The Female Crusoe: Hybridity, Trade and the Eighteenth-Century Individual (Costerus New Series)

The Female Crusoe

Hybridity, Trade and the Eighteenth-Century Individual

Costerus New Series 182 Series Editors: C.C. Barfoot, Theo D’haen and Erik Kooper



The Female Crusoe

Hybridity, Trade and the Eighteenth-Century Individual

C.M. Owen

Amsterdam-New York, NY 2010

Cover Image: © British Library Board, Pfeiffenthal, Bariteriposunds, pseud Madam Robunse mit ihrer Tochter... Adrianopel (Leipsic, 1724) Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2964-4 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-2965-1 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010 Printed in the Netherlands

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Introduction

1

1. The Critical Fortunes of Robinson Crusoe

21

2. Crusoe and the “Female Goddesses of Disorder”

41

3. Credit, Virginity and the Cannibal-consumer

63

4. The Social Contract and the Widow

83

5. The Female Castaway as Translator

109

6. The Virginal Individual

139

7. Mothers and Daughters of the New World

165

8. Female Sexual Desire and Independence

197

9. Crusoe and Modern Woman

229

Bibliography

261

Index

283

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Female Crusoe refers to this book’s central argument that eighteenth-century gendered values of trade, luxury and credit contributed to shaping the text and figure of Robinson Crusoe, as well as to the shaping of individualism and, therefore, to the gradual emergence of women as individuals. Five chapters of this book are based on my doctoral thesis, which examined Robinson Crusoe and the female castaway narratives that followed in its wake, in the early eighteenth century, and in the late twentieth century. This early work informed my growing understanding that the emergence of women’s rights was inextricable from the complex gendering of trade, with its concerns about morality, desire, excess and reputation in the eighteenth century. Many people have contributed to my writing this book including my thesis supervisors: at the Australian National University (ANU), the vigorous and generous criticism of Dr Rosanne Kennedy and the extensive literary knowledge and warm enthusiasm of Professor Iain Wright, sadly now deceased. At the ANU also I thank Professor Nicholas Thomas for his advice and patient reading and at the University of Melbourne, Professor Peter Otto for his feedback on an early version of the manuscript. I could not have completed the book without a research fellowship, timely study leave and research funds, all provided by the University of Melbourne. Every writer eventually becomes dependent on others, often friends and family, to see more clearly the work they have produced. In this respect my heartfelt thanks go to Helena Grehan, Rachid Mehdi, Matthew Rose, Katie Dobbs, Sari Smith, Christine Haines, Kim Lazenby and Susan Barrera. In Melbourne, I thank Claire Smiddy for her editing and Liz Wakefield for her patient bibliographic work. From Rodopi, I thank Cedric Barfoot for his meticulous care in editing my final manuscript, and Esther Roth for her kind and patient assistance in the final stages. Any remaining errors are all my own. Family and friends have made it possible for me to survive the various strains of writing and research, and I warmly thank them all.

INTRODUCTION

The Female Crusoe: Hybridity, Trade and the Eighteenth-century Individual addresses a deceptively simple question – what does the well-known story of Robinson Crusoe have to do with women, given that the self-titled book is widely regarded by contemporary critics as an iconic text of rational, masculine individualism and founding text of Western culture.1 The Female Crusoe is a partly tongue-in-cheek title referring to the book’s argument that Defoe’s early eighteenthcentury text was informed by the period’s feminine representations of trade, luxury and credit, and that this aspect of trading culture contributed to transforming masculine mores, and informed the advocated individualism of women at the end of the century. The younger Crusoe journeying out to sea is a figure affected by unstable desire, his own and that of others. As such, he needs to protect his reputation, much as a woman of the period might. Read in this context, Crusoe’s island stay, his enclosures and his encounter with Friday, all contribute to his final manifestation as an authoritative and hybrid figure of trade. His hybridity gives him both authenticity and authority, endorsing the positive aspects of commerce and the social mobility produced by the impact of trade. Above all, instead of the stasis associated with tradition and the aristocracy, Crusoe’s new authority and identity as a successful trader emerges from Defoe’s engagement with gendered, racial and cultural difference. Examining Robinson Crusoe in this light, together with the female castaway narratives it later gave rise to, enables a stronger understanding of the significance of the absence of women on Crusoe’s island, an absence widely interpreted by critics as signifying the dominant masculinity of individualism: the story of self-made man and the making of Western culture. The Female Crusoe assumes that the literary-historical analysis of 1

The text is referred to throughout as Robinson Crusoe and the protagonist as Crusoe. The edition used is Daniel Defoe, The Life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner, ed. J. Donald Crowley, London: Oxford University Press, 1998.

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The Female Crusoe

fictional texts can better inform us about how different, social identities come into existence as textual representations, and as social possibilities linked to social change. The main identity under investigation in The Female Crusoe is the rational individual, with its connotations of being a unitary and universal identity, connoting independence, rationality, singularity, agency, self-control and often implicitly, as I will discuss, masculinity. Each of the castaway narrative authors examined in this book imagines the castaway as drawing on the strengths of different others, whether the perceived differences stem from gender, class, culture or race. To understand this as a process of identity construction, it is necessary to understand that in language, meaning depends on the value attributed to unequal binary terms (such as black-white, masculine-feminine), and that each word depends on the meaning attributed to its opposite. In periods of social change, as meanings and values change, so the significance and value of different words will also change. What we understand “feminine” to mean in the twenty-first century is clearly very different to what was understood by that word in the early eighteenth century, and the various shifts that have occurred are integrally related to shifts in the meaning of “masculine” (and vice versa). Central to understanding The Female Crusoe is that social change not only occurs because of changes in social conditions, but also because of shifts, imagined and articulated, at the level of textual representation. Understanding the role of texts in this way allows us to connect Defoe’s imagined individual at the beginning of the eighteenth century to Wollstonecraft’s at the end of the century. In The Female Crusoe, social change and the desire for social change, driven by trade, credit and luxury, informs the emergence of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and, much later, Wollstonecraft’s emergent female individual. The castaway figure in this period was often depicted in minor, yet often, popular literature. Reading female castaway narratives throughout the period, with their desire to revalue qualities understood as feminine, allows for a productive re-reading of Robinson Crusoe and of the period’s individualism. In this reading, individualism is presented as informed by an entwining of economic and sexual desire. These desires, which were negatively associated with gender and race in the period, are re-presented in castaway narrative texts as positive and constructive qualities. This book’s range from Daniel Defoe’s work to Mary Wollstonecraft’s inscribes

Introduction

3

an almost century long arc that links Defoe’s need to make positive the negative feminine qualities associated with trade, to Wollstonecraft and her desire to blur the divide between imputed masculine and feminine values. As an example, in The Complete English Tradesman Defoe shows a tradesman accused of effeminacy and selfishness, unable to defend his country. His response is to emphasise the benefits of trade: such a man can pay for another to fight in his stead. Later, Wollstonecraft will also refer to the ideal masculinity of the military man saying they are more like women than they think: they are trained to be courteous, and similarly lack education. Many authors throughout the century took advantage of the fluctuating values associated with gender to link, often comically, male and female behaviour to a range of social and economic shifts. In the highly symbolic landscape of the castaway narrative, a host of symbolic references were suggested from moral issues to the disruptive effect of credit and luxury on society. The gender that was less valued might always be revalued to present a space of possible change in which different qualities and identities could be suggested and imagined; the new is always already there in the shadows created by social norms. The Female Crusoe concludes therefore that individualism is not a single, or masculine entity, but a hybrid phenomenon. Considered via readings of the eighteenth-century castaway narratives, individualism emerges as less a unified, coherent, fixed identity than a textured, fluctuating, gendered and cross-cultural landscape. The background to the castaway narrative resides in the story of historical beings wanting to live differently in the world and who are therefore in need of authenticity and authority. In the castaway narrative, these symbolic landscapes and imagined identities light up like a distant shadow play. As other critics have indicated, who we think we are - as modern individuals - is deeply imbued with the history of commerce, slavery and colonialism. In the texts examined in this book, the individual does not stand alone and discrete, conqueror of all that he or she surveys. Rather the figure of the individual comes into existence by drawing on values positioned as “Other” within dominant culture. These values, variously associated in the castaway narrative with the slave, the foreigner, the hermit, the servant, and the female, signify qualities that aid female and male individuals to come into existence.

4

The Female Crusoe

HISTORY AND LITERATURE There are three different, inseparable strands to this book’s overall argument, and these are historical, textual and symbolic. The social and economic history of the long eighteenth century (late sixteenth century to early nineteenth century) provides the cultural and historical context in which the castaway narrative was both read and written. Under the influence of trade, for example, value was to be differently realised. In contrast to the fixed value and status associated with inheritance and the ownership of land, trade, credit and luxury suggested a self-interest perceived as threatening the masculine and communal values necessary for the defence of England. The castaway tale must be read as not only linked to events such as large-scale migration, colonisation, trade, piracy and shipwreck, but also to concerns about power reflected in the social contract debates and debates about women’s role and education, the end of slavery and the American and French Revolutions. The second strand of the argument concerns the textual readings of the castaway narratives, understood in relation to the above social and historical factors. In these readings, the castaway texts show neglected values being reconsidered as individuals are shown surviving many dangers. The third strand reads these texts as gendered and symbolic, and inherently related to the changes in society stemming from trade. In such a symbolic reading, Crusoe’s desire for wealth and success in trade initially makes him a problematic feminised figure, and as a result he is shipwrecked. Defoe’s re-inscription of the feminine as a strength associated with sexual purity and virginal abstinence is subsequently combined with Crusoe’s discovery of Friday’s different, culturally-formed masculinity. It is such re-considerations of gender and race that enable Crusoe to emerge as a triumphant individual. At this symbolic level, newly acquired and differently shaped feminine and masculine values in the castaway narratives re-assign what and who is to have value. In these representations of remote desert islands social values are reconfigured and re-valued as essential in their association with, and reconfiguration of, the origins of society. ROBINSON CRUSOE When Daniel Defoe, author, journalist, commentator on trade and economics and, on occasion, government spy, wrote Robinson Crusoe in 1719, the advent of paper credit and increases in the availability of

Introduction

5

luxury goods, stemming from England’s colonial and expansionist activities, were transforming English society. Crusoe’s story, the fictional autobiography of a man’s shipwreck and twenty-eight years of isolation, is familiar as the story of the emergence of a successful and wealthy merchant. This novel, Defoe’s first, was followed by Defoe’s depiction of the extraordinary, idiosyncratic and independent female characters in Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana two years later. Throughout this period, in pamphlets and in narratives, a range of writers and artists widely represented trade and its related activities – finance, credit and the rising trade in luxury goods – as feminine as well as feminising factors in the emerging modern world. These feminine values not only informed Robinson Crusoe and the female castaway narratives produced in its wake, but also informed debates about women’s education and their civic roles, contributed to at the end of the century by such writers as Mary Wollstonecraft and Fanny Burney. In this book’s investigation, Robinson Crusoe emerges, not as the children’s adventure story it would become in the nineteenth century, but as an eighteenth-century text of social criticism, addressing problems of stasis and instability of identity due to changing social and cultural values. Wolfram Schmidgen argues that, in Defoe’s depictions of far away places, “Defoe’s ultimate aim … is rejecting institutions and practices at home”.2 On many fronts then, Robinson Crusoe is a potent site of investigation, its images able to inform us about the emergence of the individual as an apparently autonomous being, who yet relies on being recognised and valued by others, if he (or she) is to survive. The link to Wollstonecraft at the end of the century is that Robinson Crusoe addresses the problem of what and who is to be recognised as having value and, therefore, authority. This is the sub-text of Robinson Crusoe and the later female castaway narratives and themes it influenced. Stories of men and women cast away either actually or figuratively, show protagonists desiring to gain control over their circumstances, as priorities and values are reconsidered and reevaluated. In such eighteenth-century scenarios, a tentative and precarious authority is articulated for different marginalised and disenfranchised identities. In Robinson Crusoe, Defoe imagines a new 2

Wolfram Schmidgen, Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 41.

6

The Female Crusoe

authority for upwardly-mobile trades people.3 In the female castaway narratives, women are shown acting independently, albeit differently from the independence women experience today. A study of feminine values in this formative modern period shows the relationship between trade, individualism and gender to be lively and complex. In our own contemporary critical context, the female individual is often represented as subsumed under the sign of “man” yet, as Jane Gallop and Carolyn Burke argue, the possibility of hybridity and plurality in literary representations of subject formation might challenge and reinvigorate such discussions.4 FEMALE CASTAWAY NARRATIVES In the wake of Robinson Crusoe, female castaway stories appeared which criticised society, as such; they reveal different facets of the trading and social landscape in which Defoe imagined Crusoe. These narratives tell of the differences that emerge when a woman is placed at the centre of the iconic castaway/individualist narrative. These early eighteenth-century texts include the complementary male and female castaway narratives Martha Rattenberg and Alexander Vendchurch, written by the little known author, Ambrose Evans and published together in the same year as Robinson Crusoe. These two narratives set Martha’s success and survival as a translator alongside Alexander’s failure and corruption, proposing two, differently gendered ways of being in the world. After Evans, Penelope Aubin, a writer of popular romances in the period, published three female castaway narratives between 1721 and 1723. These feature the adventures of a series of young women cast away on reaching puberty. Aubin’s heroines deploy a series of disguises before, like Crusoe, reconciling the appearance of moral virtue with the acquisition of great wealth. Defoe, Evans and Aubin depict the island, as a space of transformation, that is neither domestic nor foreign, yet draws on values associated with both of these. In doing so, these narratives critically comment on, while they address, the problem of an English 3

Throughout the book I refer to the readers of Defoe’s The Complete English Tradesman as male because this is in keeping with Defoe’s general remarks and examples, although he acknowledges that women are in trade (trade refers to business in the period). 4 Jane Gallop and Carolyn Burke, “Psychoanalysis and Feminism in France”, in The Future of Difference, eds Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine, Boston: G.K.Hall, 1980, 107.

Introduction

7

society whose values were radically changing under the influence of trade and colonialism. The Female Crusoe argues that Robinson Crusoe and the female castaway narratives that followed it drew upon a model of moral virtue that was feminine, and therefore “natural”, internal and mobile (that is, embodied). The shift was a move away from traditional and masculine models of virtu, confirmed by rank and status, and it was essential in the new commercially-driven culture in which reputation remained a key concern. The next major shift in the female castaway story occurs in the middle of the century, when a range of French female castaway narratives were translated into English. Many of these texts engaged with the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who in Émile, or On Education (1762) advocated Robinson Crusoe as the only book useful for young Émile’s development. The status of Robinson Crusoe as an iconic text of English literature, and of children’s literature, has been largely attributed to Rousseau’s singling out of Defoe’s text. The female castaway narratives that engaged with both Robinson Crusoe and with Rousseau’s ideas at this time include the popular Paul and Virginia (1771) by Bernardin de St Pierre, Ambrose and Eleanor (in French, Lolotte et Fanfan, 1797) written by F. G. Ducray-Duminil, and Marguerite Daubenton’s Zelia in the Desert (1789). Published in the charged atmosphere of French politics, each of these texts is important to the story of individualism, because each uses isolated female castaway figures to comment on society’s values. In this sense, each narrative constructs a feminine individualism, showing what was at stake in terms of changing authority in this intensified period of social change. References to the practices of slavery, colonialism and exploration, that opportunities for social mobility depended upon, become more explicit later in the century in such female castaway texts as Unca Winkfield’s New World narrative, The Female American (1767). In this text, the female castaway directly criticises English society, when she chooses to live with an Native American tribe whose values she draws upon and combines with her own, to establish her independence. The scenario shows the author drawing on gendered and so-called foreign values to construct a hardier, hybrid individualism, just as Defoe had drawn on Friday’s and on feminine values to depict Crusoe as successful and socially mobile merchant. As the writing of Mary Robinson in the period indicated, as travel

8

The Female Crusoe

literature circulated more widely, some were becoming aware of and drawing attention to differences between societies, including the information that among indigenous tribes in America, women were participating in decision-making to a degree unheard of in Britain.6 At the end of long eighteenth century, some female castaway narratives appeared that emphasised more conservative religious themes. Narratives, such as The Family Robinson Crusoe (1814), contrasted with the earlier more critical texts and which retrospectively defined Robinson Crusoe as a pedagogical children’s narrative. At the end of the century, burlesque stage performances parodied the absence of women on Crusoe’s island and made fun of Crusoe’s asexual existence. In the changing light cast on Robinson Crusoe by such different representations, it has been overlooked that female castaway themes continued to inform texts of social reform as different as Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), Fanny Burney’s The Wanderer (1814), and her cousin Sarah Burney’s The Shipwreck (1816). These early proto-feminist texts addressed a woman’s capacity to act as an individual in her own right, showing such nascent individualism to be, not only circumscribed, but also produced by the values of the era. In these eighteenth-century narratives, writers use the image of a female cast away, both actually and metaphorically, to show women responding to the problematic terms of their society, through the necessary contingency of a journey taken from the centre of society to its margins and back again. In her examination of eighteenth-century German female castaway narratives, Jeanine Blackwell has established that, in contrast to the findings of most Robinsonade scholars, numerous female castaway narratives were written across Europe in the wake of Robinson Crusoe. Over sixteen female castaway narratives appeared in Germany, followed by at least three French, three Dutch, three British and one American.7 Blackwell concludes that, “[the] Female Robinson, with her initiative and autonomy, is a nearly forgotten 6

Mary Robinson [pseud. Anne Frances Randall], A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination. With Anecdotes, London: T.N. Longman, and O. Rees, 1799, 85. 7 Jeannine Blackwell in “An Island of Her Own: Heroines of the German Robinsonaden from 1720–1800”, German Quarterly, LVIII/1, (Winter, 1985) 5–26, includes Penelope Aubin’s The Life of Charlotta Du Pont (1723).

Introduction

9

model of the self-generating woman of the modern era”.8 However, while the story of this “self-generating woman” is an important part of the Crusoe story, The Female Crusoe suggests that it is necessarily a more complex story than the term “self-generating” suggests. In a society in which commerce, and the feminine values associated with it, was becoming more dominant, early eighteenthcentury female castaway narratives typically represented moral virtue as a persecuted young woman who, by the end of the narrative, has found a middle road between old and new values. As a consequence, she has fortuitously combined her new-found wealth with authentic status and authority. In the process, the purity associated with virginal and feminine virtue is confirmed as a significant moral ground associated with transformation and change. For Defoe, arguably one of the most slippery and inventive writers in the period, the values associated with the feminine gender (whether positive or negative), such as, changeability and an implied moral inviolability, were useful polemics in addressing some of the tensions between trade and social mobility.9 The Female Crusoe argues that over the century, trade and the female values associated with it, came to inform and strengthen arguments for women’s rights, as the identities and roles of men and women were gradually transformed by “polite and commercial” society.10 THE MODERN FEMALE CRUSOE In recent times, female Crusoe characters have been associated with imperialistic, nineteenth-century ideologies. For example, at the end of the nineteenth century, Robinson Crusoe is polemically linked to women’s independence when in America, women’s rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton depicts a female Crusoe figure in her speech before the United States Senate Committee on Woman Suffrage (1892): In discussing the rights of woman, we are to consider, first, what belongs to her as an individual, in a world of her own, the arbiter of her own destiny, an imaginary Robinson Crusoe with her woman 8

Blackwell, “An Island of Her Own”, 21. Defoe did not write his first novel until he was over sixty, before that he was prolific commentator and government adviser on issues of trade and government. 10 Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-1783, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. 9

10

The Female Crusoe Friday on a solitary island. Her rights under such circumstances are to use all her faculties for her own safety and happiness.11

Stanton’s rhetoric depicts independent woman as a Crusoe figure with a subservient, female Friday, the presence of the servant suggesting that this female Crusoe is a middle-class or upper-class woman. Such a commanding, imperial and self-reliant figure is often the target of post-modern deconstructions of Robinson Crusoe. However, under examination, the would-be independent female castaway figure of the eighteenth century might be very different to her nineteenth-century, or twentieth-century, predecessor. As other critics have noted, eighteenth-century fictions such as Tristam Shandy often utilised what we now refer to as post-modern writing strategies, including selfreflexivity, multiple narratives and hybrid characters. This book suggests that Robinson Crusoe and the eighteenth-century female castaway narratives draw on a range of such writing strategies, and that the allegorical, symbolic and constructed nature of these narratives shows them to be imbued with, and dependent on, the sexual and gendered imagery of the period, imagery which is as important as the racial and colonial frameworks within which Defoe’s iconic text is usually considered. The Female Crusoe suggests there is a surprising accord between contemporary, twentieth-century female castaway narratives (discussed in Chapter Nine) and eighteenth-century castaway narratives, in terms of their depictions and criticisms of individualism and of society. In both centuries, the castaway narratives address the gendered terms that shape the individual and propose new terms under which change might occur. Both sets of texts draw on the structure, content and language of Robinson Crusoe to critique socially dominant ideas. In the eighteenth century among the dominant ideas, being attacked or defended, were the effeminacy of trade and those engaged in it, the negative and moral effects of commerce, and the idea of women earning an income; in the twentieth century, it is the cultural dominance of individualism itself that is criticised and the idea of modern man and woman as self-made, or, in Blackwell’s 11 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Solitude of Self: Address before the U.S. Senate Committee on Woman Suffrage, February 20, 1892”, in The Concise History of Woman Suffrage, eds Mari Jo Buhle and Paul Buhle, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1978, 325.

Introduction

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terms, “self-generating”. Like the contemporary post-modern castaway texts, Robinson Crusoe and the eighteenth-century female castaway narratives draw on a range of genres including historical and fictional accounts, romance narratives and travel tales to build their texts of social criticism. For example, Aubin uses her politically-orientated Prefaces to distance her from the allegedly more frivolous narratives of Eliza Haywood (in order to strengthen her own status as an author), while her narratives of sexual pursuit, like Haywood’s, criticise the corruption of society, re-establishing the importance of cast away feminine values. In both twentieth-century and eighteenth-century castaway stories, the incorporation of different genres, such as romance and travel, reflect the importance of hybridity as different genres effectively bring different associations together to change dominant meanings. Each narrative cobbles together opposing values to bring about a shift in understanding. In both the twentieth century and in the eighteenth century, writers refer to writing as an artifice, an artificial construction, in which romance and travel tales suggest new ways of being. The conventional setting of the castaway narrative is land and sea, literally the island is surrounded by, and therefore dominated by, the sea. In the symbolic language of the eighteenth century, land and sea were often equated with what was thought to be substantial and insubstantial, and these in turn were often represented as differently gendered. Conventionally, land referred to traditional values associated with the aristocracy, the military, and with gold (rather than with the more insubstantial paper currency). In contrast, the insubstantial was associated with shifting, unstable values, such as trade, financial speculation, paper money, and social mobility. Land therefore was associated with what had value, or with who had status and authority, while the fluctuating and variable sea was often associated with what had little or no fixed value, indicating the fluctuations of status and authority. The challenge that the eighteenthcentury castaway narrative addresses is upending these long-held associations – metaphorically showing survival at sea. Both Defoe and the female castaway narrative authors contend with readers’ assumptions to re-present neglected or misunderstood values, as they redraw the terms upon which social change and personal advancement might occur. Such narratives might give rise to images which contrast

12

The Female Crusoe

the visible with the invisible; the substantial with the insubstantial; the authentic or true with the inauthentic and false, as authors work to rerepresent and redress tensions between ideal and material worlds. In these highly symbolic landscapes, the castaways learn to survive and, in the representation of their survival, the texts give new authority to neglected values and identities. The castaway narratives themselves are like castaway islands where the usefulness of neglected, rejected and even ostracised values is demonstrated. The castaway scenario is pre-eminently suited to texts critical of society because the castaway is necessarily stranded in a kind of nowhere space, a liminal space between recognisable, opposing and equally problematic locations (or oppositions), whether domestic or foreign, masculine or feminine. It is a place where, for the moment, all such oppositions, social hierarchies and marks of status can be suspended. In these circumstances, the island is a temporary, level playing field where, for example, hierarchical relations of dependence, such as, a master’s or mistress’s reliance on their servants can be highlighted and redressed. In these circumstances, gendered associations become malleable because change must take place. The stranded castaways are unable to begin a new journey until they have taken stock of their apparently finite resources. That their previous life has come to an end reflects a general crisis in society. THE SYMBOLIC CASTAWAY To be a castaway is to be neither one thing nor another. Forced into stasis, he or she is unable to go back or forward, needing to bring both past and future desires together in a new and productive way. The imperative is that the castaway must find a way that draws on, even while it transcends, both progressive and conservative values, so that the new identity can be recognised and therefore valued by others. To achieve this transformation, the castaway must change what the majority understand to have value. What better place to represent this than in an environment of scarcity where what is conventionally considered as having less value (in this case, the feminine and the foreign) can be re-presented as invaluable. Understood in these terms, it is not surprising that the castaway story was popular in the eighteenth century with its unprecedented social mobility, and large moving populations of migrants, travellers, exiles and slaves. Even if located suggestively nowhere, the fictional castaways are always

Introduction

13

located somewhere, for they take with them the world that is known, the shape of what is familiar and use it to create sense out of what is unknown and unfamiliar. Values arising from their far-flung locations and colonised lands are shown to be foreign, but are also represented as essential to survival. Like the temporary dwellings that the castaways nail together from found objects, and from the flotsam and jetsam of passing ships, new and stronger hybrid identities are cobbled together on these islands. For the reader, the island, both allegorical and real, is always elsewhere, either somewhere over the seas or in society. In the space between the known and the previously unknown, such factors as Friday’s new and different masculinity can be represented as essential to Crusoe’s survival; an idea which complements, yet stands in tension with Robinson Crusoe as a quintessential text of English dominance and colonialism. Oppositional scenarios are essential to the castaway narrative and, in another example, castaways who are unable to circulate show the vital importance of circulation. Defoe understood that the circulation of people, as well as money, was essential to the achievement of value and authority. The problem he saw was that to circulate in society (in order to maintain, or accrue value) entailed the risk of losing one’s value, that is, one’s reputation. This dilemma was intensified when the figure at the centre of the castaway narrative was a woman or, when the threat being faced, was like that faced by women. The problem for the contemporary theorist studying the influence of gender in literary texts is that what is associated with gender tends to shift in different historical periods. Value attaches itself first to one aspect of culture and then to another, and the indeterminacy of gender makes it difficult to use in analysis. In The Female Crusoe this problem has been addressed by comparing and contrasting related texts from similar periods, focusing on particular aspects of trade and on Robinson Crusoe and the female castaway narratives. In summary then, The Female Crusoe, has two essential themes: it suggests that early in the century an emerging dominant rational individualism is informed by feminine trading values, and that late in the century an emerging female individualism is informed by changes to masculinity and femininity brought about by the culture and practices of trade. As a result, at the end of century, women are starting to see themselves (and be seen by others) as potentially autonomous. The two themes are clearly connected in that feminising

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The Female Crusoe

commerce is shown influencing social values and mores, and therefore, both femininity and masculinity. CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM In feminist critical accounts, women’s emergence as individuals in their own right is a complex story that has been told in a number of ways. These include accounts of singular women achieving independence due to their own determination, as well as histories and stories of legal, economic, social and political struggles for women’s rights. The Female Crusoe sets out a scenario in which changes in social and gendered values, themselves influenced by historic and political changes, are the essential backdrop to all such individual and group struggles. The story of The Female Crusoe is consistent with (while it also criticises) contemporary critical theories that typically depict the individual Western subject, the “I” of language, as masculine and Eurocentric.14 These theories critique the idea of a singular, humanistic, self-motivating self, for whom language is a mere tool of communication; an idea seen as foundational to Western societies, and consistent with the idea of Crusoe’s “autobiography” of himself as a self-made man. Gallop and Burke usefully contrast this concept of the self with the idea of a constructed subject: “The ‘self’ implies a center, a potentially autonomous individual; the ‘subject’ is a place in language, a signifier already alienated in an intersubjective network.”15 The shift from understanding the individual as selfmotivated – as always and everywhere under control – to a subject constructed in language (and sometimes depicted as almost totally lacking autonomy) is a hallmark of post-modern criticism. Yet as Clifford Geertz points out, “the largely Western assumption of the person as a bounded unique, more or less integrated and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action, organised into a distinctive whole and set contrastively against other such wholes and against a social and natural background is … a 14

The psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud have been extremely influential in feminist theory discussions: see Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory, London: Blackwell, 1987. Jacques Derrida coined the term “phallo-logocentrism” to indicate “a continuity of phallus in logos” indicating “a certain sexual scene behind or before – but always within – the scene of philosophy” (Jacques Derrida, A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991, 313). 15 Gallop and Burke, “Psychoanalysis and Feminism in France”, 106.

Introduction

15

rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures.”16 Often referring to the iconic figure of Crusoe, such critical postmodern approaches emphasise that, “the straight, white, Christian man of property ... ‘the ethical universal’ necessarily excludes (and absorbs) all those who are different from it, including all women”.17 In accord with this idea, the void created by the absence of women on Crusoe’s island has been central to Robinson Crusoe’s representation in literary criticism as “the embodiment of economic individualism”.18 It is a description that Gillian Hewitson and Ulla Grapard have critically discussed under the rubric of feminist economics.19 Karl Marx, who was well aware of the novel’s popularity with economists, accused followers of the late eighteenth-century economist, Adam Smith, of using the depiction to give wealth and labour “a subjective essence”.20 The shipwreck scenario as a site of economic surplus and scarcity had been popular in Defoe’s own day with the philosopher Bishop Berkley (1685–1753) using the example to discuss the workings of credit when he suggested that castaways: “to record and circulate this Credit … would soon agree on certain Tallies, Tokens, Tickets or Counters.”21 The principle of exchange in relation to identity, where cultural similarities are emphasised over difference in 16 Clifford Geertz, “From the Natives’ Point of View: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding”, in Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion, eds Richard A. Shweder and Robert Alan LeVine, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, 126. 17 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Theory in the Margin: Coetzee’s Foe Reading Defoe’s Crusoe/Roxana” in Consequences of Theory, eds Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991, 159. 18 This depiction by Ian Watt in 1957 is repeated in his 1996 Myths of Modern Individualism (The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, London: Chatto and Windus, 1957, 63 and Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Watt’s influence in relation to the rise of the novel is discussed in Robert Folkenflik, “The Heirs of Ian Watt”, Eighteenth-Century Studies, XXV/2 (Winter 1991), 203-17. 19 Gillian J. Hewitson, Feminist economics: deconstructing the masculinity of rational economic man, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 1999; Robinson Crusoe's Economic Man: A Construction and Deconstruction, ed. Ulla Grapard and Gillian Hewitson, New York: Routledge, (in press). 20 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1996, 95-96; see also Ulla Grapard, “Robinson Crusoe: The quintessential economic man”, Feminist Economics, I/1 (March 1995), 33-52. 21 George Berkeley, The Works of George Berkeley, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901, 426.

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The Female Crusoe

order to facilitate economic exchange is a principle played out in a complex manner by Defoe. Robinson Crusoe is finally, and perhaps most importantly, a story understood as emerging from colonialism. As the influential postcolonial critic Edward Said wrote of Robinson Crusoe, this “prototypical modern realist novel” is one that is “certainly not accidentally … about a European who creates a fiefdom … on a nonEuropean island”.22 To go beyond the idea of the individual as autonomous and self-creating, while retaining a sense of the colonial environment that shapes the story, it is necessary to represent the emerging eighteenth-century individual as historically and spatially constructed, as a figure whose authority and authenticity is achieved through complex textual negotiations. On this basis, The Female Crusoe starts by examining the shaping presence of trade values represented as feminine, by comparing Robinson Crusoe with Defoe’s important conduct book, The Complete English Tradesman (volume one published in 1725 and the second in 1727). Reading Robinson Crusoe and subsequent female castaway narratives in the context of these eighteenth-century representations and debates on trade, luxury and credit opens up the question of what is at stake when eighteenthcentury authors depict (or fail to depict) women cast away on desert islands. THE CHAPTERS The relationship between Robinson Crusoe, the gendered values of trade, eighteenth-century individualism and subsequent demands for women’s rights is a story that must necessarily be told in stages. Chapter One sketches the critical story of Robinson Crusoe by focussing on how gender and gendered values have been understood (or not) by critics. Chapter Two reads Robinson Crusoe as a story of trade, luxury and credit, associated with effeminacy and artifice. This chapter shows how these terms are gendered and negotiated by Defoe to establish authority for a marginalised identity: the socially-mobile trader, the would-be gentleman of influence. Chapter Three discusses the importance of Friday’s different masculinity to Crusoe’s emerging individualism. Chapter Four introduces the period’s social contract debates, as an important context for understanding the castaway narrative as a text of social criticism. In the light of these 22

Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, London: Vintage, 1993, xii.

Introduction

17

representations and debates, Crusoe’s friend the widow emerges as a figure that parallels Crusoe as a prototype of a newly independent female individual. Independent, without sexual activity and, regarded as a feme sole, or woman able to trade, the widow is a potentially independent figure of finance and an important symbolic figure in her paid work, taking responsibility for Crusoe’s money and for the education of his children. In Chapter Five, the discussion turns to Ambrose Evans’ castaway narratives. In Evans’ work, the figure of Martha Rattenberg balances the excessive desire associated with trade, and as a female rational castaway and translator, she is necessarily a more moderate trading figure than Crusoe. In its companion and complementary text, the similarly bi-lingual male castaway fails to benefit from being a castaway, and his activity leads to the death of his Spanish lover, Elvira. In Chapter Six, Penelope Aubin, the first woman writer to produce female versions of Robinson Crusoe, depicts female castaways as survivors who learn to revalue previously corrupted terms in their time on the island. Evans and Aubin both use issues of sexuality and reproduction to represent moral values as interior and feminine. In their symbolic economies, daughters are in a similar disadvantaged and disenfranchised position to younger sons, such as Crusoe. Like Crusoe, Aubin’s and Evan’s female protagonists negotiate a social field in which immorality and becoming wealthy are problematically linked. Seen through the prism of Aubin’s and Evan’s narratives, the story of Crusoe, fortified within his enclosures, is analogous to the young female castaways: he projects a symbolic, gendered image of self-enclosure and self-sufficiency. As Aubin manipulates feminine and masculine values to establish authority and authenticity for her characters, she endorses and supports her own act of earning money as a woman writer. Chapter Seven turns to the absence of the mother in early eighteenth-century female castaway narratives and her return in similar narratives later in the century. After being configured as absent or dead in earlier works, in mid- to late eighteenth-century narratives, mothers return to contribute to influence their daughters. In these texts, writers respond, in part, to Rousseau: to the high status he attributed to Robinson Crusoe and to his advocating of a more prominent role for mothers in the domestic sphere. This chapter discusses female protagonists who choose to remain cast away in the

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The Female Crusoe

New World, as a place where they can realise their independence by enforcing a break from established roles and traditions. In these stories, as in Robinson Crusoe, values represented as foreign and indigenous are drawn upon to produce images of independence. Chapter Eight examines the writings of Fanny Burney, an important novelist (a significant influence on Jane Austen), and Mary Wollstonecraft, a key figure in the history of women’s rights. This chapter looks at narratives with female castaway themes produced in the wake of the French Revolution. It discusses the way in which these works are linked to the culture and rhetoric of Robinson Crusoe when they represent problems of female sexual desire and reputation in relation to issues of independence, trade and finance. Burney’s depiction of the influence of credit and luxury on the lives of her protagonists continues to link female individualism to the gendered influence of trade and finance. The chapter goes on to discuss how the eighteenth-century gendering of trade, credit and luxury informs the arguments of Wollstonecraft in relation to women’s rights. In view of the importance of contemporary critical discussions of individualism, and in light of the ongoing popularity of castaway narratives, the final chapter turns to the late twentieth century. Three post-modern female castaway narratives are discussed in which Robinson Crusoe is a significant critical inheritance, rather than simply the text being criticised. These post-modern texts engage with Robinson Crusoe as an iconic text of rational individualism, while also recognising its influence as a text of social reform. The chapter points out the many ways in which these texts, which appear to be very different to their eighteenth-century counterparts, actually replicate many of the original themes and concerns of Robinson Crusoe and the eighteenth-century female castaway narratives. In particular, these texts come full circle in associating gender and race with overlooked, yet determining values, in order to critique individualism. In Jane Gardam’s Crusoe’s Daughter (1986), Barbara Einzig’s Robinson Crusoe; A New Fiction (1983), and J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), values described as part-feminine and part-Other create a productive in-between space of translation and transformation. All these texts “use and abuse”23 the values of Robinson Crusoe in their 23

Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, New York: Routledge, 1988, 33.

Introduction

19

depiction of a hybrid individualism that carries echoes of the gendered trading culture of the eighteenth century.

CHAPTER ONE THE CRITICAL FORTUNES OF ROBINSON CRUSOE There is not an old Woman that can go the Price of it, but buys thy Life and Adventures, and leaves it as a Legacy with the Pilgrims Progress, the Practice of Piety, and God’s Revenge against Murther, to her Posterity.1

Critics have long read Robinson Crusoe as a masculine, rational text of unitary and universal individualism and this chapter discusses this perspective. The chapter raises the possibility of a hybrid Crusoe figure informed by, historically determined, masculine and feminine values. Such a reading might explain the appeal of this iconic text to women readers when it was first published, and throughout its history. From the date of its first publication, Robinson Crusoe was popular with women readers and, as the critic Pat Rogers points out, women in this era effectively constituted the “traditional literary public”. Defoe’s contemporary (and first critic), Charles Gildon noted the text’s popularity with servants, just as the writer Charles Lamb was to do much later in the century.2 The book’s wide accessibility was partly due to the fact that, apart from the three editions that appeared in 1719, it was one of the first texts to be serialised in a newspaper periodical.3 Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849), the Irish campaigner for women’s education reform, writing in the wake of Rousseau at the end of the eighteenth century, suggested that Robinson Crusoe was a text more likely to be wisely read by girls than boys. She reasoned that boys, identifying with its hero, might acquire similar aspirations to Crusoe, whereas girls “must soon perceive the impossibility of their 1

Defoe: The Critical Heritage, Pat Rogers, ed., London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972, 42. 2 Artur Blaim, Failed Dynamics: The English Robinsonade of the Eighteenth Century, Lublin: Uniwersytet Marii Curie, 1987, 29. 3 “The original London Post, or Heathcote’s Intelligence serialised the book in seventy-eight instalments between October 1719 and 30 March 1720. By 1779 the text went into fifteen official editions in addition to the many pirated publications, abridgements and chap-books” (Ibid., 15).

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The Female Crusoe

rambling about the world in quest of adventure”.4 In opposition to this common sense reading, the female castaway heroines that emerged almost immediately after Robinson Crusoe’s publication, tended to be like Crusoe – aspirants with desires for a better life, or having the need to establish a better life due to difficult circumstances. In her study of the female castaways in German literature, Blackwell observes that these protagonists tended to be “welleducated, moral, competent and headstrong young women” with “a desire to see something else of the world in spite of [their] moralistic or impoverished upbringing”, having come “from affluent families, a few are dirt poor, but all are financially self-sufficient”.5 Blackwell asks a question about the German castaways that is highly relevant to this book: “in a time when nice girls were not supposed to read adventures, when European women were not taking to the sea in droves, and the few known German women authors were poets, why did Robinsonades with female main characters constitute a hefty 12% of the genre?”6 In the English case, Blackwell’s question is partly answered by the fact that, at the end of the eighteenth century, in the novel and on the stage, the female Crusoe referred to the difficulty of economical survival, to the related problem of reputation, and to the consequent need to have resources.7 As Robinson Crusoe is a formative and iconic text of modernity, Rita Felski’s observation in The Gender of Modernity is a useful place to begin its analysis: the stories we create ... reveal the inescapable presence and power of gender symbolism. This saturation of cultural texts with metaphors of masculinity and femininity is nowhere more obvious than in the modern.8

4

Maria and Richard L. Edgeworth, Practical Education, London: Routledge/ Thoemmes, 1992, 111. 5 Blackwell, “An Island of Her Own”, 9. 6 Ibid.,7. 7 Frances Burney, The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties, (1814); Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001; Charles Dibdin, Hannah Hewitt; or, the Female Crusoe, (1792), London: C. Dibdin, 1798. 8 Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995, 1.

The Critical Fortunes of Robinson Crusoe

23

Felski refers to the “mutual imbrication as well as points of contradiction” between the subject produced by a text and the text in which a subject is produced. In referring to both literary texts and to social texts, her concern is how the way we live comes to make sense to us and of us. Felski shows that the association of masculinity with modernity, and the positioning of women outside of modernity, are not inherently fixed positions.9 She gives examples of historical instances in which values perceived as feminine have disturbed entities considered inherently masculine and discrete. Her examples include the sexualisation of the workplace when working-class women entered factories; the articulation of consumer culture as feminine (already evident in the eighteenth century); and the assertion of “a distinctively feminine morality” as the rationale for women entering the public sphere. This latter aspect is an essential part of the story of feminine individualism and of female castaway narratives throughout the eighteenth century.10 Defoe famously tells his eighteenth-century reader that Robinson Crusoe is a “Just History” written and narrated by its hero. As an eponymous text, it suggests a strong equivalence between the depiction of its lead character and the construction of the text itself. That is, in a metaphoric sense, the protagonist can be understood as a constructed text, and the text as a constructed persona. When we adopt the premise, foregrounded by the work of theorist Mikhail Bakhtin and others that texts are constituted of cultural discourses, which are multiple and complex, it is possible to look beyond the selfregenerating terms offered for Crusoe as individual. On these terms, this iconic figure and text can be understood as based in, and informed by, prevalent discourses in society. Michel Foucault’s question, “What is an author?” is pertinent here as Foucault’s work shifts the emphasis away from the individual, as the sole originator of meaning, to understanding the individual as “a complex and variable function of discourse”.11 By adopting Foucault’s premise that subject-positions (or speaking positions) are made possible, or authorised, by different discourses, it is possible to examine how this text and figure 9

Ibid., 18. Ibid., 19. 11 Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977, 138. 10

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The Female Crusoe

establishes its authority and substance. For Foucault, “the name of the author remains at the contours of texts, separating one from another, defining their form, and characterising their mode of existence”.12 In these terms, the castaway narratives of the eighteenth century can be read as produced within the ambit of their authors’ cultural backgrounds which, in turn, were circumscribed by particular discursive conditions. That is, the castaway narratives show individuals surviving in “forms which are produced historically and [which] change with shifts in the wide range of discursive fields that constitute them”.13 The development of different subjectivities as an outcome of language, however, does not mean giving up the idea of the individual as an active, controlling subject: the subject should not be entirely abandoned. It should be reconsidered, not to restore the theme of an originating subject, but to seize its functions, its intervention in discourse, and its systems of dependencies ... we should ask what conditions and through what forms can an entity like the subject appear in the order of discourse, what position does it occupy; what functions does it exhibit; and what rules does it follow in each type of discourse.14

In adopting this approach the question becomes: in what discursive conditions does individualism arise? In this light, Robinson Crusoe, like the female castaway narratives that engaged with it, emerges, as Edward Said points out, as a “narrative subject ... a social act par excellence and as such has behind it the authority of history and society”.15 The project of analysing Foucault’s “system of dependencies”, that shape (and reshape) the individual female subject, informs Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown’s work on the eighteenth century in which these authors emphasise “woman” as a “historically and culturally produced category”.16 They draw on, though distinguish their work from, previous feminist research which read texts more 12

Ibid., 123. Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory, 33. 14 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, Brighton: Harvester, 1980, 138. 15 Said, Culture and Imperialism, 92. 16 The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, eds Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown, New York: Methuen, 1987, 15. 13

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25

straightforwardly as reflective of women’s experience. The work of J.G.A. Pocock provides another important insight, in reading Robinson Crusoe as the depiction of a gendered and hybrid individualism, with his finding that: Economic man as masculine conquering hero is a fantasy of nineteenth century industrialisation .... His eighteenth century predecessor was seen as on the whole a feminised, even an effeminate being …17

A paradigm shift clearly takes place between Pocock’s eighteenthcentury effeminate economic man and modernity’s rational economic man. Studies, such as Laura Brown’s Ends of Empire, insist that concepts such as eighteenth-century mercantile capitalism “cannot be understood without an analysis of the representation of ‘woman’”.18 In accord, The Female Crusoe argues that shifts in the gendering of trade influenced and changed the roles and identities of both men and women. As discussed, the book is responding, in part, to the contemporary, over-determining perspective that, women, as Western subjects, are inevitably, always and everywhere, occupying a masculine position. In The Female Crusoe the process of achieving authenticity as a subject, as an individual, is complexly gendered, never stable nor fixed and determined. Robinson Crusoe criticism often expresses the view that the absence of women on Crusoe’s island, the idea that Crusoe gives birth to himself as an individual, and his early rejection of his parents’ advice not to go to sea, can all be explained by the period’s misogyny, together with the fact that sex and the family are typical disincentives to capitalist activity. In the late eighteenth century, Wollstonecraft, in her assertion of equal rights for women, quotes the aristocrat Francis Bacon as expressing a complementary sentiment: “Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the

17

J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, 114. 18 Laura Brown, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993, 10.

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The Female Crusoe

unmarried or childless men.”19 While these views are legitimate, The Female Crusoe reads Robinson Crusoe more symbolically, in relation to the dominant values of the period. The eighteenth century was a period in which the influx of trade led to a shift from a conventionally patriarchal regime, where the social and family circumstances of birth determine one’s fortunes, to a newly mobile society where one’s identity must be negotiated and agreed upon by others. Early in the century, these changing values were often evoked in symbolic and allegoric terms creating indirect possibilities at the level of the ideal, rather than direct and actual possibilities for male and female readers. Female castaway narratives did not lead to a greater or lesser number of young women running away to sea at puberty, nor to a large number of women becoming independent merchants like Crusoe. However, readers of the castaway narrative would have been well aware of, even effected by, the transgressive nature of the castaway narrative, in terms of the gendered tensions it evoked, and the questions it raised about morality and commitment to self versus family and community. THE FORTUNES OF ROBINSON CRUSOE Robinson Crusoe is set on a Caribbean island in the gulf of the river Oroonoko, off the mainland of Trinidad. The period is the late seventeenth century and Crusoe narrates the story of how, as the youngest son, he disobeyed his father and mother and went to sea. After he establishes a plantation in Brazil – and after many adventures involving storms, and buying and selling slaves, as well as being taken as a slave himself (by pirates) – Crusoe is shipwrecked. On the island, Crusoe successfully conserves his resources and variously calls himself King and Governor of the island, and his places of living, his “castle” and “country retreats”. After twenty-odd years in isolation, he is joined by a Carib native, whom he saves from being eaten by other tribal members and who he names Friday for the day on which they met. By the end of the more familiar first volume, Crusoe has taken possession of the island, converted Friday to Christianity and taught him English. With Friday’s help, Crusoe is able to save several white men from the Carib men who visit the island for cannibal rituals. 19

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, London: J. Johnson, 1796 (3rd edn), 136.

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27

Crusoe lives by his wits and, consistent with being a self-made man, he is not rescued from the island by others, but rescues the captain of a boat from a mutiny and then commandeers his ship. It is important to understanding the events on the island that though Crusoe rescues Friday, their relationship is also presented as mutually beneficial. That is, it is through their meeting that Friday rescues Crusoe. Crusoe leaves the island in the hands of the previously mutinous sailors, and the released Spanish prisoners of the Caribs, and sails to Lisbon, before returning circuitously to England with Friday. Defoe does not discuss Friday’s experience in England, but his burial at sea, on another journey, is noted in the second volume. While Crusoe was a castaway, two people, his Portuguese partner in business (born of English parents) and his friend, the Captain’s widow in England, have taken care of his money. As a result, Crusoe is a rich man. At the end of the narrative, Crusoe states that after leaving the island, he marries, has two sons and a daughter and that later, his wife dies. This is the basic structure of the first and best known of the three volumes of Robinson Crusoe.20 On its last page, Crusoe sends the men he left on the island, seven women “proper for Service and or [sic] for Wives such as would take them”, with a promise of English women for the English sailors (306). The success of Robinson Crusoe was immediate, with seven reprints in as many years and numerous translations into French (1720, 1722 and 1726), German (1721), Danish (1721 and 1745), Swedish (1745), Italian (1731) and Dutch (1721, 1736, 1752, 1791).21 It was translated into Russian in the 1760s, but was on a list of banned books in Spain in 1756, suggesting, as Martin Green points out, that works associated with the English Enlightenment were not always welcome in other countries.22 Though Defoe was criticised for using religion to pad out the text (authors were paid by the word), Robinson 20 The other volumes are The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), Oxford: Blackwell, 1972, – only seven editions – and Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, with his Vision of the Angelic World, London: W. Taylor, 1720 published “without any significant interest on the part of the reading public”, (Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, Feminist Companion to Literature in English, London: B.T. Batsford, 1990, 18-19). 21 Martin Green, The Robinson Crusoe Story, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990; Artur Blaim, Failed Dynamics, 1987. 22 Green, The Robinson Crusoe Story, 20.

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Crusoe was reified as a pedagogical classic late in the eighteenth century, largely due to the influence of Rousseau and Edgeworth. Since this time it has been a classic of children’s literature. As a canonical work of English literature and a significant work of colonialism, Robinson Crusoe has appeared in over seven-hundred editions, translations and imitations. In the mid- to late twentieth century, it become the focus of theoretically-informed fiction, works that were critical of colonialism and individualism.23 Two of the bestknown of this literature are Michel Tournier’s Friday or the Other Island (1967), in which the island as Speranza, or “feminine nature”, is literally seeded by a sexualised Crusoe;24 and J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) – discussed in Chapter Nine. In Foe, when Cruso (without an “e”) dies on his return to London, Friday’s mutilated tongue necessitates that the story of the foundational island is left with a female castaway. She searches for, and negotiates with, an author named Foe to assist her to write it. In this tale of deconstruction, Susan must write her own story and teach Friday, telling of her emerging individualism, as well as her involvement in Friday’s subjection. INFLUENCES ON CRUSOE Robinson Crusoe is said to be unusual in that excluding women from the desert island is a “break from the traditional expectations aroused 23

Contemporary works which engage with Robinson Crusoe from the perspective of the colonised include Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, London: Penguin, 1966; Keri Hulme, The Bone People, Wellington, London: Spiral Collective, 1983; Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men, New York: Vintage Books, 1980 (See discussion of the Robinson Crusoe connection in Kai-chong Cheung, “Maxine Hong Kingston’s NonChinese Man”, Tamkang Review: A Quarterly of Comparative Studies between Chinese and Foreign Literatures, XXIII/1-4, [1992-1993], 421-430); Patrick White, Fringe of Leaves, London: J. Cape, 1976; Derek Walcott, The Castaways, and Other Poems, London: J. Cape, 1965; and Samuel Selvon, Moses Ascending, London: Heinemann, 1975. Selvon’s text is discussed in Richard Phillips, Mapping Men and Empire, New York: Routledge, 1988. 24 Michel Tournier, Friday; or, the Other Island, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967. Martin Green describes Friday as “describing a non-heterosexual and even nongenital sexuality”. Like Crusoe, the hero has “a wife and children at home in York”, (The Robinson Crusoe Story, 189 and 190). Nature as animated and feminine also occurs in Gabriel de Foigny’s La Terre Australe Connue (1676) which features trees in the form of women, discussed in David Fausett, The Strange Surprizing Sources of Robinson Crusoe, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994, 49.

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29

by desert islands from The Odyssey to The New Yorker”.25 Homer’s Odyssey contains Circe, Calypso and the Sirens, all examples of women on islands who seek to catch the unwary sailor.26 However, it is also true that Robinson Crusoe has significant predecessors in utopian fiction. As Marie Louise Berneri comments in her survey of such fiction, “It is curious ... to see how many utopias are conceived of as sexless societies”.27 Some of the texts considered by critics to have influenced the development of Robinson Crusoe include a number in which societies are gendered exclusively as either male or female. One example is Hendrik Smeeks’ The Mighty Kingdom of Krinke Kesme (1708) in which there are “separate sub-societies on offshore islands” for men and for women.28 Krinke Kesme is a philosophical fiction that compares “the men’s abstract cosmic science with the women’s objective knowledge” and, according to David Fausett, demonstrates differently gendered reading practices, with the women being the more objective and rational: … all the Female Professors gathered to scrutinize the said Books, they were ordered by the Governess of Wonvure to tear out all the Title pages of the Books and burn them: not in order to discredit the Authors – since they acknowledge that they owe all their Knowledge to the Books of good Men – but in order not to make things difficult for the Authors, when they are quoted or copied and their words and opinions are not exactly adhered to; they use the Books as it suits them: they leave out things or add things, at their pleasure.29

Fausett describes this representation as a “radically feminist solution” to the materialist trend of its time and describes its contribution as

25

Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 68; Watt, Myths of Modern Individualism, 169. Arnold Saxton also discusses the Greek legend of Ariadne who was abandoned on the island of Naxos before being taken by Dionysus as his lover. He describes the island and her cave as symbolic and vaginal. Another example he gives is Le Nouveau Gulliver (1730) by Abbé Pierre-Francois Desfontaines in which women run the island society (“Female Castaways”, in Robinson Crusoe: Myths and Metamorphoses, eds Lieve Spaas and Brian Stimpson, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996, 144). 27 Marie-Louise Berneri, Journey through Utopia, London: Freedom Press, 1982, 188. 28 Fausett, The Strange Surprizing Sources, 98. 29 Hendrik Smeeks, The Mighty Kingdom of Krinke Kesmes, 1708, eds and trans. David Fausett and R.H. Leek, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995, 48. 26

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The Female Crusoe

informing the “battle of the sexes”.30 Fausett also cites the historical influence on Robinson Crusoe of Robert Knox who in Historical Relation (1681) associates women with general dissension. Knox states of the utopian community he himself established at this time on the coast of Ceylon, that “only single Men and Batchelors should dwell there ....”31 Fausett’s The Strange Surprizing Sources of Robinson Crusoe, gives a number of examples of the gender politics of utopian fictions. He suggests that the characterisation of Crusoe as an asexual, rational, economic subject can be read as part of a dystopian tradition, reflecting major changes in values in the early eighteenth century brought about by the shift to a secular society, increasing materialism and industrialisation, a subsequent crisis over truth and the rise of realism and the novel. However, he does not develop this important insight – that there is a link between Defoe’s text and language, gender and materialism – and gender is not mentioned in the list of his six conclusions. In the large and lively field of Crusoe criticism, The Female Crusoe attempts to develop such important critical insights. Analyses of Robinson Crusoe have for the most part tended to focus on Crusoe as the subject of the text, rather than on Crusoe as a constructed textual subject. As such, there has been little discussion, until very recently, of the role of gender, or of feminine values, in relation to the text’s rational individualism, or with regard to Crusoe’s 30

Fausett, The Strange Surprizing Sources, 98. Cited by Fausett, The Strange Surprizing Sources, 1994, 79. Another important utopian text said to have influenced Robinson Crusoe is the physician, mathematician, philosopher and poet Ibn Tufayl’s story of a self-taught philosopher raised by animals after he is abandoned after being thrown upon the shore of an island. The story gives rise to a legend that this is an island of spontaneous generation. The Spanish-Arabic text was of such importance in its time that it is speculated that the philosopher Benedictus de Spinoza was its translator when it first appeared in Holland in 1672. In 1708 it was published and translated into English by Simon Ockley as The Improvement of Human Reason Exhibited in the Life of Hai ebn Yoqhdan and advertised in The Female Tatler, the paper Bernard Mandeville contributed to regularly (1709, Nos. 1 and 2). There are conflicting spellings of both Ibn Tufayl (Tophail, Tofail, Tufail) and the name of his work, due to varying techniques for the transliteration of Arabic. In 1908 Goodrick speculated that Robinson Crusoe was “stolen” from “Ibn Tophail” as well as from Henry Neville’s Island of the Pines, 1668 (A.T.S. Goodrick, “Robinson Crusoe, Imposter”, Blackwood's Magazine, no. 183, (1908), 672-85. 31

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masculinity.32 An exception is Ian A. Bell who looks at the absence of women in Robinson Crusoe and concludes that it is both significant and “curious” that “Crusoe’s women represent the stable and enduring features of a world constantly put out of balance by the aggressive forces of male impulsiveness”.33 The most important major exception to the exclusion of gender in analyses of Robinson Crusoe is Watt’s highly influential work, The Rise of the Novel, first published in 1957.34 Watt devotes the first and longest part of his analysis to considering the relationship between rational individualism, capitalism and the treatment of women in Defoe’s novel. He observes that in the three volumes of Robinson Crusoe, women are mentioned only in relation to economic exchange and that Defoe always uses the language of commerce in his descriptions of women. He suggests that, in his writings, Defoe scorns “romantic love”, “even sexual satisfaction” and marriage, and he concludes that the ethos of economic individualism prevents Crusoe “from paying much heed to the ties of family, whether as a son or as a husband”.35 In The Rise of the Novel, Watt advocates an ideological reading of Robinson Crusoe paraphrasing Weber’s understanding in Essays in Sociology (1946) that: “sex ... is one of the strongest potential menaces to the individual’s rational pursuit of economic ends, and it has therefore ... been placed under particularly strong controls in the ideology of industrial capitalism”.36 In contemporary society, the prolific use of sexual advertising itself suggests that the relationship between capitalism and sexuality is much more complex than this description suggests, but this is not to detract from Watt’s powerful description of Robinson Crusoe and the ideology of rational individualism. In his work, however, Watt tends to limit his reading to the same terms that the text offers. That is, just as Defoe excludes women from the island, so Watt assumes the exclusion of both women 32 While Richard Phillips (Mapping Men and Empire, 1988) does not look at masculinity as a construction, he does examine various depictions of Crusoe as masculine. 33 Ian A. Bell, “Crusoe’s Women; or, the Curious Incident of the Dog in the NightTime” in Robinson Crusoe: Myths and Metamorphoses, 44. 34 Ian Watt reiterates and extends his analysis in order to link Robinson Crusoe, as myth, to human behaviour in Myths of Modern Individualism. 35 Watt, Myths of Modern Individualism, 34, 66-67. 36 Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 67.

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and feminine values from capitalism and economics, without adequately investigating the complex power of that exclusion. Watt also accepts Defoe’s representation of Crusoe as a self-made man. In this respect, though enormously important in articulating the ideology of the text, Watt’s analysis tends to remain caught within the text’s own ideology. As Joan Scott states, such a critical approach prevents an analysis of the underlying values of a text: “By remaining within the epistemological frame of orthodoxy ... these studies lose the possibility of examining those assumptions and practices that excluded considerations of difference in the first place.”37 Watt’s analysis is ultimately grounded in the assumption that the iconic individual is inherently male. As such, he states of the eighteenthcentury individual: “he alone was primarily responsible for determining his own economic, social, political and religious roles”.38 He develops this further when he states that: “every good Puritan conducted a continual scrutiny of his inner man for evidence of his own place in the divine plot of election and reprobation”.39 On this basis, Watt bases the rational individualism of Defoe’s texts in the reality of Defoe’s own life40 and presents Robinson Crusoe as a reflection of real life, portrayed with “the utmost fidelity”.41 As such, in his later work, Myths of Modern Individualism, the absence of women on Crusoe’s island is understood to be the expression of “an extreme inhibition of what we now consider to be normal human feelings”.42 Watt points out that it was Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1832 that first named Crusoe as a universal representative of humankind,43 one who Watt depicts as: “a model to us all in how he learns to manage his desolated state”.44 The Female Crusoe’s reading of Robinson Crusoe owes much to Watt’s analysis and depiction of Crusoe and to the critics who subsequently developed his analysis. Watt’s reminder that the depiction of Crusoe as pragmatic and rational precedes representations of the emotional life of the subject (more 37

Joan Scott, “The Evidence of Experience”, Critical Inquiry, XVII/4, (1991), 777. Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 61. 39 Ibid., 75. 40 Ibid., 114. 41 Ibid., 61. 42 Watt, Myths of Modern Individualism, 169. 43 Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 78. 44 Ibid., 167. 38

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common to the later narratives of Romanticism and Sentimentalism), is an important one, as is his insight that the text might have addressed some readers’ sense of isolation from the dominant mores of society. Both of these insights contribute to understanding why, immediately after Robinson Crusoe’s publication, the castaway figure emerged as a female figure. SUBJECTS-IN-FORMATION A more recent critic than Watt, Robyn Wiegman, depicts Robinson Crusoe and Roxana as paradigmatic texts based on sexual difference. As such, she suggests that in such eighteenth-century works, sexual difference “maps the terrain of the story in essence before the story begins” because of “a cultural and narrative economy that privileges masculine subjectivity – or, more accurately, equates subjectivity with the masculine, thereby excluding ... the possibility – the theoretical possibility – of woman ever being subjects and producers of culture”.45 The characters of Roxana and Moll Flanders, in particular, provide Defoe with the opportunity to rehearse the complex situation of women in a society increasingly driven by economic desire. Yet, for Wiegman, texts of individualism do not emerge from particular discourses and societies, but are all the same masculine narrative reflecting a subject that is fixed and unchanging. In a similar fashion, Sidonie Smith refers to: the universal subject and the hard nut of its normative (masculine) individuality. It speaks ... of the tyranny of the arid “I” which obscures through gray and shapeless mist everything colorful that lies within its vision.46

Rather than reading Robinson Crusoe in relation to such preestablished gender positions of relative power, The Female Crusoe adopts Foucault’s observation that “it is already one of the prime effects of power that certain bodies, certain gestures, certain discourses, certain desires come to be identified and constituted as 45 Robyn Wiegman, “Economies of the Body: Gendered Sites in Robinson Crusoe and Roxana”, Criticism, XXXI/1, (Winter 1989), 33. 46 Sidonie Smith, Subjectivity, Identity and the Body, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993, 3.

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individuals”.47 Therefore, the individual is “precarious, contradictory and in process, constantly being reconstituted in discourse each time we speak”.48 That subjectivity is always in formation opens the way to investigating the influence of different values. Such an approach contrasts with the notion that the subject is somewhere outside of language controlling meaning, or that subject positions in language are unified, coherent and fixed. Much of the past feminist criticism of eighteenth-century texts has focused on women authors and female protagonists, therefore feminist criticism of Robinson Crusoe has been relatively scarce. In Daniel Defoe: Ambition and Innovation (1986), Paula Backscheider shows Defoe using a number of archetypal incidents to shape Crusoe’s universalism, but she does so at the cost of discussing sexual, cultural and racial differences in any depth.49 She draws on the image of Crusoe as self-made, universal man, in the Coleridge/Watt tradition of reading Robinson Crusoe, which includes E.M.W. Tillyard’s claim that “Crusoe himself becomes universal man”.50 Patricia Spacks in Imagining a Self (1976), differs in that she uses Robinson Crusoe to show a “conscious preoccupation with the role of imagination in spiritual and emotional development” in early eighteenth-century novels.51 Spacks concludes that any understanding of the self is inadequate without a consideration “of society and its shaping force on identity”.52 Her autobiographical subject is, however, implicitly 47

Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 98. Critics who have examined Robinson Crusoe in relation to psychoanalysis and the body include Martin Gliserman, Psychoanalysis, Language and the Body of the Text, Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1996; Alphonso Lingis, Foreign Bodies, New York: Routledge, 1994; and Roger Celestin, “Can Robinson Crusoe Find True Happiness (Alone)? Beyond Genitals and History on the Island of Hope”, in Solitary Pleasures: The Historical, Literary, and Artistic Discourse of Autoeroticism, eds Paula Bennett and Vernon A. Rosario, New York: Routledge, 1996. Carol Houlihan Flynn examines the body in Defoe’s work in The Body in Swift and Defoe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 48 Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory, 33. 49 Paula Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: Ambition and Innovation, Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1986. 50 E.M.W. Tillyard, “Defoe”, in Daniel Defoe, ed. Harold Bloom, New York: Chelsea House, 1987, 23. 51 Patricia Spacks, Imagining a Self: Autobiography and the Novel in EighteenthCentury England, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976, 29. 52 Ibid., 90.

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masculine: “The autobiographer, attesting his existence by the fact of his writing, lives through his explanations, tacit, or explicit, of how he came to be the person he is.”53 With exceptions, the “glaring absence of women” still keeps Robinson Crusoe “away from the focus of much feminist analysis of eighteenth-century fiction”.54 Martin Green suggests that the “true masculinism” of adventure narratives ensures that these narratives remain “unvisited by either traditional scholars or radical feminists”.55 Blackwell similarly points out that discussions of German female castaway narratives have tended to limit “women’s role in the Robinsonade to sex and cooking”. She suggests that this is largely due to a “stylistic hierarchy in which the proto-novel and adventure story have a low ranking, as well as [having to do] with scholars’ flippant attitudes towards adventuresses”.56 The relative paucity of feminist criticism of Robinson Crusoe, as an iconic text of individualism, also reflects the early domination of feminist criticism by liberal humanist concerns, in which a focus on gender meant a concern with women’s roles in society. Defoe himself has received more attention from feminist critics in relation to his depiction of his female protagonists, his progressive views on women and education, and, more recently, his use of the gendered and symbolic language of finance.57 In this latter work, as will be discussed in Chapter 3, Paula Backscheider and Sandra Sherman, have analysed Defoe’s and others’ depiction of credit as a female iconic figure.

