by Steven Moore
For millions of readers for nearly three centuries, the answer was obvious: “Robinson Crusoe, the first capitalist hero,” as novelist Carlos Fuentes calls him, “is a self-made man who accepts objective reality and then fashions it to his needs through the work ethic, common sense, resilience, technology, and, if need be, racism and imperialism.”123 He succeeds against great odds—though unlike Selkirk and other predecessors, he had the advantage of a ship’s resources—and for better or for worse exemplifies “the whole Anglo-Saxon spirit,” as James Joyce noted: “the manly independence; the unconscious cruelty; the persistence; the slow yet efficient intelligence; the sexual apathy; the practical, well-balanced religiousness; the calculating taciturnity.”124 Not only does Crusoe triumph over adversity on his island, but he returns to Europe to find that his earlier business ventures have made him rich. But there are some ugly facets of Crusoe’s tale, as Fuentes, Joyce, and many other readers have noted, despite Defoe’s efforts to position it as a Christian-redemption/capitalist-success story. Robinson Crusoe is a telling example of what D. H. Lawrence warned us about: “The artist usually sets out—or used to—to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tale, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist’s and the tale’s. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale” (2).
The “opposing morals” are more obvious to modern readers than to Defoe’s original audience or to the generations of boys who read the novel thereafter. (Throughout the 19th century, Robinson Crusoe was considered primarily a YA novel, and to this day the majority of critics who have written on it are men.) First there is the titanic egotism. Defoe could have narrated the novel in the third-person, but he chose the first-person for good reason, though one unintentional drawback is that it highlights his protagonist’s selfishness. You’ll notice young Bob Crusoe (as he’s first called) doesn’t give his father a name or quote him directly: he keeps him vague, partly to blend him with his heavenly father—several times Defoe collates the two, as in “God’s blessings, or my father’s” and “my duty to God and my father” (7)—but partly to downplay any emotional ties to his father. (In marked contrast, Crusoe is moved by the effusive affection Friday shows for his father [172], witnessing emotions he evidently never felt for his own.) After Bob runs away to sea and is captured and enslaved, he befriends a Moor, only to throw him into the sea when he escapes, threatening to shoot him when the Moor reminds him of their friendship. Bob then adopts a younger Moor named Yury, who serves him selflessly until a ship captain offers to buy him; Bob hesitates, but sells him out for 60 pieces of eight—“twice Judas’s figure,” as Watts notes (69). Similarly at the end, Crusoe displays generosity only toward his business partners, no one else; we hear nothing about his selfless servant Friday after a wolf attack (during which Friday acts completely out of character), and then Defoe gives us this concise masterpiece of egotistic self-absorption: “In the meantime, I in part settled myself here [in England]; for first of all I married, and that not either to my disadvantage or dissatisfaction, and had three children, two sons and one daughter. But my wife dying, and my nephew coming home with good success from a voyage to Spain, my inclination to go abroad and his importunity prevailed and engaged me to go in his ship as a private trader to the East Indies. This was in the year 1694” (219). No names, no details (except for the date of his next business venture), no further mention of his children, just an emotionless sentence on his domestic life, followed by a preview of his further adventures to whet customers’s appetite for a sequel. And where does he get off calling himself (on the title page) a “mariner”?
