Watt, McKeon, Hunter

Just a few points from the readings for 2/15.
Watt argues that Robinson Crusoe represents a "secularization" (82) of Puritanism, a "'Sunday religion'" (81) that allows the eighteenth century's burgeoning capitalist individual's "economic motive" (64) to surpass everything else, from family and community to "spiritual salvation" (64) and pleasure. (My ignorance of economics is showing, but I was at first somewhat puzzled reading Watt because I had forgotten that individualism was such a big part of the rhetoric of capitalism. It seems that nowadays we're always hearing that individuals have little power and corporations own us).

McKeon argues that Crusoe's moral struggles are a battle between Calvinist and secular ideologies, with Crusoe finally learning "the psychological discipline needed to transform his activity into his calling" (408). McKeon demonstrates that Crusoe learns to obey Providence when it's convenient and ultimately becomes "reconciled to the naturalness and morality of the pursuit of self-interest" (422). He says that the moral development that Defoe tracks in Crusoe is in conflict with "the never-articulated insight that virtue is nothing but the ability to invoke providence with conviction" (423). This is related to what I was trying to say in my last post, although I don't know if I agree with McKeon that Defoe is providing his own "insight"--I can't shake my impression that Crusoe simply reflects Defoe's own views. I will admit that when I read the novel--and this was the second time I've read it--it didn't occur to me that Defoe might be deliberately representing a shallow morality that is pliable to self-interest. McKeon seems to be hinting at this, but I think that maybe he's giving Defoe too much credit. I don't really have evidence to back this up, just an impression, so I'll have to do some more thinking about this. (Maybe what McKeon is actually saying isn't that Defoe is critical of this view, but just that he is honest enough to expose it). McKeon says that Crusoe's struggle to find God's will in everything that happens to him seems ridiculous to us because "we, who have long since stopped trying [to do so], are sometimes distracted from the profundity to the absurdity of the effort" (419). So, he thinks it's my fault...

Hunter's discussion of the development of the novel from and alongside Puritan diaries and autobiographies is interesting. Having a "life story" is such a deeply ingrained thing for us that it seems that we take it for granted that our lives follow a continuing narrative with a pattern instead of being random things happening. In my previous post, I wrote about Crusoe's fantasy that God controls everything and rewards those who deserve to be rewarded. The other side of that is the fantasy of the "self-made man" who "takes destiny into his own hands," etc., etc., etc. It's interesting to think that this kind of fiction developed alongside novels, which we acknowledge to be fiction. (One of my instructors called literature "lies that tell the truth." These stories could be called "truths" that are lies). One of Hunter's points that caught my eye was that autobiographers like Ben Franklin consciously began to "edit" their diaries into "patterned narrative account[s]" (320). I think this is interesting--the idea of not just recording events from the author's point of view but deliberately going back and editing them.

On a side note, McKeon makes a mistake when he says that "Friday, like Behn's Oroonoko, is a black man whose 'European' beauty aids in the further differentiation of cultivated nature from the barbarian" (418). Actually, Friday is a Carib, Native American, and Defoe makes a point of telling us that Friday is not African. (Xury is African, and is quickly sold and removed from the story). If Friday, who, while a servant, is also to some extent a companion, had been African like Oroonoko, this might have been a different book. According to the eighteenth century pseudoscience that categorized and ranked people by "race," Native Americans were thought to be closer to Europeans than Africans were. It seems that if Defoe had made Friday African, it would have given readers more of a chance to question those hierarchies. Behn's Oroonoko, as McKeon points out, does still have some problematic qualities, but that book seems much more questioning in terms of how it deals with race. Defoe, on the other hand, seems to just be following conventional thought. (It's been quite a few years since I read Oroonoko, but I had remembered it as being clearly anti-slavery and dealing seriously with the injustice done to the very noble, strong, and brave title character. I just did a quick Google search and found that Behn is not believed to have opposed slavery and that she was actually married to a slave trader. This surprised me because it is at odds with my memory of the book. But I can't imagine that I will ever make the same mistake with Defoe).

Robinson Crusoe, God, fathers

I'm sorry about getting this up so late.
Several others mentioned their dislike of Crusoe's colonialism. I agree. I also found the religious didacticism repellent, combined as it is with a blithe willingness to buy and sell people into slavery. Crusoe's religious beliefs seem related to his imperialist beliefs.

Crusoe believes that God controls everything that happens in the world, that every misfortune is a punishment from God, and that God even caused Crusoe's shipwreck in which all of the other sailors died, the earthquake, and various other misfortunes for the purpose of teaching Crusoe a lesson.

His morality seems shallow to me. I found it funny when, after his illness and his first prayer, he reasons that "some secret Power" created everything, and that "the Power that could make all Things, must certainly have Power to guide and direct them," and then admits that "Nothing occur'd to my Thought to contradict any of these Conclusions, and therefore it rested upon me with the greater Force, that it must needs be" (68). And when Friday asks him why, if God is so powerful, he doesn't kill the devil, Crusoe "pretend[s] not to hear him" because he doesn't have a rote answer. The answer he finally gives is unsatisfying --God will kill the devil one day, after everyone has had a chance to repent. In the meantime, he continues to tempt people to sin. Those who take the bait will be punished. This is the sort of belief system that allows the healthy, wealthy, and successful to smugly believe that they deserve their good fortune and that the less fortunate also get what they deserve. It's a bit like a supernatural version of this country's meritocracy myth.

Crusoe believes that he must trust in God's Providence and that any willfulness or ungratefulness is a sin worthy of punishment. His God demands perfect obedience and submission, not only in deed, but in thought. For instance, when he is nearly cast out to sea after sailing around the island with the hope of finding a way of escape, Crusoe believes that God is punishing him for being unhappy with his lot instead of being grateful for the sustenance that he has received.

