Over sixteen German Robinsonaden appear between 1720 and 1800 with female castaways. Most of them are “well-educated, moral, competent and headstrong young women” (Blackwell, “An Island of Her Own”). They refuse to marry. They put on men’s clothes. They encounter other women living on the island. Eventually they will be rescued and return to Europe, reintegrated into a social order that makes them forget they had ever wished for adventure.
“No Man Is an Island”
In Muriel Spark’s Robinson (1958), Robinson is the name of an island where Miles Mary Robinson lives, reluctant to host the three guests who land when their plane crashes. January Marlow, “My name is January, because I was born in January,” is the only female survivor. A journalist, as well as a single mother, she is mandated by Robinson to keep a journal: “Keeping a journal would be an occupation for my mind, and I fancied that I might later dress it up for a novel.” According to Robinson, it will also keep her mind off Jimmie, the man she has singled out to protect her from the other two. Robinson counsels her to “stick to the facts,” which initially means his story and the history of the island, but when Robinson disappears, January uses the journal to decide which of the two men has murdered him. When Robinson reappears unharmed, the prime suspect steals the journal and claims to have burned it. January eventually retrieves her journal intact, and when the pomegranate boat finally rescues them, she realizes, “my journal … was my only baggage.”
“The World Is Full of Islands”
In J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), Susan Barton lands on Cruso’s island: “My name is Susan Barton, and I am a woman alone. My father was a Frenchman who fled to England to escape the persecutions in Flanders. His name was properly Berton, but, as happens, it became corrupted in the mouths of strangers. My mother was an Englishwoman.” Cruso lives with Friday, who is unable to speak because he has no tongue. When Cruso dies on the way to England, Susan asks Daniel Foe to write her story: “There has never before, to my knowledge, been a female castaway of our nation. It will cause a great stir.” But whose story will he tell, hers or his, the story of how dull it was on the island or the one he will invent that will reduce the island to a single episode? What about Friday’s story, the story that can’t be told, the hole in the narrative, “a buttonhole, carefully cross-stitched around, but empty, waiting for the button?” Passing as Mrs. Cruso, Susan fails to free Friday by sending him back to Africa because she is afraid he will be resold. She fails to recognize her daughter, Susan Barton, whom she claims is not hers, but Foe’s.
“Rural American. Cheap and Cheerless.”
In Fiona Cooper’s Not the Swiss Family Robinson (1991), Monica Robinson, a young woman who has grown up in middle America, learns that the only way to leave home is with a beau. Yearning to join the rodeo, she instead meets the rodeo rider Terrible Tess, who renames her Sonya, insisting on her royal Russian heritage. Once Monica overhears her father saying he adopted her, “given me his name, had he, like I was a dog he rescued,” she strives to attend college. Her English teacher, Margaret Courtland, who is English and “had this marvelous English voice and she talked like a book,” teaches her about courtly love and encourages her to compete for a scholarship that will take her to England, the home of her birth mother. Provided with her birth certificate, Monica learns that her mother’s name is Smith and that her father remains nameless. For her scholarship she will have to write an essay on Jane Austen: “I hadn’t been happy with the nit-picky little world of Pride and Prejudice, and couldn’t put my heart into it.” The adopted daughter, neither American nor straight, becomes a castaway in her own family. Monica begins by having tea with Margaret, moves into her spare room, and eventually shares her bed, but her teacher’s religious fervor prevents her from naming the romantic friendship as anything other than a perversion. When Margaret decides against accompanying her to New York City by plane, Monica takes the bus. When the bus breaks down, she meets her first out lesbian, who gives her a ride to the airport on her motorcycle. There she meets a man in a frock who tells her to call him Bubbles: “I knew what he meant about names. A shame I had Noreen Jane Smith and Monica Robinson to choose from. And of course, I had once, briefly, been Sonya Dumbassova, the fool who admitted to being seventeen at just the wrong moment.” Although children are to learn from nature rather than from books, Monica will win her scholarship by learning what to say about Austen, and to Swiss Family Robinson she says: “Eat your heart out, Pastor Robinson, with your little wife and pretty, handsome, spirited, bold, thoughtless, intelligent, well-informed Franz, Fritz, Jack and Ernest! Mom gave me a deal-with-you-later smile.” Although her mother was unable to tell Monica the story of her birth, Monica recalled, “Mom’s stories weren’t the kind you read in children’s books. They were all true and no endings, happy or otherwise.”
