Romances In Robinson Crusoe

Stories are very important throughout histories. They transmit perception, values and attitudes from one generation to the next. Shakespeare’s history plays such as Henry V and Richard II say a lot about the Elizabethan politics rather than staging a war against France to seize the French throne and extravagant king respectively and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe highlights issues such the mercantile system while focusing on a shipwreck. Stories are used for educational purposes to teach the youngsters the frame of reference fostered by a given community. Thus, the survival of the romance [is] intended to reclaim the kingdom of the English novel for male writers, male readers, and men’s stories” (Showalter, p. 78). Hereby, “king romance might recover his virility and power”, and, quintessentially, “these romances are targeted for ‘boys’” (79). Feeling this exclusion, Victorian women have recourse to the genre that humiliates them to parody it and, hence, rehandle and transform its conventions.

Parody presupposes both “repetition and difference” (Hutcheon, 1985, p. 101). This feature is claimed by the adventure fiction to speak for the aberrant groups. It presents, also, Victorian women writers’ consciousness to stand against the narrow, doctrinaire, dogmatic views of any particular ideological group:

Parody is to be understood as a mode of aesthetic foregrounding in the novel. It defines a particular form of historical consciousness. It is this historical consciousness of parody that gives it the potential power both to bury the dead so to speak and also gives it new life. (cited in Hutcheon, p. 101)

As a reverberator of historical awareness, parody is targeted to the role of the adventure hero.

7.2.1 The cont...

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...ts are either fleeting figures overwhelmingly in need of protection or under a consistent process of erasure. Jenny Sharpe has a say in this context:

British women were often used as foils in large political struggles and were often represented and treated as if in need of protection, in order to portray non- European males as barbarous. This had a profound effect on British women’s relation to imperialism, the form their interventions in political debates and the type the national subject position available to them. (Sharpe, 1993, pp. )

Both in Conrad’s HD and in Haggard’ KSM, the journey is portrayed as devoid of any female figure in response to the prerequisites of the profile of adventure hero. In fact, characters are delineated in terms of antithesis to all what is feminine so that the absence of women stands for the adventurers’ ultra-masculinity.