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REWRITINGS OF CANONICAL NOVELS from marginal perspectives not only demonstrate the power of the original to command the desire for imitation but also expose its silences and contradictions. Where the prior text's contradictions may have been resolved through a variety of dominant readings, the rew\ritings go beyond the moment of critical rereading to one of production. They foreground concerns that have slipped through the operations of various critical unfoldings of the text and set up another text as a relatively autonomous but supplementary interlocutor, which seems to add to and substitute for the original at the same time. Thus, even though Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe has continually lent itself to textual reevaluations from various theoretical positions, the novel's glaring absence of women has kept it away from the focus of much feminist analysis of eighteenth-century fiction. On the other hand, contemporary rewritings of the novel, like J. M. Coetzee's Foe, have tried to address this exclusion by recasting both Defoe and his protagonist, Crusoe, as minor characters within a woman-centered narrative, or in the case of Michel Tournier's Friday, have reinscribed Crusoe's island as "woman" and renamed the novel for its colonial Other.1
It would, however, be a mistake to think that such revisionings are confined to our historical moment, a moment inflected both by critical theory debates within the literary establishment and by the legacy of feminist and anticolonial movements. In fact, because Robinson Crusoe became immensely popular at a time when the status of both the European woman and the colonial Other were being debated and inscribed into the discourses of the Enlightenment, it is very likely that the novel was easy game for a reader or writer interested in supplanting the white male of property as human norm.2 In this essay, I will look at The Female American (1767), an anonymous novel which is for the most part ignored in studies of eighteenth-century British or American literature, as a text that not only rewrites Robinson Crusoe but also tries to replace the original through a complex process of surrogation, rendered all the more complex because it transforms Defoe's castaway narrative into one of female self-fashioning and into a critique of colonialism at the same time.3
"Surrogation," as Joseph Roach's recent study Cities...