Aspects Of Fiction In Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe

ASPECTS OF FICTION IN DANIEL DEFOE’S ROBINSON CRUSOE

INTRODUCTION

I.GENERAL HISTORICAL, LITERARY AND SOCIAL BACKGROUND

II. INTERPRETATIONS

2.1 FICTIONAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY

2.2 REALISM OF THE ORDINARY

MYTH

2.4 DESERTED ISLAND FICTION

III.ELEMENTS OF FICTION

3.1 THEME

3.2 PLOT AND STRUCTURE

3.3 CHARACTER

3.4 SETTING

3.5 POINT OF VIEW

3.6 STYLE

IV. DANIEL DEFOE AND JONATHAN SWIFT ALLEGORIES

ABOUT THE WRITER

FINAL REMARKS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

Daniel Defoe is one of the most famous figures of 18th century British literature. His first novel, Robinson Crusoe, was an instant success. It interests people of all ages. The story can be seen as a story of adventure by younger people, but also as a picture of civilization in the eyes of a mature person. With this story Defoe laid the foundations of Robinson Crusoe tradition: The Swiss Family Robinson, Peter Pan, Lord of the Flies.

Published on 25 April 1719, the first edition credited the work’s fictional protagonist Robinson Crusoe as its author, leading many readers to believe he was a real person and the book a travelogue of true incidents. Confessional, epistolary, and didactic in form, the book is a fictional autobiography of the title character. Sequels seemed inevitable: The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe (1720).

In his novels, Defoe discussed serious matters of human experience. We find in them rough descriptions, impressive details and the issues of those times. He was concerned with the ordinary aspects of life and the world of middle or lower classes. In other words, Defoe created the descriptive prose writing complex characters such as Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, Captain Singleton, Roxana, who are determined to fight in order to find their way out of the hard ships of life. He wrote for simple people, as one who knew those who had to work hard in order to own their living.

I have chosen this story because it has fascinated and still is fascinating generations, proving its intrinsic worth. Robinson Crusoe has been considered as possessing several values: as nature-study and geographical material, as a social industrial history and as a medium of ethical instruction. The book is rich in nature study suggestions: plants, animals and materials of new world. Robinson reinvents the appliances of primitive industry and makes a beginning in each industrial art. It is a study in the social life in its simple primitive form. It is a cross section of life back in its crude beginning. Each occupation and invention is seen with reference to human need and in its relation to the whole. It is seen how each trade grows out of a need. Little opportunity is given for work in the thin woods. Handworks such as basketry, clay moulding, pottery, spinning and weaving will admit are best suited to the primary grades. These occupations are best presented as problems, the solution of which involves the invention or improvements of the tools or implements used. In his struggle experimenting failures and successes, racial history is recapitulated and the path of progress revealed. Also Robinson Crusoe aims to depict a juvenile conduct. It finds the protagonist in a loving home with every comfort. But he breaks off his home ties and seeks freedom from parental restraint on board ship. His subsequent troubles are a direct consequence of his misdeeds at home, the result of disobedience. He is thrown into a situation where he must either work or starve. He gradually acquires ability to cope with the most discouraging circumstances with inferior tools.

Selfish and neglectful of his home opportunities, Robinson suffers the penalty of being deprived of the companionship of his kind and opportunity for satisfying the ordinary aspirations. Hardships are corrective. They not only make him industrious but soften his heart and fill him with anguish and remorse for his past wasted youth. He becomes thoughtful and kind to all living creatures. He knows now the value of all comradeship. Life to him becomes sacred. Having been deprived of the fellowship of his kind, he feels the value for himself of all moving things, at the same time he instinctively recognizes the right of each thing to its own life and way of living. He is the friend and the benefactor of animals and treats with kindness even savages that are entirely in his power.

After coming for his early sins, by becoming an industrious, thoughtful kind, sympathetic, useful man, he is placed at last back into the comforts and values of country men and home. Thus the story furnish as a complete dramatic cycle. A home and a place in society is lost through idleness and regained through industry. The story is thus a typical ethical situation.

CHAPTER I

GENERAL HISTORICAL, LITERARY AND SOCIAL

BACKGROUND

The eighteenth century (1702-1798) is often referred by critics as the “Augustan” age and brought with it a desire for order and stability. It is similar with the era of the Roman emperor Augustus (63 BC – AD 14). The writers drew inspiration from the Latin poets Virgil, Horace and Ovid who, under the patronage of Emperor Augustus, created the golden age of classical literature. English writers tried to imitate the Latin poets. This period was seen to be also important to English culture. Reason and the very rational basis of thought were very important to the Augustans. Emotion takes second place to clear thought and reason.

The eighteenth century was an age of political stability. Together with the monarch it was the landowning family oligarchies responsible for the distribution of political power. The interests of these families were represented at court by two factions: the Whigs and the Tories. The term ‘Whig’ was often applied to horse thieves and suggested nonconformity. They claimed the power of excluding the heir from the throne. ‘Tory’ an Irish term linked to papist outlaws, was associated with those who wished to see the Stuart, James II, restored to the English throne in accordance with hereditary rights.

Throughout the century the merchants and tradesmen of the towns came to play a more important part in life of country.

During the reign of Queen Anne (1702-1714) an Act of Union was passed in 1707, in an attempt to curb the threat of a future Catholic monarch. Scotland and England were united as ‘Great Britain’ and were to be governed under one parliament. Scotland had the access to the expanding markets under English control, but in return, had to provide an important political safeguard. They had to ensure against all future French attacks on England and to agree to the terms of the Protestant Hanoverian succession on Anne’s death.

After Queen Anne, who died in 1714, the German House of Hanover took over the British throne. With George I as a king, the prospect of a future Catholic monarch for England became an unlikely probability. This time the influence of Parliament and the prime minister continued to grow. The most eminent politician of the time was Robert Walpole, who became the hallmark of an age characterized by low taxes and a peaceful foreign policy. Britain had not known a period of such peace and internal stability for many years.

Wealthy merchants bought their way into Parliament and purchased the estates of bankrupt landowners. This process continued throughout the century and it takes place in the pages of Defoe’s Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-27).

During George II reign (1727-1760), Britain prosperity continued at the expense of her continental allies. After the Treaty of Paris in 1763 British hegemony in India and North America was firmly established, and Britain became the chief power in overseas colonization.

George III (1760-1820) was the third Hanoverian king to rule in Britain. In contrast to his predecessors, he was born in England and felt a greater affinity with his subjects.

A new mood of freedom began to grow: the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 was the first sign of it. The loss of the American colonies (except Canada) became official with the end of the American War of Independence in 1783. The war proved a disaster for Britain and opened a political crisis at home which was saved by the arrival of William Pitt the Younger in 1783. Later the French Revolution in 1789 brought the spirit of ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’ to Europe. It represented a great threat to the stability of British society, which did not want to see the revolution of 1649 repeated.

Ireland was granted legislative independence in 1782. The Irish parliament was dissolved when the Act of Union (1801) created the ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland’ which was to last for 120 years.

This century it’s the period of the Industrial Revolution and the Agricultural Revolution. Britain already had a thriving economy in the early 18th century, with productive agriculture, scientific ingenuity, a strong commercial and middling sector, and extensive manufacturing. After 1760, a gradual rise in the rates of industrial and economic growth led to Britain becoming the world's first industrial nation. Britain built factories and canals, extended agricultural productivity, experienced rapid urban growth, manufactured new industrial technique and traded extensively along its own coasts and with Ireland, Europe and the wider world. Though industrialisation brought disruption to communities, pollution, it led to a better standard of living for most workers. British trade with the rest of the world grew enormously. New processes in agriculture forced many people to move from the country to new cities to find work. It was also a time when many people, especially from Scotland and Ireland, went to live in the new colonies of America. An empire based on commerce, sea power and naval dominance consolidated British overseas settler societies. At the beginning of the 18th century, Britain possessed colonies along the eastern seaboard of North America, numerous sugar islands in the Caribbean and a foothold in Bengal. Georgia became a British colony in 1732. Britain acquired the Ceded Islands in 1763. Despite the disastrous loss of the 13 North American colonies in the American War of Independence in 1783, Britain subsequently acquired settlements in New South Wales, Sierra Leone, Trinidad, Demerara, Mauritius and the Cape Colony. She also extended her hold over Bengal and Madras.

Britain provided the shipping, commerce, settlers and entrepreneurs that held these far-flung territories together. In the Indian Ocean, the English India Company dominated trade with India, south east Asia and China. In the Atlantic Ocean, most trade was carried out by private merchant vessels. The triangular slave trade was an important feature of British transatlantic commerce, taking over three million black slaves as workers for the plantations in America and the West Indies until the trade was abolished in 1807.

Religious and educational provision for the lower classes underwent considerable change. Protestant nonconformity, especially Methodism, gained adherents and offered more spontaneous, emotional Christian worship than the Church of England provided. Popular education was heavily influenced by Christian morality. It played a larger role in the lives of working communities after the 1800 than before, largely because of the rise of monitorial schools teaching the so-called three R's – reading, writing and arithmetic.

Also during the eighteenth century there was a spirit of optimism. There was a tendency to put faith in the rational capacities of man, and this was in keeping with the general Enlightenment in Europe. The power of reason and common sense sway over those of the imagination and the emotions. This was a perfectly natural consequence of the rationalist discoveries which had occurred in and around the time. Both John Locke (1632-1704) and Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) played an important role in bringing about a new and more rational way of considering the world which surrounds us.

This century century is also linked to the English Enlightenment. The men of the Enlightenment were intellectuals belonging to the democratic strata of English society, middle class. They fought against the evils of feudal society in the economic and social fields. These men advocated the spreading of education, self-determination and liberty. They also fought for peasants who at that time were not yet completely free. The movement was associated with great social revolutions. Even though in other countries the revolution followed the movement, in England the Enlightenment followed the revolution. The main problem was that completing the revolution, or fulfilling the final aims of it, and not that of preparing one.

The Enlightenment was not a well organized movement in itself. It can be devided in two groups. One group supported the existing social order in partial reforms, the moderate wing with the next representative writers: Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele and Samuel Richardson. The second group was more radical and they believed that they should fight determinedly for the democratization of the government, for the interests of the masses especially the peasants and handicraftsmen. The representatives of this radical wing are: Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith.

There is one dominant characteristic of English literature throughout the Enlightenment and that is realism. It was a different kind of realism from that which existed during the Renaissance. The realism of Renaissance was essentially a poetic realism. The writers described titanic figures such as Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, of Shakespeare, Faustus of Marlowe, being unconcerned of everyday life. The realism of Enlightenment was essentially a prose realism. The writers focused their attention on the problems of everyday life.

Prose literature was dominant because it could be represented reality, giving a complete picture of contemporary life. During the Enlightenment we see the rise and the development of the novel and we find that the novel of manners with its moralizing theme had the first place. Till the beginning of the 18th century most of the main personages of literature were as a rule men and women belonging to the privileged classes. Even popular Renaissance writers like Marlowe and Shakespeare presented their heroes as belonging to the ruling classes. The characters are kings, nobles. The Enlightenment period brings common people as heroes. They held the first place in the novels, plays and poems of the time, even though they belong to the middle class or even to nobility who have lost their fortune, or even simple people of whose background we are ignorant.

During the 18th century English literature may be seen as three periods.

