From Island to Island, and Beyond
Chapter 1 examines the centrality of islands as gateways to the New World. The texts examined in it poeticize spatial experiences that oscillate between a sense of emergence and possibility and a corresponding fear of submergence and dissolution. The chapter begins by discussing accounts by immigrants passing through Angel Island and Ellis Island in the context of a long tradition of real and imaginary voyages to America. It then turns to two transoceanic island narratives. The first is Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), which is read alongside accounts of England’s early colonial experiments on Roanoke Island. It is argued that Shakespeare’s play and the Roanoke documents negotiate an island arrival that is both hopeful and fraught with uncertainty. The second is Cecil B. DeMille’s film Male and Female (1919), which imagines a sort of fictional Ellis Island, thereby responding to a long line of island arrivals in the New World.