53

Ibid., 1. Betty Joseph, “Re(Playing) Crusoe/Pocahontas: Circum-Atlantic Stagings in the Female American”, Criticism, XLII/3, (Summer 2000), 317. In my final stages of editing, the following unpublished thesis came to my attention: Rebecca J. Taylor, “Robinson Crusoe and the Reproduction of Singleness in England’s Long Eighteenth Century”, unpublished PhD thesis, Washington University, August 2004. Rebecca discusses a number of English and French female castaway narratives. 55 Green, The Robinson Crusoe Story, 5. 56 Blackwell, “An Island of Her Own”, 6. 57 Sandra Sherman, Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; Catherine Ingrassia, “The Pleasure of Business and the Business of Pleasure”, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, XXIV, (1995), 191-210. 54

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MALE AND FEMALE CRUSOES Dale Spender (Mothers of the Novel, 1986) criticises Robinson Crusoe’s iconic place in the canon of English literature and, with others, criticises Watt for failing to account for the predominance of women novel writers in the eighteenth century. Nancy Armstrong’s work on the figure of the eighteenth-century domestic woman, in Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987), has been crucially important in addressing both of these issues. In accordance with many feminist critics, Armstrong replaces Robinson Crusoe with Samuel Richardson’s Pamela as her starting point for the rise of the novel. By commencing with Pamela (written twenty-one years after Robinson Crusoe), Armstrong is able to associate the rise of the novel and the rise of the individual, with the historical emergence of the figure of domestic woman, arguing that: “the modern individual is first and foremost a female”.58 Robinson Crusoe, as iconic text of masculine rational individualism, is placed firmly outside Armstrong’s “domestication” thesis: “we cannot say Crusoe inaugurated the tradition of the novel”.59 In situating Pamela at the beginning of the rise of the novel in this way, Armstrong is able to place women on a different developmental path to individualism (via the domestic sphere). It is as though Watt and Armstrong take up respective and complementary masculine and feminine critical positions: Watt, concerned with public, masculine space and Armstrong with private, feminine space with each adopting an appropriately gendered, inaugural novel to reflect their theses. Due to their similarity, it is not surprising therefore that Armstrong represents domestic woman as an all-controlling Crusoe-like figure: Domestic fiction ... introduc[ed] a new form of political power. This power emerged with the rise of the domestic woman and established its hold over British culture through her dominance over all those objects and practices we establish with private life. To her went authority over the household, leisure time, courtship procedures and

58

Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987, 66. 59 Ibid., 29.

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kinship relations, and under her jurisdiction the most basic qualities of human identity were supposed to develop.60

Armstrong’s point that the rise of the novel must be considered in the context of a history of gender relations, in which the history of domesticity is central, is a crucial insight. Yet it is on this basis that she dismisses Robinson Crusoe, ignoring her own important observation that, if we ignore “the historical dimension of desire” there is no way to explain “why, at the inception of modern culture, the literate classes in England suddenly developed an unprecedented taste for writing for, about and by women”.61 The argument that I pursue in the next chapter is that the enigma is partly solved by an understanding of early eighteenth-century rhetoric, which collapse boundaries between economic and sexual desire, partly because the questions that were being raised about finance and trade were, preeminently, moral questions. From early on in the eighteenth century, desire referred to a range of appetites relating to the acquisition of wealth (in the writings of Defoe, in particular). Pro-mercantilists such as Daniel Defoe and Bernard Mandeville, argued that desire (read excess, greed and avarice) was an essential quality of being human. In the work of eighteenth-century writers, avarice was also extended to the shaping of the individual, as in having “an appetite of the imagination”: able to imagine different selves and different futures to those proscribed by tradition. As the critic Raymond Hilliard points out: “In eighteenthcentury fiction, desire is sometimes equated solely with extravagant sexual passion, but its more subtle manifestations involve an attempt to extend the boundaries of the self.”62 If desire itself is taken as a central category of analysis (rather than man or woman), then Robinson Crusoe and the subsequent female castaway narratives seem not such a curious place to begin a study of the relationship between values described as feminine, and individualism. Armstrong’s specific focus on women’s role in the domestic sphere leaves her feeling puzzled by the fact that “curiously”, in the 60

Ibid., 3. Ibid., 7. 62 Raymond F. Hilliard, “Desire and the Structure of Eighteenth-Century Fiction”, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, XIX, (1979), 358. 61

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nineteenth century, Robinson Crusoe was recommended reading for girls. This was the case, she notes, even when reading fiction in general was not recommended to girls, and “oddly”, Erasmus Darwin recommends it for the education of girls in A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding Schools (1797).63 Armstrong’s explanation is that “women were likely to learn to desire what Crusoe accomplished, a totally self-enclosed and functional domain where money didn’t really matter”.64 However, this view ignores the fact that for Crusoe, even on his island, (and as will be discussed) money and power clearly matter very much. Armstrong then concludes that Crusoe, in his domesticity and isolation, is a female figure because he contains his desires. For Armstrong, it is this that made Defoe’s work attractive to female readers: “It was no doubt because Crusoe was more female, according to the nineteenth century understanding of gender, than either Roxana or Moll Flanders that educators found his story more suitable reading for girls than for boys of an impressionable age.”65 The Female Crusoe develops the idea that Crusoe on his island can be understood as both masculine and as feminine (prior to Friday’s arrival), in that he discretely protects his virtue and his reputation. In this sense, Armstrong is quite correct in seeing a close resemblance between representations of women in the period and the emergence of individualism. Yet, because Armstrong’s strategy is to downplay the cultural importance of Robinson Crusoe in order to emphasise the importance of domestic literary fiction, she overlooks the possibility of actual and symbolic connections between Robinson Crusoe’s individualism and the development of women’s rights (for example, both Mary Astell and Defoe advocate women’s education). Another work which is significant and which takes up Watt’s analysis is Michael McKeon’s book The Origins of the English Novel66. McKeon’s work is interesting because it has been criticised for leaving out any due consideration of sexuality, but commended 63

Erasmus Darwin, Appendix to A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding Schools, (first published in 1797) New York: Garland 1973, 33. 64 Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, 16 and 106. 65 Ibid., 16. 66 Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.

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because it “implies a gender politics”.67 One of the ways in which McKeon’s work is important to The Female Crusoe is the relationship he proposes between truth and gender in the early eighteenth century. For example, he suggests that in order for moral behaviour to be conveyed to the reader, books such as Robinson Crusoe had to be read as true, but he then fails to link this insight to the observation he makes elsewhere that “fidelity of narration” is ultimately linked to feminine qualities of constancy and virtue.68 In general, there is a tendency in criticism of Robinson Crusoe simply to oppose the concept of woman and the feminine to the masculine subject of Crusoe. In other words, to divide and keep separate male and female values and subjectivities. McKeon points out that such a strategy has also applied to other oppositional discourses, such as the secular and the religious. For McKeon, in Robinson Crusoe, “spiritual and secular motives are not only ‘compatible’ [but] are inseparable”.69 An important aspect of The Female Crusoe is the argument that the castaway island story, in its evocation of a middle ground, allows all such oppositions to be seen as mutually informing, important and necessary. Such a view opens the way to examining the role of differently gendered values in Defoe’s iconic novel. For Defoe and for other writers of the period, just as travel and romance writings could also function as social critiques, so could the rhetorical power of economic problems be drawn upon to evoke new possibilities and ways of being that were more advantageous to individuals and to trade. Watt considered Robinson Crusoe to be a significant precursor to Adam Smith’s political economy70 and Stephen Copley’s work on early eighteenth-century documents shows that three economic discourses were dominant in the period of Robinson Crusoe’s publication. These were civic humanism, which included aristocratic and bourgeois humanism; Mandevillian 67 I broadly agree with Folkenflik that responses that draw on social theory “largely Marxist, Bakhtinian, and Foucauldian” are all “heirs” to Watt’s analysis even, as he says, when they disagree with Watt’s analysis (Folkenflik, “The Heirs of Ian Watt”, 217). 68 McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 121 and 148. 69 Ibid., 319. 70 Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 63.

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economics; and political economy itself.71 Civic or aristocratic humanism produced “an exclusive class of men (sic) with innate abilities who engross almost the whole reason of the species, who are born to instruct, guide and to preserve; who are destined to be the tutors and guardians of human kind”.72 In this respect, Robinson Crusoe and works by eighteenth-century commentators, such as Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, can be read as attempts to expand aristocratic humanism to include “commerce in its ‘civic virtues’ and the middle class in its ruling order.”73 As Copley points out, one of the obstacles to the integration of “aristocratic and bourgeois humanism” with commerce was the moral equation of trade with luxury, vice and “effeminacy”.74

71

Stephen Copley, Literature and the Social Order in Eighteenth-Century England, London: Croom Helm, 1984. 72 Ibid., 6. 73 Ibid., 6-7. 74 Ibid., 4.

CHAPTER TWO CRUSOE AND THE “FEMALE GODDESSES OF DISORDER” … this amphibious Creature, this Land-Water thing call’d, a Gentleman-Tradesman.1 Economic man … was seen as on the whole a feminised, even an effeminate being, still wrestling with his own passions and hysterias and with interior and exterior forces let loose by his fantasies and appetites, and symbolised by such archetypically female goddesses of disorder as Fortune, Luxury, and most recently Credit herself.2

In Defoe’s view expressed in his conduct book, The Complete English Tradesman, it was vital that tradesmen were not seen as effeminate or their businesses disadvantaged by prejudices against luxury: in order to succeed in trade and gain credit the tradesmen must be seen by society as stable, substantive and authoritative.3 Defoe perceived that trade, influenced by credit and luxury, was introducing into society a productive social fluidity and flexibility, qualities also associated with the feminine gender. The question Defoe seems to grapple with in Robinson Crusoe and in his conduct book, is how can such feminine qualities be both endorsed and resisted? This chapter suggests that Defoe, in his typically elusive and transformative style, turns a negative feminine (Crusoe’s weakness as an inexperienced youth) to a positive feminine, when he isolates Crusoe in a virginal pure state. Crusoe is a tradesman, a figure we would call a businessman, and when figures such as he became wealthy in the eighteenth century, it necessarily changed the value and status of what it meant to be a gentleman. Such social mobility was an issue of concern to some 1

Daniel Defoe, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, &c ... Written from Her Own Memorandums (1722), London: Oxford University Press, 1976. 2 Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History, 114. 3 Defoe uses the term “Tradesman”, to refer to men in commerce, and when he refers to women it is as a particular case.

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observers in the period. What might be at stake in the period can be understood when Robinson Crusoe is contrasted with Defoe’s discussion of trade and trading behaviour in The Complete English Tradesman. In the comparison, Robinson Crusoe emerges as a text with religious and economic connotations, but also as one that had a broad social and moral context, in which the feminine values associated with trade were seen to be changing society. The suggestion that gendered (both masculine and feminine) values are involved in shaping Robinson Crusoe requires that Defoe’s writing be understood as an allegory rather than as a realist text. As J. Paul Hunter writes, the “Emphasis upon the ‘realistic’ nature of ... Defoe’s choice of detail has obscured the emblematic meaning of Crusoe’s physical activities”.4 Hunter’s approach leads him to stress the explicitly religious aspects of the text, however, as G.A. Starr observes, in the period, “Trade was the other activity whose mundane details were most frequently spiritualised”.5 McKeon notes that spiritual and secular motives were typically inseparable;6 as were the dangers of trade and of the ocean, both closely aligned by commentators. An advantage of combining the emblematic or symbolic with a study of the economic and historical is that it brings the generic category of Robinson Crusoe closer to the “Allegorick History” which Defoe himself ascribed to it in his Preface. As an allegory of the problems facing trade and tradesmen, as articulated in The Complete English Tradesman, it is likely that Robinson Crusoe was informed by Defoe’s views and experiences of trade. The Complete English Tradesman was not published until six years after Robinson Crusoe and it therefore contains no direct reference to the novel. The two are not causally linked; rather their publication is 4

J. Paul Hunter, “The Conclusion of Robinson Crusoe”, in Daniel Defoe: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Max Byrd, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976, 92. 5 George A. Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965, 25. Linda Colley estimates that in this period one in five families were in trade (Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992, 56). Defoe estimates the trading population to be 40% of the total population and the gentry 8%, the largest category being the labouring poor (Defoe, Daniel, Defoe’s Review 1705-1712, ed., Arthur Wellesley Secord, Facsimile Text Society, New York: Columbia University Press, 1938, V, 51316). 6 McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 319.

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close enough for them to emerge from the same trading culture, informed by similar issues and values. Both are informed by the genre of the conduct book, a genre which readers looked to for advice and which directly and indirectly promoted certain values and advantageous ways of being in the world. In themes and concerns these two works are closely related. Just as Robinson Crusoe is recommended for the “Instruction of the Reader” (1), so Defoe calls The Complete English Tradesman a “pilot” that will help the tradesman avoid shipwreck: “I think the best service I can do the Tradesman [is] to lay before him those sunck [sic] rocks (as the seamen call them) those secret dangers in the first place, that they may know how to avoid them.”7 Volume One of The Complete English Tradesman is “Calculated for the Instruction of our Inland Tradesman; and especially of YOUNG 8 BEGINNERS”, while Volume Two addresses the entirety of trade and the more experienced trader: … all those People through whose Hands the Produce and Manufacture of Great Britain pass for Sale from their being finished and fitted for the Market to their immediate Consumption or Exportation …. All those Tradesmen who are likewise employed in buying Goods of foreign Growth, from the Merchant who is the Importer; and selling them again as well by Wholesale or Retail ...9

The two volumes echo the transition that Crusoe makes from young man to mature man or, from a subjectivity and masculinity that is precarious to a more secure and authentic identity, and social position. One of the seeming contradictions of Robinson Crusoe (observed by Watt) is that Crusoe spends most of his time in isolation, and seems not to be engaged in trade at all. However, his time on the island is framed in trade, his stay originates and results in trade and, as he states at the outset, his first voyage away from the shores of England, “made me both a Sailor and a Merchant” (17). Both The Complete English Tradesman and Robinson Crusoe therefore show the shaping of a mature tradesman’s identity and fortune. 7

Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman (first published 1725), London: C. Rivington, I, 1726, 111. 8 Ibid., title page. 9 Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, London: C. Rivington, II, 1727, 3.

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As is well known, on the island, Crusoe makes extensive use of trading language, as he keeps his accounts and records his tasks and possessions. Account keeping, as will be discussed, is a strong feature of both Ambrose Evans’ Martha Rattenberg and Fanny Burney’s The Wanderer in their portrayals of female castaway figures surviving financially and socially, at either end of the century. Watt uses Crusoe’s engagement with accounting and contractual activities to portray Crusoe as rational economic man.10 However, subtle differences of interpretation are possible when Crusoe’s island activity is read in the context of The Complete English Tradesman, rather than in the broader context of capitalism. For example, much of Crusoe’s work on the island involves tasks necessary to achieve self-sufficiency such as craftwork, manufacturing, farming, building, and husbandry. Watt suggests that this is because “It would be somewhat contrary to the facts of economic life under the division of labour to show the average individual’s manual labour as interesting and inspiring”.11 But, in The Complete English Tradesman Defoe specifically urges that the tradesman learn “the Beginning and End of every Article in Trade”,12 so that he may “undertake any Trade though not bred to it”. Because survival is at stake, he must be able to “turn his Hand and his Head to any Trade, any Employment, as Occasion calls him out”.13 In both volumes of The Complete English Tradesman, Defoe recognises the interdependence of domestic trade with foreign trade (a phrase which encompasses imports and exports, and overseas investment) and points out their similarities (in a way that brings Crusoe directly to mind): “the Shopkeeper is sometimes a merchantadventurer, whether he will or not, and some of his business runs into sea-adventures.”14 The importance of his observations lie in the widespread criticism of foreign trade in relation to the effect on 10

Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 64. Ibid., 72. 12 Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, I, pt 1, 74. 13 Ibid., I, 73. In Defoe’s Captain Singleton the men shipwrecked describe how they survive: “we were oblig’d to be our own Smiths, Rope-makers, Sail-Makers, and indeed to practice twenty trades that we knew little or nothing of: However Necessity was the Spur to Invention, and we did many things which we thought impracticable” (Daniel Defoe, The Life, Adventures and Pyracies of the Famous Captain Singleton, Montana: Kessinger Publishing, 2004, 34). 14 Ibid., xi. 11

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society of imported luxury goods, as will be discussed. Though Robinson Crusoe is located in the Oroonoko basin and The Complete English Tradesman is written for the English tradesman, the two texts have similar subject matter. Crusoe’s island setting in the Caribbean links it to The Complete English Tradesman where Defoe defines domestic trade in relation to two of the “goddesses of disorder”, referred to in the opening quote: the credit and luxury arising from foreign trade. Defoe’s enthusiasm for foreign trade is well documented and, as Maximillian Novak points out, Robinson Crusoe was written in the wake of Defoe’s plans for a project in the Oroonoko basin in South America.15 Novak suggests that Defoe, as a mercantilist himself, never abandoned the balance of trade argument of the seventeenth century, namely that imports must never exceed exports. On the other hand, by representing colonies as part of Great Britain, he effectively redefines what is thought of as foreign.16 With respect to the familiar images of scarcity and isolation conjured up by Crusoe’s desert island, it is relevant that, in the late seventeenth century, the balance of trade argument was “significant for providing a fund of rhetorical images useful for extolling restraint, frugality, and cooperation in economic life”.17 The apparently frugal figure of Crusoe therefore is part of the much wider economic and social debates surrounding foreign trade, luxury and credit (the issue of credit discussed in Chapter Three). When Robinson Crusoe and The Complete English Tradesman are considered together, Crusoe appears as a symbolic trading subject whose fortunes fluctuate according to the dual trading concerns that, Defoe tells his conduct book reader, could “shipwreck” the tradesman.18 Defoe identifies these dangers as credit and luxury 15 Maximilian E. Novak, Economics and the fiction of Daniel Defoe, Berkeley: University of California, 1962, 36. 16 Ibid., 28. 17 Joyce Appleby, Economic thought and ideology in seventeenth-century Century England, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978, 259. 18 A number of writers have referred to The Complete English Tradesman as Defoe’s primary explication of luxury and credit: “in The Complete English Tradesman [Defoe] was justifying to the individual tradesman the profitable but morally questionable trade in luxuries” (Hans J. Anderson, “The Paradox of Trade and Morality in Defoe”, Modern Philology, XXXIX/1 [August 1941], 40). It was “the manifesto of a new and ascendant social order, the trading gentry”, according to John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett, Baltimore: Johns

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(referred to in opening quote): “these are some of the most dangerous Pits for a Tradesman to fall into.”19 For Defoe, “Trade is an Ocean” and the analogy and its development allows him to address the possibilities and problems, to the tradesman, of foreign trade, financial speculation and territorial expansion. In that the ocean suggests the circulation of both money and people, it is a useful image for portraying the possibilities and problems of social mobility.20 Both Robinson Crusoe and The Complete English Tradesman use images of land and sea to contrast and re-represent values that are stable, masculine and traditional (associated with the status quo and the inheritance of land), with those that are unstable, feminine and new (associated with the ocean in relation the credit, luxury and financial speculation of foreign trade). In Robinson Crusoe, what is at stake is the tradesman’s future as a socially mobile figure. The young Crusoe, while he is neither a gentleman nor an experienced tradesman, is like Moll’s “Land-Water thing”, in the quote that opens this chapter. He is marooned between conventional and masculine forms of authority and the more fluid and feminine possibilities of trade. As Sherman observes, Defoe does not so much resolve this situation as he “aspires towards non-resolution, towards the suspension of contraries”,21 for it is in this open and complexly gendered space that he can suggest to his readers: new possibilities, meanings, values and subjectivities.

Hopkins University Press, 1977, 117; and “The contingency of a world configured by credit inspired plays, poetry, and cautionary tracts (of which The Complete English Tradesman is the consummate example)” for Sherman, Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century, 23. 19 Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, I, 109. 20 Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, II, 2-3. McKeon quotes Madeleine de Scudery (1601–1667): “the Sea is the Scene most proper to make great changes in, and ... some have named it the Theater of inconstancie” (McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 139). Braudy detects “an anguish and uncertainty about human character” in Defoe’s work. He states of Defoe’s novels, “their inconclusive endings and elusive tone announce their preoccupation with uncertainty” (Leo Braudy, “Daniel Defoe and the Anxieties of Autobiography”, in Daniel Defoe, ed. Harold Bloom, New York: Chelsea House, 107-108). 21 Sandra Sherman, “Lady Credit No Lady; or, the Case of Defoe's ‘Coy Mistress’, Truly Stated”, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, XXXVII/2 (Summer 1995), 202.

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RISKING LIFE AND LIMB When the young Crusoe first goes on board ship dressed as a gentleman it is premature and it threatens his survival: “I would always go on board in the Habit of a Gentleman; and so I neither had any Business in the Ship, or learn’d to do any” (16). By the end of the narrative, Crusoe’s education on the island results in indirect generational social mobility when he raises his nephew as a gentleman. It may be significant that status in this example is not shown simply passing from father to son, as Defoe challenges such assumptions about conventional forms of authority and status. Read in the context of trade, luxury and credit, the young Crusoe’s first sea journey describes the difficulty of achieving a resolution to the cultural and social tensions surrounding trade, by telling of a number of near death experiences and periods when Crusoe loses consciousness. Such scenes imply that the young tradesman may never achieve the authority and status appropriate to his subsequent business success. As Trotter argues, bodily and trading economies are linked throughout Defoe’s work and he notes that in Robinson Crusoe “Departure from ‘easy circumstances’ is often registered by loss of meaning, even loss of consciousness”.22 For example, after declaring his desire for wealth at the beginning of his journey, Crusoe almost dies in a storm at sea, recalling later that “no body minded me, or what was become of me ... thinking I had been dead; and it was a great while before I came to myself” (10-12). Such tenuous identity is evoked again on his first voyage when he faints in a heavy storm and a sailor “let me lye, thinking I had been dead” (12). On yet another occasion Crusoe shows his lack of preparedness for the preferred military form of masculinity when he “falls down in a swoon” on hearing the ship fire a gun (35). The context for these representations is the argument of the day that trade in luxury goods was diminishing the military strength of the nation because it weakened and effeminised men. The masculinity associated with military activity is therefore an important context for understanding Crusoe’s eventual transformation into a successful merchant figure, and it is marked, in particular, by his achieved prowess with a weapon, brought about by Friday’s arrival. 22 David Trotter, Circulation: Defoe, Dickens and the Economics of the Novel, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988, 12.

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The story of Robinson Crusoe haunts Defoe’s many anecdotes and advice to his readers in the pages of The Complete English Tradesman. He tells his reader that there is “no Condition so low or so despicable in a Tradesman, but he may with Diligence and Application recover it” and his example is of a man who returns “from an Absence of twenty Years, a long Banishment ... laden with Honesty and a Good Conscience, and without any evident Force, pays the Widows and the Orphans, whose families had suffer’d by him”.23 His anecdote roughly parallels Crusoe who, when he returns to England after twenty-seven years, displays this all-important altruism, making the point that a trading society need not (and should not) just be concerned with the accumulation of wealth. Accordingly, he gives money to his two sisters, takes his brother’s two sons into his care, and settles his affairs with his “true Friend, the Widow” (286, 304). The descriptions of past and present trade in The Complete English Tradesman suggest that Crusoe’s trials, like that of Defoe’s ideal tradesman, have arisen because of changes in the trading world. Crusoe’s father’s society is described as stable, his “middle State”24, a fixed place between the immorality associated with luxury and the hardship of the poor. As such, the young Crusoe is advised that “the middle State ... [is] the best in the world, the most suited to human happiness, not exposed to the miseries and hardships, the labour and sufferings of the mechanick part of mankind, and not embarrassed with the Pride, Luxury, Ambition and Envy of the Upper part of mankind” (4). On similar terms, in The Complete English Tradesman, Defoe tells his reader that “I know of no State of Life, I mean in that we call the Middle Station of it, and among the sensible part of mankind, which is more suited to make man perfectly easy, and comfortable to themselves, than that of the thriving Tradesman”.25 Both texts suggest that what it meant to be located (or stranded) between rich and poor had changed due to the advent of credit and luxury. Differences between past and present, Defoe says, include increased taxes, an increased tendency to buy luxury goods, an 23

Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, II/pt 1, xii. For the sake of clarity, I refer to Defoe’s middle state as middle class from now on, hoping the reader will keep in mind the immense difference between this period’s and our own understanding of term. 25 Ibid., 106. 24

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increased pride leading to more costly living, employment of more servants and greater use of carriages. He expresses the concern that “open debaucheries and extravagances, and a profusion of expense, as well as a general contempt of business, these are open and current roads to a Tradesman’s destruction”.26 Defoe frequently uses the word “extravagant”, a word with multiple meanings in the period. As well as referring to luxury in moral terms as “an unrestrained excess” and “an irrational excess”, the OED suggests that it also referred to the idea of social excess, “a wandering beyond bounds”, or exceeding one’s place in society. The phrases evoke Crusoe’s desire to literally journey beyond the confinement of existing social boundaries, particularly those represented by his father’s generation. In this period, the economy and social system based on inheritance and land was being transformed as “trade was increasingly accepted as the motor that drove the whole economy”.27 On the one hand was the traditional view that supported the status quo, those whose status was underpinned by birth and by inheritance of land. As Defoe put it: “the Landed Gentlemen, Yeomen and Farmers ... are to be esteemed the most settled inhabitants and the Bulk of the nation.”28 On the other hand, there was the new and growing class of wealthy entrepreneurs and tradesmen. With regard to the social ambitions of this latter group, Defoe’s position was clear: “trade is so far here from being inconsistent with a gentleman, that, in short, trade in England makes gentleman and has peopled this nation with gentlemen”.29 The wide-spread association of trade with feminine characteristics potentially prevented the tradesman from achieving legitimate authority and status. In fact, the luxury argument was a handy rhetorical tool which could be used against any groups who threatened to challenge the status quo, including the Whigs for their support of trade, the “money’d men” and financial speculators for their engagement in foreign trade against domestic interests, and 26

Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, I, 110. Pocock argues that values, which were based on the possession of land and property, were being undermined by the values of commerce (Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 441). 28 The Landed Interest Considered ... by a Yeoman of Kent, quoted by P.G.M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688-1756, Aldershot: Gregg Revivals, 1993, 27. 29 Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, II, xxii. 27

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women, described as “capricious consumers”. CRUSOE’S FRUGALITY In The Complete English Tradesman, Defoe addresses the problem of how the tradesman might retain his reputation and increase his status, in the context of the perceived instability and immorality of his increased wealth, and the trade in luxury goods. In his rhetoric, Defoe is much concerned with appearances. He advises the tradesman to appear to be frugal for “he that has been a frugal managing Man in Trade can never, with his Senses about him, turn an unthinking stupid Extravagant when he leaves off”.30 The advice effectively describes Crusoe’s life as a castaway, which, once he leaves the island, enables him to partake of luxury without negative effect. While Crusoe’s frugality is consistent with his depiction as a rational economic man, it is also important to note the centrality of the opposite value in the text: that is, the ambitious Crusoe’s desire for wealth and luxury. Both his journey and his ultimate success depend on his unruly desires31 and, as Hilliard observes of Crusoe, it is “desire [that] ... determines the protagonist’s adventures”.32 Novak, a key commentator on the importance of economics in Defoe’s writings, suggests that the nature of the economic problem in Robinson Crusoe has been obscured because the relationship between Defoe’s economic ideas and Crusoe’s fictional character have been neglected. He shows Crusoe to be “a mad rambling boy” who is “possest with a wandring Spirit”, as Defoe describes him in the second 30 Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, II, 163. Defoe’s list of “expensive way[s] of living” that he observes the tradesmen participating in, include the purchase of “articles of Foreign importation” (113); “tradesman’s tables … now the emblems, not of plenty, but of luxury, not of good house-keeping, but of profusion, and that of the highest kind of extravagancies” (116); “the extravagant keeping three or four maidservants in a house, nay, sometimes five, where two formerly were thought sufficient” (115); expensive dressing “do we not see fine wigs, fine holland shirts of six to seven shillings an ell, and perhaps lac’d also; all lately brought down to the level of the apron, and become the common wear of tradesman” (119). He also warns against “Expensive carriages, making a shew and ostentation of figure in the world” (112). 31 The term “desire” is used here in relation to Defoe’s usage and not in any psychoanalytic sense. 32 Hilliard, “Desire and the Structure of Eighteenth-Century Fiction”, 360. John Richetti also understands that Crusoe “manages to produce a world which is perfectly aligned with self and desires” (John J. Richetti, Defoe’s Narratives, Situations and Structures, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, 23).

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volume, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.33 For Novak, Crusoe has more in common with Thomas Hobbes than with John Locke and others who represented moral virtue as a natural state.34 Crusoe’s “mad” desires lead to his shipwreck, but also to his success as a tradesman and merchant, and his engagement in foreign trade is symbolised by his returning to sea again and again, even after his success. In this regard, both The Complete English Tradesman and Robinson Crusoe can be understood to accord with the views of Mandeville who described the human subject as “naturally selfish, unruly and headstrong”.35 Like Mandeville, Defoe thought sin or vice an inevitable aspect of society, referring to the “natural Propensity we all have to evil”.36 Both Defoe and Mandeville understood barbarism and animal nature to be among the basic traits of civilisation, as had Plato: “if desires were freed from control, either as internally imposed in the form of reason or as externally imposed in the form of law, then we eventually end up with parricide and cannibalism.”37 Robinson Crusoe not only evokes Plato’s parricide and cannibalism but, as will be discussed, the partnering of Crusoe with the cannibal Friday is essential to Crusoe’s success, when considered in the light of Mandeville’s view that “Great Wealth and Foreign Treasure will ever scorn to come among Men unless you’ll admit their inseparable 33

Maximilian E. Novak, “Robinson Crusoe’s Original Sin”, in Daniel Defoe: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Max Byrd, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976, 64-65. 34 Ibid., 60-65. The philosophers Thomas Hobbes (1588-1669) and John Locke (1632–1704) – influenced by Hobbes – developed different theories of human nature. For Hobbes, humans were essentially self-interested, while for Locke, humans were a tabula rasa or blank slate which society would shape. 35 Bernard Mandeville, Free Thoughts on Religion, The Church and National Happiness, 2nd edn, London: J. Brotherton, 1723, 44. The similarities and differences between Defoe and Mandeville have been acknowledged by a number of writers including Andersen, “The Paradox of Trade and Morality in Defoe”, 33; Thomas Keith Meier, Defoe and the Defense of Commerce, Victoria: University of Victoria, 1987, 86 and Novak, Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe, Chapter 6. BarkerBenfield shows that “Defoe had attempted to reconcile plenty with morality” (G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, xxxii). 36 George Starr, “Robinson Crusoe’s Conversion”, in Daniel Defoe: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed., Max Byrd, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1976, 78-79. 37 Christopher Berry, The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 62.

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Companions, Avarice and Luxury”.38 Mandeville’s treatise on luxury, The Fable of the Bees (1732), subtitled Private Vices; Publick Virtues, argued that because man is a desiring animal, men’s passions, or desires, are not only inevitable, but profitable. Of the human subject, he said “I believe Man ... to be a Compound of various Passions, … all of them, as they are provoked and come uppermost, govern him by turns, whether he will or no”.39 In accord with these views, and in contrast to the frugality imposed on him by his island stay, Crusoe’s initial desire is to go to sea to win his fortune. His desire is evidence of his innate avarice: “Avarice is within the man; ’tis mingled, as we say, with his Animal Life; it runs in the Blood; it has insinuated itself into his very Species, and he is truly, as the Text says, drawn aside by his own Lust, and enticed.”40 In contrast to the many representations of him as the epitome of rationality, Crusoe’s desires initially exceed his reason: “I would be satisfied with nothing but going to sea, and my Inclination to this led me so strongly against my Will, nay the commands of my Father, and against all the entreaties and Perswasions of my Mother and other Friends, that there seem’d to be something fatal in that Propension of Nature tending me directly to the Life of Misery which was to befal me” (3). It is only when he is shipwrecked that Crusoe relinquishes his desire to make a fortune: “I looked now upon the World as a Thing remote, which I had nothing to do with, no Expectation from, and indeed no Desires about” (128). When his desire does return, it is not for wealth, but for conversation: “In all the Time of my solitary Life, I never felt so earnest, so strong a Desire after the Society of my Fellow Creatures, or so deep a Regret at the want of it” (188). His desire for material wealth has been replaced by his need for (and dependence upon) the assurance of others that he exists. The image of Crusoe living frugally, without luxury, family or sexual relations seems to oppose the idea of a Crusoe who is greedy for wealth, and his island stay appears to support readings of him as 38

Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957, 201. Ibid., 39-40. Barker-Benfield explains “sensibility” as stemming from an interpretation of the importance of the nerves and Mandeville’s views of the “passions” can be understood as arising, in part, from his work as a nerve doctor (Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, 6). 40 Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, II/2, 22. 39

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having become an exemplary Protestant, condemning all “outward forms of luxury” as “idolatry of the flesh”.41 His apparent frugality seems to fit the Protestant idea that a man “engaged in increasing his wealth by exchanging quantities of fictitious tokens” has no civic virtue.42 However, the image of a frugal Crusoe fails to account for his eventual accrual of great wealth, or for Defoe’s insistence, in The Complete English Tradesman, that, in this changing society, the acquisition of wealth is not a vice: for “the Luxury of the People is become a Vertue in Trade” and “our Vices are become Virtues in Commerce”.43 Because society was changing, the scene of the castaway island must convey a middle ground that will transcend the limiting values of the status quo. By maintaining the appearance of frugality and constraint, Defoe advises his tradesmen readers that they can protect their reputations, and therefore rise in status, while profiting from the excessive desires of customers. It is a perspective that reflects Mandeville’s views concerning the “private vice, publick benefits” of luxury, in that the tradesman who appeared to suppress his vices and desires could ensure access to credit. That is, for both financial and social reasons, the tradesman needed to appear to be virtuous, even while he benefited from “public vice”, such as the trade in luxury items considered to be a corrupting influence. The key issue here refers to the importance of altruism, that is, there is a tension between whether something has public, or simply private, benefit. As Pocock writes: “Frugality could appear to be the civic virtue of the trader, assuming the circulation of the goods to be a public benefit, he displayed in frugality and reinvestment his willingness to subordinate private satisfaction to public good, of which he would be rewarded with a further share.”44 As Coleridge was to point out later in the century, Crusoe on his island balanced the “needs that all men have, and comforts that all men desire”.45 However, the narrative also supports Defoe’s defence 41 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, London: Routledge, 2001, 182. 42 J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975, 445. 43 Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, II, part 2, 167. 44 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 445. 45 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Literary Remains, London: W. Pickering, 1836, 197.

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of luxury and imported goods in that, at the end of the narrative after the years of frugal living, Crusoe is shown purchasing luxurious goods for his Partner namely, “a very handsom [sic] Present of some Italian Silks for his Wife, and two Daughters …. Two Pieces of fine English broad Cloath, the best I could get in Lisbon, five pieces of black Bays, and some Flanders Lace of good Value.” (288). By carefully including imported goods from Italy, as well as English goods that have been exported to Lisbon, Defoe carefully balances foreign and domestic trade. As Mandeville states: “If ... Imports are never allow’d to be superior to the Exports, no Nation can ever be impoverish’d by Foreign Luxury”.46 Defoe at this time was a businessman, trade journalist, political writer and adviser, and directly involved in defending English broad cloth against the importation of calico.47 In his history of eighteenth-century luxury debates, Christopher Berry suggests that Mandeville had a “subversive intent” when he defined luxury as anything “not immediately necessary to make Man subsist as he is a living creature”.48 With this understanding, almost anything might be judged a luxury good and the division between what one wanted and what one needed was productively confused. Read in this light, Crusoe’s island luxuries include his famous umbrella as well as his parrot. Elsewhere in his writings, Defoe in fact describes a parrot as an exotic and foreign item when he refers to “a lady of fashion” as saying “I hate everything that Old England brings forth ... in short, I have all about me French or foreign, from my waiting woman to my parrot”.49 Backscheider gives another example of Crusoe’s desire for luxury, saying he “failed to appreciate the New World’s abundance of rum and tobacco, … [but] wish[ed] for them 46

Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 116. To protect the wool industry, legislation which refused the importation of linen and calico was introduced a year after Robinson Crusoe was first published (Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 113, n.1). 48 Berry, The Idea of Luxury, 24. 49 The English Ladies Catechism 1703, cited in Peter Earle, The World of Defoe, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976, 247. The association of the French with fashion was long-standing. Since the fourteenth century up until the Napoleonic wars, a full-size French fashion doll (a mannequin) travelled to England every year to display the latest French court fashions (Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J.H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialisation of EighteenthCentury England, London: Europa, 1982, 43-44). 47

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frequently on his island”.50 Luxury is finally, and most famously, displayed when Crusoe says that he has “a Seat in the Country as most Princes had” and a “Sea-Coast house”. He shows his expansionist ambitions by understanding that “the whole Country was my own meer property” (258). Crusoe’s apparent frugality therefore does not suggest that his author had either a moral or religious disapproval of luxurious living or of luxury goods. Robinson Crusoe is grounded in the luxury debate, firstly, because of the possible effect of luxurious living on the reputation of the tradesman (and therefore on his ability to gain credit, as will be discussed) and, secondly, because it is the association of luxury with weakness and vulnerability that ultimately leads Crusoe to become cast away. One of Defoe’s concerns in The Complete English Tradesman was to change the way that the tradesman’s social position and integrity were regarded by others, and the particular peril that both Crusoe and the tradesman face, in terms of their social mobility, was the period’s association of trade with the feminine gender and with effeminising effects. LUXURY AND MASCULINITY Increased foreign imports and consumption in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries meant that the effects of luxury and luxurious living were debated widely. Many perceived that society’s excesses were changing a masculine society, based on military strength, civic-mindedness, stability of status and values associated with the inheritance of land, to an effeminate society based on trade, self-interest, instability of status and the shifting values of paper credit and speculation. Catherine Ingrassia points out that “In contrast to th[e] idealised citizen motivated by virtue and rationality, the selfinterested stockjobber abandons the land and the implicit tradition of civic humanism for a disordered and unstable world of paper credit and increasingly immaterial forms of property”.51 This image of instability explains why the tradesman was so “misunderstood and mistrusted” by the gentry and his “pretensions to the denomination of gentleman” not widely accepted.52 50 Paula R. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989, 427. 51 Ingrassia, “The Pleasure of Business and the Business of Pleasure”, 193. 52 Meier, Defoe and the Defense of Commerce, 34.

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Feminine values in debates about the pernicious effects of trade, luxury and credit were linked, often negatively, to excess, instability, corruption and to a weak civic state. It was objected that “Luxury ... pampered the passions”, while “virtue consisted in transcending the demands of the passions”.53 Such debates were invariably political and opposition satirists such as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift were among those who associated luxury with corruption,54 “thought to lie in the growth of credit and commerce”.55 Mandeville notably dismissed these charges as simply “bad Politicks”.56 The tradesman’s situation, reflected in Crusoe’s catastrophic desires, suggest Robinson Crusoe can be read as gendered rhetoric, concerning issues of excess and control. As Pocock explains, the control of desire itself was typically gendered in the Roman and Greek cultural inheritance that was popular throughout the eighteenth century. Pocock represents control of desire in this period as Machiavellian, gendered and concerned with trade: “to pursue passions and be victimised by them was traditionally seen as a female role, or as one which subjected masculine virtù to feminine fortuna ... [and] in the eighteenth-century, production and exchange are regularly equated with the ascendancy of the passions and the female principle.”57 The initially vulnerable Crusoe who then gains mastery over his desires, through meeting Friday, can be understood therefore 53

Anderson, “The Paradox of Trade and Morality in Defoe”, 29-30. See James Sutherland’s Introduction to Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, gen. ed. John Butt, London: Methuen, 1953, V, xxx, where he suggests that luxury was used by Pope as a criticism of the effect of the Walpole administration. 55 Berry, The Idea of Luxury, 75. Marx also understood the decline of Roman society in relation to luxury, not in gendered terms, but in relation to excessive accumulation, “as soon as either their trade etc. develops, or, as in the case of the Romans, conquest brings them money in vast quantities ... the more the decay of their community advances” (Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973, 233). 56 Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 115. 57 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 37. J.A.I. Champion remarks that “the ‘classics’ were ubiquitous in the education of the literate of the period” (J.A.I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies, 1660-1730, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 182). Editions of antiquity were available in both original languages and competent translations, and the works of Cicero, Aristotle, Polybius, Plutarch, Tacitus and Plato were commonplace. 54

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to move from feminine influence to masculine influence. Yet, Defoe resists this simple opposition and shows Crusoe retaining feminine associations, in his support of luxury and in his continued desire to return to trade, and to the ocean, at the end of the text and in the next two volumes. In the quote above, Pocock refers to “feminine fortuna” and Hannah Pitkin appropriately depicts Machiavelli’s figure of Fortuna as a transformational space, like the ocean itself, which Defoe associates with the fluctuating fortunes of trade. For Pitkin, fortuna is powerful: “‘a rapid torrent’ which destroys whatever its current anywhere reaches, and adds to one place and lowers another, shifts its banks, shifts its bed and bottom, and makes the earth tremble where it passes”.58 Fear and loathing of the sea is an understandable trait of the castaway narrative, yet it is one that Defoe refutes. In Ambrose Evans’ Martha Rattenberg, the first female castaway narrative written after Robinson Crusoe, Martha’s loathing of the sea prevents her from ever returning to England (discussed in Chapter 5). In Robinson Crusoe, when Crusoe and his fellow travelling companions are nearly killed by crossing a mountain range, Crusoe declares that he hates the land: “I shall never care to cross those mountains again; I think I would rather go a thousand Leagues by Sea” (302). Significantly Defoe also describes the wave that leads to Crusoe’s shipwreck as “mountainlike”, contributing to the text’s focus on transformation and allegory, and Defoe characteristically avoiding a clear moral preference for one set of visualised associations over another. Trade and luxury goods were associated with feminine traits in Roman and Greek literature and early eighteenth century commentators drew on such rhetoric regularly. For Plato, the luxury associated with trade was a threat to the military, because “the essence ... of masculinity” was men’s ability “to fight, to risk death”.59 Aristotle placed luxury at the other extreme to “hardiness” and “endurance”, expressing the view that: “The luxurious man is so ‘soft’ that he can endure no pain”.60 Luxury, in sum, “stood for the corruption of a virtuous manly life”.61 As Pocock states, “in 58

Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolo Machiavelli, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, 147. 59 Berry, The Idea of Luxury, 59. 60 Ibid., 58. 61 Ibid., xiii.

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Hellenistic thought, Luxury was thought to be nurtured in cities, in the houses of women, tradesmen and the lowly” (my italics).62 For many eighteenth-century commentators, such rhetoric was a handy political explanation for civic corruption,63 and Defoe himself was not immune from such ideas: “we are certainly arrived to such a pitch in all manner of riot and excess, that we have to apprehend the fatal effects to ourselves, that always have followed from the same causes, in the greatest and most potent empires, as those of Persia, Greece, Rome, etc., which were dissolved by their luxury.”64 Mandeville is an important exception to these negative representations: “Not once in The Fable of the Bees does Mandeville refer to Rome in terms of the injurious effects of luxury on empires, and considering the prevailing attitude of his time such an omission is in itself revolutionary.”65 Those attacking luxury typically associated the ideal qualities of citizenship with the military or with soldiering.66 The survival of society was understood to depend on the masculinity associated with war and civic responsibility, rather than with the selfishness and softness of luxurious living. In contrast to the military man associated with strength, valour and nationhood, the man of trade or finance was “feminised or effeminate in relation to the traditional humanist paradigms of citizenship”.67 Later in the century Wollstonecraft presents a feminised image of the military man to show that the weaknesses attributed to both women and soldiers were due to their training in courtesy and gallantry and their relative lack of formal education (discussed in Chapter Eight). Military valour was not just rhetorically important as throughout the period England battled with Scotland and with its ally France. In the fifty years after the union of Scotland and England in 1707, Britain faced recurrent invasion threats from abroad and insurrection at home 62

Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 37. In this period “the fear of luxury that Swift and others evince is a direct bequest of Roman literature” (J.D. Shields, “The Theme of Luxury in the Early Eighteenth Century”, New York: Columbia University, PhD thesis, 1973, 20). 64 Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, I, 225-26. 65 Shields, “The Theme of Luxury in the Early Eighteenth Century”, 83. 66 Berry, The Idea of Luxury, 75. 67 Stephen Copley, “Commerce, Conversation and Politeness in the Early EighteenthCentury Periodical”, British Journal for 18th-century Studies, XVIII/1 (Spring 1995), 66. 63

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on behalf of the Stuart claimants to the throne;68 overall, “England was at war for twenty-nine of the sixty-six years between 1688 and the outbreak of the great struggle with France in 1756”.69 Defoe, who participated in Monmouth’s rebellion in 1685, took an avid interest in the military and in military figures.70 For example, he was involved in debates as to how, and whether, a standing army should be funded. In spite of this high level of engagement, in A Plan of English Commerce, Defoe strongly defends trade against the charge of effeminacy, not by directly refuting it, but by arguing that trade led to wealth and with wealth came diversity. Every citizen did not need to be trained, or to be strong enough, in order to defend the country: Money raises armies, and trade raises money; and so it may be truly said of trade that it makes princes powerful, nations valiant, and the most effeminate people that can’t fight for themselves, if they have but money, and can hire other people to fight for them, they become as formidable as any of their neighbours.”71

Mandeville, on similar terms, defended trade in luxuries suggesting that the rise in wealth, fine living and numbers of gentleman, need not be a concern for “embroider’d Beaux with fine lac’d Shirts and powdered Wigs have well stood up under fire”.72 To its critics the influence of trade and increased luxurious living raised the prospect of a citizenry concerned only with individual profit and self-interest. The concern was that “the more such ‘selfish’ pleasures were indulged, the less responsibility and commitment to the ‘public good’ would be exhibited”.73 In this context, Crusoe shows his recovery from weakness when he demonstrates his all-important military sensibility and uses a gun and a knife to defend himself and Friday. A number of critics at this time explicitly drew on the gendered rhetoric of trade to comment on the behaviour of men and women. 68

Linda Colley lists such military activity as small invasions of Scotland in 1708 and 1715; a “major rising” in Scotland in 1715; and a major invasion by Scotland of England in 1745 (Colley, Britons, 72). 69 Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England, 7. 70 Earle, The World of Defoe, 6. 71 Daniel Defoe, A Plan of the English Commerce, Oxford: Blackwell, 1927, 40. 72 Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 122. 73 Berry, The Idea of Luxury, 86.

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Women, depicted as voracious consumers and associated with the changeability of fashion, were favourite targets. The philosopher Bishop Berkeley thought that “women of fashion ... enslave[d] men to their private passions”74 and doctor and philosopher George Cheyne expressed the concern that increased consumption was leading to the “degradation of males”.75 Swift, Pope and John Gay all “launched numerous attacks against women as paragons of luxury”.76 Swift, notable for his misogyny, wrote: “Is it not the highest Indignity to human nature, that men should be such poltroons as to suffer the Kingdom and themselves to be undone, by the Vanity, the Folly, the Pride, and Wantonness of their Wives ... whose whole study seems to be directed to be as expensive as they possibly can in every useless article of living.”77 In this rhetoric, traits such as the changeability of fashion are attributed to women and the problem of self-interestedness reappears (with Mandeville joining in): “In the writing of Addison, Mandeville and Montesquieu, we find variously presented the image of the woman who wants a new gown for thoroughly selfish and whimsical reasons – woman as capricious consumer is a recurrent feature of the rather prominent sexism found in Augustan criticism.”78 Defoe however defends the wives of tradesmen from the charge that they are responsible for increased spending on luxury goods: “I am loth to make any part of my argument a satyr upon the women, nor indeed does the extravagance either of dress or housekeeping, be all, or always, at the door of the tradesmans wives, the husband is often the prompter of it; at least he does not let his wife into the detail of his circumstances, he does not make her mistress of her own condition.”79 For Defoe, the basic requirement was that woman be “mistress of her own condition”, a view consistent with his writing in support of women’s education. That commerce had the potential to positively destabilise traditional roles and fixed identities was an observation 74 E.G. Hundert, The Enlightenment's Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 210. 75 Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, 12. 76 Shields, “The Theme of Luxury in the Early Eighteenth Century”, 31. 77 Jonathan Swift, The Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., and Dean of St Patrick's Dublin. With Copius Notes and Additions, and a Memoir of the Author, ed. Thomas Roscoe, New York: Derby and Jackson, 1861, vol. IV, 640. 78 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 465. 79 Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, I, 146.

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that Defoe used to effect in his writing, even as he also points out the problems. He observed, for example, that master and servant categories were becoming confused; that servants were wearing their mistresses’ cast-off clothing, and that the wives of tradesman were dressing like ladies. Defoe is concerned about the artifice that this might lead to while Mandeville seems to take pleasure in observing: “the Women of Quality are frighten’d to see Merchant’s Wives and Daughters dress’d like themselves; this Impudence of the City, they cry, is intolerable.”80 Artifice in terms of misleading appearance was a problem for Defoe, because he knew the social status of successful tradesman and his family depended not only on wealth but also on status. He did not want them to be mistaken for servants in disguise, for this might fuel prejudice, affecting their ability to obtain credit. He observes that “the tradesmen’s wives now claim that title [ladies] as they do by their dress claim the appearance”, and insists that the tradesman’s transition to gentleman must be free of all such artifice.81 Sherman points out that Defoe’s concerns regarding the problematic slippage between master and servant is addressed on Crusoe’s island where “neither Friday nor any of the successive waves of subjects could be misread as claiming proprietary status”.82 While this is so, it is also the case (as will be seen) that, in Robinson Crusoe and subsequent castaway narratives, social status is often ordered quite differently to that in society, and is typically critical of conventional power relations. Fluidity in identity and status is of great interest throughout the century to writers as different as Defoe and Frances Burney (at the beginning of the nineteenth century). Concerns about legitimacy appeared throughout the century – raised in a climate of anxiety – not only with reference to who and what was deserving of respect, but also with regard to who should be given credit to support their business. The issue in the female castaway narratives, including Burney’s (discussed in Chapter Eight), also concerned financial survival: how might a woman survive financially, that is, circulate in public and earn her own money, while retaining her good reputation. In essence then, the problem of Defoe’s tradesman’s authenticity and 80

Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 153. Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, I, 119. 82 Sherman, Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century, 554 and 561. 81

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social mobility at the beginning of the century becomes the problem of the would-be independent woman at the beginning of the next century. In this world of shifting values, the key question was: how might one retain one’s reputation, and therefore gain in status and wealth, while circulating in society? Across the century, as commercial society grew in strength and extended its reach, the association of luxury and trade with civic decline ultimately lead to a redefining of masculine and feminine values. Gradually, as Barker Benfield states, “Men ... gendered and sexualised sensibility, as they tried to make sense of a manhood now expressing itself more immediately in commerce rather than war”.83 In fact, as Berry points out, the ultimate challenge to the perception of luxury as immoral finally came about within the discourse of trade.84 Although luxury was to remain an issue of concern well into the nineteenth century, the growth of commercial culture and material improvements to everyday life slowly overcame the most prejudicial of the moral concerns. Throughout the century, as the moral landscape relating to trade changed, then what “qualified a man for civic capacity”85 also acquired a different grounding; and as it did, so how women were represented also began to change.

83

Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, xxvii. Berry, The Idea of Luxury, 59. 85 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 37. 84

CHAPTER THREE CREDIT, VIRGINITY AND THE CANNIBAL-CONSUMER Man as a consuming animal with boundless appetites capable of driving the nation to new levels of prosperity arrived with literature of the 1690s.1 the new qualities desirable for ... a man of credit mirror those coveted by a woman of quality in the marriage market; both must rely on reputation (credit or virginity).2

Early eighteenth-century society was experiencing a fundamental change: values no longer seemed fixed and unchangeable and seemingly stable social hierarchies no longer seemed absolute and timeless. The problem was the rise of commerce with its emphasis on artifice and fashion, its precarious and fluctuating values (credit, paper money and speculation) and its representation of the human as a figure of innate greed, even savagery. Change was in the air, welcomed by those with something to gain, but not so by the status quo. In the rhetoric of the day, under the influence of trade, society had become a riotous place seething with untamed human passions. Defoe’s advice to the tradesman in The Complete English Tradesman is that these prejudices might best be addressed by cultivating a frugal and natural appearance. Understanding greed as innate and essential to trade, he also understood that avarice itself must be re-presented as nonthreatening. In Robinson Crusoe, Defoe’s imagined original society, it is Friday as the archetypal original man, the “consuming animal” of the day. He is the symbolic cannibal it is essential to tame, so that his avarice might inform rather than damage Crusoe’s trading ambition. While Crusoe’s state of symbolically feminine and sexual purity gives him strength, it is his encounter with the different masculinity of Friday that enables him to leave the island and return to trade. The 1 2

Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology, 181. Ingrassia, “The Pleasure of Business and the Business of Pleasure”, 194.

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encounter with Friday’s symbolic avarice is essential because Defoe’s tradesman is understood in society as problematically feminine. Crusoe needs to represent himself differently so that his success does not jeopardise his authenticity, or his credit, in a culture driven by others’ assessment of his worth, or value. Credit is the second of Pocock’s “female goddesses of disorder”, and the second danger that Defoe addresses in The Complete English Tradesman. Warning that it may shipwreck the tradesman, he shows that credit has already transformed the trading world: “In the good old days of Trade, which our Fore-fathers plodded on in, and got Estates too at, there were no Bubbles, no Stock-jobbing, no South Sea Infatuations, no Lotteries, no Funds, no Annuities, no buying of Navy Bills and publick Securities, no Circulating Exchequer Bills.”3 The South Sea Bubble, referred to in this quote, was the first major financial investment scheme to collapse and it underlined for many the precarious nature of value itself, as many investors became bankrupt. When Robinson Crusoe was published in the preceding year to the crisis, many were already predicting that the market would collapse. The problem of speculation emphasised issues of authenticity and duplicity in relation to identity, integrity and reputation. For Defoe, the increased significance of one’s reputation meant that his tradesman-reader must “resolve to live more under restraint than ever tradesman of his class used to do”.4 He must exemplify the restraint that his customers did not, for, while luxury and credit were threats to his success, they were also the cause of it. Defoe makes it clear that good credit was essential in both social and financial senses: “Credit is the Tradesman’s life, ’tis ... marrow to his bones.”5 As a consequence, in The Complete English Tradesman, Defoe draws on rhetorical images of confinement to advise the tradesman to keep “within his own orbit, and within the circle of his own diurnal revolution”.6 In Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe exemplifies this creed as he builds his enclosures and carefully records his daily activities. The intention of such confinement, Defoe states in The Complete English Tradesman, is to preserve the tradesman’s integrity 3

Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, II, 7. Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, I, 111. 5 Ibid., I, 194. 6 Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, II, pt II, 51. 4

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in the face of public gossip. As such, his reader is constantly told to “keep up your reputation”, “preserve your integrity” and “maintain your credit”. Defoe’s dilemma is that once his tradesman becomes wealthy, his trade may be put at risk, because he lacks the authority and authenticity of the upper classes. Defoe’s language and his expressed concerns show that the tradesman is vulnerable because of the cultures of luxury and credit. In each case the problem is the risk of artifice (false representation) and the corresponding response is both confinement, and the need to appear to be natural and authentic. Defoe plays out a solution to these dilemmas when he shows Crusoe, in his isolation, building his character and reforming his values while living in a state of nature. VIRGINAL CRUSOE When Defoe refers to the young tradesman as “a bride undrest”,7 he shows that he is writer quite capable of drawing on cross-gendered references. It is possible therefore that his rhetorical solution to the problem of credit owes something to the period’s representations of virginity as a mode of being that brings together issues of safety and confinement with issues of reputation and moral goodness. In fact, both images of credit and virginity brought the tensions between desire and morality into play. In the view of John Brewer, credit had as much moral impact as did luxury, because credit impacted on the way value was understood: “Whereas the language of personal trust had originally provided the metaphors for borrowing and lending, now, in a curious transposition, the language of finance ... was employed metaphorically to depict moral and social worth.”8 For its part the virginal body not only signified desire (as it did in representations of the problem of luxury), but it also signified a mobile, internalised morality, embodied in the person rather than in the behaviour of a class. As Pocock comments, the rise of commerce effectively meant that: “a morality founded on real property” was gradually changing to become a morality founded on “mobile property”.9 The effect was not only less rigidity in values, roles and social hierarchies, but also an increased emphasis on the individual, 7

Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, I, 19. McKendrick, Brewer and Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society, 214. 9 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 441. 8

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on their behaviour and reputation. As greater opportunities to change status and roles emerged, tradesmen needed to signify moral good in their appearance and behaviour, because they could not rely on conventions of status. The inheritance of land and property had long provided the means for one class of people to be dominant, and in these circumstances value and meaning itself had seemed fixed and unchangeable. Upper class values were broadly encapsulated by the term virtu, referring to all that was aristocratic, traditional and noble. Conventionally, the concept of virtu in civic discourse was associated with a masculinity that stemmed from the romance and epic genres, as much as from aristocratic traditions. In contrast to such virtu, the female castaway narratives and other texts of the early eighteenth century advocated images of feminine virtue as a dominant social ideal for all, partly because virginity itself suggested an embodied private, interior and mobile space – all of which characterised individualism. Robinson Crusoe addresses what Pocock suggests was the need for a “complex formula … to bring virtue and commerce together”.10 Because luxury and credit, in their association with the feminine, were undermining masculine virtu, the concept was losing its “coherent moral structure”.11 It is in this context that Defoe sets out his own formula, drawing on various feminine qualities, associated with both luxury and credit, to give Crusoe greater viability as a figure of trade.12 In the iconography of the period, credit is widely represented as a virgin, the image effectively conveying problems of truth and constancy, as well as issues of change and transformation. One of the most well known examples is Joseph Addison’s 1711 essay in The Spectator describing public credit seated on a golden throne. For Addison the figure of Credit signified transformation; she “could

10

Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 470. Ibid., 467. 12 Sandra Sherman’s argument that credit in Defoe’s work is “an oxymoron: a female narrative subject who must eschew ladylikeness” is consistent with my own understanding that Defoe uses the metaphor of credit in his work to suggest grounds of transformation and to contest the popular association of the feminine with weakness (Sherman, “Lady Credit No Lady; or, the Case of Defoe's ‘Coy Mistress’, Truly Stated”, 185). 11

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convert whatever she pleased into that precious metal [gold].”13 In William Hogarth’s similarly throned female representation of “National Credit” in the drawing, The Lottery (1721), fortunes are won, but at the cost of virtue. In The Complete English Tradesman, Defoe depicts the figure of Lady Credit as Money’s younger sister. Lady Credit has Crusoe-like qualities being a “coy lass, and wonderful chary [meaning sparing] of herself; yet a most necessary, useful, industrious creature”.14 Defoe points out, that she is like a virgin because she must be won and not offended. Like Addison, he connects female credit to change and transformation. Once she is lost, he says, she is as difficult to get back “as to restore Virginity, or to make a W--re an Honest Woman”:15 “nothing but punctual honourable dealing can restore Credit”.16 Sherman points out that Defoe’s Lady Credit is endlessly transformative, as well as powerful. As one of a family of virtues (which might also be called survival strategies in Defoe’s imaginary) Lady Credit has two sisters, Virtue and Prudence. Backscheider states, Defoe’s allegorical family “asserts the essential relationship between reputation and credit as well as its necessary foundation in integrity and discernment”.17 In The Complete English Tradesman, Defoe draws on gendered imagery (and again, crosses gender) when he suggests to his tradesman reader that: “the credit of a tradesman, is the same thing in its nature as the virtue of a Lady”.18 A page earlier, he compares the tradesman to a virgin saying that “a Tradesman’s credit, and a maid’s virtue, ought to be equally sacred from the tongues of men”.19 Pursuing the imagery further, he compares the new tradesman to a young bride saying, “he that comes out of his time without a perfect knowledge of book-keeping, like a bride undrest, is not fit to be 13

The Works of Joseph Addison, ed. George Washington Greene, New York: G.P. Putnam and Co., 1856, 19. 14 Defoe, Defoe’s Review, III/5, 17. 15 Ibid., 17. In “Lady Credit No Lady; or, the Case of Defoe’s ‘Coy Mistress’, Truly Stated”, Sherman represents Defoe’s Lady Credit as a figure with regenerative hymen (186). 16 Defoe, Defoe’s Review, III/5, 17. 17 Paula R. Backscheider, “Defoe's Lady Credit”, Huntington Library Quarterly, XLIV/2 (Spring 1981), 90. 18 Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, I, 188. 19 Ibid., 187.

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married; he knows not what to do, or what shop to take”.20 In Defoe’s often counter-intuitive imagination, both tradesman and Crusoe are like the “bride undrest” as both lack the knowledge necessary to survive and both are equally vulnerable to the acts and speech of others.21 In The Complete English Tradesman, Defoe says that the advantage of being self-reliant and self-enclosed is a relative independence from society: “He is a safe man, nothing can hurt him but himself: if he comes into any mischiefs, they are of his own chusing [sic]; if he fails, ’tis his own doing, and he has nobody to blame but himself.”22 He warns that “the least hint of unreliability could bring a debtor’s collapse as his creditors unceremoniously competed with one another to ensure the security of their assets”.23 It is this danger and rhetoric that is evoked later in the century in Burney’s The Wanderer when her protagonist Juliet cannot obtain credit, either financially, or socially (see Chapter Eight), because scandal prevents her giving her true name and family. Without social connections and protection, she is represented as cast away within society. When Crusoe encloses himself in his fortifications he is a virginlike figure in that he secures himself against the avaricious desires of others (desires associated with luxury): “and so I was compleatly fenc’d in, and fortifyed, as I thought, from all the world and consequently slept secure in the night” (59). Images such as these in Robinson Crusoe have been read as suggestive of the religious retreat.24 However, because the young tradesman’s credit and the 20

Ibid., 19. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse suggest Crusoe “takes the girl’s option where Moll Flanders throws in her lot with the boys”, pointing out that where “he goes domestic, she goes native” (“The American Origins of the English Novel”, American Literary History, IV/3 (Autumn 1992), 391. 22 Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, II, 107. 23 McKendrick, Brewer and Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society, 211. 24 Braudy states that Crusoe’s caves constitute a Catholic retreat and that Catholicism appealed to Defoe because of “the combination of society and refuge encompassed by the concept of retreat” (Braudy, “Daniel Defoe and the Anxieties of Autobiography”, 123). Defoe addresses the retreat in Serious Reflections, writing “all those religious hermit-like solitudes ... are but an acknowledgment of the defect or imperfection of our resolutions”, and “The abstaining from evil ... depends upon the man’s limiting and confining his desires” (Daniel Defoe, Serious Reflections, 6–8). 21

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maid’s virtue are “equally sacred” in Defoe’s rhetoric, the enclosures can also to be read as feminine and virtuous spaces (religion being never too far away from such imagery). The idea of Crusoe occupying his enclosures as if occupying feminine, virginal space is perhaps less far-fetched when the importance of reputation to both tradesman and woman is taken into account. As Ingrassia notes in the opening to this chapter, in this period the qualities of “a man of credit mirror those coveted by a woman of quality in the marriage market; both must rely on reputation (credit or virginity).”25 Images of female virginity had been used to describe the ethos of individualism since the seventeenth-century. John Rogers points out that “The liberal image of virginity finds perhaps its most fascinating consequence in its capacity to represent the newly formulated ideal of liberal individualism ... the female virgin provided a symbolic model for the specifically seventeenth-century image of the autonomous liberal self.”26 Rogers identifies the “elevation of the sustained life of virginity to a moral ideal” for men in the English Revolution (16401660), the period immediately prior to Defoe’s birth in 1661.27 Celibacy, as the masculine equivalence of female virginity (and associated with masculine virtu) had long functioned as an image of individual endurance and strength. In the eighteenth century, when traditional social values were in tension with the feminised and feminising effects of trade, credit and luxury, it is possible that Defoe looked to qualities more positively associated with the feminine gender. In a story of betrayal in The Complete English Tradesman, Defoe associates trade with romance and strategically reverses typical gendered roles and power relations. In the story the tradesman is emerges as the tale’s most vulnerable character. The story concerns “a lady” who takes revenge on a tradesman, when she thinks he has left her for a richer woman.28 Defoe tells his reader that the tradesman had acted “unworthily” and that the lady “deserved her resentment”. He 25

Ingrassia, “The Pleasure of Business and the Business of Pleasure”, 194. John Rogers, “The Enclosure of Virginity: The Poetics of Sexual Abstinence in the English Revolution” in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property and Culture in Early Modern England, eds Richard Burt and John Michael Archer, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994, 238. 27 Ibid., 229. 28 Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, I, 195-200. 26

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then shows the devasting effect of her revenge on the man’s business. The story is told as a conversation between two women, friends of the woman concerned, as they sit at the tea table. Drinking tea signified gossip as well as increased leisure and consumption, referring to women and to “effeminate tea drinkers [who] were ‘stock comic characters’ of the period”.29 The women comment that the tradesman was “no beauty, no rarity in that way; but … a clever sort of a man in his business, such as we call a pretty Tradesman”.30 Defoe here uses the Shaftesbury association between virtue and beauty to stress the tradesman’s business acumen, but it is also possible that his language conveys the pending destabilisation of his masculinity.31 The two women read out letters from the jilted woman that assert the tradesman has a sexually transmitted disease: “the Foul disease”. One woman defends the man saying he had simply rejected her woman friend (an implicit criticism of the woman). The other woman defends the friend, saying that the man obviously had had to marry for money because his business was failing. The two women spread news of the man’s disease and betrayal and the man is literally dis-credited and made bankrupt. Later Defoe reveals that the letters were forged, suggesting not only the problem of gossip but also the period’s concern with the veracity of writings such as Defoe’s own (Robinson Crusoe was first promoted as a true and autobiographical account). He goes on to say that while the jilted woman’s reputation was later salvaged, the tradesman’s remained in ruins (like Crusoe he leaves society and does not return for over twenty years). In this cautionary tale, Defoe effectively conflates business, sexual activity and physical health to show the effect of reputation on credit and trade. FRIDAY’S MASCULINITY One of the concerns of the period related to the rise of credit and trade was that inherent value, associated with gold, was being replaced by agreed value, associated with paper money: “The paper money 29

Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility,159. Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, I, 196. 31 For Shaftesbury “What is BEAUTIFUL is Harmonious and Proportionable, what is Harmonious and Proportionable is TRUE, and what is at once both, Beautiful and True is of consequence, Agreeable and GOOD” (Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964, II, 395, 426-27 and III, 182-83). 30

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systems of public credit and the commodities thereby circulated seemed to be assuming sole and overwhelming command of all social valuation”.32 The shift was affecting perceptions of status, resulting in an additional emphasis on one’s reputation: “Once property was seen to have a symbolic value, expressed in coin or in credit, the foundations of personality themselves are imaginary or at best consensual”. For Defoe, the tradesman’s rising status, in contrast to the land-holding gentry, was directly and problematically entangled with such intangible and shifting financial values: “Credit ... symbolised and made actual the power of opinion, passion and fantasy in human affairs, where the perception of land ... might still appear the perception of real property and human relations as they really and naturally were.”33 The perception of what was considered “natural” competed with what was considered false, invented or imagined. In this context, the epistemology based on credit was “terribly fragile”, for its “objects of knowledge” had only a “fictitious value”; values, as well as language itself, were becoming reified and manipulated: “opinions ... declare and shape our actions”.34 In this context, it is important that Crusoe not only defend himself against the feminising affects of luxury and credit by adopting a virginal life, but that he become a natural, civilised man. In order to be in trade, he needs to be not only beyond reproach, but also without artifice. A natural and moral appearance will enable him to survive the conversations and circulation necessary to trade, including with customers whose desires are avaricious. In such circumstances, the question becomes, will his newfound strength and morality be enough to protect his all-important reputation. His new persona cannot be put to the test until the naturally avaricious Friday arrives. In The Complete English Tradesman Defoe draws on images of the land to move trade away from associations with artifice: Trade is not a Ball, where people appear in masque, and act a part to make sport; where they strive to seem what they really are not, and to 32

Colin Nicholson, Writing and the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires of the Early Eighteenth Century, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 9. 33 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 452. 34 Ibid., 464.

