EN3023 The Development of the Novel to 1840

Lecture Outline: Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe has been interpreted in two different ways:

1. The Economic Interpretation (cf. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 1957).

a Backbone of the story is Crusoe's rising wealth.
b Often his actions seem driven by financial motives (e.g., selling Xury as
a slave.
c His exploitation of the island as a possession ('my new colony').
d Relative unimportance of non-economic motives and responses (e.g.,
little aesthetic response to island).

2. The Spiritual Autobiography interpretation (cf. G A Starr, Defoe and Spiritual
Autobiography, 1965).

a Story of how a young man is brought to acknowledge the love of God.
b His spiritual indifference leads him to a rootless existence, punished by
his shipwreck.
c On the island he undergoes a spiritual struggle leading to a conversion
(at the crisis of his illness, when he is driven to pray).
d After his conversion, though he has relapses, he grows in faith and
becomes a means of rescuing others, including Friday.

The problem is that the book contains both these stories, although they seem to us
incompatible. Neither Crusoe nor (?)Defoe seems to see this.

Suggested solution: for Defoe there was no incompatibility, as we see in the way
Crusoe shifts between spiritual and economic motives in a breath. In fact, for him
these are simultaneous and not mutually exclusive. We see a conflict where Defoe
and his contemporaries saw a fortunate concurrence. Defoe is trying to work out a
compromise between the spiritual beliefs of his time (and class) and the growing
secular opportunities for worldly prosperity (later novelists, particularly Fielding,
were not going to be so naive about this).

The book also stresses the hero as individual and tries to reconcile the lingering
demands of traditional values with the needs of enterprising individuals. There is
some guilt about this compromise (cf. Moll Flanders, where crime does not pay until
you repent - again, Fielding was not going to be satisfied with this arrangement).