Crusoe makes a strong connection between God and paternal authority, saying that his "ORIGINAL SIN" [emphasis in original] was disobeying his father (141). This is also related to his attitudes regarding class. The novel begins with his account of his father's insisting that the middle class are the happiest, and cursing him for his disobedience. Regretting his disobedience, Crusoe says that he has been strickened by the "general Plague of Mankind, [...] that of not being satisfy'd with the Station wherein God and Nature has plac'd them" (141). The wanderlust that brought him into his misfortunes came from his desire as a third son to improve his position, since he would not inherit his father's property. What is a third son to do if he doesn't want to take up a profession? Declare himself "lord" and "king" of an island in the Caribbean. When he first surveys the island, he insists that he is "King and Lord of all this Country indefeasibly" and by "Right of Possession; and if I could convey it, I might have it in Inheritance, as completely as any Lord of a Manor in England" (73). He can then assume the role of a father figure and "master" of the local people. Crusoe says that Friday is attached to him like "a Child to a Father" (151). It is as if he is a member of a father "race," and the "noble sabages" are those who, like Xury and Friday, obey him as good sons obey their fathers, or as good Christians obey God. Despite his fear of the "savages," when Friday's real father and the Spaniard arrive, he assumes that they will be his "Subjects" (174). After his rescue, he takes the role of a father, dividing the island and its wealth among the Europeans who now live there.

Despite his repentance for disobeying his father and not fearing God, he never repents for buying and selling slaves. Near the end of his supposed moral development, he says that his trip to Africa was wrong, not because enslaving people is wrong, but because he should have been satisfied with the slaves that were available for purchase in Brazil (141). When he contemplates killing the cannibals who bring Friday's father and the Spaniard, he admits that God did not appoint him to be "Judge of their Actions" or "Executioner of his Justice," and says that God will "by National Vengeance punish them as a People, for national Crimes" (168). But he attacks them anyway when he sees that one of their captives is a white man.

Crusoe believes that God controls everything that happens. His idea that the "Savages" who don't practice Christianity are receiving a "national punishment" for "national sins" sounds like a justification for the Europeans to take a paternal hand in their fate, ostensibly guiding them and providing them with illumination, but really exploiting them.


A note to myself--the discussion of the devil, fallen angels, and Abraham (157-9) also seems related to paternal authority. And what exactly is going on with the father's talk about the middle class?

a few thoughts on ballaster and Haywood (Feb. 1)

I'm a few days late with this, and I’m still not sure what I think...
Ballaster says that the "amatory" writings of authors such as Haywood and Behn were countered by "pious and didactic love fiction" (33) by other female authors in the same period, and that the virtuous heroines of authors such as Austen later in the century were a reaction to the infamously erotic writings of Haywood and co. She (he?) says that Haywood's novels are written for an "exclusively female audience" and that they are always concerned with "competition between men and women for control of the means of seduction" (40). Ballaster also says that "romantic fiction entails 'a reversal of the common view of history allowing the usually marginalized female sphere to dominate,'" (34) and that "by dehistoricizing and mythologizing the public sphere, the romantic fiction writer provides the female reader with a sense of feminine power and agency in a world usually closed to her participation" (35).

So now I'm not sure what I think of the novel. I initially thought of Love in Excess as cheap escapism with characters that are too simplistic for me to feel much interest in what happens to them. But maybe my impression of the novel as little better than a soap opera isn't entirely fair. I've always thought that much love literature was intended to make women resign themselves to their second-class status, and that all the talk about love and women's beauty was a consolation prize after they were denied real power. But Ballaster points out that Haywood's novels "present their female readers with a thoroughly melancholy view of the world of heterosexual romance. Male desire is, with rare exceptions, short-lived and end-directed, constituting a series of metonymical displacements of woman for woman in search of an impossible and unattainable ideal. Female desire is masochistic, self-destructive and hysterical" (175). Ballaster also says that Haywood "rejected" the idea of empowering female characters by allowing them the freedom and agency of male characters. The fact that the female characters who pursue what they want are punished, while the passive Melliora is "better" is one of the things I disliked in the novel, but perhaps this aspect of Haywood's writing is intended to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. And given the worsening economic conditions for women in the eighteenth century as described by Spencer, it's easy to see how love was a primary interest for women who had little other hopes of bettering their lives. Maybe finding a false "sense of feminine power and agency" (35) in romances was the best they could hope for. Ballaster quotes Haywood, who says that she writes of love because women are "'depriv'd of those advantages of education which the other sex enjoy,'" but to understand love "'requires no Aids of learning, no general Conversation, no Application'" (168). Haywood's acknowledgment that she had few other options makes me think that maybe it isn't fair for me to dismiss her so easily. But then, didn't Austen write under similar circumstances, and still manage to create much more detailed and engaging characters?

Someone else mentioned Rousseau in her blog. I thought of Rousseau too, specifically a passage in A Discourse on Inequality, in which he distinguishes the "physical" and the "moral" in love, saying "the physical is that general desire which propels one sex to unite with the other; the moral is that which shapes this desire and fixes it exclusively on one particular object." He continues, "Now it is easy to see that the moral part of love is an artificial sentiment, born of usage in society, and cultivated by women with much skill and care in order to establish their empire over men, and so make dominant the sex that ought to obey." This is interesting because Ballaster mentions that Haywood's heroines focus their attentions on a single love object, but also distinguishes her novels by their interest in the physical, and suggests that later female novelists' careful moral purity is a step backwards, preventing women from expressing their desires. But if you believe Rousseau, prioritizing the moral is a source of power for women. On the other hand, I still think the idea of love is used to manipulate women much more than men.