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The Female Crusoe think themselves best dressed when they are least known: but ’tis a plain visible scene of honest life, shewn best in its native appearance, without disguise; supported by prudence and frugality; and like strong, stiff, clay land, grows fruitful only by good husbandry, culture and manuring.35

In this quote Defoe emphasises constructing the appearance of truth in his self-reflexive references to “acting a part” and his use of the words, scene, appearance and disguise, all of which declare the necessity of artifice (and of fiction), even as he emphasises nature. On his island, Crusoe’s virtuous reputation is safe because his only companion is the parrot Poll, who simply repeats his own words back to him, thereby confirming his identity.36 In view of the conformity Crusoe later imposes on Friday, the sub-textual inference here is that Crusoe is in isolation because the desires of others are dangerous to him: if only everyone were similar having the same desires. Friday, therefore, when he arrives, is a potential threat as a figure of absolute difference. Although Crusoe quickly defuses the threat by becoming Master to Friday, Friday’s difference also contributes to Crusoe’s newfound authority. Friday represents the opposite to the feminised Crusoe who became shipwrecked, and the feminised Crusoe in his enclosed existence on the island. Unlike Crusoe, Friday is sea-worthy, although similarly under threat from the avaricious (like Crusoe, from his own people). Meeting Friday brings Crusoe into contact with Friday’s quite different masculinity and together they defend, attack and escape. While Crusoe’s rule over Friday has been stressed in contemporary criticism, it is less often observed that Friday’s masculinity is essential to Crusoe, enabling him to leave the island as a similarly natural, savage, yet civilised (Mandevillean) man, strong in his morals, capable of self-defence and ready to participate once more in trade. Crusoe‘s island is both natural and foundational, in that it comments on, as well as reconfigures, the origins of society (a theme that will be taken up in subsequent female castaway narratives). It is into this potent scene, a scene in which Crusoe is a symbolically 35

Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, I, 117 (my emphases). Eric Jager, “The Parrot's Voice: Language and the Self in Robinson Crusoe”, Eighteenth-Century Studies, XXI/3 (Spring 1988), 324-5. 36

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virginal figure, that Friday arrives. As a naked, indigenous Carib, he is the epitome of a natural, and military, man, and such masculinity is very different to Crusoe’s. Many critics have observed that Crusoe’s response to Friday’s powerful difference is to immediately colonise him. Crusoe reduces Friday’s apparent differences in culture, race and appearance, producing a figure that is reassuringly and fundamentally the same as himself: “he [God] has bestow’d upon them the same Powers, the same Reason, the same Affections, the same sentiments of Kindness and Obligation, the same Passions and resentments of Wrongs, the same sense of Gratitude, Sincerity, Fidelity, and all the Capacities for doing Good, that he has given to us” (209). Crusoe does not see Friday for who he is, and ignores his differences: “[Friday] had all the sweetness and softness of a European in his Countenance” (205). Yet, Friday also gives Crusoe a new role. Indeed, Crusoe must change if he is not to hide away in virginal isolation forever. After Crusoe sees the footprint in the sand, he realises that others visit the island. His reaction is fear mixed with opportunism; if people arrive on the island, then one of them could show him how to leave. These people come from over the sea, while Crusoe is land-locked. One of these “savages”, as he calls them, will be essential to his survival. That Friday’s arrival then determines Crusoe’s capacity to leave the island is a fact he realises in a dream: “‘Now I may certainly venture to the main land, for this fellow will serve me as pilot, and will tell me what to do, and whither to go for provisions, and whither not to go for fear of being devoured; what places to venture into and what to shun.’” (199) In Crusoe’s dream, Friday has authority, providing Crusoe with the skills and knowledge that he lacks. When Friday actually arrives, it gives Crusoe the opportunity to become a hero (though acting in self-interest): “I was plainly called by Providence to save this poor Creature’s life” (202). Saving Friday leads to the most important shift in Crusoe’s status when the man of nature shows his subservience to the man of trade: “he came nearer and nearer, kneeling down every Ten or Twelve steps, in token of acknowledgement for saving his Life” (203). Finally Friday swears to be his “slave for ever” (204) and places Crusoe’s foot upon his own head. However, in terms of the social contract, because Crusoe’s need to be rescued also benefits his rescuer, both men remain free, neither is slave to the other. This reciprocity is

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repeated when Crusoe is able to leave the island because he rescues a ship’s captain from a mutiny. Not being rescued, but rescuing one’s self is an important moment in the development of Crusoe’s status. Crusoe’s impulse to rescue Friday combines both need and desire: “Gratitude was no inherent Virtue in the Nature of Man; nor did Men always square their dealings by the Obligations they had receiv’d, so much as they did by the Advantages they expected” (244). As Crusoe demonstrates, the propensity of the Mandevillean subject is to be “naturally selfish ... what makes them sociable is their necessity and consciousness of standing in need of other’s help”.37 Crusoe’s “selfmade” individual is therefore, ironically, thoroughly dependent on others. When Crusoe becomes the “Master” of Friday, the new role redresses Crusoe’s experience of slavery, which he describes as a fall from “Merchant to a miserable Slave”(19). As the merchant becomes a Master, so Friday is referred to not as a slave, but as a servant. In this shift in rhetoric, Defoe depicts new relations of power, in which both figures freely enter into agreed relations. The story Defoe creates depicts new relations and identities that will benefit trade. Another important act to take place between Friday and Crusoe is that on the island Crusoe wears skins, and Friday wears Crusoe’s clothes. This is important in relation to Defoe’s frequent observations about the positive and negative effects of maids dressing like their mistresses, and of tradesman imitating gentleman. Crusoe wearing skins imitates natural man and as learns to live in nature, he also learns the military skills necessary for defence. When Friday adopts Crusoe’s clothing, each of the men combine to become the ‘civilised savage’ at the heart of Mandeville’s and Defoe’s conception of society. The image is made potent by the fact that their initial meeting involves both men killing another man, each showing their prowess at self-defence. Having met and learned from Friday, after having shored up his moral stature through his feminine isolation, Crusoe can leave the island. At the point where Crusoe and Friday leave the island, Crusoe’s problematic feminine isolation, has been overcome through contact with the natural prowess of Friday representing foundational man, to make Crusoe a new and hybrid figure able to profitably circulate in public space once more. Crusoe has become a selfsufficient individual, produced by Defoe’s engagement with symbolic 37

Mandeville, Free Thoughts on Religion, the Church and National Happiness, 44.

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images of gender and race. FRIDAY AS CANNIBAL-CONSUMER As a Carib and a cannibal, Friday initially appears to be quite unlike Crusoe. However, just as the young Crusoe can be read as a Mandevillean figure of avaricious desire, so Friday is an actual and symbolic figure of greed. As Martin Gliserman points out, Friday symbolises one of Crusoe’s most important desires, which is for food: “the hero’s primary occupation and recurrent preoccupation ... is with eating and being eaten, having and not having food or becoming food”.38 The desire for food, however, also reflects the central importance of consumption to trade: consumers are the new, driving force of commerce, and they pose a threat. It is partly because of the consumer’s desire to consume the luxury goods of foreign trade, that the tradesman is represented as insubstantial, and blamed for their customers’ profligacy. By the time of Robinson Crusoe’s publication, the activities of financial speculators or the “money’d men”39 had been influencing society for over thirty years. As Appleby states, “Man as a consuming animal with boundless appetites capable of driving the nation to new levels of prosperity arrived with literature of the 1690s”.40 Defoe himself was a “seventeenth-century mercantilist”41 and Robinson Crusoe is set in the mid to late seventeenth century. In this period, “the traditional notion of English men being secure in their persons and property had … subtly shifted to include wealth-making activities”.42 At this time, discussions “were now claiming for nature what had formerly been the province of politics”.43 In particular, by the time of Crusoe and Friday’s appearance in literature, the idea of man as a “consuming animal”, and the corresponding dynamic of selfinterest, had achieved unprecedented importance.44 Considered in terms of the importance of economic desire to 38

Gliserman, Psychoanalysis, Language and the Body of the Text, 59. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England, 26-27; McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 166. 40 Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology, 181 [my emphasis]. 41 Novak, Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe, 23. 42 Ibid., 198. 43 Ibid., 192. 44 Ibid., 190. 39

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commercial activity, the young Crusoe setting out on his journey is a figure feminised and destablised by his premature desire for wealth. On the island he learns to control his desires and to acquire moral strength when he takes up an enclosed, virginal existence. After twenty-odd years his renewed desire is for conversation and in a meeting heavy with symbolism, he meets Friday, the consumer who literally eats the flesh of others. Cannibalism is a rhetorical feature of much eighteenth-century literature, not only used by Defoe but also by Swift, in A Modest Proposal (1729), and Astell, in The Christian Religion (1705), where cannibalism is a motif of threat in relation to the poor and women respectively.45 In The Review, Defoe’s periodical in which he disseminated his opinions, Defoe uses the imagery of cannibalism to describe human nature: “I tell you all, gentleman, in your poverty, the best of you all will rob your neighbour; nay to go further, ... you will not only rob your neighbour, but if in distress, you will EAT your neighbour, ay, and say grace to your meat too.”46 In The Complete English Tradesman, he depicts tradesmen as self-interested, analogous to men in a boat adrift at sea: all of whom will kill a man in order to survive, “they fall on one and kill and devour him ... they draw lots for life and do the same again.”47 In a similar sense, he compares the desire for luxury with cannibalism saying: “Expensive living feeds upon the life and blood of the Tradesman”48 and “the Luxury of the People is so incorporated with our felicity that like a Limb of the Body an amputation would endanger Life”.49 The embodied language shows the extent to which Defoe understood the actual life of the trading subject to be dependent on resolving the moral tensions between greed, luxury and credit. As such, when Crusoe arrives on the island he understands that he might eat or be eaten. Because of his vulnerability, he builds enclosures to protect himself. His concern is that “I had no Weapon either to hunt and kill any Creature for my Sustenance, or to defend my self against any other Creature that might desire to kill me for theirs” (47). 45

Felicity Nussbaum, The Brink of All We Hate: English Satires on Women 1660– 1750, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984, 179. 46 The Review, 15 September, 1711 in Daniel Defoe, Defoe’s Review, vol. VIII, 303. 47 Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, II, 194. 48 Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, I, 112. 49 Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, II, 102.

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Using language that suggests both the rhetoric of The Complete English Tradesman and the problem of consumers’ excessive and corrupting desire for luxury, Crusoe says that the Caribs “have no other Guide than their own abominable and vitiated Passions” (170). Confounding a simple opposition between Caribs and apparently more civilised societies, Defoe ameliorates criticism of the Caribs’ behaviour by comparing their cannibalism with the colonising acts of the “Spaniards [who] in all their Barbarities practis’d in America … where they destroy’d Millions of these People” (171-72). He goes on to suggest that, though destructive human passion is common to all cultures, certain cultures have adopted ethical behaviour to regulate their desires. As such, Defoe shows both Crusoe and the Caribs as having different ethics to the Spanish. Crusoe’s ethic is to not interfere in others’ business (for example, not to gossip): “it was not my Business to meddle with them, unless they first attacked me”. Friday’s ethics, he explains, are that his people only eat the enemies they capture, and a group of Europeans are living safely with his people over the sea (223). Both instances serve to question universal judgements of what Defoe’s readers might simply understand as right and wrong behaviour. In this sense, although Crusoe enforces sameness on Friday, challenging the conventional bases for judging difference, and what was good or bad, is represented as an important prerequisite in the development of new and different identities and social roles. The literal potential of Friday, as a future consumer of English goods, is suggested by Defoe when he depicts Crusoe making Friday’s clothes, changing his taste for flesh, feeding him, housing him and teaching him Christianity and the English language (208). This potential engagement with other cultures is consistent with Defoe’s letter to Robert Harley in 1711 on the benefits of colonisation: These Natives are a foundation of Commerce because They Go Cloathed and would Generally Cloth Themselves, if They Could Obtain Manufactures …. By Means of These Natives a Correspondence of Commerce will of Course be Carryed on with The people of Peru …50 50 Daniel Defoe, The Letters of Daniel Defoe, ed. George Harris Healey, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955, 347.

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In Robinson Crusoe, Defoe’s implied suggestion is that both figures will benefit when Friday becomes a consumer of trade. In discussions of the social contract, if both parties benefit from such an exchange, then neither one will become superior over the other. The social contract debates addressed the underlying agreement by which societies were first formed, shaping relationships between individuals and between individuals and their rulers (as will be discussed in the next chapter). On these terms, the meeting between Friday and Crusoe must be mutually beneficial. For example, both men desire to avoid being consumed by others (Crusoe had been both slaveowner and slave – and wanted neither – and a group of Caribs were hunting for Friday). Crusoe had been first cast away on a slaving journey some time after he bought the slave, Xury. Defoe justified Crusoe’s purchase when he told his reader that, “the buying of Negroes … was a trade at that time not only far enter’d into, but as far as it was, had been carried on by the Assiento’s, or Permission of the Kings of Spain and Portugal” (39). As will be discussed in relation to Penelope Aubin’s castaway narratives, in this period when slaves were being bought and sold in England, rhetorical and actual references to the power and powerlessness of slavery in these stories were entwined. Critics have pointed out that Friday’s later death at sea (in the second volume) indicated his precarious and problematic viability in wider society. However, it is also significant that Defoe distinguishes between Friday and Xury, suggesting that Crusoe’s ethics have changed when he describes Friday as a “pilot”, as well as a companion and a servant, rather than a slave. The shift shows Defoe envisaging a society of like-minded, savage-civilised, “self-made” individuals. The social contract debate also informs Defoe’s depiction of Crusoe as a father-figure to Friday. The day after he had noted Friday’s cannibal nature, Crusoe claims a family tie with Friday: “his very Affections were ty’d to me, like those of a Child to a Father” (209). Crusoe’s opposition to his own father, “my ORIGINAL SIN”, is the text’s foundational moment (194). As the unruly son, Crusoe gives in to his desires and abandons his father, but Friday does the opposite: he is taken from his father by the desires of others (by the Caribs and then, by Crusoe). Friday’s passive decision-making is in fact closer to representations of the female castaway, as will be discussed. When Friday leaves with Crusoe it retrospectively confirms

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Crusoe’s original decision. As Schonhorn points out, Crusoe is “father and no father to Friday”, his relationship with Friday dramatically illustrating the contention that fatherhood is not grounded on generation but is “acquired by … performance”. Schonhorn depicts the relation between Friday and Crusoe as an important “refutation of indefeasible hereditary right” and a significant disagreement with Sir Robert Filmer whose Patriarchia (1680) made him an important figure in social contract discussions.51 That Defoe’s island scenario appears to re-inscribe patriarchal rule is important to understanding the significance of the female castaway texts and themes which follow. Friday brings with him the opportunity to reconcile Crusoe’s (so far, feminine) individualism with the wider demands and perils of society: I cannot explain by any possible Energy of Words, what a strange longing or hankering of Desires I felt in my Soul ... that I might but have had one Companion, one Fellow-Creature to have spoken to me, and convers’d with! In all the Time of my solitary Life, I never felt so earnest, so strong a Desire after the Society of my Fellow-Creatures, or so deep a Regret at the want of it. (187-88)

The conversation that eventuates between the two changes Crusoe as a masculine subject, while it feminises the more masculine Friday (the latter outcome more typically remarked upon by critics). When Friday is described by Crusoe as, “a comely, handsome fellow” (205), “a stout, lusty fellow” (236) and “a lusty, strong, fellow” (240), the descriptions change the problematic associations of trade with effeminacy. The domination of the “very manly” Friday makes Crusoe not only a master of Friday, but also produces him as a differently masculine individual. The “conversation” between the two men enables Crusoe to leave the island as a socially mobile tradesman of “natural” integrity now able to defend himself and others in society. The gendered conversation between the two men has every appearance of taking place without congress with the feminine and appears to be free of artifice. The way is now open for both trader and 51 Manuel Schonhorn, Defoe's Politics: Parliament, Power, Kingship and Robinson Crusoe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, 160.

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consumer to rejoin society, both free of father-rule. THE CUSTOMER/READER

One of Defoe’s most notorious images of himself is as a writer who is “whoring for trade”. The expression is consistent with his views on trade, which are continually informed by references to the sex trade. An examination of his language reveals his perspective on fiction and on the responsibilities of his readers. Defoe suggests that all in trade are equally disingenuousness: “[if] the Tradesman is censur’d as dishonest, and that all Tradesman that practice the Art of setting off their Goods by the Help of Words are Knaves, then I must add, that all Buyers [sic] who ... endeavour to depreciate and run down the goods he buys by the Help of the same Artifice, is a Knave too.”52 He goes on to level all differences by declaring that “no Man ... can be honest” (45). Defoe’s representation of himself as a writer who trades his morality for money must be considered in relation to his defence of prostitution. For example, in 1706, he was unusual for blaming the prostitutes’ customers rather than the prostitute for her trade: “in our general Pursuit of the Sex, the Devil generally acts the Man, not the Woman; and, Gentleman, in all your Clamours against the Women, give me leave to say, ’tis your Devil, not theirs, that acts all the Mischief in the Case.”53 He goes on to say, “’tis a pretty way we have got, to seek the temptation, and then blame the tempter” (527). For Defoe, such a customer is like the general consumer: each is responsible for his (his example is male) vice: Trade ... does not introduce the Luxury, and Extravagance of the People; or their exorbitant expense in fine Clothes or fine Equipages, their Pride and Ostentation in any or either of these ... the Pride is in the inside of the Beau, while his Embroideries, his Laces, his fine Clothes only flutter in the Wind from the outside of his Carcass ... the tradesman does not bid him turn Peacock, and strut about to shew and spread his Plumes.54

Thomas Meier suggests that “To Defoe the evil is in the consumer” and that such reasoning is in line with Defoe’s creation of Moll 52

Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, II, 43. Defoe, Defoe’s Review, 527. 54 Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, I, 119. 53

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Flanders and Roxana. In these texts, “the needy prostitute is free of guilt and … her lustful customer is wholly responsible for the sin committed”.55 Defoe’s views on prostitution are consistent with Mandeville who argued that brothels for “female traders” should be legalised as a measure to protect female virtue from male lust. Another context for these views is that both Defoe and Mandeville argue that the private vice of individuals serves the public interest. From the sex trade to the writing trade is but a short leap for Defoe and, in the last edition of The Review (1713), Defoe chastises his readers for their “Modern whoring”. His examples include men chasing after what they have falsely attributed value to, such as “the furious pursuit of Pride, Luxury, Avarice, Strife, Rage, Error, and all the avowed Mischiefs of the Age”. In his discussion, he compares a book to a desired woman saying that, “all her Intrinsick worth lies in the Back and the Binding [her appearance]”.56 In this scenario, while neither woman, nor book, have intrinsic value, both are attributed value by the customer. In Defoe’s language, the desired woman/book has extrinsic, agreed worth in contrast to the virgin who has intrinsic, innate worth. Consistent with Defoe’s obfuscations around the idea of truth, Robinson Crusoe is both “true history” and fiction, just as Crusoe, like Defoe’s tradesman, must acquire a “natural” sensibility. As Leo Braudy comments on Defoe’s writing, “Behind a seemingly transparent screen of plain talk, his narrators conduct their elaborate evasions”.57 As Defoe is aware, his plain writing disguises an elaborate artifice, as all fiction must. The transformations he depicts produce Crusoe as the image of a natural and a virtuous man. Images of isolation and purity have given him integrity and Friday has endowed him with a benign, natural avarice. Considered as a response to the dangers and the potential of a feminised trading culture, the values associated with the feminine and with the foreign (represented by Friday), are not so much marginalised in Robinson Crusoe, as an essential part of its framework.

55

Meier, Defoe and the Defense of Commerce, 87. Defoe, Defoe’s Review, 213. 57 Braudy, “Daniel Defoe and the Anxieties of Autobiography”, 111. 56

CHAPTER FOUR THE SOCIAL CONTRACT AND THE WIDOW If all Men are born free, how is it that all Women are born slaves.1 … it was my misfortune to be a woman, but I was resolved it should not be made worse by the sex, and seeing liberty seemed to be the men’s property, I would be a man-woman; for as I was born free, I would die so.2

In order to understand the connection between the symbolic feminine and masculine values so far discussed and their relationship to women’s and men’s lives, it is necessary to look at how symbolic representations of power relations reflected debates about the social contract. These debates referred to so-called original societies and the conditions whereby one group had acquired power over others. Through an understanding of these debates, we come to understand Robinson Crusoe as the depiction of such an original state, and the depiction of the widow in Defoe’s text as a mirror, or necessary parallel to Crusoe’s hybrid individual. At the end of the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson indirectly referred to the problem of changing one’s self and one’s identity when he infamously declared: “Sir, a woman preaching is like a dog walking on his hind legs. It is not done well: but you are surprised to find it done at all.”3 Johnson is commenting on what was considered acceptable behaviour for women and he couches the issue in terms of what is natural and what is not. One of the most important contexts for understanding expectations based on gender, as well as for understanding the gender of individualism, were the assumptions 1

Mary Astell, Some Reflections on Marriage (1706) in Political Writings, ed. Patricia Springborg, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 18. 2 Daniel Defoe, Roxana, The Fortunate Mistress, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, 171. 3 James Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, including Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and Johnson's Diary of a Journey into North Wales, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1887, I, 463.

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underlying discussions of the social contract. As discussed, Robinson Crusoe as a text exemplifying social change and the rise of the individual depicted Crusoe emerging from a foundational or pre-social state, after contact with Friday, for whom this was his natural environment. The fictional castaway island scenario, whether literally or metaphorically depicted (in later castaway narratives some protagonists were cast away within their own societies), showed men and women stripped of social norms and as such the castaway narrative was able to convey issues relating to power, society and innate nature. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are significant for debates by Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, among others, as to the nature of the social contract, understood as the implicit agreement that underlies society, defining relationships between individuals, and between individuals and their rulers. The social contract was a way of articulating the terms upon which one individual consented to be ruled by another, whether that was a spouse, employer or monarch. In the light of these debates, which had ancient roots and had been ongoing since the sixteenth century, the castaway narrative as a foundational story, suggestively depicted relationships of power in an original state of nature. In the social contract debates, assumptions about man’s and woman’s existence in a state of nature formed the basis for theories about the shape society should take, as well as informing social roles and relations. Assumptions about what humans were originally like was a crucial determinant in the way thinkers represented modern society and its future. For example, Rousseau in On The Social Contract (1762), published in the same year as Émile, the text in which he praises Robinson Crusoe, sees nature and society as diametrically opposed, representing good and evil respectively. That is, at the origin of society, both men and women were morally good, but became corrupted by civilisation. In these debates, these kinds of assumptions affected the way in which society perceived the human potential, as well as the potential of different genders, economic classes and races. In the context of the social contract discussions, Friday is original man depicted as an avaricious figure. He is then civilised by Crusoe, whose society depends on such human behaviour. The comparison allows Defoe to establish Friday’s “savagery” as essential to Crusoe’s “civility” and the avarice of trade as the lesser of the two evils.

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Robinson Crusoe and the later female castaway narratives, with their negotiations of power, can be understood in relation to the social contract and its appropriate and civic roles. John Locke is an important figure in such debates understanding that: Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.4

Locke’s significant contribution was to shift the basis for male superiority from religious terms (the dominance of Adam over Eve) to economic terms.5 In contrast to Rousseau, who thought humans in a state of nature to be naturally good, and Defoe, Mandeville and Hobbes who thought them to be naturally self-interested and evil (and socialised to be good), Locke thought that human beings were naturally altruistic. Importantly for women, Locke, like Hobbes, thought that no one was naturally subordinate and that all needed to agree to be ruled. There is a sense of this in the depiction of Friday granting superiority to Crusoe. In Locke’s view, all rulers had a contract to rule as opposed to a right, and all contracts were finite. Locke’s Two Treatises on Government, written at the time of the 1679 Exclusionary Crisis, not only informed English politics, but also informed attitudes to divorce and women’s ownership of property. Contesting dominant views of his time, Locke introduced the possibility of divorce: “the power of the husband being so far from that of an absolute monarch, that the wife has in many cases the liberty to separate from him, where natural right, or their contract allows it.”6 In 1705, women’s reciprocal rights in marriage were recognised by the Church of England though divorce was not widely available, even for the very rich, until 1857.7 4

John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Montana: Kessinger Publishing, 2004, 12. 5 Sheryl O’Donnell, “Mr Locke and the Ladies: The Indelible Words on the Tabula Rasa”, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, VIII/2, (1979); Chris Nyland and Robert Dimand, The Status of Women in Classical Economic Thought, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2003. 6 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 96. 7 Susan Kingsley Kent, Gender and Power in Britain 1640–1990, New York: Routledge, 1999, 43.

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In spite of his advanced ideas, Locke reinforced differences between men and women when he said that, within prescribed limits, there was need for only one decision maker within a family, and that one would be determined by physical strength: husband and wife, though they have but one common concern, yet having different understandings, will unavoidably sometimes have different wills too; it therefore being necessary that the last determination, i.e. the rule, should be placed somewhere; it naturally falls to the man’s share, as the abler and stronger. But this reaching but to the things of their common interest and property, leaves the wife in the full and free possession of what by contract is her peculiar right, and gives the husband no more power over her life than she has over his.8

In the pre-Reformation period when the monarch’s rule over his people was being compared to that of a husband over his wife, Locke’s ideas were politically radical, for his implicit suggestion was that the monarch’s rule was not absolute. As Susan Kingsley Kent says of this period: “The idea that subjects might justifiably rebel against their monarch was as absurd as the idea that a wife might end her subjection to her husband either by their mutual agreement or because he abused her.”9 Locke’s ideas then continued to maintain women in an inequitable position, as was later pointed out by the early eighteenth-century advocate for women’s education, the writer and philosopher, Mary Astell. Astell went to the heart of Locke’s contradiction when she raised the inevitable question: “if absolute Sovereignty be not necessary in a State, how comes it to be so in a Family?”10 Astell’s question seems to haunt Defoe’s words in his later novel Roxana when (in the opening quote to this chapter), Roxana refers to her liberty as a property and to “being born free”; her language evoking the rhetoric of the social contract. In order to examine more closely the relationship between the castaway narrative and the development of women’s rights, this chapter examines how Defoe represents the female protagonist in Roxana, before returning to Robinson Crusoe to reconsider the figure of Crusoe’s friend, the widow. 8

Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 28. Kent, Gender and Power in Britain 1640–1990, 19. 10 Mary Astell, Some Reflections on Marriage, 17. 9

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BORN FREE

Defoe’s metaphoric and nautical references in Robinson Crusoe to being a pilot and in control, or literally being at sea, are close at hand in Roxana. Roxana is sceptical when assured by a new suitor that, even in marriage, she will “steer” her own life: “Ay, says I, you’ll allow me to steer, that is, hold the Helm, but you’ll con the Ship, as they call it; that is, as at Sea, a Boy serves to stand at the Helm, but he that gives him the Orders, is a Pilot.”11 Roxana’s former husband is the opposite of the motivated Crusoe: he keeps bad company, drinks, and is lazy and inattentive to business. Roxana’s decision not to marry again is therefore represented as a rational act, one that makes her an individual in charge of her own life. In Roxana, maid, daughter and mistress all serve as female “masters”, as well as women that are “mastered”, as Defoe shows tensions and bonds between different classes and generations of women. Roxana’s expressed desire to be a “man-woman” (in opening quotation to this chapter) includes her desire, and that of her maid’s, to “entertain a man, as a man does a mistress”.12 Accordingly, uncontrollable and vice-ridden greed is indicated when Roxana orders her maid to have sex with her own lover in front of her, and suggests that her maid murder her own daughter. Roxana’s depraved morals, in her desire to be like a man, brings to mind the overblown rhetoric of excess in The Complete English Tradesman when Defoe suggests that tradesmen hungry to survive will eat each other. Both scenarios show moral boundaries dissolved by wealth and absolute power, and show the cost to the individual. In this sense, Defoe’s individualism, as depicted in Robinson Crusoe, is as concerned with the survival of community and society, as it is with self-interest. Roxana recognises that she will remain dependent unless she can attain the liberty that, by custom, belongs predominantly to men. That is, like Crusoe, she needs the freedom to circulate in the public sphere and to control her own finances. But Roxana also needs to ameliorate the excess associated with being a man, by combining both male and female roles to become a hybrid individual: a “man-woman”. The description suggests, not only her aspiration to male freedoms, but, when examined in terms of the social contract, to the more problematic “demand that [her] womanhood be both confirmed and 11 12

Defoe, Roxana, 151. Ibid., 149.

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denied”.13 As a “She-Merchant”, Roxana is like Defoe’s hybrid gentleman-tradesman. She must incorporate new and differently gendered values into her identity. Consistent with her hybridity, and like Crusoe (and, importantly, like Defoe himself), Roxana is the child of migrants. The different, contrasting sets of values shown in the castaway narratives, values that are either familiar (domestic) or unfamiliar (“foreign”), are partly informed by the migrations of the period. The castaway narratives were both read and written in a period of strong migration to America and the West Indies, and immigration into Britain from Europe. Roxana’s parents were French Huguenots, Calvinists who fled France in 1685 after the withdrawal of the Edict of Nantes, which had guaranteed protection from religious persecution. Her French Protestant background positions her as both like and unlike the Protestant English. In this period, all that was French was associated with luxury and wealth and Roxana makes a point of saying that her father had arrived in England with money, profiting from the popularity of luxurious goods and making “a considerable Value in French brandy, Paper, and other Goods; and these selling very much to Advantage here”. She describes her parents as not being in need of charity, they were “People of better Fashion, than ordinarily the People call’d Refugees at that Time were”.14 Here Defoe was likely to be describing actual refugees as he did in his poem in defence of the King’s employment of French Huguenots. In the “True-Born Englishman”, Defoe lays out the various invasions of England that had made the English themselves a hybrid race: … from a Mixture of all Kinds began, that Het’rogeneous Thing, An Englishman [and] … A True-born Englishman’s a Contradiction, 15 In Speech, an Irony, in Fact a Fiction.

Friday’s own hybridity is relevant here as Crusoe’s depiction of him 13

Carol Pateman, The Sexual Contract, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988, 60. Defoe, Roxana, 5. 15 Defoe, Daniel, A True Collection of the Writings of the Author of the True Born Englishman, London, 1703, 10 and 12 (Defoe’s italics). In A Brief History of the Palatine Refugees (1709) he wrote about the 1,000 German Palatine refugees who migrated to England. 14

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makes him a perfect match for the hybrid, migrant son (in this next quotation, Crusoe is an advocate of toleration, as was Defoe: “My Man Friday was a Protestant, his father was a Pagan and a Cannibal, and the Spaniard was a Papist: However, I allow’d Liberty of Conscience throughout my Dominions” (241). Like Robinson Crusoe, Roxana takes place on foreign soil, in Amsterdam and Paris, as if the story it tells does not feature or concern England. Her early circumstances propel her into a metaphorical shipwreck, when she becomes as “unencumbered” as Crusoe on his island.16 Roxana tells how early in her youth she is abandoned with five children when her husband goes bankrupt. She responds by leaving her children with a relative and going to seek her fortune. At this stage she is poor because, although her father left her money, he left it with a profligate brother and she did not benefit. It is a circumstance that is repeated by Ambrose Evans in his female castaway narrative Martha Rattenberg. As is discussed in the next chapter, the scenario refers to how women’s lack of control over inheritance contributes to their poverty. Roxana’s way out of a life of poverty arises when she discovers men’s desire for her: while she has been kept poor as a wife, mother and daughter, as a mistress she is rich and in control of her life. In this sense, her situation parallels that of the seller of goods (or writer of books), discussed in the previous chapter, it is men as consumers and readers who are at fault. When Roxana establishes her independence by refusing a marriage offer, Defoe chooses the moment for her to declare her proto-feminist views: I told him … that I thought a woman was a free agent as well as a man, and was born free, and, could she manage herself suitably, might enjoy that liberty to as much purpose as the men do; that the laws of matrimony were indeed otherwise, and mankind at this time acted quite upon other principles; and those such, that a woman gave herself entirely away from herself in marriage, and capitulated only to be at best but an upper servant.17

Instead of doing what she thought a woman generally did – that is, giving “herself entirely away from herself” – Roxana becomes a self16

John J. Richetti, “The Family, Sex and Marriage in Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Roxana”, Studies in the Literary Imagination, XV/2, (Autumn 1982), 33. 17 Defoe, Roxana, 147.

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made individual through the mercenary use of her own body: “her most precious resource”. Her behaviour leads to her being called an “Amazon” in society and she becomes known for “using a kind of amazonian language”.18 Her experience leads her to believe that, in a society driven by the desire for wealth, anything and anyone can be purchased, including wives, mistresses and aristocratic titles. In this manner, Roxana demonstrates Defoe’s view that the social contract is pre-eminently an economic contract. In Roxana, Defoe suggests that the contract between a wife and a husband is disadvantageous to the economy because, as it was currently shaped, it removed women’s free will. In what has been described as Defoe’s most problematic and darkest novel, Defoe shows the problems that must arise for women when, drawing on commercial logic, they emulated men by acting in their own interest. Roxana shows Defoe concerned with questions of social order at a time when commerce and financial speculation were rapidly changing society, even while he continues to support commerce. By placing a woman at the centre of his novel he makes desire itself his focus (for goods, for books and for women). He seems to ask: what will happen when materiality and self-interest become the ruling moral order? What will happen when there are no inherent truths, only representations whose value must be agreed upon? At the same time, Defoe suggests there is an inevitability to women’s increased independence by showing Roxana as a woman disadvantaged in marriage by prevailing sexual mores, alongside an economic system which rewards her for being a sexualised being, Defoe shows the two cultures in conflict, with a hybrid “man-woman” as an inevitable outcome. In Defoe’s scenario, woman cannot escape her gender, but, if she is to survive, neither can she remain solely a woman (just as Crusoe needed options other than the existing dominant masculine roles). Defoe’s other key female protagonist, Moll in Moll Flanders, also refuses to look to marriage for her financial security and shows same desire for sovereignty and autonomy associated with Crusoe: 18

In Amazons and Military Maids, Julie Wheelwright finds “more than 100 female warriors” in ballads and stories in the early eighteenth century suggesting Defoe’s reference to the Amazon was part of a familiar tradition in popular culture. Julia Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids: Women Who Dressed as Men in Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness, London: Pandora, 1989, 8.

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I had no inclination to be a wife again; I had had such bad luck with my first husband, I hated the thoughts of it. I found that a wife is treated with indifference, a mistress with a strong passion; a wife is looked upon as but an upper servant, a mistress is a sovereign; a wife must give up all she has, have every reserve she makes for herself be thought hard of, and be upbraided with her very pin-money, whereas a mistress makes the saying true, that what a man has is hers, and what she has is her own; the wife bears a thousand insults and is forced to sit still and bear it or part and be undone, a mistress insulted helps herself immediately and takes another.19

Moll’s “Land-Water thing” discussed in Chapter 2 is like Roxana’s “man-woman”, both are under formation as new identities shaped by the permissions and limitations associated with gender, outlining a way of being to be endorsed through use and circulation. Because every move Roxana makes is circumscribed by her relationship to men, the roles she adopts that are the most financially rewarding are mistress and widow (she pretends she has been married to a rich man and has inherited his wealth). Her adopted roles, including her selfdescription as a “whore”, all incorporate self-interest and enable her to focus on the future. Roxana lives her life as if she has no past and rejects tradition and inheritance, as such, she refuses to recognise or acknowledge her daughter when she comes looking for her (this scenario is taken up by J.M. Coetzee in Foe discussed in Chapter 8). The scenario suggests that independence and financial security are problematically obtained only by detachment from the gendered morals of the family. Her failure to acknowledge her daughter constitutes a break with the financial, cultural and social inheritance associated with the family and is a theme reflected in the absence of the mother in the early eighteenth-century female castaway narratives discussed in Chapters 5 and 6 . Unlike the stories of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, Defoe refuses to bring Roxana to a satisfying moral conclusion for his readers (Moll redeems herself by becoming penitent). To write a happier ending, through the usual forms of resolution – romance, penitence or punishment – would combine financial and moral 19 Defoe, Moll Flanders, 1976: 132. Although legally, women had the right to sue to get “pin money” that was in arrears (up to a year), it was widely considered as “a private gift from the husband” (Alessa Johns, Women’s Utopias of the Eighteenth Century, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003, 60).

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interests, but at the cost of depicting the changes necessary to a newly emerging and female individualism. In this sense, Roxana’s ultimately tragic circumstances mirror the death of Friday and shows the deep tensions between society’s material and moral concerns. FRIDAY REVISITED In The Sexual Contract (1988), Carole Pateman discusses the work of Locke, as well as Hobbes and Rousseau, and the idea, espoused by these thinkers, that all individuals are born equal. This “emancipatory doctrine” was a marked shift away from a society profoundly based on inequality (due to the privilege of aristocratic inheritance) to a society based on the idea that all must have equal rights under the law. Pateman suggests that because social contract theories typically presented the individual as masculine, then debates had largely negative consequences for women. For Pateman, “contract theorists justified modern civil subjection” because they based their ideas on the principle that “a naturally free and equal individual must necessarily agree to be ruled by another”.20 The dominance of this rhetoric explains the tendency throughout the century for writers such as Astell and Defoe to compare women with slaves: both groups having limited or no civil rights. The social contract debates made the assumption that in a posited original state of nature women had agreed to be ruled by men in exchange for protection. Understanding Robinson Crusoe and subsequent female castaway narratives in the terms of the social contract therefore allows for a better understanding of the relationship between gender and the possibilities of social change. In view of the popular rhetoric that equated women and powerlessness with slavery, it is worth recalling again the relationship of Friday to Crusoe. While Defoe does not depict women on Crusoe’s island he does, as discussed, depict a scenario that utilises gendered terms. In order to be free of the island, Crusoe is imbued with Friday’s masculine “nature” and Friday with Crusoe’s feminising (and for Defoe, civilising) trading values; in this sense, both are hybrid figures, as women-men or savage-civilians, born of a combination of foreign/strange and domestic/familiar values. While Crusoe alone on his island fits Hobbes’ original state in which “an individual is pictured as existing 20

Pateman, The Sexual Contract, 40.

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without any relationships with others”,21 his yearned for conversation with Friday shows the importance of “Exchange [which] is at the heart of contract”.22 For Hobbes, a key influence on Defoe, the selfinterested individual “must will [contract or conquer] … social relationships into existence”.23 It is notable therefore that Defoe describes Roxana as an Amazon figure in order to imagine an exchange between equals, just as Hobbes depicted a female living in an original state of nature as an Amazon, retaining her power through living separately from men: We find in history that the Amazons Contracted with the Men of Neighbouring Countries, to whom they had recourse for issue, that the issue Male should be sent back, but the Female remain with themselves, so that the dominion of the Females was in the Mother.”24

In line with the Hobbesian idea of contract, both Friday and Crusoe must act out of self-interest if one is not to be a slave to the other. Crusoe is in need of companionship and Friday needs to be saved from his fellow cannibals. Similarly when the ship arrives and rescues Crusoe, he also saves the Captain and crew from a mutiny. Pateman depicts the social contract as involving two forms of property: property as material goods and property in the form of one’s person. Property in the form of one’s person refers to the “freedoms” so important to Roxana. In this light, if Friday had been referred to as a slave, it would have represented to all eighteenth-century readers, a figure with no freedom, showing Crusoe’s mastery to be dependent on such bondage. Defoe’s representation of Friday as a companion or servant significantly contrasts him with Xury, the slave bought and sold by Crusoe (and with Crusoe’s own experience as a slave). Depicting Friday and Crusoe in a typical master-slave relation would have misrepresented Defoe’s commercially driven sense that all individuals ultimately act out of self-interest. Although coercion and contract are the same phenomena for Hobbes – as relationships based on equal exchange – it remains significant that Friday is not taken by force, nor referred to as a slave, but is a companion and a servant. 21

This is also the perspective of modern “contractarianism”. Ibid., 55. Ibid., 57. 23 Ibid., 56. 24 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, 133. 22

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The difference between slave and servant is important because of the different ways in which contract theorists wrote about consent and the reward for labour. Rousseau, for example, opposed slavery by arguing that access to subsistence could not be an exchange for labour as it was prerequisite to it. Defoe suggests that it is in Friday’s interest to work for Crusoe because Friday wants to survive. While Friday clearly knows how to survive in general, his superior survival skills are represented as no match for Crusoe’s twenty years experience of the island, or for his knowledge of guns. In the exchange between the two men, experience meets skill and, in social contract terms, their subsequent cooperation leads to their mutual advantage: a “reduction in defense and predatory effort”.25 The contract is sealed when Friday puts Crusoe’s foot on his own head: “Once the individual has exchanged his life in return for a pledge of obedience to his master he becomes a ‘servant’”.26 When examined in the light of the social contract arguments, which frame Robinson Crusoe, familial and sexual relations increase in significance, for what is at stake in Robinson Crusoe, as in the female castaway narratives, is the survival of a certain kind of society. Pateman comments on the tension between society and nature in relation to people: [who] come together, engage in sexual relations and women give birth. The circumstances under which they do so, whether conjugal relations exist and whether families are formed, depends on the extent to which the state of nature is portrayed as a social condition.27

Hobbes, an influence on Defoe, was able to imagine equality between men and women only by suggesting that women and men originally came together for single and unrelated acts of intercourse.28 In this original state of nature, the separate but “equal” scenario changed when circumstances of survival necessitated confederations being “formed by conquest”. It was at this point, that woman became servant to man, providing a (non-contractual) service that was both sexual and domestic. 25

Pateman, The Sexual Contract, 6. Ibid., 68. 27 Ibid., 43. 28 Quoted by Pateman, The Sexual Contract, 45. 26

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CRUSOE AND THE WIDOW Debates on the social contract not only widely informed views of what was considered appropriate behaviour for men and women, but these views were increasingly informed by what was considered rational. For example, when Samuel Richardson wrote Clarissa and showed his young female protagonist expressing guilt at disobeying her tyrannical father, a female reader wrote to the author pointing out that such guilt was not rational as no one would voluntarily consent to such subjection.29 In particular, rationality and sexual desire were increasingly presented as opposite values in both general discussions and in fiction. The issue of power in relation to sexual desire, for example, informs Martha Rattenberg when an English pirate’s crew take female castaways captive to use for sex and domestic labour. Clearly, when the female castaway appears in an original state of nature, that is, the foundational scene, the problematic issue of sexual desire must arrive too. In this sense, while the widow in Robinson Crusoe only appears in the margins of this text, that she is not a sexualised figure suggests that she merits a closer examination. When Moll Flanders is a young child, she says she wants to be a gentlewoman. She understands this to mean having the opportunity “to be able to Work for myself, and get enough to keep me without that terrible Bug-bear going to Service” (Defoe’s emphasis).30 She learns that others understand the term “gentlewoman” to have a different, more prejudicial meaning: “to live, Great, Rich and High and I know not what”. The only woman she has heard being called a gentlewoman is a “Person of ill Fame” and not understanding what this means, she amusingly declares to the women listening that she wants to be like her.31 The story of her life path is framed by this early misunderstanding which, although corrected, influences her eventual realisation that independence must be combined with a respectable appearance. Like Crusoe, Moll claims respectability by appearing to exclude sex from her life: as Roxana did, that is, Moll poses as a widow: “I … took lodgings in a very private place, dressed up in the habit of a widow, and called myself Mrs. Flanders”.32 On a quite 29

E.J. Clery, The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England: Literature, Commerce and Luxury, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, 153. 30 Defoe, Moll Flanders, 13. 31 Ibid., 14. 32 Ibid., 64.

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different occasion, “they entertained me, not like what I was, but like what they thought I had been, namely, a Widow Lady of a great Fortune”.33 Identity for Defoe is always a slippery affair and he underscores the haphazard nature of disguise when he has Moll ironically mistaken in the street for another widow who has stolen some goods. However, in Defoe’s world, for the most part, to be a widow is to combine one’s poverty with one’s respectability and to use this to one’s advantage. Karen Gervitz in Life After Death: Widows and the English Novel (2005) shows that the widow has a long history in the novel as a figure of independence. She says of Moll Flanders, “By the end of the novel, one might argue, entrepreneurial Moll has managed to combine the best aspects of marriage (love, companionship, children, and presumably, sex) and of widowhood (independence, control of the estate and herself) all at the same time”.34 Gervitz points out that Moll’s life of crime indicates that it was “female participation in ‘modern economic life’ that was the problem, not modern economic life itself”.35 To Gervitz, Moll is both a widow and not a widow, and mis-recognition itself occurs throughout the novel, with negative consequences when Moll unknowingly marries her half-brother. The castaway narrative, with its inherent problem of “exceeding boundaries”, raises the problem of how to enact social change, while retaining recognisable markers of authority and identity. This need to retain what has value while exploiting blurred boundaries in the interests of social change is a central concern for Defoe. In this sense, the independent, yet respectable, widow, who is friend to Crusoe, is an important, symbolic figure. Defoe depicts Crusoe’s friend, the English widow, as an individual in her own right. In her central role, taking care of Crusoe’s money, she is, in many respects, Crusoe’s female equivalent. Prior to his shipwreck, Crusoe had providentially sent £200 of his new wealth from his plantation to England: “which I lodged with my friend’s widow, who was very just to me” (17). Crusoe will claim this money when he returns after escaping slavery. Like Crusoe, the widow is a figure who does not participate in sexual activity and as such she is a 33

Ibid., 142. Gervitz, Karen Bloom, Life After Death: Widows and the English Novel, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005, 135. 35 Ibid., 135. 34

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respectable woman as well as one who cannot be considered subordinate: My principal guide and privy-counsellor was my good ancient widow, who, in gratitude for the money I had sent her, thought no pains too much nor care too great to employ for me; and I trusted her so entirely that I was perfectly easy as to the security of my effects; and, indeed, I was very happy from the beginning, and now to the end, in the unspotted integrity of this good gentlewoman. (303)

At different times in the text, the widow parallels Friday, as well as Crusoe’s mother, who appears at the beginning of the text. The widow is like Friday in that Crusoe refers to her as a pilot and guide, saying she is “my benefactor and faithful Steward”, “my faithful steward and instructor” and “my principal guide and privy-counsellor” (278, 286 and 303). Each of these roles creates in both Crusoe and the widow different strengths and possibilities. Like Crusoe, the widow has had “great misfortunes in the world”: she has been widowed twice and is alone. Her virgin/widow status combines with her experience and her integrity making her trustworthy and able in financial affairs. Like most actual widows in the period, she is a figure in need and therefore gains from her exchange with Crusoe (Crusoe’s widowed sister is also “not in very good circumstances” and his generosity towards her is part of his demonstrated altruism). The widow’s need to be independent balances Crusoe’s dependence on her, enabling him to maintain his own authority: in gratitude for her former care and faithfulness to me, I relieved her as my little stock would afford; which at that time would, indeed, allow me to do but little for her; but I assured her I would never forget her former kindness to me; nor did I forget her when I had sufficient to help her (278).

The widow’s representation as one who takes care of Crusoe’s money, and eventually his children, relies as much on the actual legal status of widows in the period as on her apparent virtue. As feme soles, widows were the only females who could and did own property, and trade and invest in the period. Her legal capacity as a woman able to trade, gives her the potential, at least figuratively, to represent a new female

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subject capable of playing a larger role in public life. In particular, in taking care of Crusoe’s money, she signifies a public and feminine site of stability and trust. While the poverty of widows was the social norm, the potential offered to women by the widow’s example of independence was obvious enough for John Gay’s Polly in The Beggar’s Opera (1728) to humorously point out that: The comfortable estate of widow-hood is the only hope that keeps up a wife’s spirits. Where is the woman who would scruple to be a wife, if she had it in her power to be a widow when ever’d she pleas’d? 36

In spite of changes to her status since the medieval period,37 Peter Earle observes that for eighteenth-century women in general, it was the still the case that “real independence … came if her husband was dead”.38 Many critics have noted that Defoe summarily deals with Crusoe’s marriage, children and wife’s death in one sentence: In the meantime, I in Part settled myself here; for, first of all, I marry’d, 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 engag’d me to go in his Ship as a private Trader to the East Indies.39

It is less often observed that after his wife’s death, Crusoe pays the English widow to care for and educate his children, thereby 36

Quoted by A.D. Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England, Oxford and New York: Routledge, 1993, 15. 37 The eighteenth-century widow contrasted poorly with the thirteenth- century widow who was often affluent and who frequently petitioned the courts to obtain rulings over her property. The key difference was that the medieval widow had a dower, that is, “a cumulative life interest in a portion of her late husband’s land” and on his death, legally she was at her most competent: “she had full legal power”. Sue Sheridan Walker ed., Wife and Widow in Medieval England, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993, 4. 38 Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London, 1660-1730, London: Methuen, 1989, 160. 39 Daniel Defoe, The Farther Adventures, 305.

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representing the care of the family, in this case, the care of children, as a paid, commercial service. Other paid family services done regularly by women in the period, included domestic services, such as cooking, cleaning, wet-nursing (which Rousseau found problematic), as well as the service of sex itself. In Robinson Crusoe, the services of the widow enable Defoe to show that trading activities do not prevent Crusoe meeting his civil and familial obligations, a typical criticism of the self-interestedness of trading culture. The principle that what he cannot do himself he can pay for was seen earlier in The Complete English Tradesman when, in the face of criticism of luxury, Defoe comments that “the most effeminate people” could pay others to fight in their place.40 As discussed, many critics have commented on Defoe’s economic rationalism in relation to the family, focussing mainly on the incompatibility between the two. In The Complete English Tradesman, Defoe comments that he appreciates the economic “spur” that a family gives to business and he advises the young tradesmen not to have a family before “they [are] in a way of gaining sufficient to support it”. But this does not mean that Defoe considers trade and family to be incompatible, for he also says, “None of my cautions aim at restraining a Tradesman from diverting himself, as we call it, with his fire-side, or keeping company with his wife and children”. He also issues a warning: “That Tradesman who does not delight in his family, will never long delight in his business”.41 The widow, performing the role of “public mother”, allows the widowed Crusoe to meet his family responsibilities while continuing in trade after his wife’s death: I made my will, and settled the estate I had in such a manner for my children, and placed in such hands, that I was perfectly easy and satisfied they would have justice done them, whatever might befall me; and for their education, I left it wholly to the widow, with a sufficient maintenance to herself for her care: all which she richly deserved; for no mother could have taken more care in their education, or understood it better; and as she lived till I came home, I also lived to thank her for it.42

Importantly, the widow’s responsibility for Crusoe’s children is not 40

Defoe, A Plan of the English Commerce, 40. Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, I, 125. 42 Defoe, The Farther Adventures, 121. 41

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based on kinship ties but, like Crusoe’s relationship with Friday, it is an exchange of attributed and gendered values. In the quote above the widow is represented as skilled and knowledgeable in her care. In this society, in which a masculinity based on aristocratic and military sensibilities is being challenged and power is demonstrably shifting to trade and financial speculation, the widow combines the feminine values associated with sexual virtue and reproduction (mothering) with her “sexless” and masculine role as a responsible commercial figure in public life. In this sense, she too is a “man-woman” and prefigures the new hybrid individual. In the second volume of Robinson Crusoe, the widow entreats Crusoe not to go away and leave his family. In doing so, she suggests the role of Crusoe’s mother who had unsuccessfully prevented his leaving to go to sea: my ancient good friend the widow, … earnestly struggled with me to consider my years, my easy circumstances, and the needless hazards of a long voyage; and above all, my young children. But it was all to no purpose, I had an irresistible desire for the voyage; and I told her I thought there was something so uncommon in the impressions I had upon my mind, that it would be a kind of resisting Providence if I should attempt to stay at home; after which she ceased her expostulations, and joined with me, not only in making provision for my voyage, but also in settling my family affairs for my absence, and providing for the education of my children.43

However, although the widow is unable to prevent him leaving, in caring for his money and children she mirrors his hybrid individualism and is presented as essential to his ultimate success. DEFOE AND WOMEN’S EDUCATION Defoe’s support for women’s education and his encouragement of the wives of tradesmen to know about business in The Complete English Tradesman suggests that the exclusion of women from Crusoe’s island does not arise from a political perspective. In his writings, Defoe is supportive of women as traders and when he writes on women in general he typically stays within accepted conventions, while expressing views that are progressive for the period. He 43

Ibid., 121.

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recognises, for example, that it is social custom, rather than any innate difference between the sexes, that prevents women’s greater participation in trade and in public life, saying: “custom, I say, has made these trades so effectually shut out the women, that what with custom, and the women generally thinking it below them, we never, or rarely, see any women in any such shops or warehouses.”44 Just as luxury was a problem for trade in that it raised the spectre of effeminacy, Defoe recognised that society’s view of women represented a challenge to accepted conventions of masculinity: “our tradesman, forsooth, think it an undervaluing to them and to their business, to have their wives seen in their shops, that is to say, ... they will not have their trades or shops thought less masculine or less considerable than others”. 45 The belief of Mandeville and Defoe that there were no differences between men and women but that “custom made it so” put them in accord with a number of women who, throughout the eighteenth century, had argued for women’s access to education. Their discussions highlight the problem that sexual desire represented for eighteenth-century society and for the idea of female independence. There was no public education for women at this time, and women who were educated received their schooling at home, or in “private public schools”, and a few of the less privileged girls attended charity schools. Hans Nicholas, in an early important study of 120 elite women of the period found that “63 were educated at home, 32 in private schools, 11 were self-educated and nothing is known of the remaining 14. The largest group of notable women (51) were educated at home by their fathers, brothers and uncles (six clergy, four academics, and a naval officer, a physician, a musician, and a craftsman).”46 When Defoe outlined “An Academy for Women” in Essay upon Projects in 1697, he acknowledged that he was drawing on (and amending) the work of the reformer Mary Astell, as well as her predecessors.47 In 1694 Astell, recognising the problematic moral and sexual position of women, saw isolation in a “Monastery” type institution as an essential component of women’s education. She 44

Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, I, 293. Ibid., 293. 46 Hans Nicholas, New Trends in Education in the Eighteenth Century, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951, 195. 47 Daniel Defoe, An Essay upon Projects, New York: AMS Press, 1999 (1697), 109. 45

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developed her ideas in relation to various works that had argued for women’s education since the sixteenth century in both England and France.48 Her key model was the Port Royal School in France founded in the thirteenth century as “a place of retirement for women who were not required to take religious vows to live there”.49 Though her idea for a “Monastery” was lampooned for advocating the purity of isolation (and therefore, for its suggestion of Catholicism), Astell insisted that her proposal did not preclude women’s circulating in society. She stated that her ultimate aim was to educate women to prepare them to contribute to and circulate in public life: “the Whole World is a single Lady’s Family, her opportunities of doing good are not lessen’d but encreas’d by her being unconfin’d”.50 In the following quote, Astell emphasises women’s “active life” over “barely … Being in the World”: … a little attention to what they [critics] read might have convinced them that our Institutions is rather Academical than Monastic. So that it is altogether beside the purpose, to say ’tis too Recluse, or prejudicial to an Active Life; ’tis as far from that as Ladys Practising at home is from being a hindrance to her dancing at court. For an Active Life consists not being barely in Being in the World, but in doing much good in it: And therefore it is fit we Retire a little to furnish our Understandings with useful Principles, to set our Inclinations right and to manage our Passions, and when this is well done, but not til then we may safely venture out.51

The theme of withdrawing from society, in order to develop one’s values and understanding, enabling a more productive public life, parallels Crusoe on his island, in retreat from a prejudicial social environment. Initially, Defoe’s academy for women appears to be

48

The most notable being Juan Luis Vivres, Instruction of a Christian Maid (1523); Anne Marie Von Schurmann, The Learned Maid (1659); Richard Allstree, The Ladies Calling (1673); Bathsua Pell Makin, An Essay to Revive the Education of Gentlewomen (1673); Francois Fenelon, De l’Education des Filles (1687) translated as Instructions for the Education of a Daughter (1699) – all referred to by Patricia Springborg in her Introduction to Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, London: Pickering and Chatto, 1997. 49 Springborg in Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, xvii. 50 Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, xxxiii. 51 Ibid., 178.

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little different to Astell’s in that he too would “keep the men out”.52 But in his work, Defoe distances himself from what he calls Astell’s “Nunnery” (rejected by the Queen due to the fear of accusations of Papism). In Essay Upon Projects, Defoe declares his proposal’s difference from “Religious Confinement, and above all, from Vows of Celibacy” saying “I know ’tis dangerous to make Public Appearance of the Sex; they are not either to be confin’d or expos’d the first will disagree with their inclinations, the last with their Reputations”. As in his fiction, Defoe circumvents this either/or scenario when he describes a scheme that is similar to the existing schools – except his building would stand alone and have a suggestively Panopticon dimension and self-monitoring: The Building shou’d be of Three plain Fronts, without any Jettings, or Bearing-Work, that the Eye might at a Glance see from one Coin to the other; the Gardens wall’d in the same Triangular Figure, with a Large Moat, and but one Entrance.”53

The school would involve “No Guards, No Eyes, No Spies set over the Ladies” and men would be kept away from the women because, he says, it is men (always morally suspect for Defoe), not women, who proposed “intrigues”. Women would voluntarily enter and leave the building, which would also function as a “safe house”, that is, “any Woman who was willing to receive the Addresses of a Man, might discharge herself of the House when she pleas’d; and, on the contrary, any Woman… might discharge herself of the Impertinent Addresses of any Person she had an Aversion to, by entring into the House.”54 Defoe is countering the popular notion that women corrupted men and masculine values, understanding that some men’s lack of control meant that women might need a refuge. At the same time he attributes women with the capacity to monitor their own selves. Again, this place of education, which is also a refuge from men’s desires, has parallels with Crusoe on his island building his fortifications so that he might sleep safely at night. Defoe’s proposed school is consistent with his view (and Mandeville’s) that in prostitution, it was male customers who were responsible for brothels, not the women who worked in 52

Defoe, An Essay Upon Projects, xli. Ibid., 109. 54 Ibid., 111. 53

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them. As E.J. Clery points out, debates about women’s education in the period were inextricable from debates about sexual morality. These debates inevitably referred to the effect on society of the problematic desires associated with greed and instability and therefore: luxury, credit and trade.55 In the face of the feminisation that accompanied the rise of trade, it was important that men’s sexual roles or behaviour be represented as very different to women’s. This is one of the contexts in which, nine years after Robinson Crusoe, Alexander Pope attacked women and women writers in The Dunciad, attributing his “vision of effeminate decline” to the rise of trade.56 Resisting the conventional association which suggested women had the superior morality (the ground which Aubin’s castaway narratives occupy), Pope depicts women as selfinterested rakes with uncontrollable passion and vanity. Clery suggests that Richardson counters this view of women in Clarissa when the rake Lovelace claims that not only were women just like men, but that only female education could prevent it. As Clery states: “Lovelace repeatedly speculates that Clarissa’s virtue is a triumph of education over nature”, that is, in his view, women are not innately virtuous.57 Reading is blamed for Lovelace’s rakish way of thinking and the depiction is consistent with Richardson’s project to persuade women writers of their moral and public responsibility to influence society for the better. Richardson suggested that the woman writer use morality to influence her readers. Penelope Aubin, whose female castaway narratives are discussed in Chapter Six, was one of the women writers linked to Richardson and his ideas. Her characters are essentially and notably pure, in contrast to Pope’s women who in their private lives are represented as notoriously false, amoral, promiscuous and filthy. The problem was that, the more women were represented as physically embodied (that is, as sexual beings), then the less they were seen as capable of authority and independence. Conversely, when women were associated with a higher, more virtuous morality than men then they were idealised and seen as needing masculine 55

It is in the middle of the eighteenth century that the term “blue-stockings”, used in a different sense to its first use in 1683, came to apply to the literary gatherings of men and women who supported education reform for women (OED). 56 Quoted by Clery, The Feminization Debate, 79. 57 Ibid, 114.

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protection. In her portrayal as a asexual being, the widow is therefore much like Defoe’s tradesman, each must appear to be free of desire, if they are to rise in status and wealth with integrity and authority. Just as, in Robinson Crusoe, Friday, the widow and Crusoe all influence and shape each other’s sensibility and subjectivity, so Clarissa’s attributes influences Lovelace (as Richardson would have women writers influence their readers). Clarissa is a Crusoe-like, isolated, figure who lacks desire. Like Crusoe, and other female castaways, her days are “mercantilist, she draws up accounts”.58 As such a disinterested figure of desire, she is both inaccessible to Lovelace and distinct from him. In her unattainability and virtue, Lovelace is influenced by her and complains “this lady, the moment I come into her presence, half assimilates me to her own virtue”.59 As Lovelace becomes a like-Clarissa figure, so another female figure, Mrs Townshend, a dealer in exotic fabrics (indicating both luxury and foreign trade), has a “manlike spirit”.60 Like Crusoe, Clarissa requires isolation in order to maintain her integrity. In a letter written in 1746, Richardson depicted the need for a young woman writer to “vindicate her Claim to Sense and Meaning by going into isolation” – into the “Clarissa-closet” – to gain the necessary space in which to write “uninterrupted; her Closet, her Paradise; her Company, herself”.61 In A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Astell similarly asks her female reader to consider, in contrast to “Complements and Fulsome Flatteries”, what was in her own “real interest”. In promoting a distinction between real and false self-love, Astell urges her female readers to “employ your care about that which is really your self”.62 Astell, who agreed with Defoe, Hobbes and others that humans are driven by their “desires and passions”, recognised as a problem that women increased their self-worth by investing in their appearance, in order to be praised by men. The need for isolation for Astell was therefore not only a defence against immorality, but was also a symbol of self-reflection, selfdetermination, self-control and self-monitoring; in other words, the 58

Clery, The Feminization Debate, 126. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa in The Works of Samuel Richardson, London: H. Sotheran, 1883, 163. 60 Ibid., 127–8. 61 Ibid., 137. 62 Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, 6. 59

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development of an individual self that would influence, rather than be limited by, society. Astell’s concern was similar to Defoe’s: she wanted women to circulate and profit from society, while defining themselves differently to social custom. THE PROBLEM OF FICTION Like many eighteenth-century authors, Astell used the example of fiction, specifically romance, to discuss the problematic and slippery relationship between words and truth, as she attempted to disengage language from its customary social meanings: Love and Honour are what every one of us naturally esteem, they are excellent things in themselves and very worthy of our regard; and by how much the readier we are to embrace whatever resembles them, by so much the more dangerous, it is that these venerable Names should be wretchedly abus’d and affixt to their direct contraries, yet this is the Custom of the World: And how can she possibly detect the fallacy, who has no better Notion of either than what she derives from Plays and Romances? How can she be furnished with any solid Principles whose very Instructors are Froth and emptiness? ... Such an [sic] one would value her self only on her Vertue …63

For Astell, virtue alone was an insufficient basis for the development of independent judgement. Education was necessary to develop women’s capacity to discriminate, to read and interpret correctly, so that she could participate in and survive public life: it is not intended that she spend her hours in learning words but things, and therefore no more Languages than are necessary to acquaint her with useful Authors. Nor need she trouble herself in turning over a great number of Books but take care to understand and digest a few well-chosen and good ones.64

Her emphasis is on action rather than on reading, and on specific rather than wide reading, or reading for its own sake. Her words recall those of Rousseau, who recommended only Robinson Crusoe for Èmile’s “natural” education, acquired through the practical development of his own resources: 63 64

Ibid., 12–13. Ibid., 22.