The Early Enlightenment, which last from the Glorious Revolution until 1740. The most important representative of this period is Alexander Pope. It is characterized by poetry holding the first place. Yet, at the beginning of the century we find a new literature springing up in prose. It consists in the sketches and essays of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, and the beginning of the English novel in the realistic writings of Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift.

The second period, known as the Enlightenment Proper (1740-1768), is when the novel becomes the most important literary form in English literature, the novel of manners as represented by Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett.

The last 20 years of the 18th century mark the appearance of a new literary trend, of sentimentalism, having as its most important representatives Oliver Goldsmith and Laurence Sterne. We see the realistic drama of the Enlightenment which reaches its peak in the plays of Sheridan. We have a revival of poetry and at the end of the century we note the literary manifestations of the Pre-Romanticism which were to precede the Romantic Movement that started

Therefore in the early period the old idealisms, by which man had lived, appear to be gone. The writers are more civilized, more calculating, more rational. The coffeehouse, in London replaces the Court as the meeting place of men of culture. The journalist makes it appearance. Poetry becomes social and familiar. The development of daily newspapers, magazines and journals, with the periodical essay stand as a proof that the published word can play a powerful role in society. Yet the most important outcome is represented by the emergence of the novel as a genre of its own.

The rise of the novel is said to begin from the early 1700s, though there are many earlier examples of fictional writing. Before that there had been forms of long and continuous narrative prose, such as travel writings: the Travels of Sir John Mandeville (c. 1375) and Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller (1594). After the Restoration of 1660, the figure of Aphra Behn is also important in the development of the novel. Women have always written a lot of fiction, and in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century they were also the greatest part of the readership, the market for the new professional writers. Aphra Behn wrote about thirty novels, including Love Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister (1683), a novel in the form of letters also called an epistolary novel. This became a very popular form about sixty years later, when the epistolary novel was on top of literary fashion. Her most famous novel Oroonoko (1688), was sometimes called the first philosophical novel in English. It is inspired by a visit she makes to Surinam in South America, and concerns the African royal prince Oroonoko who is captured and sent as a slave to the English colony of Surinam. It is a strong protest against the trade in slaves and against the power of colonialism, just at the time when such power was growing. Aphra Behn was not afraid of controversy, in fact, seemed to enjoy her role as a speaker for women’s rights. But she was an outsider in the society of the time, which was controlled by men, and her novels were not well considered by later critics.

A similarly ‘scandalous’ woman, Mary de la Riviere Manley, and although her novels were popular in her own life time, they were ignored by the critics who followed. She was traditional and royalist in her politics, but very liberal in her views on the role of women in society. So her novels also show the struggle between the sexes: an innocent girl ruined by an older man is frequently a part of these stories. The novels are rather collections of stories than well-structured plots. Published in separate parts, The Secret History of Queen Zarah (1705), had notes with every part to explain all the references to real-life characters. Also political, The New Atalantis (1709) handled many ‘objectionable’ themes such as rape, incest and homosexuality. When these themes were later handled in novels by men, they were not considered quite so objectionable. The fathers of the novel, rather than the mothers of the genre, were seen as the writers who gave a strong moral position to the novel in the eighteenth century.

At first, for more than a century, poetry was a higher form of literary art.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744), the son of a merchant, became the dominant poet of his generation, in many ways summing up the age in a similar manner in which Dryden had done the same for the Restoration period.

His first work, written in imitation of Ovid’s Heroids, a collection of verse letters, of which those from betrayed women to their lovers proved most popular. Inspired by the story of the legendary 12th century lovers, Eloisa and Abelard, whose illicit love and secret marriage was brutally sanctioned by the young woman’s family, the poem turns into a bleak study in the self-imposed loneliness of the heroine, torn between frustrated erotic feelings for her former lover and religious renunciation. The second is a melodramatic poem which addresses and meditates over the ghost of the unfortunate lady whose love brought her condemnation and suicide.

The masterpiece of the earlier part of Pope’s career is The Rape of the Lock (1712, 1714, 1717). It was written at the request of a friend, John Caryll, as an attempt to reconcile two prominent families of the day at war over an incident in which Lord Petre had cut off a lock from Mrs. Arabella Fermor’s hair. Pope reverts to “the mock-heroic use of epic language and images to describe small-scale social world of London” (Baines 2001: 14), elaborating the event into the semblance of an epic in miniature, which abounds in parodies and echoes of The Iliad, The Aeneid, or Paradise Lost, forcing the reader to constantly compare great things with small.

In the last part of his literary career, Pope moved on the philosophical, ethical and political subjects, through which he championed the same values of traditional civilization: right reason, humanistic learning, sound art, good taste, and public virtue: Essay on Man (1733-4), the Moral Essays (1731-5).

Even though the verse was interesting during the Augustan Age, the works that have worn interest of the general reader are written in prose. It was only in the 1720s that a recognizable ‘novel’ form emerges, one which is concerned with the realistic depiction of middle class life, values and experience, showing the development of individual characters, over time. There was a growing market among the middle classes, especially among ladies, for novels, and this market grew during the eighteenth century until the novel reached a huge readership all over the world.

But, before dealing with them, the development of the newspapers and of the periodical essay, standing as an interesting literary sideline of the 17th and 18th centuries, should be considered.

Journalism had started developing during the Civil Wars with it’s up-to-minute news that were vital at the time. The Oxford Gazette (1645) was the first English newspaper. Two years late, the licensing Act of 1647 established government control of the press by granting the Gazette a strictly enforced monopoly on printed news. Late seventeenth-century periodicals, The Observer (1681) and The Athenian Gazette (1691) supplemented the news with varied content, such as political commentary, reviews, literary works and provided specialized material targeting a specific readership. When the Licensing Act expired in 1694, newspapers and weekly journals sprang up not just in London, but all across England and its colonies.

British periodical literature underwent a series of changes in the eighteenth century. It included social and moral commentary, and literary and dramatic criticism, as well as short literary works. It is remarked an outgrow of essay, a rise of an genre which begins with John Dunton’s Athennian gazette on 17 March 1691. It’s maturity arrives through Addison and Steele’s Tatler (1709-1711) and Spectator (1711-12). Its decline is advanced when the last number of Goldsmith’s short-lived Bee is published on 24 November 1759. The differences between the courtesy books of the Renaissance and the essays of Addison and Steele in the early century illustrate the differences between the old aristocratic education and the new genteel variety.

The Tatler and The Spectator were journals of coffee house gossip and ideas in London. They were well informed magazines. Joseph Addison (1672-1719) and Richard Steele (1672-1729) , their founders, are looked upon in many ways, as being the fathers of the modern periodical. Their friendship began when they were schoolboys together in London and they both attended to Oxford. The aim of these two men was educational. Their purpose was to improve the minds, morals and manners of their readers. They inaugurated the tradition of the daily periodical whose subject was not news, but literature and manners, and they adapted the gentlemanly culture of polite letters to a wide print audience.

Although from the time of the Restoration London had been more and more the centre of English cultural life, England was still essentially an agricultural country. Addison meditated between town and country, between Cavalier and Puritan.

This periodicals were not the only ones at the time. Reference should also be made to: The Genleman’s Magazine (1731-1914), The Grup Street Journal (1730-1734), a satirical literary magazine, and The Monthly Review (1749-1845), the most significant of literary magazine in the last part of century.

These periodical reflected the image of London during the Augustan period, as well as its tastes. They also stand as a proof that the published word was becoming a powerful instrument in society, and explain the reason for which so many of the writers of the age like Pope, Swift, Defoe, Fielding, Johnson, used journalism as a vehicle for their ideas.

The word ‘novel’ as a label for prose fiction meant something different to the readers at the start of the eighteenth century than to those at the end of nineteenth. Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957) connects the emergence of the genre with the growth of the middle classes in eighteenth century.

The development of the eighteenth century novel refers to the recurring preoccupation with realism, and realistic depiction of society. This is seen in Defoe’s and Fielding’s reoccupations with the word ‘History’ and the need to defend themselves against accusations of lying, and in their attempts to make their works as realistic as possible, whether by using first person narration as in Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe. Another tactic was to use epistolary form, most notably in the works of Richardson, and burlesqued by Fielding in Shamela, or to use consciously anti-romance forms, in the picaresque tradition of Cervantes, as a means of asserting the realism in their writings.

Working against this was the need to shape experience into narrative order, which would lead to the inevitable conflict between the demands of narrative order and realistic potrayal. Defoe’s solution was to produce a loose novel, without a clear sense of narrative order and progression, which employed the episodic technique. By the time of Fielding, he is already self-consciously using Chapters and Books to order his narratives. This conflict between realistic intention and aesthetic narrative order is most clearly evident in Sterne’s anti-novel Tristam Shandy, in which the conventions of the novel has had a chance to become a settled form.

Another point of view realted to this was the moral purpose. The eighteenth century novel often appears torn between not to offend, to teach, and yet to be realistic. Novel writing is tied to the moral demands of a middle class readership, with is need for pleasurable instruction, evident in the way in which these early novelists deal with adultery, passion and desire (Richetti 1999: 12-4).

Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders is a good example of moral purpose. It tells the story of a woman who has been a prostitute, a thief, comitted incest, and been to prison. But when she tells the story, she has reformed and changed her life. The novel makes a moral point about ways of living. The readers shares Moll’s terrible experience and how to live. Such a concern contrasts with the interest in the Renaissance in the exploration of new worlds and ideas. Most of the novelists of the eighteenth century described the bad side of life, but with a happy ending to show that it was all worth. ,

It was widely associated with the genre of romance, as in Daniel Defoe’s assertion in the preface to Moll Flanders (1722) that “ the World is so taken up of late with Novels and Romances, that it will be hard for a private History to be taken for Genuine” ( Defoe 2001: 1).

There is a modern setting and fidelity to reality (realism) as hallmarks of the novel that distinguish it from romances set in a distant past which disregard the everyday. The rise of reading coincides with a decline of the public theatre. The early novel is considered the form most expressive of the social goals of middle classes, an after-ripple for Puritanism, when, following the Revolution settlement of 1688-1689 and the liberation of finance from monarchical control, the religious goals of nonconformists become secondary to their social aspirations. The novelist Henry Fielding said that the eighteenth century was a period in which, ‘the Nobleman will emulate the Grandeur of a Prince; and the Gentleman will aspire to the proper State of the Nobleman’ (Fielding, 1751: 3).

Like most critics Raleigh acknowledges important precedents for the eighteenth-century novel. Bunyan figures rather prominently for the way he overcomes allegory, with its tendency to typify experience, with realism, which aims to particularize experience. These techniques are extended by Defoe, especially in Robinson Crusoe. Defoe’s other fictions had an novelistic canon , also imitated by Swift in Gulliver’s Travels. This kind of book is that children read it without sense or suspicion of its being other than a ‘funny book’. Any critic takes the thing as no more than fairly sharp satire. The same is the case with the earlier Tale of a Tub.

Richardson and Fielding herald the novel’s arrival as a work of art: aestheticism is an important aspect of Raleigh’s study, as he sees these two geniuses working out problems of technique. They do not so much reject the autobiographical model established by Defoe as amplify. The fiction of the 1740s was ample both in its design and in its appeal. The phenomenal popularity of Richardson’s work with readers at home and abroad is well attested. The ready availability of often expensive novels to the British reading public had been promoted in 1726 by the establishment in Edinburgh of the first circulating library, followed in London only in 1740. The presence of these circulating libraries, supported by subscribers, rapidly spread to most of the major towns of Britain in response to the needs of those who did not necessarily want to own books and of those who could not afford to do so. New literature in general, and novels in particular, circulated, for a moderate fee, amongst a wide range of readers and the popularity of a book with the customers of a library became, for some two subsequent centuries, a mark of true commercial success. The libraries also helped to consolidate national taste by dissolving certain provincial and class distinctions in literature.

