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).