The opening section also establishes Crusoe’s xenophobia and paranoia. He and Xury sail down the coast of Africa “where whole nations of Negroes were sure to surround us with their canoes and destroy us, where we could never once go on shore but we should be devoured by savage beasts, or more merciless savages of humankind” (19), but just the opposite happens. They cowardly shoot a sleeping lion, and the natives they meet are open-handed and furnish them with food and water. But Crusoe forgets all about the nonthreatening beasts and “friendly Negroes” (25) after he is shipwrecked. Building himself a camouflaged fort, a heavily armed Crusoe hunkers down in it like a paranoid survivalist in a bomb shelter, even “though, as it appeared afterward, there was no need of all this caution from the enemies that I apprehended danger from” (45). The most “dangerous” animal on his island is a goat, and the occasional visiting Indians eat only their prisoners of war, yet he spends much of his time quaking in irrational fear and anxiety. When he spots that first footprint, he reacts not with joy in anticipation of meeting another human after a dozen years of solitude, but with terror: “I came home to my fortification not feeling, as we say, the ground I went on, but terrified to the last degree, looking behind me at every two or three steps, mistaking every bush and tree, and fancying every stump at a distance to be a man” (112). But years pass before anyone shows up. The saddest example of his selfish, suspicious nature occurs when Friday, after years of selfless service, expresses a desire to visit home:
I made no doubt but that if Friday could get back to his own nation again, he would not only forget all his religion, but all his obligation to me, and would be forward enough to give his countrymen an account of me and come back with perhaps a hundred or two of them and make a feast upon me, at which he might be as merry as he used to be with those of his enemies when they were taken in war.
But I wronged the poor honest creature very much, for which I was very sorry afterwards. However, as my jealousy [suspicion] increased, and held me some weeks, I was a little more circumspect, and not so familiar and kind to him as before. (162)
Though Crusoe criticizes Spaniards for their the harsh treatment of the natives, and though he experiences moments of multicultural relativism, he too is part of the European invasion and colonization of the Americas. Shortly after arriving, “I shot at a great bird which I saw sitting upon a tree on the side of a great wood; I believe it was the first gun that had been fired there since the creation of the world” (40), which for him is merely a noteworthy datum, but which for us has an ominous ring. Instead of adapting to his island habitat, he imposes European systems on it—he of course converts Friday to Christianity, and gives him that European name without even asking his real one—and on the final page of the novel Crusoe reports what he saw and heard when he returned to his colony, a horror story of escalating violence between the Europeans he left behind and the neighboring Caribbeans—horrible to the modern reader, that is. To him, it’s merely the cost of doing business as he reports his findings with all the objectivity of an accountant.
Crusoe’s business mentality is obvious from the start as he itemizes the return on his initial investment (14), and from his precise date-keeping and accounting on the island (“we had gotten as much land cured and trimmed as we sowed 22 bushels of barley on and 16 jars of rice . . .” [179]). This bookeeping mentality looks a little ludicrous when he creates a chart “to set the good against the evil, that I might have something to distinguish my case from worse, and I started it very impartially, like Debtor and Creditor, the comforts I enjoyed against the miseries I suffered” (49), and later, a little scary: after he and a small band repel some unauthorized visitors, he even totes up a body-count chart (171). There’s a well-known passage early in the novel when the shipwrecked Crusoe realizes how worthless his gold coins are: “I smiled to myself at the sight of this money. O drug! said I aloud, what art thou good for? . . . I have no manner of use for thee, e’en remain where thou art and go to the bottom as a creature whose life is not worth saving.” But his capitalist instincts immediately kick in: “However, upon second thoughts, I took it away . . .” (43), and he still possesses the “drug” 28 years later when he is rescued. Upon returning to Europe, Crusoe overwhelms the reader with financial details of his investments, and the climax of the novel occurs not when he is reunited with his family and friends, or when he marries, but at
his realization of how rich he is: “In a word, I turned pale and grew sick, and had not the old man run and fetched me a cordial, I believe the sudden surprise of joy had overset nature and I had died upon the spot” (205). That’s the same page on which Crusoe compares himself to Job, and would have made a fitting conclusion. Yet the novel continues for 15 increasingly grim pages, during which Crusoe is menaced by an army of wolves, and ends with references to battles, storms, famine, and destruction. Nor would Crusoe have become this rich had he stayed home and not committed the “original sin” (141) of defying his earthly and heavenly fathers by running off to sea, which seems to negate the religious message of the novel. Disobedience is the key to his success. If Defoe wanted to expose the incompatibility of capitalism and Christian principles, he couldn’t have managed it better.