For Stein and Toklas, expatriates in Paris, America is not the mainland but a desert island, where lesbian lovers, like the lesbian with two mothers, have been shipwrecked.
To be Swiss not in New York or San Francisco is to be stranded, in the middle, shipwrecked between two oceans, landlocked in a monolingual wilderness, or so they imagine in Switzerland.
“Switzerland and Other Islands”
Aleksandra Mir was born in Communist Poland in 1967, grew up in socialist Sweden in the 1970s, spent fifteen years living in capitalist New York City, moved to Palermo, on the island of Sicily, and is currently living in multicultural London. She studied media and communications in Gothenburg, Sweden, received her BFA in Media Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York, and studied cultural anthropology at the New School. A citizen of Sweden and the United States, she says, “I wear all my national identities like second-hand clothes: loose old T-shirts, baggy jeans and borrowed sneakers. They all kind of fit, but not really” (Sgualdini, “How to Do Something with Nothing”).
Mir is best known for The First Woman on the Moon, a project that took place in 1999 on a Dutch beach where ten bulldozers created a crater in the sand and Mir planted an American flag. She was interested in the manmade nature of one of the widest beaches in Europe, as well as the thirtieth anniversary of the moon landing as both media event and as coinciding, more or less, with her lifetime.
In 2006 the Zürich Kunsthaus commissions Mir to think about Switzerland as a political island in the heart of Europe, for which she produces thirty-two drawings, four by six meters in size, that represent political, geographical, and mythological islands, including a series of undiscovered islands. Switzerland and Other Islands, curated by Marjam Varadinis, represents Mir’s first solo show in a major art museum. “The … show was conceived on the urban jungle island of Manhattan, produced on the fertile island of Sicily, and exhibited at the political island of Switzerland” (Sansone, “Interview with Aleksandra Mir”). Islands for her represent the impossibility of isolation, “marked by the relationship between borders and boundaries as points of awareness that need to be transcended” (Schmidt, “Interview with Aleksandra Mir”). Switzerland for her represents friendships, research into photographic archives, and a helium-inflated airplane sculpture suspended in a permanent state of landing at the Zurich airport. “Switzerland is used as a hypothesis,” she says, as “a point of departure to study more general phenomena” (Schmidt, “Interview with Aleksandra Mir”).
Mir calls her mapmaking “naïve cartography,” which means drawing from existing maps, “so my freehand translations inevitably become naïve renderings of modern cartographic technologies: they resemble the maps made by the early explorers of our world” (Mir, “The World from Above”). She likes the idea that people who live there can complete the drawing with their own references and so the maps are never finished.
The drawings are all made with Sharpies—thick, indelible, felt-tip pens—on paper. She calls these “an unpretentious tool” in her immediate environment and in the environment of the general public, allowing her access to a “vernacular present.” The maps are simple line drawings, minimalist in thei
r representation, outlined by Mir and filled in by her assistants in varying shades of grey, depending on how new or used the Sharpie is.
Aleksandra Mir, Insula Svizzera, marker on paper, 360 x 600 cm, Kunsthaus, Zürich, Switzerland and Other Islands, 2006 (courtesy Aleksandra Mir)
The exhibition poster Insula Svizzera refers to a tradition of early-modern map-making that places the island in the middle of the sea surrounded by four continents as a way to represent its place in the world. Elaborate ornamentation depicts a series of sea monsters but also foregrounds an icon from another island nation, namely Hello Kitty, where the sea monster becomes the domestic feline and historical iconography takes the form of popular culture.