Pamela is the livelist story which had been, followed by Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison. Their scheme is enlarged and in all the major characters are analysis, thought, and action, carried to a much higher pitch.

The novel was new to the early eighteenth century and it derived from the realist rejection of romance. This process has a number of imperfect practitioners before 1740, with Defoe the most important, but Richardson and Fielding’s innovations in mid-century were consolidated by the work of Smollett and Sterne.

CHAPTER II

INTERPRETATIONS

2.1 FICTIONAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Daniel Defoe began writing his novels and his travels when he was almost sixty. Before that he gathered the knowledge for such literature. In his youth, he learned something of the world by going to Spain and France. As merchant, as editor of the Review, and as a secret agent for the Tory Minister Harley and for Harley’s Whig successors, he traveled by horseback over England and Scotland gathering facts that in 1724-1726 resulted in the best description of the country produced in the entire century:

A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain.

More astonishing than the detail for his authentic book is the mass of information he acquired about foreign places, especially the darker continents and distant islands, being interested in the colonizing of the Southern Hemisphere. His detailed plans appear in A New Voyage round the World”, and he was also the author of A general History of the Pyrates.

He started in 1705 to write imaginary voyages. A talent of his is to play a part, to identify himself with some character whose name or personality he assumed. Defoe used four favorite methods to remain anonymous. He used an uncertain author, ‘a Gentleman’, a fictitious name, ‘Andrew Moreton, Esq.”, or ‘Written by a converted criminal’. He had a mask for every occasion, like his contemporary Swift. Defoe’s many characteristics is this duplicity. All of his biographers must make a decision and the purpose of his travels.

A religious and highly moral person, he also considered himself a good friend, a patriotic Englishman, and he loved his family. But he was also a journalist and a government spy, which made him a deceiver too. Therefore when he came to write the books that have made him a figure in literature, he was a Robinson Crusoe, a Captain Singleton, a merchant on his voyage of discovery.

The story of Robinson Crusoe owed its inception to the account by Woodes Rogers of the life of Alexander Selkirk on Juan Fernandez Island. Selkirk had quarreled with his captain, Thomas Stradling, and when given the chance to stay on the island, he took it. The next four years he lived on goat meat, cabbage and turnips, dressed in a “Goat Skin Jacket, Breeches, and Cap, sew’d together with Tongs as the same” (Edward Cook 1712: 37). He “said he was a better Christian while in this Solitude than ever he was before, or than, he was afraid, he should ever be again” (Edward Cook 1712: 326). Not until the end of the century he took the distinct role as the “real” Robinson Crusoe. It became a misguided belief that Defoe had stolen Crusoe’s from Selkirk., but in the 19th century, the editions and imitations of Crusoe multiplied, therefore they popularized Selkirk. A book called The Solitary of Juan Fernandez or The Real Robinson Crusoe (1851), written by Joseph Xavier Saintine, presented both Robinson Crusoe and Alexander Selkirk as they are “really the same personage” (Xavier 1851:139). In the year 1966, The Chilean government renamed Juan Fernandez as Robinson Crusoe Island, untroubled that Crusoe was shipwrecked in the Caribbean and Selkirk in the Pacific. Books and articles appear again: The True and Strange Adventures of the Real Robinson Crusoe (2001), the Real Robinson Crusoe (2005).

In fact Crusoe’s island is richer than Selkirk’s. He is condemned to a solitude, but he makes that solitude abundant. Taking the castaway narrative as a genre, it lies in the solitude of experience, to try the unverifiable. Woodes Rogers writes that

Whatever there is in these stories, this of Mr. Selkirk I know to be true; and his behaviour afterwards gives me reason to believe the account he gave me how he spent his time, and bore up under such affliction, in which nothing but the Devine Providence could have supported any man. By this one may see that solitude and retirement from the world is not such an unsufferable state of life as most man imagine, especially when people are fairly called or thrown into it unavoidably, as this man was.( Bohls 2005: 433)

Within a year of the publication of the novel, a parody of it had appeared, ending with the point-black assertion that Defoe was a liar. He defended himself specifying that the book was in fact allegorical, every important passage in it corresponding to an event in his own life. The writer’s defence may be in detail and in a sense it is obviously true. Defoe began with no other intention than to write a fake-autobiography of a sailor like Selkirk or Dampier, but the readers who return to it today as an adult cannot fail to see in it more than the adventures of the castaway on an uninhabited island. He had dramatized as sharply as possible the inescapable solitariness of each man in his relation to God and the universe, a representation of the human being in this timeless situation.

Robinson Crusoe is narrated in the first person as though it is an autobiographical account, and is not just an adventure story, but also one of moral discovery. The writer gives the impression of realism by adopting Puritan self confession narratives to form a fictional moral tract. Defoe’s intention is to reduce literature to journalism, to tell inventing things as though he is a reporter writing an account for press. The experience of living alone for many years doesn’t produce moral or psychological change of the protagonist. Defoe has no imaginative understanding of the human behavior. But he has his own kind of imagination, the ability to lie like the truth. The novel is linked with literary needs and habits of mind of the rising middle classes.

The new type of Englishman, empirical, self-reliant, and with the sense of direct relation with a God made in his own image, he expresses in the character of Crusoe. The sources of the story have been hunted down by the scholars. In writing Robinson Crusoe he was not consciously writing a novel, he was writing a spoof-autobiography which was to be taken by readers as fact. It sums up, as it were, within itself all the travel books that had gone before it. The book is also, in its way, a highly scientific work, its facts, geographical and otherwise, are as accurate as the knowledge of his day could make them.

This was the nature of the man. The secret of his verisimilitude he achieves has often been analysed. Daniel Defoe was the master of the literal. He produces his illusion of complete reality by employing a mass of circumstantial detail of a kind no one, would bother to event.

In the book, the shipwreck and the hero’s sojourn on his island, are still only parts. Before he reaches the point of being cast away, the hero passes through a lot of adventures. This includes a period in slavery to the Barbary corsairs. When we reach the shipwreck it has already become in our mind something that would inevitably happen to him. The smaller lives have conditioned us to accept the bigger one. Crusoe is on his island twenty-eight years, two months, and nineteenth days. The exactitude is characteristic. We can follow Crusoe’s experiences at times from day to day, from year to year, with the dates given, that we swallow the impossible. In fact, the impossible has been caged by the calendar and tamed. But we accept Crusoe’s story even more readily because Defoe puts the stress all the time not on the island or on the dangers surrounding his hero but on Crusoe the man himself.

In his excursion into imaginary autobiography, Daniel Defoe had nothing to guide him but his own genius. Crusoe is a complete character. Though there are areas of human experience on which he has nothing to say, this does not make his completeness and roundness the less, for those he does report on are rendered so fully that we can work out for ourselves his attitude to the others. At first sight Crusoe’s character may seem to be this: “It was in vain to sit still and wish for what was not to be had, and this extremely rouz’d my application”. His powers of observation and deduction are shown for instance in his account of his first encounter with the goats on the island:

I observ’d if they saw me in the valleys, tho’ they were upon the rocks, they would run away as in a terrible fright; but if they were feeding in the valleys, and I was upon the rocks, they took no notice of me, from whence I concluded that by the position of their opticks, their sight was so directed downward, that they did not readily see objects that were above them; so afterward I took this method, I always clim’d the rocks first to get above them, and then had a frequently a fair mark. (Defoe 2001: 98)

There is also the other side to Crusoe, the religious side, his preoccupation with theology, his moralizing, thinking of how Providence has delivered him from dangers. It comes out especially in such a passage as this:

This renew’d a contemplation which had often come to my thought in former time, when I first began to see the merciful dispositions of Heaven in the dangers we run through in this life…though I knew no other reason for it than that such a pressure or such a hint hung upon my mind. (Defoe 2001: 207)

This hint saves Crusoe from many disasters: his accidentally landing from the shipwreck on the side of the island which the cannibals never visit, being saved during the earthquake, from the strong currents that seize his canoe during one of his efforts to escape. He never learns what these mysterious signs are, he just knows that they are, but nothing more.

Crusoe is God’s Englishman, as much as Milton, and God helps those who help themselves. The sense of partnership between God and man is with Crusoe all the time.

Religious considerations throughout the book come with the belief that God helps those who help themselves. It is an allegory of one’s man journey through life , following the tradition of puritan allegorical writing that was popular in the 17th and 18th centuries. The moral allegory “depicts a journey through a symbolic landscape in which the central figure moves from innocence to enlightenment (Hammond, 1993: 179)”. Robinson Crusoe learns to triumph over adversity, gaining in time control over his environment and becomes a wiser being.

Even from the preface we can categorized the novel as a religious allegory, where the editor specifies this novel will teach us to “ honour the wisdom of Providence”. Publishing this book, the reader is meant to learn something spiritually useful when reading this story and Crusoe’s experience to instruct others in God wisdom, by repenting one’s sins. But it is not enough simply to express gratitude or to pray to God: “ Seeing all this things have not brought thee to repentance, now thou shalt die.”

Just a few pages into the novel we learn that Robinson’s father, who is described as retired tradesman, who made a good fortune during his business career, wants his son to follow his steps and become a lawyer himself (Defoe 2001: 5). His ignorance towards his father and the fact that he eventually runs away from home is what he latter referrers to as his original sin: “…the excellent advice of my father, the opposition to which, was, as I may call it, my ORIGINAL SIN; (…)” (Defoe 2001: 154). The biblical reference suggests that Crusoe’s exile from civilization represents Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden.

Recognizing his absolute dependence on the Lord, he is a born-again person. Therefore, Crusoe complains less about his fate and sees the island more positively. The elements of spiritual autobiography as a genre of literature are clear. Starr says a spiritual autobiography starts with a misdemeanor of the respective protagonist, which can be also referred to as “original sin” (Starr 1965: 53).

The wrong way of young Robinson Crusoe is seen as a starting point of his spiritual autobiography, supported by several successive events in the novel that can be interpreted as messages from God or providences. Crusoe has to overcome a shipwreck during his very first time at sea, but also a capture and enslavement by North-African pirates, an episode during which he remembers his father warning words. These two adventures Crusoe survives are not drastically enough to be taken to account as a warning from God and bring him to repentance, but his castaway on a deserted island during his journey from Brazil to West-Africa surely is. During twenty-eight years he is marooned on this uninhabited place. Here Robinson Crusoe has to overcome numerous challenging and dangerous situations. The serious illness that befalls the protagonist after his arrival on the island, is important for the interpretation of the story as a spiritual autobiography:

But now when I began to be sick, and a leisurely view of the miseries of death came to place itself before me; when my spirits began to sink under the burden of a strong distemper, and Nature was exhausted with the violence of the feaver; conscience that has slept so long, began to awake, and I began to reproach myself with my past life, in which I had so evidently, by uncommon wickedness, provok’d the justice of God to lay me under uncommon strokes, and to deal with me is so vindictive a manner. (…) I cry’d out, Lord be my help, for I am in great distress. This was the first prayer, if I may call it so, that I had made for many years.(Defoe 2001: 72)

The prayer at the end of quotation shows a more serious Christian. He continued in his relationship to God : "I daily read the Word of God, and applied all the comforts of it to my present state" ( Defoe 2001: 147)

Robinson Crusoe tells the story twice: once as journal and once as memoir, but the journal reaches his fulfillment:

I now began to consider seriously my condition, and the circumstance I was reduc’d to, and I drew up the state of my affairs in writing, not so much to leave them to any that were to come after me, for I was like to have but few Heirs, as to deliver my thoughts from daily poring upon them, and afflicting my mind; and as my reason began now to master my despondency I began to comfort my self as well as I could.( Defoe 2001: 101)

From a tradition of Puritan diary, where keeping a journal is for reflection on one’s own spiritual progress, it also serves to present solitude to the readers. The journal is one of his souvenirs on the island, his artifact of solitude. He lives for himself and for God, but he is also amongst us readers, aware of our narrative needs.

