SUMMARY
Through an examination of R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1858), I argue that island-stranding narratives stage a scene of struggle that is midway between metropole (where civilized men serve as the guarantors of order among savage boys) and colony (where young men, bearers of an already internalized civilization and culture, come into contact with the savagery of the colony). In The Coral Island , the vestigial savage masculinity and incipient feminine civilization of boyhood are pitted against each other according to a logic that casts the British boy as both colonizer and colonized. I argue that The Coral Island functions as wish-fulfillment narrative in which the supposedly innate savagery of British boys is revealed to be essentially different from the savagery of the colonial other insofar as the nascent, somehow innate, forces of civilization inherent in the still unformed British boy, guarantee the triumph of civilization even in the absence of colonizing British men. Savages, by contrast, appear to require violent, top-down, political and economic colonization, rather than the more invisible cultural and ideological colonization that the metropole enacts on its own boys, in order to be delivered into a state of reason and civilized enlightenment.