Insula Svizzera shifts the detail from what we imagine about the sea to what we know about the land through voyages of discovery. Three ships sailing toward an island whose interior has been mapped suggests that what Switzerland discovers is ultimately its own isolation.
“Lac Suissy” suggests that the ships are not external but internal, sailboats on Switzerland’s many lakes that serve as among its main tourist attractions, surrounded this time not by ornamentation that threatens from the unknown but by what contains the inside through infinite domestic labor. The ornamental border references the lace doily as a kind of island on the surfaces of the bourgeois interior.
In “Asteroidus Svizzerus” Switzerland the island is shown as an asteroid, living in the splendid isolation of outer space, where the insignificance of the country is remarked on by the impossibility of it ever having a space program. But inasmuch as there are millions of asteroids, Switzerland will become one of many in the infinite rather than alone at the continental center.
As Russell King observes in “Geography, Islands and Migration in an Era of Global Mobility,” “islands are good at emigration but bad at immigration, especially those that see themselves as small islands with a high population density.” The boat quickly becomes too full. Switzerland’s own islandness, as a non-EU country, as the site of so-called offshore banking, and as a model in miniature of the very thing it refuses to belong to, namely a unified, multilingual Europe, results in an unwillingness to join but also a fear of invasion. Islandness leads to insularity, to a kind of geopolitical fortress that refuses the in-migration of minarets. Tourism, unlike colonization, relies on a stay that is always temporary.
Heidi (1880)
* * *
“Switzerland’s Most Famous Girl”
Dear Johanna Spyri,
A 2006 ad campaign for Heidiland, the mineral water, uses the slogan “Call Me Heidi!” But who is calling, in English, no less? Not a girl with blond braids or even dark curls, but a young man with kinky brown hair and an extraordinarily wide smile. He is wearing a blue polo shirt, where instead of bearing a logo such as Lacoste’s alligator, it has the words FrauenPower pur. The sound of FrauenPower reminds me of “flower power,” but that could just be me. At the bottom of the ad, in the tiniest print, comes the punch line: Funktioniert sogar für Männer! “It even works for men!” He is tilting back the bottle, ready to take his first sip. Should we warn him? In the drawing on the bottle’s label, a little girl in a red dress is looking out over an alpine scene: jagged snowcapped mountains, a winding stream flowing past a solitary chalet, a stand of alpine flowers: Edelweiss, Enzian, Alpenrosen.
How has Heidi, barely five years old, come to embody “woman power”? What aspect of “woman power” makes this man so radiant?
Anne
Dear Johanna Spyri,
When I mention Heidi, people ask me whether I am referring to the “Heidi game.” What, you may ask, and so did I, is the “Heidi game”? It is November 17, 1968, and the NFL playoffs between the Oakland Raiders and the New York Jets are being broadcast on national television. There are fifty (or was it sixty-five?) seconds left to play and the Jets are ahead by three points when Heidi (the 1968 U.S./German coproduction with Maximilian Schell and Michael Redgrave) is scheduled to begin at 7:00 p.m. Twenty minutes into the movie, a ticker along the bottom of the Swiss alps announces that the Raiders have won, 43–32. Raiders fans are outraged because they have failed to witness the final two touchdowns; Jets fans are enraged because had the referee’s call not taken players off the field, they might not have lost. Thousands of distressed viewers call the New York City Police, the New York Telephone Company, the New York Times. The phone lines are snarled for hours, and NBC’s switchboard breaks down. NFL television contracts are changed forever: games are now broadcast to their conclusion.
If we assume, correctly or incorrectly, that the distressed viewers were mostly men, we might also assume that they were drinking something other than water.
Anne
Dear Johanna Spyri,
The Swiss have been cracking down on Bergkäse as a label to certify cheese made from milk produced by cows grazing on grass at an altitude high enough to be called alpine. This has affected, most specifically, the line of milk products produced by Migros under the Heidi label. As the largest retailer in Switzerland, Migros is unlikely to acquire all of its milk from the same source, and so will it still be able to market its products as Bergmilch? The drawings of Heidi on the labels for milk, butter, and Rahmquark are similar to those on the mineral water, but she is younger, her hair shorter, and she is wearing pants, all of which make her more boyish. There are short quotes from Heidi on each product, illustrating different scenes from the book.