Daniel Defoe’s novels are very often referred to as works with religious connotation. He was a dissenting Presbyterian and received his education at Charles Morton’s Dissenting Academy in Newington Green. His pamphlet The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702), a drastically written satire earned Defoe three days in the pillory and six months at Newgate Prison.

He satirized the Anglican Tory attitude to the nonconformists using irony in suggesting extreme measures of persecution to be taken against them. This technique gave the hint to Swift in his Modest Proposal. Irony, as Defoe discovered, is a dangerous weapon. Both Tories and Dissenters attacked him and had to serve a short jail sentence and stand in the pillory.

There is not surprising that his novel features signs of Defoe dissenting, respectively Presbyterian or Protestant attitude. He is the representative of the middle-class dissenting Englishman. “Dissenting” means membership of nonconformist Protestant sect, characteristic of large numbers of the English trading class. It can be found in the novel passages which may not fit into the general definition of spiritual autobiography, but Defoe’s dissenting attitude. An example is the protagonist’s feeling of becoming a better Christian by “by the bare reading of Scripture” (Defoe 2001: 174). There are also evident his emotional experiences in times of possible danger. That is for example during the earthquake, his illness or before his fight against the Spanish sailors. He very often returns to his usual business right after his religious moments. Defoe imbues his account of Friday's conversion with a particular irony: the fact that Crusoe himself is something of a convert, a man who before his experiences on the island had little time for religious practice or spiritual thought, but one who gradually comes to value the Bible as a constant and faithful companion.

Defoe is always the hero. His fortune change as quickly and as completely: he is up, he is down, he is courted, he is spurned. He declares in his Serious Reflection (Robinson Crusoe, Part III), that Robinson Crusoe is an allegory of his own life, but that the correspondence extended even to minuteness. He averred that the fright and fancies that succeeded the sight of the print of the man’s foot, the discovery in the cave of the goat with gleaming eyes, the incident of his annexation of Friday, everything that happened in Crusoe, had its counterpart with Defoe

REALISM OF THE ORDINARY

The examples of realism of the ordinary are numerous. After the shipwreck the reader gets the idea that Defoe is more into describing ordinary things in a realistic manner than elaborating on the nature or the landscape of the island. Robinson Crusoe brings his surroundings under his rational and practical control not as a colonist but as a lonely exile. The hero records his experiences and his achievements meticulously, because he is logging the nature of his moral survival. As a methodical diarist delighted by his resourcefulness and by his awareness that God helps those who help themselves. It is Crusoe who fills the picture, as a truly heroic figure, a man dominating nature. He is the great individualist, but he convinces as such by his ordinariness. Having assumed his large impossibility, Defoe henceforward is scrupulous in keeping within the bounds of the possible.

The story written as a meaning of making money, revealed something more, the ability to organize and present detail in order to implement a view of the relation between man and nature. This is a middle-class view of life. The writer’s fascination with ordinary events and facts is predominating when it comes to the description of Crusoe’s life on the island. An example is the protagonist’s habit of making lists and keeping everything he does in a journal. The journal starts soon after the shipwreck and shows Crusoe’s daily activities in a precise way: “Nov. 2. I set up all my chests and boards, and pieces of timber which made my rafts, and with them form’d a fence round me (…). Nov. 3. I went out with my gun, and kill’d two fowls like ducks, which were very good food. In the afternoon went to work to make a table”(Defoe 2001: 58).

Another examples can be Crusoe’s rather rational weighing up of good and evil regarding his desperate situation on the deserted island (Defoe 2001: 54), the accurate description of the weather and the seasons on the island (Defoe 2001: 85).

A conclusive argument for the omnipresence of realism in Robinson Crusoe is shown when he tries to create ordinary things such as bread or clay pot. The making of bread is described in great detail, since it seems to be important for Defoe to point out how much work is to finish just one loaf of bread: “(…) I believe few people have thought much upon, the strange multitude of little things necessary in the providing, producing, curing, dressing, making and finishing this one article of bread”( Defoe 2001: 94).

The difficult process from the planting the seeds to the actual baking of bread, the manufacturing of vessels and pots, Crusoe’s attempts to make himself some containers without having the proper tools to do so, are examples for the great significance realism has in this novel.

The parts that are concerned with economics are at the beginning and the end of the novel. First we find out that Robinson Crusoe seems to be quite a clever businessman, since he does not invest all his money he earned in his first adventure, but lodges a part with a friend’s widow, which may be called good risk management. The greatest display of economic realism, however, is to be found towards the end of the novel when Crusoe is informed about the profit he has made during his stay on the island: “First, there was the account current of the produce of my farm, (…) the balance appear’d to be 1174 Moidores in my favour. Secondly, there was the account of four years more while they kept the effects in their hands, (…) the value of the plantation increasing, amounted to 38892 Cruisadoes, which made 3241 Moidores” (Defoe 2001: 223).

It takes Defoe several pages to give detailed descriptions of Crusoe’s financial gain, while the emotional aspect of his long awaited return to the civilized world is almost completely neglected. The emphasis clearly lies on an accurate and realistic portrayal of economic and financial facets. Even during Crusoe’s stay on the island it becomes clear how important money is for him, taking them even though it is not useful for him. The two sides of Crusoe, the practical and the religious, and it is none the less religious because so often expressed in moralistic terms, come togheter in such a passage, which Coleridge acclaimed as ‘worthy of Shakespeare’, as: “I smil’d to myself at the sight of this money: “O drug!” said I loud….However, upon second thoughts, I took it away; and wraping all this in a piece of canvas…”. (Defoe 2001: 68). Robinson Crusoe becomes a symbol of economic man, who by recapitulating on his island all the basic productive processes, provides the economists with their favourite example.

The fact that Crusoe becomes a model of industry, does not mean he likes work. In the total setting of the trilogy, it becomes quite clear that Crusoe regards his little profits on the island only as a consolation prize. What he wanted were unearned increments from the labour of others. In Brazil, he had soon tired even of the tasks of a sugar plantation owner, and it was his quest of the more spectacular rewards of the slave trade which took him to the island. And after Crusoe leaves the island, his foreign trade gave the highest and quickest returns on capital. Only on the island he shows what is important for a modern economic organization by combining with accurate planning and stocktaking. Defoe knew this theoretically. He dealt with such matters in his economic manuals. But he himself had not been able to carry out his economic ideals into practice. They were to be realized only on Crusoe’s island.

DESERTED ISLAND FICTION

A deserted island fiction is “a form of fiction in which a remote and 'uncivilised' island is used as the venue of the story and action. It has a particular attraction because it can be placed right outside the 'real' world and may be an image of the ideal, the unspoilt and the primitive. It appeals directly to the sense of adventure and exploratory instinct, and to a certain atavistic nostalgia. The publication of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe in 1719 marked the beginning of a universally popular literary genre.” (Cuddon 2000)

Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe setting centres on an island. In writing about his experiences, Crusoe makes a journal, not because of the passing of time, but for the objects he produced in labour ( a tame of goats, a musket and gunpowder, sheafs of wheat he uses for bread, and a shealter carved from rock with all the trappings of a King’s castle). Nature plays a major role in bringing the required maturity in Robinson. He is traveler, he runs from his much protected shelter, ignoring his parent's warning but he never takes life as seriously. Robinson learns to make adjustment with adverse situation:

“[…] I descended a little on the side of that delicious vale, surveying it with a secret kind of pleasure (though mixed with my other afflicting thoughts), to think that this was all of my own, that I was king and lord of all of this country indefeasibly and had a right of possession; and if I could convey it, I might have it in inheritance, as any lord of a manor in England. I saw here abundance of cocoa trees, orange and lemon and citron trees; but all wild[…]. ( Daniel 2001: 101)

Crusoe, obviously thinks that the island is his and that he is its proprietor from the moment he set the foot on it. He is in a position of control and domination over what he sees, giving to the island the signification of an empire or a colonial property. He had gone on his journey as a trader, in order to make money and increase his material comforts, and when he found himself on the island his only thought was to recreate as best as he could something of the material civilisation he had left behind. He invokes a European system of ownership and declares himself lord of the place. The scene, also, unmasks the greed with which territories have been possessed and produced as a part of empire. Considering it a property, he emphasizes its belonging to the British Crown, meaning it becomes a colony. Crusoe becomes a colonial agent. His mission is to colonize the island, to explore its landscape, to establish a permanent settlement on it, and therefore to make it a part of a empire. This explains not only Crusoe’s titles as “lord” and “governor”, but also his work of making canoes, not to leave the island, nor to release his feeling of isolation, but to tie the island with the rest of the world. Crusoe’s form of narration is not only an account of his sufferings, ingenuity and endurance but also the history of the island. Defoe’s narrative celebrates the fiction of discovery of the island, and continues the epic of Western supremacy and conquest. Defoe resorts to Crusoe’s autobiographical narration to gain credence and to prevent other alternative histories of the island from emerging.

Using the pieces of the shipwreck and transporting whatever is useful to the shore, Crusoe establishes imperial connections and writes a colonial history of the island. The colonisation starts with his exploitation and transposition of the shipwreck’s symbolic potential. With those items, that are in the main guns, muskets, ammunition, cables, nails, spikes, a grindstone, hatchets, spare canvas, grains of corn, food, Crusoe invests the landscape with meaning and transforms the island into an imperial accretion. Crusoe’s colonisation of the island would have been impossible without the ship:

Then it occurred to me again how well I was furnished for my substience, and what would have been my case if it had not happened, which was an hundred thousand to one, that the ship floated from the place where she first struck, and was driven near to the shore that I had time to get all these things out of her. What would have been my case if I had been to have lived in the condition in which I at first came on shore, without necessaries to supply and procure them? Particularly, said I aloud (though to myself), what should I have done without a gun, without ammunition, without any tools to make anything or to work with, without clothes, bedding, a tent, or any manner of coverings?(Defoe 2001: 66)

This are the instruments with which he interrupts the order of nature and inscribes the beginning of colonial rule and subjugation on the island. The most desolate island cannot retain its natural order. Whether the white man brings his rational technology there can only be man-made order. Confident in his use of his solitary colony, he has cultivated an equally confident of himself. He manage to hold nearly fifty goats, finds out how to make butter and cheese, his clothes are made from goatskin. His fortification on the beach, near his crops and his country side near the goats and grapes are abundant. Yet, Crusoe’s history of island is challenged by unexpected moments of subversion that put in danger its authority a colonial beginning. The print of a naked foot that Crusoe comes across on the shore sends him wandering in total confusion and fright:

It happened one day, about noon, going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised with the print of a man's naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen in the sand. I stood like one thunderstruck, or as if I had seen an apparition. I listened, I looked round me, I could hear nothing, nor see anything. I went up to a rising ground, to look farther. I went up the shore, and down the shore, but it was all one; I could see no other impression but that one.I went to it again to see if there were any more, and to observe if it might not be my fancy; but there was no room for that, for there was exactly the very print of a foot, toes, heel, and every part of a foot. How it came thither I knew not, nor could in the least imagine.(Defoe 2001: 152)

In this moment Crusoe realizes he is not alone. The island becomes threatening. Crusoe thinks of digging up his barley and tearing down his enclosures, and also stops building fires or firing his gun. His discovery of the remains of a cannibal feast discovers his powers of inventions. The Carib savages use the island periodically to devour each other’s flesh and celebrate their victories over one another. The island is a site that hosts specific Caribbean rituals that Crusoe obviously interprets as cannibalism. He is not the first one to invest the island with meaning and history. Ironically, a Carib’s footprint subverts Crusoe’s narrative of beginning and unveils an already inscribed history of the island. The hero’s self exploratory time on his island, his cultivation of the land and of his soul, and his later codes of belief and action on Friday, have been interpreted as processes of European colonization.