Emotionless, paranoid, egocentric, imperialistic, racist, profit-minded (not to mention a cat-killer), Robinson Crusoe of York would be a divisive figure if running for office today. Conservative Republicans would idolize him, liberal Democrats would abhor him. (To adapt Lawrence’s terms, the artist is a religious Republican, the tale a secular Democrat.) But in Defoe’s time, Robinson Crusoe gave middle-class readers a hero of their own who shared their values, worshiped the same god, spoke their language—plain English prose, not la-di-da literary language—voiced their suspicion of strangers, and validated their conviction that hard work pays off, so they rewarded him by turning it into a best-seller.
Like few literary artists but most commercial writers, Defoe responded to the book’s surprising success by rushing out a sequel. A mere four months after Robinson Crusoe was published, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe appeared. Overlapping with the end of the first novel, Crusoe tells a little more about his marriage, then returns with Friday to finish civilizing his island (including forcing cohabiting couples to marry), but shortly afterward he loses Friday during a cannibal attack. Crusoe’s lack of emotion at his longtime companion’s death has drawn much criticism—from Charles Dickens, for one—but it is perfectly consistent with his heartless character, since presumably Friday didn’t owe him money. Crusoe then travels to Madagascar, to southeast Asia and China, and eventually to Russia before returning to England at age 73. But this part has never been very popular, nor has the other sequel Defoe published a year later, Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe, a series of moral essays. It was not Crusoe or his reflections that appealed to readers but his early experiences on the island, brilliantly conceived by Defoe and described in such convincing detail that it creates a kind of virtual reality where readers can play along, imagining themselves in his place. And if certain readers want to linger on Crusoe’s remark that “Friday and I became more intimately acquainted” (160), what happens on the island stays on the island.125
The success of Robinson Crusoe gave Defoe a burst of literary energy that sustained him for six more novels over the next four years. Three of the them are minor (though as good if not better than most novels published in the early 1720s): Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720) records the exploits of an Englishman who fought on the Swedish side during the Thirty Years’ War and then for the royalists during the English Civil War. Captain Singleton (also 1720) is about an Englishman who reluctantly becomes a pirate, though the novel focuses more on the economics of piracy than on its buccaneering side. (Is it possible to writing a dull novel about pirates?) Colonel Jack (1722) is a rags-to-riches story partially set in Virginia about a young Englishman sold into slavery who rises to overseer, returns to England as a merchant, “married four wives, and five of them proved whores” (as the title page riddles us), entered military service, and is now writing his memoirs in the hope of dying a gentleman. All are realistic, plainly told novels; no more fanciful journeys to the moon for Defoe.126
After imagining himself as a castaway, Defoe in his next major novel imagined himself as a woman cast away in London, and the result is another story of an egotistic capitalist, equally resourceful and repulsive. Moll Flanders (1722) feigns to be the autobiography of a woman abandoned at birth by her criminal mother, written in 1683 when Mrs. Flanders is nearly 70.127 As with Robinson Crusoe, the “spiritual autobiography” provides the basic framework, for Moll eventually repents of her sinful life, which she describes as “a horrid complication of wickedness, whoredom, adultery, incest, lying, theft, and in a word, everything but murder and treason . . . from the age of eighteen or thereabouts to threescore” (218). But Defoe also draws upon the picaresque genre for the first half of the novel, as Moll faces one obstacle after another in her quest for bourgeois gentility, and then the criminal autobiography for the second half, after Moll loses her fifth husband and, realizing at age 50 she can no longer trade on her looks, decides to turn thief. Like other authors in this genre (Moll refers to Mary Frith on p. 157), she offers her story as a cautionary tale, and even taunts those readers who read her book for the sensational parts and not for the spiritual lessons: “It would be a severe satire on such [readers] to say they do not relish the repentance as much as they do the crime” (228). Defoe knew his audience.