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Since we absolutely must have books, there exists one which, to my taste, provides the most felicitous treatise on natural education. This book will be the first that my Émile will read. For a long time it will alone compose his whole library, and it will always hold a distinguished place there.65

Rousseau’s appreciation of Robinson Crusoe can be seen to partly guard his charge against the feminine excesses of novels and romance. But before looking at Rousseau’s influence on women’s lives at the end of the century, the next two chapters examine how female castaway narratives drew on the traits of such romance and adventure tales, in order to criticise society and to advocate the bringing together of virtue with material success. The female castaway narratives published after Robinson Crusoe enable further examination of the feminine values that inform Defoe’s text, and provide a better understanding of the emerging individualism of eighteenth-century woman. As Mary Severance argues, “What is new (or modern) about eighteenth-century Britain is the emergence of a social contract that is female-specific – and which leads to the emergence of the womancitizen”.66 Severance argues that there was a “feminine logic of individualism” in the period, identified with a transfer of power from the monarchy to the individual. The female castaway figure enabled writers to refer to women’s difficulties (actual problems as well as a set of moral values considered to be under threat), while using their protagonists’ trials to criticise society. In these tales, the female castaways benefit from negotiating a compromise between excessive materiality and self-interestedness, while showing women obtaining an increasingly powerful, more altruistic and moral, public role.

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, Montana: Kessinger Publishing, 2004, 184. Severance, Mary, “Sex and the Social Contract”, ELH, LXVII/2, (Summer 2000), 460. 66

CHAPTER FIVE THE FEMALE CASTAWAY AS TRANSLATOR … in their mediatory role, between heroic romance and mercantile imperialism, [women] generate and enable the mutual interaction of these two otherwise incompatible discourses.1 … most of the conversation run through my hands, I being interpreter to them all.2

In this chapter, the female castaway is considered as a median figure, a figure representing a middle ground between opposing values, thereby creating a new space in which a way forward can be articulated. As a literal and symbolic figure of translation, the female castaway brings contrasting values together creating new realities, understandings and identities. Two complementary castaway narratives, both featuring female protagonists, were written in the same year as Defoe’s publication and in response to Defoe’s text. Little is known of their author, Ambrose Evans,3 apart from the perhaps significant fact that his printer, Charles Rivington, produced several editions of The Complete English Tradesman.4 Evans’ work is interesting in that one of his texts, Martha Rattenberg, shows the 1

Brown, Ends of Empire, 48. Spoken by the female castaway character Martha Rattenberg in The Adventures of Rivella by Mary De La Riviere Manley and the Adventures and Surprizing Deliverances of James Dubourdieu and His Wife and the Adventures of Alexander Vendchurch by Ambrose Evans, ed. Malcolm J. Bosse, New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1972, 54. 3 Ambrose Evans is the signature on page 102 of the 1719 edition. It is difficult to verify names of authors in this period when authors frequently published anonymously or under false names, just as Defoe originally published Robinson Crusoe as authored by Crusoe himself, suggesting the text was a castaway account like the narrative written by the Scottish castaway Alexander Selkirk. 4 Charles Rivington co-printed The Complete English Tradesman in 1725, 1726 and 1727 and printed A Plan of English Commerce in 1728 and 1730. He was also Penelope Aubin’s printer. 2

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female castaway emerging as a strong individual through her, and the text’s reconciliation of opposing values (that is, she is both a literal and metaphoric translator). Evans makes Martha a translator between a series of different actual and moral languages, showing her achieving a productive middle ground between problematic foreign trade and corrupt English society. In Alexander Vendchurch, the shorter narrative published with Martha Rattenberg, a contrary story is told of a male protagonist cast away on an island after his deceitful experiences in a Spanish trading colony. Alexander’s behaviour brings about the death of Elvira, a castaway and rich Spanish heiress, after which he returns to England without profit. The importance of Evans’ linked narratives lies not in their canonical value, nor even in their popularity, as it is not known how many copies were sold. These narratives are significant because, published in the same year as Robinson Crusoe, they seem to draw on the same gendered field of values regarding trade, which inform Defoe’s work. Though more prejudicially than Defoe, Evans also associates greed and artifice with financial speculation and foreign trade, and shows such tensions being reconciled, through recourse to a different, feminine and moral set of values. For Evans, the female castaway represents the good morality of English tradespeople, who are metaphorically cast away due to English corruption. The Lives, Adventures and Wonderful Deliverances of Mrs Martha Rattenberg and James Dubourdieu and its companion text, The Adventures of Alexander Vendchurch And of his Ship’s Crew Rebelling against him, and setting him on Shore in an Island in the South Sea, etc, were published in one volume in October 1719.5 Drawing on rhetoric similar to that deployed by Defoe, in the first narrative, Martha on the island demonstrates a pragmatism that throws Crusoe’s more excitable nature, and Defoe’s more liberal outlook on foreign trade, into stark relief. While the transformation effected in Martha Rattenberg is not the development of a new Crusoe-like and socially mobile trading identity, it is that of a female trading identity who establishes a profitable middle ground between domestic and foreign trade. In doing so, like Defoe, Evans draws together such 5

Both appear in the reprint The Adventures of Rivella, 1972. Blain notes that no translations appeared and there were no further editions in the eighteenth century (Blain, Clements and Grundy, Feminist Companion to Literature in English, 19).

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oppositions as masculine and feminine, French and English, and Catholic and Protestant to produce a new hybrid trading identity. Martha’s journey begins when Evans shows her desire for romance and financial independence simultaneously produced and thwarted by the excesses of the age in which she lives. The excessive sensuality, corruption and luxury of London had long been a theme of popular literature and criticism in the press. As discussed, these themes were often imbued with political, commercial and religious significance. Criticism of excess in general was a handy political tool that was widely understood. In Martha Rattenberg, Evans represents excess through reference to Martha’s avaricious family, her liaisons with several duplicitous men, references to bigamous marriages and to financial speculation, all of which fuel Martha’s initial desire to migrate in order to marry a wealthy plantation owner. Like Crusoe, Martha is shipwrecked by her desire for great wealth and by her unpreparedness for supporting herself economically. As a castaway, at one stage on the island, she survives alone for three years, while her soon-to be French husband (whom she meets on board ship) is captive in a utopian community in the middle of the island. When he and his friend, a Catholic priest, fail to meet the utopian’s more feminine and domestic standards, they are ejected and return to Martha. The men’s ejection from the feminine utopian community parallels Martha leaving masculine and corrupt England. That the men’s values change, due to the influence of the utopians, and that Martha has learnt to survive alone, informs the couple’s eventual survival and success. The accompanying shorter narrative, Alexander Vendchurch, is a cautionary tale featuring Alexander and the Spanish heiress Elvira. Evans’ title is a direct parody of the name Alexander Selkirk, the figure whose real-life story of being cast away on an English privateering voyage informed Robinson Crusoe.6 The title brings together the Latin/French word “vend”, meaning to sell (commerce) with the Scottish word “kirk” meaning church (religion). The name, in effect, might suggest the need to reconcile morals with commerce without, perhaps, embracing Defoe’s more expansionist ambitions. Or, given the negative nature of the story, it may indicate the threat that commerce poses to the church. The Scottish and French 6

Some have also connected the origin of Robinson Crusoe to the Dutch text Smeeks’ Krinke Kesme (1708) or with the Scottish castaway, Robert Drury. See Earle, The World of Defoe, 299.

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references in the title and in the text may also indicate the author’s Jacobite sympathies. When Martha refuses to go back to England, she and James settle in France, and in the second narrative, Alexander returns to Scotland to claim a meagre inheritance from his father. In each of Evans’ castaway narratives, social change is linked to contact with foreign languages and cultures. Martha learns French and Alexander learns Spanish, references to other languages as well as Catholic and foreign values (unfamiliar, and problematically, not English). Both countries represent the influence of luxury, or the excesses of foreign trade. Martha’s French and Alexander’s Spanish, as references to foreign trade and luxury, offer them the means to survive financially. Martha takes advantage of the London fashion for French cooking and Alexander gets a job for a Spanish merchant. In contrast to Alexander’s prospects, Martha’s future is initially more conservative and domestic: she aspires to obtaining one of “the most beneficial places that a servant could hope for” (24). Martha’s role as a translator depicts her in a median role, bringing together contrasting values. She and James learn to benefit from the culture of excess, without becoming corrupted by it. In contrast, Alexander becomes corrupt when he falsifies his identity in order to claim an inheritance that is not his (an analogy, perhaps, for the problem of the tradesman who would be a gentleman). Reference to all that is foreign is a useful shorthand reference to a number of cultural and social tensions. As was evident in the discussion of the lady with everything about her “French or foreign” in Chapter 2, French goods were widely identified with the problem of luxury. English, French and Spanish rivalries were also being played out more directly on the military front. The War of Spanish Succession (1708-1714) had led to the grandson of King Louis XIV giving up his right to succeed in favour of the Spanish throne, and by 1718, Spain was at war with France, England and Austria (and later Holland). In the press, a number of other associations were evident. The Spanish were famed for their pirating activity (pirating was a popular image of financial speculation), while both French and Spanish as Catholics could always be negatively contrasted with English Protestantism. As will be evident in the discussion of the Protestant and Catholic protagonists of Aubin’s narratives in the next chapter, such tensions were handy oppositions that, in the right

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circumstances, could be brought together to show the formation of new values and identities. MARTHA RATTENBERG Martha Rattenberg stands in opposition to the story of Alexander Vendchurch, in which a Spanish merchant employs Alexander and takes him to the port of Cadiz. There, he acquires business skills and learns to play music, an important representation of seduction and desire in both texts (2). His master then takes him to Panama where only Spanish citizens are allowed to go and, through imitating those around him, he says: “I soon grew a perfect Spaniard” (4). In its isolation and closed nature, the Spanish colony (like the utopian community of Martha Rattenberg) is a pure state, a kind of island, from which Alexander must eventually flee. Alexander’s master is not married and has no children, his status suggesting the unproductive nature of this singular, trading society. He calls Alexander his nephew and renames him Roderigo. When he dies, the “uncle” leaves Roderigo, together with an actual nephew, a large inheritance. When Alexander, as the false nephew Roderigo, finds he must contest his claim in the Spanish courts, he admits that: “I could be neither heir nor executor in prejudice to a native Spaniard, and a true Catholick”. He then leaves the island and becomes a castaway. Similar to, yet different from Alexander, Martha’s family in England cheat her out of her inheritance. While Alexander becomes a cast away due to his foreign and false status, it is Martha’s experience of domestic England that leads to her becoming a castaway. As is often the case in such popular narratives, the opposite suggests the same: foreign trade and financial speculation have corrupted English values. Castaway with others, Martha’s language skills are put to practical purpose when she translates for the other English and French castaways (who include her future husband). Unlike Crusoe, who longs for just one person to talk to, Martha is the centre of a small castaway community and she comments on her significant (and symbolic) role: “most of the conversation runs through my hands” (54). The beginning of Martha Rattenberg starts at the end of the castaway experience with Martha and James living in France running a tavern for the English merchant ships that visit their French port. The narrator, to whom each of them tells their story, is a visitor who asks them about a framed picture of an island they have hanging on a

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wall. The narrative is written as if to the English visitor’s patron, an English aristocrat, thereby suggesting the story’s value as a true and original account of endurance and survival. The story, like Robinson Crusoe, is told retrospectively as it has been a decade since Martha, James and their friend, a Catholic priest, spent sixteen years cast away. Martha, as the first narrator, tells of her difficulties in England with romance, bigamy and financial survival. James then tells of his and the priest’s experience of the utopians. This community consists of men, women and children who describe themselves as refugees from society. Their community is separated from the rest of the island by a deep chasm, indicating a distancing from conventional values, as well as from Martha, who stays alone for the three years the men are in the community. The utopian community’s values are feminine, based in particular on equality, family love and the domestication of nature. The utopians are shocked at the sight of the two hirsute men, suggesting that the pair’s difference is their masculinity and Hobbesian nature, that is, compared to the utopians they are wild, uncivilised men. Correspondingly, the utopians come to condemn the men for following their passion, instead of their reason. Reason, in this configuration, is the feminine control (or domestication) of masculine passion and wild nature. The utopians tell how, because they followed their reason, God protected them by sinking the land around the island, and then around the utopian society, creating a doubly fortified space (93). Such fortification, particularly in the context of the utopians’ advocated feminine values suggests that, like Astell’s Nunnery, and Crusoe’s fortified enclosures, the enclosed community is a feminine and pure space, which protects the utopians against external, excessive and corrupt masculine desire. The men’s eventual rejection from this “Paradise” suggests that neither wholly masculine (England) nor wholly feminine (utopian) values will do, rather a mix must be made of the two. While James is in the utopian society, Martha learns to survive alone, reversing the usual association of romance, travel and fantasy with the feminine, and the factual and rational with the masculine. When Martha acquires her survival skills the rational combined with the feminine effectively evokes the hybrid men-women of Defoe’s texts discussed earlier. At the start of her journey, Martha joined a ship in London with other female migrants after she discovers that riches are more readily

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available in other countries, and are accessible through marriage. An important context for the eighteenth-century castaway narrative is the thousands of migrants who left England to go to America and the West Indies. When pirates capture Martha’s ship, the shipwreck and castaway events that followed would have been familiar stories to readers, both in the press as well as in fiction. The telling of true events (to the English narrator), as in Robinson Crusoe, provides an important realistic context for the portrayal of these highly symbolic and moral stories. After the shipwreck, the pirates take most of the young women, except Martha, as their mistresses. God’s punishment for their immorality is that both pirates and women are eventually killed in a volcanic explosion. Echoing the hybrid character of Crusoe (as well as protagonists in Aubin’s work, discussed next), the Catholic priest uses the Protestant Book of Common Prayer to marry the English Protestant Martha to the French Catholic James. Marriage was both symbolic and significant in the social contract debates, as well as in fiction, and this hybrid religious marriage establishes a symbolical and contractual relationship between masculine and feminine values. The couple have married in response to the pleas of others – the priest and elderly people (who die shortly after) – that she and James are the only ones left who can populate the island. Their request is notably already undermined for the reader by the narrator’s initial description of the story-telling couple as middle-aged and childless (in contrast to the fertile Crusoe). The success and failure of both marriage and fertility are used in most of the eighteenth-century castaway narratives to criticise the values of society. In this sense, it must be said that, although Martha and James establish a middle ground, upon which to build their life, Evans does not emulate Defoe’s more optimistic outlook. FINANCE AND CIRCULATION In its engagement with Robinson Crusoe, Martha Rattenberg parallels Martha’s story, as a daughter, with Crusoe’s as a younger son. Martha is thirteen-years old when her father dies of “inward decay”; and his description of her – “the child of his age” – evokes a similar era of change to that in Robinson Crusoe. The coincidence of the father’s death with Martha’s puberty is typical of the female castaway narratives, and characterises the castaways’ vulnerability as financial,

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sexual and moral. Martha’s vulnerability is doubly pronounced as her mother (her father’s second wife) dies shortly after she is born. Her father’s death means that Martha cannot be “married and settled” like her older sisters, and her father’s dying concerns about her welfare come true when, unintentionally, Martha is left “friendless and unprovided for”. In comparison to Crusoe who insists on leaving home, an act his mother is powerless to prevent, Martha is ejected from her home after her stepbrother (importantly, he is not of her blood) steals her inheritance. While her father is shown to be protective, the inheritance he intended for her was stolen because it was not written down. It was, in other words, reliant on his presence. In these texts, visible presence, along with gold, are markers of inherent value in preference to the agreed value of paper money and the written word. The male generation, represented as following on from her father, is greedy and manipulative in accord with society’s new commercial values. As a result, Martha’s loss of power is domestic and gendered in parallel with Crusoe’s initial fall from merchant to slave: “I who ’till now had been mistress of the house, could after my father’s funeral scarce be admitted to any share in it” (6). That many of the female castaways learn to survive in the face of the death of the father suggests that writers were associating the impact of foreign trade, and its corresponding financial speculation, with the breakdown of the traditional patriarchal system. In the early eighteenth century, daughters and younger sons stood in a similar situation in relation to inheritance. Historian Susan Staves quotes a 1713 legal case in which the court explained the legal custom: “Every one but the heir is a younger child in equity, and the provision which such a daughter will have is but as a younger child.”7 It was common for the son to take precedence over the daughter; the older child over the younger; the first marriage over the second. On these terms Martha is disadvantaged as the daughter of her father’s second marriage and Alexander is also, as the youngest son of a second marriage. Of aristocratic marriages, Randolph Trumbach states: “opposition to second marriages often centred on the care of

7

Susan Staves, “Resentment or Resignation? Dividing the Spoils among Daughters and Younger Sons”, in Early Modern Conceptions of Property, eds John Brewer and Susan Staves, London and New York: Routledge, 1995, 195.

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the children of the first marriage”.8That Martha’s father waits to remarry until the children of his first family have married is a sign of his propriety: Martha comes from “good stock”. Crusoe-style, Martha records her life in London as a profit and loss account. Her father tells her he has left her – “one hundred broad pieces of gold, all my mother’s apparel, and all his household goods except what he had already disposed of to my brothers and sisters” – but, after he dies, she finds that, he “mention’d them not in his will, by which he only bequeathed me his household goods”(6). Martha is left with just five pieces of gold. When a wealthy female patron later suggests to Martha that she could sue her step-brother, she refuses: the point being made perhaps that taking him to court would actually make her obligated to the wealthy patron. Her reluctance may have also represented a moral and religious dilemma in terms of taking a family member to court, with its implicit criticism of her dead father. As one cleric in the period advised his readers: “[in] matters of Contract, Estate, Inheritance, or Money, it must not be for any small matter, nor for a light injury, nor for any thing easy to be born, that a Child may implead his parent; the hardship must near be intolerable; the injustice great and pressing”.9 Up until 1544 inheritance had “simply descended from father to eldest son at common law” and, as Staves goes on to say, “the extreme freedom of property owners to decide ... how family property would be divided” was “one of the most idiosyncratic features of English law”.10 Martha is forced into circulation and into public space, when her step-brother “turned me out of doors with only the cloaths to my back” (7). From this point on, her experience continues to show the problem of masculine avarice (as well as excessive desire) when two men try to trick her into marriage. She is at the church altar with one when he is revealed to have twenty other wives, all of whom he has cheated of money. In sum, Martha’s London experiences refer to a range of actual problems of the period including bigamy; the issue of inheritance for daughters of second marriages; the cost of regaining 8 Randolph Trumbach, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England, New York: Academic Press, 1978, 51. 9 Bishop Fleetwood in 1705 quoted by Staves, “Resentment or Resignation?”, 203– 204. 10 Staves, “Resentment or Resignation?”, 199.

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money through the legal system; and the problem of the lottery, representing speculation and gambling, in contrast to earning an “honest wage”.11 Through these actual and symbolic references, Evans represents an England fraught with inequality, speculation and corruption. In contrast to this scene is domestic trade, which, as for Crusoe, represents honesty, community and support. For Martha in London, women in trade are essential to her survival. These women offer Martha assistance, give advice and help her pay her debts (2021); just as Defoe had Crusoe speak of tradesmen as scrupulously honourable and important Pilots. Martha is also markedly honest and fair-minded, yet, like the young Crusoe, she lacks experience and is therefore vulnerable. When previous wives turn up to exhort money from her, although she is advised by the more experienced tradeswomen to ignore them, she gives them money out of pity. Her experiences in London, and in the family, show her vulnerability to being duped. She is “a bubble” (21), an insubstantial figure, able to be cheated like a South Sea Bubble investor.12 Her actions accord, not only with the young, vulnerable Crusoe, but also with Defoe’s representation of women as not responsible for the vice they become involved in. Basically Martha is too honest to survive in England and she must become a castaway to find resources within her self to become a successful trader. As it was for Crusoe, her original castaway state is in London where she is “all alone, in a strange place, without any friends to advise or assist me” (19). Her reading of “books of travel and voyages” lead to her Crusoe-like “mighty desire of seeing the world” which “grew greater and greater every day” (15). Consistent with Defoe’s views, Martha slowly learns that both she and her money must circulate in order to gain in value: “keeping [money] by me was not the way to improve it” (24). In line with this view, she wishes to migrate in order to become wealthy, even though she recognises that: “being a woman indeed was some check to these imaginations” (25). 11 Lottery tickets were expensive at approximately ten pounds each (the equivalent of five-hundred pounds today). 12 The Oxford English Dictionary definition of bubble reads, “Anything fragile, unsubstantial, empty, or worthless, a deceptive show. From 17th century onwards it often applied to delusive commercial or financial schemes.” Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language includes “A cheat: a false show” and “Anything which wants solidity and firmness; anything which is more specious than real”.

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WOMAN AS TRANSLATOR Critics have read the absence of women on Crusoe’s island as referring to the general issue of sexual morality, and to women, sex and the family as deterrents to economic activity. Moral concerns are suggested when the sailors’ and castaways’ arrival on the island soon turns to debauchery, conveying the idea that the original, foundational scene is similar to the one left behind in London. Evans’ challenge seems to be to describe a middle path between Martha’s honesty and society’s depravity and he does this by representing Martha on the island as pragmatic and useful to others, particularly in terms of her ability to translate between different languages and values. Her ability to translate between French and English would have evoked for the eighteenth-century reader a negotiation of tensions between morality and immorality, feminine and masculine, Catholic and Protestant, and foreign and domestic trade. In that her role signifies an essential feminine middle space (also the island itself), her values and skills will enable society (in this case, the small community) to survive. In this sense, Evans’ texts reflect the ideas of Aubin, discussed in the next chapter, and similarly advocate feminine virtue as essential to civic society. At the time of Martha’s capture, the Spanish pirate ship was masquerading as an English ship, and its English pirate captain, soon assigns a crew to the ship and then sails away. Responsibility for the shipwreck that follows is therefore shared between England and Spain, with England having the greater responsibility. Martha and the other women, all of whom are migrating, in search of love or riches, are left with insufficient provisions, sick crew members and French prisoners (4). Figuratively, the English and Spanish pirates are the problematic “money’d men”, financiers, projectors and stockjobbers of the period, while the ship’s “sailors of all nations” (36), evoke Addison’s observation of the Royal Exchange in London, the centre of foreign trade: “all the languages of Europe [are] spoken in this little Spot.”13 On the island, Mandeville’s ideas are suggested when Martha makes friends with a prostitute, “the Governess”, lover of the pirate captain. That is, Martha learns that to gain fresh clothing, tools, materials for building and other supplies, virtue must trade with vice. She now recognises the interdependent relationship between private 13

Joseph Addison, The Spectator, 3 (2 March 1711), 69.

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vice and “publick benefit”, suggested by Mandeville and Defoe. The Governess embodies excess and luxury having “render’d herself mistress of the inclinations ... of the principal of our masters”. She is “an old face in London, and quite out of credit [seeking] a new fortune abroad where she is less well known”. Her being “out of credit” is synonymous with her vice and lack of status. In a drunken scene, she retorts that Martha and the other virtuous women are slaves like her: all must become lovers to the sailors. His crisis impels Martha to be more pragmatic and less judgemental in her relationship with Governess: “I from the beginning determin’d to make my advantage of the interest she had in him, therefore much against my will, made my court to her, and persuaded her to engage our captain, not only to furnish us with all that was necessary for our lying on shore, but to furnish us with materials to keep us at work; which she the more easily yielded to, by my promising that she should have a large share, not only of my cargo of linen, but in my work to make it up” (45). In this environment of scarcity, the exchange of goods is presented as an alternative to the exchange of sexual favours. Self-interest determines the pragmatic relation between Martha and the Governess until the latter’s death in a volcanic explosion brings new fortune to Martha and James. Lack of emotion is generally understood to be a sign of rationality and in this Martha is comparable with Robinson Crusoe, about which Watt states: “The hypostasis of the economic motive logically entails a devaluation of other modes of thought, feeling and action.”14 In her period of isolation, after the two men leave and following others’ deaths, Martha’s practicality and rationality is marked by her emotional control. For example, she represents herself as “I, within whom, grief and uneasiness never dwelt long” and “having cried out my cry I began to recover my spirits” and “there was no longer any grief to be found in my face, but all was jocund and easy” (9). Her stoical nature is markedly more sober than Crusoe’s, who experiences continual outbursts of emotion in relation to his “complicated good fortune”. The emotional Crusoe eventually becomes a fertile and (colonially) expansive individual, who returns to sea again and again. In comparison, Martha is a more restrained, and infertile, subject who refuses to travel again on the high seas or to return to England. 14

Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 64.

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Both symbolic and actual reproduction is important to all the castaway narratives, including, as we have seen, to Crusoe and to the widow. Before Martha is cast away, a fortune teller tells her that she is barren. In that the fortune teller is a speculative figure, it is significant perhaps that Martha is told she is barren in England, as the corrupt site of financial speculation. The fortune teller’s view contrasts with those on the island who urge Martha and James to marry and reproduce. However, when Martha takes up a life of trade with James in France, she still has no children. Again, Martha’s childless state contrasts with Crusoe as a more resilient, fertile figure marking out a potential future for English society. Naming and language are significant sites of future reproduction (of meanings) in Robinson Crusoe, Martha Rattenberg and Alexander Vendchurch (as in all the female castaway texts). In Evans’ texts what is designated as foreign or strange might similarly highlight the possibility that different cultural responses are possible to current impasses. In contrast to Alexander, who changes his name to Roderigo in order to secure an inheritance, Martha keeps her own name after marriage, in keeping, it is pointed out, with the French custom. In a similar fashion, Crusoe at birth is given his mother’s name, Robinson, and the name of his German migrant father Kreutznaer. Figuratively this makes Crusoe a gendered and racial hybrid, as well as a social and natural figure. His hybridity is then hidden by custom as Kreutznaer becomes anglicised as Crusoe, changed and legitimised through conversation and circulation: “by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call ourselves, and write our Name Crusoe, and so my Companion’s always call’d me” (3). That Crusoe retains his mother’s name while changing his father’s establishes the first break with what is represented in this text as the natural order, that is, the hierarchy defended and represented by his father. When Martha chooses to retain her own name on marriage, she is keeping her patrilineal name but, in doing so, she is challenging English custom by her adoption of a (relatively feminine) French custom. The name that she keeps changes its previously avaricious associations (a proverb, “as covetous as old Rattenberg”,15 is named 15 Books of proverbs were popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and critics suggest they form a textual middle ground between oral accounts and the novel. (Rosemary Kegl, The Rhetoric of Concealment: Figuring Gender and Class in Renaissance Literature, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994, 128 and 141).

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for her uncle, who had also refused to help her). Her claiming of her father’s name allows Evans to show Martha as a new man-woman changing previous associations and values. Martha is a symbolic figure of translation in the context of names referring to meanings that are dependant on use, culture and social custom. EMBODIED LANDSCAPES

As in Robinson Crusoe, travel is symbolically associated with social mobility when Martha decides to migrate after meeting a woman who had been a servant until she had married “a rich citizen” (16) in another country: “a man of quality [whose] father was a shoe maker” and who had made money in “the Barbadoes” (25). Echoing Defoe’s representation of generational social mobility based on trade, this man’s son was “a gentleman, and a companion for Lords” (24). These experiences inform Martha’s desire “to make my way into some condition of life which was more free and independent” (25). As was the case for Crusoe, circulation is shown to be both dangerous (she is shipwrecked) and essential to trade when Martha and James survive to earn money from the English ships that visit the coast of France. It is relevant to Evans’ resolution of social tensions that he locates his protagonists where they can profit from the increased wealth of the English, without having to live there. The tavern that they run, also suggests Evans is depicting a middle ground between virtue and vice. Defoe had defended tavern-keepers against the idea that “Ale-houses” be placed under licence, saying that such a law implied that inn keepers “need[ed] to be [kept] under the eye of the magistrate”. His suggestion that the “Ale-house keeper might be a very Honest Tradesman”, indicates that there is a need for the trade to be defended.16 As discussed, the masculine excesses of England are countered in the text by the feminine utopian society that James and the Catholic priest experience in. Men, nature and the sea are all domesticated in this community. As such, the two men are required to purify themselves in the sculptured pool (fed by the ocean) each day, and all

16

Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, II, 96.

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the utopians do this twice a year (76).17 In the view of the utopians England and France are wild and masculine societies, and in contrast the “Lyons” that guard the men are “like dogs, tamed domestick animals” (78).18 In contrast to Evans’ representation, the taming of Hobbesian desire19 is more complexly represented in Robinson Crusoe, where the “Lyons” are wild sea lions, hybrid creatures capable of surviving on both land and sea: “ravenous Creatures [who] seldom appear but in the night ... we found the people terribly frighted, especially the Women” (30). The meeting with the utopians effectively reverses the meeting of the “wild” and “natural” Friday with the feminine and civilised Crusoe. The utopian men are not wild or hirsute and their occupation is pruning trees into hedges, while the women educate the children. The emphasis is on the shaping of nature and, as such, the utopians conversely use artifice to shape what is natural. Yet the utopians cannot distinguish artifice from what is natural and when James and the priest remove their clothes it is assumed that they are removing their skins. In contrast to the naturally hairless and feminine utopians, the two men are understood to be a “sort of impure animal” (74). James and the priest are not only wild but are, problematically, different from each other, illustrated by one man having hair all over his body and the other not. Such differences are frowned upon as the utopian society represents an ideal state (though one that the men cannot live in) where harmony is achieved because there is minimal difference between citizens, a possible criticism of Defoe making Friday into his own likeness. In the utopian society, adultery is not only unheard of, but is considered unnecessary, as all are equally desirable in appearance. Both mother and father give the bride and groom to each other in the marriage ceremony and, topical for the period, the young people make their own decisions as to who to marry. The implication is that without similarity, such equality is

17

The purification suggests baptism, which, in different periods, was a contentious issue and a fundamental objection of certain dissenting sects (see Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978, 114). 18 Hobbes states “when from the sight of a man at one time and of a horse at another, we conceive in our minds a Centaur ... it is a compounded imagination, and properly but a Fiction of the mind” (Hobbes, Leviathan, 12). 19 The title of Hobbes’ Leviathan originates in the Bible and is a symbolic reference to a large aquatic animal.

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impossible. Because the two men are not even similar in appearance to each other, these idealised values are clearly unviable for them. Equality between external appearance and internal values is also represented as necessary for the complementary, monogamous relationships that mark this society. Even work and nature are in balance, as equally valued and undifferentiated, as such: “virgins often accompany’d their lovers to work” (82). For Evans, perhaps even more so than for Defoe, hybridity and difference are strengths and purity is an impossible state. The work of both authors suggests that in their texts, cultural difference, whether in relation to gender or race, shapes individualism within the context of trade. The individual is shown to be stronger for the incorporation of new and different values, even though the negotiation, or cultural meeting itself, will likely cause a reduction of such differences. HARMONY AND RELIGION The utopians have only a minimal need for law: old men direct discussion (rather than control it) and wives are regarded as “sacred” (81), in contrast to the eighteenth-century English wife of whom society “presumed inferiority and incompetence vis-à-vis her husband … a life of second class citizenship”.20 Music plays a central role suggesting that harmony is emphasised over coercion. In Martha’s England, music was a sign of desire, seduction and fantasy, and when Martha listened to it she was tricked and deceived. The men find the utopian society by following the sound of the “sweet music”, associated with goodness, sweetness and harmony. When Martha hears this music she ceases to worry that the men have disappeared. Evoking the pleasure of Crusoe’s parrot repeating his words back to him, the two men comment that the birds are “very like our parots [sic]” (60): they sing the words to the people’s songs, harmonising animal and human worlds. The music signifies the harmony of a world in which (preceding Coleridge on Robinson Crusoe) there is a perfect balance of wants and needs: “How happy are we, who want nothing that’s necessary to life, nor have any desire or wishes for what we do not want” (78). Without 20

Janelle Greenberg, “Legal Status of the English Woman in Early EighteenthCentury Common Law and Equity”, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, IV (1975), 179.

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the desire of Mandeville’s and Defoe’s “consuming animal”, the people cannot understand the two men’s society’s pursuit of wealth: … we could by no means make them comprehend what gains and riches were. They asked us whether we wanted food in our own country .... We told them it was not that but the earnest desire of having more than what was absolutely necessary, that made us venture so far; since large possessions and great abundance did not only gain the respect and veneration of those who had not the same advantage, but even an authority over them. This likewise seem’d to puzzle them, for they could not form an idea of any pleasure and satisfaction that there should be in those things. (77)

In Evans’ text these views are accompanied by a critique of religion, the Catholic priest’s religion in particular. A young virgin girl tells the visitors of the utopian society’s religion and singles out the Catholic church for criticism. The utopians say “their ears could not hear of the Deity being split into three; and that a man, who he confess’d dy’d, was however the living God” (90). The scene suggests the period’s freethinkers, who were critical of the role of priests and of the concept of the Holy Trinity. As historian David Nicholls points out: The early part of the eighteenth century witnessed a growth in what was called “free thinking” or “rational religion”. The Glorious Revolution, with the advent of William of Orange, had resulted in, among other things, a growing toleration for Dissenters and for those of unorthodox views within the established church. Some of these men, renouncing Trinitarianism, and believing that the true religion can be derived from nature and reason, were known as deists and theists.21

Unlike Crusoe’s conversion of Friday, the Catholic priest is unable to convert the utopians. The utopians criticise Catholicism is criticised in terms of fantasy, fiction and excess. The account accords with accusations in the period that the Catholic Church was corrupt and excessively concerned with pomp and ostentatious display. The text is as critical of Catholicism as it is of a corrupt and Protestant English trading society and the impasse, in view of the need to trade with 21

David Nicholls, God and Government in an “Age of Reason”, London: Routledge, 1995, 128.

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Catholic nations of France and Spain, might explain Evans’ bringing together the Protestant Martha with the Catholic James in a productive middle ground. Nothing is known of the practices or beliefs of Ambrose Evans but Defoe was a Dissenter who, as John Richetti points out, ironically “dissented from … what most dissenters of his class thought”.22 In general, Defoe was tolerant of all religions, while most Dissenters opposed the Catholic Church and the Anglican High Church. They were typically critical of the artifice of priests wearing special and ornate vestments. This had been a criticism of both Catholic and Anglican churches since the sixteenth century, when the vestments of priests had been a key issue of dissent. In terms of artifice, Defoe rhetorically associates Roman Catholicism with the illusory aspects of romance and fiction. In The New Family Instructor (1727) a father tells his son “I derive the word Romance ... from the Practice of the Romanists, in imposing Lyes and Fables upon the World; and I believe ... that Popery is a Romantick Religion”.23 Robinson Crusoe, with its appearance of being a “True History”, shows Defoe’s concern that his own work not be dismissed on these grounds. The significance of Robinson Crusoe is that its truth appears to be vouchsafed by the one who was there, on the island. Both Evans and Defoe use such references to truth, history, presence and absence as a response to the instability and femininity associated with trade, fiction and romance. In both of Evans’ narratives, letters refer to a society in which credit, paper money and financial speculation suggest the precarious nature of the written word. In contrast to such insubstantiality, the solid gold that the explosion exposes (and which Martha hides), is eventually used to fund the couple’s French tavern.24 In his discussion of the 22

John J. Richetti, The Life of Daniel Defoe: A Critical Biography, Maldon, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005, 4. 23 Daniel Defoe, The New Family Instructor, 1727 quoted by McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, 89. 24 The solidity of gold compared to the insubstantiality of paper money is an important feature of the mercantile period. Charles Davenant writing just prior to Defoe in the late seventeenth century wrote: “Of all beings that have existence only in the minds of men, nothing is more fantastical and nice than Credit” (quoted by J.S. Peters, “The Bank, the Press and the ‘return of nature’: On Currency, Credit and Literary Property in the 1690s”, in Early Modern Conceptions of Property, eds John Brewer and Susan Staves, London and New York: Routledge, 1995, 375).

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female castaway incident involving Mrs Heartfree in Henry Fielding’s Jonathan Wild (1743), McKeon understands credit and romance to have similar traits of excess, illusion and insubstantiality. It is these traits that Defoe also sees: “Credit has paid Interest for nothing and turn’d nothing into something, Coin’d Paper into Metal, and stampt a Value upon what had no Value before.”25 The word “romance”, for its part, whether referring to lovers or to a genre of fiction, frequently referred to that which was unbelievable or unsubstantial – a chimera. On these terms, fiction, credit and romance are all conducive to being represented as feminine, with romance said to be like a woman: a figure represented by Aphra Behn as “a meer trick of the slight of hand”.26 As problematic as these associations may have been, they were undoubtedly useful to writers in associating the feminine with transformation (and translation). Evans’ utopian society is problematically romantic and when, on their return, they tell Martha they have been in “Paradice” and have met “Angels” (67), she clothes them in linen shirts she has pragmatically obtained by negotiating with the prostitute figure, the Governess. Evans uses linen here just as Defoe had used broadcloth to express his equal treatment of domestic and foreign luxurious goods. Linen was “a major alternative to wool”27 and, in England, it came from Germany, imported by the Dutch. Martha’s negotiation with vice, her stability (after three years in isolation), and her pragmatic offer of clothing enables the men to re-enter society. The encounter revises the story of Eve, since, when the two men are cast out of “Paradice”, the figure that rescues them is a woman (in effect, two women, one virtuous and one associated with vice). DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN TRADE Evans brings together the strengths of both foreign and domestic trade, when, after their experience, Martha and James are shown in domestic trade, yet located on a foreign shore. This is not the social mobility emphasised by Defoe, but rather a compromise. Early in the text, Martha expresses doubt about whether or not her father was a gentleman: “I can’t say he was a gentleman, but he farmed his own 25

Ibid., 375. Quoted in McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 27. 27 Walter Scott Dunn, The New Imperial Economy: The British Army and the American Frontier, Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 2000, 109. 26

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estate, which was about forty pounds a year ... and ... brought up six daughters and one son, all of whom he saw married and settled before he married his second wife, my mother …” (5). In preference to social status, she states his income, occupation and the number of children he raised. In other words, his status is reflected by his actions, rather than by words that indicate his social superiority. Martha’s marriage to the Frenchman James, and their final location on the coast of France, is likely have been due to their different religions as well as to the common association of luxury and foreign trade with all that was feminine, French and corrupt. As Lynn Festa notes: Francophilia and Francophobia in England, like Anglophilia and Anglophobia in France, express the relations between nations and give form to rifts within each nation between the aristocracy and the people, between the noblesse and the bourgeoisie …. The Francophilia of the nobility is depicted as the subordination of insufficiently autonomous men and decadent women to an insidious and pervasive foreign influence.28

It is worth noting here that many French people, like the English, had “a morally censorious attitude toward luxury” up until the end of the nineteenth century.29 Evans’ narrative depicts a middle path between perceptions of English and French vice by drawing on religion and language. In doing so, he draws out the positive strengths of English and French associations. In terms of the marriage that takes place on the island by the Catholic priest using a Protestant book of prayer, it may have been useful to Evans that France and England had different attitudes to marriages based on love, and arranged marriages. Among the English aristocracy, romantic marriages were increasing and arranged marriages declining while, in France, arranged marriages were widely favoured. According to Randolph Trumbach, “The English Channel had become the great divide between romantic and

28 Lynn Festa, “Cosmetic Differences: The Changing Faces of England and France”, in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, ed. Jeffrey S. Ravel, Maryland: John Hopkins University Press, 2005, 31. 29 Berry, The Idea of Luxury, 4.

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arranged marriages”.30 In France after 1724, under the rule of a Catholic monarchy, all French marriages had to be performed by a Catholic priest. It is relevant to Evans representation of Martha’s marriage that: The case of Protestants in France was odd, for Louis XIV had imposed the intolerant fiction that they did not exist, so it was Catholic marriage for them or nothing. Protestants who married before their own pastors risked the future of their children if rapacious Catholic relatives went to law to claim inheritance.31

For their part, the English had a long history of discrimination against Catholics, and the discrimination against Catholic poet Alexander Pope at this time can be taken as an example: The acts of William and Mary and William III deprived Pope of rights of residence, worship and Catholic education before he was ten years old; …George 1 deprived him of professional employment rights … . [He] appropriated the majority of Roman Catholic estates … imposed financial penalties on Roman Catholic worship … . [T]he Revolution and the Act of Settlement … made Roman Catholic life ‘a long disease’ of potential civil oppression even where sanctions were not enforced.32

Whether Catholic or Protestant, married through love or by arrangement, whether with or without a priest, the circumstances of being married (or not), on a desert island, makes marriage a significant and symbolic act in all of the female castaway narratives of this period. Her castaway situation is able to show not only moral values in crisis, but also patriarchal protection, inheritance and sexual and symbolic reproduction (the future of society). In this sense, English society itself is often described as cast away with a compromise between masculine and feminine values necessary to ensure its survival. In Martha Rattenberg, Evans’ compromise is 30

Trumbach’s discussion focuses on aristocratic examples, but he states that “In England the opposition to second marriages often centred on the care of the children of the first marriage” (Trumbach, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family, 113 and 51). 31 John McManners, Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France: Clergy and People, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, 70. 32 Murray G.H. Pittock, Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 108.

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between masculine/feminine, French/English, Protestant/ Catholic, foreign/domestic and tame/wild. With regard to the latter, the Catholic priest returns to France as a vegetarian, a comment on the problem of man’s innate greed, so vividly expressed by Defoe as consumer cannibalism. NOT BEING CRUSOE Just as Martha is initially a victim of English masculine desire, so Alexander, like Crusoe, is a victim of his own avarice and deceit, and again, the moral lesson is slightly different to Defoe’s. Alexander’s Spanish leads to his deceitful claim of inheritance and his false representation as Roderigo. He had planned to secretly marry Elvira, a Spanish heiress and daughter of his master’s enemy. When their duplicity is discovered, Elvira flees from her father and is shipwrecked. Later Alexander is shipwrecked on the same island, where Elvira eventually dies and he is later rescued. Language is again central to this narrative and, when he is rescued, Alexander recovers his English speech after hearing some of the sailors on the ship curse in English. The reference is to Caliban’s speech: “You taught me language, and my profit by it is, that I know how to curse”. The implication is that he is returning to a vice-ridden world and this is confirmed when he realises that he has been rescued by privateers. His final pronouncement, before returning to Scotland and his ageing father’s small inheritance, is contrary to Defoe’s views, when he declares: “Private gain seldom has much regard to publick tyes” (34). The link between Alexander Selkirk’s historical narrative and Robinson Crusoe suggests that Alexander Vendchurch engages both fact and fiction, referring to romance and traveller’s tales. The text effectively displaces the focus of the Selkirk narrative on hardship and mutiny, with a criticism of foreign trade, privateering and excessive wealth. In 1712 Woodes Rogers, who had rescued Selkirk, explained the circumstances of Selkirk becoming a castaway. He wrote that Selkirk’s privateering came to an end when, “a difference betwixt him and his Captain, which together with the ships being leaky, made him willing to stay here [on Juan Fernandez island], than go along with him at first and, when he was at last willing, the Captain would not

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receive him”.33 By situating Alexander Vendchurch in a Spanish trading colony, Evans associates his narrative with Selkirk’s account and with the colonial trading activities of Rogers and William Dampier, who was on Selkirk’s ship when he was abandoned and when he was rescued. At this time, Spain had exclusive rights over certain lands in the South Seas, including the right to trade in slaves (as referred to by Defoe). Therefore, Selkirk and Alexander are both cast away in lands where they are not supposed to be. Each is cast away for approximately four years and arrive on their islands with only a few tools and weapons. Like Selkirk, Alexander is shown surviving by eating turnips and feral goat. Both men are rescued by a ship, which then goes privateering in Jamaica, before returning to Scotland, after many years. In contrast to Selkirk’s narrative, and in contrast to the tame, domesticated lions of Martha Rattenberg and the amphibious sea-lions of Robinson Crusoe, it is the wildness of lions that is stressed when they kill people in Alexander Vendchurch. Alexander’s romance with Spanish trade makes his wooing of Elvira, the daughter of another important Spanish merchant, highly symbolic. The feminine here represents something quite different from the feminine ideal of the utopians or Martha’s feminine middle ground, for Elvira is the reward of English masculine desire for foreign luxuries itself. Elvira is a prize like the women taken by the pirates in Martha Rattenberg. Consistent with their deceit (Elvira of her father), on the island, Alexander criticises religion and persuades Elvira to marry him without a priest: … after having convinced her we were really man and wife before heaven ... she seem’d less averse. I told her that as for the priest, and the other formalities of the church, they were mere ceremonies and wholly political. (29)

In Alexander Vendchurch, as in Martha Rattenberg, male and female narrators tell their separate and different tales, as Alexander and Elvira narrate their stories of becoming cast away. Without knowledge of Alexander’s real identity, the passionate reunion in which Elvira greets “her unfortunate Roderigo” is represented as a parodic and false 33

Woodes Rogers, A Cruising Voyage Round the World, Amsterdam and New York: N. Israel, Da Capo Press, 1969, 125. The Captain referred to in the quote is William Dampier.

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romance. Elvira is represented as an insubstantial figure because her status is based on her father’s wealth rather on than her attributes and skills (as Martha’s is). As the daughter of a wealthy family, her status depends on the labour of the servants who support her (another common theme of the castaway narrative). In contrast to Alexander who is a tradesman’s son, Elvira, the daughter of an “esteemed citizen”, is completely dependent on her maid, her servant, Diego and finally, on the false Roderigo. Because of this, Elvira’s island experience is one of downward social mobility and, when her maid dies soon after the couple’s arrival, Elvira must wear her clothes (23); echoing and reversing Defoe’s observations on servants wearing their mistresses’ handed down clothing. When Elvira has the support of her servants she is “a perfect campaigner” (25), and when she is alone she is “all alone, a poor helpless woman” (27). She survives her shipwreck on the back of her servant Diego, who swims with her to shore (a scene evoked in Coetzee’s 1986 novel Foe, discussed in Chapter Nine). When Diego dies from a sea lion’s bite, Elvira is unable to bury him because she is alone. When Roderigo buries the dead servant, the act clears the way for a new beginning as her removes the body from a hut to make it ready for the couple to live in. In this act, social status is undone and equality and the materiality of the body are emphasised. When Elvira dies, the stench (25) of her dead body levels her with Diego through the “horrid stench” (27) of his own corpse: “I considered that she must be buried, since it was impossible to keep her another day in this hot climate without putrefaction; I took pains, therefore, to dig a grave as deep as I could; into which, having first kissed her, tho’ she began to smell pretty strong, I gently let her down in her cloaths …”(33). In Evans’ narratives, the exchange of clothes recalls Crusoe wearing skins and Friday wearing Crusoe’s clothes. Crusoe’s skins addressed the problem of a masculinity at risk of feminisation, due to the association of effeminacy with luxury, credit and trade. Similarly, Martha’s hand-made, hand-sewn linen shirts enable the men who return to her to become civilised. TRADING IN STORIES The Martha Rattenberg story is told before a framed painting of the castaway island in the couple’s French tavern. Echoing Defoe description of his writing as “whoring for trade”, the narrator tells how

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the stories are sold and told to him in a sexualised trading exchange, when the visitor solicits the story from Martha. Through the discussion of the quality of the picture and the room in which it is housed – which “might pass even in London itself” (3) – the castaway narrative, the reader is about to read, gains in its integrity. The quality and authenticity of the narration is also confirmed by the pictures that surround the one of the island, all painted “by good hands” (2), the narrator recognising one of the artists. Having established the shipwreck picture’s quality, the author/narrator then comments on its distinctive quality. He is struck by its “oddness”, its novelty, as opposed to its aesthetic quality “which was but indifferent” (3). Again echoing Defoe, the narrator goes on to point out that what may be novel to the English reader, may be quite acceptable in another country.34 As when Martha kept her own name after marriage according to the French custom, cultural difference broadens the range of what is considered to be normal and conventional: an important aspect of the social criticism enacted by all the castaway narratives. When Martha and James tell their respective stories to the narrator/author, the narrative is written as if in a letter to his patron, an English lord. In the text, Evans raises the problems and possibilities of such fictions through his references to the problematic word in letters that might either vouchsafe Martha’s good character or destroy it (1, 102). Letters, like fiction, show meaning to be an agreement between reader and writer over which the writer has little control. In this sense, the motif of the letter is still a popular device for writers of postmodern fiction, as discussed in Chapter Nine. As Defoe showed, such mis-readings – like mis-recognitions – are always possible (and can be productive), when values and identities are in flux. In one example, authorial intention is shown to be a fickle thing when Martha’s avaricious uncle reads a letter intended to ensure her protection, and he responds by throwing her out. As in Defoe’s tale of the tradesman ruined by gossip, the written word in Martha 34

Peters analyses the phenomena of novelty in the late seventeenth century and states the view that “The ‘Augustan’ mistrust of things novel is merely the flip side of the general collective enthusiasm, in the 1690s, for novelty”. He comments on the paucity of analysis of the early eighteenth-century concern with novelty (J.S. Peters, “The Novelty; or, Print, Money, Fashion, Getting, Spending and Glut”, in Cultural Readings of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Theater, eds J. Douglas Canfield and Deborah C. Payne, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995, 169 and n. 1).

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Rattenberg can establish or destroy reputations and character. In another example, in London, before she sets sail for America, a sailor dupes Martha to trust him by way of a letter of identity that he shows her from his ship’s master. When she agrees to stay with him at an inn, he cheats her of her money. For Evans the written word is a sign of the shifting values of the period when meanings are unstable. His response is to have witnesses appear at crucial points in the story: as when other wives turn up at Martha’s wedding to expose bigamy, and when the pending arrival of the Catholic priest is announced, come to confirm the couple’s island story. In reading the narrative, the readers are put in the position of the patron for whom the narrative is obtained and told, which makes the reader responsible for the fiction they are reading. In his reading of the relationship between virginity and textuality, Jon Stratton suggests that, “in reading an epistolary novel, the reader is forced to occupy the position of the character to whom the letter is sent”.35 This is reminiscent of Defoe’s depiction of the customer’s culpability, whether as reader or as purchaser of luxury goods: “if the Buyer comes and directs him to make this or that particular thing ... it is his business to perform it, and the Extravagance is indeed the Fop’s that Imposes it upon him.”36 Permission to tell the story comes from Martha and her tale is feminine, valuable and hard-won by the narrator. Its acquisition is couched in the financial and sexual language of obligation and trade and the narrator draws on the language of credit and debt: “I had been too good a customer since my discovery of the house, and brought too many of my acquaintance thither to let her venture the disobliging me a denial” (4). The language positions Martha as a reluctantly seduced, good woman who is under obligation to obey. The scene recalls Martha’s experience when she had a near escape from bigamy: “Tho’ I was vex’d at my forwardness in listening to the love of a strange man, whom I had never seen before, yet I was not without a secret satisfaction that I had behav’d my self with so much virtue and courage against all his villainous attempts, and was heartily glad that I was got rid of him so” (20). It is Martha’s virtue, demonstrated by her experience of 35

Jon Stratton, The Virgin Text: Fiction, Sexuality and Ideology, Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987, 31. 36 Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, II, 151.

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surviving her castaway experience, that finally validates the narrator overcoming her resistance, as a result, the narrative itself increases in value. Many critics of eighteenth-century fiction address social and epistemological issues of sexual inequality, but are less concerned with gendered values and the gendered nature of allegory. Ros Ballaster finds “party politics” in some of the period’s amatory fiction and connects it to the “struggle for a specifically feminine authority”37, however, the struggle for this feminine authority is clearly itself subject to (and a reflection of) the tensions produced by the feminisation of fiction, finance and trade itself. The struggle for a particular feminine authority requires an engagement with the same gendered issues of authority and value (the conditions of production), which produce Crusoe’s authority. Separating gender from politics becomes impossible when female gendered terms are understood as a pre-condition for the development of authority and identity. When she was alone for three years without writing or conversation, Martha faced extinction as a social subject and, like other actual and fictional castaways, she says she worried about losing “the use of my tongue ... [so] ... I frequently talked to myself” (36).38 She sings in both English and French to prevent losing her ability to speak. She addresses her difficulties through reading and writing down her memories, spending her time reading the Bible and writing “an account of all that I could remember had happen’d to me during my whole life, to that very time”. Yet unlike Robinson Crusoe, this life story is not the one that is being read. A number of steps remove the story from the event itself. Martha’s castaway space is located between the corrupt real of London and the ideal of the utopian community. Her feminine virtue and her reading of the Bible, without the intervention of a priest, underwrites the truth of the narrative as she tells it to the narrator.39 In this sense, Martha as a castaway also 37 Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women's Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992, 16. 38 The fear of losing one’s language was evident in the period in discussions of the story of Alexander Selkirk. 39 McKeon comments that: “The reliance of Protestant thought on the figurative language of the Bible as the one true sense and ‘literal’ Word of God is profoundly analogous to the new philosophical argument that in nature’s book was to be found the register and signature of divine intent” (McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 21).

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guarantees James’ narrative, her silence and his absence, confirming ideals of faith. Silence and absence acquire a similar pragmatic value when James starts his narrative at the moment of leaving his everyday self behind to cross a chasm into the utopian’s world: “I have nothing to acquaint you with, Sir, relating to my self or family or any of my affairs in France. I shall therefore begin my narration at our passing the gap in the mountains of which she has told you” (8). The Evans narratives show the development of a domestic trading sensibility, adjusting to the new social conditions introduced by the luxury and the wealth associated with foreign trade. While Defoe brings together masculine and feminine imagery to depict a new authority achieved in the face of the excessive desire for wealth as achievable, Evans produces a pragmatic, trading couple in the face of foreign trade as masculine and negative. For Evans the dream and desire for wealth and the artifice involved in it must be taken advantage of, but only in order to survive, that is, to make a living. In both Martha Rattenberg and Robinson Crusoe, the protagonists as figures of trade, are shaped by feminine virtue and by the association of the feminine with change and transformation. All three narratives participate in ancient associations between sex, gender, money and value.40 In Robinson Crusoe, the father is associated with an older trading morality that did not challenge the dominant hierarchical culture. In Martha Rattenberg, the death of the father represents vulnerability at the end of an older dominant social order that had been based on patriarchal rule and ownership of land. In Alexander Vendchurch, the father’s values are rejected but settled for when Alexander returns and claims his father’s small inheritance. In all three texts the changing values created by trade and the financial system are linked to crisis, and to new social possibilities. Both Crusoe and Martha, isolated within society prior to being cast away, are at the centre of texts that criticise their society. The castaways’ journeys in other countries, in contact with other races and cultures, 40

Discussions of the relationship between money and fiction often do not focus on gender, but Marc Shell shows that in Greek thought analogies of sexual reproduction and images of women were significant to discussions of the value of coinage and that generally, gender arises in the literature of money in relation to representation, reproduction and value (Marc Shell, The Economy of Literature, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Chapter 3).

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and the multiple, hybrid origins of the protagonists themselves, allowed these authors to reshape what was considered to have value. The Evans narratives support the reading of Robinson Crusoe as drawing on gendered values to produce a new trading identity that is compatible with a society being changed by financial speculation and foreign trade. When Martha first envisages becoming wealthy she says that being a woman was a check to the imagination, but Evans then proceeds to depict her as an all-important figure of transformation: a counter to the problem of illusion and artifice, having values which allow the individual to survive and benefit from social change.

CHAPTER SIX THE VIRGINAL INDIVIDUAL … orthodox Christian virtue as a humanised, sexually desirable young female is a surprisingly provocative metaphor ... 1 … while set up to be a subjected body, the virginal also affords a social identity under the guise of which apparently fixed social myths and institutions may be questioned, revised, or even evaded. The veil works both ways.2

Read symbolically and in the context of our discussion of the impact of trade, female virtue can be read as embodying the strength necessary to stay pure under pressure from others’ desires. It is in this sense that virginity and its related value of female virtue enter the rhetoric surrounding eighteenth-century commerce and the individualism it produces. In Defoe’s conduct book, we saw desire linked to avarice and the desired, yet problematic, consumption of luxury goods, and virtue linked to self-control. In the work of such authors, allegory and symbolism produce a proliferation of meanings, beneath which social criticism and the production of new meanings and identities were enabled. Similarly, Lloyd Davis (author of the second quotation above) suggests that images of the virginal in Victorian literature often constituted a veil of morality beneath which a vigorous social criticism was mobilised. Given this duality, and given the sexualised and gendered images of trade used by Defoe, the image of Christian virtue as sexually desirable (referred to in the first quotation), is perhaps less surprising than it seems. Many such images of female Christian virtue appear in the early eighteenth-century castaway narratives of Penelope Aubin, in which the effect of wealth on civic life is critically commented on in stories of romance and sexual pursuit. These stories, in which castaway women and men lose 1 Ronald Paulson, The Beautiful, Novel and Strange: Aesthetics and Heterodoxy, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, 121. 2 Lloyd Davis, Virginal Sexuality and Textuality in Victorian England, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993, 15.

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then find one other before returning home, typically and indirectly comment on social concerns, such as tensions between romantic and arranged marriage, the role of the church in the recognition of marriages, and paternal and aristocratic power in relation to inheritance. More symbolically though, and more immediately relevant to the discussion of gendered imagery in Robinson Crusoe, these stories depict feminine virtue as essential to public life and to the survival of the female castaway. In her depictions of the triumph of constancy and virtue, Aubin’s work draws on a tradition which dates back to fourteenth-century counter-romances,3 which “challenge[d] the hypocrisy of aristocratic culture by testing it according to its own courtly ideals”.4 As a woman writer with the need to make money and to protect her reputation, her tales dwell on the salacious, in order to triumphantly celebrate her protagonists’ virtue. In this sense, Aubin’s work is multi-layered and deeply ironic, with irony in the period appropriately referring to the “hidden real beneath misleading appearances”.5 PENELOPE AUBIN A self-confessed imitator of Defoe, Aubin (1685-1731) was the first woman writer after Robinson Crusoe to produce narratives featuring female castaways. She wrote seven novels between 1721 and 1728, most of which had second editions published in their first year and three of which featured castaway stories.6 As well as producing fiction and poetry, and translating and editing the work of others, Aubin was a Catholic who lived and, as a layperson, preached in London.7 Her parents, like those of Defoe’s Roxana, were French Huguenot migrants to England and therefore Protestants.8 Her mixed religious 3

McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740, 147. Mary Ann Schofield, Masking and Unmasking the Female Mind: Disguising Romances in Feminine Fictions, Newark, NY: University of Delaware Press, 1990, 28. 5 Paulson, The Beautiful, Novel and Strange, 62. 6 Cheryl Turner, Living by the Pen, London and New York: Routledge, 1992, 50. 7 William H. McBurney quotes The Universal Spectator (16 August 1729) on her activity as a lay preacher (“Mrs Penelope Aubin and the Early Eighteenth-Century Novel”, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, XX/3 [May 1957], 245). 8 Perhaps like Aubin’s own family, Defoe’s ancestors left France in the Huguenot expulsion in 1585 (McBurney, “Mrs Penelope Aubin and the Early EighteenthCentury Novel”, 247, n. 8). 4

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background partly explains why several of her characters have mixed Catholic/Protestant religious parentage and why she draws on such differences to argue (Defoe-style) for the fundamental sameness and equality of all. Aubin’s three female castaway narratives are The Strange Adventures of Count de Vinevil (1721);9 The Noble Slaves (1722);10 and The Life of Charlotta Du Pont (1723).11 Each of these narratives is organised as a series of long, repetitive and episodic, first person accounts. While Aubin’s work readily meets Addison’s definition of the novel in providing “Variety, where the Mind is every Instant called off to something new”,12 there is also a sameness in her themes, imagery and emphasis on feminine virtue, which has lead Mary Ann Schofield to refer to them as ur-stories of feminine abduction.13 The crisis of being cast away in the period between puberty and adulthood enables the protagonists’ sexual and gendered traits to be part of the story of survival. As in Robinson Crusoe, on their islands the female protagonists learn to review what is essential. Just as the otherwise frugal Crusoe imagines his town and country estates, one of the female castaways describes a hut as a “Tarpaulin palace” in which 9

The full title of the 1721 edition begins The Strange Adventures of the Count de Vinevil and His Family. Being an Account of what happen’d to them whilst they resided in Constantinople. And of Mademoiselle Ardelisa, his Daughter’s being shipwreck’d on the Uninhabited Isle of Delos, in her return to France, with Violetta, a Venetian Lady, the Captain of the Ship, a Priest, and five sailors…, 1721. The edition quoted here, Penelope Aubin, The Life of Madame de Beaumont, a French Lady and the Strange Adventures of Count de Vinevil and His Family ... (and of His Daughter Being Shipwrecked on the Uninhabited Island Delos ...), New York: Garland, 1973. 10 Penelope Aubin, The Noble Slaves, or, The Lives and Adventures of Two Lords and Two Ladies, who were shipwreck’d and cast upon a desolate Island near the EastIndies, in the year 1710. London: E. Bell, 1722. Due to the brevity of the actual castaway period, Artur Blaim excludes The Noble Slaves as a Robinsonade, but it is included here on the basis of its basic shipwreck and castaway themes and overall concerns (Blaim, Failed Dynamics, 6). 11 The full title of the 1723 edition begins The Life of Charlotta Du Pont, An English Lady; Taken from her own Memoirs. Giving an account how she was trepann’d by her stepmother to Virginia, how the ship was taken by some Madagascar pirates, and retaken by a Spanish man of war. All three Aubin texts were reproduced in a collected edition in 1739 with a Preface said to be by Samuel Richardson, the author of Pamela. See discussion in Wolfgang Zach, “Mrs Aubin and Richardson’s Earliest Literary Manifesto”, English Studies, LXII/3 (June 1981), 271-85. 12 Paulson, The Beautiful, Novel and Strange, 49. 13 Schofield, Masking and Unmasking the Female Mind, 35 and 42.