Crusoe builds a society of two men, with only his man ‘Friday’ as his companion. The story can be read as a fable of survival in praise of the human spirit, or as an example of how the new society brought its values, religion to any place it colonized. Friday is considered inferior, his religion laughed at, and his ignorance ‘cured’. When his island is ‘peopled’ by Friday’s father and a Spanish sailor, Crusoe thinks of himself as a king an absolute Lord. He establishes a principle which many contemporary Europeans would have regarded as radical. He tolerates pagan, Protestant and Catholic alike. This principle was not fully established in contemporary Britain.

Crusoe’s original objective in the voyage which brought him to the island was to get more slaves. He sells the Moorish boy Xury, who has saved his life, to the Portuguese trader for sixty pieces of silver. And eventually providence provide him with Man Friday, who answers his prayers by “swearing to be my slave for ever” (Defoe 2001: 226). He treats him like an owner, not like a friend. Crusoe does not ask Friday his name, he gives him one. Even in language, the medium whereby human beings may achieve something more than animal relationships with each other, Crusoe is a strict utilitarian. “I likewise taught him to say yes and no” (Defoe 2001: 229). Yet Crusoe regards the relationship as ideal. In the period alone with Friday he was “perfectly and completely happy, if any such thing as complete happiness can be found in a sublunary state” (Defoe 2001: 245-6). But in time he becomes obsessed with the fear that Friday may be ungrateful and returns to his tribe. But the fear proves groundless and they leave the island together. Crusoe later avoids to keep Friday in servitude by the altruism “to do something considerable for him, if he outlived me” (Defoe 2001: 133). But Friday dies at sea, faithful to the end, and rewarded by a brief word of compassion.

In the meantime, Robinson grows rich, and when he returns to society he has become a model of the new capitalist of Europe. Property and the white man’s power are more important than such things as love or marriage. Robinson’s marriage occupies only a page of the story. The happy ending suggests the continuation of the way of life Crusoe has brought to island, on the model of white European society.

In his biography of Defoe, Novak observes that Robinson Crusoe has “become a classic text for postcolonial studies, though it is uncertain whether its protagonist and its author are to be regarded as heroes or villains” (Novak 2001: 706). But Defoe’s enthusiasm for colonialism is well known. In his view it represented a crucial element in the expansion of British trade.

MYTH

Defoe’s first full-length work of fiction seems to fall more naturally into place with Faust, Don Juan and Don Quixote, the great myths of our civilization. Each of their heroes embodies an exceptional prowess and a vitiating excess, in spheres of action that are peculiarly important in our culture: Don Quixote, the impetuous generosity and the limiting blindness of chivalric idealism; Don Juan, pursuing and at the same time tormented by the idea of boundless experience of women; Faustus, the great knower, his curiosity always unsatisfied, and therefore damned. Crusoe does not at first seem a likely companion for these other culture-heroes. They lose the world for an idea, he for gain.

By the end of the nineteenth century, there had appeared at least 700 editions, translations and imitations, also a popular eighteenth-century pantomime. In 1848, an enterprising French industrialist started a restaurant up a tree, a particularly fine chestnut in a wood near Paris: he called it ‘Robinson’(Pottier 1941: 171-4). In France, again, ‘un robinson’ has become a popular term for a large umbrella.

Partly because of Defoe’s verisimilitude, the story’s name has been forgotten, while he himself has acquired a kind of semi-historical status, like the traditional heroes of myth. Today, we can surely apply the story to Malinowski’s description of primitive myths: “It is not of the nature of fiction, such as we read today in a novel, but it is a living reality, believed to have once happened in primeval times, and continuing ever since to influence the world and human destinies” (Malinovski 1926: 18-9).

Almost universally known, almost universally thought of as at least half real, he cannot be refused the status of myth. Yet, it is difficult to define what kind of myth it is, because after the Strange and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Defoe wrote two others: the Farther Adventures and the Serious Reflections. They complicate the meaning because, though the character is the same, he is no longer on the island. But myth always tends in transmission to be whittled down to a single, significant situation. Hardly anyone knows the later books of the trilogy. The hero’s island existence occupy almost all our attention, and the rest is largely forgotten, or plays a very secondary role. Even the other portions of the first volume of the trilogy, comprising the early adventure and the eventual return to the society, though are hardly part of the myth, which retains only the island episode. The essential social meaning of this episode is solitude. The writer himself gives two main explanations for Crusoe’s solitude. He thinks he is being punished for irreligion but also for his disobedience in leaving home. In the Farther Adventures he even accuses himself of having ‘killed his father’( Defoe 2001: 149-50). Besides religion, there is also taken in consideration the relationship of his story to some enduring traits of social and economic history.

In keeping with the status of Robinson Crusoe as a myth, we know the varied shapes that a myth takes in men’s minds, as from the form in which it first arose. It is not an author, but a society, that metarmorphoses a story into a myth, by retaining only what its unconscious needs dictate, and forgetting everything else.

The hero, alone on his island, deprived of all assistance from his fellows, and nevertheless able to look after himself, is obviously a figure that will enthral readers of all ages. To attain this way of life, Rousseau believes that “the surest way to raise oneself above prejudices and to order one’s judgement on the real relationships between things, is to put oneself in the place of an isolated man, and to judge of everything as that man would judge of them, according to their actual usefulness” (Richard 1939: 210-4). The hero’s life is its demonstration.

In his newspaper the Review, Defoe had written that “Nothing follows the course of Nature more than Trade. There Causes and Consequences follow as directly as day and night” (Wilson 1830: 319). In the island the nature of the universe is most importantly manifested in the rationality of the processes of economic life. The island solitude is an exceptional occasion not for undisturbed self-communion, but for Crusoe’s efforts at self-help. He observes nature, not with the eyes of a primitive, but with a calculating attitude of colonial capitalism. Wherever he looks, he seeks for improvement. He finds himself on a desert island, but he has no intention of letting it remain as such.

He goes overseas. Not to pastoral retreats but to colonies. It shows the ancient conflict between urban and rural ways of life. That conflict can be resolved by the urbanization of the countryside. Hero’s task is done only when he has taken possession of his colony. In The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe the hero rejoices that “never was there such a little city in a wood” (Defoe 2001: 118).

For the main processes by which man secures food, clothing, and shelter are only likely to become interesting when they have become alien to his common, everyday experience:

“It might be truly said that now I began to work for my bread. ‘Tis a little wonderful, and what I believe few people have thought much upon, viz., the strange multitude of little things necessary in the providing, producing, curing, dressing, making and finishing this one article of bread.’ (Defoe 2001: 130). It is the fascination we find in reading the detailed descriptions of Crusoe’s island labours.

Samuel Smiles was trying to persuade us that hard work even in the present state of society is the key to all: that “labor omnia vincit”. The idea that labour does and always will conquer all is an interesting example of what have made Robinson Crusoe a myth.

As we read, if we draw a moral, it can only be that Defoe confidently prescribes the therapy of work. A man is capable of redemption only through untiring labour.

The Gospel of Work was by no means new even in 1719. In Greece, Cynics and Stoics had opposed the denigration of manual labour which is a necessary part of a slave-owning society’s scale of values. In the Christian tradition labour had never been a dishonourable estate. In the sixteenth century, Protestantism, in harmony with the obscure needs of social and economic change, revived and expanded an old belief. The Biblical view that labour was a curse for Adam’s disobedience was displaced by the idea that hard work, was a obligation.

For Crusoe hard work seems to be a condition for life itself, and we notice that the arrival of Friday is a signal, not for increased leisure, but for expanded production. One of the reasons we can consider Robinson Crusoe a myth is certainly its consonance with the modern view that labour is both the most valuable form of human activity in itself, and the same time the only reliable way of developing spiritually. The combination of this aspect of ideology of Ascetic Protestantism, or Puritanism, with a kind of return to nature, is particularly happy. Daniel Defoe embodies in the same story two historically associated aspirations of the middle class with whom he and his hero have been long and justly identified.

On the desert island Robinson Crusoe turns his forsaken estate into a triumph. This is a unreality. Other castaways in the past, including Defoe’s main model, Alexander Selkirk, were reduced to an extremely primitive condition, and in the space of a few years. Harassed by fear, dogged by ecological degradation, they sank more and more to the level of animals. In some cases they forgot the use of speech, went mad or died of inanition. One book which Defoe had almost certainly read, The Voyages and Travels of J. Albert de Mandelso, tells of two such cases. There is a Frenchman who, after two years of solitude on Mauritius, tore his clothing to pieces in a fit of madness brought on by a diet of raw tortoise and a Dutch seaman on St. Helena who disinterred the body of a buried comrade and set out to sea in the coffin(Secord 1924: 26-28).

As the book is read, it can be forgotten the fact that isolation can be painful or boring, that it tends to apathetic animality and mental derangement. In fact, the readers are rejoiced to find that isolation can be the beginning of a new realization of the potentialities of the individual. They imagine themselves to be sharing each step in his conquest of the environment. It becomes a humanity’s success story.

If we look further afield for economic motivation in Defoe, if we leave the island, we find a very different picture. The other adventures of Robinson Crusoe, and the lives of Defoe’s other heroes and heroines do not point in the direction of hard work. Moll flanders, Roxana, and Colonel Jack satisfy their needs in ways which no one would propose for imitation.

CHAPTER III

ELEMENTS OF FICTION

3. 1 THEME

Theme may be defined as the central idea which runs through the novel, the author’s purpose in writing. It gives the story focus, unity, impact and a ‘point’. The theme becomes clear by looking at what happens to the major characters. If the main character survives while others don’t, it shows us that his behavior is being rewarded by the author.

