Autobiographical acts in Robinson Crusoe

ELH - English Literary History

Volumn 71, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 899-920

  Marshall, David ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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EID: 60950206496     PISSN: 00138304     EISSN: 10806547     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/elh.2004.0050     Document Type: Review

References (55)

1. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. Michael Shinagel (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1974), 31. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number.
2. All citations of the novel will refer to this edition. The original title page was not included in the original Norton Critical Edition, but it is included in the revised 1994 second edition. For a discussion of the various strands of autobiographical narrative in the novel, see Everett Zimmerman, "son Crusoehor and Narrator," in Defoe and the Novel (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975), 20-47;
3. and The Boundaries of Fiction: History and the Eighteenth-Century British Novel (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1996), 62-70.
4. See also Eric Jager, "The Parrot's Voice: Language and the Self in Robinson Crusoe," Eighteenth-Century Studies 21 (1988): 316-33.
5. Obviously, there is a great deal of scholarship on autobiography. Felicity A. Nussbaum provides a nuanced account of the generic complexities in discussing autobiography in the eighteenth century in the opening chapters of The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1989), 1-29.
6. See also J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century Fiction (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990), 303-23;
7. and George A. Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), 3-50.
8. For example, see Maximillian E. Novak, Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1962);
9. and Daniel Defoe and the Nature of Man (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963).
10. See Paul K. Alkon, Defoe and Fictional Time (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1979), 105-67.
11. See Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe's Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1966), 47.
12. See Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim;
13. and Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography.
14. For some other discussions of Defoe and the Puritan tradition and related questions, see Starr, Defoe and Casuistry (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971);
15. Robert W. Ayres, "Robinson Crusoe: Allusive Allegorick History," PMLA 82 (1967): 399-407;
16. Rudolf G. Stamm, "Daniel Defoe: An Artist in the Puritan Tradition," Philological Quarterly 15 (1936): 225-46;
17. James Moffatt, "The Religion of Robinson Crusoe," Contemporary Review 115 (1919): 664-69;
18. Rodney M. Baine, Daniel Defoe and the Supernatural (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1968).
19. Robert A. Erickson discusses Crusoe's birth from the womb of the ocean and related imagery. See "Starting Over with Robinson Crusoe," in Daniel Defoe: The Making of His Prose Fiction, ed. Malinda Snow, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 15:2 (Fall 1982), 51-73.
20. Daniel Defoe, Serious Reflections During the Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe with His Vision of the Angelic World, in The Works of Daniel Defoe, 16 vols. (New York: The Jenson Society, 1903), 3:iv-xiii.
21. Augustine, Confessions, trans. William Watts, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1912), 1:463-64.
22. My understanding of the narrative structure of the conversion experience in autobiography is indebted to insights of Neil Hertz and John Freccero. See Freccero, Introduction, Dante: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1965), 5;
23. Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986);
24. and "Autobiography and Narrative," in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, ed. Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna, and David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1986) 16-29.
25. For a related analysis in a different context, see Homer O. Brown, "The Displaced Self in the Novels of Daniel Defoe," ELH 38 (1971): 576-83.
26. Brown's important article, still powerful after thirty years, helped to shape my first readings of Defoe's novels. See also my The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1986), 126-29.
27. Jager comments on the sortes Biblicae topos and Augustinian context ("The Parrot's Voice," 320-21).
28. Speaking of the conversion scene, Starr writes: "If any single episode can be isolated as the book's turning point, it is probably this one" (111). For some additional background, see Paul Delaney, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Routledge, 1969);
29. Martin J. Grief, "The Conversion of Robinson Crusoe," Studies in English Literature 6 (1925): 551-74;
30. Hunter, "Friday as a Convert: Defoe and the Accounts of Indian Missionaries," Review of English Studies 14 (1963): 243-48;
31. Peter A. Dorsey, Sacred Estrangement: The Rhetoric of Conversion in Modern American Autobiography (University Park: The Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1993), 1-42.
32. Augustine, 1:435.
33. For relevant and suggestive accounts of Augustine, see Robert Folkenflik, "The Self as Other," in The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation, ed. Folkenflik (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1993), 215-17;
34. and Geoffrey Galt Harpham's "Conversion and the Language of Autobiography," in Studies in Autobiography, ed. James Olney (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988), 42-50.
35. Defoe, Moll Flanders, ed. Edward Kelly (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 6.
36. Defoe, Roxana, The Fortunate Mistress, ed. Jane Jack (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969), 6.
37. Brown writes, "For Defoe, however, the gift of self is as 'symbolic' as the sacrificial death. Self will continue to reassert itself and be lost consequently in distraction. For it is Defoe's insight that the essential characteristic of symbolic death is that it is only symbolic and must be repeated endlessly." Brown notes that in Roxana, "What has replaced the conversion is the act of narration itself" (579, 582).
38. Patrick Riley writes: "Augustinian conversion is a fortunate death promising greater life; Rousseauean conversion becomes a repeatable chain of deaths which the self always somehow survives, but from which it emerges in an increasingly disfigured guise" ("The Inversion of Conversion: Rousseau's Rewriting of Augustinian Autobiography," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, ed. Julie Candler Hayes and Timothy Erwin, 28 [1999]: 236).
39. In the Serious Reflections, Crusoe describes related experiences. In one, after being awakened by the sense that a creature has disturbed him in his bed, Poll cries out, "Hold your tongue," and "What's the matter with you?" as well as "Robin Crusoe," and "Poor Robin Crusoe" (Serious Reflections, 253-57).
40. For another reading of the parrot scene, see Jager, 325-27.
41. Acts, 9:7.
42. For other discussions of these scenes, see Geoffrey M. Sill, "Crusoe in the Cave: Defoe and the Semiotics of Desire," Eighteenth-Century Fiction 6 (1994): 227-32;
43. and Carol Houlihan Flynn, The Body in Swift and Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), 149-59.
44. The arrival of the mutineers and the sailors whom Crusoe rescues leads to a series of impersonations in which Crusoe plays various roles. For a discussion of this scene in the context of Defoe's preoccupation with impersonation, and the ways in which playacting and autobiographical fiction are used to hide the self and multiply the self into different parts and persons, see my The Figure of Theater, 79-81.
45. For some other related discussions, see David Blewett, Defoe's Art of Fiction: Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, and Roxana (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1979);
46. Leopold Damrosch, Jr., "Defoe as Ambiguous Impersonator," Modern Philology 71 (1973): 153-59;
47. Arnold Weinstein, Fictions of the Self: 1550-1800 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981);
48. Patricia Meyer Spacks, Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1976).
49. Brown writes: "A footprint in the sand - a partial signature whose power lies in its mystery and ambiguity. . . . But rather than being a signal to Crusoe's hopes - of company or of deliverance - in a flash the footprint destroys all his hopes and all his security" (571).
50. See also Zimmerman, The Boundaries of Fiction: History and the Eighteenth-Century British Novel, 66-69;
51. and Blewett, 39.
52. See, for example, Brown; Leo Braudy, "Daniel Defoe and the Anxieties of Autobiography," Genre 6 (1973): 76-97;
53. John J. Richetti, Defoe's Narratives: Situation and Structure (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 63-93;
54. and Thomas M. Kavanaugh, "Unraveling Robinson: The Divided Self in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 20 (1978): 416-32.
55. J. M. Coetzee, Foe (New York: Viking), 1987.