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they sleep “as if they had lain in Palaces on Beds of Down”.14 Aubin’s work has been described as “pure Defoesque”,15 and The Dictionary of Literary Biography describes Aubin as “the most productive imitator of Defoe’s works”. Her borrowings from Defoe include the depiction of “a Crusoe-like figure” in Charlotta Du Pont as “an old Indian Man ... drest in Beasts Skins, a Hat of Canes, and Sandals of Wood upon his Feet”, with “bear skins ty’d about his legs with twigs, his head a strange fur cap on”.16 Her imitations have been described as bordering on plagiarism, demonstrating “thematic as well as circumstantial resemblances” to Robinson Crusoe.17 In contrast, Backscheider describes her as original in combining romance with travel in her engagements with Defoe’s text: “Aubin seems to have seen the originality of Robinson Crusoe more clearly than her contemporaries.”18 In the wake of Defoe’s success and read in his rather large shadow, other contemporary critics have tended to read Aubin’s work as a diminished copy of the original. Richetti, for example, argues that because Aubin’s heroines do not fight against their desires (as, for example, Eliza Haywood’s female protagonists), then, to some, Aubin’s differences from Robinson Crusoe reflect her incompetence as an interpreter.19 This chapter shows that while Aubin’s castaway narratives necessarily differ from Robinson Crusoe, in their depiction of female castaways, they do draw on Defoe’s text, to show the female castaways as successful, and to show feminine virtue as essential to the integrity of the individual and to success of public life. AUBIN’S CASTAWAY NARRATIVES One key difference from Robinson Crusoe is that Aubin’s female castaways are not alone for long before others (male and female) join them, all cast away in similar circumstances. Picaresque in style, each 14

Aubin, Count de Vinevil, 97. McBurney, “Mrs Penelope Aubin and the Early Eighteenth-Century Novel”, 24546. 16 Aubin, The Life of Charlotta Du Pont, 148 and 158. 17 Martin C. Battestin, ed., Dictionary of Literary Biography, ‘British Novelists, 16601800, Detroit: Gale Research, 1985, XXXIX, 13. 18 Backscheider, Daniel Defoe, 225. 19 John J. Richetti, Popular Fiction before Richardson: Narrative Patterns, 17001739, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965, 222. 15

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of her, often large, cast of characters has a similar story of hardship and survival to tell to the main female castaway when they arrive on the island, building a sense of the general shipwrecking of virtue and the consequent and potential collapse of society. The general capsizing of virtue (a trait of many, but always configured as feminine) in Aubin’s work is typically caused by the growing tension between a declining society based on aristocratic ideals and values, and a burgeoning society based on values of trade. The problem for Aubin, as it was for Defoe and Evans, was how, in these circumstances, could artifice be circumvented and authority, status and trade reconciled. In Count de Vinevil, Ardelisa and fellow castaway Violetta are shipwrecked with a ship’s captain, a priest and five sailors for five months. The shipwreck is one of a series of trials that arise after Ardelisa’s father enters trade due to being “neglected by his Sovereign”.20 For Aubin, similarly to Defoe and Evans, trade represented an unprecedented autonomy, not only in relation to increased wealth, but in relation to the possibility of a safer and more more open society. As Ardelisa’s father says: “I am going amongst Mahometans [into foreign trade] to avoid the seeing those, who have been my Vassals, lord it over me.”21 All that is foreign (the various Turks, Infidels and Mahometans of these texts) constituted a handy, ready-made rhetoric for portraying different values to those of Christians, and similar values to those of a powerful and corrupt English court. Aubin’s readers would have been familiar with such rhetoric as well as with the background to such references. Her depiction of “heathenous Turks” for example may well have referred to the banning of Catholicism in Turkey in 1722,22 and her Muslim characters would have been familiar from news stories of piracy in both Muslim and Catholic countries.23 In her next published work, The Noble Slaves, the Spanish heroine Teresa is on a pleasure boat with Domingo, her black slave, when a storm takes her out to sea and the pair shipwrecked. On their castaway 20

Aubin, Count de Vinevil, 10. Ibid.,13. 22 Charles A. Frazee, Catholics and Sultans: The Church and the Ottoman Empire 1453-1923, London: Cambridge University Press, 1983, 155. 23 In 1721, for example, 280 English captives released from Moroccan jails marched to St Paul’s in London to give thanks (McBurney, “Mrs Penelope Aubin and the Early Eighteenth-Century Novel”, 257-58). 21

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island, Domingo dies and Teresa must learn to survive without him, and without the protection of her widowed father. Aubin uses the term “Treasure” to refer to both gold and to virginity: the shores of the island relinquish various figures saved by clinging to their “Treasure” chests.24 The dying Domingo, after confessing his intentions to Teresa, says: “May no other rob you of that Treasure which I no longer can protect.”25 Keeping in mind the instability of paper credit, both gold and virginity are stable values, that is, arguably both have essential, rather than agreed value. In Aubin’s work, the two are exchangeable and essential to a harmonious social order. Because symbolic and actual female virtue is linked to the female body, then dangers to the female castaways represent dangers to society itself. In the third narrative, The Life of Charlotta du Pont, the eponymous heroine is shipwrecked due to the deceit practised on her father by her stepmother, Dorinda. In order to marry Charlotta’s father, Dorinda pretended to be a widow to hide a past in which she worked as a prostitute. Her father’s susceptibility leaves Charlotta vulnerable and she is shipwrecked and cast away after Dorinda lures her on board a ship to get rid of her. When Dorinda is later cast away on the same island, she is redeemed when she tells her story and shows that corruption and masculine vice were responsible for her downfall.26 In the story of how Dorinda was cheated into prostitution at thirteen years of age, Aubin associates vice with masculinity, and with the inconstant rank of gentleman: “had he not been a hardened Wretch, and one of those heroick Rakes that have been vers’d in every Vice this famous City can instruct our Youth in, he would have relented; but he was a complete Gentleman, had the eloquent Tongue of a Lawyer, was deceitful as a Courtier, had no more Religion than Honesty, was handsome, leud, and inconstant.”27 The gentleman-rake figure is a threat in Aubin’s work, not only to the individual female castaway, but also to civic virtue itself.

24

Aubin, The Noble Slaves, 22. Ibid., 6-7. 26 Another Aubin narrative to feature isolated female characters is The Life of Madame de Beaumont (1721) in which a mother and daughter live in a cave in Wales. 27 Aubin, The Life of Charlotta Du Pont, 8. 25

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READING APPEARANCES It is important to understanding Aubin’s work that, in society, both virginity and credit required a verifiable, visible and readable reputation. Yet, in Aubin’s narratives, this reliance on reputation becomes impossible, due to the dangers of circulating in public and foreign spaces. As a result, disguise becomes the norm and virtue becomes a mobile, interior, protected, and therefore invisible, personal ideal. Aubin’s ideas can be understood as related to Defoe’s concerns about possible (and potentially productive) misreadings of the tradesman’s and his wife’s appearance under the influence of luxurious living. In Aubin’s work, traditional markers of identity have become destabilised and the female castaways have to protect themselves as they circulate in public space. At the end of these narratives, disguise, deception and artifice bring about an ideal match between male and female protagonists based on their virtue, and each pair is rewarded with great wealth and status. The story of high ideals and courtly romance is, of course, much older than the eighteenth century but, in each era, the story will have different resonances, and Aubin’s stories resonate with the implications of commerce and social change. Like Defoe and Evans, Aubin’s work makes great play of oppositional terms, typically drawing out their similarities. For example, The Life of Charlotta Du Pont is an autobiography in which duplicity and artifice (and their opposites) are significant features. Charlotta tells how on board ship she fell in love with a Protestant Spanish merchant. But before they can marry, Spanish pirates separate them. The pirate captain tricks her into thinking that he himself is the merchant and she is compromised into marriage by being isolated with him on the island. Dutifully, she converts to the pirate’s Catholicism, marries him and has two children. When he dies, she leaves her children to marry the Protestant merchant. For Aubin, appearances are often deceptive and what is apparent is rarely true. When Charlotta rescues a slave, another Domingo (as in The Noble Slaves), with his Catholic Spanish lover and their “Molotto” child, she discovers they have been unable to marry due to their island isolation and to the consequent lack of a priest (a common castaway island theme). Her rescue leads to their marriage and to Domingo regaining his status as a prince, thus restoring order. The scenario counters literal and symbolic black and white thinking by challenging assumptions based on sight

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alone. Aubin’s narratives challenge an eighteenth century that “far more thoroughly and definitively than ever before identifies truth with the evidence of the senses”.28 As Schofield states, when Aubin’s protagonists are cast away “they suffer the torments of isolation and persecution”;29 yet when they disguise their appearance, they survive, meet their ideal partner and achieve social mobility and wealth. When Charlotta reveals that the now Prince Domingo fought for James II, the deposed Catholic King who fled to France in 1688 as a result of England’s Glorious Revolution, Aubin’s symbolism is turned to polemical effect. She then counters this display of Catholic allegiance, and perhaps addresses the tastes of a mixed readership in a predominately Protestant English population, by having Charlotta (long after she has converted to Catholicism) declare herself to be “a Protestant at heart”.30 The key fixed and verifiable truth in these narratives is the hidden, internal virtue of each individual. Even a figure of vice such as Dorinda may turn out to be virtuous. Written in the context of a society that stressed the danger to a woman’s reputation should she circulate freely, Aubin’s protagonists rely heavily on disguise. In Count de Vinevil, Ardelisa covers her “fatal face” and disguises herself in “the Habit of a Man”,31 and in The Life of Charlotta Du Pont, the women dress as “Eunuchs”: “the safest disguise we could put on”.32 In these texts, these hybrid men-women defend themselves as they stab, jab, wound and sometimes kill their attackers.33 Their disguises not only hide, but also enable new experiences and identities. Ardelisa like Moll Flanders’ man-woman is a hybrid figure, she has “all the softness of a woman with all the Constancy and Courage of a Hero”. As if in conversation with Defoe, Aubin uses disguise to call into question what is natural, using animal skins (which commonly signified social transformation34) and skin itself as a facet of disguise: Domingo, a white woman and their child,

28

McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740, 127. Mary Ann Schofield and Cecilia Macheski eds, Fetter'd or Free: British Women Novelists, 1670-1815, Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1986, 230. 30 Aubin, The Life of Charlotta Du Pont, 75. 31 Aubin, Count de Vinevil, 40. 32 Aubin, The Life of Charlotta Du Pont, 145. 33 Aubin, The Noble Slaves, 48-49; The Life of Charlotta Du Pont, 35. 34 McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740, 148. 29

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for example, are discovered hiding inside a cave, inside a bear skin.35 Revealed as a Prince, Domingo points out the problem of judgements based on appearance: ... tho’ my outside is black and distasteful, I fear to your eyes, yet my soul is as noble and lovely as your own. I was born a prince, and free; tho’ chance made me a slave, and the barbarous chieftains bought and sold me, yet my mind they could never subdue.36

In another story related to inheritance, and which displaces what is natural with what is social, in the same text, Count de Vinevil, Aubin depicts a youth as an adopted son: “a Count [and] ... heir to a considerable Estate.”37The fact of his adoption constructs patrilineal descent by social, rather than natural means, and recalls the construction of new social relations, rather than natural families, by Defoe and Evans. Appearances are suspect in Aubin’s work simply because they cannot tell the whole truth: characters who appear to be evil can turn out to be good and some who appear to be heathen might turn out to be Christian. According to such logic, in these times of social change, Aubin may well have been negotiating her own contradictions, for she was a Catholic priest, a one-time Protestant daughter; possibly a wealthy woman, and, at the very least, a woman of trade (the business of writing) with a reputation to protect. SEDUCTION NARRATIVES AND SOCIAL CRITICISM Aubin’s stories of vice chasing virtue have been described as seduction narratives, a form used by many women writers to show female protagonists justified in acting in their own interests. Writers used the rhetoric of sexual adventure to depict the parlous state of society, the problems of inheritance and financial survival, as well as tensions between individual and community interest. As Prescott argues: The representation of seduction raises crucial questions for women concerning power relations between the sexes, the problem of representing female desire and the unequal gender balance of eighteenth-century society in general. Therefore, the seduction 35

Aubin, The Life of Charlotta Du Pont, 59. Ibid., 62. 37 Aubin, Count de Vinevil, 13. 36

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The Female Crusoe narrative, and its dominant tropes and themes, offered a number of women writers the opportunity to intervene in and shape constructions of femininity in the period.38

While the actual lives of eighteenth-century women may have indirectly informed these narratives (which end when virtuous female meets virtuous male), this is not the limit of their interest. As Beasley argues, “the political content and appeal, and sometimes the explicit political value” of these stories written by eighteen-century women “has not been sufficiently noticed”.39 In the wake of Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood, the seduction narrative or romance genre had become a popular mode of political criticism for women authors. As Laura Brown says of Behn’s Oroonoko,40 it was a style of narrative that “must have women, and it generates – or rather ingeminates – female figures at every turn, as observers, beneficiaries, and consumers”.41 One of the influences on Aubin’s work was Mary de la Rivière Manley, author of The New Atlantis (1709), who made “insistent reference[s] to the ideal of female virtue”. For Manley, such virtue was “synonymous with Toryism, while wickedness was associated with the Whig leaders who control[led] the government”. As in Manley’s work, Aubin’s narratives “associate perfect and beauteous womanhood with ideals of order and public morality”.42 In these authors’ works, the veil works both ways as “the romance genre is transformed into a document of female assertion, woman, and writer”.43 In Aubin’s castaway narratives, foreign regimes often stand in for English political corruption, understood as synonymous with sexual vice, as in The Noble Slaves, where she describes: … the Monarch [who] gives loose to his Passions and thinks it no crime to keep as many Women for his use, as his lustful Appetite 38

Sarah Prescott, “The Debt to Pleasure: Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess and Women’s Fiction of the 1720s”, Women’s Writing, VII/3 (2000), 429. 39 Jerry C. Beasley, “Politics and Moral Idealism: The Achievement of Some Early Women Novelists”, in Fetter'd or Free, 216. 40 Aphra Behn, Oroonoko: or The Royal Slave (1688). 41 Brown, Ends of Empire, 40. 42 Beasley, “Politics and Moral Idealism”, 223. 43 Schofield, Masking and Unmasking the Female Mind, 17.

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excites him to like; and his Favourites, Ministers of State, and Governors, who always follow their Master’s example, imitate his way of living. This caused our beautiful Heroines to suffer such Trials.44

Depicting such situations allows Aubin to comment on the effect of corruption on virtue itself. For example, in Count de Vinevil, when Ardelisa arrives in Turkey with her father, who is there to trade, she has to stay inside the house. Corruption and avarice, Aubin suggests, combined with sexual desire puts both individual and society at risk. Not only is women’s freedom of movement at stake, but also civic virtue as her future husband pleads: “as you prise your Vertue, and my Life, show not yourself in publick.”45 Ardelisa, unable to symbolically enter the public sphere, is “now kept in her Chamber, and would no more be seen by strangers”.46 The public corruption referred to by both Evans and Aubin was a popular topic in the news and would have been familiar to her readers: “Parliament itself, a governing institution, [was] seen to be both a corrupting agency and an object of corruption.”47 The themes of Aubin’s Prefaces, which address corruption, serve to re-contextualise her otherwise light and entertaining stories as having moral worth, a familiar strategy for writers wishing to protect their reputations. In particular, there was always a risk that a salacious text would suggest its author’s morals. Beasley’s description of the period suggests that Aubin’s themes of vice and corruption would have been quite familiar rhetoric: The visible moral shabbiness of important officials and, above all, the threat posed by the continued exercise of arbitrary power: these facts of the period’s politics produced outrage and, if the varied public forms of expression may be trusted, a genuine cultural anxiety over the weakening moral structure of a perplexingly changing society. In all kinds of popular art – including countless ballads and satirical prints – the men governing the land are projected as agents of chaos instead of stable order, as treacherous servants of villainous impulses in human nature – avarice, cruelty, power-lust, promiscuity,

44

Ibid., x. Aubin, Count de Vinevil, 18 (also used by Aubin in The Noble Slaves, 30). 46 Ibid., 22-23. 47 Nicholson, Writing and the Rise of Finance, 2. 45

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The association of such corruption with the rise of trade, the effect of financial speculation and the desire for luxury was common and Jonathan Swift, as an author, Protestant, High Churchman and Tory, represented the problem of corruption as both moral and political. He blamed the “Monied Men” whose “Principal and Interest it was to corrupt our Manners, blind our Understandings, drain our Wealth, and in Time destroy our Constitution both in Church and State”.49 Aubin addresses the problem of corruption by representing the qualities of feminine virtue as those essential to civic virtue. The rise of trade, finance and luxury was producing a productive blurring of values, identities and meanings for writers such as Aubin and Defoe, and that Aubin promotes feminine virtue, as the foundation of civic virtue contradicts the idea that she “charges only women with the responsibility of sexual morality”.50 Rather Aubin represents the moral virtue conventionally attributed to the female as noble and essential to all. Aubin uses the term nobility with some irony in her work, as in the title: The Noble Slaves. Noble conventionally referred to high ideals as well as to the aristocratic class who, by birthright, traditionally held both land and power.51 However, as McKeon argues, it was also a term that had changed because, “capitalist or ‘middle class’ values have transformed the aristocracy … individualistic and class criteria are eating away, as it were from within, at a social structure whose external shell still seems roughly assimilable to the status model.”. McKeon quotes the historian Christopher Hill who observes that the aristocracy were already deeply involved in commercial life, “participating in England’s greatest capitalist industry, its money invested in the Bank of England”.52 Aubin’s texts advocate a morality based on female virtue, yet, as Alasdair MacIntyre argues, between 48

Beasley, “Politics and Moral Idealism”, 218. Quoted in Nicholson, Writing and the Rise of Finance, 57. 50 Jean B. Kern, “The Fallen Woman, from the Perspective of Five Early EighteenthCentury Women Novelists”, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, X (1981), 456. 51 In terms of the influence of monetary value on value in general, it is worth noting that noble also refers to an English gold coin circulated in the first half of the fifteenth century. 52 McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740, 167. 49

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1630 and 1850, “‘morality’ became the name for that particular sphere in which rules of conduct … [were] allowed a cultural space of their own”.53 In Aubin’s work, the gendered language and discourse of the family arguably provide a readymade cultural space in which a more robust morality (in its capacity to be combined with great wealth) could be developed and articulated. MOTHERS, FATHERS AND DAUGHTERS In Aubin’s castaway narratives (as for Evans), it is daughters rather than sons who “emphasise filial disobedience, explore the manifestations of Providence in the human world, and endorse the economic rewards of virtue”.54 Unlike Crusoe, Aubin’s daughtercastaways generally do not disobey their parents and, as in Martha Rattenberg, it is typically one or both parents’ absence or death that brings about the castaway crisis. Her female castaways are between twelve to fourteen years old, on the cusp of their sexual and reproductive lives, when they are cast away. Some of them marry after separating from their fathers, but are then separated from their husbands; others are cast away before meeting the men they will eventually marry. Like Martha and Crusoe, Aubin’s castaways are shown depending on their own resources, influencing others and adapting successfully to their changed circumstances. Unlike Crusoe, these young protagonists are not always sinners in need of redemption and are more typically described as pure, good and virtuous, cast away through no fault of their own. In contrast to the female castaway narratives of the mid-to-late eighteenth century discussed in the next chapters, the castaway crisis in Aubin’s work typically originates with death of the mother (and her era’s values). All of Aubin’s female castaways’ mothers die when they are young and some are named for absent mothers.55 The naming of daughters for mothers suggests the need to restore neglected feminine values in the face of social crisis. These scenarios of motherless children had some basis in truth as a majority of children

53 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, London: University of Notre Dame, 1981, 37-38. 54 Battestin, Dictionary of Literary Biography, XXXIX, 13. 55 Aubin, The Life of Charlotta Du Pont, 3; Count de Vinevil, 138.

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“were bereaved of at least one parent before they were fully adult”,56 leading to a high incidence of remarriage and of families constituted of step-siblings and step-parents, situations not so very different to our own modern, blended families. In addition, prior to the influence of Rousseau (see the next chapter), aristocratic women had often put their children out to wet-nurses, and had them raised by servants. The absence of the fathers in these female castaway texts is also important because, without the paternal authorising presence, these daughters achieve an unprecedented autonomy, making their own decisions, particularly in relation to marriage (consistent with the period’s general shift away from arranged marriages). As Hilliard indicates in his discussion of Robinson Crusoe: “Typically, the father in eighteenth-century stories is delinquent or incapacitated ... in Augustinian terms, there is a failure of the ‘will’ ... a failure of a partially emblematic character whose double function should be to uphold social or religious standards and to prohibit the fulfilment of wishes which violate them.”57 For Aubin, as for Defoe and Evans, the loss of parental and paternal control gives rise to a moment of change, at least rhetorically, when new values can be articulated and propelled to the fore. In Aubin’s work, the idealised, absent mother fills the void left by the absent or dead father. In the absence of her parents, the female castaway must act in her own interest and give birth to herself as an individual. FEMALE INDIVIDUALISM Although Aubin’s female castaways are virgins, suggesting their vulnerability, their virginity also usefully conveyed a certain power, as suggested by their ultimate survival. The state of chastity was an important “bargaining chip” in the eighteenth century in relation to marriage with the potential to affect “the degree of social hierarchy [attained] and property rights”. Aristophanes’ suggestion in Lysistrata (c. 411 BC) that “the withholding of sexual favours is a woman’s only source of power over men”, shows that virginity had had long been associated with power, control and self control.58 As suggested in 56 Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977, 359-60. 57 Hilliard, “Desire and the Structure of Eighteenth-Century Fiction”, 360. 58 Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 636.

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relation to Robinson Crusoe (in Chapter Three) there had long been a rhetorical link between images of virginity, chastity and individualism. In this sense, Aubin’s castaway narratives can be read as early prototypes of an emerging female individualism because her association of moral strength with female virtue imbues her castaways with power, making them more than victims of circumstance. In considering how the rhetoric of virginity might have informed Aubin’s castaway/seduction narratives, it is useful to examine her work in relation to the philosopher and statesman, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury’s ideas on the importance of disinterest. As in Robinson Crusoe, one of the tensions that Aubin’s scenarios address is between the self-interest associated with commerce and the ideal disinterest of the moral persona. Shaftesbury argued that “disinterestedness” was the higher state and therefore the ideal: “a virtuous administration, and an equal and just distribution of rewards and punishments, is of the highest service ... by making virtue to be apparently the interest of everyone.”59 Shaftesbury thought that “an action is not virtuous if influenced by thoughts of reward”60 and, as such, sexual desire was a threat to the disinterested subject. As Paulson observes: “The beautiful female threatened the crucial disinterestedness that he posited as what distinguishes a civic humanist and a man of taste from the vulgar: as a property owner he is above considerations of ambition, possession, consumption, and desire, indeed of gender.”61 Aubin’s work is interesting because she seems to endorse disinterestedness while promoting an ideal of female virtue, as a broad, public ideal, and showing her female castaways profiting from sexual pursuit. Aubin’s pursued virgins not only suggest Fielding’s pursued Catholic virgin, referred to in the first opening quote, but also Defoe’s representation of the highly pursuable Credit in The Complete English Tradesman; Addison’s Credit on a golden throne; and Hogarth’s engraving of a young virgin pursued (Harlot’s Progress, 1731), as “a Jacobite innocent destroyed by the new money men of the rising commercial class”.62 Unlike the vulnerability inherent in these images, Aubin’s castaways are 59

Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, facsimile 2nd edn, 1714, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964, 270-72. 60 Paulson, The Beautiful, Novel and Strange, 2. 61 Ibid., 50. 62 Ibid., 242.

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survivors whose stories can contribute to our understanding of the various ways in which images of virginity, as “a figurative embodiment of the private realm itself” and the ideal of female virtue, have informed individualism and the public sphere.63 Aubin not only depicts virtue as internal, feminine and endlessly recoverable, but she also locates it within both her male and female figures. That all internal moral virtue is feminine (and therefore pure and inherent) is consistent with the period’s concerns about the mutability of value in relation to the effects of paper money and credit. Consistent with the stability of gold, Aubin draws on the seventeenth-century understanding of virginity as an inviolable, enclosed space where virtue implies not only purity, but the possibility of maintaining integrity, making it possible to insure against fluctuations in meaning and value. In her work, isolation or enclosure occurs on the island, in prison, and in freely chosen retreats, which the protagonists retire to as places of redemption after a sin has been committed, or where safety can be found in the face of danger, as in Robinson Crusoe. In The Life of Charlotta Du Pont such places of redemption and renewal include monasteries, convents, huts, “a cavern in a rock”, a cottage,64 as well as (in the other texts): numerous caves, huts, prison cells, boats and, of course, the castaway island itself.65 Like Crusoe, in Count de Vinevil, the castaways on their island have “no enemies to fear, no inhuman Turks to murder or enslave us; we may sleep in Security”,66 and in The Noble Slaves, the island though “desolate” is understood as a “Paradice”.67 These retreats not only reflect a feminine, quasi-religious representation of the redemptive powers of isolation, but also support the necessity for independent actions in a corrupt world. As such, in The Life of Charlotta Du Pont, a hermit living among tombs states that he would “rather sleep and eat amongst the Dead, rather than live luxuriously amongst Infidels”.68 63

Burt and Archer, Enclosure Acts, 238. Aubin, The Life of Charlotta Du Pont, 50, 65, 57, and 62. 65 Hermit figures also appear in The Life of Charlotta Du Pont, 91 and 150; The Noble Slaves, 21 and 30. 66 Aubin, Count de Vinevil, 97. 67 Ibid., 97 and The Noble Slaves, 21. 68 Aubin, The Life of Charlotta Du Pont, 148. 64

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The extraordinary circumstances of the castaway scene enables the young female protagonists to behave differently to ordinary women. In order to do this, while also representing them as heroic, Aubin must disentangle their lives from social concerns about sexual morality and reputation. Her various scenarios of risk allow her to imbue her heroines with individuality and independence of action and in this they contribute to the process that Ruth Bloch calls “the feminisation of ideas about public virtue”.69 Although Bloch is discussing revolutionary America at the end of the eighteenth century, she points out that the eighteenth-century tradition of literary sentimentalism was significant in the production of feminine depictions of public virtue in which women were “valued for a kind of self-discipline”.70 As Richetti comments, Aubin herself represented such a “new persona”: the “lady novelist” as “moral censor of the age”.71 This was a role actively advocated for women writers in the period by Aubin’s mentor, Samuel Richardson, author of Pamela, a novel which itself centres on the female protagonist’s situation and which has been described as a “powerful, foundational image” of modernity.72 STATES OF POWERLESSNESS The work of gender in Aubin’s texts has been the main focus of the discussion so far, but there are two other interlinked states of relative powerlessness that, like Defoe and Evans, Aubin comments on and draws upon, namely, slavery and religion. In The Noble Slaves, the consequences of general civic disorder are said to threaten “our excellent constitution [that] will always keep us rich and free, and it must be our own faults if we are enslaved, or impoverished”.73 In The Life of Charlotta Du Pont, the story of the slave Domingo revealed to be a prince suggests Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) a narrative it is argued that “almost allegorically projects the lately emerged political ideal of individual worth on a black man”. An important context for Aubin’s narratives is the rhetoric of master/slave that was so prevalent in the social contract discussions outlined in Chapter Four. As in discussions 69

Ruth Bloch, “The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America”, in Rethinking the Political: Gender, Resistance and the State, eds Barbara Laslett, Johanna Brenner, and Yesim Arat, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, 27. 70 Ibid., 24. 71 Richetti, Popular Fiction before Richardson, 229. 72 Ibid., 483. 73 Aubin, The Noble Slaves, Preface, vii.

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about the social contract, slavery is not only literal for Aubin but is also an iconic state of powerlessness. Beasley states of Oroonoko that it was “a powerful subversive commentary upon some of the most controversial political issues that were swirling about at the time of its composition and publication: the maladministration of king and government leaders, their violations of the people’s trust, their undermining of the ideals of public virtue, and the consequences in individual human suffering caused by all these failings”.74 In an example from The Noble Slaves, and in a reversal of Eve tempting Adam, Teresa warns her father’s slave Domingo not to eat some fruit he has never seen before and when he ignores her, he dies. In this display of proto-feminism, the castaway island is a biblical Eden and Domingo is an everyman, a symbolic slave, because he will not listen to female advice. As he dies Domingo confesses: “I brought you to the woods with thoughts my Soul now sinks at …”.75 His subsequent death evokes the consequences of male vice. Of equal importance to this symbolism, however, is Domingo’s dying speech which draws directly on both anti-slavery and courtly rhetoric when he says: “I was born free as you and thought I might with Honour ask your love, since Heaven singl’d me out to save your life.”76 McBurney suggests that “Mrs Aubin lends a crusading fervour to her anti-slavery propaganda”.77 To a certain extent this view is supported by The Life of Charlotta Du Pont, when Aubin has a character argue, “we ought to visit those countries to convert, not buy our fellow creatures, to enslave and use them as if we were devils, or they not men”.78 Writings such as these have been interpreted as racist and, by other critics, as advocating anti-slavery. The general disagreement suggests the slippery nature of Defoe’s style of writing and Aubin’s work is also notable for its suggestive multiple meanings. Her emphasis on the need to transform meanings and her mixing of the symbolic with the real tends to fuel debate about her intended message, when the play of difference and opposition may itself be the point of these narratives.

74

Beasley, “Politics and Moral Idealism”, 222. Ibid., 6-7. 76 Aubin, The Noble Slaves, 6-7. 77 McBurney, “Mrs Penelope Aubin and the Early Eighteenth-Century Novel”, 257. 78 Aubin, The Life of Charlotta Du Pont, 64. 75

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POWERLESSNESS AND RELIGION Just as social contract discussions made slavery a common rhetorical tool for depicting shifts in power, so Aubin’s use of Catholic and Protestant religious designations suggests both historical and symbolic references to power and powerlessness. That Aubin was a Catholic (and a preacher) has caused literary critics to be divided as to whether her purpose in writing was material or moral. However, the division tends to collapse when it is understood that in her narratives she frequently work to bring together apparent opposites (as did Defoe in relation to Friday and Crusoe). For Defoe, Evans and Aubin, assimilation happens, only when important differences have been absorbed in a two-way exchange. Aubin has Protestant heroines suffering in Catholic countries, but also numerous Catholic castaways, perhaps suggesting the Stuart cause: in “political iconography the Beautiful [had] Stuart associations – the female nation, the debauched Britannia ... the gender of the last Stuarts, Mary and Anne”.79 At a time when Catholics constituted only one per cent of the population, Aubin’s favourable treatment of Catholics is “a highly unusual attitude in the literature of Georgian England”.80 When the Catholic journal Renascence examined Aubin’s writings in 1959, Roger B. Dooley reached the conclusion that “Not only do [her] works contain the only favourably depicted conversions, the only miracle and the only martyr, but all her heroes and heroines … are active Catholics whose lives are at some point influenced by their faith”.81 Dooley also suggests that, apart from the Catholics depicted by Samuel Richardson, Aubin’s were the last positive depictions of Catholic priests in English novels for another fifty years.82 MacCarthy, who describes Aubin as a “staunch Catholic”, understands that her objective was “to win her readers towards the Catholic point of 79

Paulson, The Beautiful, Novel and Strange, 50. Support for the Stuart cause could not be shown directly: in 1719 a printer was hanged for publishing the claim that the exiled Stuarts were England’s true monarchs (John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in Eighteenth Century, London: HarperCollins, 1997, 131). Aubin’s views would have aligned her with the Tories, particularly with Lord Bolinbroke: “the critic of a corrupt and venal society” (Issac Kramnick, Bolinbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992, viii). 80 Battestin, Dictionary of Literary Biography, XXXIX, 11. 81 Roger B. Dooley, “Penelope Aubin: Forgotten Catholic Novelist”, Renascence, XI (Winter 1959), 71. 82 Ibid, 66.

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view”.83 However, not all of Aubin’s protagonists are Catholic and not all are treated favourably, with Spanish Catholics at times portrayed as being as villainous as Turks and Muslims: “It is the nature of Spaniards to be close and very subtle in their designs, very amorous and very vengeful.”84 That many of Aubin’s protagonists have mixed religious and national parentage suggests that her themes connect virtue to persecution in general, rather than to Catholic persecution in particular. For example, perhaps recalling her own ancestry, in The Life of Charlotta Du Pont, Charlotta’s father moves to England from France so that, as a Protestant, “he might enjoy his religion without molestation”, the scenario represents England as a place free of religious persecution. Later, when Charlotta marries a Catholic, she converts fearing that her Protestant religion might may lead to her persecution: “if her father [in law] and family discovered she [is] a Protestant, she must expect to be hated and slighted.”85 Aubin, like Richardson, appears to be concerned with “not theological but moral truths”86 and her approach is perhaps intended to win sympathy from all her readers.87 As a converted Catholic, Aubin would have been aware that Catholics had been legally discriminated against in England for over three hundred years. After 1689, when Catholics were excluded from the Act of Toleration, they had been burdened with a double land tax (1692) and were barred from entering the professions in 1695. The castaway narratives of Defoe, Evans and Aubin were published between the Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745, military actions that revived distrust of Catholics. After 1716, Catholic lands had to be 83

MacCarthy, Bridget G., The Female Pen, Cork: University of Cork Press, 253. Aubin, The Life of Charlotta Du Pont, 38. A report at the time humorously commented that a Spanish Chief Minister’s stay in Scotland had “such an effect on the female population that the British government deemed it advisable to ship [him] to Spain as soon as possible”. The suggestion is that not only did the Spanish influence have the potential to corrupt English women, but that the Spanish Minister needed protection from English women. (Quoted in Lawrence Bartlam Smith, Spain and Britain 1715-1719: The Jacobite Issue, London and New York: Garland Publishing, 1987, 340 n. 183. Smith provides no reference for the anecdote itself.) 85 Aubin, The Life of Charlotta Du Pont, 75. 86 Paulson, The Beautiful, Novel and Strange, 129. 87 Dooley points out that “Aubin steered clear of any vexed contemporary religious issues” (“Penelope Aubin: Forgotten Catholic Novelist”, 67). 84

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registered and, eventually, after 1753, marriage before a Catholic priest had no force in law.88 As a woman preacher, Aubin would have been compared to the dissenting preachers, also known as “mechanick preachers”, as both Dissenters and Catholics were understood as disenfranchised groups. A well-cited saying from 1641 – “When women preach and Cobblers pray, the fiends in hell make a holiday”89 – indicates the long tradition behind Samuel Johnson’s remarks on the novelty of a woman preaching (that is, on her attempt to be a public figure of authority).90 In spite of these prejudices, it is possible that Aubin’s personal experience of prejudice was limited by the fact that she lived, published and preached in London, an important centre for Catholic activities where “The inns of Court, the embassy chapels ... [all] provided patronage for priests and opportunities for Catholic gentry to practise their religion”.91 In addition, as a woman, Aubin already had limited rights to own and inherit property and to enter the professions. These realities, together with the fact that Aubin also depicts Protestants as castaways and victims of prejudice, suggest that religion for Aubin was yet another symbolic state of powerlessness. In that Aubin’s work engaged with Robinson Crusoe, it may have been relevant to Aubin that Defoe was notably less prejudiced against Popery than other commentators, and was unusual for not hating them as many did. Defoe also represents Crusoe as tolerant of all religions and in Moll Flanders, Moll’s husband is a Catholic and a Jacobite of whom Moll declares that through him she “learnt to speak favourably of the Romish Church”.92 In The Great Law of Subordination Considered, Defoe depicts Catholicism as a mere scapegoat: “’Tis the universal scare-crow, the hobgoblin, the spectre with which nurses fright the children and entertain the old women all over the country, by which means such horror possesses the minds of the common people about it, that I believe there are 100,000 stout fellows, who would spend the last drop of their blood against popery, that do not

88

W.J. Sheils, “Catholicism from the Reformation to the Relief Acts”, in A History of Religion in Britain: Practice and Belief from Pre-Roman Times to the Present, eds Sheridan Gilley and W.J. Sheils, Oxford: Blackwell, 1994, 235-37. 89 Watts, The Dissenters, 83. 90 Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, I, 463. 91 Sheils, “Catholicism from the Reformation to the Relief Acts”, 238. 92 Defoe, Moll Flanders, 142.

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know whether it be a man or a horse.”93 Defoe’s progressive attitudes suggest that his depiction of Friday as a companion, rather than a slave is a calculated one, and that Robinson Crusoe as a text is a symbolic and fraught landscape in which the perception of others might always stabilise or destabilise value. AUBIN AS WOMAN WRITER Critics have been divided as to how to interpret Aubin’s work and much of the confusion rests in the disparity between her Prefaces and her narrative content. Jane Spencer argues that the political and moral content of the prefaces may simply have been part of Aubin’s agenda to defend herself against the charges of immorality that were widely levelled at the novel.94 In this regard, Aubin distances from other women writers saying that she refuses to write in “a Style careless and loose, as the Custom of the present Age is to live … I leave that to the other female Authors, my Contemporaries, whose Lives and Writings have I fear too great a resemblance.”95 Among these authors was actor, playwright and novelist, Eliza Haywood, who had satirised Richardson’s Pamela, and, unlike Aubin, had been an object of Pope’s satire in The Dunciad.96 In its bringing together of politics and fiction, Aubin’s work has been described as combining the “narrative strains of Haywood and Defoe”.97 Both authors were critical of the Whig government of the day and Aubin’s “projected archetypal figures of good and evil locked in a moral conflict [would have been] already familiar to her readers from their own experience in a real world of embattled idealism.”98 Beasley argues that, like Haywood, Aubin’s narratives are not only “fantastic satire”, but also “anti-Walpole 93

Daniel Defoe, The Great Law of Subordination Consider'd; or, the Insolence and Unsufferable Behaviour of Servants in England Duly Enquir'd Into ... London: S. Harding, W. Lewis, London, 1724, 20. 94 Aubin, The Life of Charlotta Du Pont, vi. 95 Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen, Oxford: Blackwell, 1986, 86. 96 Haywood’s Love in Excess was as popular as Robinson Crusoe when it was first published in 1719 (Beasley, “Politics and Moral Idealism”, 227). Her other major works were Memoirs of a Certain Island, Adjacent to Utopia (1724), and The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751). 97 Battestin, Dictionary of Literary Biography, XXXIX, 10. Prescott, “The Debt to Pleasure”, 430. 98 Beasley, “Politics and Moral Idealism”, 227.

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fictions”.99 An example of this satire appears in The Noble Slaves, when Teresa and her slave are shipwrecked in a pleasure boat,100 and the narrator wryly comments that the father had been taken at his word when he “resolv’d to sacrifice all he had, rather than not place her nobly in the world”.101 Aubin and the other women writers were affected by the immorality associated with trade and the sale of luxury goods for to write fiction, particularly romances, was to be involved in artifice, and to read fiction was to be associated with wealth and idle leisure: “for women to appear in print was improper either because this made their worth the visible object of admiration, or because it associated them with the ‘low affair’ of commerce.”102 Aubin defuses opposition to her work by associating criticism with groups who were recognisably immoral: “Atheists, Wits, Letchers, young Debauchees all join to decry it”. She represents their opposition as hypocritical and ironic: “It is all a fiction; a Cant they cry, Virtue’s a bugbear, Religion’s a Cheat, though at the same time they are jealous of their wives, mistresses and daughters and ready to fight about Principles and Opinions.”103 Richetti and McBurney argue that Aubin’s Prefaces, which introduce each of her narratives, may well have served as a “screen of respectability” to allow her to sell to a wide audience.104 Sarah Prescott points out that while Aubin’s vocation as a preacher has been heavily depended upon by critics to explain her morality, in fact, both writing and preaching are based on “theatricality and performance”.105 These arguments refocus discussion on Aubin writing for her living, yet it is also possible that, consistent with her own use of double meanings, both political purpose and financial interest are at work. For example, in one of her Prefaces, Aubin refers to her need for money, but also links it to the wider social problem of poverty: 99

Ibid., 225-26. The theme of disaster occurring in relation to a ride in a pleasure boat also occurs in Aubin, The Life of Charlotta Du Pont, 151. 101 Aubin, The Noble Slaves, 3-6. 102 Harriet Guest, “A Double Lustre: Femininity and Sociable Commerce, 1730-60”, Eighteenth Century Studies, XXIII/4 (Summer 1990), 483. 103 Aubin, The Noble Slaves, xi. 104 Richetti, Popular Fiction before Richardson, 239; McBurney, “Mrs Penelope Aubin and the Early Eighteenth-Century Novel”, 245. 105 Sarah Prescott, “Penelope Aubin and the Doctrine of Morality: A Reassessment of the Pious Woman Novelists”, Women’s Writing, I/1 (1994), 107. 100

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She then distances herself from financial motives and reminds the reader of her moral purpose: “I do not write for Bread ... but I am very ambitious to gain Esteem of those who honour Virtue.”106 Abbé Prévost, French author and translator,107 states that, by the time of her death, Aubin was a wealthy woman: “the short lived fame of novelty had been sufficiently enduring in Aubin’s case to ensure her the highest pleasure of avarice, which [was] to die in the midst of wealth.”108 Later, Prévost would contradict his own statement saying that towards the end of her life Aubin wrote because she was in financial difficulties.109 Given the irony inherent in Prévost’s first statement, given the popular rhetoric of the period regarding the incompatibility of virtue and wealth, both of his statements could well be spurious. Also disputing the representation of Aubin as an essentially religious and moral writer, other critics have shown that Aubin’s Prefaces, in which she associates herself with various aristocratic women, were sometimes based on fabricated friendships, suggesting that she sought respectability at any cost. Spencer shows, for example, that Aubin writes of the religious writer Elizabeth Rowe’s husband as if he is still alive, when a friend would have known that he had died some years previously. Aubin, Spencer states, also claims a friendship with a patron’s husband, when the couple had been separated some 106

Aubin, The Life of Charlotta Du Pont, vi. Apart from the seven narratives, the Dictionary of Literary Biography lists Aubin as author of three published odes and one play; editor of a moral treatise and translator of four other texts. Her work was produced posthumously in three volumes in 1739 and editions of three of her narratives were published in the 1970s. Four of the novels, two translations and the edited moral treatise were produced in two years. 108 Abbé Prévost, Le Pour Et Contre, Paris, 1736 quoted by Prescott, “Penelope Aubin and the Doctrine of Morality: A Reassessment of the Pious Woman Novelists”, 111. 109 Battestin, Dictionary of Literary Biography, XXXIX, 12. 107

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years before.110 Although Aubin’s stated morals contrast with these deceptions, her emphasis in her narratives on the importance of deception does not. It was also not unusual for writers to shore up their status and that of the text, by falsely claiming an association with people of influence (the calculated gamble perhaps being that few readers would know the truth). Arguments in favour of the genuine nature of Aubin’s moral focus include support for her work by Samuel Richardson, another author noted for his lack of criticism of Catholics and who actively encouraged women writers in general to exercise a feminine and moral influence on society. Richardson’s first and most famous novel, Pamela, declared on its title page that it was “Published in order to cultivate the Principles of Virtue and Religion in the Minds of the Youth of both Sexes”.111 Similarly, Aubin “endow[s] her females in particular with a kind of moral energy that foreshadows what the author of Pamela and Clarissa would achieve with his heroines”.112 Wolfgang Zach argues that Aubin’s literary aims are “highly suggestive of Richardson’s central tenets” and that Richardson may have written the Preface to the 1739 collection of Aubin’s work after her death.113 There is some support for this in that Richardson’s printer Charles Rivington, “an intimate friend of Richardson”, published Aubin’s collected editions.114 Rivington is a strong link between all three of the eighteenth-century castaway authors as not only printed Evans’ two castaway narratives but also Defoe’s The Complete English Tradesman.115 Critics have even suggested that Aubin may have been “deliberately groomed as a rival to Defoe as that ‘complete English Tradesman’”116, and that “if we regard Richardson as the ‘father’ of the modern English novel, we may dub Aubin its ‘grandmother’”.117 However, to single out Aubin, would be to ignore 110

Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist, 87. Samuel Richardson, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. In a Series of Letters from a Beautiful Young Damsel, to Her Parents, London: Charles Rivington, J. Osborn, 1740. 112 Beasley, “Politics and Moral Idealism”, 230. 113 Zach, “Mrs Aubin and Richardson's Earliest Literary Manifesto”, 272-76. Some twenty-four years younger than Defoe, Aubin died in the same year. 114 Ibid., 272. 115 Bettesworth, another of the syndicate to publish Aubin’s work, also had a share in Defoe’s The King of Pirates (1720). 116 McBurney, “Mrs Penelope Aubin and the Early Eighteenth-Century Novel”, 252. 117 Zach, “Mrs Aubin and Richardson's Earliest Literary Manifesto”, 281. 111

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the contribution to the picaresque, romantic and political literary tradition already well established by Behn, Manley and Haywood. The pleasure of Aubin’s narratives come from the stories of the protagonists as they are flung far from the centre, propelled or pushed by the times in which they live. Such early eighteenth-century castaway allegories allow their authors to alter conventional terms of survival and success. In the work of Defoe, Aubin and Evans, each of the castaways finds an enclosed place in which to convert, transcend or adapt, drawing strength from the neglected values of purity and stability associated with feminine virtue. Aubin’s young, female protagonists face danger in order to escape their confines, circulate in public and achieve wealth and marriage. Evans endorses a more marginal but successful life, profiting from the mobile and luxurious life led by others. The more ambitious Defoe promotes a trading figure that overturns all traditional senses of social limitation. The difference between the three authors is apparent. Defoe has Crusoe claim the world as his trading universe while Evans’ protagonists (Martha and James) occupy a median space of compromise and benefit. Aubin’s protagonists circulate in and survive dangerous public places, their inner and individual virtue enabling them to avoid the accusations of immorality that would compromise their own (and Aubin’s) financial survival. For all three authors, the castaway narrative is simultaneously and productively a space that is open as well as bounded, a space within which particular identities change and develop by productively combining masculine and feminine imagery. The identities that emerge come about through negotiations with mutually informing motifs of sexual and economic desire, and with gendered understandings of trade, luxury and credit. The early eighteenth-century castaway narratives combine neglected values taken and transformed for use like rescued goods from a wrecked ship. The events of these texts provide the necessary reality beneath which social criticism can occur. Like Robinson Crusoe, the female castaway was a mythical figure whose actions refigured and recombined conventionally attributed masculine and female qualities. The identities that emerged resulted from, and were an expression of, a desire for social change.

CHAPTER SEVEN MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS OF THE NEW WORLD From Richardson’s Pamela to Rousseau’s Julie and beyond, the daughter’s story mesmerized the eighteenth -century imagination.1 We are outcasts – we are aliens of all our species.2

A key change will occur in the castaway narrative by the middle of the century. In the castaway narratives so far we have seen a symbolic exchange occur between ascribed masculine and feminine values. Crusoe incorporated an inner feminine strength in his isolation, before reconfigured his masculinity through his exchange with Friday, allowing him to re-enter society. By the middle of the century, castaway narratives represent the pubescent female individual, not in opposition to masculine values, but in conversation with another female figure, her mother. The daughter’s female identity is reflected back to her, not via masculine values, but via her engagement with different feminine values. At one level the feminine is both doubled and strengthened. At another level, the feminine is split, able to comment on its self and to change as differences between the feminine values of different eras merge. True to the nature of the castaway tale, the young female castaways absorb what is useful and discard what is not. In the process they show a new feminine identity being shaped and mother and daughter shaping a moral feminine sphere within which all social behaviour will be observed. Late in the eighteenth century, and early in the nineteenth, commerce, luxury and credit were still seen by many as key destabilising factors in society, although society had changed substantially. The problem of fluctuating values was still often represented as a young woman “perpetually in danger of betrayal into 1

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Feminism Without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991, 126. 2 Marguerite Daubenton, Zelia in the Desert, London: C. Forster, 1789.

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extravagance … by luxury and fraud”.3 In the female castaway narratives discussed in this chapter, we see again the emphasis on female virtue, as espoused by Aubin, with the rhetoric of trade now downplayed as commerce becomes a less contested influence on society. These narratives were produced in the charged atmosphere of revolutionary change in France and America and war across Europe. Ideas about social change now referred not only to idealised worlds, such as those evoked in English, French and American revolutionary tracts, but they also referred to the possibilities presented by America as the New World. The castaway narratives in this chapter would have resonated in many contexts, one of which was the migration of thousands to America, widely identified with opportunities for disenfranchised men and women. Mary Wollstonecraft herself, whose writings were central to the development of twentieth-century feminism, had planned to migrate to America with Gordon Imlay. The most important shift in the female castaway narratives at this time was the new representation of mothers cast away with their daughters, and the representation of indigenous communities as role models for English society. Consistent with Defoe, Evans and Aubin, many of these castaway narratives evoke the importance of inherited feminine values, particularly female virtue, and almost always, a rejection of paternal values. Some positively contrast free and natural indigenous societies (represented as such) with disempowered figures of slavery (a contrast which may have informed Defoe). Often the mother-daughter relation is one of adoption, reflecting Defoe’s emphasis on the constructed relationships of trading societies, in preference to inherited relationships and traditions. According to the view of the writer, the mother-daughter relation might infer either pragmatic or idealised, positive or problematic aspects of social change. In 1766, after King George III had issued a royal proclamation closing the American colonies to commerce and trade, the news broke that France would fight with the Americans against the English. A year later, in this charged atmosphere, The Female American, or The Adventures of Unca Winkfield Compiled by Herself was published in

3

Miranda Jane Burgess, British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740– 1830, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 106.

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London.4 In an intertextual engagement, the narrative declares itself to be the founding, original story to Robinson Crusoe.5 The narrator and female castaway Unca Eliza Winkfield predicts that one day “some bold adventurer’s imagination, lighted up by my torch, will form a fictitious story of one of his own sex, the solitary inhabitant of a desolate island”.6 This new world narrative and autobiography set in the 1630s, consciously gives a feminine and racial heritage to Defoe’s iconic text, positioning it as the “child of a tradition mothered by Unca”. As will be discussed, Unca is not only the protagonist’s name, but, possibly, referred to the name Incas, an Indian Mohican chief who was a hero for the British, but who betrayed his people. In The Female American, the female protagonist has been described as a “feminising agent of the civilising process”,7 an understanding that aligns the text with Aubin’s and Evans’ narratives. The female protagonist Unca is cast away while travelling from England to America. On the island, a dying hermit (suggestive of Crusoe) leaves her his hut and survival manual. Although the narrative’s Preface provocatively declares Robinson Crusoe’s debt to The Female American, Unca’s survival is shown to be dependent on her inheritance from the hermit. When Unca occupies the hut where the hermit has died, the scene is reminiscent of Alexander Vendchurch when a hut is cleared of a dead servant’s remains, so that others may shelter there, emphasising dependence on the lower classes. Like Evan’s protagonists, Unca speaks two languages, English and a language she refers to as Indian. These are not only the languages of colonised and coloniser, but are two languages shaping quite different worlds. As daughter of an Indian Princess and an English father, Unca is another productively hybrid figure: a product of two different

4

Unca Eliza Winkfield [pseud.], The Female American, New York: Garland Publishing, 1974. The original publication was 1767 and more editions were published in 1790 and 1814, but not in America until 1798. Ongoing contemporary interest in the narrative is suggested by its 1970 and 2000 editions. 5 Tremaine McDowell links Robinson Crusoe to The Female American, although she claims “the book has little intrinsic worth” (Tremaine McDowell, “An American Robinson Crusoe”, American Literature, I/3 (1929), 307-09. This view is countered by Blaim, Failed Dynamics, 42. 6 Winkfield, The Female American, 164. 7 Joseph, “Re(Playing) Crusoe/Pocahontas”, 319 and 321.

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cultures and sets of values.8 Contributing to the narrative’s truth claims, the names Unca, Eliza, and Winkfield all refer to actual historical figures engaged in the colonisation of America in the seventeenth century. Betty Joseph suggests that the protagonist’s grandfather Edward Maria Winkfield is a likely reference to Edward Maria Wingfield, first head of the Jamestown colony, and she suggests that: ‘Incas’ was chief of the Mohicans when the tribe joined the Puritan settlers in a war against a fellow tribe (the Pequots) in the 1630s …. the brutality of this war resulted in the virtual decimation of the Pequots and is believed to have stunned other tribes into treaties and compliance. Uncas, a traitor to native struggles, remained a hero for the British, whom he aided in all their wars till his death in 1683.

Both Wingfield and Incas are appropriately complex in the sense that Wingfield was sent home to London on corruption charges and Incas was both traitor and hero.9 Placed in the middle of these two potent and problematic names the name Eliza both joins and separates the male Western and indigenous names to form a feminine middle ground. In some sense, Unca also becomes both traitor (to the English) and hero (to the Indians) when she eventually refuses to go home to England. Her decision to live with the Indian community as their leader is the end of the narrative journey that had commenced with her Indian mother’s murder early in the narrative. In the Indian community, Unca has privilege, independence and a secure future, reversing English colonisation and the powerlessness and death of her mother. FEMININE, MORAL INFLUENCE In London, prior to becoming a castaway, Unca’s exotic background and New World sensibility is contrasted with English mores. As April London comments, Unca is “a force which attracts then domesticates

8

The in-between position is similar to that of Susan Barton in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe, the late twentieth-century, postmodern novel discussed in the final chapter. 9 Joseph, “Re(Playing) Crusoe/Pocahontas”, 322.

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the questing male of the old world.”10 As such, she tells a cousin who wants to marry her, “I would never marry any man who could not use a bow and arrow as well as I could”.11 However, when she is cast away on her return to America, her idealised self-reliance is tested and she finds it too hard to hunt and catch prey. In order to escape her situation, she disguises herself as an Indian god by hiding inside a statue, and deceiving the indigenous people who regularly visit the island and the statue for worship. As in Aubin’s and Defoe’s work, virtue is a feminine and interior characteristic and represented inside an external shell, hidden from view. Hiding Unca inside a statue of an Indian God, both reifies and centralises feminine influence. As for Crusoe, the indigenous people are Unca’s only contact with the outside world. The god that is worshipped is feminine: “with the neck and bosom quite bare like the manner of women”.12 Inside the statue, Unca addresses the people in their own (her mother’s) language by amplifying her voice. She tells them she is not God, but is God’s representative, and so she is able to leave the statue and live with the people. Unlike Crusoe, Unca does not convert the Indians but imbues their religion with her feminine, moral influence. Her sympathies are with the indigenous people and, as a half-Indian woman, she opposes slavery and advocates secrecy and isolation for “their country might be discovered, and probably invaded, and numbers of people be carried away into slavery and other injuries committed.”13 The social contract rhetoric of slavery and powerlessness and The Female American’s references to indigenous people are clearly linked, both referring to the state of human nature in foundational societies. In contrast to the figure of the slave, the indigenous person represents an original state of freedom and independence. Many years after The Female American was published, Mary Robinson in A Letter to the Women of England on the Injustice of Mental Subordination (1799), similarly held up the life of indigenous tribes in America as an example of women’s potential contribution to public life: 10

April London, “Placing the Female: The Metonymic Garden in Amatory and Pious Narrative, 1700–1740” in Fetter'd or Free?: British Women Novelists, 1670–1815, 100. 11 Winkfield, The Female American, 51. 12 Ibid., 78. 13 Ibid., 324.

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In Robinson’s discussion, indigenous societies represent a natural and foundational state, while contemporary society is unnatural and therefore wrong. She refers to the Ancient Britons here in contrast to the more popular heritage of Rome, whose downfall was attributed to the negative and feminine effects of luxury. Robinson’s rhetoric seeks to evoke an ancient and positive, yet nationalistic lineage for women, to give them greater authority to act in the world. THE INFLUENCE OF ROUSSEAU Also in the 1760s, drawing on the idea of a natural and foundational state, Jean-Jacques Rousseau advocated a practical and natural education for both boys and girls, even while he prioritised male education. In writing of the destabilising effects of rapid, social change, he outlined a moral, domestic and maternal role for women. By envisaging a distinct role for women, his ideas promoted a division between public and private lives and contributed to stabilising concerns about fluctuating values. His writings, which gave greater status to women in the domestic sphere, were widely welcomed by both women and men as giving much needed meaning to the perceived leisure-filled lives of middle-class women. However, not all were in agreement with him, including the otherwise admiring Mary Wollstonecraft who criticised Rousseau for envisaging women’s lives as separate from participation in education and public life. Other critics noted that his writings advocated women’s subordination by making a virtue of their domestic confinement. In 1764, Voltaire wrote that Rousseau had placed his own five children in the Paris orphanage at birth, separating them from their mother Thérèse Levasseur. Voltaire says that Rousseau did this because of “his unfitness as a father, … the bad influence of Thérèse’s family, and … 14 Anne Frances Randall [Mary Robinson], A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination. With Anecdotes, London, 1799, 89.

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Plato’s ideas about the benefits of having children brought up by the state”.15 Rousseau’s actions clearly contradict his advice to women, but his reference to Plato’s ideas also suggests that Defoe’s depiction of the widow, paid to take care of Crusoe’s children, may have referred to this more specific moral and political context. Under the influence of Rousseau’s most popular works, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761) and Émile (1762), and twenty years or more after The Female American, a number of French female castaway narratives were published in England. Unlike those published earlier, many of these featured mothers cast away with their daughters. The centrality of the mother’s role contrasts with the dead or absent mothers of the earlier castaway narratives. Castaway narratives had been popular in England, France, Germany and Holland since the early part of the century and, influenced by Rousseau’s ideas on pedagogy, many were now produced as educational books for children.16 Three translated French castaway narratives became widely popular in England late in the century (at a time when the two countries were at war – 1793-1815). These were not targeted specifically for children and would have been read by many different groups. As is clear in the discussion which follows, it is an irony of the castaway narrative throughout the century that, though it is said to be high in entertainment rather in seriousness, read by women, by the lower classes and later, by children, many leading intellectuals of both 15

Voltaire published this information in his Sentiment of the Citizens (1764). See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, xviii; and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Discourses and Other Political Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, xxxiv. 16 According to Jeanine Blackwell, German titles in the eighteenth century included Jungfer Robinsone (1723), Madame Robunse (1724), Finnlanderin Salome (1748), Mariana (1752), Europaische Robinsonetta (1752), Europaische Hochshulschriften (1753), Die Insul Charlotten-Burg (1753), Ostfrieblandlische (1755), Zehnjahriges Madgen (1756), Kosakische Standesperson (1766), Lottchen (1771), Behluckte Inseln (1777), Einsiedlerin (1778), Deutsch Frauenzimmer (1789), Abenteurerinnen (1793), Die wilde Eurpaerinn (1799), Schiffbruch (1800) and Dutch titles include De Berugte Land-en Zee-Heldin (1756), Petrus Lievens Kersteman (1756), De wonderlyke Reisgevallen (1759). Blackwell, “An Island of Her Own”, 1985. J.G. Schnabel’s Wunderliche Fata (1731) features a shipwrecked man and his bride Cornelia and the story “bears a likeness to Pamela and Clarissa”; a French title, Guillaume Grivel’s L’lle inconnue (1784) features “a pair of lovers” castaway on a desert isle (Green, The Robinson Crusoe Story, 45 and 43).

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sexes were often involved in the production and, or, promotion of these books, including Mary Godwin, Helena Maria Williams, Erasmus Darwin, Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Daniel Malthus and Rousseau. Consistent with its themes and setting, ideas about gender, values and power, well as nature and human behaviour continue to be raised. The successful Paul and Virginia was written by Jacques Henri Bernardin de Saint Pierre, an important French naturalist, and published in England in 1795 (first published in France as Paul et Virginie in Etudes de Nature, 1788). A little earlier in 1789, Zelia in the Desert, also influenced by naturalism, was published (in France, Zelie dans le desert, 1787).17 Two years after Paul and Virginia, Ambrose and Eleanor was published (published in France as the popular Lolotte et Fanfan in the same year).18 PAUL AND VIRGINIA Jacques Henri Bernardin de Saint Pierre, author of the immensely popular Paul and Virginia, was a friend and follower of Rousseau.19 His naturalist research on the French colony of Mauritius informs this story set in the colony in an isolated valley, where two mothers and their children live as social, rather than literal, castaways.20 The story was hugely popular in both England and France as a tale of sentiment and high romance that engaged with Rousseau’s ideas about the need for practical education. While Robinson Crusoe was Rousseau’s recommendation for the young fictional protégée Émile, Paul and Virginia was recommended for girls by Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, doctor, philosopher, poet and naturalist, and author of A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding Schools 17

The frontispiece states it is “By the lady” who translated Madame de Genlis’ Adele et Theodore ou Lettres sur l’Education (1782) into English (but it is unclear if this is a reference to the author or if there was a translator). Adele and Theodore was a popular book advocating female education in terms of having a strong mother as a role model. It was critical of Rousseau but, in turn, was criticised by Wollstonecraft for advocating submission to parental will over reason. 18 François Guillaume Ducray-Duminil. Ambrose and Eleanor; or the Adventures of Two Children, Deserted on an Uninhabited Island. Abridged version by Lucy Peacock, London: R. and L. Peacock, 1796. 19 Twenty years after his popular narrative brought him national fame, he succeeded Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon as superintendent of the Jardin des Plantes, the major botanical gardens of Paris. 20 Mauritius, a French colony since 1715, was also known as the Isle de France.

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(1797).21 In France, the narrative was so well received that the names Paul and Virginie became popular for children, including Bernardin de Saint Pierre’s own. As in the earlier castaway narratives, names are significant in these works and Bernardin de Saint Pierre, as Rousseau’s friend, may have named his noblewoman for Mme Alissan de la Tour, a novice writer and obsessed reader of Rousseau’s Julie. In a fifteen-year period, she wrote over one hundred letters to Rousseau romantically imagining herself as Julie, with Rousseau as the lover and protagonist Saint-Preux.22 Both the King of France and Napoleon praised the book and, in England, the Romantic siblings Dorothy and William Wordsworth understood the story to reflect their own close relationship and, as a result, they modelled their garden on that described in the narrative.23 Daniel Malthus, father of the famous population theorist, produced the first English translation as Paul and Mary in 1789,24 while the English radical and poet, Helen Maria Williams translated the later and more popular version in 1795 (fifteen editions were published between 1796 and 1850).25 Williams was not only outspoken about women’s rights, but she was also a supporter of the French Revolution. Her translation, which included several of her own poems, was written while she lived in France where, according to her Preface, she wrote “amidst the horrors of Robespierre’s tyranny” when “Society had vanished”.26 Rather than excluding women from the foundational island as 21

Erasmus Darwin, A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education, 177. Mary Seidman Trouille, Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment: Women Writers Read Rousseau, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997, 58. 23 Elizabeth A. Fay, Becoming Wordsworthian: A Performative Aesthetics, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995, 53-54. 24 Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Paul and Mary, an Indian Story, in two volumes, London: Printed for J. Dodsley, 1789. The attribution of the translation to Daniel Malthus first appeared in an obituary in the Monthly Magazine in February 1800, but was later challenged by his son. See Charles Ryskamp “Boswell and James, Goethe and Malthus” in Eighteenth-Century Studies in Honor of Donald F. Hyde, ed. W.H. Bond, New York: The Grolier Club, 1970. 25 “Helen Maria Williams” in The Literary Encyclopedia, 2002: www.litencyc.com (accessed 15 June 2009). Richard F. Hardin says over sixty printings of the novel were produced in England prior to 1900 and twenty-five in America (Richard F. Hardin, Love in a Green Shade: Idyllic Romances Ancient to Modern, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000, 84). 26 Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Paul and Virginia, trans. Helen Maria Williams, London: Printed for Vernor and Hood, 1796, iii. 22

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Robinson Crusoe does, Paul and Virginia plays out a doubling of feminine values and addresses the problem of such idealised sameness (as did Evans in his portrayal of the utopians) and equality, through the central role of the two mothers. On the island, the widow and noblewoman Madame de la Tour lives with her daughter Virginia (named for the virtue her mother lost by marrying against her family’s wishes). Near these two live Margaret, a lower-class, poor, unmarried woman, and her son Paul. The two families are cast away within a society, rather than from it as they travel when necessary to a nearby port and church, associated respectively with commerce and religion. The narrator, a hermit, tells the story, as a pedagogical tale and history, to a young male traveller after the two families have died. The hermit was the only person to visit the two families in the valley, as it was difficult to access. In the book’s most famous scene towards the end of the narrative, the daughter Virginia drowns in a shipwreck off the coast, following an enforced visit to Paris. She had been sent to France, due to the growing love between herself and Paul, and on the orders of a childless and imperious French aunt. Virginia drowns because she refuses to take off her heavy clothes in order to be rescued and her death leads to the eventual death from grief of both families. Virginia’s drowning appears to implicitly criticise her French education, in which society’s ideas about correct behaviour for women prevail over the natural, common sense Virginia had learnt on the island (an argument that complements Rousseau’s ideas). Darwin understood the ending as a warning against restricting young women’s physical and moral development. A close reading of the text suggests that its author implicitly criticises both styles of education, as both the island (under the influence of the mothers) and the mainland (under the influence of the aristocratic aunt) produce figures who are unable to survive. France and Mauritius as colonising and colonised societies, are similar to the contrasting foreign and domestic states of the earlier castaway narratives. In the earlier narratives, and in The Female American, a third and hybrid way based on feminine values was typically advocated to surpass the limited choices offered by new and old societies. In Paul and Virginia, the choice is between two feminised societies: the powerless community, run according to values that are benign and natural, and powerful France, a society dominated

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by luxury and corruption.27 In this sense, Paul and Virginia is a counter-narrative to Robinson Crusoe because it shows a group failing to set up a new colony and failing to reintegrate into, and therefore change, society. At first, Virginia follows Crusoe’s lead and travels from her island, across land and ocean, and resumes a life in society. However, inadequately prepared by her time on the island, she rejects French society, and drowns. When she goes to France (leaving home for the first time) she travels contrary to her own wishes, and contrary to the wishes of her mother, while Crusoe always travels in pursuit of his own desires. While the protagonists of Evans, Aubin and Defoe benefit from their experiences, in Paul and Virginia, the families’ harmonious and enclosed life leaves them unprepared for change. In this sense, the depicted feminine community is similar to Evans’ utopian community who cast out James and the priest in order to remain cut off from the world. Paul and Virginia reflects Rousseau’s view that, in a state of nature, humans have a natural tendency to compassion and altruism, yet the narrative goes on to show the incompatibility of such tendencies with contemporary French society. SAMENESS AND DIFFERENCE Sameness and difference, in terms of the possibilities and problems of each, inform this text about a small, enclosed community run by two mothers. These two women have no male partners whose values they complement (as in Aubin), and they are not barren, as Evans’ Martha was. Each in fact mirrors and, may stand in for, the role and fertility of the other: “we shall each of us have two children, and each of our children will have two mothers.”28 The women breastfeed the children, irrespective of which is their own child, evoking a double, or intensified, feminine presence that needs no opposing term to simply confirm itself. The reference emphasises and reifies the feminine, while presenting feminine excess as a positive. It also indirectly refers to the practice of aristocratic women sending their children to wet nurses. The scene evokes Rousseau’s reification of the maternal, as well as his campaign to have women breast-feed their own children. 27 To the eighteenth-century English reader, Marie-Antoinette (guillotined in 1793, two years before the narrative’s English publication), and a dissolute French court, may have been suggested by this narrative. 28 Ibid., 21.

