island turns to the intersecting axes of gender, missionary culture and settlement in order to address these questions.
The Coral Island is a landmark text in the development of the Victorian boys’ adventure genre, which projected British boys successfully negotiating imperial cultures, peoples and landscapes to British ends through a series of exotic adventures. And there is no shortage of adventure in The Coral Island.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Victorian Settler NarrativesEmigrants, Cosmopolitans and Returnees in Nineteenth-Century Literature, pp. 153 - 164Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014