Letteratura inglese 1

THE ISLAND

1. Providence casts Robinson onto a situation of penance that at first he curses;
2. Isolated life allows him to discover his sinfulness and acknowledge God's providential protection from a sinful life;
3. With only the Bible to rely on, he comes to understand his guilt and builds a new virtuous life.

Leaving in a corrupt civilization, man has an innate ability to distinguish between good and evil, is religious by nature and can redeem himself through utter isolation brought about by a sudden shock or providential event.

The paradox of isolated life as collective moral of a conquering race.

Isolation as moralising metaphor has emerged among a people who think of themselves as apart and as naturally good. Robinson's story could not have arisen among cultures inclined to consider the individual as

part of the whole. The task of digging an abyss between a corrupted civilized society and the noble individual fell to writers of a Protestant spirit, who were obsessed with their moralizing mission and who sought within man the innate foundations of a good life, away from any institutions.

• Robinson's desert island paradoxically stands for the centrifugal aspiration of a conquering people: a race of sailors and colonizers.
• This type of 'island life' requires aggressiveness towards anything and anybody that differs from the 'good self'. Robinson's relation to Nature and people is one-directional; he sees the world for his exclusive use and exploitation and Providence is always on his side.

It's a world without love: no empathy, no reciprocal relationship, no respect for nature.

Robinson's self-examination is a blind exercise as he really understands nothing of himself and his actual situation. He's a hopeless.

1. He never doubts the rightness of his purposes and projects which he tries hard to fulfil (the only side of him that we sympathise with!)
2. He lives in a world of endless cruelty, of struggle of all against all, in which he finally thinks that he deservedly wins because God is on his side.

Saving doubts: the novel questions Robinson's narration and ideas by giving us the chance to know the reality, how?

1. Constant hints at Robinson's unreliability as narrator and his need to write his story to 'compose' his crazed mind
2. The author's presence is increasingly evident through 'giant marks' that Robinson cannot understand
3. The reality of the island is described:

• impossible facts making us doubt about his situation (e.g., 'green barley', 'wild sugar cane' miraculously appearing!)
• descriptions of Nature (the tides, the seasons, Trinidad)

of native inhabitants' knowledge and culture (e.g., canoe, barbecue, use of tobacco and rum as a cure)

Readings from 'Part II':

• How the story is composed
• Happy life, ink finishing, and a sense of threat and confusion emerge
• The gigantic footprint, fear, end of industry and faith, feeling discomposed but
• gradually recomposing order on the isle by saving people and gaining their gratefulness, loyalty and obedience.

A story of desire and fulfilment at all costs: focus on 'Part II - Settling down' and 'Part III - Returns'

desire, fulfilment, and returns Defoe is telling us the story of 'Robinson's' desire to conquer a marketplace and to live by it:

• Robinson's apparent satisfaction with island life and his actual desire to possess and rule over a productive society, and to leave
• Robinson competing to be the sole owner of the island and to have slaves and subjects

to work in it without bloodshed• Robinson’s ‘return’ and his dream come true: back to Britain he discovers◆ that his Brazilian plantations have made him enormously wealthy; back to theisland he will develop it into a thriving plantation, to be narrated in a newbook!

And what is the first and constantly acting cause of the Slave-trade? That cause, by➔ which it exists and deprived of which it would immediately cease? It is notself-evidently the consumption of its products? And does not then the guilt rest on theconsumers? Think not of the slave captains and slaveholders!

If one half only of the Petitioners, instead of bustling about with ostentatious◆ sensibility, were to leave off—not all the West-India commodities—but onlySugar and Rum, the one useless and the other pernicious—all this miserymight be stopped. Gracious Heaven! At your meals you rise up, and pressingyour hands to your bosoms, you lift up your eyes to God, and say, “O

"Lord! bless the food which thou hast given us!" A part of that food among most of you, is sweetened with Brother's Blood. "Lord! bless the food which thou hast given us?" O Blasphemy! Did God give food mingled with the blood of the Murdered? Will God bless the food which is polluted with the Blood of his own innocent children? 'Part I' - cartographic and political details relating to the slave trade what do the novel's cartographic details and references to the slave trade tell Defoe's contemporary reader? The novel's references to the slave trade and what they told Defoe's contemporary reader:

• When the novel was written (1719) Robinson's sea voyages to Guinea reflected Britain's new involvement in the slave trade: the government had secured the asiento with Spain in 1713, which granted Britain monopoly over the shipping and selling of enslaved Africans in Spanish colonies in South America for thirty

Travel books as source of the novel's cartographic precision

• The island is then an allegory of commercial redemption based on 'virtuous➔ colonialism' founded, for Defoe, on more ethically acceptable terms. The islandcore-part of the novel represents this new colonial order based on settlement,cultivation, and exploitation, paired with a civilizing mission. If young Crusoe theGuniea trader cared about the labour force deriving from enslaved Africans, Crusoethe mature settler fulfils a civilizing mission [!].
• 'Part 3 – Returns' (to Britain and to the island)
  • The shipwreck signifying a break between a 'corrupted and a redeemed' form of➔ colonialism is yet fiction:
  • Europe's wealth still relies on enslavement and forced labour:
  • For a moment, in the final section of the novel, Robinson seems to have realized and➔ his overcome by this tragic reality, but then continues to

Navigate his immoral world.

However, what about Defoe? Why does he make the reader face the tragic and seemingly inescapable horror?

The early 18th-century novel is structurally entangled in travel writing, necessary for describing the meaning of Englishness as colonizing expansion and national consolidation.

Robinson is the prototype of the new Briton, the proactive individual pursuing profit, the world controlled by his commoditizing enterprise.

What about Gulliver?

Gulliver's Travels a mock travel book: why and how playing with fiction & reality?

• Examples from GT
• What's wrong with travel books?
• Telling which truth about the society, Gulliver and Swift?

By the end of the book, Gulliver explicitly criticizes travel writing.

What's wrong with travel books?