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By “the 1780s Rousseau had become a kind of patron saint for nursing mothers” and his campaign reportedly included awarding aristocratic women a sash (said to be woven by his own hand), as a reward for breast-feeding.29 A sash draped between the breasts, thereby drawing attention to them, seems an appropriate for representing the period’s tension between sexual and domestic woman. As with Friday and Crusoe, the differences between the two women inform their sameness. For example, their status is very different: one is a noblewoman and the other describes herself as a peasant. The noble Madame de la Tour arrives on the island first; she married against her family’s wishes and was therefore left without family support and wealth when her husband died. When the women are introduced to the reader it is in terms of their reputations, and their financial and social situation. Madame de la Tour is “a widow in a country, where she had neither credit nor recommendation, and no earthly possession”.30 Margaret comes to the island looking for “some colony distant from that country where she had lost the only portion of a poor peasant girl, her reputation”.31 After she became pregnant, her lover was forced to marry a wealthy woman. In neither case are the men portrayed as to blame for the women’s situation, rather it is the way in which reputation informs the system of inheritance and credit that is shown to shape their lives. The two mothers plan that their children will eventually marry ensuring the continuation of the community, even though “the first names they learnt to give each other were those of brother and sister”.32 The false implication of incestual relations is given added tension in relation to the different social status of the two mothers. Such false incest is typical of the castaway narrative and in Daubenton’s Zelia in the Desert (to be discussed), an adopted daughter falls in love with a man who is not yet married to her adopted mother. In this “family”, none are related by blood. Reading Robinson Crusoe through the prism of Paul and Virginia brings into view again Defoe’s emphasis on social rather than natural relationships, including the role of Crusoe’s friend, the widow, and 29

Trouille, Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment, 16. Bernardin de Saint Pierre, Paul and Virginia, 7. 31 Ibid., 9. 32 Ibid., 23. 30

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Friday, who, at times, is depicted as Crusoe’s son. In both Zelia in the Desert and in Paul and Virginia, the families are pre-eminently social and accord with Defoe’s recognition of the problems of patronage and inheritance, and of a rapidly changing society. For Defoe, constructed kinships and social connections in societies based on commerce must displace traditional hierarchies based on blood and on land inheritance. He takes his lead from the blurred distinctions that have arisen between social groups, even though mistaken identity can cause problems: such as Moll Flanders’ incest when she marries her own brother. More conservative than Defoe, Bernardin de Saint Pierre focuses on the problems, rather than the possibilities of a society dominated by the feminine values of commerce. Representation of mothers and daughters in fiction enabled such issues to be articulated in terms of morality, reproduction and inheritance, that is, in terms of the consequences to, and future of, society. This partly explains why fiction in this period tended to focus on the new, the young and the feminine. As Fox Genovese states, in the opening quote to this chapter, “the daughter’s story mesmerised the eighteenth century imagination.” As in the previous female castaway narratives, the real crisis comes when the children reach puberty. In the face of her daughter’s relative immaturity, Madame de la Tour asks her aunt, who had disinherited her, to educate Virginia in France. The aunt agrees, but when Madame de la Tour sees the terrible effect of her decision on Paul, she changes her mind. At the aunt’s command, the Governor of the island and a local missionary, representing the collusion of politics and religion, force Virginia’s departure. In Paris, Virginia, represented as an Evelike figure, becomes conscious of herself as a sexual object of desire, and the modesty, which then leads to her drowning, is represented as an outcome of tensions between her two very different, natural and social, educations. Her island education had complemented Paul’s, but her social education had taught her she was different. Her education in a state of nature had not prepared her for corrupt French society, and her social education had weakened her natural instincts, skills and strength. Unlike Crusoe, she could not act to save herself. In France, she had become a fallen Eve and her education in the importance of modesty led to her death when, on her return, she refused to remove her outer clothes, so that a sailor could swim with her to shore in the storm.

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In a manner reminiscent of both Defoe’s, Evans’ and Aubin’s styles, Bernardin de Saint Pierre brings the reader’s attention to different languages and values. For example, the two societies in Franc and in Mauritius, attribute different values to particular words. Just as Virginia’s sense of what is normal and natural changes in France, when Margaret tells Paul he is a “natural child”,33 he is excited, but then learns that, in Europe, it means he is a bastard. Because of this, if he went to join her in France, as he desired to, he would not be able to move in the same social circles. The problem is status and reputation, the problem that had created the community in the first place. As the narrator, who is also the old man hermit, explains: “Obscure birth … in France shuts out all access to great employments, nor can you even be received among any distinguished body of men.”34 To survive is to know the social rules, which in turn changes the meaning of what is understood by the word “natural”. In this text, difference is problematic and an attribute of society. On the island, the children, women and slaves are not only similar, but are equal and interchangeable. The women, who each regard the other’s child as their own, represent mothering as a natural relation. They are “delighted to place their infants together in the same bath, to nurse them in the same cradle”.35 The mothers’ affinity contrasts with their different social status, and they agree that they receive more support from each other than they had in society: “[more] than I have ever experienced from my own relations!”36 The declaration makes the fact of their gender, more important than their class. SLAVERY AND COMMERCE

Madame de la Tour is the most Crusoe-like figure of the two mothers. She arrives with her servant-slave, seeks the security of isolation and enclosure, and is practical in her outlook: [her] misfortune armed her with courage, and she resolved to cultivate with her slave a little spot of ground, and procure for herself the means of subsistence … she avoided those spots which were most 33

Ibid., 120. Ibid., 163-64. 35 Ibid., 21. 36 Ibid., 10. 34

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fertile and most favourable to commerce; and seeking some nook of the mountain, some secret asylum, where she might live solitary and unknown … she wished to shelter herself as in a nest.37

She rejects the more fertile and commercial ground in favour of isolation, where the women raise their “children of nature” without the luxuries of civilised life and with no formal education, other than that of subsistence. The narrative soon shows, however, how matters of finance, reputation and inheritance inform their lives. The hermitnarrator recalls that, when they arrived, the women asked him to subdivide the land so that the son and daughter could inherit equal portions. Although the noblewoman is initially better off, having her own servant, she has no access to credit, due to her now defunct social connections. In contrast, because Margaret has the capacity to labour she obtains credit and buys her own servant-slave, making the women equal. The comparison not only indicates the vulnerability of the women, whose worth is tied to their reputations and social position, but also suggests Margaret’s greater capacity, as a labouring woman, to overcome these social problems. The problems of working women, in relation to issues of credit and reputation, are addressed directly by Fanny Burney in The Wanderer published early in the nineteenth century (discussed in the next chapter). For Burney, because the issue of reputation was essential to the system of credit, trade and finance, it was inextricable from women’s independence. Although Bernardin de Saint Pierre writes of the small community that “They had but one will, one interest, one table; – all their possessions were in common”,38 the idealised community is only superficially one of equality. Each of the two women has a slave of their own: one is a male farm labourer and the other is a female domestic servant. The women are also represented as symbolic slaves and, on the rare occasion when they enter the local town, they wear blue slave clothes. In France, the aunt’s maids refer to Virginia as having lived in a “country of savages”. The low status of all that is associated with the natural and with manual work is highlighted when the aunt tells Virginia that she has received “the education of a

37 38

Bernardin de Saint Pierre, Paul and Virginia, 7. Ibid., 18.

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servant”,39 because she worked in the house and field. The slave references indicate powerlessness, as in the slaves’ barren marriage, and the death of all in the community. Ideas from society are shown to be unsuitable in the colony, symbolised by the infertile European seeds Virginia sends home. Paul comes to understand and draw on some of these ideas, after reading some novels he acquires to learn about France (so he may write to Virginia). Through reading, he starts to take on the aspirations of European society and comes to see slave ownership as natural and necessary to his community’s survival. Although the hermit tells him that he chose a solitary life, without wife, children, or slaves, Paul ignores him stating that soon: “Virginia being rich, we shall have a number of negroes, who will labour for you”.40 In the narrative, the two women are commended, by the other islanders, for treating their slaves as equals. But Bernardin de Saint Pierre shows the children, in their naivety (a fault of their natural education), colluding with cruel slave-owners. After they return a young slave to her owners, asking him not to beat her, they learn that, later, she was chained up and beaten. Their island education has made them ignorant of human nature shaped by society: Virginia sighed at the recollection of the poor slave, and at the uneasiness which they had given their mothers. She repeated several times, ‘Oh, how difficult it is to do good!’41

On this journey, the slaves have saved the children who are lost in the woods, showing that they are the stronger and more resilient. The incident is similar to a scene in Rousseau’s Émile when, in a typical and symbolic lesson, Émile loses his way and must use his knowledge to find his way out of the woods.42 The scene of the children being carried on the backs of slaves also recalls the represented importance of servant labour in the earlier castaway narratives. In all these texts, slavery weakens its owner-protagonists, and the depiction complements the gradual rejection of slavery in England. 39

Ibid., 146 and 141. Ibid., 168. 41 Ibid., 50. 42 Rousseau, Émile, 119-20. 40

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As for Aubin, slavery is an effective term for all powerlessness for Bernardin de Saint Pierre as he creates an analogy between actual and symbolic, black and white, female “slaves”. For example, when Virginia returns to the island by ship, she refuses the help of the “good, white people”. The phrase is used earlier when Virginia and Paul returned a young slave woman to her owners. The slave says she was going to drown herself before being helped by the children: “the good, white people”.43 Both the slave woman and Virginia, by refusing or accepting the assistance that is offered, must determine their own fate within prejudicial and constraining limits. Both women are powerless within societies they have no control over and, as such, their decisions lead to disaster. In other words, their emergence as female individuals is shown as limited by race and class. The analogy adds a new layer of potency to the relationship of Crusoe (who had been a slave) to Friday. That is, Friday and Crusoe are potentially exchangeable figures and, as a result, either Crusoe must change Friday, or must become Friday. NATURE AND EDUCATION Paul is described as “stronger and more intelligent” at twelve “than Europeans are at fifteen”, and the main aim of his work on the island is to improve on nature: so he “embellishes their plantations which Domingo had only cultivated”44 and moves birds’ nests so Virginia can hear them from her favourite seat. His manipulation of nature recalls Evans’ utopian community in which the men improve on nature by pruning trees and directing the ocean into pools. Paul is never quite satisfied with his efforts to please Virginia and he foreshadows her eventual departure: “sometimes the young arbours did not afford sufficient shade, and Virginia might be better pleased elsewhere.” When the two women wish to export and profit from their excess crops, Paul declines the opportunity to leave the island to trade. His refusal effectively opposes him to Crusoe. That his difficulty is with foreign, rather than domestic trade, is made clear when he states:

43 44

Bernardin de Saint Pierre, Paul and Virginia, 32. Ibid., 57.

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… why do you wish me to leave my family for this precarious pursuit of fortune? Is there any commerce more advantageous than the culture of the ground, which yields sometimes fifty or a hundred fold? If we wish to engage in commerce, we can do so by carrying our superfluities to the town, without my wandering to the Indies.

In this maternal society, the main figure of independence is the hermit-narrator who mourns that he is “Like a man whom shipwreck has thrown upon a rock”. The hermit-narrator and the young male wanderer listening to the tale, are isolated, wandering figures. As the young traveller listens, he receives an Émile-like practical education. As a barren figure, the hermit tells him: “I am like a father bereft of his children, like a traveller who wanders over the earth, desolate and alone.” In contrast to these figures, Paul refuses the life of a wanderer and chooses to remain in a domestic and feminine world, which ultimately leads to his early death. For Bernardin de Saint Pierre, nature is a mesh within which Paul and the female community are caught: “the echoes of the mountain incessantly repeat the hollow murmurs of the winds that shake the neighbouring forests, and the tumultuous dashing of the waves which break at a distance upon the cliffs.”45 There is no active subject in this description, that is, no Western-style individual dominating and controlling the landscape. In contrast, a distant mountain town (where the hermit takes the grieving Paul after Virginia’s death, because “passions gather strength in solitude”46) is described in terms that emphasise individual activity, European industry and development: A crowd of carpenters were employed in hewing down the trees, while others were sawing planks. Carriages were passing and repassing on the roads. Numerous herds of oxen and troops of horses were feeding on those ample meadows, over which a number of habitations were scattered …. The freshness of the air, by giving a tension to the nerves, was favourable to the Europeans.47

Agriculture, industry, labour and trade are presented as good for the body and health of the individual. In this scenario, the development of 45

Ibid., 2. Ibid., 201. 47 Ibid., 201-202. 46

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the individual requires the domination of feminine nature and the scene occurs just before Paul’s life, and that of the community’s, comes to an end. Long after these events, the hermit-narrator represents nature as suggestively defensive: “near the ruined cottages all is calm and still, and the only objects which there meet the eye are rude steep rocks, that rise like a surrounding rampart.” The phallic rampart, like Crusoe’s fortifications, had provided the women with a defence against the outside world, but the protection is now irrelevant, for the community has been destroyed by ideas. The female and maternal education, represented as isolation in a closed off sphere, has not survived the values of mainstream society and the narrator wryly observes: “It is lack of suffering that ultimately causes suffering”.48 The criticism of this feminine isolation emphasises the importance to Crusoe of his meeting with Friday, for it is Friday who allows Crusoe to combine the virtues of his feminine-style isolation with Friday’s new masculinity. ARTIFICE AND THE TEXT Paul and Virginia questions the authority of the two women before it goes on, as if by association, to question the authority of fiction itself (specifically the romance narrative). In this sense, the text seems to urge its reader to recognise and evaluate artifice. On this basis, when Virginia goes to France, Paul questions Madame de la Tour’s accustomed role as his mother (she is not his natural mother): He, trembling, repeated the words, “My son – My son – You my mother,” cried he; “you, who would separate the brother from the sister! …. You send her to Europe, that barbarous country which refused you an asylum, and to relations by whom you were abandoned …. Since I cannot live with her, at least I will die before her eyes; far from you, inhuman mother! Woman without compassion! …”

Paul then “loses his reason” and, cursing her, predicts the deaths that follow: “may the waves, rolling back our corps amidst the stones of the beach, give you in the loss of your two children an eternal subject of remorse!”49 The narrative works to counter the romantic notion that 48 49

Ibid., 2. Ibid., 127-28

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female virtue can withstand social corruption (the idea which informs Aubin’s and Evans’ narratives). In fact, Bernardin de Saint Pierre seems to warn the reader against the sentiments of his own text when he writes: “as if rocks could form a rampart against misfortune; as if the calm of nature could hush the tumults of the soul.”50 It is a view that suggests Rousseau’s view of reading books, except Robinson Crusoe. In accord with this theme, in Paul and Virginia, a spatial and temporal shift occurs when, in order to understand Virginia’s new society, Paul reads novels, as well as geography and history books. The children have learnt to read and write so that they can communicate with each other and their newfound literacy changes them and their values. Paul, because of his feminine influences, expresses a preference for reading romances, which is where he learns of society’s corruption. When he reads that: “fashionable novels … drew a just picture of European society, he trembled, not without reason, lest Virginia should become corrupted, and should forget him.”51 As the earlier authors had done, Bernardin de Saint Pierre undermines the romance narrative, while he uses its illusory qualities. As such, the hermit-narrator indirectly recommends Paul and Virginia as a moral tale: “In the midst of so many passions, by which we are agitated, our reason is disordered and obscured; but there is an ever-burning lamp at which we can rekindle its flame, and that is, literature. Literature, my dear son, is the gift of Heaven.”52

In turn, literature is shown to inform, and be informed by, other kinds of stories, such as the rumour that Virginia is to marry a nobleman, or has done so already. The novels that Paul reads seem to confirm the truth of the rumour. The romantic and sentimental narrative, with its isolated community and tragic heroine, dominated the book’s reception, in spite of its overall anti-romantic themes. In France in 1856, Flaubert depicted the book as the favourite reading of Emma Bovary, as an

50

Ibid., 8. Ibid., 140. 52 Ibid., 170. 51

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example of the problematic romantic ideas inform her.53 In Belinda (1801), its author and education reformer Maria Edgeworth, renames a character Virginia to reflect her impractical and romantic qualities. As an insubstantial character, she is contrasted with the more vigorous Belinda described as: … handsome, graceful, sprightly, and highly accomplished … she had been educated chiefly in the country; she had early been inspired with a taste for domestic pleasures; she was fond of reading, and disposed to conduct herself with prudence and integrity. Her character, however, was yet to be developed by circumstances.54

When, the male protagonist Clarence Hervey, who has raised Virginia according to the natural education principles of Paul and Virginia (and who is another adopted father figure), comes to prefer Belinda, he says: “The virtues of Virginia sprang from sentiment; those of Belinda from reason.” The comparison is between Belinda who has circulated in the world and Virginia who has been isolated in domesticity: In comparison with Belinda, Virginia appeared to him but an insipid, though innocent child: the one he found was his equal, the other his inferior; the one he saw could be a companion, a friend to him for life, the other would merely be his pupil, or his plaything. Belinda had cultivated taste, an active understanding, a knowledge of literature, the power and the habit of conducting herself; Virginia was ignorant and indolent, she had few ideas, and no wish to extend her knowledge; she was so entirely unacquainted with the world, that it was absolutely impossible she could conduct herself with that discretion, which must be the combined result of reasoning and experience.55

The difference between the two rests on their education and wider experiences. Hervey cautioned against giving Virginia “common novels” to read, but was happy for her to read romances seeing them as harmless diversions.56 His housekeeper Mrs Ormond’s worried that 53

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary: Provincial Lives, London: Penguin, 1992, 27. Maria Edgeworth, Tales and Novels (Vol XI contains Belinda, 3 vols), London: Baldwin and Craddock, 1833, vol. I, 1-2. 55 Ibid., 368. 56 Ibid., 369. 54

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the romances would lead to hero-worship of Hervey, and this occurs. In contrast to Virginia, Belinda, educated in the country with prudence and integrity, is shown as guided by her own values, developing a Crusoe-like reliance. ZELIA IN THE DESERT Marguerite Daubenton’s Zelia in the Desert; or, the Female Crusoe was published in England in 1789, the same year as Paul and Mary, and the year of the storming of the Bastille in Paris. Daubenton (17201818)57 was the wife and cousin of the important French naturalist and palaeontologist Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton. Through her husband’s work, she is likely to have known Rousseau58 and she fought a court case with Bernardin de Saint Pierre against literary piracy in the 1790s.59 In England, Zelia in the Desert, “written in a natural style with engaging situations” won “a fairly large audience”.60 At least six editions were published and, in America, the work remained in print until 1812. In this narrative, women raise children who are not their own and the problems of love marriages and illegitimate birth are used to symbolise the breakdown of traditional society. Zelia is left with her maternal grandmother in France when her French Catholic mother dies and her Protestant English father sails for Java with the Dutch East India Company. Zelia is therefore another hybrid castaway figure shaped by both Catholic and Protestant values, as well as by a mix of upper and middle-class values. In France, her grandmother’s authority, like that of the aunt in Paul and Virginia, represents a powerful and feminised nobility. Unlike Crusoe’s own powerless mother, the grandmother’s status allows her to petition the King to stop Zelia leaving France. But Daubenton portrays the noblewoman as no longer powerful enough to prevent change and 57

The English Short Title Catalogue has 1788 as the date of her death, but elsewhere it is dated 1818. See the entry for Marguerite Daubenton in Joseph-Marie Quérard, Félix Bourquelot, Charles Louandre, Louis-Ferdinand-Alfred Maury, La Litterature Francaise Contemporaine 1827-1844, Paris: Daguin Freres, 1848, 147. 58 Her husband co-wrote with Georges Louis Leclerc Buffon, the first three volumes of Histoire Naturelle (1747-67) and worked with Rousseau on Denis Diderot’s Encyclopedie (1751-72). 59 Carla Hesse, Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1810, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, 218. 60 Quérard, La Litterature Francaise Contemporaine, 147.

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Zelia and her future husband d’Ermancour sail for Batavia to get her father’s permission to marry. As in the early castaway narratives, trade is represented as producing a desire for different values and a different way of living, and these desires in turn lead to a cast away state, a temporary suspension between new and old traditions. A friend, the pregnant Nina travels with the young couple and exemplifies the problem of forced marriages. Like Margaret in Paul and Virginia, she has become pregnant to a man who is required by his family to marry another woman. Nina travels with the couple to “conceal my shame in some far off country … some unknown desert”.61 After the ship is wrecked, the women are separated from the men, each thinking that the other group has drowned. When the men reappear (the women first see a footprint), sexual desire becomes the focus of the story and the particular problem is sexual desire in the absence of traditional family structures; it is “the danger we are continually exposed to”.62 In order to appear respectable to the old hermit they find on the island, Nina says she is a widow. When she dies in childbirth, Zelia then raises her child Ninette, (named for her mother as in Aubin’s narratives). Zelia raising another woman’s child makes her a similar figure to Crusoe’s widow, and to the mothers in Paul and Virginia. Zelia reads novels to Ninette who, in a Crusoe-like statement, indicates her growing sense of individualism and agency when she says they “gave me the idea of writing my own history”.63 Her statement not only indicates her desire for self-determination but also critically refers to her problematic blurring of history and fiction. Her education is interrupted (and completed) by male sexual desire when Zelia’s fiancé, d’Ermancour and his servant Jerome arrive. After the misunderstanding that Ninette is Zelia’s child, d’Ermancour is eventually convinced of the truth by the proof of Zelia’s virginal innocence: “[her] air of constraint and … blushes”. Her demure reaction to him constrains his sexual desire and he agrees to become her “faithful and submissive friend”. The taming of masculine sexual desire (the taming of avarice) is suggested when, after embracing her too closely, he sinks to his knees at her feet “in terror”, exaggerating 61

Daubenton, Zelia in the Desert, I, 34. Ibid., 178. 63 Ibid., 181. 62

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his submission to her morality. Again, in a parody of femininity, he goes away in tears “suddenly to the thickest part of the wood perhaps to conceal from me [Zelia] this little instance of weakness”. The wood, like Crusoe’s enclosures, is a space where the self can be shaped and maintained and when d’Ermancour re-emerges he has been transformed into a paternal figure. He has the child Ninette by the hand, which gives him “an air more assured”.64 Masculine sexual desire is sublimated in this new masculine and paternal role, which has been achieved by the dual effect of Zelia’s virginity and her rationality; in particular, it is his paternal role that now confirms his masculinity. Sexual desire in this text is a problem because female virtue is conflated with sexual morality, as Zelia explains: How could I have appeared before him ... if he had abused [my] moment of weakness …? How could I have supported the pretence of a man who would have had the right to despise me?65

Because she resists d’Ermancour and her own desires, Zelia seems to him to be no ordinary mortal. Her apparent superiority leads to him throw himself at her feet, parodying Friday’s deferment to Crusoe. Zelia is discomforted and says, “I was very far from enjoying that empire which I appeared to have over him”.66 This conflation of high ideals with the feminine is repeated when Ninette, at puberty, leaves the couple and is mistaken for a princess by a local tribe. In a scene reminiscent of The Female American, d’Ermancour and the indigenous tribes are paralleled in that each equates gendered (and racial) difference with superior values. Female independence in this text therefore links virtue (sexual morality and abstinence) to colonialism (through its references to trade) and individualism, all aspects that shaped Robinson Crusoe. In Paul and Virginia, Bernardin de Saint Pierre described the sexual feelings of the two women as sublimated to religious sentiment: “if sometimes a passion more ardent than friendship, awakened in their hearts the pang of unavailing anguish, a pure 64

Ibid., 173. Ibid., 177. 66 Ibid., 176. 65

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religion, united with chaste manners, drew their affections towards another life.”67 In Zelia in the Desert, d’Ermancour suggests that the superior, goddess-like status he has conferred on Zelia means that she can transcend social laws and have a sexual relationship with him. Echoing the argument that Evans’ Alexander put to Elvira, d’Ermancour states the self-interested view that, “If she loved me as I do her, would she confine herself to laws which are only made to promote interest and good order in large societies”.68 An important context for the castaways’ decisions as to whether to marry or not without a priest was the large number of marriages that were taking place at this time without church blessing, a trend that ended with the introduction of the Hardwicke Act (discussed in the next chapter). When Ninette becomes an adolescent, she falls in love with d’Ermancour. The nobleman is not her father and is betrothed to a woman who is not her mother. The scenario raises once more the spectre of symbolic and actual incest, and the possible breakdown of society. However, Daubenton posits a positive consequence: Ninette chooses to leave the small community and survives and prospers. Both Daubenton and Bernardin de Saint Pierre address the issue of reputation, how to achieve the authority to survive and prosper in a scenario of social change. The risk is that in a period of social change, without fixed and agreed upon values, one’s status, position or gender cannot be confirmed. The fear that status and social class, as key indicators of value, will break down is shown by Ninette’s sensitivity to d’Ermancour’s servant Jerome:, when she wipes her skin clean after he brushes past her. When Ninette leaves the community she becomes the narrator of the story, inheriting the role from her mother. In her narrative, as in The Female American, indigenous communities provide a positive alternative to the social contract rhetoric of slavery. The indigenous groups in these narratives serve to symbolise constructive differences between cultures, while slavery shows a lack of freedom that locks both women and indigenous people into a subservient relationship of power. As a member of the middle class, Ninette, like Crusoe, is located between the vices of the upper class and the poverty of the lower class, while her quest for independence associates her with 67 68

Bernardin de Saint Pierre, Paul and Virginia, 18. Daubenton, Zelia in the Desert, vol. I, 39.

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upper class vices and privileges. In the Indian society, for example, she is reified as a princess and has the independence of a privileged figure. Problems arise with this status, however, when the Indians ask her not to return to her family, and she risks becoming a permanent castaway. Her dilemma is resolved when, at the end of the story, Zelia and d’Ermancour leave the island and Ninette leaves the Indians to inherit the couples’ hut. Inheritance is valued over high status combined with isolation. Rejecting both the Indian society, where she is privileged, and English society, which is associated with problematic desire and prejudice, she chooses a new world. At the end of the narrative the reader realises that the narrative they have been reading is the explanation that Zelia and Ninette are giving to Zelia’s father who was mistakenly told (by a Dutch East India company representative) that Ninette was Zelia’s illegitimate child,. The return of Zelia’s natural father effectively and conventionally authorises the story of Ninette’s independence, transforming it from fiction into history and autobiography. Ninette’s decision to stay in the new country and earn her own living as an artist confirms her as a self-determining individual. Her occupation merges leisure with employment, as she is draws on the skills of a gentlewoman. THE NEW WORLD The radical poet and translator of Paul and Virginia, Helen Maria Williams was indirectly associated with another castaway narrative, when her Auguste and Madelaine, a Real History was jointly published with the English translation of F.G. Ducray-Duminil’s Lolotte et Fanfan (1788). The translation was titled Ambrose and Eleanor, translated by Lucy Peacock (1785-1816), writer and bookseller in 1796.69 Ducray-Duminil (1761-1819) was a writer of popular and children’s narratives, as well as being a journalist, drama critic, minor poet, music teacher and writer of songs for the theatre. He largely wrote gothic novels and “Even Lolotte et Fanfan featur[ed] 69 Another edition of Ambrose and Eleanor is described as translated by Helen Maria Williams in 1797. Ambrose and Eleanor was published with Williams’ Auguste and Madelaine in 1798 and 1799, the story of an upwardly-mobile daughter and a young aristocrat “whose love is obstructed by pre-revolution convention …” (Angela Keane, Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s: Romantic Belongings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 71). Ambrose and Eleanor was still in print in 1824.

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... an underground setting and ‘un manoir sinistre’”.70 Such was the popularity of his gothic works, he was imitated into the 1860s.71 In contrast to the theme of the purity of feminine values, as proposed by Aubin and others, Ducray-Duminil’s work was “not always ‘d’une purete irreproachable’”.72 As a result, his work could be associated with women who lacked good sense. For example, a young French barmaid in Paris was described as a typical Ducray-Duminil reader in 1821: “a girl with a lot of spirit; [who] subscribed at 1 fr 50 per month to a cabinet de lecture, she knows by heart all the novels of DucrayDuminil, Carfnaval and d’Angelique, and Jeanneton.”73 In a different example, all that is French, nationalistic and Anglophobic is referred to when Honore de Balzac, in Modest Mignon (1844), has a character say: “I much prefer the novels of Ducray-Duminil to all these English romances. I’m too good a Norman to fall in love with foreign things – above all when they come from England.”74 Victor Hugo similarly satirises Ducray-Duminil’s writings in Les Miserables (1862), when he shows a woman’s fall from nobility to the lower classes, by her becoming an avid reader of Ducray-Duminil’s works. Ambrose and Eleanor is a pedagogical tale that was explicitly promoted for youth. It features a brother and sister who raise themselves, without parents, on a desert island before they are discovered. The children were cast away on a voyage, and separated from their parents. The original cause of the disaster is the problem of paternal consent: their father had married their mother against his father’s wishes. For Defoe, Bernardin de Saint Pierre, and DucrayDuminil, thwarting the will of the father is frequently a necessary condition of independence, while for the female castaway it is often enough for the father to be merely absent. The rescue of the children is 70

Tilby states that, by 1904, Ducray-Duminil had published 1.2 million copies of his most successful work Coelina, ou l’enfant du mystère (1796), (Michael Tilby, “Ducray-Duminil's Victor, Ou L'enfant De La Fôret in the Context of the Revolution”, in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, ed. H.T. Mason, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1987, 407). 71 Timothy Unwin, The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 76. 72 Tilby, “Ducray-Duminil's Victor”, 412-13. 73 J.P.R. Cuisin, Les cabarets de Paris, ou l’homme peint d’apres nature, Paris: Delong Champs, 1821, 14-15. 74 Honoré Balzac, Modeste Mignon, Montana: Kessinger Publishing, 2004, 26.

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facilitated by the arrival of a new father figure, a colonel satirically named Milord Welly, and all three are reunited with their families. As is appropriate to this work for children, the moral of this story is less complex than the other castaway texts discussed so far – yet it also portrays a criticism of society that is relevant to this discussion. That is, in the context of two parents who are unable to protect their children, due to the father’s limited power and the mother’s lack of influence, the children bring themselves up, effectively giving birth to themselves in the style of Crusoe. This sense of a family in crisis continues early in the nineteenth century in The Family Robinson Crusoe (1814), the original version of The Swiss Family Robinson (1818), by Swiss pastor Johann David Wyss (1781-1830). These stories told by the pastor to his children were edited by his son, a professor of philosophy. In England, the original text was published and translated either by William Godwin (first husband to Wollstonecraft) or by his second wife, Mary Jane Godwin. Readers of The Swiss Family Robinson in the present century might recall a happy ending to this drama in which an entire family is shipwrecked. However, the first version ends with the family wondering, after two years of waiting, if they would “ever see another human face again”. The author’s son as editor, addresses the ending in a footnote, not to reassure the reader, but to say that a ship arrived to pick up the journal upon which the story is based, but that it was “driven away again before they could be rescued”. The narrative, which leaves its family stranded, tells of self-sufficiency and survival in the establishment of a new colony. In later versions, the ending is changed to ensure the continuity of the little society when a young shipwrecked English girl is conveniently discovered on a neighbouring rock by one of the boys. The Family Robinson Crusoe, described by the Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature as “Rousseauist, German pietistic, didactic”, relates to Robinson Crusoe in its emphasis on a practical education and on achieving control over

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one’s circumstances.75 The final example of a mother-daughter castaway narrative in this period is “The Shipwreck”, published as the first volume of Tales of Fancy (1816)76 written by the novelist Fanny Burney’s half-sister, Sarah Burney. On its release, a reviewer described “The Shipwreck” as “a sort of female Robinson Crusoe”, indicating a continuing trend to position the female castaway narrative in the context of Defoe’s text.77 The same reviewer recommends the narrative as “well delineated, and shew[ing] the difference between a masterly and a hacknied pen”. “The Shipwreck” is a survival story that shows once more the necessity of deceit and artifice. Feminine and maternal themes, and criticisms of masculinity, are placed at the centre when Viola, the daughter of an aristocratic family, is cast away with her mother after they lose contact with the father in a shipwreck. The presence of other humans is signalled by a footprint, and by an arrow in a dead pheasant. When their copy of The Tempest disappears, it suggests an English speaking, educated castaway. The mother sees and recognises Fitz Aymer, who is with the small son of a ship’s passenger who has died. As was the case for D’Ermancour in Zelia in the Desert, Aymer has a tarnished reputation that is partly salvaged by this representation of him as a father figure. Without telling Viola that she knows about Aymer and his past, the mother advises her daughter to dress as if she were a boy, her cousin Edward, to avoid sexual advances from Aymer. Viola’s cross-dressing links Burney’s text to the reversals of gender in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and raises the status of “The Shipwreck”, by its acknowledgement of Shakespeare’s shipwreck drama as a literary influence. When Viola and Aymer relate as young men, Aymer again gains in prestige when he becomes a role 75

The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature, eds Humphrey Carpenter and Mari Prichard, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, suggests that its translator was William Godwin, with his wife Mary Jane as publisher (510). J. Hillis Miller names Mary Jane Godwin, who was stepmother to Wollstonecraft’s daughter Mary (the author of Frankenstein), as its translator (J. Hillis Miller, On Literature, London: Routledge, 2002, 130). 76 Sarah Burney, “The Shipwreck”, in Tales of Fancy, London: Henry Colburn, 1816, I, 1-400. 77 Anonymous, Monthly Review, 2nd series, 79 (February 1816), 214-15 in the database, British Fiction 1800-1829, www.british-fiction.cf.ac.uk (accessed 7 May 2009).

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model to Viola as the Edmund, the younger of the two men. Viola as Edmund then reciprocally saves Aymer from being attacked. The two achieve the equality idealised in the social contract debates because neither one nor the other has a gender advantage, and neither is under obligation to the other. As indicated by the mention of Shakespeare, cultured reading and education are at the fore in this work with each chapter headed by quotations from contemporary authors such as Charlotte Smith and Robert Southey, as well as Milton and Shakespeare. Viola, perhaps like Burney’s desired reader, is an exemplary educated and modern young woman. Unlike Bernardin de Saint Pierre’s Virginia, Viola is described as “highly educated, few of the studies connected with the system of female improvement adopted in modern times had been neglected through the progress of her education”.78 The occasion of being shipwrecked provides the opportunity for mother and daughter to compare the resources of the men and women, and it is a comparison that emphasises equality. The mother, for example, questions her daughter’s assertion that it would have been better if they were male castaways. The mother makes a virtue of women’s greater endurance: Women, my dear Viola, are not any more formed for retirement, but they know how to yield to circumstance …. Sudden danger appals them; but sufferings, privations, disappointments, sorrows – women can bear all of these, and even display greatness of mind in bearing them; whilst men sink under such … calamities, and degenerate into helpless and peeving repiners.

Her mother asks Viola if she has ever considered herself as a Miranda (The Tempest), as “comforter to the poor Prince”. Viola replies that such “a man would be so unhappy, so disgusting and so increasingly repining that not even in my most visionary moments, do I ever admit one into my romance”. That Aymer has a copy of The Tempest, and that a chapter heading quotes Shakespeare: “Be of good cheer, youth – you a man! You lack a man’s heart”, adds authority to her view.79 The quote from As You Like It associates Viola with another cross-dressing 78 79

Burney, “The Shipwreck”, 30. Ibid., 33.

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strong female figure, Rosalind. Dressed as a man however, Viola initially finds she is unable to speak and express herself, she complains: “I am a mere cipher, a poor helpless insect.”80 Her silence when she wears the clothes of a man in front of Aymer links her inability to speak out, to her gender and as she learns to express herself in her new masculine identity, she also learns how to survive as a woman. When Aymer arrives, Viola sees “a gay, and somewhat luxurious man of fashion”.81 In his defence, Aymer refers to his masculine credentials – his military service in the army – and to his feminine credential, raised by a maternal aunt. He emphasises that his feminine upbringing is as essential to him as his masculine pursuits, and his declared hybridity complements Viola’s cross-dressing. It is man himself who is judged in this narrative as mother and daughter determine, along with their readers, whether he is a man of value or not. The women effectively judge and control Aymer’s access to their higher social status. Read in this context, the romance that develops between Viola and Aymer saves the castaways, but also establishes woman as man’s moral guide. As Aymer declares (evoking Aubin’s sentiments), “I will … move, speak … but by your direction! You shall be the sole guide of my conduct”.82 In many ways that evoke the early eighteenth-century castaway narratives, these narratives engage in the new world, demonstrating the emergence of female individuals as they survive, as Crusoe did, by borrowing from other cultures, including the cultures of colonised and indigenous societies. The narratives express desire for both stability and change. In an English society that was witnessing the tensions of the French Revolution, as well as the dramatic changes in status brought about by trade and by migration, the female castaway narrative’s focus on ascribed feminine values, and on women’s role as mothers, was conservative but potentially liberating (as we know from the mixed response to Rousseau’s work). As the novel informed by everyday life starts to take over from these early, popular and stylised narratives at the end of the century, the readers started to see their own lives reflected more directly as a story of potential influence and 80

Ibid., 83. Ibid., 99. 82 Ibid., 221. 81

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independence, as well as economic and social survival. The stylised, allegorical and symbolic castaway narrative comes to an end in this period as the novel, nuanced, psychological and reflective of everyday life, comes into being.

CHAPTER EIGHT FEMALE SEXUAL DESIRE AND INDEPENDENCE Here, … ended, with the acknowledgment of her name, and her family, the DIFFICULTIES of the WANDERER; – a being who had been cast upon herself; a female Robinson Crusoe, as unaided and unprotected, though in the midst of the world, as that imaginary hero in his uninhabited island; and reduced to sink through inanition, to non-entity, or be rescued from famine and death by such resources as she could find, independently, in herself .… Yet even Difficulties such as these are not insurmountable … 1 Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue – and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath.2

In Fanny Burney’s The Wanderer, we see the female castaway represented in a novel in a recognisable social, everyday context. In the new, or novel, form the reader could recognise her own concerns and difficulties and have reflected back to her different ways of being and models of behaviour. Yet symbolism and allegory continue to inform the novel as Burney, for example, draws on the castaway narrative tradition to show her female protagonists engaging in the difficulties of financial survival, including problems of credit and luxury. She shows economic concerns to be directly related to representations of female sexual desire and problems of emerging individualism. The absence of women and sexuality on Crusoe’s island has been discussed so far in relation to perceived and problematic associations between sex, excess and luxury; between reputation, credit and 1

Burney, The Wanderer, 873. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, London: J. Johnson, 1796 (3rd edn), iv.

2

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financial survival, and with respect to the polemical power of images of the virginal in depicting the moral individual. As we have seen, in most of the eighteenth century the female castaway narratives only tangentially refer to female sexual desire. In most cases, desire is problematic, masculine and avaricious, in association with trade and moral corruption. Exceptional moments of female desire include Evans’ Martha Rattenberg, in which the Governess, as the Captain’s mistress, and the sailors’ women are said to be keen to populate the island; various oblique moments in Aubin’s work, such as humour regarding the safety of eunuchs in Charlotta du Pont; and the desire of Ninette for her adopted mother’s lover in Zelia in the Desert.3 On the whole, the correlation of the moral individual with the absence of sexual desire informs female castaway representations until the end of the century, when the story begins to appear on stage.4 About this time, women writers, such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Frances Burney, began to sketch, what we would now term, a sexual politics in relation to women’s social and economic limitations. Understanding this shift as a reaction to an earlier and stricter morality would be folly in view of the sexual nature of many sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century castaway narratives discussed in Chapter One.5 Late eighteenth-century castaway narratives are typically closer to their early eighteenth-century predecessors than to the earlier centuries’ bawdier, though still political, versions. This was the case even in theatrical performances of Robinson Crusoe, which tended to undermine conventional bases for authority through ridicule, humour, and role reversal, as in the first stage production of Robinson Crusoe as Robinson Crusoe or Harlequin Friday (1781) by Richard Brinsley Sheridan.6 At this time, the female castaway figure on stage tended to 3

Aubin, Charlotte du Pont, 145. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Robinson Crusoe; or, Harlequin Friday, London, 1781; I. Pocock, Robinson Crusoe; or, The Bold Buccaneers … A Romantic Drama in Three Acts, London: J. Cumberland, 1817. 5 Early castaway texts which feature women, include Ariadne, sexual seduction and betrayal in “Catullus 64”; the various island stories of rape and seduction in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron (1558); the bawdy Rabelais’ Pantagruel (1532), and Joseph Hall’s Another World and Yet the Same (1605) featuring female Amazons in Viraginia. 6 The pantomime featured Crusoe in the first half of the performance and Harlequin, as Friday in a black-face mask, in the second. For Mita Choudhury, Harlequin’s “protean nature” effectively demoted the centrality of Crusoe and, understood in 4

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be an independently-minded figure, as in Pocock’s Robinson Crusoe; or, The Bold Buccaneers (1817), where Crusoe’s wife is “a woman of spirit [travelling] the wide world, in order to find her lost husband”.7 Charles Dibdin’s novel, Hannah Hewitt; or, the Female Crusoe (1792), was performed on stage for a benefit in 1798.8 The novel told “the history of a woman of uncommon, mental and personal accomplishments … cast away in the Grosvenor East-Indiaman … for three years the sole inhabitant of an island, in the South Sea”.9 In 1803, Dibdin commented on the novelty of his female protagonist, saying that a woman of “uncommon, mental and personal accomplishments” was still rare enough to be entertaining: “as women are more fertile in expedients than men, when put to ... new trials, I had no doubt but the idea of a female Crusoe would excite curiosity.”10 Like her female castaway predecessors, Hannah is represented as a hybrid figure for “added to her female requisites, she had a male mind.”11 These relatively sturdy and rational female castaways are more suggestive of Evans’ Martha Rattenberg than Aubin’s castaways, or the goddess-like figures of Unca Winkfield and retrospect, the “dance of savages” that began and ended the performance, contextualised Britain’s wealth in relation to colonisation and slavery (Mita Choudhury, Interculturalism and Resistance in the London Theatre, 1660–1800: Identity, Performance, Empire, London: Associated University Presses, 2000, 154). Gerald Frow suggests it was so unlike Sheridan’s serious works it was variously attributed to his wife, his wife’s sister as well as to his wife’s sister’s husband. In another pantomime of the 1780s or 1790s, “Robinson Crusoe; Or Friday Turned Boxer”, Daniel Mendoza, the famed pugilist has a boxing match with a “Man Friday” (“Oh, Yes It Is!” A History of Pantomime, London: BBC, 1985, 58). See also John McVeagh, “Robinson Crusoe’s Stage Debut: The Sheridan Pantomime of 1781”, Journal of Popular Culture, XXIV/2 (Fall 1990), 137-52. 7 Pocock, Robinson Crusoe; or, The Bold Buccaneers, 9. 8 Dibdin is described as “the father of English song” (William Kitchener, A Brief Memoir of Charles Dibdin. With Some Letters and Documents Never before Published, Supplied by His Granddaughter, Mrs. Lovat Ashe, London: W. Walbrook, 1884, 10). 9 Charles Dibdin, Hannah Hewitt; or, the Female Crusoe, London, 1792, 1. A reviewer of the day noted that Dibdin emulated Defoe: “Throughout he imitates, even to the language, De Foe; though we do not mean to say, he writes either so well, or so correctly, as that author (The Freemason’s Magazine, VI [June, 1796], 420). 10 Charles Dibdin, The Professional Life of Mr. C. Dibdin, Written by Himself, Together with the Words of Six Hundred Songs, London: Dibdin, 1803, 319 (Dibdin states that Hannah Hewitt is based on the life of his brother, who drowned at sea). 11 Dibdin, Hannah Hewitt, iv.

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Zelia in the Desert. These idealised representations have more in common with the ethereal and fantastic female figures that appear in castaway narratives in the middle of the century. For example, in Robert Paltock’s The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1750),12 the male castaway meets the opposite of the down-to-earth female: “a Gawry or flying woman, whose life he preserv’d and afterwards he married her.”13 Similarly, in The Life and Surprising Adventures of Crusoe Richard Davis (1756), another castaway meets his female Friday: “a WILD FEATHERED WOMAN who he lives with, teaches English [to] and converts her and all the feathered people to Christianity”.14 The feathered woman’s wings wrap around her body like a corset and the male castaway struggles to remove them from his bride. The scene suggests that the feathered woman is losing her freedom, but that coming down to earth might be a physical, sexual liberation. Across the century, many and varied representations of female figures show them as either sexually immoral or virginally pure; embodied or ethereal; rational or excessively emotional; of this world and yet not. As the century came to a close, with the pros and cons of the French Revolution being hotly debated, women writers struggled with such contradictory perceptions as they addressed the condition of women within a society that was now decisively under the influence of commerce and the values of the leisure-seeking middle class to which it had given rise. It is therefore not with a theatrical, pedagogical or utopian castaway story that this discussion of the eighteenth-century female castaway narratives ends, but with a novel, the form that Defoe is credited with shaping, with its overwhelming preoccupation with everyday life.

12 Introduction by James Grantham Turner in Robert Paltock, The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, ed. Christopher Bentley, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990 (first published in 1750 or 1751). 13 Peter Wilkins was influenced as much by Jonathon Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels as by Robinson Crusoe: as “a vivid hybrid of the shipwreck tale, the fantasy, the spiritual autobiography, the sexual idyll and the Enlightenment Utopia” (Blaim, Failed Dynamics, 23). 14 Adolphus Bannac, The Life and Surprising Adventures of Richard Davis, London, 1756, 27.

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THE WANDERER Fanny Burney’s The Wanderer, or Female Difficulties, written at the end of the long eighteenth century, takes up the female castaway theme, and extends to address the relationship between female sexual desire and women’s economic survival. Burney was a significant influence on Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth, all three of whom were successful writers engaged in questioning gender roles and behaviour in their work. Burney’s novel addresses the relationship between the sexual and the financial, credit and luxury, inheritance and reputation in relation to women’s independence. Published in 1814, in some nine-hundred pages, the work depicts two quite different female castaway figures, one of whom, Juliet, takes a long, complex and frustrating journey through society, experiencing the difficulties of survival. The other, Elinor, idealises revolutionary behaviour from within her financial secure household, but comes to be a castaway like Juliet. One female castaway appears at the beginning of this novel and is eventually rescued from poverty by middle-class marriage, and the other is cast away at its end, by rejecting the values of the middle class. The circularity of the narrative suggests different levels of discrimination against women as each castaway struggles for individuality and self-determination. Juliet’s castaway experience begins where most castaway narratives traditionally end, with her rescue off the coast of France. On the novel’s first page, the English ship picks up what appears to be a stranded black female servant on the coast of France, during “the dire reign of the terrific Robespierre” (11). Once the castaway is on board ship, the English passengers commence what becomes an ongoing theme: the all-important investigation of her social status. The woman, who refuses to give her true name, is given the name Ellis (for the L.S. initials on her bag). On arrival in England, she gives up her black servant disguise and reveals herself to be a white Englishwoman. Although later she reveals that her name is Juliet, she continues to refuse to tell anyone her family name, denying herself the protection and connections this name would give her. Ellis/Juliet is a castaway in England because, without a family name of repute, she has no status and no protection. As in previous narratives, the female castaway figure without family protection is perfectly suited to show the problem of economic survival, because she brings to the fore the issues of reputation and status.

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Elinor, a privileged young woman, first meets Juliet on board ship. Elinor makes it clear she is a supporter of women’s rights and of the French Revolution. In contrast to the reserved Juliet, and in common with the working poor, Elinor’s passion will make her a similarly “pathless” woman by the end of the novel. That is, Elinor’s intense and outspoken emotional, sexual and political views lead her to the same isolated state that Juliet has experienced throughout the novel, due to her lack of a family name: “Alas! Alas!” she cried “must Elinor too, – must even Elinor! – like the element to which, with the common herd, she owes, chiefly, her support, find that she has strayed from the beaten path only to discover all others are pathless!” (873)

The figures of Ellis/Juliet and Elinor complement each other in showing the different levels of restriction which impact on women’s ability to control their own lives. Juliet shows the restrictive and interdependent relationship between social and financial credit, as she attempts to earn her living. Burney shows Elinor’s more revolutionary desires (she wants self-expression and self-determination), to be both highly dependent on, and therefore vulnerable to, her privileged status. At the time of the publication of The Wanderer, Fanny (Frances) Burney (1752-1840) was a highly successful woman writer, having written three popular and critically well-received works, Evelina (1778), Cecilia (1782) and Camilla (1796). According to her Preface, Burney began The Wanderer in England in the 1790s at the height of revolutionary activity and continued writing the work in France where she lived with her French husband between 1802 and 1812. The novel, which was to be her last, was eagerly awaited but poorly received. In a letter to her brother, written after the novel’s publication, Burney speculates that her readers may have expected a more conventionally political novel,15 due to its release during the Napoleonic Wars, and only a year before the battle of Waterloo. Burney understood that critics expected her work to be more critical of the French (in spite of 15

Burney’s 1815 letter to her brother refers to its reception ironically as “the only Difficulty in which I had not myself involved her [her protagonist]” and hopes that future generations will understand her book (William Bryan Gates, “An Unpublished Burney Letter”, ELH, V/4 (1938), 302-304. Reception of the book is discussed by Margaret Doody in her Introduction to the 1991 edition of The Wanderer.

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her French husband), and that by 1814 there was a desire in England for ideas of revolution to be a thing of the past. The review from the British Critic in April 1814 states: “The revolutionary spirit, which displays itself in the sentiments and actions of Miss Elinor Joddrel, is, fortunately for a bleeding world, now no longer in existence.”16 It was a view that Burney seems to foresee in her own extinction of Elinor’s desires at the end of the novel. In retrospect it is possible to see that the novel’s setting in England, at the time of the French Revolution, allows Burney to criticise different aspects of English society by showing her protagonists’ choices as circumscribed by class and gender. It allowed her to create a parallel between national politics and sexual politics and to convey changes taking place in representations and conventions of masculinity and femininity. Through contrasting Juliet’s practicality and rationality with Elinor’s intense idealism and emotion, she is able to portray their different vulnerabilities to issues of self-determination, reputation and financial independence. CASTAWAY AND WANDERER The rhetorical figures of castaway and wanderer are closely related in this period. The wanderer was a Romantic figure who was more typically male than female. Examples include “the freeborn wanderer” in Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) and the male wanderer in Wordsworth’s The Excursion (1814),17 both of whom were depicted as figures standing apart from and, therefore, able to criticise society. The wanderer tended to act in his own interest and was typically pictured living outside of conventional society through choice. In Daubenton’s Zelie in the Desert and in Bernardin de Saint Pierre’s Paul and Virginia, the male hermits who have rejected society, both refer to themselves as wanderers. Like the castaway, the wanderer literally wanders and, symbolically, exceeds accepted social boundaries. In 1818, Mary Shelley, daughter of Wollstonecraft, depicted Frankenstein as “a divine wanderer”, indicating his roots in

16 Frances Burney, Known Scribbler: Frances Burney on Literary Life, ed. Justine Crump, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002, 23. 17 William Wordsworth, The Excursion (1814), Book I, 11, 915-16, eds E. de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966.

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Romanticism, as well as his difference and status as an outsider.18 Both castaways and wanderers determine the development of their own selves and make their way, without the protection of the allimportant reputation required by society. Like the castaway figure, the wanderer usefully enabled writers to present an outside perspective on society. In The Deserted Village (1770) Oliver Goldsmith contrasted his wanderer’s individualism with the more complacent family, which he associated with an ongoing state of childhood. As Morris Golden notes, for Goldsmith, “Ambition, achievement … are outside the compass of the static, secluded, virtuous family”19 and therefore “the wanderer is the adult in a dangerous but meaningful world”.20 The image is gendered in that family implies domesticity, evoking the idea of women confined within the family like children in need of protection. In contrast, without family and home, the male wanderer chooses his own way. When the wanderer figure is a female, she also suggests independence, but inevitably, the difficulties she must overcome also concern her sexuality. An influential text of the period that is useful in understanding the issues raised by Burney’s novel is Charlotte’s Smith’s Letters of a Solitary Wanderer (1800).21 The Letters are a collection of interlinked tales, substantially based on Smith’s own experience, in which the wanderer is a woman in poverty. For most of her adult life, Smith had had to write to support herself and her family due to the activities, and eventual absence, of her husband, who she describes as a spendthrift. The Introduction to her Letters describes the effect of her husband’s credit crises and debts: Born the daughter of a gentleman, she was urged into marriage just before turning sixteen, and her fortunes followed those of her 18 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, 17. 19 Quoted in Morris Golden, “The Family-Wanderer Theme in Goldsmith”, ELH, XXV/3 (1958), 187. 20 Ibid., 190. 21 Shelley had read Smith’s Letters two years before she wrote Frankenstein. Smith was a close friend of Shelley’s father, William Godwin (Jacqueline Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–1835: A Dangerous Recreation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 93).

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husband. He was in debt; she was in debt. He squandered away his father’s estate and was sent to jail; she went to jail with him. He fled 22 creditors; she fled with him, children in tow.

Eventually, when her husband exiled himself to Scotland, Smith stayed in England to care for their twelve children. Her Letters may have influenced Wordsworth’s The Excursion, particularly the first Book entitled “The Wanderer”, in which a traveller stops before a ruined cottage and is told the history of Margaret who was its last inhabitant. Douglas B. Wilson describes Margaret as “a feminine figure of abandonment” and the poem as a “[gendered] dialectic between solitary dream and suffering”.23 Margaret, her hard-working husband and two children suffer from the hardship brought on by drought and, as a result, her husband leaves her to join the army. Although he says she must not take up “that wandering life”, she must travel in search of rural work. Wordsworth tells how one of her children is put to work as an apprentice for a farmer and the second child dies. As her home and living conditions decline Margaret, still waiting for her husband to return, supports herself, an isolated figure spinning hemp: In sickness she remained; and here she died; Last human tenant of these ruined walls!24

The narrative is pedagogical and the heart-rending story of the isolated woman teaches Wordsworth’s traveller a lesson about life. Jacqueline Labbe suggests that Wordsworth’s The Excursion “post dates Smith’s and is if anything Smithian”:25 the female wanderer standing for both poet and woman as outcasts from society. The poverty-stricken figures of Smith’s work haunt Burney’s text and the lives of Juliet and Elinor. As Burney’s protagonist Juliet states, “how little fitted to the female character, to female safety and to female propriety was the hazardous plan of lonely wandering” (671). 22

Introduction to Charlotte Smith, The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith, ed. J. Stanton, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003, xiv. 23 Ibid., 98. 24 Wordsworth, The Excursion, 38. 25 Jacqueline Labbe, Charlotte Smith: Romanticism, Poetry, and the Culture of Gender, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003, 14.

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In The Wanderer, Burney contrasts the rational Juliet with the more financially secure Elinor, who has a more romantic desire for independence, one that is sexual, emotional and feminine, and, like Juliet’s path, is associated with poverty and danger. Wordsworth’s “Sonnet, On Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress” (1787), depicts the female, revolutionary poet as a similar figure. In the poem, Wordsworth draws attention to the work of writing and representation in conveying emotion, and draws on feminine and poetic imagery to depict the problem of wandering and instability: A sigh recall’d the wanderer to my breast; Dear was the pause of life, and dear the sigh That call’d the wanderer home, and home to rest. 26

This, Wordsworth’s first published poem, was written when he was only seventeen in the wake of Williams’ Poems (1786).27 On the publication of Poems, Williams had been acclaimed as a poet, and said to be “unrivalled by any of her sisters”;28 many had written sonnets praising her and her work. Although Wordsworth’s wanderer stresses the comforts of domesticity (or of England, in preference to France where Williams lived for many years), Williams’ high status as a poet – relative to Wordsworth at this time – suggests the female wanderer as a positive trope of independence. In this period of Sentimentalism and Romanticism, an individual’s independent emotional and creative life was frequently represented as in tension with their rational and material life. Such representations often contrasted what was natural (emphasising the practical, the body and emotions) with what was learned in society (emphasising ideals, and/or corruption, and the life of the mind). This tension informs Burney’s contrast between Juliet, as a rational subject, and Elinor, an emotional, embodied and revolutionary subject. The idealistic Elinor is emotionally driven and committed to self-expression, including the 26

First published under the pseudonym “Axiologus” in The European Magazine, (March 1787), 202 (for the full text of the sonnet, see Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940 (rpt. 1967), I, 269). 27 Helen Maria Williams, Poems, London, Thomas Cadell, 1786. 28 Quoted in Michael O’Neill and Mark Sandy, Romanticism, Oxford: Taylor and Francis, 2005, 161.

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declaration of her sexual desire for the male protagonist Harleigh. Juliet, on the other hand, with the benefit of her practical experience earning a living, values rationality and, in order to survive, gives way to convention. Like the castaway, in Burney’s and Wordsworth’s work, the figure of the wanderer signifies both problems and possibilities and, as such, raises questions about the stability of the individual, and of society. DOWNWARD SOCIAL MOBILITY

The “relentless cataloguing of Juliet’s sufferings”29 shows her castaway experience to be both gendered and financial. As Katherine Rogers states: … by comparing Juliet’s unsupported state to Crusoe’s isolation on his island, Burney invites us to contrast male preparation for life with female incapacitation. Like Crusoe, Juliet must either starve or find 30 resources to support herself.

Juliet, as L.S. or Ellis, is as arbitrarily named as is Friday and she has become a castaway for several reasons. Her father’s relatives have rejected her because her parents eloped to France, when they were refused permission to marry. After Juliet is born and her mother dies, her father eventually remarries. His new marriage requires him to keep Juliet and his first marriage a secret, but, she learns later, he planned to bring her to England, after her education in a convent. He dies before he is able to do this and believing Juliet to be illegitimate, his family disregard his wishes. Juliet can inherit a small sum of money, only if she marries and stays in France. After a Frenchman hears of this and forces Juliet to marry him, she wishes to escape to England and is “rescued”, in disguise, by the English ship. Continuing the theme that, due to problems of inheritance and reputation, the circumstances of her life are out of her control, the ship’s pilot steals her remaining money and she is unable to pay her fare. The 29

Maria Jerinic, “Challenging Englishness: Frances Burney’s the Wanderer”, in Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution, eds Adriana Craciun and Kari E. Lokke, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001, 69. 30 Katherine M. Rogers, Frances Burney: The World of “Female Difficulties”, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990, 141.

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conclusion of the novel finds a solution to her situation by establishing her good name: she is united with supportive family members and gains her rightful inheritance, after it is proved that her parents had married before her birth, and that she is her father’s lawful child. Juliet’s life, having no family name of note and therefore no status, is the life of the working class woman, and Burney depicts Juliet attempting to support herself in a wide variety of jobs, including private music teacher, milliner’s shop assistant, paid companion, actor, tutor, musician and public performer. In these roles, Burney shows her to be highly dependent on the good will of upper and middle class men and women (including Elinor), some of whom do not bother to pay her. Her novel, with its focus on hierarchy, shows some working women as similarly neglectful of those who are even poorer (than those “who had neither rank nor fortune”[427]). Burney gives many details of Juliet’s financial situation using the language of the account balance, which had informed Robinson Crusoe and the early eighteenth-century female castaway narratives, to portray the precarious nature of survival. A list of Juliet’s difficulties include (a few examples): borrowing money (224, 239); refusing money (282, 303, 610); being unable to pay debts (276, 281, 297); being accused of deception and extortion (45, 133); paying debts (328, 333, 623); having debts paid for her (423, 450); receiving wages and money from doing business (239, 653); and being refused payment (293, 298). She also loses money by theft (28) and is falsely charged with stealing money (813), before finally using her inheritance to release her from her marriage to the Frenchman. After the problems she has had with reputation (for example, as a public performer), with credit (as when she tries to run a business) and with humiliation, because of her low status in all the jobs she undertakes, Juliet’s eventual decision to marry and gain both respectability and wealth (like Aubin’s castaways) is represented as a rational and justified decision. In marrying Juliet to Harleigh, a respected, wealthy member of the upper middle class, Burney makes it clear that such an outcome is not likely to be available to the poor, or even to many working class women. Like Defoe and the other castaway authors, Burney is sympathetic to working people, and presents trades people and servants, in a positive light. In the novel, one of the problems of female independence is identification with the labouring class in the

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context of the immorality associated with that class by leisured middle class women. Juliet points out therefore that she had spent time with the lower classes “without meeting any difficulty” (672). The issue that most concerns Burney is the same as the one that had led Defoe to strand Crusoe on his island; that is, the issue of reputation in relation to economic and social survival. As Evans and Aubin indicated, for the female castaway, the issue of survival is always refracted through the prism of her sexuality. When Defoe had urged women to learn their husbands’ business, he had been concerned that some women believed the work to be below them. Burney’s novel suggests that the tension between paid work and status continued to affect middle-class women throughout the century. Regardless of her personal beliefs about work, a middle-class woman had to distinguish herself from the lower classes in order to retain financial and social credibility. Her particular problem was that when a woman of the middle class worked for a living, it proved her lack of private means. It was a small step from there to assumptions about her trustworthiness, her sexual morality and her ability to pay her debts. “UNSEX’D WOMAN” The woman writer, by virtue of her visibility as a female striving to contribute alongside men in the public sphere, was an example of such a morally problematic figure for many commentators and she was subject to attack throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a visible sign of, and contributor to, social change. The independent middle-class woman, and the women who wrote the works that depicted her, were often satirised as being like men. An anti-Jacobin31 poem entitled “The Unsex’d Females” (1798), for example, depicted the women writer as sexless, as well as vengeful and military: Survey with me, what ne’er our fathers saw, 31

In the period following the declaration of war on France by the British Government in 1793, radicals were frequently labelled “Jacobins” while those opposed to the Revolution were “Anti-Jacobins”. G.J. Barker-Benfield shows how this extended to the novel, where anti-Jacobins attacked women writers “for inspiring immoral behaviour”. Burney was one of those who Richard Polwhele, the author of the poem, disapproved of less than others (Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, 360).

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The Female Crusoe A female band despising NATURE’s law, As “proud defiance” flashes from their arms, And vengeance smothers all their softer charms. A shudder at the new pictur’d scene, Where unsex’d woman vaunts her imperious mien.32

Polwhele wrote this poem after William Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, was published in 1798. Godwin wrote his memoir of Wollstonecraft soon after her death and, in memorialising her life, he gave details of her attempted suicide and unconventional life. In the poem Polwhele refers to Wollstonecraft as “an enemy to blushes” and, in The Wanderer, Wollstonecraft is suggested by Elinor’s fury at her own blushes.33 Not only is Elinor an “enthusiast for the Revolution and rights of men and women alike”,34 but the novel in general demonstrates Burney’s familiarity with Wollstonecraft’s writings, as well as with Olympe de Gouges’ French manifesto, the Declaration des Droits de la Femme et de la Citoyenne (1791).35 Helen Maria Williams may also have been a model for the emotional Elinor as Burney, a friend of the poet, had described the revolutionary poet as similarly, “excessively affected”.36 The figure of Juliet who, unlike Elinor, refuses to speak of her desire for Harleigh, also suggests Rousseau’s Julie (1761), in its advocating the control of female sexual desire in marriage. As Bernardin de Saint Pierre noted, Julie had had a dramatic and moral effect on French society (where Burney lived while writing the novel): I know libertines who married and young women who publicly attributed their happiness to him [Rousseau]. Numerous women aspired to become Heloïses like Julie. Rousseau’s maxims made their

32

Vivien Jones, Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity, New York: Routledge, 1990, 141. 33 Quote from author’s note to his poem, Richard Polwhele, The Unsex’d Females, London: Cadell and Davies, 1798, 13. 34 Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974, 248. 35 Rogers, Frances Burney, 163. 36 Quoted in Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 195.

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way all the way to the throne; under his influence, even queens chose 37 to breastfeed their babies.

In this regard if, as Doody suggests, Juliet is a reference to Shakespeare’s heroine (933), she may also be a hybrid French-English literary figure that, ironically (because of the association of the French with romance) brings together the iconic English and romantic figure of Juliet with Rousseau’s more sensible Julie. These intertextual references are also ironic, in that Burney strongly frames Juliet’s decision to marry as an economic rather than romantic decision, in the context of her great difficulty surviving outside of that state. REPUTATION AND CREDIT The reality and consequences of being judged by others was as relevant in this period as it had been for Defoe and other castaway narrative authors. In Zelia in the Desert, written before the French Revolution, Daubenton vividly describes the problem that Burney will make the key premise of her novel. Juliet directly echoes Daubenton’s female castaway who is similarly unknown and therefore unprotected: … what can they think of a young woman who arrives like a mad creature without being able to say who she is, or whence she came, or what engaged her to come to people she was wholly unacquainted with? They would not receive me; they would repulse me; they would 38 mortify me; and I should have no one to defend me.