Anne
Dear Johanna Spyri,
My father has agreed to introduce me to friends of his who live in Maienfeld, the only place mentioned by name in your book, even though he considers my topic a bit trashy for a literary critic, for an established academic. Although the family includes three grown daughters, the father volunteers to take me on a tour of Heidiland.
Heidiland, I learn, was invented in 1999 as a tourist region in eastern Switzerland, renaming what was once referred to as “Sarganserland—Walensee—Wartau—Bündnerherrschaft” and now comprises thirty-two villages within twenty-four square miles. The name “Heidiland” was originally coined in St. Moritz in 1977, to mark the place where the twenty-six-episode television series Heidi was filmed. Trying to do for summer tourism what skiing does for winter tourism, the enterprise failed. St. Moritz has since called itself “Top of the World,” but only after registering the trade name “Heidiland.” It collects license fees from the Mövenpick restaurant and rest stop along the Autobahn; the “Heidiland Express,” part of a cantonal train system; and “Switzerland East.” “Switzerland East” is now “Heidiland—The Heart of Switzerland.”
Do you remember the week you spent in Jenins in 1879 with your friend Anna von Salis-Hössli? She was one of four sisters you met while in Yverdon, in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, where, like many young women, you were sent at seventeen: part language school, part finishing school, part year abroad, mostly polishing-up for the marriage market. From Jenins, the two of you walked to the town of Rofels and farther up to the Ochsenbergalp, encouraged by a tale Anna’s grandfather told about a crusty old mercenary who had settled there. On the way to Rofels, a little girl with short black curls crossed your path.
Because this is the first story not based on your childhood memories, people are obsessed with finding the origins of the novel you finished in four weeks, has been translated into fifty languages, and has sold over 50 million copies.
They have finally given up thinking you are Heidi.
Anne
Dear Johanna Spyri,
I remain somewhat perplexed by the two competing Heidiweg leading to two different Heidi alps in two different cantons on two sides of the Rhine. One leads from Bad Ragaz to the Alp Schwarzbüel in the canton of St. Gallen; the other from Maienfeld to the Ochsenberg in the canton of Graubünden.
On the western side of the Rhine is Bad Ragaz, the spa resort with luxury hotels, where your mother took the waters and Heidi’s aunt Dete worked as a chambermaid. From the train station, a brief walk through
a residential neighborhood brings us to the bottom of the Pizolbahn, four-person gondolas built to transport skiers up to the Pizol hut at 2,227 meters. The ride takes about half an hour and drops us off at the bottom of the chair lift, which operates only in winter.
A sign indicates the way to the Schwarzbüel hut, subtitled the Heidipfad. The walk takes about twenty-five minutes on a gravel path, level enough to make it wheelchair accessible. The path is punctuated by signposts with excerpts and illustrations from Heidi, placed too high for children to read. The story is a retold version of your novel, ending with Heidi falling asleep at the dinner table her first night in Frankfurt, which is hardly the end of your story. But it is the end of the path. We arrive at a picnic spot with a snack bar where Heidi’s grandfather will be serving local specialties. Grandfather seems to have the day off. The picnic spot is swarming with children unwilling to share the few available seats with the childless.
Maienfeld, on the other side of the Rhine, was unwilling to sacrifice its identity as part of a wine-growing region in order to buy into destination tourism. Part of the Bündnerherrschaft, it wants to be the Napa Valley, not the Disneyland, much less the Legoland, of Switzerland. But Heidiland needed an alp, making the top of the Pizol Bahn the logical choice. A Heidipfad is more likely to produce revenue during the summer months than a multi-lake hike, the other featured attraction, requiring a commitment of four to five hours on the part of those more likely to bring, rather than buy, their lunch.
Coming Out Swiss Page 20