Letteratura Inglese II The Eighteenth Century, The Romantics, The Victorians, The Early Twentieth Century

Daniel Defoe (1660 – 1731)

Daniel Defoe was an English trader, writer, journalist, pamphleteer, and spy. He is most famous for his novel Robinson Crusoe, which is second only to the Bible in its number of translations. In the 18^th century, there are many nursery writings (stories for children): songs and poems based on the story of Robinson.

Robinson Crusoe

The novel was written 300 years ago in 1719 and, because he was a journalist, the novel was written in a journalistic style, very easy to understand. It is also a novel that can be part of western imagination: the desert island theme is popular in western literature.

Robinsonades

The term robinsonades refers to stories that tell of a man or a group of people ending up on a desert island trying to survive (all the novels that are based on Robinson one). Robinson Crusoe and "robinsonades" share plot elements with William Shakespeare's The Tempest, but the story emphasis and message are markedly different. Before Robinson Crusoe, in 1611, William Shakespeare wrote The Tempest.

William Shakespeare and Daniel Defoe both center their stories, in part, on slavery. Starting from a chapbook song version of the late 18^th century ("Oh, Poor Robinson Crusoe") and its related nursery rhyme.

Influence and Adaptations

• 1812 - The Swiss Family Robinson – David Wyss
• 1842 - Mastermind Ready – Fredrick Maryatt
• 1857 - The Coral Island – Robert Ballantyne
• 1954 - The Lord of the Flies – William Golding
• 2001 - Life of Pi – Yann Martel

Movies

• 1927 Silent
• 1954 Luis Brunel
• 1997 Pierce Brosnan
• 2000 The Castaway – Tom Hanks

Chapbooks

A chapbook is a cheap publication of popular literature for poor people and it was printed on one big sheet of paper (folded into books from 8 to 32 pages). The tradition of chapbooks arose in the 16^th century, as soon as printed books became affordable, and rose to its height during the 17^th and 18^th centuries. In the 18^th century, there is the first chapbook version of Robinson Crusoe and to show the popularity of this novel, throughout all that century, there are 150 more chapbook versions.

Background and Themes

Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe in 1719. Because he was a journalist, the novel has a journalistic style (very direct) so it is very easy to understand. His father was a trader, producing candles. The Defoe family was very religious: they were puritans and, in particular, they believed in Scottish Calvinism, emphasizing predestination.

The novel deals with many religious themes. There is a sense of responsibility and duty. If you have success in life, that is a sign that you are predestined to go to heaven: it’s a religion based on action and duty. They belong to a puritan merchant middle class and they are involved in international trade during the time of the colonial period.

Plot Overview

The plot centers around a man shipwrecked on a desert island. Robinson Kreutznaer, anglicized Crusoe, was born in York in 1632 of a German father and English mother. At the age of nineteen, he decided to travel around the world to make his fortune, and during one voyage, he is shipwrecked on a desert island where he must remain for twenty-eight years. He spends twelve years alone and subsequently saves a native from cannibals. This native, called Friday by Robinson because he met him on that day, became his slave. After twenty-eight years, Robinson returns to his country and becomes a governor.

The story is narrated in the first person and reported in diary form. The characters are ordinary men and women with ordinary names to give more realism to the story. Robinson Crusoe was the personification of the readers of those times: practical-minded, resourceful, religious, and mainly concerned with the basic needs of life. Even in his isolation, the protagonist tries to re-create the material and moral civilization. He establishes his supremacy over Friday, forcing him to use his own language and to convert to his own religion. Moreover, he considers Friday his slave and does not show the least consideration or respect for Friday’s own culture.

The Island

The setting of most of the story, the island, is the ideal place for Robinson to prove his qualities: he organizes a primitive empire, thus becoming the prototype of the English colonizer; his stay on the island is not seen as a return to Nature, but a chance to exploit and dominate Nature.

The New Middle-Class Hero

The new hero belongs to the middle class. What Robinson has in common with the classical heroes of travel literature is his restlessness, the search for his own identity in alternative to the model provided by his father. Actually, the story begins with an act of transgression, of disobedience, which places the character in a situation of separation that will culminate with his isolation on the island after the shipwreck. There is always something strange in novels. Here we see how Robinson is dressed: he is at the tropical and he is wearing winter clothes.

Theme of Slavery

At the beginning of the novel, he becomes a prisoner and a slave and he manages to escape one day with one of his fellows’ slaves. He then sells his friend as a slave. He went then to South America, to Brazil, and he starts working a plantation and he owns slaves to work on the plantation. He was asked to go to Africa to take more slaves for the plantation. Here he becomes a slave trader.

When Crusoe heads to Africa, it is to purchase slaves. He himself becomes a slave and then soon becomes a slave owner. When he became shipwrecked, he only desired a friend. He accepts slavery and then his new friend ends up being a slave.