As in Robinson Crusoe and in the earlier female castaway narratives, Juliet’s welfare is dependent on the value that others accord her. In this sense, her value is like that of paper money, an agreed value, rather than the inherent value of gold that Aubin attributed to her heroines’ virtue. The problem of agreed value haunts the language and symbolism of credit, common in many novels after 1780,39 and, in The Wanderer, Juliet is a character whose (social and financial) credit is clearly at risk. Without a family name, she is judged, by the system of reputation and patronage, as having low value. Without suitable credit, 37

Quoted in Trouille, Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment, 59. Daubenton, Zelia in the Desert, III, 118. 39 Burgess, British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 97. 38

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she lacks credibility, and cannot easily engage socially or economically, for “to enter the credit system, one must already have entered it; credit circulates without end in this novel”.40 Burney portrays men’s and women’s lives in this period as subject to a system in which middle-class women monitored each others’ reputations, and therefore access to marriage and social mobility. The system of reputation mirrored that which controlled financial transactions in the public sphere where, without credit, men and women could be prevented from succeeding. The monitoring of other women’s access to privilege and power gave the middle-class woman added status and an important gate-keeping role, particularly in the context of the ongoing problem of merchants and their families marrying into upper class families, whose status was based on land ownership and birthright. Such gate-keeping is done by the mother in Sarah Burney’s “The Shipwreck”. Rousseau’s influence continued to be pervasive, affecting generations of women, who having had limited formal engagement in public life, now found new social importance: … by … stressing … the connection between civic virtue and the family, whether [Rousseau] recognised it or not, [he] supplied women with a rationale for intervening in political affairs. Confining women to the private sphere, he nonetheless helped to dissolve the distinction between it and the public. For if politics is indistinguishable from morality … then surely women as guardians of morality must have some right of access to the political.41

In Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987), Nancy Armstrong interprets the reification of women’s domestic role, and the power newly associated with it, as a representational crisis brought on by a declining or absent paternal order. The father whose death or absence regularly precipitated the castaway crisis of the female castaway narratives indicates this shift. However, while Armstrong’s work reconciles the push towards domesticity with an emerging female individualism, her work does not address the tension between different groups of women. And among those most vulnerable, in terms of their 40 41

Ibid., 107. Colley, Britons, 274.

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reputations, were those having the greatest capacity for independence: the middle-class women who worked for a living. Like Juliet, by circulating in society, they inevitably endangered their reputations because of their greater exposure to public life, and because their status was no longer fixed solely by their family names. Both Burney and Wollstonecraft described upper- and middle-class women as having a salacious interest in policing social mobility. Wollstonecraft pointed to centuries of exclusion from education to explain the middle-class, gate-keeping culture, suggesting that these were women who, conventionally excluded from the public sphere, had few other interests, and little access to other forms of power. In both direct and indirect ways therefore, the social monitoring role, bolstered by the reified role of mother and wife, under Rousseau’s influence, contributed to an increase in women’s power and status, in general. In this critical environment, two main groups had to establish their integrity (and their credit) differently: the first were lower-class women who lacked any social influence or protection, and the second were middle-class working women, such as Wollstonecraft herself. Like Defoe’s gentleman-tradesman, this latter group had to establish the integrity necessary to become financial secure through monitoring their own behaviour. As Defoe put it – they must stay within their own diurnal revolution – or as Aubin and Evans put it, they must embody the role of moral agents – because they could no longer rely wholly on their family name and connections. Like the castaway figures, their integrity had to be mobile and interior and among the implications of this shift was the greater need to control one’s emotions and sexual desires. Conventionally this had included the adoption of particular physical movements, for example, demure behaviour signalling moral correctness. Burney suggests that the pragmatism of working life made a luxury of such embodied language, as when Juliet shares her room with another working woman: Their intercourse was confined to oral language alone. The lively intelligence, the rapid conception, the arch remark, the cordial smile; which give grace to kindness, playfulness to counsel, gentleness to raillery, and softness even to reproach; these, the expressive sources of delight, and of comprehension, in social commerce, they were fain wholly to relinquish; from the hurry of unremitting diligence, and undivided attention to manual toil. (394)

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A different form of expression was necessary, partly because of the absence of leisure time, but also because working women needed to avoid charges of immoral sexual behaviour.42 The implication is that work (and therefore female independence) directly countered what was understood as traditionally feminine and indirect modes of expression. On the other hand, a more outspoken manner of expression, particularly in relation to women’s sexual desire, was inseparable from the issue of reputation, which in turn impacted directly on economic survival and on female independence. It is in this context that Burney parallels Elinor’s desire for Harleigh with her idealistic and revolutionary sentiments. When Juliet’s refuses to earn her living by going on the stage (she wants to avoid a bad reputation), Elinor describes the problem as equal to the problem of breaking the law: … you only fear to alarm, or offend the men – who would keep us from every office, but making pudding and pies …. Oh woman! poor subdued woman! Thou art as dependent, mentally, upon the arbitrary customs of man, as man is, corporally, upon the established laws of his country! (399)

Elinor puts the view that such a system must repress women’s desires and that, as a result, woman must monitor her own desires (as Crusoe did): “must be mistress of her passions; she must never listen to her inclinations; …. Frankness, the most noblest of our qualities, is her disgrace” (400). From within the mileau of her working life, Juliet observes that a consequence is that language becomes utilitarian. She represents a sense of play, multiple levels of meaning and a subtlety of expression as stemming from a culture of privilege, while Elinor, within her privileged culture, describes women as discouraged from directly articulating their desires.43 42

After William Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798) disclosed Wollstonecraft’s earlier unmarried relationship with Gilbert Imlay and their illegitimate daughter, her writings were not widely published and distributed until the second wave of feminism in the 1970s established her contribution to the history of women’s rights. 43 Early feminist-style figures are not uncommon in novels in this period. A caricature called Harriet Freke is a less sympathetic example in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801).

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EXPRESSING SEXUAL DESIRE Burney contrasts Juliet and Elinor in their differently expressed desire for Harleigh, brother to Elinor’s ex-fiancé. Aware that she is breaking with convention, Elinor openly expresses her desire for Harleigh after rejecting his brother. Harleigh prefers Juliet, described as practical, rational and discrete, and they marry at the end of the novel. The tension is between a woman shaped by romance, or by rationality, as it was in Edgeworth’s Belinda, when the practical and rational Belinda is preferred over the figure named for Bernardin de Saint Pierre’s Virginia. The perhaps intentional irony in Burney’s work is that Juliet gains her desired rationality by her experience as a working woman. Throughout the novel, the privileged Elinor’s desire for direct and honest self-expression is countered by her physical reactions and crippling emotional responses – her learnt behaviour – conveyed as blushes, sighs, a near loss of speech and later, an all-pervasive, then and literal threat of suicide (191, 358, 781). Elinor’s view is that the expression of her sexual desire is “the Right of woman” (176) and she passionately and rhetorically asks: Why, for so many centuries, has man, alone, been supposed to possess, not only force and power for action and defense, but even … all the fine sensibilities which impel our happiest sympathies, in the choice of our life’s partners? …. must even her heart be circumscribed by boundaries as narrow as her sphere of action in life? Must she be taught to subdue all its native emotions? To hide them as sin, and to deny them as shame? Must her affections be bestowed but as the recompence of flattery received; not of merit discriminated? Must every thing that she does be prescribed by rule? Must every thing she says, be limited to what has been said before? Must nothing that is spontaneous, generous, intuitive, spring from her soul to her lips? – And do you, even you, Harleigh, despise unbidden love! (177)

When Elinor speaks out to Harleigh about her passion, she discovers that her socialisation is ingrained in her own body, even as Crusoe’s lack of hardiness had led to his fainting on board ship. The language of tyranny marks her realisation that her body is constrained: She arose, and clasping her hands, with strong, yet tender emotion, exclaimed, “That I should love you –”. She stopt. Shame crimsoned her skin …. “How tenacious a tyrant is custom! how it clings to our practice! how it embarrasses our conduct! How it awes our very

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The Female Crusoe nature itself, and bewilders and confounds even our free will! We are slaves to its laws and its follies till we forget its usurpation. Who should have told me, that, at an instant such as this; an instant liberation from all shackles, of defiance to all forms; its antique prescriptions should still retain their power to confuse and torment me? Who should have told me, that, at an instance such as this, I should blush to pronounce the attachment in which I ought to glory? and hardly know how to articulate …” (174)

In contrast to Elinor’s visually exposed state, Juliet goes about in relative disguise: she is quite anonymous, adopts demure behaviour and is disguised as a black servant on leaving France. The more economically vulnerable Juliet must hide her individual desires in order to avoid the social criticism that will penalise her financially. Only the more financially and socially secure Elinor can attempt greater self-expressiveness. The double standard applied to sexual desire concerned Catherine Macaulay, the most respected woman intellectual and historian of the period.44 She objected that when Rousseau promoted women as moral guardians, he gave men no responsibility for the containment of their sexual desire. In his writings, she argued, he attributes women with moral responsibility and men with freedom. In effect, he made up a hybrid individual consisting of: … a moral person of the union of two sexes, which for contradiction and absurdity, outdoes every metaphysical riddle that was ever formed in schools. In short it is not reason … it is pride and sensuality that speak in Rousseau and in this instance has lowered the man of genius to a licentious pedant.45

She goes on to suggest that superiority, including a romantic sense of the individual as genius (the male wanderer), is used by Rousseau to represent man as incapable of self-control (women must take up this role), and she condemns him for the vanity of this position. In the same year as Macaulay’s Letters, Wollstonecraft had commented on 44 Macaulay’s major work was the eight volume History of England from the Accession of James I to That of the Brunswick Line, London: J. Nourse, 1763-1783. 45 Catherine Macaulay, Letters on Education: With Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects, London: C. Dilly, 1790, 206.

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the women’s role of moral guardian: “The sensualist, indeed, has been the most dangerous of tyrants, and women have been duped by their lovers, as princes by their ministers, whilst dreaming that they reigned over them”.46 In this developing language of sexual politics, Wollstonecraft and other writers depicted the rake as both real (if stereotypical), and as a symbol of corrupt and unstable male power, as he had been for Evans, Aubin, Haywood and others. The rhetoric of rake and virgin not only allowed writers to portray moral, financial and political tensions, but also problems relating to women’s developing independence. From her own experience, Wollstonecraft knew that the double standards described by Macaulay had real consequences. Wollstonecraft had worked to support the child she had out of marriage, and knew that the difficulties that abandoned mothers had supporting themselves and their children. The situation of such women meant that one of the earliest manifestations of the call for women’s rights related to the problem of illegitimate children, some of which would have been the consequence of extra-marital, that is, unsanctioned sexual desire. Both Wollstonecraft, in The Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), and a year later Olympe de Gouges, in her Declaration des Droits de la Femme, called for financial support for such women, through the paternal recognition of their illegitimate children. De Gouges’ proposal took the form of a marriage contract which she called “Form of the Social Contract Between Man and Woman”. The contract required a man to support all the children he’d fathered, whether inside or outside of marriage: We, X and Y, of our own free will join ourselves for the term of our natural lives and the duration of our natural love, on the following condition. We firmly intend to hold our fortune communally, while reserving the right to divide it in favour of children from our own and from other attachments. We each recognise that our worldly goods belong directly to our children, legitimate or not, and that they have the right without distinction to bear the names of the fathers and mothers who have acknowledged them: we intend to forswear the law permitting the denial of one’s family …. This, approximately, is the formula of the marriage contract whose introduction I propose. I can 46

Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 45.

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The Female Crusoe already see sanctimonious hypocrites, prudes, clergy and all the rest of the damned rabble rising against me the minute they read it. 47

In effect, de Gouges’ marriage contract is an early call for the right of an unmarried woman’s children to the wealth of their father, and it also depicts women as well as men, in legitimate and non-legitimate relationships. In the Introduction to The Vindication of the Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft recognises women’s capacity to eventually support themselves, while depicting women as more passively sexual, in her important call for “men … to maintain the women whom they have seduced”: … when a man seduces a woman, it should I think, be termed a lefthanded marriage, and the man should be legally obliged to maintain the woman and her children, unless adultery, a natural divorcement, abrogated the law. And this law should remain in force … while they depend on man for a subsistence, instead of earning it by the exercise 48 of their own hands or heads.

These calls for reform focus on what Mita Choudhury calls society’s “romantic/erotic conditions of enslavement”.49 De Gouges and Wollstonecraft were addressing the gender inequality that was inherent to the expression of sexual desire. In effect, they were also addressing the larger, related problem: women’s lack of power and illegitimacy as not-yet full, Crusoe-like, citizens. THE MARRIAGE REVOLUTION Marriage, as we have seen, was an important part of the symbolic language of the castaway narrative in its reference to perfect matches of opposing and similar values, able to produce hybrid and strong, survivor-citizens. During the French Revolution, English writers and reformers such as Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, Mary Hay and Mary Robinson had advocated the extension of social, economic and legal rights to women. As Susan Kent states, it was a period in which: 47 Olympe de Gouges, The Rights of Women, London: Pythia Press, 1989, 17 (my emphases). 48 Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 154. 49 Choudhury, Interculturalism and Resistance, 125.

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… suggestions like Wollstonecraft’s of women becoming autonomous of their husbands and fathers, of their acting openly and freely in political affairs, of their taking to arms, produced enormous disquiet …. We should recall that France had long been viewed by Britons as a “feminine” nation. Now, in the midst of a revolution in which large numbers of women participated and which became increasingly radical as months passed, Briton’s anxieties about women’s place in 50 public life took on greater intensity.

The French and American Revolutions had demonstrated to many social observers women’s powerful capacity to contribute to social change (often termed social chaos by critics), and Elinor’s chaotic state and revolutionary views can be understood in this larger context. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Edmund Burke, a critic of the Revolution, had criticised French proletariat women as vile and shameful even, drawing on the language of avarice, calling them “cannibalistic women”.51 For Burke, the new French democracy was feminine, immoral and powerful: The Assembly … [acts] amidst the tumultuous cries of a mixed mob of ferocious men, and of women lost to shame, who, according to their insolent fancies, direct, control, applaud, explode them; and sometimes mix and take their seats amongst them; domineering over them with a strange mixture of servile petulance and proud presumptuous authority. As they have inverted order in all things, the gallery is in place of the house.52

In this inverted world, the Assembly includes irrational women who are “lost to shame”. In Burke’s rhetoric, it is the tragic figure of the Queen, not the proletariat women of France who is a suitable subject for masculine chivalry. As Linda M.G. Zerilli argues, Burke needed the image of Marie Antoinette’s “endangered femininity”, under attack by “the furies of hell” (the common women), to construct a politics, grounded in chivalrous masculinity.53 In contrast, in her 50

Kent, Gender and Power in Britain, 1640-1990, 129. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, 301. 52 Ibid., 69. 53 Linda M.G. Zerilli, Signifying Women, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994, 8889. 51

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lengthy descriptions of Juliet’s difficulties, Burney represents English chivalry as a problematic myth, a false rhetoric and a thing of the past, with particular negative consequences for women. An old Admiral, who later turns out to be a long lost relative, is on board ship when Juliet is rescued, and gives an example of such chivalry. His status as a military man and his behaviour define his nation: “An unprotected female, provided she’s of good behaviour, has always a claim to a man’s care …. I should be ashamed to be an Englishman, if I held it in my power to think narrower than that” (22-23). However, through showing Juliet’s general reception on board ship, and her experiences in the workplace, Burney shows that such chivalry is a myth from a past era, (just as Aubin, in her criticism of masculine vice, had shown one heroine after another, having to physically defend her own honour). At the end of the novel, Juliet’s marriage is made possible by the Admiral as the maternal uncle gives her away in marriage to Harleigh. In this sense his old-fashioned values are the context for her necessary return to the English middle class. By this stage of the novel, because the reader has experienced the long and many difficulties of Burney’s title, Juliet’s marriage is a rational and positive, yet compromised, step. It is also a marriage that is her choice (she spends most of the novel avoiding Harleigh’s chivalric offers of assistance), in opposition to either the arranged marriage or clandestine marriage of her father. As François de Singly discusses in Modern Marriage and Its Cost to Women, love marriages were becoming increasingly acceptable in the period and the shift in itself marked the growth of women’s individualism: Very gradually throughout the Western world, beginning half-way through the eighteenth century, love and marriage came together …. Marriages are no longer arranged since what is at stake is no longer the continuation of the family line but the emotional development of husband and wife …. The history of marriage could be seen as a rebellion against the yoke of family inheritance.54

54 François de Singly, Modern Marriage and its Cost to Women, New Jersey: Associated University Presses, 1996, 183.

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For Burney, the power of marriage and the power of the state are one and the same for women. To marry who one wished was a comparatively independent act, even when constrained by the need for parental and social approval. As Juliet herself points out, in contrast to her own situation, “the general custom of the country … rarely permits any choice even to the man, and to the female, allows not even a negative” (622). Towards the end of the eighteenth century, there was an increased mixing of different classes in marriage. Consistent with Defoe’s concerns on the artifice accompanying the rise of trade, there were numerous cases of false identity and fraud, affecting the personal and financial reputation and status of those involved. After a number of high-profile abductions and problematic liaisons, the Hardwicke Marriage Act of 1763 was introduced, bringing an end to clandestine or illicit marriages (like those on the castaway islands, these only required a ceremony before God). Before its introduction, the Hardwicke Act had been widely debated, as it was for years afterwards, because the Act was understood to challenge the basic social contract principles of liberty and free choice. Free choice was not only a key principle of commerce, but was one of the few rights that was increasingly understood to apply to both men and women. The new Act challenged this because it required the parental consent of both parents for all marriages concerning individuals under twentyone years of age. Burney, who was critical of the domination of mercenary values, supported the Act understanding that its prevention of forced marriage offered protection to a woman’s reputation and future. Her support for the Act may have also been influenced by her perception of changes in representations of masculinity, an advocated similarity between men and women, at least in the pages of the novel. In The Wanderer, for example, there are echoes of the gendering of Defoe’s, Evans’ and Aubin’s texts when Burney’s describes Harleigh’s sensitivity matching Juliet’s rationality. A MAN OF FEELING As in the earlier castaway texts, in The Wanderer, marriage is a symbolic act, in which different values come to complement each other (as for Friday and Crusoe). Burney uses marriage to bring together Harleigh, a sensitive man with the feminine, yet rational Juliet – each benefiting from the other’s characteristics in order to

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show the emergence of new identities. When Elinor is outspoken in declaring her feelings for him, Harleigh sees her as lacking appropriate feminine sentiment: “Her spirit I admire, but where is the sweetness I could love” (189). He associates the forthright Elinor with a masculine demeanour devoid of feminine qualities and prefers Juliet who is combines rationality and with being demure. In preference to Elinor’s unacceptable manly outspokenness, Juliet is a man-woman hybrid individual. Harleigh’s preference for Juliet partly depends on her strength, which, like Evans’ Martha Rattenberg, lies in her silence and fortitude. Juliet who says nothing of herself and her desires protects her reputation and therefore, Harleigh’s and her family’s. However Harleigh’s love for Juliet is not traditional and conventional, for she lacks status and attracts criticism, as well as problems of credit and debt. For many of the people she encounters, she simply does not exist, and is often invisible, ignored and slighted. Juliet can only come into existence if there is a change in social values, and Burney suggests this in representing Harleigh as a new, complementary man. Under the influence of commercial society with its increased leisure and polite behaviour, masculinity was changing. Men were increasingly represented as more emotional, informed in part by the fashion for Sentimentalism and Romanticism, but also by the demands of a polite and commercial culture. A range of novels, including Mary Hays’ Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) and Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple (1744) depicted a new and feminised “man of feeling” (the title of Henry MacKenzie’s novel, published in 1771).55 Harleigh as a “man of real sensitivity and feeling” (xxvi), represents differences between the sexes as less hierarchical and polarised. In such a scenario, public space itself could be represented as less hostile to women, allowing them to imagine fuller and less restricted lives. A gendered tension was described in earlier chapters of this book, between the feminine values associated with commerce and a more traditional society in which masculinity was shaped by the military, and by the patriarchal family. These gendered associations arise again at the end of century in Wollstonecraft’s founding text of Western 55

Doody points out that similarly named male protagonists (spelled as Harley rather than Harleigh) appear in Henry McKenzies’ Man of Feeling (1771) and Mary Hays’ Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796). (Burney, The Wanderer, xxvi).

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feminism A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), when Wollstonecraft works to diffuse the masculinity associated with soldering. In an analogy that suggests Defoe’s feminised men (as being quite capable of defending the country), Wollstonecraft observes that, like women, soldiers are trained for a particular role in society, as opposed to being well educated. Her soldier is a feminised figure and both soldier and woman are products of inadequate education: As a proof that education gives this appearance of weakness to females, we may instance the example of military men, who are, like them, sent into the world before their minds have been stored with knowledge or fortified by principles. The consequences are similar; soldiers acquire a little superficial knowledge, snatched from the muddy current of conversation, and, from continually mixing with society, they gain, what is termed a knowledge of the world; … ... And as for any depth of understanding, I will venture to affirm, that it is as rarely to be found in the army as amongst women; and the cause, I maintain, is the same. It may be further observed, that officers are also particularly attentive to their persons, fond of dancing, crowded rooms, adventures, and ridicule. Like the fair sex, the business of their lives is gallantry. – They were taught to please, and they only live to please. Yet they do not lose their rank in the distinction of sexes, for they are still reckoned superior to women, though in what their superiority consists, beyond what I have just mentioned, it is difficult to discover. … The consequence is natural; satisfied with common nature, they become a prey to prejudices, and taking all their opinions on credit, they blindly submit to authority.56

In The Anxieties of Idleness, Sarah Jordan states (developing the work of Leonore Davidoff’s and Catherine Hall’s Family Fortunes, 1987), that, in this period, definitions of masculinity were shifting from a focus on aristocratic privilege, idleness and military prowess to a middle-class valorisation of occupation and industry.57 Arguably, it was a shift that Defoe’s own writing had participated in, in his creation of Robinson Crusoe. As middle-class women became 56

Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 43-44 (my emphasis). Sarah Jordan, The Anxieties of Idleness: Idleness in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture, Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2003, 20. 57

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wealthier, they were said to risk “idleness”, largely due to the increased emphasis on domesticity, and greater numbers of servants. Influenced by the aristocratic leisured tradition, as these women rose in rank and influence, their status was marked, in opposition to working women, by their refinement, softness and sensitivity.58 Wollstonecraft blames wealth and this more leisured way of life for the increased interest that many such women had in maintaining the conventional hierarchies between genders and between classes: Riches and hereditary honours have made cyphers of women to give consequence to the numerical figure; and idleness has produced a mixture of gallantry and despotism into society, which leads the very men who are the slaves of their mistresses to tyrannize over their sisters, wives, and daughters. This is only keeping them in rank and file, it is true. Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there 59 will be an end to blind obedience.

The sense of a literal and symbolic blindness in both passages, quoted above from Wollstonecraft, suggests that she understands that there is a ruling ideology at work, one which, for both Burney and Wollstonecraft, could only be countered by the resources of writing and language. LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATION Writing in the Edinburgh Review in 1843, poet and statesman Thomas Macaulay deprecatingly describes the language of The Wanderer as “a sort of broken Johnsonese, a barbarous patois, bearing the same relation to the language of Rasselas, which the gibberish of the Negroes of Jamaica bears to the English of the House of Lords”. He speculates that her language is due to her having been in exile in France, and in doing so he evokes the notion that castaways in other lands lose their speech and language.60 Macaulay was not only Johnson’s biographer, (and would have known of Johnson’s support of Burney’s work), but was influential in championing English in 58

Ibid., 20. Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 44. 60 Thomas Babbington Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to the Edinburgh Review, London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1867, II, 62. 59

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colonial contexts, making it the main language of instruction in Indian schools. His comparing of Burney with Johnson promotes the idea of a pure and true English language, one that is quite remote from either Defoe’s sense of hybrid Englishness in his poem “The True-born Englishman” (1701), or from Laurence Sterne’s self-reflexive and playful Tristam Shandy, published in the same year as Johnson’s Rasselas. That Burney’s work has been described as “stylistically influenced” by Tristram Shandy61 suggests that she may have consciously manipulated her language to reflect the tensions she saw operating in society, just as the earlier castaway narratives had drawn on issues of language, such as translation, silence and the castaway’s assumed loss of speech. In her journal in 1762, a much younger Burney comments that she has been reading of the search of happiness in Rasselas and was “equally charmed and shocked”. It may be that Johnson’s work was, ironically, an influence on The Wanderer, for Burney goes on to say: “one thing during the Course of the successless enquiry struck me, which gave me much comfort, which is, those who wander the world avowedly and purposely in search of happiness, who view every scene of present joy with an Eye to what may succeed, certainly are more liable to disappointment, misfortune and sorrow.”62 Burney’s novel, in fact, has much in common with the early eighteenth-century female castaway narratives, which drew on different languages and cultures, the resources of language itself, as well as writing (versus speech), and other narrative strategies to create new identities. Burney’s play with language includes onomatopoeia and puns in both French and English.63 Juliet is a hybrid figure in both language and culture, as she born a Protestant and raised in a French Catholic convent, like similar figures in Aubin’s and Evans’ narratives. Juliet, castaway between classes, is like Martha: a translator between different languages and different values. Burney too draws on the problem of letters and their misinterpretation, and the 61

Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750-1835, 199, 136. Frances Burney, Journals and Letters, ed., Peter Sabor, Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 2001, 3. 63 Doody suggests that L.S., or Ellis (Juliet’s pseudonym given her by Elinor, champion of women’s rights), is a play on the French-English, “elle is” (Burney, The Wanderer, xvi). 62

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problematic truth of travel and romance narratives. In The Wanderer, Burney manipulates language, value and text to suggest new identities, different liaisons and different possibilities. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft had cited Rousseau as saying: “Educate women like men … and the more they resemble our sex, the less power will they have over us.” In other words, Rousseau had made women’s education appear to benefit men. Wollstonecraft’s responds by indicating that the outcome of women’s education would be self-control: “I do not wish them to have power of men, but over themselves.”64 Wollstonecraft thought that education, not only in the schoolroom, but in public life itself, would reduce men’s power by giving women greater experience and making them better judges of human behaviour. It was essential to her argument that women circulate freely and equally: The world cannot be seen by an unmoved spectator, we must mix in the throng, and feel as men feel before we can judge of their feelings. If we mean, in short, to live in the world to grow wiser and better, and not to merely enjoy the good things of life, we must attain a knowledge of others at the same time that we become acquainted with ourselves … 65

Her imperative for women “to feel as men feel” seems to support the idea that the female individual in Western societies is over-determined by a masculine and rational individualism, and her image suggests a Crusoe-like freedom and individualism. Yet Wollstonecraft retains her opposition to an individualism that would reify the self and rationality at the cost of emotional and community life. When Wollstonecraft urges her readers to “Make the heart clean, let it expand and feel for all that is human instead of being narrowed by selfish passions”,66 she evokes a similar and complex critique of social values to Defoe in his depiction of the returning Crusoe as an altruistic figure. It is in such moments that the isolated figure of the castaway seems to speak directly to the eighteenth-century with its gendered tensions between individual and community; economic and social concerns, and masculine and feminine roles. 64

Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 134. Ibid., 252. 66 Ibid., 279. 65

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Wollstonecraft and Burney, whose work comes to influence Jane Austen, draw on the image of the female castaway to envisage the problems and possibilities of individualism and independence. Like the early castaway narratives, written in the wake of Robinson Crusoe, their stories emphasise the mutability of values described as masculine and feminine, as they draw on genre and the different significations of language and writing to call new identities into existence. The female castaway story, as it continues into the nineteenth century, increasingly becomes a story of reification tied to a female Britannia, and the politics of Empire. Under the influence of the nineteenthcentury children’s adventure story, the female castaway, more vigorous and independent, is largely the story of Empire writ large. As Virginia Woolf observed of women in fiction, in comparison to women’s everyday reality, “she is a person of the utmost importance”.67 It is not until the late twentieth century, that writers (as discussed in the next chapter) return to the female castaway narrative in a critical context to contextualise individualism. These postmodern castaway narratives effectively reinvigorate the female castaway figure as a site of complexity and transformation, turning Robinson Crusoe back into the gendered text and text of social criticism that is once was, while acknowledging its role as a founding text of individualism. In order to more fully understand the relevance of values determined as feminine to the development of individualism, it is necessary therefore to turn to female castaway narratives of the twentieth century.

67

Quote from A Room of One’s Own (1929), in Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, and Three Guineas, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, 55.

CHAPTER NINE CRUSOE AND MODERN WOMAN His women have the indecency and the continence of beasts; his men are strong and silent as trees. English feminism and English imperialism already lurk in these souls which are just emerging from the animal kingdom.1 Defoe, by reiterating that nothing but a plain earthenware pot stands in the foreground, persuades us to see remote islands and the solitudes of the human soul.2

The Female Crusoe ends with a discussion the female castaways of the late twentieth-century postmodern novel for two reasons. The first is to examine the relevance of the castaway theme to our own modern era and the second is to read these texts of post-modern deconstruction alongside Robinson Crusoe and the eighteenth-century female castaway narratives, now understood as social, critical, complex and hybrid. Given that the eighteenth-century texts have been read through a post-structuralist lens, it is perhaps not surprising that similarities abound between the two sets of texts. Yet it is still useful to look at the castaway themes taken up in the postmodern texts and see that these texts not only deconstruct a masculine rational individualism, but that they also return to Robinson Crusoe and revive its social criticism and complexity. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, there was a 1

James Joyce, Daniel Defoe, ed. Joseph Prescott, Buffalo: State University of New York, 1964, 23. 2 Virginia Woolf, “Robinson Crusoe”, in The Second Common Reader, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1932, 54. Consistent with Defoe’s use of hybrid forms (the man-woman of Defoe’s Roxana, discussed earlier, for example), Susan M. Squier shows that Defoe’s writing was the inspiration for the gender-crossing Orlando, and quotes Woolf as saying: “I sketched the possibilities which an unattractive woman, penniless, alone might yet bring into being ... . It struck me, vaguely that I might write a Defoe narrative for fun” (Susan M. Squier, “Tradition and Revision in Woolf’s Orlando: Defoe and ‘The Jessamy Brides’”, Women’s Studies, XII/2 [1986], 167).

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notable turn to the eighteenth century in the work of contemporary novelists. In a survey of fifty of these works, Donna Heiland stated that these constituted “a genuine literary sub-genre” that was only “beginning to be understood”.3 She suggested two main reasons for their interest: modern technology was beginning to question the Cartesian mind-body distinction and an historical dismantling of colonialism was well underway. In Heiland’s view, the two were connected in the sense that the key convention being questioned was that of a European mind controlling a colonised body. In particular, the authors’ depiction of gendered and racial identities, as historically shaped in language and culture, proposed a “deep connection between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries”.4 It is in this context that a number of literary works portraying female castaways and castaway themes, and engaging both directly and indirectly with Robinson Crusoe, appeared in the mid 1980s. Jane Gardam’s Crusoe’s Daughter (1985), Barbara Einzig’s Robinson Crusoe; A New Fiction (1983) and J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) are respectively English, American and South African responses to Robinson Crusoe and the story of rational individualism.5 In each text, a female castaway narrates her story in retrospect and, in doing so, shows her struggle to come into being as an individual. In each work, attention is paid to problems and possibilities as each female protagonist becomes the writer of her own autobiography and her own textual self. All three authors show the female castaway’s individuality to be enabled and restrained by dominant gendered and historical discourses, as well as by the embodied experience of being female. In particular, the female individual is shown cast away within a gendered landscape of overlapping historically-informed discourses of trade, religion and Western philosophical thinking, as well as by particular conventions of writing and narrative. Most importantly, and 3

Donna Heiland, “Historical Subjects: Recent Fiction about the Eighteenth Century”, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, XXI/1, 109. 4 Ibid., 114. 5 Other engagements with Robinson Crusoe throughout the second half of the twentieth century include Michel Tournier, Friday; or, the Other Island, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967; Jean Giradoux, Suzanne and the Pacific, New York: Howard Fertig, 1975; Marian Wiggins, John Dollar, New York: Harper and Row, 1989 and Hong Kingston, China Men, 1989, described in Green, The Robinson Crusoe Story, 183 and 203, as “a Sinified version of Robinson Crusoe”.

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in accord with the eighteenth-century castaway narratives, in these texts the state of being cast away is not just a state of powerlessness and deprivation, but also a site of possibility and transformation for the individual and for society, showing that the castaway scenario continues to be used to evoke the emergence of different kinds of subjects and societies. These three authors, as in the eighteenth century, draw on themes that include the defining of certain values as feminine and the depiction of the castaway island as an in-between ground of transformation.6 In these contemporary texts, the individuality of modern men and women emerges from Modernity’s sexist, racist and colonialist history. Significantly, Robinson Crusoe does not simply represent an all-consuming masculine rational individualism, but is represented to the reader as a text whose hybrid and gendered values have contributed to the shaping of modern identity. Like the eighteenth century authors, the contemporary authors of the female castaway narrative draw on the transformative nature of feminine values (ascribed differently in each work) in order to critically comment on individualism and society’s values. Gardam, Einzig and Coetzee draw on many themes which appeared in the early castaway narratives, albeit in very different periods and with different preoccupations. The list of similar themes includes reproduction, inheritance and marriage as symbolic and linguistic acts; the role of the mother in shaping women’s public and private participation and identity; women as influential moral and pedagogical figures; the inextricability and interdependence of class, sex and race; the symbolic (and actual) significance of slavery to individualism and feminism; the importance of language and writing in shaping emerging subjects and, finally, the feminine as a median ground of translation in relation to the precarious, illusory and negotiable nature of values, meanings and language. In addition to these themes, what is represented as foreign (or strange) in these novels includes the emotions, the female body, the migrant, and art, 6

In the earlier chapters, the feminine referred to the feminine gendering of certain values in the eighteenth century. While, none of the three twentieth century novels suggest an inherent feminine nature, all three suggest feminine values and a feminine textuality and ethics that inform modern subjectivity.

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and what is domestic and familiar includes English culture, masculinity, rationality, linear history and industry. These tensions are represented as shaping individualism, as opposing values mutually construct, deconstruct and inform each other. In these three narratives, rational and Protestant individualism is not only criticised, but also drawn upon as the authors take up the theme of travel, migration and journeying into writing to transform the meanings of dominant cultural narratives. Eighteenth-century castaway texts drew on ascribed feminine and so-called foreign values to show the cultural relativity of what was conventionally considered to be true and authentic. In the twentieth-century texts, values described as feminine and foreign are represented as powerful exclusions from dominant culture, which – through their exclusion – continue to powerfully shape individualism. The contemporary female castaway narratives places values described as feminine, at the centre of Modernity, and associates these values with social change, thereby reaffirming the hybrid, feminine and textual aspects of Robinson Crusoe and the eighteenth-century female castaway texts that engaged with it. The modern castaway texts work to transform the dominant story of the unitary, rational masculine individualism widely associated with Defoe’s iconic text, and in doing so the restore the hybridity and gendered complexity of Defoe’s eighteenth-century text. The discussion that follows briefly discusses each of the three texts before going on to discuss, in more detail, thematic resemblances to the eighteenth-century female castaway narratives. CRUSOE’S DAUGHTER By bringing together Robinson Crusoe with a variety of Modernist texts, Jane Gardam’s Crusoe’s Daughter becomes a narrative “in which Defoe’s novel begins to look very modern”.7 As this chapter’s epigraphs indicate, Modernist authors like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce understood Defoe’s writing to speak of emerging modern subjects. Though perhaps reflecting their own writing styles, it is interesting that Defoe is praised by Joyce for his ability to depict the 7

Russell McDougall, “A Novel Atlas: Tradition and the Individual Text of Crusoe’s Daughter”, in Uncommon Ground: Essays in Literatures in English, eds Andrew Taylor and Russell McDougall, Adelaide: Centre for Research in New Literatures in English Publications, 1990, 122.

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real, substantial and physically present, and by Woolf, for his depiction of the ideal, abstract and the insubstantial. As suggested by reading Robinson Crusoe as an allegory, the apparently different readings by Joyce and Woolf may be but two doors leading to the same text. Gardam’s novel represents Robinson Crusoe as informing the emergence of Western female individualism and the life of the protagonist Polly Flint, whose name speaks of the influence of children’s literature in general. Polly grows up in twentieth-century England,8 raised by aunts in a house called Oversands, built on the coastland marshes of England. The house, which tosses “like a ship” and is like “a desert isle”,9 is built on a marsh, a space that is neither land nor sea. As in the eighteenth-century castaway stories, the meeting of land and sea effectively evokes an in-between space between what is known and what is not, between what is considered insubstantial, and substantial. By the end of the novel, the landscape has been transformed by industrialisation and the house is part of the city. As the built social and industrial environment comes to dominate the natural landscape, Polly is radicalised, staging a sit-in protest with a group of nuns to save her house from compulsory purchase. Polly, whose sailor father dies early in the text, is cast away as a female between the complex and contradictory discourses of religion, rationality, aesthetics and commerce, all literally identified with her own and others’ houses. In her house, she is shaped by her aunts’ religious values, represented as synonymous with those of the middle class. As she grows she has increasing contact with the neighbouring houses of the artistic and aristocratic Thwaites and the industrial Zeits, bring her knowledge of aesthetic and rational values respectively. When she comes of age, Polly comes to realise that her aunts’ Anglican faith requires that she have no sexual or material desires and she refuses to be confirmed in her religion.10 As a young girl, Polly 8

Her name is a reference to Crusoe’s parrot, as well as to the pirate captain (and parrot) in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883). 9 Jane Gardam, Crusoe’s Daughter, London: Abacus Books, 1986, 12 and 130. 10 Lissa Paul, discussing Gardam’s blurring of children’s and adult literature, states of Crusoe’s Daughter that “Transgressions of spatial, sexual and linguistic authority occur on almost every page” (“Escape Claws: Cover Stories on ‘Lolly Willowes’ and ‘Crusoe’s Daughter’”, Signal: Approaches to Children’s Books, LXIII/1, [September 1990], 214).

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has admired Robinson Crusoe and her name indicates her initial parroting of Crusoe and his values. Her reaching puberty calls both the relevance of Crusoe, as a guide for her life, and religion into question. Although in her old age Polly will come to admire Crusoe’s fortitude once more, when she begins to menstruate, she realises her undeniable and embodied sexual difference. Polly’s ultimate castaway state, already marked by her physical location and by her withdrawal from religion and from Crusoe, is finally realised when, as an adult, her boyfriend Theo Zeit’s rich industrialist parents prevent him from marrying her (in the thwarted marriage scenario of the earlier castaway narratives). When Zeit marries another woman, Polly becomes a drunk, highlighting her previously ordered, rational and Protestant state. Alice, the maid who once worked for her aunts, has since married the local headmaster and she rescues Polly by offering her a job as a teacher. The scene indicates Alice’s social mobility, the theme that was so important to the eighteenth-century narratives, as Alice and Polly reverse roles as mistress and servant. By the end of the text, Zeit has divorced and, after his experience of Nazi Germany, he dies in Polly’s care. The earlier critique of inheritance, and the theme of social communities as families, continues to be important to this castaway narrative as Polly raises Zeit’s daughters as if they were her own, and leaves her memoirs to Alice’s daughter, a journalist (her occupation suggesting the legacy of Defoe). Polly’s adoption of the children, and her own experience of being raised by her aunts, emphasises the idea of family as a social, rather than natural phenomenon: a prevalent theme of the earlier castaway narratives. Gardam depicts Polly’s experiences as real, symbolic and influential and, throughout the text, she combines the influence of Robinson Crusoe with various feminine literary, pedagogic and religious representations, showing the gendered complexity of Polly as a modern individual. At the end of the text, Polly and Crusoe complement each other, just as Friday and Crusoe confirmed and transformed each other’s identities. In Gardam’s work, Robinson Crusoe contributes to the rise to female individualism, as Polly, represented as a childless virgin, influences and raises her adopted “daughters”, much as Crusoe’s experiences paved the way for his nephew to become a gentleman.

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ROBINSON CRUSOE; A NEW FICTION In Barbara Einzig’s post-modern and pseudo-autobiographical Robinson Crusoe; A New Fiction11 the protagonist, named for, yet different from, the author Einzig, who grows up in America in 1951 in a family shaped by its Hungarian Jewish origins. This highly parodic, intertextual narrative opens with Einzig locating herself, spatially and socially, by describing the circumstances of her birth in Michigan. In a parody of Defoe’s opening paragraph she states: “I was born in the year, 1951, in the town of Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the county of Wayne, in a Catholic hospital, near the large family of my mother, daughter of a rabbi and an apartment house manager, and that of my father, a young, handsome man whose virtue shone.”12 Einzig goes on to tell of coming into being as a writer, in the context of her family history: her Jewish maternal family in Hungary; her parents’ post-war migration; and the family’s journey across America to California. Like Crusoe whose name changed from Kreutznaer, Einzig points out her own corrupted name: My mother enters this story early by necessity … having married my father, whose relations were long ago called Egyes, being it is told the only Jews in that place, Kisvarda, also of Hungary, but after whom I have not been strictly called, but known instead as, Barbara Einzig; for by the usual corruption of words in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, we were called, nay, we call ourselves, Einzig, and so my companions always called me.13

As in the tradition of the female castaway text, Einzig’s problem comes at puberty, signalling a crisis at the site of her sexual difference and emerging female sexuality. Her crisis is also one of writing and representation when she decides to write poetically, in order to write 11 Barbara Einzig, Robinson Crusoe; A New Fiction, Wisconsin: Membrane Press, 1983. Einzig is an American-born author who has produced prize-winning short fiction and poetry, as well as translations from Russian. Her text is a short prose piece (seventeen pages long) published by an alternative press. In its paperback edition it resembles a chapbook, the periodical form in which Robinson Crusoe was later serialised. It is also available on the Internet: http://www.thing.net/~grist/l &d/leinzig2.htm (accessed 2 April 2009). 12 Einzig, Robinson Crusoe; A New Fiction, 2. 13 Ibid., 1.

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her Hungarian grandmother’s history. She compares her desire to mix the genres of poetry and history with Crusoe’s desire to go to sea and observes: “The original continent for which I set out required but a modest voyage: I wrote of my mother’s mother sailing for this country.”14 In evoking Defoe’s eighteenth-century language, Einzig exposes the apparent transparency of realism and represents language and memories, societies and narratives as imbued with “a plague of connection”, all marked by differently gendered values. In particular, history is rational and masculine, while poetry is feminine and irrational. In accord with Crusoe’s isolation and individualism, she comes to understand the inherent cultural investment (leading to both problems and possibilities) in “keeping things separate”: My father ... trembled at the possibility of a dangerous by-product being accidentally released through the combining of women and history within one literary vessel. My work, he argued, began to approach poetry, wedding all things ... should I continue on my present course I might return us to the era prior to Adam Smith, whose most important achievement had been to divorce political economy from ethics.

What is at stake here is value, the key early eighteenth-century castaway theme, in Einzig’s story, referring to the risk that history or truth will be devalued in its association with poetry and imagination. The stated irony – that Smith had divorced economics from ethics – suggests the implications of the gendering of value and presents Einzig’s work as a text of social criticism. Representations of such boundaries as permeable (the eighteenth-century’s definition of excess as the exceeding of boundaries) is a theme in the work of all three authors, as for example when Gardam’s Polly sees her friend Treece’s poetry and compares it to Defoe’s writing: “it had a lovely fortitude.”15 Einzig’s parents, despite their early encouragement and her own father’s writing, forbid her to write anymore and her father’s words echo Crusoe’s father: “if she writes on, she will be the most miserable wretch that ever was born.”16 Without authority to write, Einzig 14

Ibid., 10. Ibid., 156. 16 Ibid., 9. 15

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begins to doubt the truth of knowledge itself and her doubts signify a break with the dominant rational paradigm. She says she can no longer trust the conventions and boundaries inherent in genres of literature, knowledge, culture and society. Expressed in sea-going terms, her thoughts can “not rest on any horizon line”.17 She represents herself as an epistemological castaway, unable to survive, to exist, in dominant paradigms. Like Robinson Crusoe and the earlier castaway narratives, such as Zelia in the Desert, a result of the crisis is that Einzig writes the highly poetic and inter-textual montage that the reader is reading. Robinson Crusoe; A New Fiction ends showing an Einzig figure who is both anxious and productive, having interrogated her own textual and cultural construction and authored her own self and autobiography through reference to Crusoe’s own authoring. In order to write her “New Fiction”, Einzig has created a “web of connections” which include her inheritance from Defoe, the philosophies of Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt (quotes from all three precede the text), and a feminine and Jewish literary inheritance that includes: Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, Jane Austen and the story-telling Rabbi Nachman.18 In particular, by productively associating Arendt’s concepts of public and private space with Benjamin’s concepts of translation19 Einzig creates her autobiographical self as a complex montage fiction. Her use of fragmentation, montage and quotation counters continuity, rationality and linearity, as Einzig’s text itself becomes a hybrid space of transformation and translation.

17

Ibid., 5. Ibid., 11. Rabbi Nachman was the founder of Hasidism, or Chassidism. Harold Bloom says that “Hasidism was the ultimate descendent of Kabbalah” (Kabbalah and Criticism, New York: The Seabury Press, 1975: 34). Hannah Arendt names Nachman as the only writer Franz Kafka would read. Arendt describes Kafka’s work (in terms similar to Einzig’s work) as “making decisive changes in traditional parables or inventing new ones in traditional style” (Introduction to Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, New York: Schocken Books, 1969, 41). 19 Rey Chow observes that gender “forms the basis for some of Benjamin’s most important conceptual moves” (“Benjamin’s Love Affair with Death”, New German Critique, 48 [Autumn 1989], 65). Arendt’s engagement with gender issues and relevance to feminism is also discussed by Seyla Benhabib, in “Feminist Theory and Hannah Arendt’s Concept of Public Space”, History of the Human Sciences, VI/2 (May 1993), 97-114. 18

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FOE Coetzee’s Foe, the most well known of the three texts, is a postmodern work of deconstruction that focuses on the interactions of gender, language, subjectivity and value.20 Similarly to Gardam and Einzig, yet more so than both, Coetzee situates the female castaway in a literary, philosophic, psychoanalytic and symbolic eighteenthcentury textual landscape.21 The female castaway, Susan Barton, is stranded on an island following a journey in which she fails to find her daughter, described in eighteenth-century as having been “abducted and conveyed to the New World by an Englishman, a factor and agent in the carrying trade”.22 The mother, cast away on her journey to find her daughter, evokes the absent or dead mothers of the early eighteenth century and the mother/daughter castaways later in the century. Similar to the blurred representational distance between author Einzig and protagonist Einzig, names in Coetzee’s work have multiple resonances. For example, Susan’s daughter is also called Susan, blurring the roles of mother and daughter, and referring intertextually to the daughter of Defoe’s Roxana. After a mutiny on the ship on her way home, the mother Susan is put into a boat with the dead captain. This punishment, for an alleged sexual relationship with the Captain, brings her to the island where she finds a Friday who has no tongue, and a figure named Cruso, his name – now spelt without an “e” – indicating his sameness and difference from Defoe’s Friday.23 Susan, frustrated in her attempts to discover the histories of the two men concludes that Cruso’s connection with Friday is slavery. Read in 20

Coetzee acknowledges he is able to move “relatively freely within the deconstructive mode” (J.M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992, 245-46). 21 Coetzee’s depiction of the island as foundational suggests Derrida’s “white mythology”, of which he states: “White mythology – metaphysics has erased within itself the fabulous scene that has procured it, the scene that nevertheless remains active and stirring, inscribed in white ink, an invisible design covered over in the palimpsest” (Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy”, in Margins of Philosophy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, 146). 22 J.M. Coetzee, Foe, London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1986, 10. 23 Chris Bongie points out that the “e” can only be heard in writing, indicating the difference that writing makes (Chris Bongie, “‘Lost in the Maze of Doubting’: J.M. Coetzee’s Foe and the Politics of Unlikeness”, Modern Fiction Studies, XXXIX/2 [Summer 1993], 271).

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the context of postcolonial criticism, the silent Friday suggests the colonised black subject whose experience is excluded from representation in white, or Eurocentric writing.24 As such, Susan’s discovery that “I have come to the wrong island”25 is also the readers’ discovery, as they come to realise the text’s engagement with Robinson Crusoe, and the story’s focus on the significance of language in the construction of gender and race, individuality and society. Echoing the way in which so-called foreign or neglected values of both race and gender, were drawn upon in order to “rescue” the eighteenth-century castaways, Foe establishes symbolic and actual associations between the silent Friday as a castrated figure, and the female castaway. Susan says of him, for example, “It was no comfort that his mutilation was secret, closed behind his lips (as some other mutilations are hidden by clothing), that outwardly he was like any other Negro.”26 The likeness between the two figures, implicit in their descriptions and actions, is made clear to the reader, while the female castaway simply observes Friday with abject horror.27 Coetzee represents Friday and Susan as interdependent bodies in pain, suggesting the difficulty of their achieving full representation and authority in language. As such, when Susan arrives on the foundational island she emerges from the ocean half-limping.28 Just as the early castaway narratives had shown female castaways carried on the backs of servants, so in Foe, Friday carries Susan: “So part-way skipping on one leg, part-way riding on his back, with my petticoat gathered up and my chin brushing his springy hair, I ascended the 24

White Writing (1988) is the title of a collected edition of Coetzee’s critical writings. The title has a double significance as Eurocentric writing and as Derrida’s “white ink” indicating both race and erasure, as that which cannot be read. 25 Coetzee, Foe, 6. 26 Ibid., 24. 27 Teresa Dovey suggests that Foe represents an “unveiling” of “men’s privileging of the phallus and of the faculty of sight”, evocatively suggesting Aubin’s characters’ veiled disguises (Teresa Dovey, The Novels of J.M. Coetzee: Lacanian Allegories, Craighall: A.D. Donker, 1988, 372-73). 28 Benita Parry points out that three of Coetzee’s female narrators “explicitly represent the body as the agent of language” (Benita Parry, “Speech and Silence in the Fictions of J.M. Coetzee”, in Critical Perspectives on J.M. Coetzee, eds Graham Huggan and Steven Watson, London: Macmillan, 1996, 48).

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hillside, my fear of him abating in this strange backwards embrace.”29 When her foot swells, her hopping on one leg plays with the idea that Defoe’s single footprint is, in this instance, shaped by a woman. Once back in England with Friday (Cruso having died on the return journey), Susan looks for the author named Foe, so that he may write her story of the island. The name Foe refers to Defoe himself (he called himself De Foe), but may also refer to the alienation of the self in language and to binary interdependencies such as friend/foe, masculine/feminine, foreign/domestic, author/reader, and individual and society. As they do in Einzig’s and Gardam’s work, such binary tensions fragment the language of the text, as Susan and Friday struggle to come into existence as legitimate subjects. Susan is to legitimise her own and Friday’s way of being in the world through her writing. As Coetzee states in his later novel, The Age of Iron (1990): “Death may indeed be the last great foe of writing, but writing is also the foe of death”.30 Coetzee makes an important distinction between the feminine (associated with the non-dominant binaries of language) and female (as an historical subject position). In an interview he describes Susan as not only “The Female Castaway”,31 but also a “feminine subject”.32 That is, for Coetzee, Susan is more than a gendered female subject and more than a theoretical, feminine abstraction. As critic Brian Macaskill states of another of Coetzee’s female castaways, Magda in In the Heart of the Country: [she] is only in part, a theoretical construct, a “hole” born of deconstruction, or an absence indicated by lack of a historiographic record. Her “wholeness” lies elsewhere ... in the intersection of linguistic and literary codes.33

All three authors depict language and literature as a web of intertextual connections within which the individual must emerge, though always incomplete, due to these same textual independencies. For Coetzee, language is like nature itself – a mesh that is natural, 29

Coetzee, Foe, 6. J. M. Coetzee, The Age of Iron, London: Secker and Warburg, 1990, 106. 31 Coetzee, Foe, 67. 32 Coetzee, Doubling the Point, 248. 33 Brian Macaskill, “Charting J.M. Coetzee’s Middle Voice”, Contemporary Literature, XXXV/3 (Autumn 1994), 462. 30

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interlinked and connected: “The rain dripped here and there through the roof and hissed on the hot stones. In time the rain ceased and the sun came out, drawing wisps of steam from the earth, and the wind resumed and blew without respite till the next lull and the next rain.”34 The description echoes the scene in Paul and Virginia (quoted in Chapter Seven) in which Bernardin de Saint Pierre depicts industry as a web of connections, and therefore the importance of recognition by others, when the hermit and Paul stand on a hill and observe the activities of a small town.35 In her work, Gardam refers to the problematic seamlessness of realism (and to the advantages of individualism) when Polly observes that when Crusoe was “married to a landscape ... he had a hard time to keep sane”. On the same page Polly criticises the Brontës’ nineteenth-century narratives saying that they while they wrote “a compelling landscape … I am not sure that we were ever meant to become knitted into a landscape”.36 The figure of Mrs Woods, the aunts’ housekeeper, wearing black wool and carrying her black knitting, becomes an example of oppressed identities and desires, when she “hisses” her suppressed love for one of the aunts and Polly says: “Nobody mentioned the scene. Ever.”37 Einzig evokes the tensions of separateness and connectedness, of individual and community, by referring to the Kabbalah, to the Eastern European oral story-telling tradition of Rabbi Nachman, and the English literary tradition of the Brontë sisters. Einzig’s phrase “Spinning a tale” draws out the important differences and similarities between Jewish and feminine story-telling traditions. Rabbi Nachman’s tales have a sonic quality; they exceed boundaries and ring throughout “the spinning globe”. In comparison, the Brontës’ narratives “had to be spun in underground caverns where the atmosphere was sufficiently moist”. Nachman’s texts are associated with the air and with lofty ideals – ”the heights made me dizzy” –, while the tradition of literary women suggests private, enclosed space and women’s domestic and hidden labour. The feminine literary tradition, though enclosed and confined, is represented as powerful, 34

Coetzee, Foe, 14. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Paul and Virginia, 201-202. 36 Gardam, Crusoe’s Daughter, 77. 37 Ibid., 59 and 13. 35

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while Rabbi Nachman’s voice is tiny, but “soaring”. In these descriptions, Einzig places disclosure and enclosure on an equal footing, showing both as informing the construction of the female individual (the difference between Arendt’s and Crusoe’s philosophies is important here and will be discussed shortly). THE SPACE IN-BETWEEN

Each of these contemporary narratives reflects the triangular structures of the eighteenth-century castaway narratives where values and ways of being are depicted as in crisis and cast away, only to be reshaped on the island, before re-emerging as newly authentic and authoritative. In this sense, the female castaway is associated with transformation (or translation) in each text. As Coetzee has another of his female protagonists say – Magda from In the Heart of the Country: “The medium, the median – that is what I wanted to be! Neither master nor slave, neither parent nor child, but the bridge between, so that in me the contraries should be reconciled.”38 In these terms, feminine values, the female castaway and writing itself shape an active transformative space between subject and its Other, and between what is considered to have substance and what is not. In both centuries, the castaway narrative shows identity to be the outcome of tensions between various binary oppositions and discourses. Coetzee’s triangle of characters on the island, and in London; Gardam’s three discursive houses of influence; and Einzig’s female castaway and her sisters, representing various symbolic “marriages” produce a new space in which new subjects, or subjectivities, arise. Einzig is shown to be both related to and different to her mother (the outcome of a marriage between religion and commerce – “a rabbi and an apartment house manager”) and her father, an economist teaching at a university, his role linking commerce and knowledge production. Einzig is similar and different to her first sister who is a social worker, shaped by a language that prioritises the material, social world; and to her second sister who with a philosophical sensibility, “wanders certain islands to the west, shirt out”.39 Shaped by multiple discourses, Polly occupies a median and hybrid position between old and new worlds. Gardam depicts Crusoe 38 39

J.M. Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country, Johannesburg: Raven, 1978, 133. Einzig, Robinson Crusoe; A New Fiction, 1.

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as denying his interdependency on textual negotiations and therefore, at the end of the book he says unequivocally: “Characters in fiction cannot make new departures. We are eunuchs. Frozen eunuchs.”40 But, a vigorous, productive and hybrid individualism (evoked via Robinson Crusoe and feminine, religious and Modernist literary cultures) has already shaped Polly as an active subject in the world. In contrast to Crusoe’s comments on the infertility of texts, when Polly’s Aunt Frances changes dramatically after a death, Polly finds that “new people can emerge: and it will be a bad day for novels when this is not so”.41 For Polly, her aunt’s transformation is “as precise as a birth and as astonishing and as complete”.42 For Gardam, social change is not always dramatic and sudden but can be tentative, hesitating and precarious: “change ... proceeds waveringly ... and ... often does not proceed at all”.43 The hesitancy, literalised in its dot-dot representation, shows Gardam enacting the textual difficulty of achieving an authoritative voice in language, while also representing the emergence of such an identity. When Polly says that Crusoe’s finding another person’s footprint is often understood as Robinson Crusoe’s most “terrifying” episode, and says she finds it “much more frightening” when Crusoe hears “his own voice calling out his own name” (Crusoe’s parrot calls out “Robin Crusoe”), she seems to be referring to the existential terror of realising one’s textual and discursive construction in language.44 However, such imitations ultimately serve Polly as she comes to realise that her strength is not based on her isolation, but on her engagement with others. Polly not only imitates those in the neighbouring houses, but is also imitated by others and her realisation of the significance of this comes when her upwardly-mobile maid Alice rescues her. Before hearing Alice speak her own words, Polly “had begun to be a little afraid of Alice”,45 her statement evoking the eighteenth-century concern and confusion over the status of servants: 40

Gardam, Crusoe’s Daughter, 221. Ibid., 54. 42 Ibid., 55. 43 Ibid., 54. 44 Ibid., 65. 45 Ibid., 155. 41

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‘Yes I see. That’s a good thing then,’ she [Alice] said, examining the parcel. It was my own voice using my own words. She was in charge – and had probably been in charge, though I had not known it, for ages. ... . Alice was her own woman ... . But when I got used to the change I liked it.

All three authors play with issues of identity and language in their work, just as the eighteenth-century castaway narrative authors had played with genre expectations of romance and travel narratives. At the end of her text, Gardam signals changes in identity and agency when the novel form becomes a theatre script. Einzig shows her protagonist’s struggle for self-expression through a highly intertextual and poetic writing and Coetzee implies the limits of language in a final short section that is historical, poetic, elliptical and repetitive. In this final scene an unnamed first-person narrator descends into the symbolic scene of the shipwreck to find Friday beneath the bodies of “Susan Barton and her dead captain … half-buried in sand … I come to Friday”. For Coetzee, the “slow stream” that pours from Friday’s open and silent mouth is all-pervasive and defining: “Soft and cold, dark and unending, it beats against my eyelids, against the skin of my face.”46 Susan, who is aligned with Friday in having such a shaping influence throughout the novel, is also shown as different to Friday. In keeping with the novel’s triangular dialectic, Susan is not only similar to yet different from Friday, but also from Foe (as muse to his writer, she becomes a writer herself), and from Cruso, with his non-dominant masculinity (she forces him to leave his island and then takes over his responsibility for Friday). In her similarities and differences from the trio of Friday, Foe and Cruso, Susan signals an in-between ground which shapes all three. The reader comes to understand that Susan’s subjectivity is shaped by contradictory discourses, which continue to enable new subjectivities to come into existence. THE FAMILIARITY OF THE FOREIGN Like the eighteenth-century castaway texts, these texts associate the feminine with the foreign (in being non-dominant and undervalued) and show different cultures symbolically and productively 46

Coetzee, Foe, 157.

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contributing to the development of Western culture and individualism. In Crusoe’s Daughter, Polly learns to speak French and German and, like Evans’ Martha Rattenberg, Polly becomes a translator. As a translator, she is able to speak to people who are Other to, and different from, herself. Her skills in language lead her to Theo Zeit and to her responsibility for his daughters in the wake of Nazi Germany. Just as Coetzee’s Susan inherits responsibility for the care of Friday, so Polly comes to care for Theo’s daughters. Gardam places the feminine and the foreign at the centre of English social and cultural life, and aligns each with an invigoration of English culture. In Einzig’s Robinson Crusoe; A New Fiction, migration and Einzig’s Hungarian and Jewish past feature as symbolic and actual transgressions of boundaries that are both negative and violent, as well as active and positive: each contributes to the shaping of American identity. In particular, history is represented as inextricable from the present. For example, in her dreams, Einzig connects the explorer De Soto and the car named for him with a figure she describes as an Indian Queen.47 Einzig counters yet recognises that all that is Other is often experienced as foreign and inaccessible. She describes the problem as one of establishing authenticity and when she discusses her grandfather’s religion, she says “Hasidic” was “a foreign, closed word”48 and “so . . . my public persona was to me but another fiction”.49 Her religion becomes an artificial construction that she must take her mother’s word for: “I regarded that attribute as a private one of my mother’s, a sort of personal mood that sometimes came over her, as a small shrine to the ominous …. Perhaps Mother even made it up.”50 For Einzig, visual and aesthetic representations underscore belief systems and she aligns the eighteenth-century insecurity over paper currency with the problem of belief in what can be observed: “when I reported where I was born it was with a sense of being a counterfeiter, 47

Hernando De Soto colonised the southern states of America travelling through what became Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas between 15391543. 48 Einzig, Robinson Crusoe; A New Fiction, 10. 49 Ibid., 8-9. 50 Ibid., 3.

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shining the false silver currency of my biography and catching your vulnerable eye. Eyes have an affinity for money, often decorating the notes themselves.”51 Her protagonist’s problem is that she cannot believe her eyes, trust her senses, or know the truth of others. She cannot be sure whether what she sees is memory, or whether sight is objective, so that “the eye formed a kind of foreign witness”.52 She explains to the reader that her story, based on information given to her, cannot be trusted. Continuing the religious hybridity of the eighteenth-century castaways, both Gardam and Einzig feature Judaism as a feminine contrast to the perceived masculine and Protestant individualism of Robinson Crusoe. As was the case for Aubin’s Catholicism, Judaism in Modernity is often associated with feminine values and with oppression. In Gardam’s text, the Jewish Theo and the Protestant Polly are parallel figures shaped by, while being different to, Crusoe. Einzig’s portrayed self is caught between religious and secular value systems, aligning these with feminine and masculine domains respectively. Through her references to Benjamin and Arendt, both of whom were critical of, and criticised by, the Jewish establishments of their era, Einzig attributes a critical yet positive role to Judaism in the construction of “Einzig’s” identity.53 THE WORK OF TRANSLATION Benjamin’s writings on translation allow Einzig to depict what is silenced by language, as well as what might be produced by both silence and language. In the Preface to her text, she quotes Benjamin in his “The Task of the Translator” saying: it is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work. For the sake of pure language he breaks through the decayed barriers of his own language. 51

Ibid., 14. Ibid., 5. 53 See discussions in Benhabib, “Feminist Theory and Hannah Arendt’s Concept of Public Space”; Chow, “Benjamin’s Love Affair with Death” and Beth Sharon Ash, “Walter Benjamin, Ethnic Fears, Oedipal Anxieties, Political Consequences”, New German Critique, XLVIII, (Autumn 1989), 2-42. 52

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Einzig positions herself as the translator of her own life, and contrasts Arendt’s understanding of spatiality and language (influenced by Benjamin) with Crusoe’s. She quotes Crusoe as saying: “I must keep the tame from the wild . . . and the only way for this was to have some enclosed piece of ground” and Arendt as saying (as if in dialogue with Crusoe): “you look only to the communicative value of the word. I look to the disclosing quality. And this disclosing quality has, of course, always a historical background.”54 Arendt’s statement concerns disclosure, while Crusoe’s words concern enclosure (and maintaining distinctions). The subject of Arendt’s quotation concerns ideas, language and history, while Crusoe’s appears to concern actions and nature. That these differences, spoken by differently gendered subjects serve Einzig’s text well, as Einzig then uses Benjamin’s play with gendered distinctions – for example, between nature and history – to problematise the idea of the seamless and autonomous individual.55 In Einzig’s text the boundaries between the self as subject and the self as a text are permeable as the boundaries she describes between private and public spaces. Arendt’s understanding that what is experienced in private and public space cannot be valued equally, is used by Einzig to positively portray the private sphere, with its conventional associations with the individual, the feminine and the domestic. Arendt argues that, “prior to the modern age ... to have no private place of one’s own (like a slave) meant to be no longer human”.56 In this context, Einzig associates her mother’s hidden 54

Einzig, Robinson Crusoe; A New Fiction, Preface, no page number. The quotation from Benjamin is from, “The Task of the Translator’, in Illuminations, 80 (my emphasis). 55 Christine Buci-Glucksman states that in Benjamin’s work, “the motif of the woman imposes, by its constancy, its persistence and wealth of meanings, all its interpretative radicality’ (“Catastrophic Utopia: The ‘feminine’ as Allegory of the Modern”, Representations, no. 14 [Spring 1986], 220-29). Eva Geulen suggests Benjamin’s work “might provide insights for feminism’s current dilemma, [as] Benjamin also sought alternatives … to the idealistic dialectic of subjective and objective, particular and universal” (“Toward a Genealogy of Gender in Walter Benjamin’s Writing”, The German Quarterly, LXIX/2 [Spring 1996], 161). 56 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958, 64.