The hero must overcome his fear in order to survive on the deserted island. The trial by fear begins when he runs about like a madman, scared of every shadow, and sleeps in a tree with a weapon. He quickly realizes that he must recover his reason if he is to survive. At several points in the narrative, Crusoe is almost overwhelmed by his fear of the unknown. It propels him to colonize the island, securing his shelter and becoming self-sufficient. Crusoe masters his fear when he faces the last challenge, the devil. Investigating a cave, he is met by a pair of eyes. At first scared, he realizes that he can confront this enemy just like he has met every other challenge on the island. He rushes in to confront the devil and discovers a dying goat. He has passed his trial. Had he not faced his fears, he would have run away in full belief that the devil lived in that cave. Instead, he investigates and confronts his fear.

Robinson Crusoe is a meditation on the human condition. Finding himself alone in a deserted island, Crusoe struggles to maintain reason, order, and civilization. His “original sin” is his rejection of a conventional life. When he leaves England for a life on the high seas, he refuses to accept what has been given to him. Crusoe struggles with, and eventually triumphs over nature. This struggle is at the heart of human nature. Man is on earth to triumph and gain profit from nature. Once Crusoe is able to overcome his fear and subdue nature is rewarded.

Money is an important theme in Robinson Crusoe. At the beginning of the narrative, Crusoe details how much money he has, what he does with it, and what he gains by his actions. On the island, money loses all value. Crusoe has to find another way to measure his worth. While rummaging through a ship for salvage he laments aloud at the sight of some money, “O Drug! …what are thou good for.”(Defoe 2001: 68)

At that point he realizes that just one knife is worth more than money. Usefulness is the key to evaluation of worth. Crusoe’s hope of returning to England is symbolized by these tokens of civilization. On the island, the money is only a reminder of his old life and he treasures it as a memento. In all of his other endeavors he freely admits his success or failure. But as a merchant, he knows that though separated from the world now, he can only reconnect with it if he has money. Once he returns to London, his old reliance on money returns.

Industrialization is Crusoe’s occupation, according to his cultural background and his religion. He immediately sets out to be productive and self-sufficient on the island. By the time of Robinson Crusoe, most villages were experiencing labor specialization. People began to buy bread instead of baking it. Thus Crusoe has to relearn many of these arts to survive. With practice, Crusoe is able to increase the level of industrialization on his island. Crusoe has a few implements with which he is able to reconstruct a semblance of civilization as well as create more advanced technology. While building his house, he notes that every task is exhausting. In brief, he praises the idea of “division of labor” as he describes cutting timber out of trees, bringing the wood from the trees to the construction site, and then constructing his shelter. The necessity of a sharp ax leads Crusoe to invent his own foot-powered sharpener. He manages to fire pottery. He needs a mill for grinding his grain, but not finding a proper stone, he settles for a block of hard wood. The entire process of baking his own bread is a realization of how wonderful the state of human technology is.

Crusoe is not suggesting that people return to a world of self-sufficient households. Instead, creating a simple shelf in his house, he comments that a carpenter could have finished the two-day job in an hour. He appreciates the process of specialization that helps make industrialization so successful.

3.2 PLOT AND STRUCTURE

Plot is the pattern of events and situations in a narrative, as selected and arranged both to emphasise relationships between incidents and to elicit a particular kind of interest in the reader. It is the author’s design for a novel, in which the ‘story’ plays a part, as well as the author’s choice of language and imagery.

The concept of plot was first developed by the Greek philosopher, Aristotle, to describe the properties of drama. His formulation introduced concepts such as the protagonist, or hero, whose fate is the focus of the audience’s attention. The hero may be in conflict with an antagonist in the form of a human opponent or of some abstract concept such as fate. Or the conflict may be in his own mind.

As the plot progresses, it arouses expectations in the reader about the future course of events and how characters will respond to them. A concerned uncertainty about what is going to happen is known as surprise.

A plot has unity of action if it is perceived by the reader as a complete and ordered structure of actions, directed towards the intended effect, in which none of the component part is unnecessary. Aristotle claimed that it does not constitute a unified plot to present a series of episodes which are strung together because they happen to a single character. The order of a unified plot, as Aristotle pointed out, is a continuous sequence of beginning, middle, and end, and develops through the stages of exposition, amplification, climax, denouement. In many plots the denouement involves a reversal in the hero’s fortunes, which frequently depends on a discovery, the recognition by the protagonist of something of great importance unknown to him or to her.

Novelists in particular have at times tried to subvert or ignore the reader’s expectation of a causally linked story with a clear beginning, middle, and end, with no loose ends. The tradition that the novel must tell a story, whatever else it may do, survives for the most part intact.

Defoe constructed an excellent plot in Robinson Crusoe involving the reader consistently in a logical step progression of the action. Robinson Crusoe begins by introducing himself to the reader. He informs him about his family, his education and his early experience. Then the protagonist leaves home in search of adventure. He makes several voyages and during one of them he is caught by pirates and sold as a slave. Crusoe escapes and becomes a rich plantation owner in Brazil.

During another voyage the ship is wrecked and Crusoe is the only survivor. On the first night he sleeps in a tree an when he awakes next morning he finds himself on an uninhabited island. And this is the starting point of the exciting experience.

Crusoe gets settled and adjusted on the island. He builds a raft and carries all the supplies from the ship to the shore. Then he builds and fortifies his house. The hero is interested in making provisions, food supplies, corn, goats, birds.

He surveys the island and discovers its richness and beauty. He builds a boat and sets out to sail around the island. After a while, the protagonist thinks of getting out of the island. The idea occurs to him particularly when he discovers a foot print on the sand. He also becomes alarmed at the idea of cannibals visiting the island.

The rescue of Friday provides the occasion for a few interesting aspects. Crusoe begins to educate Friday and again makes plains of leaving the island.

After a long, hard, and interesting existence on the island an English ship passes by and Robinson Crusoe returns to his native country.

CHARACTER

Character refers to a personage in a narrative: it is normally expected of a novel that it should have at least one character, and preferable several characters shown in processes of chance and social relationship.

Characterization is the representation of persons in narrative and dramatic works. It may include direct methods, like the attribution of qualities in description or commentary, and indirect methods inviting the reader to infer qualities from characters’ actions, speech or appearance.

Robinson Crusoe is a common Englishman who faces the hardships of everyday life. The hero stands out like a symbol of human conduct. The imaginary of fictitious voyage of an ordinary man constitutes but a pretext in order to bring in relief a model destiny.He narrates his adventures and meditations in a simple manner and his way of speaking is of a simple man with good sense. In his multiple incidents the novelist concentrates on the hero’s state of mind rather than on his activities.

The protagonist is the prototype of the early eighteenth century Englishman. His character is a kind of combination of the features of the English merchants, adventures of that time. Crusoe’s way of being able to adapt himself to the new and unfavorable conditions is what brings him greatness. He knows how to make the things he needs with his own hands, creating his own conditions for a tolerable existence. He can be defined as a modern character whose dominant feature is not adventure but conscious activity. His will for knowledge gives Crusoe with a certain wisdom and greatness. The author shows him as a good personage who yearns for human companionship in order to remove his loneliness. This need of human society on the island is symbolically rendered by the appearance of Friday. New relationships spring up on the island. It is that between master and servant. Crusoe does whatever he can in order to educate his servant, being presented by Defoe in the best possible light.

He can also be considered an industrious and a hard-working man, being careful with his supplies and having in mind that anything he finds might be useful one day.

There is no special attention showed to the other characters. Friday remains fairly consistent throughout the book, providing comfort and help to Crusoe. He shows docility, strength, agility and loyalty to his master. The rest of the characters are flat characters that Crusoe interact.

SETTING

Setting refers to the part which may be played by location or milieu or historical time in the design of the novel. This is most commonly a reflective or supporting role. It underlines or enhances the nature of the action or the qualities of the characters which form the substance of the novels. Setting may be a means of placing a character in society which allows scope for the action his nature is capable of, or it may generate an atmosphere which has a significant function in the plot.

It encompasses a number of different, but linked, elements: time (day or night; summer or winter; the historical period); place (inside or outside; country or city; specific town or country; real or fictional); social context (the significant cultural issues affecting a story’s setting or autorship); mood ( the undelying feeling or atmosphere produced by a story).

In simple terms, the relations between setting on the one hand and character and events on the other, may be causal, or analogical: features of the setting may be either cause and effect of how characters are and behave; or, more by way of reinforcement and symbolic congruence, a setting may be like a character or characters in some respects. While the examples above tend towards the broadly personificatory, the more conventional ‘undramatised’ settings play an important part in promoting verisimilitude and indirect characterisation.

3.5 POINT OF VIEW

Point of view refers to the way a story gets told, the mode or perspective established by the author by means of which the reader is presented with the characters, actions, setting, and events that constitute the narrative in a work of fiction.

A broad division is established between third-person and first-person narratives. In a third-person narrative, the narrator is someone outside the story proper, who refers to all the characters in the story by name, or as ‘she’, ‘he’, ‘they’. In a frst person narrative, the narrator speaks as ‘I’, and is himself participant at the story.

Third-person points of view are: the omniscient point of view ( the convention in a work of fiction that the narrator knows everything that needs to be known about the agents and the events; is free to move at will in time and place, to shift from character to character, and to report their speech and actions; and also that the narrator has privileged access to the characters’ thoughts and feelings and motives, as well as to their speech and actions. Within this mode, the narrator may be intrusive (not only reports, but freely comments on and evaluates the actions and motives of the characters, and sometimes expresses personal views about human life in general: Dickens and Hardy), or unintrusive (impersonal or objective, describes, reports, or ‘shows’ the action in dramatic scenes without introducing his own comments or judgements: Hemingway); the limited point of view ( the narrator tells the story in the third-person, but within the confines of what is experienced, thought, felt by a single character, or at the most very few characters within the story. Henry James, who refined this mode, described such a selected character as his ‘foucus’ or ‘mirror’, or ‘centre of consciousness’. Later writers developed this technique into stream-of-consciousness narration, in which we are presented with outer observations only as they impinge on the current of thought, memory, feelings, and associations, which constitute the observer’s awarness: Joyce, Virginia Wolf.

First-person points of view is consisted in that this mode naturally limits the point of view to what the first-person narrator knows, experience, infers, or can find out by talking to other characters. We distinguish between the narrative “I” who is a fortuitous witness of the matters he relates, or who is a minor or peripheral participant of the story, or who is himself or herself the central character in the story: Mark Twain, Daniel Defoe.

Robinson Crusoe is a fictional autobiography written from a first-person point of view, apparently written by an old man looking back on his life. The story also includes material from an incomplete diary, which is integrated into the novel.

3.6 STYLE

Style refers to the approach the writer takes in putting together words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. It can determine how directly the author relates the story to the reader. Style may be: simple ( it uses common words and simple sentences, even if the situation described is complex; the effect is to present facts to the reader without appealing to the reader’s emotions directly); complex ( it uses long, elaborate sentences that contain many ideas and descriptions; the writer uses lyrical passages to create the desired mood in the reader, whether it be one of joy, sadness, confusion, or any other emotion); mid-style ( it is a combination of the simple and complex styles; it can give a neutral tone to the book, or it can provide two different effects by contrast).

