“To try the difference”

It is critical that the imagined space of Henry Neville’s Restoration-era novella, The Isle of Pines, is an island, a space cut off from the mainland where history and culture can unfold in different ways. The island, encountered unintentionally by “civilized” Europeans during a Dutch trading voyage across the Indian Ocean, has a previously unknown population. Rather than a new, long-established nation of islanders, however, the population are the descendants of five castaways from an English shipwreck. Viewed through the lens of the unfamiliar, these islanders adhere to tropes associated with discovery narratives; simultaneously, the islanders carry with them debased versions of Elizabethan culture, offering an alternative history of an English island. Besides the sexual license practiced by these fertile people and their vague memory of English religion, the people grapple with political instability and the unnameable problem of race. The Isle of Pines, then, allows its author to imagine a space for new social formations, even as that space carries with it elements of the old ways

Psychoanalysis · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Philosophy · Psychology