Like Crusoe, Moll displays her capitalist instincts early: insisting she wants to be a “gentlewoman” even before she understands the term, she learns she can achieve that goal quicker from coitus than from her needlework when she’s given five guineas for making out with the elder brother in the home she’s staying at.128 Though already attracted to him, she becomes “more confounded with the money than I was before with the love” (20), and continues renting her body to him for handsome tips until she’s forced to marry his younger brother, the first of her quasi incestuous relationships. Whatever sympathy the reader has for her up to this point should evaporate when “Betty” (as the brothers call her) gives this heartless summary of her first marriage, which recalls Crusoe’s curt account of his:
It concerns the story in hand very little to enter into the farther particulars of the family, or of myself, for the five years that I lived with this husband; only to observe I had two children by him, and that at the end of five years he died. He had been really a very good husband to me, and we lived very agreeably together, but as he had not received much from them [his family], and had in the little time he lived acquired no great matters, so my circumstances were not great; nor was I much mended [financially improved] by the match. Indeed I had preserved the elder brother’s bonds to me to pay me 500 l. which he offered me for my consent to marry his brother; and this, with what I had saved of the money he formerly gave me [for sex], and about as much more by my husband, left me a widow with about 1200 l. in my pocket.129
My two children were indeed taken happily off my hands by my husband’s father and mother, and that by the way was all they got by Mrs. Betty. (46–47).
With all the emotion of an accountant preparing a profit/loss statement, Moll focuses solely on the financials of her first marriage, and like a businessperson relieved to get out of a cumbersome lease, she “happily” unloads the unnamed, unwanted kids on her in-laws (a common practice back then in situations like this, but still). This businesslike attitude characterizes the rest of her relationships—four more marriages plus a six-year affair, resulting in a dozen children who, with one exception, are nameless and abandoned—and is carried over to her criminal career. She soon makes enough as a thief to retire early, but she’s addicted to what Crusoe called the drug: “as poverty brought me into the mire, avarice kept me in” (158). It might be going too alliteratively far to mock Moll as a monster of middle-class materialism, but I’ll leave that hanging out there.
This is not the story of an independent woman trying to make her way in a man’s world by any means necessary, but of a greedy egotist who preys on society. Defoe attempts to turn the reader against Moll with his choices of her earliest crimes: the first is the theft of a child’s necklace, and Moll admits she was tempted to kill “the child in the dark alley that it might not cry” (151: not the only time she refers to a child as “it”). Shortly after t
his, she hears of a fire in her neighborhood and rushes to join the looters, pretending to help but making off with a bundle she later discovers consists of family heirlooms. At first, she reacts as any moral person would: “it really touched me to the very soul when I looked into this treasure to think of the poor disconsolate gentlewoman who had lost so much by the fire besides; . . . I confess the inhumanity of this action moved me very much and made me relent exceedingly, and tears stood in my eyes upon that subject. But with all my sense of its being cruel and inhuman, I could never find in my heart to make any restitution. The reflection wore off, and I began quickly to forget the circumstances that attended the taking them” (161). That should expunge any remaining sympathy the reader has for this heartless scum, yet I find there are readers and critics who describe Moll as “marvellous” and admire “her resilience and courage and generosity,” which I find both inexplicable and morally reprehensible.130 Though Moll claims to be giving “an account of what was, not of what ought or ought not to be” (78), it’s obvious she’s lying to us and suppressing evidence. She never even tells us her real name: “Moll Flanders” is an alias. When she gives a résumé of her life midway through the novel, she lets slip she has “lain with thirteen men” (142), though she has accounted for only five of them so far. (And you can bet she wasn’t giving it away.) After a while, her claims that “women were the most unhappy creatures in the world” (55) and that “if a woman has no friend to communicate her affairs to, and to advise and assist her, ’tis ten to one but she is undone” (101) begin to ring hollow. Peddle your story somewhere else, sister.131