“In the middle of my labours it happened, that rummaging my things, I found a little bag, which as I hinted before, had been filled with corn for the feeding of poultry, not for this voyage, but before, as I suppose, when the ship came from Lisbon; what little remainder of corn had been in the bag was all devoured with the rats, and I saw nothing in the bag but husks and dust; and being willing to have the bag for some other use, I think it was to put powder in when I divided it for fear of the lightning, or some such use, I shook the husks of corn out of it on one side of my fortification underthe rock. It was a little before the great rains, just now mentioned, that I threw this stuff away taking no notice of anything, and not so much as remembering that I had thrown anything there; when about a month after, or thereabout, I saw some few stalks of something green shooting out of the ground, which I fancied might be some plantI had not seen, but I was surprisedand perfectly astonished when, after a little longer time, I saw about ten or twelve ears come out, which were perfect green barleyof the some kindas our European, nay, as our English barley. (Defoe 2001: 82)

The main aim of the writing is clearly to keep as close as possible to the mind of the narrator as he struggles to make exactly what actually happened clear to himself and us.

The final result is that the little bag takes its place with all the other objects of Crusoe’s life which have fastened themselves on our imagination: the first clay pot, the climatically inept for garments, the umbrella, the boat, the grindstone.

He concentrates his attention on the primary qualities of objects. Defoe’s prose contains a higher percentage of words of Anglo-Saxon origin than that of any other well-known English writer except Bunyan. His sentences are often long, but Defoe somehow makes this a part of his air of authenticity. The lack of strong pauses within the sentence gives his style an urgent, immediate, breathless quality. His units of meaning are so small, and their relatedness is made so clear by frequent repetition and recapitulation, that he gives the impression of perfect lucidity. The writer had been exposed to all the influences which were making prose more prosaic in the seventeenth century: to the Royal Society’s wish for a language which would help its scientific and technological aims by keeping close to the speech of middle class, using repetition rather than imagery of structural elaboration. His twenty years of journalism had taught him that it was impossible to bee too explicit for the audience which he kept continually in mind.

In the passage quoted is not only a clear description, it is also Defoe’s intention to make us accept the truth of his narrative. He admits that he cannot be absolutely certain about some details. For example he doesn’t no when and where the bag had been originally filled with corn, or what he had actually wanted the bag later.

In finding the green barley, the miracle itself reflects Defoe’s religious background and his didactic intention.

The Puritan tradition saw the whole world, and every incident of individual experience accorded to divine intervention or intention. The protagonist interprets his experience in this way, looking for signs of Grace or Reprobation in everything that happens to him.

The book is not only a travel story, but also a story with religion and morality purposes. Crusoe’s story demonstrates how God’s Providence saves an outcast who by leaving his family and forgetting his religious training has sinned against the divine will. He is well rewarded for his sins. Without them he would hardly have risen above low life to which he had been born, and become a wealthy merchant, plantation owner, slave treader, and colonizer.

Defoe’s natural prose style is not only an admirable narrative vehicle in itself, it is also much closer to the ordinary person life than any previous writer, admirably adapted to the tongue of Robinson Crusoe.

The writer never admits that he wrote fiction. It is typical of him that his greatest success, Robinson Crusoe, is prefaced with a statement that it is just a histoy of fact. This claim to hisorical truth is false. Although Defoe took a good deal from the accounts of Alexander Selkirk and other castaways, the story and the character of Robinson Crusoe are Defoe’s invention. But the narrative is presented with so much circumstantial detail that the reader doaes not think of the book as fiction.

Daniel Defoe possesses the unusual power of giving verisimilitude and vividness to his fiction. The value of the novel lies particularly in this faithful description of the characters and natural setting proper for what is called atmosphere. The book is appreciated for the manner in which it discloses the specific English character of the age and the way it is made alive for the reader. The moral integrity of Crusoe spreads an atmosphere of naturalness and credibility all over the story. The style is simple, precise, the general mental vision spreads a cold, meditative and sad perspective of great dramatic impact. It is an attitude towards life typical of a man of the Enlightenment.

3.7 SYMBOLISM

Many novels have two layers of meaning: the literal plot and a symbolic layer in which images and objects represent abstract ideas and feelings.

Using symbols allows authors to clarify a theme and express themselves indirectly on delicate or controversial matters. Symbols can be anything from a single object, a place, a repeated type of object, a gesture, a colour, a sound, a piece of music, poetry.

CHAPTER IV

DANIEL DEFOE AND JONATHAN SWIFT’S ALLEGORIES

An allegory is when characters or events in a work of fiction represent something from reality, such as actual people, places, events, or even ideas.

Defoe claimed in the Serious Reflections that Robinson Crusoe was in part an allegory of his own life, but attempts to connect details in the book with specific experiences in the life of Defoe have not been found convincing. Yet, his plea has a certain essential truth. The author tends to identify himself with his protagonists and most fully perhaps with Crusoe. His own life, too, had been one of solitary and heroic achievement against great odds.

It is quite possible that the symbolism is by no means a part of Defoe’s intention. As his imagination warmed to its task, the story began to take on its symbolic overtones, and his later comment is merely an attempt to defend himself against the charges of trying to pass off fiction as fact. Allegory seems to have been always in accordance to the Puritan mind as a legitimate province in which the imagination might exercise itself. Defoe can hardly have been unaffected by the forces that shaped Bunyan and that accounted for the continued popularity of his allegories. It is perhaps surprising that in view of his background we do not find more evidences of allegory in the work of Defoe. Robinson Crusoe is far more than the account of a practical man’s adjustment to life on a deserted island. Side by side with Crusoe’s physical conquest of nature is his struggle to conquer himself and to find God. Despite repeated signs and warnings, Crusoe only gradually awakens to the necessity for salvation, and it is not until in his illness he stumbles to the tobacco box and comes upon the Bible that he crosses the hump. The final stage is his realization that his deliverance from the island is unimportant in comparison with his deliverance from sin through the mercy of God.

Now I began to construe the words mentioned above, Call on me, and I will deliver you, in a different sense from what I had ever done before; for then I had no notion of any thing being call’d deliverance, but my being deliver’d from the captivity I was in; … but not I learn’d to take it in another sense. Now I look’d back upon my past life with such horrour, and my sins appear’d so dreadful, that my soul sought nothing of God but deliverance from the load of guilt that bore down all my comfort: as for my solitary life, it was nothing; I did not so much pray to be deliver’d from it, or think of it; it was all of no consideration in comparison to this. (Defoe 2001:96)

His mind is essentially at peace, and the remainder of his autobiography is in the nature of an account of the rewards and powers of the man who has been saved. Although Defoe’s Christianity is at times fairly materialistic, the account of Crusoe’s conversion has a peculiar force and intensity to it that tempts one into believing it of some greater than ordinary personal significance to Defoe. As soon as Crusoe gets back to Europe, he sheds his Christianity like an old cloak and pursues his complacent way with expressions of gratitude to his Creator and Preserver.

Some of the details of Crusoe’s struggle with nature seem to symbolize his spiritual quest, though perhaps not intentionally on the part of Defoe. The main outline of Crusoe’s story lends itself readily to allegorization. By no means all the details of the novel are allegorical. The geography of the island is conceived in moral terms. The side of the island on which Crusoe lands and where he establishes his “home,” as he calls it, although it affords a better prospect of the ocean, is less favored naturally than the other side that he explores later and where he builds his “bower.” The latter yields not only a greater variety of fruits, aloes, limes, wild sugar cane, grapes, but a more numerous fauna. Goats abound in the rich meadow, also hares and fox-like creatures, and on the shore a great profusion of turtles, which are something of a rarity on the other side of the island. Crusoe is tempted to move, but decides against it, wisely, as it turns out. The shore where the turtles can be found is the one where the cannibals are accustomed to land for their inhuman feasts. Also, the richness proves to be largely illusory. Crusoe doesn’t dare eat the grapes until dried, for fear of flux.A batch he gathers and leaves overnight are “trod to pieces” and spread about by some “wild creatures”. The goats, though more numerous, are harder to catch because of lack of cover. In a curious passage in his second trip he describes descending into a large wooded valley where he becomes lost for several days in the forests and in a haze that springs up. It is difficult not to sense allegory at work behind all this. Turtle, as in Pope and Fielding, is a symbol of luxurious living. The grapes are harder to fix, though there may be Biblical overtones here.

Since these experiences happen to Crusoe on his two exploratory trips shortly after his conversion, the thither side of the island becomes to him, like Egypt to the Israelites on the march to Canaan, a temptation to be resisted. Fundamentally, the temptation to move is an appeal to a species of pride, not to remain where he had been cast up by divine Providence, but to go whoring after false gods. When it comes to attempting to escape from the island entirely, however, which presumably he must not do until a sign has been given, Crusoe shows that he is not proof against this sin. In his first effort, pride acts to blind his reason.

Generally, the symbolism is built around the conversion. Crusoe sheds tears at the realization that the stalks are “perfect green barley,” and for the first time begins to reflect seriously on God’s providence. Clearly, they are the seeds of grace stirring in his heart and sending forth their first tender sprouts. Similarly, Crusoe’s ultimate success in fashioning an earthen pot after certain false starts is analogous to his ultimate success in attaining a spiritual goal. In a sense Crusoe is the pot himself. Several times he has been brought to the fire, but nothing had come of it. Tthe goatskin clothes he makes after his old ones wear out may be the new armor of faith, and the elaborate system of defense that Crusoe establishes on the island may suggest the invulnerability of the true believer.

In Gulliver’s Travels, and especially in Part I, many of the things Gulliver experiences can be linked to actual historical events of Swift’s time. The religious and political controversy between the Big Enders and Little Enders corresponds to actual conflicts between Protestants and Catholics that led to several wars. Lilliput stands for England, while Blefuscu stands for England’s longtime enemy, France. The two-faced Treasurer Flimnap corresponds to the Whig leader Sir Robert Walpole, while the Empress’s outrage at Gulliver’s extinguishing a palace fire with his urine mirrors the complaints Queen Anne had about Swift’s “vulgar” writings.

When Swift was writing Gulliver’s Travels in the 1720s, England was undergoing a lot of political shuffling. George I, a Hanoverian prince of Germany, had ascended the British throne in 1714 after the death of Queen Anne ended the Stuart line. He was not a bad or repressive king, but he was unpopular. King George had gained his throne with the assistance of the Whig party, and his Whig ministers subsequently used their considerable gains in power to oppress members of the opposition Tory party. Swift had been a Tory since 1710, and bitterly resented the Whig actions against his friends, who often faced exile or worse. Understanding how events in Europe and England led to this political rivalry can help the reader of Swift’s novel better understand his satire.

The Restoration era began in 1660, a few years before Swift was born. At this time Charles Stuart became king of England, restoring the Protestant Stuart family to the throne. He supported a strong Church of England, also known as the Anglican Church. He was supported by the Tories, a political party made up mostly of church officials and landowning noblemen. Protestants who did not support the Anglican Church teamed with Roman Catholics to form the opposing Whig party. The main source of contention between the parties was the Test Act of 1673, which forced all government employees to receive communion according to the Anglican Church’s customs. In effect, this prevented non-Anglicans from holding government jobs. Swift himself supported the act, and even switched from Whig to Tory in 1710 because he believed a strong Church of England was necessary to keep the balance of power in the government. He felt that institutions such as the church and government had to be strong in order to rein in people’s tendency toward chaos and sin. He explored this idea in Gulliver’s Travels. Over the years, however, Swift came to believe the Tories were as much to blame as the Whigs for engaging in partisan politics, locking horns over minor issues and bringing the government to a stalemate. Whenever one party was in favor with the reigning king and in power in the Parliament, it attacked the other party, exiling and imprisoning the opposition’s members. Swift satirized their selfish and petty politics in Part I of Gulliver’s Travels, where the Lilliputian heir (who represented George II, the future king of England) has to hobble about with one short heel and one high as a compromise between the two parties that wear different heights of heels.