In the puritan tradition, there is the idea that if you are a slave you have to work hard for freedom, you are responsible for your own position in society. If you work hard enough to get free, you will be free. It’s incorrect to assume that Robinson has the same idea as Defoe. The crucial event in the novel is when the ship sinks. This is the moment when he went to Africa to take slaves. He was punished for this by God, and he ends up on an island, alone, for 28 years.

Inspiration and Allegory

The story was not invented by Daniel Defoe. Alexander Selkirk (1676 – 1721) was a Scottish privateer and Royal Navy officer who spent four years and four months as a castaway (1704–1709) after being marooned by his captain on an uninhabited island in the South Pacific Ocean. He had to spend 4 years on an island after a shipwreck. By the time he was eventually rescued by English captain Woodes Rogers, who took him back to England. In 1712, Rogers wrote The Cruising Voyage Round the World. His story of survival was widely publicized after his return to England, becoming a source of inspiration for writer Daniel Defoe's fictional character Robinson Crusoe.

The Value of Money and Religion

The value of money is really important for both Robinson Crusoe and Daniel Defoe. The novel is not only an adventure. There are many possible ways to read the novel: (a) adventure, (b) religious.

We watched brief key passages in Bunuel's 1954 movie (Robinson discovering he is in possession of a Bible), Rod Hardy's 1997 movie with Pierce Brosnan (cannibals), and in the Robinsonade The Castaway (lighting a fire).

Adventure

By definition, the adventure genre is dominated by danger, action, risks, and excitement. They take place in unusual settings unlike that which people encounter every day. The action is fast-paced and extraordinary compared to daily life. The adventure begins with the wreck of Crusoe's ship and his immediate action to salvage materials that he can use to survive. He suddenly saw a footprint on the sand and he is scared. He is afraid of other people, after spending many years alone (his companion becomes the beetles, which Robinson speaks to, and feeds them. He is very satisfied by doing that or the ball).

The others are cannibals, they want to eat you, so you have to defend yourself. He wants to kill them all (because they are “men-eaters”) but then he regrets his thought. In the novel, the topic of violence plays an interesting role. Violence is used for action and suspense, and it also poses dilemmas for the protagonist, which allows for the exploration and development of his character. One significant episode of violence, which contributes to the development of Crusoe as a character, is implied upon Crusoe’s discovery of the Cannibal feast, to which he reacts with horror and outrage.

The Preface

If ever the story of any private man’s adventures in the world were worth making public, and were acceptable when published, the Editor of this Account thinks this will be so. The wonders of this Man’s Life exceed all that (he thinks) is to be found extant; the life of one man being scarce capable of a greater variety.

The story is told with modesty, with seriousness, and with a religious application of events to the uses to which wise men always apply them to the instruction of others by this example, and to justify and honor Providence in all the variety of our circumstances, let them happen how they will. The Editor believes the thing to be a just history of fact; neither is there any appearance of fiction in it: And however thinks, because all such things are dispatched, that the improvement of it, as well as the diversion, as to the instruction of the reader, will be the same; and as such he thinks, without further compliment to the world, he does them a great service in the publication. This is a great story to make public. The story is told in modesty is a religious teach.

Very short preface and what emerges is an emphasis on instruction, religion, and providence. These are the main purposes of the novel.

“Serious reflections during the life and surprising adventures of Robinson Crusoe, with his vision of the angelic world…” written by himself. It is interesting how, immediately after writing Robinson Crusoe, one year later, he published this book. It is a serious book, it has religious importance. There is a spiritual value in the novel.

Religion

Kreutznaer = Crusoe cross/near = close to Christ. He is running away from home. He didn’t ask for any blessing, not God’s blessing or his father’s blessing. The two are on the same level. He is against his father, and his father is a symbol of God. He is against religion.

Spiritual (auto) biography: it’s very concerned with being saved. There is a constant search for signs of God. Constant struggle between the good and the evil.

If we look at the structure of the spiritual biography we always start with “sin”.

• Sin: he is not obeying anyone, he makes decisions
• Warning from God: God says that you are going to sin (God suggests to him to stay in England)
• Ignore warnings: Robinson doesn’t listen to him (and he becomes a slave)
• Hardening against God
• Saving grace from God, God is still with you
• Repentance (when he was about to die)
• Conversion of soul (faith)
• Salvation

Conversion

For years, he prayed to God for a friend because he feels alone, and God sends him Friday. But Robinson doesn’t understand that this was a gift. When he met, for the first time, the cannibal he wants to kill them all, but he stops. It was not his duty, but God’s one. God has to punish them. The second time he shoots them with no hesitation. This is typical of Robinson Crusoe: it comes to a resolution decision but then there is a relapse, he goes back to previous decisions.