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private world with a productive feminine space in which space and time are of generous proportions: “ the suburb in which we dwelt was not a mean one: great oak trees spread their boughs over the quiet streets; lanes and parks existed for walking quickly out of sight or hearing of automobiles … . ” 57 Such private spaces speak of openness and difference, rather than of silence and oppression: “there are a great many things which cannot withstand the implacable, bright light of the constant presence of others on the public scene.”58 While Arendt states that “an action can only be an action if there is a public space in which it can appear”59, she also recognises that public acts are not determined by agency (by individual intention), but are examined according to “the meanings the act takes on in the eyes of spectators in different times and places”.60 Einzig’s engagement with these ideas resonates with the eighteenth-century castaway narratives in which private space (the restorative space of reevaluation and negotiation on the island) complements the allimportant circulation in public space. FRIDAY AND SLAVERY Coetzee is the only one of these three modern authors who develops a Friday figure. While Defoe described his Friday as “not ... like the negroes” and as a commodity – his teeth like ivory – Coetzee describes Friday more directly, and less ideologically, as “a black African”.61 Susan, a figure produced by the discourses of commerce and Empire, itemises Friday’s appearance in the now familiar language of the account book: “the flat face, the small dull eyes, the broad nose, the thick lips, the skin not black but a dark grey, dry as if coated with dust.” Unlike Defoe’s description of Friday, this is a face that refuses to appeal to a European aesthetic (the noble savage), and 57

Einzig, Robinson Crusoe; A New Fiction, 3. Arendt, The Human Condition, 63. 59 Arendt quoted in Lisa Jane Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994, 79. 60 Arendt quoted in Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy, 79. 61 Derek Attridge, “Oppressive Silence: J.M. Coetzee’s Foe and the Politics of the Canon”, in Critical Perspectives on J.M. Coetzee, 184. Robert Post suggests that Friday’s description indicates that Foe is an allegory of South Africa (Robert M. Post, “The Noise of Freedom: J.M. Coetzee’s Foe”, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, XXX/3 [Spring 1989], 145). 58

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each suggestion of agreeableness on these terms is undermined. The description calls attention to Friday’s status as a non-subject and therefore, to the language of ownership, slavery and commerce. In her omission of the possessive pronoun “his” (for example, his flat face), Susan’s description, enacts slavery by refusing Friday ownership of his own body. For Susan the description is negative and when she arrives on the island, she imagines that Friday will want to kill her, not from enmity but, as a cannibal for subsistence. She supposes that to him she is like “a porpoise thrown up by the waves”, a description which merges her subjectivity with the shaping role of the ocean. When she observes that the waves give both death and life, her language is of a commercial give and take and a gendered activity and passivity. In this highly symbolic text, the rhetoric of give and take suggests the reciprocal process by which Friday and Susan must come into being as subjects within language and culture, both always already half-submerged in dominant and powerful discourses. In teaching Friday English, Susan is both active and passive and, in authoring her self, she both gains and loses. For Defoe and Coetzee, for different reasons and expressed differently, individuals are not separate and equal, but are always shaped in language, impinging on and influencing each other. In order to arrive at all on this foundational island, Susan must swim “against the current” to break “free of its grip”. Once on shore she is in need of Friday’s help while, in England, she is essential to Friday’s survival. Such reciprocity informs their first encounter as Friday touches her and she smells him: He reached out and with the back of his hand touched my arm. He is trying my flesh, I thought. But by and by my breathing slowed as I grew calmer. He smelled of fish and of sheepswool on a hot day.62

Both have arrived on the island (and into the narrative) disabled by their difference. In parallel with Friday’s silence, Susan is invaded by the wind to the extent that she has to bind her head and become deaf. With Friday unable to speak and Susan unable to hear, each is unable to communicate his or her difference from the masculine subject that 62

Coetzee, Foe, 6.

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is Cruso. Susan, Friday and Cruso (and, in London, Susan, Friday and Foe) exemplify the similarities and differences that define each of them as both and neither black/white; male/female; mistressmaster/slave and pupil/ teacher. FEMALE SEXUAL DESIRE All three authors represent the female body and female sexual desire as influential sites of difference in that their textual elision or absence shapes gendered roles and cultural meanings and values. In these contemporary texts, values described as feminine inform a median (or cast away) position that is associated neither with dominance nor with powerlessness. Connected with a productive, in-between space, these feminine values are associated with fluidity, excess and exteriority (existing outside of the known), just as the values associated with the feminine were associated with fluctuating, shifting and transformative values in Robinson Crusoe and the eighteenth-century female castaway texts. Coetzee represents the problem of female individualism in positioning Susan between Friday who, as a silenced body, is at one with himself, and Cruso who is at one with language (he is as one with the idealised foundational island and cannot survive out of it). The choice available to Susan therefore is one of bodily substantiality or textual insubstantiality. As Susan tells Foe, the problem is that if she is not author of herself in language then, as a sexualised female body, she risks being consigned to sexual commodification (just as the devalued Friday risks being a tradeable commodity). Like the immorality risked by the eighteenth-century female castaways, as a sexual and desiring subject, Susan risks compromising both her status and authority. In this regard, she says: I could return, in every respect to the life of a substantial body, the life you recommend. But such a life is abject. It is the life of a thing. A whore used by men is used as a substantial body.63

The texts of all three authors refer to the dominant cultural representation of the female sexual and reproductive body as positioned outside of, and in excess of, the subjectivity of the rational, economic individual. Because of this, all three authors represent the female castaway as a single, childless woman, just as some of the 63

Ibid., 126.

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earlier eighteenth-century narratives had depicted castaways as barren women, focussing on the problems of sexual desire and symbolic and actual reproduction. The twentieth-century texts however also counter this position of exclusion, by drawing on feminine cultural traditions and references in their texts (such as references to female and Modernist writers, religious figures and female professions). As a result each text produces female subjects who are also shaped by the influence of values described as feminine in Western culture and society. In all three texts, the female castaway emerges as an influential, quasi-maternal social figure: Coetzee’s Susan teaches Friday, Gardam’s Polly raises Zeit’s daughters and influences Alice’s journalist daughter, and Einzig gives birth to herself as a poet. In their work Einzig and Gardam locate Robinson Crusoe alongside a female literary tradition that includes writers as various as Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf. Early twentieth-century Modernism is important to these writers because this literary movement tended to both fragment and sexualise the self, influencing writers wishing to express an embodied and sexualised female experience.64 In one of Gardam’s many intertextual references, Polly in 1915 is the same age as Rachel from Woolf’s The Voyage Out (1915).65 Like Polly, Rachel had a Christian upbringing and was educated at home with her aunts: “her mother being dead”. In the tradition of Rousseau, Woolf’s Mrs Ambrose thinks Rachel would benefit from reading Defoe.66 While Woolf’s Rachel dies, in Gardam’s text Defoe’s writing is combined with Modernism to bring sexual vitality and life to the female subject. For 64

Dennis Brown contrasts Robinson Crusoe to the Modernist self, saying “Robinson Crusoe is a classic exemplification of the integral and consistent self” (Dennis Brown, The Modernist Self in Twentieth-Century English Literature: A Study in SelfFragmentation, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1989, 1 and 3). For a discussion of Modernism as feminine, see Rereading Modernism: New Directions in Feminist Criticism, ed. Lisa Rado, New York: Garland Publishing, 1994. 65 Gillian Beer suggests that Woolf’s novel has a “closely realistic surface” making it a possible model for Crusoe’s Daughter (Gillian Beer, Arguing with the Past: Essays in Narrative from Woolf to Sidney, London: Routledge, 1989, 167). 66 Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out, London: The Hogarth Press, 1949, (1st published 1915) 144. Gillian Beer describes The Voyage Out as having “a closely realistic surface” making it a relevant model for Crusoe’s Daughter (Gillian Beer, Arguing with the Past, 167).

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Gardam, as for Joyce in the opening epigraph to this chapter, Defoe’s realism has a sexual vigour, evident in Defoe’s depictions of Moll and Roxana. As Polly says of two other characters: “he changed – intensified – [her]”. The language suggests the way in which Friday’s masculinity and difference invigorates Crusoe’s virginal state, even as Crusoe feminises or “civilises” Friday. When Polly writes of her sexual desire to Theo, she compares herself to Moll Flanders “who could not have told him so with more passion and less restraint”.67 Earlier, Polly is surprised when she finds her grandmother’s hidden copy of Fanny Hill. In this sense, Gardam’s work echoes Woolf’s sentiments (in the second epigraph to this chapter), when Polly describes Defoe as having the ability to create: “men and women ... who were free to talk openly of the passions and desires which have moved men and women since the beginning of time, and thus even now they keep their vitality undiminished. There is a dignity in everything that is looked at openly.”68 In Woolf’s view, Defoe made “common actions dignified and common objects beautiful” and he made an important contribution by “describ[ing] the effect of the emotions on the body, not on the mind”.69 Gardam seems to draw on Woolf’s observations when she shows the power of plain language to convey great emotion and momentous, personal events: “Blood again. Disturbance in the blood. Ah well so it’s over. No children now.”70 Realism, sexual desire and the life and experience of the body are interlinked in these works. Negatively comparing modern realism to Defoe’s realism, Joyce stated that modern realism was a reaction to that real which “defies and transcends the magical beguilements of music”.71 In keeping with Joyce’s poetic reading of realism, Polly sees Defoe’s prose as “full of poetic truth”. It is journalism “with glory added. And not a lot of gush and romantic love.”72 In contrast, echoing what has conventionally been seen as Defoe’s verisimilitude, in Gardam’s text, Zeit the industrialist thinks that Robinson Crusoe is 67

Coetzee, Foe, 163. Virginia Woolf, “Defoe”, in The Common Reader, First Series, London: Hogarth Press, 1948, 130. 69 Woolf, “Robinson Crusoe”, 53. 70 Gardam, Crusoe’s Daughter, 200. 71 Joyce, Daniel Defoe, 22. 72 Ibid., 86. 68

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news reportage: “He was real, wasn’t he?”73 In these three modern castaway narratives, such tensions between rational language and poetic language are gendered and symbolic and as such, echo the earlier castaway narratives’ manipulation of the illusory nature of romance and travel narratives. Echoing the eighteenth-century castaway texts of Aubin in particular, Coetzee uses the language of the marriage ceremony when, after Susan has had sex with Cruso, she ponders the circumstances of her arrival and rhetorically asks “whether there was a better or worse”.74 Throughout Foe, Coetzee draws on the language of marriage (of individuals, of meanings) to join opposites such as the substantial or embodied (land) with the insubstantial (water), to create a language that is hybrid: both the same and other than its binary opposite. For example, the actions of Cruso and Susan describe an “activepassivity” that privileges both the agency of the subject and of the body. In this manner, Coetzee suggests the importance of both retaining and relinquishing agency. As such, when in London Susan lies with the author Foe, Foe asks the question: ‘I ask myself sometimes’, he said, ‘how would it be if God’s creatures had no need of sleep. If we spent all our lives awake, would we better people for it or worse?’75

Susan’s question on the island was similar: “What are these blinks of an eyelid, against which our only defence is an eternal and inhuman wakefulness?”76 Coetzee’s deconstructive text tears apart the appearance of seamlessness in order to create new meanings and to expose the constructed and textual nature of dominant meanings. The act is political as, on the island Susan notes that in “blinks” of silence and darkness there might be experienced “cracks and chinks through which other voices speak in our lives”.77 As if to show language as a living, changing phenomena, a constant work in process, Coetzee sprinkles his text with hyphenated words and words based on sounds 73

Gardam, Crusoe’s Daughter, 143. Coetzee, Foe, 30. 75 Ibid., 137. 76 Ibid., 30. 77 Ibid., 137. 74

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such as “willy-nilly” and “higgedly-piggedly”. Other newly hyphenated words, such as “ink-well”, “watch-dog”, “log-boat”, “slave-ship”, “watch-coat” and “slave-trader” (which later in the text becomes “slaveowner”) show the evolution of new words, identities and meanings in language. When, like the men in Evans’ utopian society, Susan asks Friday to trim hedges, she hopes that by controlling nature he will “build a bridge of words over which … he may cross to a time before Cruso … when he lived immersed in a prattle of words as unthinking as a fish in water”.78 The sense of bridges and cracks (and islands and shipwrecks) across and through which new meanings and different truths might emerge, informs the work of all three authors. Einzig, in her references to the Kabbalah, conveys Benjamin’s sense of languages as translations of an original sacred text: A song means filling a jug, and even more so breaking the jug. Breaking it apart. In the language of the Kabbalah we perhaps might call it: Broken Vessels.79

She describes the language of “sacred texts”80 as originary: a language that is both feminine and productively excessive. Both Susan and Friday spin language out of themselves differently. While Susan picks up Foe’s pen, Friday physically spins around in Foe’s clothes. In an interview, Coetzee indirectly indicates the significance of Friday’s act: Since experience and action depend upon man’s representations, man lives in relation to objects almost exclusively as language leads him to live it. By the very act of spinning language out of himself, he spins himself into language.81

78

Ibid., 60. H. Leivick, quoted by Harold Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, Preface. 80 Gershom Scholem, “Walter Benjamin”, in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, ed. Werner J. Dannhauser, Schocken Books, 1976 (quoted by Susan BuckMorss, The Dialectics of Seeing, Massachusetts and London: The MIT Press, 1989, 263). 81 Coetzee, quoting Wilhelm von Humboldt in the 1830s (Coetzee, Doubling the Point, 181). 79

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Macaskill argues that: “Coetzee’s act of ‘doing-writing’ represents a middle voice, a crucial – critical – response to materialist historiography”.82 Coetzee himself points to Defoe’s use of agentless sentences “to epitomise a particular moment in the rise of the bourgeoisie”.83 Coetzee uses the female castaway to build such a “middle voice”, to link individualism with an understanding of its historical production. He presents Friday and Susan, as differently empowered yet inextricably linked and asks the pertinent, rhetorical question: “is representation to be so robbed of power by the endlessly skeptical processes of textualisation that those represented in/by the text – the feminine subject, the colonial subject – are to have no power either?” (my emphasis). He addresses the difference between this “feminine subject” and Friday, saying: Friday is the true test. Is his history of mute subjection to remain drowned? ... Friday is mute, but Friday does not disappear, because Friday is body ... Whatever else, the body is not “that which it is not,” and the proof is that it is the pain that it feels. The body with its pain becomes a counter to the endless trials of doubt.84

For Coetzee, because identities are textually constructed, so bodies themselves must constitute the more substantial basis for ethics. Gardam uses the image of the lower body to align the problem of women’s difference with the situation of the lower classes and the colonised. Her images highlight “the relation of order to disorder, being to non-being, form to formlessness, life to death”.85 In these terms, Gardam’s novel suggests, in colloquial language, that foreign and dirt are not only Other to the enlightened rational self, but are also inextricable from it. For example, a character refers to Naples as 82

Macaskill, “Charting J.M. Coetzee’s Middle Voice”, 447. Coetzee points out the capacity of such a writing strategy to be “wide open to misunderstandings by an audience not attuned to its nuances” and draws attention to its use “by such neo-conservative writers as Swift and Gibbon” (“The Agentless Sentence as Rhetorical Device (1980)”, in Doubling the Point, 174). He puts the view that his own work Foe was launched into an “unpropitious” rhetorical climate (146). 84 Coetzee, Doubling the Point, 248. 85 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969, 5. 83

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demonstrating “the filth of foreign countries”.86 In contrast, when Polly meets the German and Jewish, second generation and Englishspeaking Zeits, she is excited and observes: “I was listening to a foreign language I couldn’t understand.”87 For Gardam, embodied, reproductive female sexuality is the sin created by religion that surreptitiously informs English literature and shapes identity. Before Polly started reading other books, she is depicted as a faithful reader of Robinson Crusoe seeing it as a kind of bible in which sexuality is absent. Indicating Robinson Crusoe’s foundational status with respect to individualism, Polly says to Crusoe at the end of the novel: “Quite a few people see an affinity between you and Jesus Christ.”88 Gardam gives Polly a nineteenth-century upbringing in which reading is a leisure activity linked to morality and religion89 and, as such, it can be done only “if sins not too bad”.90 Living under multiple constraints, Polly takes a book from the shelf when she menstruates but is not allowed to read because “it was a Sunday and it was a novel”.91 As Polly observes, whether in novels or in religious texts, there is a silence about a woman’s biological life: “There was nothing about women going funny in novels.”92 This book commenced by questioning the modern representation of the individual as a masculine figure, suggesting that values that were complexly gendered in the early eighteenth century informed the iconic text of individualism, Robinson Crusoe. In this early period, trade and finance, credit and luxury were associated with selfishness and greed; masculine avarice was represented chasing sexually desirable moral virtue. It was a threatening image and trade itself was presented as a feminising force, able to weaken the military strength of the nation and challenge traditional class hierarchies. In the hands 86

Gardam, Crusoe’s Daughter, 61. Ibid., 25. 88 Ibid., 223. 89 Thomas Laqueur explores the role of sex in literature and culture in The Making of Sex, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990 and discusses links to the discourse of finance in “Credit, Novels, Masturbation”, in Choreographing History, ed. Susan Leigh Foster, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. 90 Gardam, Crusoe’s Daughter, 18. 91 Ibid., 36. 92 Ibid., 123. 87

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of the female castaway narratives that followed immediately in its wake, feminine moral virtue is reified and promoted in the face of masculine corruption. As in Robinson Crusoe, these narratives draw on differences of gender, race and religion to create a middle ground between opposing values, in order to combine morality with economic and social survival. Creating a space of compromise, in order to suggest a way forward, the castaway texts of the eighteenth century seek to surmount the criticisms of foreign trade and the trade in luxury goods and to address the problem of credit, with its imputation that all values are negotiable, by creating a space grounded in feminine, moral virtue. In the middle of the century, the female castaway texts, written in the wake of Rousseau, are influenced by both colonisation and migration. These texts focus on the figures of mother and daughter and bring to the fore the imagined values of the New World and indigenous communities. Both difference and sameness are essential to all the eighteenth century texts. Difference invigorates and strengthens the individual and the community, while the importance of an essential moral sameness and ethics is emphasised. Burney and Wollstonecraft in their writings were confronting similar tensions, with respect to the all-important issue that had confronted Defoe: how to bring together earning money in trade, or business while protecting one’s reputation. In examining the twentieth century texts I have suggested that, in their criticisms of nineteenth century individualism, they return to similar concerns, metaphors and images of the eighteenth-century texts. The state of being cast away in the texts of Gardam, Einzig and Coetzee, as well as in the earlier castaway narratives, recognises that meanings are unstable and that language and its social construction can metaphorically (and productively) either rescue one or, perhaps productively, keep one at sea. The problem that the authors in both centuries recognise is that meanings cannot be fixed by reference to either material reality, or to moral and political ideals. The early eighteenth-century authors acknowledge the instability of language and take advantage of it to articulate new identities and to suggest shifts in values and meanings, an aspect of their work, which is, perhaps surprisingly, echoed in these post-modern texts. Castaway narratives are supremely about the process whereby things – identities and values – are named and renamed, and about the

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terms, which make that renaming necessary and possible. Reading feminine values into the castaway texts, and into Robinson Crusoe contributes to our understanding of how values marked feminine have “settled like magic dust” over Modernity93 contributing to the shaping of identities, society and culture. The female castaway narrative in both of the periods examined is not only a mechanism for criticising society, but is also a way to show neglected and less powerful values informing and creating new identities and meanings. The gendering of the text of Robinson Crusoe is complex, as befits an author whose work has been described as “narrative transvestism”.94 Defoe’s desire to make his upwardly-mobile tradesman authentic and credible in the face of the effeminacy of luxury and the fluctuating values of credit, addresses issues of greed and power, authority and authenticity, self and community, making it a text that still has much to say to modern readers. Crusoe emerges as a new eighteenth-century man of commerce no longer effeminised by the culture of trade. Various authors rewrote his story in terms that placed vulnerable, pubescent female protagonists at the centre of the castaway narrative. Studying these texts has enabled a better understanding of the symbolic values, languages and discourses that informed Robinson Crusoe and the subsequent eighteenth-century texts that attempted to depict greater autonomy for women. The gradual dominance of trading values and the increased identification of the middle-class woman with leisure, domesticity and maternity gave rise, by the end of the eighteenth century, to literary representations of the female castaway as a troubled, yet prospective, individual. These textual representations of men and women were depicted as less dominated by the culture of militarism than by a society whose values have been described as polite and commercial.95 Post-modern castaway narratives, such as those discussed in this chapter, have rescued the complexity of the eighteenth-century texts, 93

Tania Modleski identifies the view that femininity has “lost its terrors” as a postmodern perspective (Feminism without Women, New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1991, 101). 94 Madeleine Kahn, Narrative Transvestism: Rhetoric and Gender in the EighteenthCentury English Novel, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. 95 William Blackstone, MP, judge and academic first used the phrase “polite and commercial people” to describe the late eighteenth-century society in which he lived (Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, 1).

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by returning a sense of social criticism to the castaway narrative. In these contemporary texts, the post-modern, female Crusoe figures are part-textual constructions and part-submerged beings, due to their embodied and sexual difference. These narratives suggest complex, racial and gendered, textual processes of social change in their deconstructions and reconstructions of identity, language and power.

BIBLIOGRAPHY PRIMARY TEXTS ROBINSON CRUSOE AND RELATED FICTIONS Aubin, Penelope, The Life of Charlotta Du Pont, London: A. Bettesworth and C. Hitch, 1723. ––– The Life of Madame de Beaumont, a French Lady and the Strange Adventures of Count de Vinevil and His Family...(and of His Daughter Being Shipwrecked on the Uninhabited Island Delos...), New York: Garland Publishing, 1973. –––The Noble Slaves; or, the Lives and Adventures of Two Lords and Two Ladies, London: E. Bell, 1722. Balzac, Honoré, Modeste Mignon, Montana: Kessinger Publishing, 2004. Bannac, Adolphus, “The Life and Surprizing Adventures of Crusoe Richard Davis”, Critical Review, II, 351-357 (November 1756), London: F. Noble, and Monthly Review, XV, 656 (December 1756). Behn, Aphra, Oroonoko: or The Royal Slave, London (1688). Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Jacques-Henri, Paul and Mary, an Indian Story, 2 vols, London: Printed for J. Dodsley, 1789. ––– Paul and Virginia, trans. Helen Maria Williams, London: Vernor and Hood, 1796. Bosse, Malcolm J., ed., The Adventures of Rivella by Mary De La Riviere Manley and the Adventures and Surprizing Deliverances of James Dubourdieu and His Wife and the Adventures of Alexander Vendchurch, New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1972. Burney, Frances, The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Burney, Sarah, “The Shipwreck” in Tales of Fancy, London: Henry Colburn, 1816. Catullus, “Catullus 64”, in The Poems of Catullus, trans. J. Michie, London: Duckworth, 1990. Coetzee, J.M., The Age of Iron, London: Secker and Warburg, 1990. ––– Foe, London: Penguin Books, 1986.

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––– In the Heart of the Country, Johannesburg: Raven, 1978. Corry, John, Sebastian and Zeila, or, The Captive Liberated by Female Generosity, London: Crosby and Co., 1802. Daubenton, Marguerite, Zelia in the Desert; or The female Crusoe Written by Herself, London: C. Forster, 1805 (1789). Defoe, Daniel, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Oxford: Blackwell, 1927. ––– The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, &c ... Written from Her Own Memorandums, London: Oxford University Press, 1976. ––– The Life, Adventures and Pyracies of the Famous Captain Singleton, Montana: Kessinger Publishing, 2004. ––– The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner, ed. J. Donald Crowley, London: Oxford University Press, 1998. ––– Roxana, The Fortunate Mistress, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. ––– Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, with His Vision of the Angelic World, London: W. Taylor, 1720. ––– A True Collection of the Writings of the Author of the True Born Englishman, London, 1703. De Foigny, Gabriel, The Southern Land, Known (La Terre Australe connue, 1676). Trans. and ed. David Fausett, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1993. De Genlis, Stéphanie-Félicité, Adele et Theodore ou Lettres sur l’Education, 3 vols, London: C. Bathurst and T. Cadell, 1783. De Navarre, Marguerite, Heptameron, trans. Paul Anthony Chilton, Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1984 (1560). Desfontaines, Abbé Pierre-François, Le Nouveau Gulliver, Paris: Veuve Clouzier and Francoise Le Breton, 1730. Dibdin, Charles, Hannah Hewitt; or, the Female Crusoe, London: C. Dibdin, 1792. Ducray-Duminil, François Guillaume, Ambrose and Eleanor; or the Adventures of Two Children, Deserted on an Uninhabited Island. Abridged version by Lucy Peacock, London: R. and L. Peacock, 1796.

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Edgeworth, Maria, Tales and Novels (Vol XI containing Belinda), London: Baldwin and Craddock, 1832-1833. Einzig, Barbara. Robinson Crusoe; A New Fiction, Wisconsin: Membrane Press, 1983. Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary: Provincial Lives, London: Penguin Classics, 1992. Ford, Lucy, Female Robinson Crusoe, A Tale of the American Wilderness, New York: Jared W. Bell, 1837. Gardam, Jane, Crusoe’s Daughter, London: Abacus, 1986. Giradoux, Jean, Suzanne and the Pacific, New York: Howard Fertig, 1975. Hall, Joseph, Another World and Yet the Same: Bishop Hall’s ‘Mundus Alter et Idem’, ed. and trans. John Millar Wands, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981 (1605). Haywood, Eliza, Love in Excess, or The Fatal Inquiry: A Novel, London: W. Chetwood, 1719. ––– Memoirs of a Certain Island adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia London: N. Dobb, 8 vols, 1726 (1724). ––– The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, ed. Beth Fowkes-Tobin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997 (1751). Hong Kingston, Maxine, China Men, New York: Vintage Books, 1980. Hulme, Keri, The Bone People, Wellington, London: Spiral collective, 1983. Jerrold, Douglas William, “The life and adventures of Miss Robinson Crusoe”, The Living age, New York. X/117, 294-295; X/124, 468-470; X/124, 601-605, 1846. McKenzie, Henry, Man of Feeling, London: T. Cadell and W. Strahan, (1771). Neville, Henry, The Isle of Pines, or, A late discovery of a fourth island near Terra Australis, Incognita, London: Allen Banks and Charles Harper, 1668. Pocock, I., Robinson Crusoe; or, The Bold Buccaneers, London: J. Cumberland, 1817. Polwhele, Richard, The Unsex’d Females, London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1798. Pope, Alexander, The Dunciad, gen. ed. John Butt, London: Methuen, 1953.

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Rabelais, François, Gargantua and Pantagruel, New York: Barnes and Noble Publishing, 2005 (Pantagruel, 1532). Richardson, Samuel, Clarissa in The Works of Samuel Richardson, London: H. Sotheran, 1883. ––– Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. London: Charles Rivington, J. Osborn, 1740. Rhys, Jean, Wide Sargasso Sea, London: Penguin Books, 1966. Tournier, Michel, Friday; or, the Other Island, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967. Tytler, Ann Fraser, Leila, or, The Island, Boston: Crosby, Nichols, Lee and Co., 1861, (1849). Selvon, Samuel, Moses Ascending, London: Heinemann, 1975. Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, Robinson Crusoe; or, Harlequin Friday, Pantomine, Drury Lane, London, 20 January 1781. Smeeks, Hendrik, The Mighty Kingdom of Krinke Kesmes, 1708, eds and trans., David Fausett and R. H. Leek, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995. Spark, Muriel, Robinson, London: Macmillan and Co., 1958. Walcott, Derek, The Castaways, and Other Poems, London: J. Cape, 1965. White, Patrick, Fringe of Leaves, London: J. Cape, 1976. Wiggins, Marian, John Dollar, New York: Harper and Row, 1989. Williams, Gus, Meta, the Girl Crusoe, or, the Secret of the Sea, New York: F. Tousey, 1894. Winkfield, Unca Eliza [pseud.], The Female American, New York: Garland Publishing, 1974. Woolf, Virginia, The Voyage Out, London: Hogarth Press, 1949. ___ A Room of One’s Own, and Three Guineas, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Wordsworth, William, “Axiologus” in The European Magazine, (March 1787). ––– The Excursion (1814), Book I/11, 915-16, eds E. de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966. ––– Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940.

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Wyss Johann David, The Family Robinson Crusoe; or, Journal of a Father Shipwrecked, with His Wife and Children, on an Uninhabited Island, London: M. J. Godwin and Co., 1814. OTHER PRIMARY TEXTS

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––– Defoe’s Review 1705-1712, ed. Arthur Wellesley Secord, Facsimile Text Society, New York: Columbia University Press, 1938. ––– The Great Law of Subordination Consider’d; or, The Insolence and Unsufferable Behaviour of Servants in England Duly Enquir’d Into ... , London: S. Harding, W. Lewis, 1724. ––– The Letters of Daniel Defoe, ed. George Harris Healey, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955. De Gouges, Olympe, The Rights of Women, London: Pythia Press, 1989. Didbin, Charles, The Professional Life of Mr. Dibdin, Written by Himself, Together with the Words of Six Hundred Songs, London: C. Dibdin, 1803. Edgeworth, Maria and Richard L., Practical Education, London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1992. Fielding, Sarah, The Adventures of David Simple (1744), London: Oxford U.P., 1969. Godwin, William, Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, London: Joseph Johnson, 1798. Goldsmith, Oliver, The Deserted Village (1770), Chicago: The Fountain Press, 1965. Greene, George Washington, ed., The Works of Joseph Addison, New York: G.P. Putnam and Co., 1856. Hays, Mary, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), London: Pandora, 1987. Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Johnson, Samuel, Rasselas, (1759), London: John Sharpe, 1817 Kitchener, William, A Brief Memoir of Charles Dibdin, London: W. Walbrook, 1884. Knox, Robert, Historical Relation of the island of Ceylon, in the EastIndies, London: Richard Chiswell, 1681. Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government, Montana: Kessinger Publishing, 2004. Macaulay, Catherine, History of England from the Accession of James I to That of the Brunswick Line, London: J. Nourse, 17631783. ––– Letters on Education, London: C. Dilly, 1790. Macaulay, Thomas Babbington, Critical and Historical Essays

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INDEX

Addison, Joseph, 40, 60, 141, 153; ed. The Spectator, 6667, 119 allegory, 10, 13, 26, 42, 57, 67, 135, 139, 155, 164, 197, 233, 239, 247-48 Amazons, 90, 93, 198 Andersen, Hans H., “The Paradox of Trade and Morality in Defoe”, 45 Appleby, Joyce, Economic thought and ideology in seventeenth-century England, 45, 63, 75 Arendt, Hannah, 242, 246-48; The Human Condition, 248; Illuminations, 237 aristocracy, 1, 11, 25, 39-40, 66, 90, 92, 100, 114, 11617, 128-29, 140, 143, 150, 152, 162, 174-76, 190, 193, 223-24, 233 Armstrong, Nancy (with Leonard Tennenhouse), “The American Origins of the English Novel”, 68; Desire and Domestic Fiction, 36-38, 212 artifice, 11, 16, 61, 63, 65, 7172, 79-81, 110, 123, 126, 136-37, 143, 145, 161, 18386, 193, 221

Ash, Beth Sharon, “Walter Benjamin, Ethnic Fears, Oedipal Anxieties, Political Consequences”, 246 Astell, Mary, 38, 92, 101, 114; The Christian Religion, 76; A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, 102-103, 105-106; Some Reflections on Marriage, 83, 86, 92 Attridge, Derek, “Oppressive Silence: J.M. Coetzee’s Foe and the Politics of the Canon”, 248 Aubin, Penelope, 6, 78, 104, 112, 115, 119, 139-64, 16667, 169, 175, 178, 181, 184, 187, 191, 195, 198-99, 208209, 211, 213, 217, 220-21, 225, 239, 246, 253; as woman writer, 11, 17, 109, 140, 160-64; Charlotta Du Pont, 8, 141-63, 198; Count de Vinevil, 141-154; The Life of Madame de Beaumont, 141; The Noble Slaves, 141-61 Austen, Jane, 18, 201, 227, 237, 251 authority, 1, 3, 5-7, 9, 11-13, 16-17, 24, 36, 41, 46-47, 49, 65, 72-73, 96-97, 104-

284

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105, 125, 135-36, 143, 159, 170, 183, 186, 189, 194, 198, 219, 223, 233, 237, 239, 242-43, 250, 258 avarice, role of, 37, 52, 63-64, 68, 71-72, 75, 81, 84, 111, 117, 121, 130, 133, 139, 149, 162, 187, 198, 219, 257 Backscheider, Paula, “Defoe’s Lady Credit”, 67; Daniel Defoe, 34-35, 54-55, 142 Ballaster, Ros, Seductive Forms, 135 Balzac, Honoré, Modest Mignon, 191 Bannac, Adolphus, “The Life and Surprizing Adventures of Crusoe Richard Davis”, 200 Barker-Benfield, G.J., The Culture of Sensibility, 51, 62, 70, 209 Battestin, Martin C., Dictionary of Literary Biography, 1660-1800, 142 Beasley, Jerry C., “Politics and Moral Idealism”, 148-50, 156, 160, 163 Beer, Gillian, Arguing with the Past, 251-52 Behn, Aphra, 127, 164; Oroonoko, 148, 155 Bell, Ian A., “Crusoe’s Women”, 31 Benhabib, Seyla, “Feminist Theory and Hannah

Arendt’s Concept of Public Space”, 237, 246 Benjamin, Walter, “The Task of the Translator”, 246-47, 254; Illuminations, 237 Berkeley, George, 60; The Works of George Berkeley, 19 Bernardin de St Pierre, Jacques Henri, Paul and Virginia, 7, 172-73, 176-82, 184, 186, 188-89, 191, 194, 203, 210, 215, 241 Berneri, Marie Louise, Journey through Utopia, 29 Berry, Christopher, The Idea of Luxury, 51, 54, 56-59, 62, 128 Blackwell, Jeanine, “An Island of Her Own”, 8-10, 22, 35, 171 Blaim, Artur, Failed Dynamics, 21, 167, 200 Blain, Virginia, ed. (with Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy), Feminist Companion to Literature in English, 27, 110 Bloch, Ruth, “The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America”, 155 Bloom, Harold, Kabbalah and Criticism, 237 Bongie, Chris, Lost in the Maze of Doubting’, 238 Boswell, James, Life of Johnson, 83, 159

Index Braudy, Leo, “Daniel Defoe and the Anxieties of Autobiography”, 46, 68, 81 Brewer, John, The Birth of a Consumer Society, 54, 65, 68; Early Modern Conceptions of Property, 116, 126; The Pleasures of the Imagination, 157 Brontë, Charlotte and Emily, 237, 241, 251 Brown, Dennis, The Modernist Self in Twentieth-Century English Literature, 251 Brown, Laura, Ends of Empire, 109, 148; The New Eighteenth Century, 24-25 Buci-Glucksman, Christine, “Catastrophic Utopia”, 247 Buck-Morss, Susan, The Dialectics of Seeing, 254 Burgess, Miranda Jane, British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 166, 211 Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 219 Burney, Frances (Fanny), 5, 18, 61; Journals and Letters, 225; Known Scribbler, 203; The Wanderer, 8, 22, 44, 68, 179, 197-227 Burney, Sarah, “The Shipwreck”, 8, 193-95 Calvinists, 88 cannibalism, 26, 51, 75, 77, 89, 93, 249 (see consumer

285 culture) Carpenter, Humphrey, ed. (with Mari Prichard), The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature, 193 Catullus, Catullus 64, 198 Celestin, Roger, “Can Robinson Crusoe Find True Happiness (Alone)? Beyond Genitals and History on the Island of Hope”, 34 Champion, J.A.I., The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, 56 Cheung, Kai-chong, “Maxine Hong Kingston’s NonChinese Man”, 28 children’s literature, 5, 7-8, 190, 192, 227, 233; Robinson Crusoe as classic, 28 Choudhury, Mita, Interculturalism and Resistance in the London Theatre, 198-99, 218 Chow, Rey, “Benjamin’s Love Affair with Death”, 237, 246 circulation, importance of, 13, 15, 46, 53, 70-71, 74, 121, 248; to women’s lives, 6162, 87, 91, 102, 106, 11518, 122, 145-46, 164, 185, 212-13, 226 Clery, E.J., The Feminization Debate in EighteenthCentury England, 95, 104105 Coetzee, J.M., The Age of Iron,

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240; Doubling the Point, 238; Foe, 15, 18, 28, 91, 132, 168, 230, 231, 238-42, 244-45, 248-55, 257; In the Heart of the Country, 240, 242 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 32, 34; The Literary Remains, 53, 124 Colley, Linda, Britons, 42, 59, 212 colonialism, 3-5, 7, 10, 13, 28, 73, 77, 120, 167-68, 188, 199, 225, 230-31, 245, 255, 257; and colonies, 45, 110, 113, 131, 166, 168, 172, 174-76, 180, 192, 195; and post-colonialism, 16, 230, 239, 255 commerce, as discourse, 233, 238, 248-49; effect on society, 1, 7, 14, 40, 56, 6163, 65, 75, 93, 111, 145, 150, 165-66, 177, 200, 221, 259; and effeminacy, 10, 40, 75, 258; and gender, 9, 31, 62, 66, 90, 99, 100, 111, 116, 139, 153, 161, 222; and individualism, 3 communities, and castaway narrative, 113-14, 119, 17484, 189; indigenous, 166, 168, 257 (see utopian); and individualism, 26, 56, 87, 118, 147, 226-27, 234, 241, 257-58 consumer culture, as cannibalistic, 75-79, 130, 219, 249 (see cannibalism);

as gendered, 23, 49, 60, 80, 89, 129, 75-80, 148 Copley, Stephen, “Commerce, Conversation and Politeness in Early Eighteenth Century”, 58; Literature and the Social Order in EighteenthCentury England, 39-40 corruption, as masculine, 144, 148-49, 184, 198, 257; and romance genre, 184; individual, 6, 168; of society, 11, 56-58, 110-11, 118, 148-50, 175, 206; of words, 121, 235 (see luxury) Corry, John, Sebastian and Zeila, or, The Captive Liberated by Female Generosity, 242 counter-romance, 140 credit, culture of, 3-5, 126-27, 134, 154, 179, 213, 257; and Burney, 18, 201-23 passim; and Crusoe, 2, 1516, 41-61 passim, 64-81 passim; and gender, 18, 104, 120, 127, 132, 144, 165, 179; importance of reputation, 145, 176, 179, 197 (see effeminacy) Cuisin, J.P.R., Les cabarets de Paris, 191 Darwin, Erasmus, A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding Schools, 38, 172-74

Index Daubenton, Marguerite, Zelia in the Desert, 7, 165-66, 172, 176-77, 186-90, 193, 198, 200, 203, 211, 237 daughters, 17-18, 27, 54, 61, 87, 89, 91, 98, 102, 115-17, 128, 131-32, 147, 151-52, 161, 165-95, 224, 234, 235, 245, 251, 257 Davis, Lloyd, Virginal Sexuality and Textuality in Victorian Literature, 139 De Foigny, Gabriel, La Terre Australe Connue, 28 De Genlis, Stéphanie-Félicité, Adele et Theodore, 172 De Gouges, Olympe, The Rights of Women, 210, 21718 De Scudery, Madeleine, 46 De Singly, François, Modern Marriage and its Cost to Women, 220 Defoe, Daniel, The Complete English Tradesman, 3, 16, 42-46, 48-72 passim, 76, 80, 99, 101, 109, 122, 134, 153, 163; Defoe’s Review 1705-1712, 42; An Essay upon Projects, 101; The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 27; The Great Law of Subordination Consider’d, 159; The Letters of Daniel Defoe, 77; The Life, Adventures and Pyracies of the Famous Captain Singleton, 44; Moll

287 Flanders, 5, 33, 38, 41, 46, 68, 80, 90-91, 95-96, 146, 159, 177, 252; A Plan of English Commerce, 59, 99, 109; Robinson Crusoe, 163 passim; Roxana, 5, 15, 33, 38, 80, 83, 86-93, 95, 140, 229, 238, 252; Serious Reflections, 27 Derrida, Jacques, A Derrida Reader, 14; White Mythology, 238-39 desire, and Defoe 81, 90, 103, 139; as economic 33, 56, 68, 71-72, 75, 87, 89-90, 100, 104-106, 123, 125, 136, 150, 164, 187; and Robinson Crusoe, 1, 47, 4957 passim, 65, 72, 74-79, 175; as sexual, 2, 17-18, 37-39, 65, 68, 81, 87, 8990, 95, 101, 103-105, 11136 passim, 142, 147, 149, 153, 158, 164, 177, 187-88, 197-227 passim, 233, 236, 241, 250-59 passim; and social change, 2, 164, 190 Dibdin, Charles, 22; Hannah Hewitt, 199; The Professional Life of Mr. Dibdin, 199 Dickson, P.G.M., The Financial Revolution in England, 49, 59, 75 Dimand, Robert, The Status of Women in Classical Economic Thought, 85 Disch, Lisa Jane, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of

288

The Female Crusoe

Philosophy, 248 disguise, 6, 61, 72, 81, 96, 145-46, 169, 201, 207, 216, 239 domesticity, 37-38, 185, 204, 206, 212, 224, 232, 242, 248, 258 Dooley, Roger B., “Penelope Aubin”, 157-58 Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger, 256 Dovey, Teresa, The Novels of J.M. Coetzee, 239 Ducray-Duminil, F. G., Ambrose and Eleanor, 7, 172, 190-91 Dunn, Walter Scott, The New Imperial Economy, 127 Earle, Peter, The Making of the English Middle Class, 98; The World of Defoe, 54, 59, 111 economic man, rational, 15, 44, 50 Edgeworth, Maria, Belinda, 185, 201, 214-15; (with Richard L. Edgeworth), Practical Education, 21-22, 28 effeminacy, 3, 10, 16, 25, 4041, 47, 55, 58-59, 70, 79, 99, 101, 104, 132, 258 Einzig, Barbara, Robinson Crusoe; A New Fiction, 18, 230-31, 235-38, 240-48, 251, 254, 257 enclosures, 3, 17, 64, 69, 76, 114, 154, 178, 188, 242,

247 Erickson, A.D., Women and Property in Early Modern England, 98 Evans, Ambrose, 6, 17, 109, 119, 130-31, 143, 145, 147, 149, 151-52, 155, 157-58, 163-64, 166-67, 174-75, 178, 181, 184, 209, 213, 217, 221, 225; Alexander Vendchurch, 6, 109-13, 121, 136, 167; Martha Rattenberg, 6, 17, 44, 57, 89, 95, 109-37, 151, 19899, 222, 245, 254 Fausett, David, The Strange Surprizing Sources of Robinson Crusoe, 29-30 Fay, Elizabeth A., Becoming Wordsworthian, 173 Felski, Rita, The Gender of Modernity, 22-23 Festa, Lynn, “Cosmetic Difference”, 128 Fielding, Sarah, The Adventures of David Simple, 222 finance, language of, 65, 134, 208, 249 financial speculation, 11, 46, 49, 55, 63-64, 75, 90, 100, 110-113, 116, 118, 121, 126, 137, 150 Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary, 184-85 Flynn, Carol Houlihan, The Body in Swift and Defoe, 34 Folkenflik, Robert, “The Heirs

Index of Ian Watt”, 15, 39 Ford, Lucy, Female Robinson Crusoe, A Tale of the American Wilderness, 242 foreign values, 3, 6-7, 12-13, 18, 45, 81, 88, 92, 112, 232 Foucault, Michel, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 23-24; Power/Knowledge, 33-34 Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, Feminism Without Illusions, 165, 177 Frazee, Charles A., Catholics and Sultans, 143 Frow, Gerald, “Oh, Yes It Is!” A History of Pantomime, 199 Gallop, Jane, “Psychoanalysis and Feminism in France”, 14; (with Carolyn Burke), The Future of Difference, 6 Gardam, Jane, Crusoe’s Daughter, 18, 230-34, 236, 238, 240-46, 251-53, 25557 gate-keeping, culture of, 21213 Geulen, Eva, “Toward a Genealogy of Gender in Walter Benjamin's Writing”, 247 Geertz, Clifford, “From the Natives’ Point of View”, 14-15 Gervitz, Karen, Life after Death, 96 Giradoux, Jean, Suzanne and

289 the Pacific, 230 Gliserman, Martin, Psychoanalysis, Language and the Body of the Text, 34, 75 Godwin, Mary Jane, 172, 19293 Godwin, William, 192-93, 204; Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Women, 210, 214 gold, significance of, 11, 6667, 70, 116-117, 126, 144, 150, 153-54, 211 Golden, Morris, “The FamilyWanderer Theme in Goldsmith”, 204 Goldsmith, Oliver, The Deserted Village, 204 Goodrick, A.T.S., “Robinson Crusoe, Imposter”, 30 Grapard, Ulla, “Robinson Crusoe”, 15 Green, Martin, The Robinson Crusoe Story, 27-28, 35, 171, 230 Greene, George, ed., The Work of Joseph Addison, 67 Greenberg, Janelle, “The Legal Status of the English Woman in Early Eighteenth-Century Common Law and Equity”, 124 Guest, Harriet, “A Double Lustre: Femininity and Sociable Commerce, 173060”, 161

290

The Female Crusoe

Hall, Joseph, Another World and Yet the Same, 198 Hardin, Richard F., Love in a Green Shade, 173 Hays, Mary, Memoirs of Emma Courtney, 222 Haywood, Eliza, 11, 142, 164, 217; The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, 160; Love in Excess, 148, 160; Memoirs of a Certain Island, Adjacent to Utopia, 160 Heiland, Donna, “Historical Subjects”, 230 hermits, 3, 68, 154, 167, 174, 178-80, 182-84, 187, 203, 241 Hesse, Carla, Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris, 1789– 1810, 186 Hewitson, Gillian, Feminist Economics, 15 Hilliard, Raymond F., “Desire and the Structure of Eighteenth-Century Fiction”, 37, 50, 152 Hillis Miller, J., On Literature, 193 Hobbes, Thomas, 51, 84-85, 92-94, 105, 114, 123; Leviathan, 93, 123 Hong Kingston, Maxine, China Men, 28, 230 Huguenots, 88, 140 Hume, Keri, The Bone People, 28 Hundert, E.G., The

Enlightenment’s Fable, 60 Hunter, J. Paul, “The Conclusion of Robinson Crusoe”, 42 Hutcheon, Linda, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 18 hybridity, 1, 3, 6-7, 10-11, 13, 19, 21, 25, 74, 83, 87-90, 92, 100, 111, 114-15, 12124, 137, 146, 167, 174, 186, 195, 199, 200, 211, 216, 218, 222, 225, 229, 231-32, 238, 243, 246, 253; and Defoe 225 imperialism, 9-10, 109, 229 incest, symbolic, 176-77, 189 Ingrassia, Catherine, “The Pleasure of Business and the Business of Pleasure”, 35, 55, 63, 69 inheritance, 4, 46, 49, 55, 66, 89, 91-92, 112-13, 116-17, 121, 129-30, 136, 140, 147, 159, 167, 176-77, 179, 190, 201, 207-208, 220, 231, 234 intertextuality, 167, 211, 235, 238, 241, 244, 251 Jacobites, 112, 153, 158-59; anti-Jacobin, 209 Jager, Eric, “The Parrot’s Voice: Language and the Self in Robinson Crusoe”, 72 Jerinic, Maria, “Challenging Englishness: Frances Burney’s the Wanderer”,

Index 207 Jerrold, Douglas William, “The life and adventures of Miss Robinson Crusoe”, 242 Johns, Alessa, Women’s Utopias of the Eighteenth Century, 91 Johnson, Samuel, 83, 118, 159, 224; Rasselas, 225 Jones, Vivien, Women in the Eighteenth Century, 210 Jordan, Sarah, The Anxieties of Idleness, 223 Joseph, Betty, “Re(Playing) Crusoe/Pocahontas”, 35, 167-68 Joyce, James, Daniel Defoe, 229, 232-33, 252-53 Kabbalah, 237, 241, 254 Kafka, Franz, 237 Kahn, Madelaine, Narrative Transvestism, 258 Keane, Angela, Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s, 190 Kegl, Rosemary, The Rhetoric of Concealment, 121 Kent, Susan Kingsley, Gender and Power in Britain 16401990, 85-86, 218-19 Kern, Jean B., “The Fallen Woman, from the Perspective of Five Early Eighteenth-Century Women Novelists”, 150

291 Kitchener, William, A Brief Memoir of Charles Dibdin, 199 Knox, Robert, Historical Relation of the island of Ceylon, in the East-Indies, 30 Kramnick, Isaac, Bolinbroke and His Circle, 157 Labbe, Jacqueline, Charlotte Smith, 205 Langford, Paul, A Polite and Commercial People, 9, 259 Laqueur, Thomas, “Credit, Novels, Masturbation”, 256; The Making of Sex, 256 Lingis, Alphonso, Foreign Bodies, 34 Locke, John, 51, 92; Two Treatises of Government, 85-86 London, April, “Placing the Female”, 168-69 luxury, 1-5, 16, 18, 40-41, 4562, 64-71, 75-77, 80-81, 88, 99, 101, 104-105, 111-12, 120, 128, 132, 134, 136, 139, 150, 161, 164, 166, 170, 175, 197, 201, 213, 257-58; and France 54, 88, 112, 128 Macaskill, Brian, “Charting J.M. Coetzee’s Middle Voice”, 240, 255

292

The Female Crusoe

Macaulay, Catherine, History of England, 216; Letters on Education, 216-17 Macaulay, Thomas Babbington, Critical and Historical Essays, 224 MacCarthy, Bridget G., The Female Pen, 156 MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue, 150-51 Malthus, Daniel, 172-73 Mandeville, Bernard, 37, 72, 75, 81, 85, 101, 103, 11920, 125; The Fable of the Bees, 52, 54, 56, 58-61; The Female Tatler, 30; Free Thoughts on Religion, The Church and National Happiness, 51, 74 marriage, 31, 69, 111, 115, 128-29, 133, 140, 152, 159; in fiction, 85-87, 89-90, 96, 98, 115-17, 121-23, 128, 133, 145, 152, 164, 180, 186-87, 189, 201, 204, 207208, 210, 212, 217-18, 22021; in postmodern fiction, 231, 234, 242, 253; Marriage Act, 253 (see Trumbach) Marx, Karl, 39, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 15; Grundrisse, 56 materialism, 29-30, 52, 62, 90, 92-93, 107 McBurney, William H., “Mrs Penelope Aubin and the Early Eighteenth-Century

Novel”, 140, 142-43, 156, 161 McDougall, Russell, “A Novel Atlas: Tradition and the Individual Text of Crusoe’s Daughter”, 232 McDowell, Tremaine, “An American Robinson Crusoe”, 167 McKendrick, Neil, The Birth of a Consumer Society, 65, 68 McKenzies, Henry, Man of Feeling, 222 McKeon, Michael, The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740, 38-39, 42, 46, 75, 126-27, 135, 140, 146, 150 McManners, John, Church and Society in EighteenthCentury France, 129 Meier, Thomas Keith, Defoe and the Defense of Commerce, 51, 55, 80-81 middle class, 10, 40, 150, 170, 186, 189, 200-201, 208209, 212-13, 220, 223-24, 258; definition, 48, migration, 4, 12, 88-89, 111, 114-15, 118-19, 121-22, 140, 166, 195, 232, 235, 245, 257 military, 3, 5, 11, 47, 55, 5759, 73-74, 100, 112, 158, 195, 209, 220, 222-23, 25758 Modleski, Tania, Feminism without Women, 258

Index money, paper, 11, 63, 70, 116, 126-27, 154, 211, 246 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, 60 mothers, 26, 52-53, 8, 91, 97, 100, 116-17, 121, 123, 128, 141, 144, 165-80, 187, 192, 217, 242, 245, 248, 257; absence or death of mother, 17, 91, 151-52, 186, 207, 238, 251; as authority figures, 193-95, 212, 231, 235; and grandmothers, 186, 236, 252; and Hobbes, 93; mothering as a public service, 17, 99-100, 116-17, 121,123, 128, 183, 187, 189; and Rousseau, 213 (see gate-keeping) Nachman, Rabbi, 237, 241-42 (see Kabbalah) names, 24, 106, 109, 133, 174, 198, 201, 208, 258; and anonymity, 68, 197, 201202, 208, 211, 213, 244; arbitrariness of, 26, 201, 207; changing of, 113, 12122, 235; father’s name, 217; and intertextuality, 28, 111, 167-68, 173, 185, 215, 222, 233-35, 238, 240, 243, 245; mother’s name, 121, 151, 187 (see marriage, translators, hybridity, migration) Narrative transvestism, 258 naturalists, influence of, 172, 186

293 nature, as foundational state, 75, 84-85, 92-95, 104; as language, 241, 247, 254; domestication of, 114, 12223, 127-32, 254, 182; and education, 181-83, 223; and gender, 28, 51, 114, 120, 122-24, 168, 210, 216; state of, 65, 72-74 (see naturalism, Hobbes) Neville, Henry, The Isle of Pines, 30 New World, the, 7, 18, 166-68, 190-95, 243, 238, 257 Nicholas, Hans, New Trends in Education in the Eighteenth Century, 101 Nicholls, David, God and Government in an ‘Age of Reason’, 125, Nicholson, Colin, Writing and the Rise of Finance, 71, 149-50 novel, definition of, 141 Nussbaum, Felicity, The Brink of All We Hate, 76, ed. (with Laura Brown), The New Eighteenth Century, 24 Novak, Maximilian E., “Robinson Crusoe’s Original Sin”, 51; Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe, 45, 50-51, 75 O’Donnell, Sheryl, “Mr Locke and the Ladies”, 85

294

The Female Crusoe

O’Neill, Michael, ed. (with Mark Sandy), Romanticism, 206 Parry, Benita, “Speech and Silence in the Fictions of J.M. Coetzee”, 239 Pateman, Carol, The Sexual Contract, 88, 92-94 patronage, 114, 117, 133-34, 159, 162, 177, 211 Paul, Lissa, “Escape Claws”, 233 Paulson, Ronald, The Beautiful, Novel and Strange, 139-41, 153, 15758 Peacock, Lucy, 172, 190 Pearson, Jacqueline, Women’s Reading in Britain, 17501835, 204, 225 Peters, J.S., “The Bank, the Press and the ‘return of nature’”, 126; “The Novelty; or, Print, Money, Fashion, Getting, Spending and Glut”, 133 Phillips, Richard, Mapping Men and Empire, 28, 31 piracy, role of, 4, 26, 95, 112, 115, 119, 131, 141, 143, 145, 233 Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel, Fortune Is a Woman, 57 Pittock, Murray G.H., Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland, 129

Pocock, I., Robinson Crusoe; or, The Bold Buccaneers, 198-99 Pocock, J.G.A., The Machiavellian Moment, 49, 53, 56-58, 60, 62, 64-66, 71; Virtue, Commerce and History, 25, 41 Polwhele, Richard, The Unsex’d Females, 209-10 Pope, Alexander, 56, 60, 104, 129; The Dunciad, 160 Post, Robert M., “The Noise of Freedom”, 248 Prescott, Sarah, “The Debt to Pleasure”, 147-48, 160; “Penelope Aubin and the Doctrine of Morality”, 16162 puberty, 6, 26, 115, 141, 165, 177, 188, 234-35, 258 Quérard, Joseph-Marie (with Félix Bourquelot, Charles Louandre, LouisFerdinand-Alfred Maury), La Litterature Francaise Contemporaine 1827-1844, 186 Rabelais, François, Gargantua and Pantagruel, 198 race, 1-2, 4, 10, 18, 34, 73-74, 84, 88, 121, 124, 136, 156, 167, 181, 230-31, 239, 257 Rado, Lisa, ed. Rereading Modernism, 251 refugees, Palatine, 88

Index religion, 27, 69, 111, 124-28, 131, 144, 155, 161, 163, 167, 174, 177, 189, 230, 242, 245, 256-57; Catholicism, 68, 102, 11115, 119, 122, 125, 130, 134, 140-41, 145-47, 153, 15759, 163, 186, 225, 235, 246; Islam, 143, 158; Judaism, 235, 237, 241, 245-46, 254, 256; Protestantism, 53, 88-89, 111-12, 115, 119, 125-26, 128-30, 135, 140-41, 14547, 150, 157-59, 186, 225, 232-34, 246 (see Calvinism, Huguenots, refugees) reproduction, sexual, 17, 100, 121, 129, 136, 176-77, 231, 251 reputation, importance of, 1, 7, 13, 18, 22, 38, 50, 53, 55, 62-67, 69-72, 103, 134, 140, 145-47, 149, 155, 176, 178-79, 189, 193, 197, 201209, 221-22, 257; and credit, 211-14 revolution, American, 4, 155, 166, 219; English, 69, 125, 129, 146, 166; French, 4, 18, 166, 173, 190, 195, 200-203, 206-207, 209-11, 218-19 Rhys, Jean, Wide Sargasso Sea, 28 Richardson, Samuel, 157-58, 163; Clarissa, 95, 104-105;

295 Pamela, 36, 141, 155, 160, 163, 165 Richetti, John J., “The Family, Sex and Marriage in Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Roxana”, 89; Defoe’s Narratives, Situations and Structures, 50; The Life of Daniel Defoe, 126; Popular Fiction Before Richardson, 142, 155, 161 Robinson, Mary [Anne Francis Randall], A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination, 7-8, 169-70 Rogers Woodes, A Cruising Voyage Round the World, 130-31 Rogers, John, “The Enclosure of Virginity”, 69 Rogers, Katherine M., Frances Burney, 207, 210 Rogers, Pat, ed. Defoe, 21 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 17, 21, 28, 85, 92, 94, 99, 107, 152, 170-73, 175-76, 184, 186, 192, 195, 212-13, 226, 251, 257; Confessions and The Discourses and other Political Writings, 171; Emile, 7, 106, 171-72, 180, 182, 216; Julie, 165, 171, 173-76, 210-11; On the Social Contract, 84 Ryskamp, Charles, “Boswell and James, Goethe and Malthus”, 173

296

The Female Crusoe

Said, Edward, Culture and Imperialism, 16, 24 Saxton, Arnold, “Female Castaways”, 29 Schmidgen, Wolfram, Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property, 5 Schofield, Mary Ann, ed. (with Cecilia Macheski), Fetter’d or Free, 146; Masking and Unmasking the Female Mind, 140-41, 148 Schonhorn, Manuel, Defoe’s Politics, 78-79 Scott, Joan, “The Evidence of Experience”, 32 Sekora, John, Luxury, 46 Selvon, Samuel, Moses Ascending, 28 servants, 3, 10, 12, 21, 49-50, 61, 74, 78, 89, 91, 93-94, 112, 122, 132, 149, 152, 160, 167, 178-80, 187, 189, 201, 208, 216, 224, 234, 240, 244 Severance, Mary, “Sex and the Social Contract”, 107 sexual politics, 198, 203, 217 sexual reproduction, 17, 100, 121, 129, 136, 177, 231, 251 Shaftesbury, Third Earl of, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 70, 153 Sheils, W.J., “Catholicism from the Reformation to the Relief Acts”, 159

Shell, Marc, The Economy of Literature, 136 Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, 203-204 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, Robinson Crusoe; or, Harlequin Friday, 198-99 Sherman, Sandra, “Lady Credit No Lady”, 46, 6667; Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century, 35, 61 Shields, J.D., “The Theme of Luxury in the Early Eighteenth Century”, 58, 60 shipwreck, 4-5, 15, 26, 43-45, 51-52, 57, 64, 72, 89, 96, 111, 115, 119, 122, 130, 132-33, 141, 143-44, 161, 174, 182, 192, 200, 244, 254 slavery, 3-4, 7, 12, 26, 73-74, 78, 83, 92-94, 96, 116, 120, 131, 143, 145, 147, 155-56, 160, 166, 169, 178-81, 189, 199, 216, 218, 231, 239, 242, 248-50, 254 Smeeks, Hendrick, The Mighty Kingdom of Krinke Kesmes, 29, 111 Smith, Adam, 15, 39, 236 Smith, Charlotte, 194; The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith, 205; Letters of a Solitary Wanderer, 204-205 Smith, Lawrence Bartlam, Spain and Britain 17151719, 158

Index Smith, Sidonie, Subjectivity, Identity and the Body, 33 social contract, the, 4, 16, 73, 78-79, 83-107 passim, 115, 155-57, 169, 189, 194, 217, 221 social mobility, 1, 6-7, 9, 1112, 16, 26, 42, 46-47, 55, 62, 79, 110, 122, 127, 132, 146, 190, 207-209, 212-13, 234, 243, 258 South Sea Bubble, 64; definition of bubble, 118 Spacks, Patricia, Imagining a Self, 34 speech, loss of, 135, 215, 22425 Spencer, Jane, The Rise of the Woman Novelist, 160, 16263. Spender, Dale, Mothers of the Novel, 36 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “Theory in the Margin”, 15 Squier, Susan M., “Tradition and Revision in Woolf’s Orlando”, 229 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, “Solitude of Self “, 9-10 Starr, George A., “Robinson Crusoe’s Conversion”, 51; Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography, 42 Staves, Susan, “Resentment or Resignation? Dividing the Spoils among Daughters and Younger Sons”, 11617, 126 Steele, Richard, 40

297 Sterne, Lawrence, Tristram Shandy, 10, 225 Stone, Lawrence, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800, 152 Stratton, Jon, The Virgin Text, 134 Swift, Jonathan, 56, 58, 60, 150, 255; Gulliver’s Travels, 200; A Modest Proposal, 76 Taylor, Barbara, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, 210 Taylor, Rebecca J., “Robinson Crusoe and the Reproduction of Singleness in England’s Long Eighteenth Century”, 35 Tilby, Michael, “DucrayDuminil’s Victor, Ou L’enfant De La Fôret in the Context of the Revolution”, 191 Tillyard, E.M.W., “Defoe”, 34 Tomalin, Claire, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, 210 Tournier, Michel, Friday; or, the Other Island, 230 trade, domestic, 44-45, 54, 110, 118-19, 127, 181, foreign trade, 43-54, 75, 105, 110, 112-13, 116, 119, 121, 127-30, 136-37, 143, 181, 25 translators, bilingualism, 17, 167, 169; castaways as, 6,

298

The Female Crusoe

17-18, 109-37 passim, 22427, 231, 237-38, 242, 245, 246-48, 254 Trotter, David, Circulation, 47 Trouille, Mary Seidman, Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment, 173, 176, 211 Trumbach, Randolph, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family, 116-17, 128-29 Tufayl, Ibn Muhammad ibn Abd al-Malik, The Improvement of Human Reason Exhibited in the Life of Hai ebn Yoqhdan, 30 Turkey, images of, 149; Ottoman empire, 143 Turner, Cheryl, Living by the Pen, 140 Tytler, Ann Fraser, Leila, or, The Island, 242 Unwin, Timothy, The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel, 191 utopian fiction, 29-30, 91, 11136 passim, 174-75, 181, 200, 254 vegetarianism, 130 virginity, 4, 9, 41, 63, 69, 81, 97, 134, 139, 144-45, 15254, 188, 198, 187, 200 Walcott, Derek, The Castaways, and Other Poems, 28

Walker, Sue Sheridan, ed., Wife and Widow in Medieval England, 98 wanderer, figure of, 182, 197226 passim, 203-97, 216 (see Burney) war, climate of, 54, 58-59, 62, 112, 141, 166, 168, 171, 202, 209 Watt, Ian, 31-33, 36, 38-39, 43-44, 120; Myths of Modern Individualism, 15, 29; The Rise of the Novel, 15, 29, 31-32, 44, 120 Watts, Michael R., The Dissenters, 123 Weber, Max, Essays in Sociology, 31; The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 53 Weedon, Chris, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory, 14, 24, 34 Wheelwright, Julia, Amazons and Military Maids, 90 White, Patrick, Fringe of Leaves, 28 widows, 17, 27, 48, 83-107 passim, 121, 144, 171, 174, 176, 187 Wiegman, Robyn, “Economies of the Body”, 33 Wiggins, Marian, John Dollar, 230 Williams, Gus, Meta, the Girl Crusoe, or, the Secret of the Sea, 242 Williams, Helena Maria, 172-

Index 73, 190, 206, 210 Winkfield, Unca, The Female American, 7, 166-69, 199 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 2-3, 5, 8, 18, 25-26, 58, 166, 170, 172, 192-93; A Vindication of the Rights of Men, 21718; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 197, 21718, 223-27 passim women writers, 17, 104-105, 140, 147-48, 155, 160-61, 163, 173, 198, 200, 202, 209, 224, 244 women, earning money, 10, 17, 62, 118, 190, 202, 207, 214, 218, 257 women’s education, 3-5, 2122, 35, 38, 58, 61, 86, 99104, 106-107, 170, 172, 174, 177, 179, 183, 185, 187, 194, 207, 213, 223, 226, 251 women’s rights, 8-10, 14, 16, 18, 25-26, 38, 85-86, 92,

299 159, 173, 197, 202, 210, 214, 217-18, 221, 223, 22526 Woolf, Virginia, 232-33; “Robinson Crusoe”, 229; A Room of One’s Own, 227, 232-33; The Voyage Out, 251-52 Wordsworth, William, 172-73; “Sonnet, On Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress”, 205-207; The Excursion, 203 Wyss, Johann David, The Family Robinson Crusoe, 8, 192-93 Zach, Wolfgang, “Mrs Aubin and Richardson’s Earliest Literary Manifesto”, 141, 163 Zerilli, Linda, Signifying Women, 219