Charles II’s brother King James II, a Catholic, came to the British throne in 1685. He immediately repealed the Test Act and began to hire Whigs for his government. The Anglican-dominated Parliament secretly negotiated with William of Orange, the Protestant Dutch husband of James’s Protestant daughter Mary, to take over the throne. In December 1688, William did so, and James II fled to France without a fight. This was called the Glorious Revolution because no one was killed in the coup.

Soon after King William III and Queen Mary II came to power, the Catholic Louis XIV of France declared war on Spain over trade and religious issues. William entered the war on the side of Spain, a war the English called William’s War. This conflict was satirized by Swift in the war between the Lilliputians (England) and Blefuscudians (England with the Spanish, Dutch, and Germans as allies) was fighting France, it was also warring with Ireland. Irish Catholics wanted freedom from British rule, and England feared that France could invade their country through a sympathetic Ireland. Peace came about in 1697, but England got almost none of the spoils of war, land in Spain. In order to appear strong, William declared war again, this time on the Spanish and the French. This began the War of Spanish Succession.

In 1702 William died and his daughter Queen Anne ascended the throne. The war waged on while at home the Whigs and Tories fought amongst themselves. Many of the Whigs were merchants who were profiting from the war, and they wanted the fighting to continue. The landowning Tories wanted the war to cease, because it devalued their property. Swift helped the Tories in their efforts to stop the war by becoming editor of their newspaper, the Examiner. His influential writings, along with his friend Bolingbroke’s secret negotiations with France, helped end the war in 1713 with the Treaty of Utrecht. Queen Anne seemed ungrateful for these efforts, as she later exiled Bolingbroke and destroyed Swift’s chances of a career in the Church of England. Swift was forced to return to Ireland to find a job as an Anglican priest.

Intellectuals, philosophers, and scientists such as John Locke, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton were opening the doors to exploration in many fields, asking new questions, and experimenting. They discarded the old idea that man is by nature sinful because of Adam and Eve’s fall from grace in the Garden of Eden. Man’s ability to reason, they claimed, could save him from his tendency to sin. Man could create a utopia, or perfect society, that solved the problems of humankind. Swift vehemently disagreed. He felt that reason could just as easily be misused for foolish or selfish purposes as good ones, and man could never rise above the tendency toward sin to be able to create utopia on earth. His satire of the folly of Enlightenment scientific and theological musings and experiments in Part III of Gulliver’s Travels is followed by his portrayal of a utopian society, the Houyhnhnm’s, into which man can never fit.

The idea of a perfect society, with institutions such as government, school, and churches that are flawless in design, began with the ancient Greeks and was explored by Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). Many writers before and since Jonathan Swift have toyed with the idea of utopia, and some contemporary writers have even written novels about anti-utopias (properly known as dystopias), in which utopian visions have gone terribly wrong. For example, George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Both of these authors were fans of Gulliver’s Travels. Gulliver finds a near-utopia in the land of Brobdingnag, where war and oppression are unheard of. In this section, Swift incorporated many of the ideas of the social engineers of his day. Swift’s impatience with utopian theories is also evident, however. Because the Brobdingnagians are humanlike, their utopia is not completely perfect. They can be insensitive, treating Gulliver as some sort of pet or toy, and their society includes poor beggars. In Luggnagg, Gulliver is told of a race of men who are immortal, and he imagines that their wisdom must be great, making their society wellordered and their people happy and content. Unfortunately, everlasting life does not combat the effects of old age, and the immortals are objects of pity and disgust. Swift comes close to creating a perfect utopia with the Houyhnhnm, but suggests that man can never really fit in a perfect society, because he is by his nature flawed. Therefore, he can only strive for the ideal, and never reach it. The Brobdingnagian society is imperfect, but the people are wise and humane. While the Houyhnhnm society does not have grief, lying or deceit, greed or lust, ambition or opinion, it also doesn’t have love as we know it. All the Houyhnhnm love each other equally. They chose their mates according to genetics rather than love or passion, and they raise their children communally, because they love all the children equally. Gulliver wants to rise above the human condition and be a Houyhnhnm, but Swift implies that this is neither possible nor necessarily desirable.

When I thought of my Family, my Friends, my Countrymen, or human Race in general, I considered them as they really were, Yahoos in shape and Disposition, perhaps a little bit more civilized, and qualified with the Gift of Speech; but making no other Use of Reason, than to improve and multiply those Vices, whereof their Brethren in this Country had only the Share that Nature allotted them. When I happened to behold the Reflection of my own Form in a Lake or Fountain, I turned away my Face in Horror and detestation of my self; and could better endure the Sight of a common Yahoo, than of my own Person. By conversing with the Houyhnhnms, and looking upon them with Delight, I fell to imitate their Gait and Gesture, which is now grown into a Habit; and my Friends often tell me in a blunt Way, that I “trot like a Horse”; which, however, I take for a great Compliment: Neither shall I disown, that in speaking I am apt to fall into the Voice and manner of the Houyhnhnms, and hear my self ridiculed on that account without the least Mortification. (Swift 2000: 183)

The Houyhnhnms also have difficulty distinguishing Gulliver from the Yahoos, however. In spite of his best efforts to learn to be like the Houyhnhnms, they eventually find Gulliver too much like a Yahoo and sentence him to exile. Devastated, Gulliver builds a boat and sets sail. Long after his rescue by a Portuguese ship and return home, Gulliver consistently expresses his deep hatred for humanity, whom he calls Yahoos. Part IV concludes with Gulliver very slowly learning to accept his wife, his family, and other humans again, but still full of self-hatred and misanthropy.

The books have long appealed to both the young and older reader. Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’sTravels, though are diverse, they coincide the scene of submissinon. Lemuel Gulliver’s ceremonial prostration to his Houyhnhnm master parallels Friday’s manners of gratitude to Robinson Crusoe. Through their submission to their respective masters, the Horse Master and Master Crusoe aknowledge Gulliver’s and Friday’s servitude. No matter how much Friday follows his master in the colonizer’s dressing and language, “tawny” skin and “broken English” are to be remarked. Crusoe’s caricaturizing of Friday’s colonial semblance subjects the master/slave duo. Comparable with Crusoe, The Horse Master considers Gulliver a “perfect” and “exact” Yahoo, in spite of Gulliver’s “civility” and “cleanliness” and his “prodigy” for language acquisition which distinguishes him from the Yahoos.

The infiltration of colonial and racial elements associates these two literary texts together. On the historical level, Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels, as historical referents, mark the impossibility of crossing racial boundaries in literature during the early eighteenth century. On the literary level, inculcating Friday and Gulliver politically and culturally institutionalizes racism and colonialism in early eighteenth-century English literature.

ABOUT THE WRITER

Daniel Defoe was born in 1660, in London. He was originally christened Daniel Foe, changing his name around the age of thirty-five to sound more aristocratic. Defoe was a third child, like his character Robinson Crusoe. James and Mary Foe, his mother and father, were Presbyterian dissenters. James Foe was a middle-class wax and candle merchant. As a boy, Daniel witnessed two of the greatest disasters of the seventeenth century: a recurrence

of the plague and the Great Fire of London in 1666. These events may have shaped his fascination with catastrophes and survival in his writing. Defoe attended a respected school in Dorking, where he was an excellent student, but as a Presbyterian, he was forbidden to attend Oxford or Cambridge. He entered a dissenting institution called Morton’s Academy and considered becoming a Presbyterian minister. Though he abandoned this plan, his

Protestant values endured throughout his life despite discrimination and persecution, and these values are expressed in Robinson Crusoe. In 1683, Defoe became a traveling hosiery salesman. Visiting Holland, France, and Spain on business, Defoe developed a taste for travel that lasted throughout his life. His fiction reflects this interest; his characters Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe both change their lives by voyaging far from their

native England. Defoe became successful as a merchant, establishing his headquarters in a high-class neighborhood of London. A year after starting up his business, he married an heiress named Mary Tuffley, who brought him the sizeable fortune of 3,700 pounds as dowry. A fervent critic of King James II, Defoe became affiliated with the supporters of the duke of Monmouth, who led a rebellion against the king in 1685. When the rebellion failed, Defoe was essentially forced out of England, and he spent three years in Europe writing tracts against James II. When the king was deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and replaced by William of Orange, Defoe was able to return to England and to his business. Unfortunately, Defoe did not have the same financial success as previously, and by 1692 he was

bankrupt, having accumulated the huge sum of 17,000 pounds in debts. Though he eventually paid off most of the total, he was never again entirely free from debt, and the theme of financial vicissitudes, the wild ups and downs in one’s pocketbook, became a prominent theme in his later novels. Robinson Crusoe contains many reflections about the value of money. Around this time, Defoe began to write, partly as a moneymaking venture. One of his first creations was a poem written in 1701, entitled “The True-Born Englishman,” which became popular and earned Defoe some celebrity. He also wrote political pamphlets. One of these, The Shortest Way with Dissenters, was a satire on persecutors of dissenters and sold well among the ruling Anglican elite until they realized that it was mocking their own practices. As a result, Defoe was publicly pilloried, his hands and wrists locked in a wooden device, in 1703, and jailed in Newgate Prison. During this time his business failed. Released through the intervention of Robert Harley, a Tory minister and Speaker of Parliament, Defoe

worked as a publicist, political journalist, and pamphleteer for Harley and other politicians. He also worked as a spy, reveling in aliases and disguises, reflecting his own variable identity as merchant, poet, journalist, and prisoner. This theme of changeable identity would later be expressed in the life of Robinson Crusoe, who becomes merchant, slave, plantation owner, and even unofficial king. In his writing, Defoe often used a pseudonym simply because he enjoyed the effect. He was incredibly productive as a writer, turning out over 500 books and pamphlets during his life.

The Defoe that is known to the modern reader is the Defoe of the five years, 1719-1724, the man who between his sixtieth year, and his sixty-fifth wrote the three parts of Robinson Crusoe, The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Duncan Campbell, Memoirs of a Cavalier, The Life, Adventures, and Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, A Journal of the Plague Year, The History and Remarkable Life of the Truly Honorable Colonel Jacque, Commonly Called Col. Jack, The Fortunate Mistress, or, as the title is often given, Roxana, and A New Voyage round the World. Of these eleven volumes, the third part of Robinson Crusoe, has more or less dropped out of side. The first and second parts of Robinson Crusoe have attained world-wide fame, the rest vary considerably in reputation and in the number of readers secured, but all of them have been warmly praised by admirers. At least one, A Journal of the Plague Year, has been generally accepted as an English classic, one, Captain Singleton, has been latterly been regarded by some readers as one of the best stories of adventure extant, and one, Moll Flanders, has been praised by competent critics, native and foreign, as a masterpiece of realistic fiction. During these years Defoe’s bibliography must be credited with his interesting and valuable Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, appeared in 1724.

It is clear that, as soon Defoe found that Robinson Crusoe was selling rapidly, he added to it a sequel, and then for four years supplied the readers with the stories enumerated, with a miscellaneous character, topographical, occult, sociological, economic, being also a pamphleteer. In short, the twelve years between the appearance of Robinson Crusoe, in April, 1719, and the death in April, 1731, may be regarded as one of the most remarkably fertile periods ever known in the biography of an aging man of genius.