“A Very Strange Thought”: Colonial Fantasy, Domesticity, and Property in <i>The Female American</i>

As a female Robinsonade, The Female American casts a feminine gaze upon a landscape conventionally portrayed from and dominated by a masculine point of view. As the biracial daughter of an Indigenous American princess and an English plantation owner, she also performs a self-consciously hybrid identity that at once augments and complicates her performance of feminine power. In this article, I show how her constitutional “strangeness” as a travelling biracial woman unsettles the racial logic of transatl colonialism. Her liminality positions her simultaneously in the space of colonial contact and as the embodied product of that contact. At once capable of empathizing, communicating, and identifying with Indigenous and enslaved people in her midst, she nevertheless occupies positions that grant her access to the privilege of property, including enslaved Indigenous people. Her disruptive presence exposes the tense lines of ideological and material violence that uphold and also link domestic and colonial tyranny.