At the end of the novel, he comes back to Europe. They end up in Portugal. The strange thing is that he is afraid to embark with the ship the last little piece that separates him from England. He has just sailed from South America to Portugal and now he is afraid? He wants to go by land. Friday saved Robinson in Europe. The slave is saving the master, as Robinson did with him.

Allegorical Meaning

Spiritual shipwreck. Spiritual disease. Cloth of faith. Seeds of grace. Dominion, power, tyranny. Everything is linked to colonies. Robinson (as the colonials) takes possession.

Octave Manoni wrote about colonization. He is a psychologist, he speaks about ‘misanthropic neurosis’. According to Manoni, the colonial suffers from this misanthropic neurosis. The personality of the colonial (Robinson Crusoe) is not made up of characteristics that he acquired by the experience in the colonies. The colonial mind is untouched by the colonial experience. The colonial is characterized by features which are already repressed in the European psyche. There is already something inside the colonial which comes out when they go to colonies. This is the neurosis which he talks about. It is a mental disease which colonial already has before leaving colonies. He says that there are basically two people: Europeans that go to the colonies: those who change and those who do not change and bring out mental repression. Those that change are those that interact with people of the colonies and do not behave in the colonial way.

But those who have repressed neurosis will bring out something in the colonies that they will never bring out in Europe. These neuroses are formed in infancy, that are already present since they were children.

‘He is much less unhappy when he is absolutely alone than when he is afraid he may not be’: man is afraid because he is alone and his fear is fear of a man, of somebody who will interrupt his loneliness. Fear of solitude is fear of intrusion upon that solitude. There is in the child some trait which is partly misanthropic, or at any rate anti-social.

Manoni explains that in all children there is an empty social state. That child is the center of the world, everything has to turn around the child and everything that is outside is seen as an intrusion. It is normal when you are a child, not normal when you grow up and become an adult and you think that you are the center of the world. Some people never grow up. And this is what makes the idea of the desert island so attractive.

Examples: Caliban and Prospero, characters of ‘The Tempest’ by Shakespeare. There is a lot of parallelism between Prospero and Robinson and Caliban and Friday. ‘Some of the semi-human creatures the unconscious creates, such as Caliban [...], reveal their creator's desire to denigrate the whole of mankind. Others are a compound of the bad creatures on whom the child projects his own desire to be naughty.

He is talking about children and that they can create in their mind their own world, their own fantasy world like fairies, monsters. And the attraction of this creation in the child’s mind is that if the world is empty from human beings, it can be filled with creatures of imagination: Calypso, Ariel, Friday. But if we are to achieve a complete and adult personality it is essential that we should make the images of the unconscious tally, more or less, with real people; flight into solitude shows that we have failed to do so ...’

Robinson Crusoe has never grown up, he is still in that infant state. This is ‘resulting usually from a grave lack of sociability combined with a pathological urge to dominate.’ This is the perfect description of Robinson on the island. Therefore ‘The colonial's personality is wholly unaffected by that of the native of the colony to which he goes’: it means that there is no interaction. And this is what happens when Friday comes to the island of Robinson Crusoe. 'What the colonial in common with Prospero lacks, is awareness of the world of Others, a world in which Others have to be respected'. Robinson doesn’t mind about his identity, language, or culture.

'This is the world from which the colonial has fled because he cannot accept men as they are. Rejection of that world is combined with an urge to dominate, an urge which is infantile in origin and which social adaptation has failed to discipline.'

'What is resented in Caliban is not really his physical appearance [...] but that he should claim to be a person in his own right and from time to time show that he has a will of his own.'

Friday on the island seems not to exist. No name, no religion, no language. It also seems Defoe is teaching Robinson a lesson when he goes back to Europe and Friday saves Robinson. As Friday is a person of his own and he is able to make decisions.

'In other words, we are perfectly happy if we can project the fantasies of our own unconscious onto the outside world, but if we suddenly find that these creatures are not pure projections but real beings with claims to liberty, we consider it outrageous.' When we are children or when we are colonials and never grown up. Dominating the others with no granted liberty.

Adults and repression of sexuality. Robinson and the way he is dressed, he cannot accept the way he is naked. Obsession of covering himself, in order to hide. Indication that Robinson is not really grown up.

‘Serious Reflections’: a book which Defoe writes in 1720. 'Written by himself', meaning by Robinson. Written in first person singular as Robinson Crusoe’s novel. The first chapter is on solitude, kind of solitude Manoni’s talking about. He is putting an example of a man who is disgusted by the way people of his family speak and he says that he won’t speak to them again. He refuses to speak with them because they use bad language. His children left him, also his wife. Until he gets ill, he starts talking again.

Inability to interact in this case: as Robinson for 29 years. He remains alone and becomes a social being through the help of his daughter who helps adjust.