4 - Call it Courage and the Survival of the Imperial Robinsonade

Summary

Introduction

The children's desert island story in the nineteenth century was closely associated with European exploration and colonisation, and with particular ideals of masculinity. R.M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1857) is perhaps the typical imperial Robinsonade, aligning boyhood and the passage to manhood with the mastery of an alien environment and the subjugation of its animals and native people (Phillips, 1997, 36–40, 50–55). Ian Kinane's Introduction to this volume sets out the narrative mechanisms by which particular ideological (largely imperial) messages were conveyed to child readers. He argues that the twentieth century saw a number of works which retained the didactic impulse and strategies of the nineteenth-century imperial Robinsonade, but which, in addition, questioned and subverted the genre's ideological assumptions, often in postcolonial or feminist terms, or directed them towards other ideological ends. Some of these revisionist texts are the subjects of other chapters in this volume. However, the subject of this chapter, Armstrong Sperry's classic North American Robinsonade Call it Courage (1940), cannot be considered a revisionist text in the same way.

At the time of its publication, Call it Courage was regarded as ‘a magnificent adventure story, a penetrating psychological study of cowardice, and a sympathetic portrayal of Polynesian civilization’ (White, 1946, 7). Forty years later, Joan McGrath's assessment of Sperry's work argued that, ‘in an era rendered more sensitive to the feelings of minority cultures and racial pride’, some of his books were likely to be regarded as ‘condescending’ and ‘stereotyped’ (1989, 913). Bruce Henderson's more recent evaluation of Call it Courage, the only one of Sperry's books still in print, noted that ‘contemporary critics and readers may question its ethnographic authenticity’ and ‘some of the descriptions strike today’s readers as racist’ (2001, 666). Henderson's assessment relegates Call it Courage to that particular group of children's literary classics (such as The Coral Island) that was once recommended for children's reading but, in light of later critical reassessment, is now widely regarded as perpetuating outmoded imperialist, ethnocentric, and/or masculinist attitudes. The critical response to Call it Courage is indicative of the ways in which the didactic merit of a particular text, its ideological significance, and its perceived value for young readers change over time.