Spatial Modernities by Johannes Riquet Elizabeth Kollmann & Elizabeth Kollmann

Author:Johannes Riquet,Elizabeth Kollmann & Elizabeth Kollmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2018-02-23T16:00:00+00:00

Scholarly and Fictional Responses

Most surprisingly, the lack of evidence regarding the islandness of the setting has been largely ignored by scholarship. Seelye is one of very few scholars, if not the only one, to discuss the non-insular depictions of the castaway location, and he does so in the introductions to the two editions discussed earlier (1991, xiii; 2007b, xvi). Most scholars (including Green, Loxley and Weaver-Hightower) generally take The Swiss Family Robinson’s island setting as a given. This is particularly odd given the novel’s status as an iconic island text. It appears that the assumptions held by characters within the story have carried through to scholarship on the novel. Weaver-Hightower, for instance, reads the hilltop moment as though the castaways have discovered that they are on an island, and uses the scene to illustrate certain points of her theory concerning monarch-of-all-I-survey scenes (2007, 30). The Watermill Press 1980 edition she refers to is an extended version of the story, and thus includes greater exploration than the 2007 Seelye edition. Nonetheless, it does not contain an insular monarch-of-all-I-survey scene. Standing on the mountaintop, the characters see water to one side and an “inland” view to the other (Wyss 1980, 32). As is routinely the case in editions of The Swiss Family Robinson, there is no evidence within this passage that the castaways are surrounded by water. Weaver-Hightower’s argument thus appears to be informed, to a certain extent, by genre expectations. Such an engagement with the novel is not unique, as explained earlier: most scholars (excluding Seelye) assume, like the Swiss family themselves, that the story’s setting is an island. Its insularity is generally, in the academic discourse, neither questioned nor proven: it is just accepted as such.

While the issue is not taken up extensively by scholarship, fictional responses to the novel have been more attentive to the lack of island evidence. Two ‘sequels’ to Wyss’s story, Paul’s Willis the Pilot and Verne’s The Castaways of the Flag, acknowledge that The Swiss Family Robinson’s castaways do not fully explore or view their surroundings and thus cannot know if they are on an island or a continent. While Paul’s novel engages only briefly with the question, Verne’s story takes it as a fundamental reason for re-engaging with the text: as the preface of the English translation states, Verne did not consider the original to be complete as “[t]he surface of the island had not been fully explored” (Verne 1924, iii). The issue is so central to the novel that it is raised in the second paragraph of the first chapter: “After eleven years spent upon this land,” the reader is told, “it was none too soon to attempt to ascertain whether it was a part of one of the continents laved by the Indian Ocean or whether it must be included by geographers among the islands of those seas” (1924, 1). The story sees several characters, including young Jack, climb a mountain for the express purpose of defining their surroundings. The subsequent monarch-of-all-I-survey scene becomes a crucial point in the island’s human history.

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