Father, God, and Master: The Role of Paternalism in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (original) (raw)
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The Imaginative Conservative, 2020
The essay is a discussion of Defoe’s novel as an oscillation between a search for a Divine providential meaning in the plights of existence and a more secular interpretation of phenomena. The essay shows how Crusoe as narrator tries to reflect back on his journey as a sort of spiritual self-discovery; however, his own actions and deepest passions (in the form of his naturalistic interpretation of events on the island as well as his excessive attachment to wealth) undermine this spiritual orientation. This oscillation between the explanatory frameworks offered by Christianity and secular modernity, I assert, make the novel still relevant and powerful for us today.
The Crusoe Trilogy and the Critics During the last two decades, feminist, Marxist, and New Historicist critics have transformed our understanding of the eighteenth-century novel, but none of them has questioned the iconic status of Robinson Crusoe (1719). Even those critics skeptical of the hero's justifications for colonizing ''his'' island accept the commonplace that Defoe's first novel transmutes the raw material of Puritanical injunction and moral self-scrutiny into the psychological realism that helps define the novel form. In turn, Crusoe's individualistic psychology, most critics agree, marks the transition from a residual aristocratic to an emergent bourgeois, capitalist, and (since the 1980s) broadly Foucauldian ideology of selfhood. The titles of many of these critics' works-centering on ''rises'' and ''origins''-reveal a tendency to write the history of modern identity, the rise of the novel, and the rise of financial capitalism in mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing terms. 1 Paradoxically, Robinson Crusoe retains its crucial role in revisionist histories of the novel precisely because Defoe can be credited with (or blamed for) developing a colonialist model of subjectivity: conquering the wilderness and exploiting the labor of native peoples allow the colonizer the luxury of becoming a bourgeois subject. 2 Seen in this light, Crusoe's economic moralizing and religious proselytizing may not quite open a window to the soul, but they do offer a compelling novelistic strategy for representing the psychological complexities of Defoe's reluctant pilgrim. This consensus view of Robinson Crusoe, however, holds up only if critics ignore or explain away the two sequels that Defoe published shortly after his successful first novel. In this essay, I call into question some of the assumptions and values that
Confronting Authority: JM Coetzee's Foe and the Remaking of Robinson Crusoe
International Fiction Review, 1991
The process of remaking Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe continues as each successive generation since 1719 has taken the Crusoe myth, reconsidered it, reshaped it, repudiated it-and still we have not finished with this strange man, his island, and his Friday. In this century alone, writers the likes of H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Rose Macauley, Muriel Spark, E.L. Doctorow, William Golding, and Richard Hughes (to name only a few) have grappled with Defoe's creation in an attempt to silence his presence once and for all. As Martin Green has suggested in his recent study, The Robinson Crusoe Story, Crusoe is a towering figure in literature: his tale has been hailed as the first English novel, the first story of psychological realism, the first adventure narrative, and the most compelling myth of Empire. 1 Indeed, so powerful is this father of literature, an entire genre, the Robinsonnade, has been named in his honor. And as this name suggests-Robinsonnade-Crusoe exists in each of these remaking-a trace, a shadow, a subtext. He is always there, in the margins.
International Journal of English and Studies, 2021
Although New-Historicism and Reader-response literary theories suggest different attempts in the generation of meaning, in fact, they exist in separate domains. However, the connection between them is a matter of the existence of a text. Without doubt, on the most basic and cursory level, New Historicism is aimed at decoding the manner and culture prevalent in a particular time of history as encoded in the text while Reader-response firmly comes from the strength that a work of art cannot generate meaning for itself without the reader. From this measure of understanding, the clarity in the amalgamation possibility becomes clear. In Robinson Crusoe (1719) analysis here, the intention is to identify the meaning of realism construction the researcher gives to it but within the historical context of the 18th century English novel. On this significant scope the twin theories of New-Historicism and Reader-response become unavoidable tools in the research investigation.
Survival Made Him the Fittest: The Ideological Evolution of Defoe's Robinson
Crusoe While heralded by many as the first novel of the English language, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe also warrants praise as a novel in which the evolution of the protagonist shapes the entire story. Unwilling to allow his Crusoe to travel from cover to cover statically immutable, Defoe instead presents a character whose initially fear-filled, fatalistic colonialism gives way to a Christian understanding of providential kindness. Beyond the surface-level narrative of a castaway merely seeking survival, Robinson Crusoe is a story of a man working to learn how to live in both his immediate environment and that which lies beyond what he can physically see. Although the ethos of the protagonist, and the novel as a whole, is still significantly encumbered by imperialistic tendencies, Defoe's narrative unfolds his Crusoe's transformation into a relatively sympathetic representation of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Christian faith and a drastically different protagonist than the one who opened the novel. Critics of the Protestant view of providence often equate that doctrine with the broader idea of fatalism. While surface level similarities certainly exist and many who claim a belief in providence often express it in attitude and terminology more akin to a belief in Fate, the two ideas are distinct and in many ways contradictory. Far from being the result of an impersonal force, the Protestant view of providence argues that a personal deity exists in sovereign control of every second of every day and of every atom of every molecule. How this is manifest in the ebb and flow of everyday life is debated, but the personal nature of providence distinguishes it from fate. Robinson
Lifting the Veil off Crusoe’s Empire in Daniel Defoe’s
2017
The aim of this research paper is to offer a postcolonial interpretative reading of Daniel Defoe’s magnum opus Robinson Crusoe. For years the text has been appreciated as a classic text of adventure, a tale of individualism, capitalism and also of spiritual growth. It has been studied as an exemplary text representing the liberal, adventurous and progressive spirit of the age. And while postcolonial elements in the narrative have been discussed before, critical readings of the text have not laid enough focus on the extreme denigration and essentialization of the native culture and religion and the repeated acts of assault on nature and animals that the ruler/colonialist, Crusoe engages in the fiction. This paper seeks to explore this gap in the field of critical inquiry with respect to the text of Robinson Crusoe.
Lifting the Veil off Crusoe's Empire in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe
The aim of this research paper is to offer a postcolonial interpretative reading of Daniel Defoe's magnum opus Robinson Crusoe. For years the text has been appreciated as a classic text of adventure, a tale of individualism, capitalism and also of spiritual growth. It has been studied as an exemplary text representing the liberal, adventurous and progressive spirit of the age. And while postcolonial elements in the narrative have been discussed before, critical readings of the text have not laid enough focus on the extreme denigration and essentialization of the native culture and religion and the repeated acts of assault on nature and animals that the ruler/colonialist, Crusoe engages in the fiction. This paper seeks to explore this gap in the field of critical inquiry with respect to the text of Robinson Crusoe.
Emotional Management of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe's Main Character
Journal of Language Teaching and Research, 2023
This study aims to describe and reveal the main character's emotional management in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, a Penguin classics novel published in London in 1994. This study employs a descriptive qualitative technique and Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic approach. The research data was derived from the novel's narrations and portrayal of the main character. The study found that the main character's psychology employed a defensive mechanism to regulate all the emotions that arose. The main character in this work uses suppression, rationalization, reaction construction, regression, anger and indifference, and imagination. Repression serves as the main character's protection mechanism in the narrative. The main character demonstrated that he attempted to channel his melancholy into thankfulness and to turn his anxiety into rational thinking.