Core Course: English Literature/ 2015-16

Target population: 1st year students, 2nd semester

Specialization: Romanian/French-English
Module Tutor: Dr Elena Butoescu

UNIT 5

THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL (I)

DANIEL DEFOE (1659-1731)

Daniel Defoe was a journalist and we can consider him, in many ways, the father of
the modern periodical. The most interesting of Defoes documentary works is The Journal
of the Plague Year (1722), where one gets the impression that Defoe was actually present in
London during that devastating time, seriously taking notes, but a glance at his dates will
show that this was impossible. In this journal, the writer is certain that the disease is the
visible hand of God, which, to him, is a fact like any others, which he records with the same
chilling simplicity. The description of Crusoe landing on his island may serve as an example
of one kind of imaginative vision in Defoe. Defoes prose is dominated by the personal
pronoun. He keeps our eyes fixed on the man. This kind of imagination is the one concerned
essentially with the successful struggle of the individual to dominate his environment. Action
is by far the most important mood. This imaginative vision sees the world as one of objects
for humans to act on.
In Robinson Crusoe the fascination lies in the bald statement of facts which are quite
convincing even though Defoe never had the experience of being cast away on a desert
island and having to fend for himself. The story is told in the first person narrative, things are
seen from Robinsons point of view, from the point of view of the civilized human being.
Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe has been engaged in an intertextual dialogue ever
since its inception, in April 1719, when the first part of the trilogy, The Life and Strange
Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, was published. This volume was shortly followed
by The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, which came out on 20 August 1719 and is
concerned with the events that happened after Crusoe had returned to England. In this part,
Defoe gives an account of Crusoe's marriage, the death of his wife, and his travel back to the
island with his nephew (Novak 2001, p. 555). The sequel to these two parts, Serious
Reflections of Robinson Crusoe appeared on 6 August 1920 and consisted of various reflexive
essays on how Crusoe turned into a mature person after all the experiences he went through.

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This third part has been a neglected volume by the literary critics and apart from the opening
text presented by Crusoe as a realist allegory, it has never challenged literary criticism into a
heated debate (Novak 2001, p. 562).
Clearly, Defoe's texts engaged in a dialogue, the two sequels responding to and
enlarging upon the first part. Also, it is widely believed that Defoe based his novel on the real
story of the Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk, who was shipwrecked on an island in the
Pacific in 1704 and spent four years alone on the uninhabited island.
Defoes vision is highly selective; his imagination is taken up with what he sees as the
basic human condition. Crusoe is every man isolated on his desert island to reveal man as he
really is to Defoes imagination: alone, faced by a hostile environment, forced to make his
way against it, shape it to his will or be destroyed. Robinson Crusoe is a realist novel: for
dreamers, deserted islands are idylls, which are linked to the hearts desire, while for Crusoe,
the island is reduced to economic relationships between man and his environment. Friday
provides additional manpower, but in a master-servant bond. Crusoe gives him a masters
affection in return for submission, loyalty, and labour. He gives him a name and teaches him
enough English for what Crusoe thinks he needs to know.
Crusoe is alone, but not naked, he is provided with a complete collection of tools and
supplies and his island becomes an estate crying out for development. We get a synoptic
economic history of man imaginatively concentrated in the 28 years of Crusoes life on the
island. The island is his absolute property; he becomes first the governor, then the landlord of
an absentee colony. The struggle for survival concludes with magnificent profit.
First, there is the caveman stage, where the basic necessities are shelter, fortification
and hunting. Then he learns how to make his environment serve him in the agricultural and
herding stage. He learns to grow food, manufacture utensils and cultivate the land, acquire
and domesticate livestock.
Defoe is not concerned with the intricacies of character. The world of the senses is
missing. The novel is crammed with objects and we are compelled to see their utility. They
never compose a landscape. The world of consciousness is attenuated to a point that it is
psychologically unrealistic. Crusoe never voices any longing for companionship or for
women; when companions arrive, human relationship is reduced to economic relationship.
Crusoe is the citys mythic celebration of economic man.
Defoe was not interested in character. He was keen on action, but he always saw
action in terms of situation. When Crusoe finds the coins on the wreck, he proceeds to take it

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before a storm breaks. If we are to look through Defoes eyes, the money is useless on the
island, but useful if Crusoe ever gets back to civilization. It all depends on the situation.
In Moll Flanders we seem to be reading the real life-story of a bad woman, written
in the style appropriate to her. She begins her life in a state of isolation, being dependent on
the economic nature of society itself. A moneyless female may survive only by selling herself
into servitude. She rebels against it and that is what makes her heroic. Her main hope is
marriage, but this is an economic institution in which the cards are in the hands of the male.
Outside marriage, there is the choice of poverty, or prostitution, or crime. After her first two
marriages, a succession of economic-sexual contracts called marriages, a crime and
imprisonment, where she experiences, like Defoe himself, Hell, Moll is saved by her
repentance. She starts a new life in Virginia on a sound economic footing.
The intention of these works is that the reader should regard them as true, not as
fictions, and so Defoe deliberately avoids all art, all fine writing, so that the reader should
concentrate only on a series of plausible events, thinking: This isnt a story-book, this is
autobiography.

References:
Novak, M. E. (2001) Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions. His Life and Ideas. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.